Cleopatra�s Perfume

by Jina Bacarr

  It was.

  No sooner had I offered to change into my uniform to continue posing for her when she whispered in a husky voice she’d rather I wore nothing at all.

  I freshened up (a bath was out of the question at this time of the day), but I washed and combed my hair and grabbed a silky white sheer dressing gown. I should have known something was amiss when Anna asked me to forgo any fragrance, insisting she preferred the natural scent of a woman, clean, musky.

  And aroused? I wondered, wiping the moisture between my legs that had a slightly sweet scent. Confident—after all I was in my own home in Mayfair—I agreed to shed my inhibitions and lounge about in a state of dishabille. I lay down on the bed and she began to sketch me, pointy breasts, long torso, a white scarf tied around my head and trailing down my back, and a string of perfect white pearls around my neck. I slipped on the ruby-and-pearl ring Ramzi gave me to complete my look. We drank French wine, rather easy to come by since many restaurants and suppliers had stocked up before the Germans took Paris, and I laughed and giggled like a schoolgirl when she asked me to pose in different positions. I twirled the end of the scarf around my fingers, then allowed it to fall over my left breast in such a way my nipple poked through the silk in a provocative manner. Then, biting down on my lip with the sharp edges of my teeth, I stared at her for a long moment, watching her pencil flying through the air, thinking about how pretty she was with her sad eyes and dark skin. Her shoulders swayed as she sketched, her foot tapping a silent rhythm that accompanied her creative process as if she were laying down each stroke in a private dance.

  I shivered. I also wanted to move my body. Against hers. Nude skin, mine as white as eggshell, hers, rich and dark as burnt copper, breast against breast, belly against belly, legs entwined. Why did I feel like this? I was responding with sensual intent to that same wild element I saw in myself, imagining her painting me with oils that bore the rich scent of perfume. And for some reason not clear to me, I wondered what secrets her body possessed. Perhaps I was jaded from the constant but cold attention from the virile men I had taken to my bed, ready to enjoy my body but never diving into my soul; or perhaps I yearned to again savor the taste of the exotic pleasures I had known in Cairo, the staid British demeanor no longer to my taste. Whichever it was, I intended to act on my desire, stretching my body, preparing to feed on her uniqueness while indulging in my fantasy. I delighted in how my breathing slowed as I remained in control, while hers sped up to a quicker pace when she looked up and I pulled the trailing scarf off my nude breast, then tilted my head downward, my glance seemingly pointing to my hardened nipple.

  “Would you like to touch me?” I asked, already knowing her answer. I delighted in the idea of being fondled and handled by her soft hands and elegant fingers.

  She nodded and the game took a different turn when she ran her hand over my breasts, stroking me, then gently twisting my nipples. Perfect points, she commented, rolling the tip of her tongue over my rose-brown nubs and licking them, sucking on them. Her lips set me on fire, the warmth and gentleness of a woman something so different from the demanding thrusts of a man. Often cold, quick, unfeeling. But not Anna. No, dear reader, she licked my flesh with a tenderness that took my starved emotions, shriveled up like dry floral petals deprived of moisture and heat, and my body unfolded under her touch. Her sighs matched mine when she parted my legs and kissed the soft hair on my pubic mound before parting my labia and edging her tongue inside me, sucking on my clit and sending me into a dreamlike state. My fears disappeared into the shadows as the day darkened into night, though I had cleansed my body of the perfume with the sweet-scented soap of jasmine. I basked aglow in a heightened state of arousal, though I was without the perfume protecting me from danger, my whole body suffused with the driving urge for sex. I moaned, delighting in the silky sweep of her pink tongue across my pleasure bud. A charismatic feeling between us, two strangers, that brought about a certain nervousness and hesitancy.

  I wasn’t ready to give up full control to this woman, raking my hand through her glossy black hair, guiding her to where I wanted her to lick me. My clit was incredibly sensitive, responding to her flicking it back and forth with the tip of her tongue, my hips gyrating in rhythm to her sucking, my mind wondering if she enjoyed the strong taste of my juices in their natural state not mixed with the scent of the perfume—

  She stopped. No, she couldn’t do that. Not now. Please. I burned with fever, aching, wanting to climax, wanting to experience a clitoral orgasm with all the selfish pleasure due to me.

  Sweaty, panting, I forced myself up on my elbows and opened my eyes to see why she had stopped. Intoxicated with alcohol, I stared at her, disbelieving. She was pointing a pistol at my breasts. Then I understood. With a boldness I didn’t know I possessed, I pushed out my chest and pointed my bare breasts at her.

  “What are you waiting for?” I said with a curious laugh. “Shoot me.” Did I really mean that? Or was I so drunk I didn’t take into consideration I wasn’t wearing Cleopatra’s perfume? Did I want to die? I don’t know, only that I’d been played a fool.

  “I—I…” the girl stammered, wiping sweat off her face, then rubbing her palm on her skirt so hard she tore the cheap fabric.

  “What do you want? Money, jewels?” I pulled the ruby ring off my finger and tossed it at her. It rolled on the carpet, but she made no move to pick it up.

  “Yes, I mean, no, I want—” She searched my bedroom, dressing room, knocking over lotion bottles, grabbing my jewel box, dumping earrings, bracelets, everything out on the floor, then opening my vanity chest until she found—

  Cleopatra’s perfume.

  “This is what I want.” She ran her fingers over the pale golden alabaster box carved with delicate emblems outlined in black with the nude, bare-breasted figure of a queen holding a scepter and perched on a throne. “What I must have or—”

  But it was too much for her. The sex, the wine. Touching, seeing, smelling. She broke down, started crying, offering no resistance when I took the pistol from her, then wrapped the dressing gown around me. How could I have been so foolish as to have let down my guard? I knew who had sent the girl. And to think she sent a woman to seduce me. I shivered, an oppressive feeling of disgust coming over me. She knew my foibles better than I did.

  I asked, “Laila sent you, didn’t she?”

  The girl nodded and explained how she was hired as a German agent by a Muslim woman with heavily lined eyes and dangling earrings. She gave her money and arranged for her passage to England with one thing in mind: to seduce me then murder me and steal my jewelry and my valuable Egyptian perfume box. A stolen artifact, she said. Which must be returned for Goering’s personal collection.

  “I was supposed to kill you,” she said, “then take the Egyptian artifact back to Switzerland where it would be sent via diplomatic courier to Germany.” She collapsed into my arms, sobbing. “But I couldn’t do it, Lady Marlowe. I couldn’t. I’ve already seen too much death.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked with more than a hint of skepticism. “How did you get here?”

  “I came to England in a small boat during the cold of night.”

  “From where?”

  “Dachau.”

  Mrs. Wills returned with an armful of yarn and blisters on her aching feet to find my Mayfair town home filled with men from Scotland Yard. I told the investigator I befriended the young woman and how she had tried to rob me. Nothing more. The girl muttered her thanks, insisting I keep the drawings before she was taken away to Holloway prison and booked as a displaced person, where she’ll be treated fairly. Anna, I found out, was a Romani Gypsy, an artist and the last of her tribe. She learned to speak many languages, including English, so she could sketch tourists and townspeople to earn her way as her Gypsy caravan crossed Europe.

  The evening in her arms was indeed a potent meditation on the power of the perfume to destroy a woman as well as to create resolve in another, to conjoin our fea
rs and, I believe, heal our souls. I rarely experienced such intensity with a sexual partner as I did with this young woman. Love, pain and a betrayal of which I’ve yet to rid myself, knowing I sent her to another prison. But I must. For her sake as well as my own. She will be out of Laila’s hands there until the war is over. If she were sent back to Germany, I’m certain she’d find herself again in a concentration camp, where the Nazi bureaucracy that recorded every arrest, movement and death of a victim (even the lice picked from their heads, according to Anna) would kill her. She told me about seeing little children murdered with sticks and thrown into a fire burning in a pit, as well as how she stared at the corpses of Jewish men and women stacked on top of each other like firewood, their huge eyes sunken in their skulls more bone than flesh, keeping her gaze on them long enough to notice that several eyes blinked back at her. They were still alive.

  I’m still haunted by her account. Her description of life in Dachau was one of startling richness, especially the mention of the “death books” that present a clear picture of the tortures the inmates suffered and who lived and who died. How her own life was spared when she was sent to see the camp Kommandant and she saw a note scribbled in the margin in green ink next to her name: she was to be used as part of a sterilization experiment. When she was stripped in preparation, drawings she had made of other inmates fell out of her pockets and onto the floor. Instead of being tortured, as she expected, the Kommandant was impressed with her work, noting how she captured skin tone and facial structure better than any photograph. He kept her alive to draw such pictures for him until a woman visited the camp. A dark-eyed woman with dangling earrings and a foreign accent.

  I cannot put blame upon the girl’s slender shoulders for accepting Laila’s offer to be released from the concentration camp. I feel certain someday Anna will be able to return to her way of life in peace. I have told you her story; when this terrible war is over, I shall petition the Foreign Office to help her, for to do so is the only way to rescue her from oblivion. She inhabited a world parallel to mine but with key differences, such as the monsters who beat her, humiliated her and who lacked even the most elemental human emotion.

  Why am I telling you all this? Because I want you to understand why I am infusing my story with the vigor of such powerful emotions so as to convey my state of mind on that seventh day of September 1940. Though days had passed since Anna’s arrest, guilt flooded me, rage overcame me, but what could I do? An addict. A woman whose desires didn’t go beyond the tiresome need for sex and cocaine. Selfish. Rootless. Gutless. Damn, I was going mad. Laila’s tentacles were here in London. Who would she send next? What was I going to do?

  What was I going to do?

  I know you are resilient enough, dear reader, to see through any melodrama or vivid and morbid descriptions to sway you and make up your own mind about what transpired. Know this, when I dabbed the perfume between my thighs on that September night and set out for an evening of frivolity, I was frightened, unnerved, and on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I continued using drugs to make the pain go away, to block out everything I’d heard since that first day in Port Said, irritated with the Jewish girl’s solicitude regarding her plight, but never once criticizing my own obstinacy to become involved. Since then, I had been privy to a firsthand account of what was really happening in this terrible war, the suffering, the hatred, the humiliation.

  But I still refused to join the fight.

  The restaurant for her daughter’s upcoming twenty-first birthday party had been selected by Lady Palmer when, in a moment of exuberance and frustration, she declared it was time to stop living this “phony war” of mock air raids and the wail of that awful siren every night and return to a semblance of normalcy. To her that meant planning an elaborate celebration, but rather than have the party at a proper hotel like the Grosvenor or the Dorchester, her daughter insisted on staging her event at an establishment located in Piccadilly in an underground restaurant. Below a cinema, very expensive and smart, and very popular. Jazz, decor and great food for everyone. No doubt with the wartime food rationing, the guests would enjoy anything to tempt their palates, with the exception of what had become known as Woolton Pie, a low-cost dish filled with bland vegetables.

  I dared to speculate who among the society crowd would be attending, as most Londoners who could leave had already done so since we expected the bombing to begin any day. The interminable waiting got on everyone’s nerves, but we were determined that as long as we lived it would not be in a Nazi England.

  I felt detached from all this somehow, going about my daily routine, thinking about how I felt powerless to face the truth about what I’d become. Stripped of all the fancy adornment of my sexual needs, I knew I must look back on what happened to me in Cairo and interpret it for what it was: I was acting out my illusions about sex, creating a myth that even I could not uphold with my wild ways, that to ever find such a love as I’d had with Lord Marlowe, I must allow a man to know me, my flaws as well as my strengths. It was a sad awakening, one I was not able to accept, and so I tossed it away with a wave of my wrist when I sniffed the white powder and proceeded to continue peering forward into the identical mirage I had created for myself in the Near East. I existed for sex, nothing more. And the war wasn’t going to change that.

  So when Lady Palmer and her daughter dropped in for tea on occasion and I saw the bloom on Flavia’s pretty face, aglow with youth and gifted with the hope young people have that life awaits them, I admit I understood her yen to stage this birthday party and to live for today. Hadn’t I done the same with my years of decadent rootlessness and irresponsibility? I had even helped her convince her mother, Lady Palmer, to stay in London rather than join the other city dwellers flooding the country hotels or private homes (sitting and reading and eating and drinking, wondering if they had fled for nothing), no doubt because of the dashing RAF officer I spotted her with at the Coconut Grove nightclub. A brilliant chap who blasted his way through the skies over Dunkirk and sailed straight into battle with five Messerschmitts on his tail and brought down two, to hear Flavia tell it, all in an effort to return to her arms.

  I must admit a pang of envy shot through me when I heard her go on about her young flier, my own loneliness haunting me until I reached the ineffable pleasure the drug gave me, far more commanding, more comforting than the farewell of an officer about to leave for the front, knowing so many of them would not return. I knew my drug would always be there for me, though I didn’t use every day. I could take a hit and not think about it for a day or a week, especially during the London springtime and summer when the parks were green and overflowing with succulent tulips waving their farewells in the breeze.

  But autumn was upon us and the thought of spending a cold London winter under the threat of invasion tore me apart. Every night we heard the bombers flying overhead on their way to Liverpool or the Midlands and every night we held our breath, waiting.

  I continued on this wayward folly for months, believing it would never end, but I must admit, I looked forward to the birthday party after this time of turmoil in my life, to donning a slinky backless gown that embodied the prewar, aristocratic luxury gone from London. I wanted to emit a certain seductiveness, to titillate and tease the libidos of those gentlemen who knew about my reputation but who never had the opportunity to taste the forbidden fruit of what many assumed was my debauched experiences in the Near East. Erotic, arousing in its implications.

  Thank you, dear reader, for listening to me recount all that happened during that year, as the details are instrumental to setting the scene for what is about to take place on that night in London when the skies turned dark with the appearance of three hundred fifty Nazi bombers escorted by six hundred fighters over the city, the scream of the bombs filling the air with its sharp sound and the knowledge that at last what we feared most had come to pass.

  That night, the horror of the London Blitz began, and my own glamorous life as I knew it ended.

>   18

  London

  September 7, 1940

  S aturday. Five p.m. No one paid attention to the monotonous droning in the distance, a buzzing in our ears that we deemed more of a nuisance than a warning as we made our way downstairs to the underground restaurant, our gas masks slung over our shoulders (we carried them everywhere—they became a kind of charm). But we had no time for war tonight. This was a birthday party, a night of celebration. Vanilla cake (sweetened with carrots since sugar was rationed) with candles waiting to be lit, pudding and apple tarts tempted us to indulge in dessert before dinner, which consisted of creamed fish and mashed potatoes. Dangling red paper chains hung from the numerous glass mosaics decorating the walls. Cold drinks, iced and ready. It had been a hot, sunny day and everyone looked forward to an evening where the exuberance of youth reigned over the stodginess of an older generation unwilling to show fear. We believed we were slipping through the looking glass of ordinary life as if by magic into a visual tapestry promising flirting, romance and, I promised my burning clit, sex.

  I raced forward into that night with the giddiness of a young girl, the breezes warm, my libido aroused. Over the past year, I had drifted from one infatuation to another, survived the turmoil of quick sex without commitment, suppressed my disappointment when I smelled the scent of another woman upon a man’s lapel, delighted in exaltation over a new conquest, then suffered through days of self-reproach for my selfishness. To be shocked by my actions, dear reader, is to be shocked by the times in which I lived. We were at war. I beg you not to ignore that.

  I continued tonight more desperate than ever on my mad escapade of sexual conquests, not in the least subdued by my recent brush with Laila’s unbelievable scheme to remove Cleopatra’s perfume from my grasp. More than ever, I was careful to wear the perfume at all times, if only a dab, and to keep a small amount in a round pill box in a secret compartment in my clutch.