—
Maxime Du Camp and Gustave Flaubert sat on a divan puffing pipes as Kuchuk Hanem, three dancing girls and a small band of musicians prepared for the show. Kuchuk Hanem had washed the guests’ hands with rose water. Ah, these khawajah loved rituals – the more bizarre the better, and the more profitable for the performers. Gustave didn’t have high expectations. His brief experience of Egypt’s demimonde gave him the impression that the beautiful women here danced terribly. The most thrilling dance he had witnessed was performed by a male. Hasan el-Belbeissi, he wrote, wore wide trousers that allowed one to glimpse the slope of his naked buttocks.
The dancing girls could never compete with Hasan’s pelvic gyrations but they were ‘learned women’ nevertheless. ‘The equivalent of our intellectual Parisian ladies,’ Gustave whispered in Maxime’s ear.
Awalim, or ‘learned women’, meant prostitutes.
The Dance of the Bee was the evening’s highlight. The musicians lowered a fold of their turbans to cover their eyes. Only Gustave and Maxime would have the honour of witnessing the special dance in that cramped, dimly lit space. One rabab player was reluctant to blindfold himself and, for reasons unfathomable to the French travellers, fixed them with a hostile stare. The man appeared old and haggard. He had a skeletal figure and long, bony fingers. His face was dark and he had sunken cheeks and a thin moustache.
‘Mehmet,’ Kuchuk Hanem called his name gently and winked.
Gustave and Maxime guessed that this Mehmet was protesting. His broken voice was indistinct. For Gustave, such unintelligibility went beyond a language barrier. He couldn’t tell whether the man was uttering a sentence, presumably unfinished, or was simply grunting like a pig. His tongue seemed trapped. Gustave could only hear choppy laryngeal sounds, conjuring images of a rite to resurrect the dead.
‘No need for him to close his eyes if he doesn’t want to. The old man is quite harmless,’ said Maxime, who had little interest in local dramas.
Confronted with Kuchuk Hanem’s stubbornness over the integrity of her performance, Mehmet finally gave up. But the phrase ‘gave up’ didn’t reflect what was in his eyes just before he applied the blindfold. Something was festering there, decaying slowly, as if Mehmet himself had started decomposing long ago.
In the next moment, Kuchuk Hanem transformed into a beautiful girl pondering a lover, motionless, her feet fixed on the ground. Suddenly, a shrill. The music grew frantic, terrifying, like an angry bee. Such a merciless bee it was, darting at her breasts, making her writhe, her feet still grounded, compelling her to shed all her garments. As she jerked her hips in a frenzy, Gustave observed the folds of flesh on her belly and caught a faint scent of turpentine emanating from her skin. Perhaps not Hasan el-Belbeissi, Gustave thought, but a muse regardless.
The Bee was hardly the Muse’s favourite piece of choreography, but at least it allowed the pleasure of acting silly rather than sexy.
—
When the musicians left at eleven, the air was still heavy with perfume, perspiration and smoke. The travellers decided to spend the night. Gustave noted that Maxime appeared exhausted and concluded that this could not be due merely to the intense revelry of the past four hours (with the occasional interlude for a bout of fucking, he added in an arch note). The photographer, who possessed an admirable, perhaps self-destructive, desire for precision, may have been contemplating the balance between light and shadow in his images, or whether the calotype would convey the perfection in scale and detail he had envisaged. Maxime always remained fully absorbed in his project – a raging mania for photography, Gustave called it – even while amusing himself with a whore or two. Kuchuk Hanem, who couldn’t bear to see a man unmoved by her charms, teased Maxime. ‘Would you like to take pictures of me while you’re here?’
‘Apologies, Mademoiselle. I only photograph historical monuments. Ours is a mission in the service of science.’ His tone was polite and distant, though he had already surveyed her legs and torso, appraised her proportions.
‘As you wish. Besides, I’m not the best at sitting still and keeping my mouth shut,’ she laughed coyly. She was a poor actress when she pretended to be humble. Maxime looked away and forced a cough.
Gustave went to Kuchuk Hanem’s bedroom while Maxime slept alone on the divan. Later that night, on her palm-branch bed, Kuchuk Hanem already found herself unable to recall whether she’d had an orgasm. To be fair, Gustave’s member entertained her well enough. Ditto his tongue. He was a perfectionist in matters of arithmetic; he took notes. Five times (he counted his coups, mon ami, not hers). The third was the most ferocious. The writer catalogued his virility in letters to his dear friend Louis Bouilhet.
After they made love, Gustave wiped his semen with a handkerchief and proffered it to Kuchuk Hanem. She raised her eyebrows.
‘My mistress in Paris treasured evidence of our heated couplings,’ he said.
In fact, Gustave was referring not to his mistress but to Maxime’s. In recalling his tumultuous affair with the poetess Louise Colet, he delighted in imagining her as a woman who archived all that was ephemeral, including his ejaculations. In return, she had given him a lock of hair from the deceased Chateaubriand, her literary hero.
Kuchuk Hanem demurred, little impressed by the notion of immortalising bodily fluids (a week later, she cursed Gustave, who had deposited a different sort of keepsake with her: syphilis). Gustave was disappointed that his passion for metaphor went unrequited. Louise would have behaved otherwise, he thought, for she was a writer who read poems composed in an elegant tongue and had translated Shakespeare; she was a creature with a capacity for abstract thought.
Perhaps Kuchuk Hanem required a more straightforward thank you. Gustave gave her a wooden doll he had purchased in a nearby market. She smiled and pecked him lightly on the cheek, as if thanking a good boy. Gustave persisted: ‘In exchange, may I have that beautiful item?’ He gestured at the long golden shawl she had worn during the dance, now discarded on the floor. He bent down to stroke the delicate fabric, imagining how, many years after Esna, it would speak to him of the irretrievable: this room, this air, this corporeal Muse.
It is an old custom, unthreatening for many. Travellers leave traces where they visit and take something home in return. Without souvenirs, the verity of a travel narrative is called into question.
Yet it was a logic of transaction that she refused to adopt.
‘Then may I ask you to sell it to me?’ Gustave cajoled her.
She said no once more, this time more firmly. She was perched on one side of her bed, arms folded and legs unmoving.
Lying beside Kuchuk Hanem, Gustave replayed his memories of nights of worship in Paris. He remembered brothels, faint lamplight, women in low-cut dresses sauntering in the rain. Like any true artist contemplating encounters with whores, Gustave set himself adrift in melancholia. He mused on the ascetic façade that denied carnal pleasure, the mystique of the transient and the profane, et patati et patata. Prostitutes are poetry. Kuchuk Hanem snored loudly.
Gustave and Maxime set out the next morning. A new adventure called. Off to a hunt! Gustave scratched at his back. Kuchuk Hanem’s bedbugs were especially ill-mannered towards foreigners.
By the time his state-sponsored trip to the Orient came to an end, Gustave had gathered all manner of curios. A cornucopia of costumery, gazelle and lizard skins, a small embalmed crocodile from Nubia, hashish from Cairo, silks from Beirut, rosaries from Jerusalem. Maxime, whose interests lay only in the antique and the dead, consoled him: Kuchuk Hanem’s shawl was nothing special. Yet Gustave couldn’t dismiss it so easily, not even when he had reconciled with Louise and his friendship with Maxime had soured. But he also took solace in images and feelings he had recorded in his mind, in all that his senses witnessed. There is no finer archivist than a European man of letters.
—
Kuchuk Hanem sunk into bathwater scattered with flower petals, and afterward reclined on her bed. Mehmet, the aged rabab player, appear
ed in the doorway. He was a faithful lover, as devoted as a dog. For the past decade, he had gone wherever Kuchuk Hanem led, from the bustle of cosmopolitan Cairo to the village of Esna, where she and other dancing girls, courtesans, and other Egyptians of dubious cultural pedigree had been exiled. Her unruly body may have disgraced the modern Pasha, but not Mehmet.
Mehmet walked silently to the bed. He showered his lover’s feet with kisses. Kuchuk Hanem felt something wet her toes. His tears.
‘What is it, my love?’
He didn’t answer. His face sank between her thighs. She closed her eyes, ran her fingers through his grey hair. Sometimes she thought she truly loved Mehmet. She felt an enormous contentment in acting as a generous mistress who showed compassion towards her slave. His face was ugly and his mouth too big. Any comparison with her young admirers – such as handsome Monsieur Flaubert, before he went bald – would be cruel. Yet, she would never trade Mehmet’s tongue for the tongue of any of her white lovers. His was not a tongue that took possession of the earth, but a tongue so gentle as to thrill the bones. She moaned.
An Oriental woman is but a machine, wrote Gustave, to assuage the fury of Louise.
It never occurred to Kuchuk Hanem to ask Mehmet if he’d known jealousy. Sentimentality was his fate; it had no place on her stage.
Mehmet was so slight that the voluptuousness of her body overwhelmed him. He submitted to her orders, stroking here, nibbling there, faster, harder, all to worship the great Kuchuk Hanem. How she adored bearing witness to his wild desire for her, fierce and ravenous, and hearing his words of veneration in her ears, from the amorous to the obscene. Yet that day, towards the end of their violent lovemaking, his energy subsided gradually. His increasing lassitude was almost imperceptible. Faintly, she heard him making a desperate hiss, like a wounded animal.
The sun had almost set when Kuchuk Hanem awoke to find herself alone. Mehmet wasn’t by her side. She called out to her cherished slave but received no reply. As she rose to her elbows, something caught her eye. She screamed. Her soft skin was splattered with blood. Something cold and moist lay on her stomach.
—
Mehmet never returned. On Kuchuk Hanem’s small dining table was a letter and a knife stained with dried blood, pointing at her.
My love,
I see the future. So clear, just as when I saw you dancing last night, even though my eyes were shut. You will see it too, one day. I cut off my tongue with my own hands before another cuts it off for me. I could envision them silencing me slowly, muting me – those who travel far, those who peer through cameras.
Remember me always.
Kuchuk Hanem crumpled the letter, cursing her romantic, foolish lover, cursing his nonsensical prophecy. In anguish, she hurled her antique lamp against the wall.
She painted her eyes and smiled coy greetings at marketgoers. But in the evenings, she cried for hours in her bath. On the fifth day after Mehmet left, she was so weak she couldn’t leave her bed. (It was unclear whether her infirmity was caused by the loss of her devoted slave or by syphilis.) In the throes of her high fever, she thought of many things – of how she would have posed if Maxime had agreed to photograph her; of what Gustave would say to the Parisians about her bedbugs; of how Gustave’s mistress would react to tales of her hips; of who would look at their photographs and read their accounts; of eloquent tongues; of a mute rabab player. This was no delirium. Everything was lucid. Then, one dry night, she decided to end her mourning. She had an idea about keepsakes, one that her jealous lover could never have imagined.
For the next decade, every time a foreigner expressed his desire for her shawl as a souvenir, Kuchuk Hanem would refuse.
‘Then what can I give you for it?’ the visitor would ask.
She would give an enigmatic smile and say, ‘I don’t confuse my heart and my cunt.’
Thinking she was demanding an exorbitant price, the gentleman would mention an amount of money. She would respond with a little laugh. Then, she would rise from the bed and, with that serpentine sway of her hips, she would stride to the cupboard in the corner of the room and return with a bottle of murky liquid.
‘Long ago, I gave my shawl to a man from Cairo named Mehmet. In return, he gave me this souvenir.’
In the bottle, the visitor would behold not a genie, but something altogether less mystical.
The sight was so repulsive and humiliating that it silenced them. None of those who came later – tourists, archaeologists, writers, politicians – recorded this event. Because Kuchuk Hanem’s souvenir, unlike a sweat-stained shawl or an embalmed crocodile, mocked them. Because it held up a mirror, and that mirror revealed a hideous face. Because it revived the memories of a thousand other tongues they didn’t comprehend, of guttural sounds from the back of the throat, savage and mischievous. And a language as beautiful as the devil’s had no place in this world. Such a language was meant to dissolve with the sound of the desert wind, to be buried with the ruins of ancient tyrants.
In Maxime Du Camp’s photographs of statues, pyramids and temples, a dark figure is often visible, a small and lovely ornament, like a tattoo inked onto the colossal shoulder of Ramses. Had those figures ever made a sound?
Scream in a Bottle
‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’
Gita sees the woman for the first time. Her face is hard, cheekbones high, jaw sharp. Her sallow, mottled skin does little more than mask her wispy frame. Cheap batik is draped haphazardly around her waist, and a black kebaya and black headscarf render her even more sombre. As soon as she draws near, Gita catches an odd, pungent odour. It’s not human sweat but fragrant cloves from a distant realm, incense for departed souls, stiff bodies bathed in flowers before being placed into the grave.
No scent of life wafts from the abode. Its distance from the city and its seclusion should have freshened the house but the owner cares little for ventilation. Brown curtains dangle in the windows. Branches of frangipani shade the yard, making the sun reluctant to greet the weeds spreading on the ground. A dark fence, peeling and rusty, serves as a barrier between the house and the outside world.
Like a snail in a shell, shunning interaction.
And rightly so. The woman now in front of Gita is notorious in her hometown, which is nestled up against the cliffs of Cadas Pangeran. People speak of her only in whispers. Sumarni. A witch. A sorceress allied with the devil. A second Mak Lampir, the evil conjurer. Yes, Lord, she will burn in hell until the strips of her flesh sizzle. Yes, Lord, may she not find forgiveness.
Gita realises that the woman is waiting for her to answer.
‘I’m doing research,’ says Gita, trying to conceal her nervousness, and to convey an attitude of respect. ‘Of course, your name and place of residence will be disguised.’
The wrinkled woman squints and regards her coldly: ‘That is necessary.’
Her eyes probe, trying to confirm that Gita hasn’t smuggled in a camera or some other recording device. Maybe the woman has lost a substantial sum buying off the police. Or maybe she is irritated because most visitors take advantage of her. Recently, a TV crew came from Jakarta to interview her as a source for a crime drama. They broadcast her later in blurred black and white, masking her eyes with a thick strip. The episode’s title? ‘The Dark Side of Women.’
Gita enquires delicately about the woman’s profession. What it is that she does. How long she has been… practising it.
Embarrassed, Gita dares not utter the phrase that dances in her thoughts: disposing of life. It sounds like a mantra of the damned.
The old woman’s lips are clamped shut, even though she has already worked out the situation. She knows what people expect of her. The mark is on her forehead, a bright red stamp that will never disappear.
‘I’ve been doing this a long time,’ she says, slowly and heavily. ‘Maybe thirty years. Maybe more.’
It’s as if time is gnawed away by termites here. The hours melt into the night, and the ti
ck of the clock no longer matters.
‘Why do they do it?’
‘They don’t want to, child, but nature punishes those who give in to lust. They can’t control themselves: their eyes, their fingers, their breath, their womb. They are like leaves that yellow, dry up, and fall to the ground.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Ah, no one tries to understand.’
‘Why do you do it?’
Sumarni’s lips turn up slightly at the corners. She seems almost to smile, but no smile is reflected in her grey eyes. Gita watches as those eyes become the sky. Clouds gather within; they let loose rain, but no thunder.
‘Child, for the sake of one life, sometimes you have to extinguish another. Some birds must destroy themselves in flame to give birth to a new generation. We consider it natural, even noble, to be born to sacrifice. Like Sinta in the Ramayana. And therein lies your value. You never knew, child, that dead birds surround you, breathing the same air as you. They look alive, but maggots, invisible to the eye, gnaw their rotting flesh. They are only present as givers of life; like water, sometimes polluted, which gushes forth continuously formless. Water can only mould itself to the vessel.
‘And I, child, I have indeed been an ally of the devil. Because I know that some birds don’t want to destroy themselves in flames. I know that there are waters that simply want to freeze rather than become wellsprings for the sake of a stillness that they have never known.’
Apple and Knife Page 4
