The Paradise Ghetto

by Fergus O'Connell

  ‘So imagine – the war is ended, the Germans are defeated. We are free again.’

  ‘And we’re here in Theresienstadt?’

  ‘I suppose so. Let’s take it from here. Would you go back and finish your studies?

  ‘I don’t think so. I can’t imagine the thought of spending more years cooped up in some place – even if it was a library or a university. I think I’d travel. What about you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go back to Amsterdam,’ says Julia. ‘That’s for sure. There’s nothing for me there.’

  ‘Maybe not for me either ... now.’

  Suzanne is thinking about her parents. Julia has an image of her own mother and father. Where did they go? What happened to them? The image stays in her mind for a moment and then she banishes it.

  ‘Would we finish the book?’ she asks.

  ‘Julia – of course we’d finish the book. And we’d find a publisher.’

  ‘I was thinking,’ says Julia. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if it got made into a movie?’

  ‘And you played Birkita,’ adds Suzanne.

  ‘That would be unbelievable,’ says Julia.

  The girls go quiet again.

  Then Suzanne asks, ‘Why do you want to talk about all this? Here? Now?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to lose you.’

  The words are out before Julia has had time to think about them.

  ‘I don’t want you to go out of my life. I would want us still to be friends after this is all over. I really like you, Suzanne.’

  ‘And I really like you,’ Suzanne says, lifting the glasses off her nose, putting them on her head and looking at Julia in that blinky way she has when she’s without them. Julia asked her once what it was like – to see the world in that way. ‘Most of the time, it’s a pain,’ Suzanne told her. ‘I’d love to have normal sight like most people. In my next life I’ll be an eagle. But sometimes it’s really beautiful – like a painting by Renoir or Monet.’ Suzanne has asked if she knew any of their pictures. She doesn’t. Suzanne said they will see them after the war.

  ‘I’m glad,’ Julia says.

  Somebody announces that it will soon be lights out. The girls go to the bathroom, wash, brush their teeth. They climb back onto the bunk and settle in under their luxurious three blankets. They lie facing each other. It is what they normally do while they try to remember whose turn it is to spoon first.

  ‘I think it’s me on you,’ says Julia.

  Suzanne continues to gaze at her. The silence lengthens. Suzanne seems to be waiting for Julia to say or do something.

  When Julia doesn’t, Suzanne just turns over.

  Chapter Ten

  Birkita’s Plan (Julia)

  Birkita had counted four moons since she arrived in Pompeii. Winter came. But it was not the kind of winter she had known. There was no snow, no frozen rivers or pools with thick layers of crunchy ice on top. No bitterly cold, rainy days when all you wanted to do was huddle by the fire and eat hot food and drink ale. Instead the weather got colder but there were still sunshine and blue skies. It was no different from summer really – except there wasn’t the great heat.

  Everything here was wrong. Back in her old life her day had been tied to the sun. She woke when the first hint of daylight started to creep nervously into the hut. The first thing she always did was to go outside and see the sun. Make sure it was still there. What if a day happened when it didn’t rise? But it always did.

  In winter – she could still picture this so clearly – the grass and bushes and leaves would be white with frost, the air thick and crackling with cold, the sky the faintest of blues. The black figures of birds would flap across her eye line and she would watch as the sun rose until it became a blood-red disc in the sky.

  Summer was so different. The ground would be warm after the heat of the previous day and the only slightly cooler night. There would be mist low in the hollows and spread across the land like the breath of the gods. Birds would be twittering and singing madly – celebrating the warmth, the abundance of food, life itself. All the colours would be pale shades of their more vivid selves. And then would come the sun.

  At first, light the colour of the centre of daisies in the east, as though a fire burned just below the horizon. Then a small orange bar colouring the edge of the world. It was the same vivid orange she had seen on butterfly wings. And finally, in all its glory the great glowing orb lifting itself up and pouring its blessings down on everybody.

  How her body, her whole being ached for that time and place. And how she detested this one. Everything about it was so different from her old life. She no longer thought of ‘home’ now. She had no home. There was just her old life. Sometimes it seemed as though that time and all those people – her mother and father, her brother and sister-in-law, their children, even Moon and Sun – had all been just a dream, or a story told around the fire one night. She found too that their memory was becoming more and more faint. She could no longer remember their voices, picture their faces, recall the colour of their eyes.

  It was late morning and she was still in bed in her cubicle. Her eyes were closed – trying to go back to sleep or feigning death – she wasn’t quite sure which. She had been working until after dawn, had slept an exhausted sleep and been woken when the sounds out on the street became loud as lunchtime approached. She hated the way her days no longer followed the sun – in fact, the way they spat in its face. She slept when the sun woke; she was awake long after it had gone. She hated the people who had imposed this on her. She was revolted by what she was forced to do every day.

  ‘In about an hour,’ a voice said outside.

  It was Cassius, the first of the two bodyguards. Birkita’s cubicle was one of the two beside the front door. Cassius was right outside talking to somebody on the street.

  ‘Try to keep it in your pants until then,’ Cassius said and the other man laughed.

  The night after Antonius, Cassius had come to her. It had been her first full day in the lupanar. A slow day. Four, five, six men – she couldn’t remember. After the first couple she was just in a daze. Eventually, Flavia had said that they were closing and Cassius had locked the door. Birkita’s groin was in agony. Somebody had raked their nails down her back and only now was she feeling the pain. She lay on her bed in her cubicle, facing the wall. She tried to sleep, to forget.

  But then the curtain rustled. She thought it was Flavia. But it was Cassius.

  ‘Hello, new girl,’ he said.

  She rolled onto her back wondering what new horror this was. Cassius smiled.

  ‘We have a tradition here in the lupanar,’ he said. ‘The master gets the first bite of the cherry. Then I get the second.

  ‘You’re too late,’ said Birkita. ‘There have been plenty of others today.’

  He continued to smile.

  ‘Not where I’m going there haven’t.’

  She looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Face down,’ he said.

  Birkita tried to shake off the memory. It was time to get herself ready.

  She got up and stretched. Overhead, through the small barred window that gave on to the street, smells wafted in – food being cooked; shit and piss, animal and human. The cubicle where Birkita lived and worked was slightly longer than she was tall. Along one wall was a stone bed with a thin mattress upon it. After that it was less than two paces to the window. There was a table upon which lay a tiny hourglass, a simple oil lamp for after dark, a bowl, an empty water jug and a small wooden chest in which she kept the few possessions she had. She opened it now to take out the blanket she used for work and to fold away her sleeping blanket. She laid the blanket on top of the mattress.

  She slipped her feet into her sandals and pushed past the curtain that screened the cubicle. Outside in the corridor, Cassius was at the door still chatting with somebody. He moved aside briefly so that Albinus the water boy could come in from outside. He carried a large earthenware amphora of water half as tall as hims
elf and struggled under the weight. Birkita said hello to him – she never talked to Cassius if she could avoid it. Then she walked down the corridor to the toilet. Returning, she washed in the water that Albinus had brought in and changed into her other red toga. She would wash the first one later. Albinus looked in and handed her some food on a plate – some fruit, cheese, bread.

  ‘Lunch, Birkita,’ he said cheerily.

  ‘Eat up,’ called Cassius over his shoulder. ‘Nobody likes a scrawny whore.’

  He laughed, as did the man he was talking to.

  She hated Cassius. During her first few days here she had eaten nothing. Looking back on it, she wasn’t sure whether it was from revulsion at what she had to do or because she wanted to get her revenge by starving herself to death. Either way, after a couple of days, Cassius had noticed it and must have told Antonius. The result had been that Flavia had come to her and coaxed her into eating. Sly Cassius. Fawning Cassius. She would kill him if she ever got the chance.

  More than anyone else, more than the men who came to her, it was Cassius whom she hated. He tormented her constantly. ‘Just one word from me,’ he would say to her, ‘just one word is all it needs and you’ll find yourself doing what you do – but in the arena.’

  He threatened that he would bring some of his friends and they would all enjoy her together. For a while, the terror of these threats kept her from sleeping. But after a while she saw that they were actually idle boasts. Cassius would have had to pay for this and he would never have paid for something which – on his own – he could get for free.

  She sat on the edge of the bed while she ate. Apart from Flavia, Cassius, Crispus the other bodyguard and Albinus, the aquarius, there were five girls in the lupanar. There were two girls from Syria – twins. They occupied the two cubicles on the same side as Birkita. Sometimes customers asked for the two of them together. Opposite Birkita in the biggest cubicle was a girl called Claudia. She had been there the longest, Flavia told her. At one time, she had been the most popular girl there but she had become pregnant and had found out too late to have an abortion. When the child was born, just before Birkita arrived, it had been removed from her, taken somewhere and left to die. Flavia told Birkita that this was the Roman way. Ever since then Claudia had become more and more silent and withdrawn. She too had stopped eating and was becoming ‘scrawny’. Birkita could see that Claudia was in serious danger of incurring Antonius’ anger. Birkita had tried to talk to Claudia, to warn her but it was clear that Claudia was both completely aware of the risk she was running and, at the same time, quite indifferent to her fate.

  ‘I’ve tried to tell her,’ Flavia said, ‘but she won’t listen. Any more complaints and I won’t be able to save her.’

  The last girl was called Bakt and came from Egypt. She had arrived just before Birkita. She had the most beautiful face that Birkita had ever seen – straight black hair, perfect creamy skin, beautiful lips, deep eyes. Of all of them she seemed the least bothered by what they had to do. She kept to herself and seemed to live a lot of her life inside her head. It was something Birkita wished she could do.

  She dreaded the thought of what the day would hold. Things had been quiet this week but you never could tell. Some days, for no apparent reason, it could be unbelievably busy. Cassius would let in the first customers in the middle of the afternoon and from then on would come a succession of faceless men. Some talked, some didn’t. Some were nervous, others were aggressive, hard. There were those that had washed and were scented and those who stank. Some looked as though they were disease-ridden. Almost all of them had bad teeth and vile breath that reeked. Birkita didn’t know which disgusted her more – when they lay on top of her and put themselves into her or when she had to give them fellatus or when she had to submit to the other things they asked for.

  Sometimes, a group of men came and asked to use the upstairs room and have several girls. Antonius wanted to hold more and more of those sessions, according to Flavia. He made a lot of money on them, overcharging for his cheap wine and for food brought in from down the street. Those sessions were generally the worst. The men became drunk and aggressive. Flavia told Birkita about a time the group of men had become so bad that they had done all sorts of damage to the upper room and Cassius had had to throw them out. A girl had nearly died and been good for nothing afterwards. Antonius had been furious about having to pay for the repairs.

  ‘What happened to the girl?’ asked Birkita.

  Flavia looked at her, an expression of irritation on her face.

  ‘She could hardly walk. Her face was a mess. You couldn’t put her in front of clients. What do you suppose happened to her?’

  Birkita had been involved in a number of these sessions. In some of them, several men would use one of the girls at the same time. All the girls would end up covered in bruises, with bite marks on their body and – usually – bleeding. There hadn’t been one of these for nearly a month now but you never knew from day to day when Antonius might arrive and announce that such an event was to take place.

  Normally, he wasn’t around very much and Flavia pretty much ran the place. Apparently, he had several lupanars around the city but this was his biggest. Flavia told Birkita that Antonius had been some kind of moneyman in the army, responsible for paying the soldiers. He had left the army with a pile of money which he had invested in lupanars. While he was generally not there for most of the time it was open, he always arrived near the day’s end to pick up the takings.

  Birkita applied chalk powder to her face to whiten it. Then she dabbed some wine dregs onto her cheeks and rubbed them in to produce a pink effect. Finally she blackened around her eyes with soot as Flavia had taught her and touched some perfume made from rose petals to her neck, her throat, between her breasts, on her belly and the insides of her thighs. Just as she was finishing, Flavia clapped her hands and called the girls out into the corridor. A few moments later, Cassius let the first customer in.

  He was little more than a youth – thin, spotty and nervous.

  ‘Now sir, which of our beautiful girls would you like?’ Flavia began her patter. ‘We have them from all corners of the world. Syria, Aegyptus, even as far away as Britannia. Take a look. What do you fancy, this fine day?’

  Birkita smiled, as did the other girls. She pouted, pushed her breasts forward, and pulled up her toga to show her thigh. The spotty youth made a very short show of trying to choose, but in reality he chose the first girl he looked at. Birkita’s heart sank – it was she. However, her smile widened as though she had just received a great surprise, she took his hand and led him into her cubicle.

  ‘How much are you going to spend?’ she asked, in the Roman tongue.

  ‘How much is it?’

  ‘Depends on what you want – fellatus, full sex, half and half.’

  ‘What’s half and half?’

  ‘Some of each.’

  ‘I’ll have that.’

  ‘That’ll be twenty asses.’

  The spotty youth looked shocked.

  ‘That’s a lot. It’s more than I was –’

  ‘You don’t have it?’

  If he didn’t, Birkita’s next question would be to ask how much he did have.

  ‘No, I have it.’

  ‘Would you like wine?’

  ‘Is that extra?’

  ‘Two asses.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Would you like to buy me one?’

  The spotty youth gulped and nodded.

  Birkita went to the curtain and called to Albinus to bring her two cups of the house’s best wine. Returning with them, she asked, ‘What would you like to call me?’

  ‘Wha – what’s your name?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. While you’re here I can be any woman you want me to be.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Aurelia,’ he said.

  Birkita often wondered about all these other women whose names were mentioned here and whom
she briefly became. Who was Aurelia? Some wealthy woman whom the spotty youth admired from afar? Some girl his own age who lived in the house next door? The mother or older sister or aunt of one his friends?

  She passed him the wine and then held out her empty hand for him to give her the money. The coins felt warm and damp, as though they had been clamped in his fist. She quickly checked that all the money was there and then, lifting the lid of the chest, dropped the coins into a bowl she kept inside. She upended the hourglass. By the time she turned back, the spotty youth had gulped down half the wine. She undressed while the spotty youth watched her with wide eyes.

  ‘Do you like it?’ she asked with a smile.

  He drank down the rest of the wine and nodded. Birkita could almost have felt fond of him. He reminded her of her brother Banning when he was that age. She pushed the thought away.

  When she was naked, she motioned to the spotty youth that he should sit on the bed. She knelt down, lifted the knee-length tunic he wore and went to work.

  Birkita kept one eye on the hourglass. When the sands ran out, she stopped what she was doing, got up and climbed onto the bed. She lay on her back and indicated that he should take off his clothes. He undressed and got on top of her. He went to kiss her and she let him. Flavia said that men liked kissing and while not every lupanar allowed it, Antonius said his girls should do it. As the spotty youth entered her and began to pump her, Birkita closed her eyes.

  ‘Aurelia,’ he groaned. ‘Oh, Aurelia!’

  She moaned and whimpered and uttered compliments and encouragement as Flavia had taught her to do but her mind flew away.

  It flew back to Britain and she imagined finding the bull Roman, taking him captive. She would bring him to exactly the same spot where he had killed her brother and his family. There, she would crucify him. She pictured his face as the nails were driven into his wrists. What he would look like as he hung from a cross looking down at her. She wondered how long it would take him to die. He was big and strong. He would take a long time. Much longer than the time it had taken Banning. More than a day, she thought. Maybe two. She hoped so. And she would stay there at the foot of the cross for all of it. She would revel in the bull Roman’s suffering. She wondered if he would die bravely. She thought not. Like all bullies, he was a coward, she thought. He would grovel, weep, plead for mercy.