Mother Nile

by Warren Adler

  “Do you love her?” she asked after a long pause. It seemed an appropriate comment. What else was one to say? Besides, her own aspirations were an absurdity. She was merely a vessel for his lust. For her part, she submitted but felt nothing.

  “She has good teeth,” he said, suddenly erupting in laughter that shook the flesh of his enormous body.

  She pondered that later, prompting a timid question as Zakki drove her home.

  “He means she will be a good breeder. He wants a son. The next King of Egypt.” There was no need to belabor the fact that his first wife had given him only daughters. What use were daughters? It was also her own mother’s plaint.

  “In my grandfather’s time, they would dump the baby girls into the Nile,” she had told Farrah. Nothing had changed, Farrah had determined that at a very early age. Indeed, there were moments when she considered such a fate a preferred outcome.

  “You could have told me,” she said, curious that Zakki had not been the first harbinger of the bad news. There had been ample opportunity earlier in the evening.

  “I didn’t want to be indelicate,” he said, looking at her archly. His response seemed completely out of character.

  “Zakki,” she taunted, “you are getting soft in your old age.”

  He pulled the car to the side of the Corniche overlooking the Nile, then turned and faced her. It was midday and a film of sweat lathered his forehead and upper lip, although the air was cool.

  “Maybe it’s time for both of us to take a queen,” he said with effort. He was less clumsy when he was mean. She dreaded what was coming, praying she might hide beneath her skin.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Us. Farrah. Us.”

  “There is no us,” she said with brutal finality. “No us at all.”

  “I know I have seemed mean.”

  “Seemed. You have always revolted me.” She threw back at him his original proposition. “Zakki is the keeper of the key.” She laughed with contempt. “Not to mention that little drama with the knife.”

  He lowered his eyes and looked down at his rough hands.

  “That was only a game,” he mumbled. “I never hurt you.” Then suddenly, his eyes misted, confusing her completely. Was this beast capable of tears? “I have a heart, Farrah.”

  “I never doubted that,” she said haughtily. “A black one.”

  He ignored her attack, humbled by his own confession. She knew now what had always lain beneath the surface, and she was determined to beat it back at all cost.

  “You think it was easy to endure. You and him, while the king’s lackey…” His thick lips trembled and the cobra tongue came out to lick them. He seemed, suddenly, to contemplate a new thought. “His bride-to-be was taken from another man. She is engaged. He simply says: ‘I want you.’ And the engagement is broken. He doesn’t love her. He is not capable of that. He will never be faithful to her.” He was silent for a long time, as if he resented the king’s intrusion. “If you would only let me prove to you—”

  “Zakki,” she said with total indifference, “it is not becoming. Just take me back to the club.”

  “I will marry you. I will take you away. Believe me, I have lined my pockets. I can take care of you. And I will love you.”

  His revelation seemed to trigger some particularly venomous streak in her.

  “Love me,” she spat. “The king’s cunt.” She could not help herself, persisting in the sarcasm. “I would rather marry a camel.”

  For a long time, he sat watching her, looking pained, forlorn, the way he must have looked as a poor boy roaming the slums of Cairo. She saw the image, glimpsed it briefly, and felt guilty for not feeling any pity at all. In fact, she welcomed this opportunity to taunt him, to be cruel.

  “You’ve only seen one side of me,” he begged, as if he were peeling away his own skin. “I have deep feelings.” Tears flooded over his cheeks and his shoulders shook in a convulsion of hysteria. She watched him for a while, suspicious still. Is my heart supposed to melt? she wondered, angered at his display of emotion.

  “Take me to the club, Zakki,” she said, turning away, concentrating instead on the feluccas that looked like listing swans moving gently in the Nile breeze. The agony of his hysteria sputtered and she knew that he was concentrating on reassembling himself, drawing the layers of his old self-protective veneer around him. She had been foolhardy, she realized now, surrendering herself to pure vengeance. She knew he would not forget his humiliation.

  The car moved, swerving as it jumped the curb, kicking up a cloud of dust as the wheels gripped the hard ground. When she looked at him again, his eyes were dry and the cobra tongue again licked the thick dry lips, curled now in a mocking half-smile.

  This Zakki was familiar. But it was the other one she feared.

  Chapter Nine

  She suspected that she was pregnant just about the time that Cairo’s frenzy and good feeling about the king’s impending marriage was at its height. For some reason, Cairenes had interpreted Farouk’s decision to marry again as a kind of renewal. The bad boy king, the voluptuary, was turning over a new leaf. Egypt would be saved from its degradation, the British would be expelled, and this ancient land, the cradle of civilization, would regain its shining glory.

  What it meant to Farrah was that the king was now simply more discreet, although his meetings with her were less frequent. Zakki, still the faithful intermediary, would drive her to and from the king’s presence, maintaining a surly indifference, barking occasional insults. She knew that the memory of his humiliation lingered, and she tried to avoid any conversation with him.

  The king enjoyed his clandestine indiscretions and their logistics reflected his nervous meanderings, the designless pacing and huffing of the penned bull. He would have Zakki deliver her to a nondescript villa in Heliopolis, a posh suburb in the northwest part of the city, which he owned in the name of a fictional bohemian rug peddler.

  “I am Omar Natachian.” He winked, greeting her in the strange setting, a room authenticated by his own bizarre imagination of how a bohemian rug peddler might have lived.

  Sometimes, they flew in one of his private planes to his summer palaces at Alexandria or Montazah, spending part of the night there and, in the early morning hours, taking a sunrise cruise in the royal yacht Mahroussa, which lay at anchor on the clear sparkling Mediterranean.

  Mostly, the game plan was to have her driven to the Qubbah Palace after the last show, where the king awaited her in his private quarters. He no longer appeared in nightclubs now, one of the few concessions to his fiancée. Sometimes they would watch Hollywood westerns, or play backgammon, or she would sit silently as he gorged himself on food, concentrating on his ingestion until the blood rushed to his cheeks and the sweat poured off his forehead.

  Her role, she knew, was to provide him with continuing accessibility to her person and her time. She no longer harbored any illusions that went beyond that. Wasn’t she lucky to have engaged the king’s attention? It gave her status. A mistress to the king! She knew she was merely an occasional diversion for this obsessive man who could not bear to be alone with himself. Zakki would never let her forget that she was just one in a sea of royal cunts.

  “Tomorrow is Lily’s turn,” he would snicker as he shuttled her back and forth. “Or Margo’s, Tutu’s, Ellan’s.” She never gave him the satisfaction of responding.

  Besides, she was absorbed in her own problem, searching for the perfect moment to announce her predicament. In a month or two, it would be impossible to hide the fact from the people at Auberge des Pyramides. And, she realized now, that Zakki had been right about her false pride. She simply had not figured on such an eventuality.

  When Farouk told her that he was planning an extended honeymoon on Capri and the Riviera, she knew she had no choice. He would be gone for months. He might even remain faithful to Narriman, his
new wife, become a devoted doting husband. If that occurred, she was certain, he would never take responsibility for his paternity.

  She decided that she had to see her father. They seldom talked now. Even his weekly appearance to accept her largesse was a cold, empty transaction. Although he was not yet forty, he looked twenty years older. But she still loved him, cherishing their earlier years together. She hoped that, pressed by this crisis, his mind might clear momentarily, and offer some wisdom. He had fawned over her as a girl, much to the irritation of her mother, who, in the end, ignored her. It hardly mattered now, since her life had become a treadmill of childbirth and simple survival.

  It was her father, too, who had urged her to escape from the predictable drudgery of a slum woman’s existence. That had been wisdom, and she was grateful for it.

  “You must leave this, Farrah.” He had encouraged her to become a dancer. “Teach my daughter,” he had begged the dancers, who took their leisure in the Auberge parking lot. Responding to his tenacity, they’d begun to oblige and soon, Farrah was dancing for piastres in the streets, a beautiful, coppery-skinned girl with green eyes. What did it matter if her father took the money to buy hashish? She loved him and he loved her.

  Her dancing became the principal source of irritation between her parents, and their arguments reverberated through the filthy slum building. It had been built for ten families. Now it housed forty, a stench-ridden snake pit filled with people, animals, and despair.

  “You are making her a whore,” her mother would cry.

  “A dancer,” he would mutter.

  “It is against the will of Allah. It brings shame on our family. Allah will punish us all.” Her mother would be sitting cross-legged on the floor, a child in her lap, another suckling at a wrinkled breast. Her father would be leaning against the wall, his legs stretched out on the chipped floor, a water pipe at his side, drawing in the fumes of the hashish, lost in a kayf. The acrid sweetish odor dominated all other effluvia in that barren, dank, empty room.

  “There is no worse sin than to be a whore,” her mother would rail.

  He would lift his eyes dreamily and look at his wife, a black-draped raven-like creature to whom the present had no meaning.

  “It is Allah’s will,” he would mock. He had long ago lost his trust in Allah.

  ***

  “Well,” her mother greeted her when she arrived at their crowded ruin of a home. “The king’s whore.” She had expected such a reaction, and that was probably the real point of the expedition in the first place. Perhaps she needed to take another quick look at the abyss.

  There was her mother, surrounded by the squalor of a doomed life, howling half-naked brats, and the stink of putrefaction; trapped by ignorance and the appalling weight of reproduction.

  “How can you live like this?” she whispered. It was, she knew, the litany of hopelessness. She looked around the room. Her father was gone.

  “Allah will provide,” her mother said with a sigh. The poor woman had just returned from a day hauling tomato crates and was too exhausted to continue the combat. She was nursing her latest baby, and the child was protesting the meager milk supply in the woman’s shrunken breast.

  “Not in this world,” Farrah observed gloomily. Her mother shrugged helplessly.

  The biological connection, the knowledge that she was spawned here and had deserted them, filled her with a gnawing sense of guilt. She wished she could find the child’s lost maternal love. Had she ever loved this woman? she wondered.

  Her mother’s head dropped, and she backed away, moving down the garbage-strewn steps choked with children and animals. She wondered which among the shabby children were her brothers and sisters.

  She found her father in the back of a dingy coffee shop, sucking on the inevitable water pipe. He lifted his dreamy eyes and watched her approach. She did not sit beside him, knowing that the other men in the shop would be offended. This was the domain of men, only men.

  “I must talk with you, Father,” she implored. Through the haze, he must have sensed her anguish. He took a deep, lung-swelling drag on the water pipe, then stood up. He followed her out into the narrow, crowded street.

  “The king has made me pregnant, Father,” she said. He had once been alive, alert. Now he peered at her face through bloodshot, glazed eyes.

  “You know what I’m saying, Father?” she asked softly.

  He nodded slowly, avoiding her eyes.

  “I don’t know what to do. If I tell him, he will be angry. It will be a burden, a complication.”

  “He will provide,” her father said thickly. “He is the king.”

  “Soon I won’t be able to work,” she said. “I will need every piastre.”

  “Then Allah will provide.”

  “Allah?” She looked at him curiously. Allah! Was he mocking her now?

  “I can’t go back to this, Father. Never.”

  “No, you mustn’t.”

  Then what shall I do, she wanted to ask him. His face was a mirror of futility. She needed wisdom now and he was incapable of providing it.

  “Soon there will be no more for you,” she said, gently. But he was far away, nervously looking toward the coffee shop, beyond comprehension.

  “I must go,” he said.

  She sighed and touched his gaunt face.

  “I love you, Father,” she whispered. His eyes misted, and he turned away. She knew she was alone now. Perhaps she would have been better off not knowing a different life. It was too late for such thoughts, she decided.

  Chapter Ten

  She saw the king again at the Qubbah Palace on the eve of his wedding. He had sent for her, as Zakki had explained maliciously, for her farewell “hump.” But by then she had made allowances for his crudeness, knowing that she had transcended them. Determined not to let the evening pass without a discussion of her predicament, she was crestfallen to find that the king was totally consumed by plans for his wedding. Between bites of pastry, he explained what was being planned.

  “The noise will blast these dirty Arabs from their hovels. A hundred-and-one-gun salute, each blast a signal to send the king presents. Lots of presents. Gold, preferably. Then Narriman will come in a motorcade of a dozen Rolls-Royces, twenty-five motorcycles, five red Cadillacs. It will be fantastic. Fantastic.”

  She nodded, hoping that his euphoria might dissipate so that she might get on to her problem. But he rambled on.

  “I’ve reserved a hundred and fifty rooms at the Caesar Augustus Hotel in Capri,” he said. “They will see that the King of Egypt is no third-rater.”

  That night he consumed more pastries than she had ever seen him eat, an endless parade of sugar that seemed to feed his nervous energy and goad him into a talking fit.

  “This will be a whole new phase. When I come back, I will whip those political bastards into bringing this sewer of a country into the twentieth century. And I’ll expel the British shits. I’ll be able to govern then. I’ll be a real king.”

  He stood up and began pacing the ornate room. It was curious that his bulk did not physically slow down his movements. He waved his hands. “Somewhere out there is the blood of the Pharaohs, enough of the old genes to resurrect this dung hill. Egypt’s glory will live again. Once and for all we will be the guardians of the gateway to the Middle East and Africa. Our own masters at last. No more foreign dogs to tell us how to conduct our affairs. I will build my army, not the bleating bastards that couldn’t wipe out a few Jews. Brave men with modern weapons. Weapons that work. And I will cut off the balls of every lousy politician.” She had never seen him so wound up. His eyes blazed with his words. “You will see. Before I am through, I will be the great king of the Middle Eastern empire. I swear to the heavens that I will toss those British dogs back into their filthy kennels. I will build a great army and I will expand my rule. No more will we pay those filthy Arab and p
iss-ass sheikhs to keep things quiet. It will be Egypt, and Egypt alone that will control the waterways to the east and the land bridges to the west and south. What Hitler did not do in Europe, Farouk will do in Africa and the East.” He patted his bloated belly. “I will make bulk fashionable. Everybody will want to be like Farouk.”

  Suddenly he became aware of Farrah watching him and he smiled enigmatically.

  “You’ve never seen me so…” He paused, showing the boyish uncertainty. “So kingly?”

  She nodded vigorously.

  “I am Farouk of Egypt,” he said. “I will be greater than the second Ramses.”

  He stopped, growing pale, and leaned back on a clutch of pillows. She knew what that meant, and she undressed him. His speech had already excited him and his organ was hard, twitching. As he watched it, his eyes glowed with pride.

  “Am I powerful?” he cried, patting her head, diverting her. She caressed the organ with her tongue. A film of sweat flowed from his huge bulk, as his breath labored and his flesh grew hot with pleasure.

  “Is it strong and hard and beautiful?” he gasped.

  “Yes, Majesty.”

  “I will be greatest of all Egypt’s kings.”

  “Of course.”

  He was particularly satisfied with his pleasure and surprised her by slipping a gold chain around her neck. Attached to it was a gold coin. “A special gift,” he whispered. She thanked him. For a moment she was happy and she determined to take advantage of his mood.

  “I am going to have a baby,” she whispered, watching his closed eyes for some reaction. He yawned and rubbed his nose.

  “May it be a son,” he mumbled.

  “Yours,” she said.

  “Talk to Zakki,” he said after a long pause.

  Zakki! A dark hand grabbed at her insides. Was he going to throw her on the mercy of Zakki? Sooner or later, Zakki had said. Was this what he meant?