Black Light

by Galway Kinnell

  “These days,” said Effat, “if you try to be choosy you end up with nobody.”

  chapter twenty-one

  After the ‘beau’, looking bedraggled from his visit, had gone his way, the government pharmacist arrived. He wore a striped suit and had octagonal, rimless glasses. He carried a fat black plastic satchel. His face was large and cheerful.

  “Goli,” the pharmacist said, looking at Effat.

  I’m Goli,” Goli said.

  “Goli, my dear,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve a bit of bad news to tell you.” He slipped his arm around her in a fatherly way. His hand came to rest on her buttock. “You’ve got yourself a little minor condition . . .”

  “Condition? What condition?” Goli cried, slapping his hand away.

  “Ah, my dear, I’m afraid it’s a touch of syphilis . . .”

  “Liar!” Goli said. “I wouldn’t touch any of your rotten diseases with a mop-handle! Get out of here and stop annoying healthy women!”

  “Now don’t get hysterical,” the pharmacist said. “Blood samples don’t lie. If you saw your blood under a microscope you’d die of fright. It’s crammed full of horrible bugs and germs. The wonder is you don’t feel them creeping up and down your veins right this minute.” He rummaged in his satchel and brought forth a great sheet of paper, which he handed to her. “Here. Go to the hospital tomorrow and take this with you.” He turned away. “Filthy child,” he muttered, half under his breath. Goli broke into tears. Jamshid jumped to his feet.

  “That’s no way to talk,” he blurted out weakly. As the pharmacist turned to reply, Effat sprang to the attack.

  “Mother-slut!” she shouted, “Get out of here!” The pharmacist fell back under her fury, turned, and made for the door with what dignity he had. But Effat was not going to let him escape so easily. She leapt after him, goosing him into a trot. “Where’s his asshole?” she screamed, goosing him again. “I don’t believe he’s got one!” She let him have it once more, as the man scooted out.

  “That silly little fart,” Effat laughed, “trying to scare a healthy girl. Here, Goli, have a glass of tea.” Goli sat down next to Jamshid.

  “I’ll turn into an old hag, just like Mehre,” Goli said, weeping. “It’ll eat up my nice face and make me crazy . . .”

  “Hush,” said Effat. “These days they take care of those things like magic. They stick your buttocks full of needles and in a week you’re good as new. In my time, now, it was something else again.” Effat launched into lurid histories about chancres, lesions, pustules, hair-loss, speechlessness, blindness and insanity, and about equally hideous cures. Not at all comforted, Goli wept on Jamshid’s shoulder.

  “Don’t cry,” Jamshid said. “Look, why not sing me a song instead? I love songs.” He spoke to her as if she were a little girl. He felt a surge of tenderness toward her. She snuffled and looked up at him with puffy eyes. “I can’t sing,” she whimpered. “I smoke too much and it ruined my voice.”

  “Come on, one little song.”

  “All right,” she said, and managed a smile, “just one, if you’ll give me a cigarette.”

  “I’ll give you a dozen,” Jamshid said, laughing. He went out to fetch some.

  The night before there had seemed to be an excitement and boisterous life in these streets. Now, by daylight, Jamshid saw only cold-eyed desolate men and obscene, humiliated women, and slime, and urine puddles, and ditches with used condoms in them.

  At the cigarette stall the condoms, wrapped in silverfoil and arranged in neat rows, looked to Jamshid exactly like the chocolate wafers he and Varoosh used to buy as children. Suddenly Jamshid felt dizzy. He had to get out, even if it meant he would be captured and die.

  He put the cigarettes and matches in his pocket and made his way to the gate. Nobody seemed to be guarding it and he stepped forward eagerly. But behind some willow leaves he glimpsed a patch of wooly blue cloth. His willingness to die vanished. As he walked away he forced himself not to break into a run. Had they noticed his abrupt turning away? He could almost hear a hue and cry starting up behind him. When he reached the courtyard he slammed the door and threw the bolt.

  “What’s the matter, Jamshid?” Goli said, noticing how he was puffing.

  “It’s nothing. It’s only an old illness,” he said. “It makes me short of breath sometimes.” He gave Goli a cigarette and lit one himself. It made his head spin but he kept on smoking.

  “Jamshid,” Goli said, “do you want me to sing you a song in Persian or in Kurdi?” The girl’s voice seemed to come to him from far away. He tried to concentrate.

  “In Persian,” he said.

  “Are you absolutely sure? Kurdish songs, you know, are so much prettier.”

  “All right, then, in Kurdi.” He felt the girl’s warmth, and it cheered him up. At the same time it made him feel wistful, because she so resembled Leyla. And how, he wondered, was Leyla making her living without him? For the first time he understood that ordinary girls, no more wicked than anyone else, could become prostitutes. Previously he had believed that prostitutes were human fiends and should be destroyed like vipers or wolves. It was strange, too, that he felt closer to this prostitute he had met last night than he had been to his own daughter.

  “That’s too bad,” Goli said, “because I don’t know Kurdi.” She giggled. Jamshid laughed too. He put his arm around her and gave her a hug.

  Now a loud rattle came at the door. “Police,” a voice cried. “Open up!” Jamshid jumped to his feet.

  “I’m not here,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “I’m not here. I beg of you.”

  “Walk on my eyes,” Goli said. She touched Jamshid’s hand and he ran up the stairs to her room.

  The police, it turned out, had only come on the complaint of the pharmacist.

  “And be sure to go to the hospital tomorrow, or we’ll arrest you for that too. And note well, under no circumstances are you to indulge your appetites or do business in the meantime. As for you,” they said to Effat, “the next time you insult a servant of the government, you will find yourself in jail.”

  “We will leave the door locked,” Effat said when Jamshid had come out of hiding. “Goli is on vacation anyway, and these days nobody goes in for me. You must stay here,” she told Jamshid, “until the gate is free again. Put your carpet there under the willow.”

  “Indulge your appetites . . .” Goli kept muttering angrily.

  After dinner Jamshid sat against the garden wall. He had found his refuge. It was a horrible world, peopled with the degenerate, the sick, the used-up, but he was grateful for it. He liked Effat, and especially he liked Goli.

  “Goli,” he said, as Goli knelt by the pool to wash the dishes, “did you love your father very much when you were a little girl?”

  “Yes,” she said. “However, I hate him now. He made me a whore.”

  “What are you saying?” Jamshid answered sharply. “How can a father make his daughter into a whore?”

  “My father ran off, and as soon as I could I whored around to earn money for the family.”

  “Listen,” Jamshid said, hearing in his voice an anger he did not understand, “don’t tell me he made you a whore! Why couldn’t you have been a seamstress or a maid? You made yourself a whore and now you’re looking for someone to blame.”

  The girl repeated firmly, “He made me a whore.”

  chapter twenty-two

  It turned out that Goli had practically every sexual disease one can get, and she was ordered not to ‘indulge her appetites’ for a month. The news was a hard blow to Effat, for Goli was her only breadwinner. Effat made a few unlucky attempts to make up the loss. She offered herself to the men who came looking for Goli, and one night she went out soliciting in the streets. In the end she was obliged to ‘rent’ from another house a girl young and pretty enough to be the stand-in.

  During this time Jamshid fell back into gloom. He knew he was a burden on these women. The longer he stayed th
e more his hopes began to seem as sleazy and unreal as those of everybody else. He felt uncertain even of the existence of the widow, as though he could have dreamed her. But whenever he went to the gate the police were there, checking everyone’s papers.

  Late one evening he happened to be sitting in the garden when Effat came in from her night of streetwalking.

  “Not a nibble,” she laughed. “This blubber I use for bait!” She shook herself in such a way that all her flesh quivered and flapped. Even in her laments, even when the tears were cascading down her cheeks, Jamshid noticed, Effat remained somehow triumphant and invulnerable. In fact, he recalled, he had been thinking Ali was invulnerable at the very moment the old man was being killed. A wind started to whine at the edges of the garden. Effat, too, had been defeated out there. In the glow of the darkness he could only make out her forehead, her cheeks, her nose and the false shine of her lips.

  “Tell me,” he said. As he looked at her, her eyes grew visible a moment.

  She said, “Out there, when they don’t want you, they don’t just say ‘no.’”

  Much later, as Jamshid was drinking tea under the willow branches, Goli’s sore-lipped client stuck his head into the courtyard.

  “Is Goli around?”

  “Filthy germ-monger, get out of here!” Jamshid cried. “Goli’s sick, and you know why.” The head withdrew quickly.

  Effat looked from the house.

  “Jamshid!” she cried. “What do you think you’re doing? Stop chasing the customers away!”

  “It was that ugly diseased one,” Jamshid said. “The one with the sores all over him . . .”

  “It’s us who’ve got to get in bed with all those sores, not you. And never mind about the diseases. I’ve got a whole closet full of condoms for just such cases.”

  Jamshid sat unhappily under the tree. It was very easy, he saw, to have scruples on someone else’s behalf. Perhaps, Jamshid thought, he could find the man and apologize; perhaps he could bring him back as a client for Effat.

  Jamshid went out into the street, but the crowd was so thick he gave it up and wandered over to the gate. As usual the police were there. A dozen or so men stood in line waiting to get out.

  Poor Effat, Jamshid thought. Her error had been to befriend him. A strange new pain now constricted his chest. It seemed to have five points, that dug into him in a kind of half circle. Was it for himself or for Effat and Goli? Or did it seize hold of him quite indifferently, as the painted hand print of the martyr grabs any wall whatsoever?

  Jamshid noticed that a well-dressed man was walking abreast of him, glancing this way and that. The man seemed to give him one brief, quizzical look. He realized at once the man wanted a girl and was looking for someone to help him get a nice one. How grateful would Effat and Goli be, he thought, if he were able to persuade such a man to come back and take Effat. His gloom lifted. But before he could act the man had vanished.

  Suddenly Jamshid glimpsed, in the glare of a kebab stand, his daughter Leyla dressed in a tight blue skirt. The glow of the fire lit her up a moment, then the dark smoke shrouded her. He plunged after her, but she, too, had disappeared.

  He wandered in a frenzy of anxiety. He told himself he must have been mistaken. And yet he felt quite sure it had been she. He stared at the faces of all the women. He inquired at houses in the vicinity. After a while he glimpsed her again, this time wearing a chaddor. He ran up to her, but it was only an old hag, who spit at him when he seized her arm.

  The third time he spotted her she was wearing the tight blue skirt again. He stepped in front of her and took her by the shoulders.

  “Leyla!” he said. The girl looked at him, mildly astonished.

  She said, “I’ll bet I can screw just as good as your Leyla and I can let you have it very cheap, too, there in the shadows, standing up, if you’re short of cash . . .”

  Jamshid stood dumbstruck, staring at the mechanical, scarred face of this creature he had thought was his daughter. He dropped his hands. He stared again into her face, in the dim light, to be absolutely sure . . .

  “Well, then,” the girl said. She turned and disappeared.

  Jamshid stood abashed. So then it wasn’t his daughter. It couldn’t be. He had looked her right in her face, hadn’t he, and it was someone else’s daughter. And yet, what did he know? Just because that blue-skirted girl wasn’t Leyla, did that prove Leyla wasn’t in the New City? One day or another he would see her soliciting somebody in an alleyway. His head began to throb. He could hardly see. The crowd swirled by, each face a blur. The tricks his eyes were playing! He might look his own daughter in the face, he thought, and fail to recognize her. That blue-skirted girl, for instance: why hadn’t he looked at her really closely . . .?

  When the streets had emptied, Jamshid went back and lay on his carpet in the courtyard. There was a crawling sensation at his crotch and in his neck and armpits, as there had been for several days. That night he had a nightmare in which he died and was put in the grave. Lying next to him was a corpse. He touched it and it said timidly, “Papa?”

  chapter twenty-three

  He was awakened by drizzling rain. It was the first rainfall of the year. The goat had come in under the tree too, and was sleeping next to him. He got up and went out into the streets. It was still dark, and the streets were quite deserted. The rain was falling very lightly. The dirt underfoot, trampled by so many footsteps, did not turn to mud but only grew a little slick.

  As he walked past the dark houses his skull felt struck by a piece of iron. His head began ringing and aching. The other pain started up again at his chest, with sharp claws pressing toward his heart. He sat down in a doorway.

  A few matches remained in his pocket. He felt anguish at the thought that they would get wet. He searched the ground. He found a bit of silverfoil and dried it as best he could. He wrapped it tightly around the matches, sealing the package well to make it waterproof. He was shivering.

  He sat there most of the day. His shivering kept him from falling asleep. When at last it started to grow dark he got up and wandered through the quarter.

  He saw a rich-looking man with a furled umbrella. He was strolling along and peering into doorways and alleys. This one, Jamshid observed, actually shone with the gold coins hidden all over him. Jamshid realized he could not interest someone like this man in so dowdy and plump a woman as Effat. But now he remembered this was the day the new girl was to start work.

  With the pain gripping at his heart, he stepped forward and spoke.

  “Excuse me.” He was hardly able to get out these words. Yet the moment the words were uttered the pain lifted completely from his heart. “Excuse me, if it happens you’re looking for a pretty girl . . .” He felt the inner, almost invincible strength of one who knows he is living the decisive moment. “I believe I can be of service . . .” The rich man stopped and turned to face him. “She’s pretty . . . I could say beautiful . . .” He felt now as if a poem were about to spring from his lips. “A pure light dancing over the ground . . . ground full of bones . . .” Swinging with both hands, the man slammed his umbrella across Jamshid’s face.

  “Dirty pimp!” the man cried. Jamshid clutched at his face. The man stood staring at him, as if waiting for him to fall dead. Jamshid stared back . . . he noticed now the hooded eyes . . . the wide mouth. . . . Suddenly the expression on the face twisted into a grimace of horror . . . and the man vanished.

  “Goli, run for the pharmacist!” Effat said, when Jamshid staggered into the courtyard. “He’s just down the alley suctioning the last drops of honest blood out of poor Simeen. Somebody’s hit Jamshid with a sword. Who did it?” Effat asked, as Goli ran out.

  Those eyes . . . the mouth. . . . What else could account for that look of horror? If it had been Varoosh, what kind of man would break open someone’s face just for being a pimp?

  “I don’t know,” Jamshid said, suddenly seeing himself standing over the dead body of the mullah, “just somebody, a stranger.”r />
  Jamshid watched the hag who crouched in the doorway.

  As the pharmacist—a different one—applied the bandage, he said, “Look at her! Some phony darvish talked her into buying a whole case of his ‘Syphilis Potion’! In reality it’s surplus rat poison. It was sold off cheap because the rats couldn’t stand to go near it. It only burns her sores and keeps them infected. You can’t take it away from her, though, or she’ll rip you to pieces. She’d be better off if she’d drink it.”

  Jamshid wanted to ask the pharmacist about the sores that seemed to be appearing on his loins and thighs, but just then Mehre started crawling toward him.

  “Get away, filthy crone,” the pharmacist said. He quickly packed his black satchel and walked out.

  Jamshid had not remembered to take Ali’s old carpet in. It lay soaked in mud under the tree. It seemed the earth was actually absorbing it. He threw himself down on the rectangle where it lay. Pain flashed at his crotch again. He wondered if he had caught something just from touching Goli—or, in the sterile dust at Takhte Jamshid, had he made love with the mad woman in his sleep—and passed on her germs to the widow, keeping, to be sure, plenty for himself? He had not meant to cause very much harm in the world, he thought. But what he had meant seemed to have no relation to anything. He lay there groaning.

  “Jamshid!” Effat cried. “Why have you thrown yourself in the mud? You’ve gone crazy too! Get in here. I’m putting you in with the girl tonight, on account of the rain. By the way, she’s pretty, and even younger than Goli. I’ve told her to be good to you, if you should feel inclined. . . . Nothing’s a better cure for sadness.”

  She spoke cheerfully. But Jamshid could see in her eyes she was troubled. “Jamshid,” she said, at the foot of the stairs, “I’ve only learned one thing in my life.” Jamshid turned. “It’s that nothing matters.”