The Most Beautiful Night of the Soul

by Sandor Jaszberenyi

  “Hello there. Are you alone?”

  “Not anymore. What’s your name?”

  “Pocahontas.”

  “I didn’t even know there are American Indians in Sudan.”

  “You can’t know everything.”

  She laughed, and sat down on the barstool beside me.

  I hadn’t batted an eyelid when she’d said her name moments earlier. In the months prior I’d heard dozens of fanciful names, from Mona Lisa to Madonna. The girls would say anything they thought the men would find exciting, anything at all that was suitable to mask the huts they’d come from, without running water or electricity, and the witchcraft-inspired names they’d gotten from their mothers. All the shady bars and brothels were full of Madonnas, Mona Lisas, and Pocahontases.

  “Will you have something to drink?” I asked, unable to resist staring at her breasts. They were small, with pugnacious, big nipples.

  “Beer.”

  I waved at the waitress, who brought out the drinks. We drank.

  “I’d like to spend the whole night with you,” I said.

  Pocahontas laughed, her eyes glistening.

  “You’ll have to pay for that. Five hundred geneihs. I’m a businesswoman.”

  “I’m not American. I don’t have money. I have two hundred geneihs altogether.”

  “Two hundred fifty.”

  “Two hundred.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  From the way she’d said it, I knew we’d settled on the price. I turned to the bar to order another round of drinks. That’s when the problems began.

  A paunchy, fifty-something Brit appeared from out of thin air and stepped between me and the girl. I knew the type. He was with the British Embassy and didn’t work a bit, and yet every month he took home double what I make from wars. He started talking to Pocahontas.

  “Sorry,” I said, and tried sitting back on my seat.

  “Beat it,” the bloke replied in a gurgling voice.

  That’s all I needed. I gave him a right hook. He was on the floor at once.

  I should not have hit him.

  The British Embassy staff go whoring about together. Three characters the size of small trucks came charging at me immediately, SAS tattoos on their arms. They must have been the embassy’s gardener, pastry chef, and shoeshine boy, since officially not a single foreign mission was allowed to have its own soldiers in Egypt.

  The first drove a fist twice into my face. The first blow cracked my nose, the next one tore the skin at my eyebrows. I was already on the ground.

  The others joined in only once I’d fallen. Their fists rained down on my head, they kicked me, and once I was no longer moving and not even trying to defend myself, they dragged me out in front of the bar and flung me onto the street. My backpack came flying after me in a big arch from the door, and I heard my laptop’s monitor implode as it hit the ground. The bouncers looked on the whole scene with stoic calm, and when the gardener, pastry chef, and shoeshine boy went back inside the bar, the bouncers pulled me a bit to the side, to some bushes, so I wouldn’t disturb the flow of business with my bleeding.

  Just how long I lay there on my back among the bushes, choking and half-blind from my own blood, I have no idea.

  I felt a boundless calm. I watched the stars in the sky, the flickering lights of the many quasars and galaxies, and I kept thinking that this was exactly the distance I was from what people call a meaningful life. My brooding was interrupted by a deep, woman’s voice.

  “Don’t you die, M’zungu,” said Joyce and lifted me up off the ground. We knew each other in passing from the Faris. Late one night we’d had a beer.

  “Don’t you die, M’zungu,” she said while helping me into her rented house on the edge of the desert, and as she then sat me down on the edge of her bed and untied my boots.

  “Don’t you die,” she said as she wet a towel and, with a well-practiced hand, washed the blood out of my eyes.

  “M’zungu,” she whispered as she took off her clothes and lay down beside me.

  “There is no death.”

  Her two colossal breasts covered me from the world as surely as a total eclipse of the moon.

  Making love with a prodigious black woman is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced if you are fair-skinned and from a land where this is unlikely to have been part of your reality. The oscillating mass, whose every last feature was far from what I’d learned to perceive as beautiful, was mesmerizing. If you were once a provider, a father, a husband, and are then no longer these things, you can only define yourself by what you are not. If such traditional structures have betrayed you, if you no longer give a shit about them, why then, and if you happen to be in the right part of the world, having come from elsewhere, why then you bed down with women only because that’s what the scorching heat that has penetrated your bones dictates. Bathing in sweat, your heart hammering away, all you can think of is that you must make love or die. You take serious measures to ensure either option.

  Joyce was different than any woman I’d ever encountered as a man. Her beautiful body, more than 300 pounds, nearly pressed the life out of me when she lay upon me. Her sweat smelled of spices.

  Many black Africans regard white people’s sweat as among the most intolerable smells of all. Our sweat is vinegary, so they say, and, in contrast with that of Arabs or blacks, it stinks from afar. There may be something to this. Everyone in the house smelled good, though they sweated just the same as did I.

  For three days straight I didn’t even get up out of Joyce’s bed. Figuring mightily into this was the fact that the Brits had given me a rather sound beating. I was blue and green everywhere, and breathing came hard.

  She lived in a two-storey concrete house. Her room had one window, with a worn, black wooden frame. That window afforded a good view of the desert access road. When Joyce went down to the kitchen, or for some reason left me alone, I’d stare at length out at the aged Lada station wagons rolling along toward the Sinai Peninsula. The wind would catch the scarves of the barefoot Bedouin drivers, and those scarves would then flutter outside of the rolled-down windows.

  We lay on a two-person old colonial-era bed that creaked at our every move. Opposite the bed was a closet with a mirror, and beside that, a makeup table. For three days straight even she hardly left the room. We made love, or else, in the unbearable heat, we ate opium. We didn’t talk much.

  The third night, after we had the falafel sandwiches Joyce brought for supper, I stood up and began getting dressed.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  She sat up in bed, her huge breasts swinging forward like two waterskins, the sweat glistening on her body.

  “I don’t know. Away.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve overstayed my welcome to begin with. I’m sure you’re bored of me.”

  “I’m not bored of you, M’zungu. Where are you going?”

  “Why should you care? I’m no one to you.”

  “You sleep with me.”

  “I sleep with anyone.”

  “Do you have a place to go?”

  “Not yet, but I will. That never was a problem before.”

  “Where will you sleep?”

  “In some hotel.”

  “Stay.”

  “Why do you want me to stay?”

  “Because you sleep with me, and beyond that, it could only help the business if there’s a man here.”

  I lit a cigarette and thought to myself that it didn’t matter at all.

  “What would my duties be?”

  “To watch over the girls.”

  “I can’t even watch over myself.”

  “It’s enough if you’re seen.”

  “OK.”

  “Hey, come on,” she said, and led me down to the kitchen. The kitchen was on the ground floor by the girls’ rooms, opposite the massive front door. A large space that smelled of grease with a charmless wooden table and plastic chairs in the middle. Its
two windows looked out onto the yard, affording a view of sickly palm trees with filthy leaves and garden plants faded to the color of sand. No one took care of the yard.

  The kitchen was the heart of the house, with its eight-holed greasy black gas-stove. This is where the young women who lived in the house gathered every night; it was here that they spoke of their days, their customers, and it was here that they paid Joyce her due for the lodging, their visas having been arranged, their new lives in Cairo. They were loud. Their laughter and squealing filled the house every night. They were the faithful companions of my never-ending insomnia, for until the sun didn’t rise in all its full light, there was always someone there to talk to.

  Joyce employed four women. Not one was older than thirty. The oldest among them was called Mina, and, like Joyce, had come from the Belgian Congo. The other girls were South Sudanese, from Juba or environs. Samiya and Brinda were sisters, with serious ideas about and plans for life; and little Yaya, who couldn’t have been a day older than eighteen, regularly sent money to her family back home.

  It was well after midnight the first time Joyce led me down to the kitchen. All four young women were sitting around the table. Their makeup had already smeared, and they were in panties and T-shirts. They were smoking and drinking cheap, Egyptian beer. Each one of them fell silent when we stepped in.

  “Who is this?” asked Mina, breaking the silence and provocatively placing her foot up on the table. Her eyes burned with hatred.

  “This is M’zungu, my friend,” said Joyce. “He’ll be staying here for a bit.”

  “It’s bad luck to let a white man stay for long in a house.”

  “This is my house.”

  “It still brings bad luck.”

  The other girls snickered, and gazed at me with curiosity.

  “This one doesn’t bring bad luck.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know, and that’s that. I didn’t ask for your opinion. If you don’t like something here, you can leave.”

  Mina turned her eyes down and took a gulp of her beer.”

  “As you want, Big Mama. Keep your M’zungu. But don’t forget I warned you.”

  “I think he’s got a really sweet face,” said Brinda, laughing along with her sister. Yaya then spoke, noting that the worst customers were those men who first went cheating on their wives before coming here, since a girl needed to work on them forever before they were able to produce a respectable erection.

  Joyce took two beers from the fridge, pressed one into my hand, and sat down in an empty chair.

  “How many were there today?” she asked the young women. They then began haggling loudly over the money.

  I was Joyce’s lover.

  During the day I alone was awake. The women, who invariably went to sleep toward dawn, rarely awoke before noon, and it almost never happened that they’d emerge from their rooms until the air didn’t cool down enough to be tolerable.

  Life in the house began at 5 PM. Until then I occupied myself as best I could. I did the necessary shopping and I sat in front of a white sheet of paper onto which—such was my conviction—I should write something, or else I lay back down beside Joyce and watched her measured, heavy breathing.

  In European terms, Joyce’s house would not have qualified as a brothel. Men never arrived on their own, and it wasn’t advertised anywhere. The women working for Joyce were the living advertisements of the service provided, the sales reps, and the transactors in one. Joyce only provided the rooms and made it possible for them to live legally in Egypt. For that, she paid lots of money to officials at the immigration agency.

  When those in the house began waking up in the late afternoon, at first all I could hear were the toilets being used, and then the radios were turned on in the rooms and Egyptian pop music began blaring. The cacophony didn’t bother anyone. The women ran about the house half-naked, brushed their thick black hair in front of the mirrors or shouted at each other if one of them occupied the bathroom for too long.

  They quarreled, and then they made peace in a flash. The fights came easily to blows. If one girl got on another’s clothes or used up another’s perfume or hairspray, the owner unhesitatingly fell at her, yanking away at her hair and wrestling with her on the floor with such vehemence that the others had to intervene. And yet such brawls petered out just as fast as they erupted. The women, who minutes before had been at each other with unbounded hostility, were now sitting beside each other, laughing, having what to them was breakfast, like inseparable friends.

  Preparations took until 9 PM—all the way until Joyce gave the command to begin. The girls would have been capable of spending all night primping themselves, straightening their hair with flat irons and then spraying or gelling or waxing their hair rock-hard, if Joyce didn’t roar at them that it was time for the night to begin. When we stepped out the door, the company looked as if headed for the opera, each woman in her cocktail outfit, with black pantyhose and high-heel shoes.

  They divvied up their hunting grounds among the African bars in Ma’adi. Two girls always went to the Faris and two to the Koriana or else to some ship docked on the Nile. Their first order of business was to catch Western men for themselves, for such men were both the gentlest and paid the most. The Arabs were wilder, with less cash to spare, but if there were no other takers, the women went with them, too, as well as with visitors from relatively affluent black African countries.

  There were regulars, too. Awaiting the women in the bars were diplomats from abroad and staff at international NGOs—men who by day fought fiercely for human rights and issued proclamations left and right condemning prostitution, only so that at night, woozy from cheap Egyptian alcohol, they could then work off their built-up stress with the girls.

  The price of the service varied by the customer, but the women didn’t go with anyone for under two hundred Egyptian pounds, or geneihs. When they made a deal, they sent Joyce a text message letting her know they were headed off. At such times we too left the bar, where we’d been drinking, and the girls made sure that Joyce would always get home first.

  I think it was the occasion on which I involuntarily became an active participant in the business that the girls accepted that I, too, was a bona fide resident of the house.

  One evening toward midnight Joyce and I were drinking between the dragon-ornamented folding screens of the Faris when someone began roaring my name. I turned toward the sound. Sitting in a corner with three other men was a New York City guy I knew from the local English-language paper. He was a well-heeled Jewish kid from Brooklyn whose sense of mission and need to prove himself had swept him all the way to Cairo, where he was learning Arabic. He was now sitting about with group of men who, while varied, all looked American.

  “Hey, Daniel, what’s up, you old warrior?” he said. “Come have a drink with us.”

  I headed toward them and tried remembering his name. It came to me.

  “David. It’s been a while. What’s up?”

  “A whiskey for my friend!” David shouted to the bar.

  The waitress brought the whiskey. We clinked glasses and drank.

  “You’re still traveling about in wars?” he asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “This kid is crazy, I tell you,” David said to his friends. “But he’s charged his way through the Egyptian and Libyan revolutions. And how many times have you been to the Gaza Strip?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Fourteen? Like I said, this kid is crazy!”

  “What are you guys doing here?” I asked. “I’ve never seen you in this bar.”

  “We got a tip that there are girls here. You know, men need to satisfy certain needs of theirs. Do you think those two women there at the bar are whores?”

  I turned to look. Two girls were sitting at the bar, but neither worked for Joyce.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. If I was in your shoes I’d be careful. It’s easy to pick up something you don’t want to.”

 
; “You’re right, Daniel. But where in Cairo can we find clean working women, where?”

  We went on drinking, and I looked over those at the table. They were young, middle-class men in their early twenties. They were exuberant on account of the booze.

  “But you can.”

  “Where?”

  “I know a phone number. But I’m sure they’re not cheap.”

  “Call them over here right away.”

  I stood from the table and stepped over to Joyce.

  “One hundred fifty dollars apiece,” she said.

  I sauntered back to the guys’ table and told them the price.

  “That’s nothing,” came the reply, and they ordered more drinks.

  A half-hour later the four girls arrived from the house and took home the four men. They later reported that they were shy, bashful kids without any sexual experience. They posed no problems. They paid like troopers, and one or two even returned almost every week. Given that one hundred fifty dollars was almost as much as they made all week, the girls were enormously satisfied with me. Mina now even overlooked the fact that I was white. From then on I always had to look around the bars to see if I might happen upon an acquaintance to whom I could recommend our services.

  It almost never happened that anyone spent the whole night at the house. After orgasm, most customers, overcome by shame, left the promises as quickly as possible. By no later than 4 AM the house emptied out entirely, and the girls gathered in the kitchen to talk over their day and give Joyce her due, a third of their proceeds.

  Joyce showed no mercy in collecting the sums. She never let anyone go to sleep until she was paid. She bound the takings with a hair tie. The thick, filthy wad of cash was always on her. She slept that way, too, with the money in her hand, or else she placed it beside her face, on the pillow, close enough so she could smell it.

  “Why do you sleep with the money?” I asked her late one night as we prepared for bed.