Nekropolis (26 page)

I collapse on the pillows and cry until Akhmim finally gets home and wraps his arms around me and kisses my tears away.

Then I dress in my best blue, with a clean white veil. It’s old and the hem needs to be resewn, but it’s clean. Akhmim braids my hair in a thick single braid. I’m thinking that maybe Professor Malik’s wife wasn’t at Miss Aziza’s because she doesn’t approve. I can always take the veil off.

I can imagine her, someone like my aunt Zehra, only kept young like all these people are, like Akhmim and I will be. (A strange thought, that Ayesha will grow old like my mother and I will stay young-someday I will look like her daughter, like Tariam. Another betrayal.)

A little red bubble car pulls up while we are waiting outside, Akhmim and me, and the driver says, “Miss Hariba, Mr. Akhmim?” Professor Malik lives out east of the city, and we drive down almost to the sea before turning and heading east. I catch glimpses of the water sometimes, bright in the early evening sun. He doesn’t live on the water, his house is a couple of streets back, but it’s a little house crowded in with other little houses, not a flat. The bubble car pulls into a kind of courtyard with bricks for a floor and planters with olive and lemon trees and flowers spilling over them. Professor Malik comes out, dressed in unbleached linen that looks very elegant. I feel shabby.

Maybe here I can be made beautiful. So many people seem beautiful here. If they can make people young, how much harder can beautiful be?

“Miss Hariba,” he says, “Mr. Akhmim. Welcome to my little house.” There is a fountain and a pool near the door, all of brick, with lilies floating in it. “My wife gardens,” he says. “She has the touch.”

It isn’t a big house like Mbarek’s, but it’s beautiful in a way that Mbarek’s could never be. The floor is tiled in beautiful stones, and there is furniture everywhere, but light, graceful, and curved pieces of furniture that don’t clutter everything up. The mistress had preferred projections of blue glass and silver, but the colors here are warm and each room is a little different. The main room is colored with wood and deep red and brown velvets, but there are splashes of green, as light as spring and suggesting rain.

He takes us through the kitchen, where the unexpected color is orange. The sink is the color of tamarind.

The room in the back is full of light from a huge window in the ceiling. The table is long and narrow and set as if for a party, with lots of yellow and bits of amethyst. It is all so vivid, but it looks handled and used, a bit worn, not too garish, as if all these things have been loved for years and years.

“Your house is beautiful,” I say.

“My wife,” he says, and waves his hand. “She does these things.”

“Malik? Are your people here?” A woman calls from the hall.

“Claudia,” he says. “This is Miss Hariba and Mr. Akhmim.”

His wife is nothing like I expect. She is tall and as narrow as a stork, with dark red hair that frames her face and shines like a helmet. She is wearing a green tunic with a high collar and long sleeves, and white pants. Even her feet, in leather sandals, are elegant. She’s not Moroccan.

I reach up and pull off my veil. I’m glad I braided my hair.

“This is my wife, Claudia,” says Professor Malik. “She is a professor of mathematics.”

Akhmim, unperturbed as always, puts his hands together and bows slightly.

“Claudia,” Professor Malik says, “This is Miss Hariba, and Mr. Akhmim.”

We sit down at the long table, all eating at one end. Professor Claudia brings in chicken and rice and vegetables. “I’m sorry it’s all so plain,” she says.

I can smell the lemon and garlic in the chicken. “Oh no,” I say, “its wonderful.” There are olives in the chicken, too. Professor Malik’s wife asks me about how Akhmim and I like Málaga. Akhmim tells her that we are taking Spanish classes, and compliments her on her Moroccan.

“Claudia’s mother is from Morocco ,” Professor Malik explains.

“Where is she from?” Akhmim asks.

“Fez ,” Professor Claudia says.

“That’s where you’re from, isn’t it?” Professor Malik says.

I look at my yellow plate and my amethyst glass and my yellow napkin. No one mentions Alem. I wonder what Ayesha is doing at this moment. Eating with her mother. And Alem is in prison. Maybe with my brother, although more likely he would be in jail right now. I wonder if they’ve beaten him. Nabil said that they beat Fhassin.

But the chicken is very good and I’m hungry. I eat it, and the rice, yellow with saffron. After dinner, there’s strong, sweet coffee and pastry with walnuts and honey.

“I’ve got some work to do,” Professor Claudia says. “I’ll leave you here to talk.”

“It was a wonderful dinner,” I say. “And you have a beautiful house.”

She smiles. “The house has been in my father’s family for over a hundred years.”

“It’s lovely,” I say.

“We’re comfortable,” she says. I don’t know if that means that they love the house, or if it means the house is not so much. They seem rich to me, but what do I know?

“Some more coffee?” Professor Malik asks.

“No, thank you,” I say. “Thank you very much for the lovely dinner. I hope we didn’t inconvenience you.”

“Not at all,” he says. “But let’s talk about your friend, the one who was arrested.”

Akhmim smiles at me. He’s been holding up the conversation all during dinner because he knows I’m too upset to talk. I couldn’t do without him, and he does love me, and he understands me better than anyone else, better than my mother or my sister or Ayesha.

“I’ve been thinking of who we could ask to help, but there aren’t many,” Professor Malik says. “Obviously, if I can contact them, then they’re under suspicion because they have contact with the E.C.U. But I was thinking that we might be able to buy his freedom.”

“Buy his freedom?” I say.

“The police are quite corrupt,” Professor Malik says. “I think maybe ten thousand E.C.U. in the right place and your friend would be free.”

10,000 E.C.U. is more money than I have ever seen in my life. I am not sure what the professor means. Is he offering to pay for Alem to go free?

“How much do you have?” the professor asks.

“Fourteen hundred E.C.U.,” Akhmim says. “Maybe a little more.”

Professor Malik sighs. “Not enough, I’m afraid.”

“Professor Malik, could you help us, with a loan?” I say. Surely with this house, this life, it isn’t so much to him. “We’ll pay you back.” I don’t know how, but we will.

He sighs again. “I’m sorry, dear, I can’t. I don’t have a secure teaching position here, and everything we have, well, it is all my wife’s…”

All his wife’s? Then I understand. Professor Malik is a refugee, like us. He has nothing. He lives on the sufferance of his wife.

He’s like Akhmim.

* * *

Akhmim and I send 600 E.C.U. to Ayesha. It’s worth about 2,000 in Moroccan. She can use it to do what she can for Alem. I wait to get a letter back from her, but I don’t. Eventually I get a letter from my mother telling me Ayesha says she received the money, but that’s all.

I mean to send more. But everything is so expensive here. Akhmim and I have to have all new clothes. And school is expensive. It isn’t like we didn’t try, after all. And I also have to send money to my own family.

There’s nothing I can do. I try not to think about it. It’s all so far away that when I think about Morocco , it’s like a pain in my chest.

* * *

Professor Malik gives Akhmim the address of another chimera, a man named Ari, but Akhmim doesn’t mention him again. I don’t think he gets in touch with him, either, because most of the time we’re together, except for our classes and our counselors.

I ask the counselor about chimera.

“There are half a dozen kinds of chimera,” he says. “Laborers from Brazil and Argentina . There is a whole caste of chimera in India . They’re priests and it’s considered good karma to raise a boy chimera and endow him a place in the temple. The Hindu believe that these boys are souls that are ready for enlightenment, that they are above humans. But there aren’t very many of them, of course.”

I don’t understand what he’s talking about.

“Prostitute chimera like Akhmim are pretty common in the Middle East and northern Africa ,” he says.

“Akhmim’s not a prostitute,” I say, shocked. “Men can’t be prostitutes.”

The doctor nods, as if thinking. “Why not?”

“Because women don’t pay men to have sex with them,” I say.

“What about your master’s wife? Did she have sex with Akhmim?”

“No,” I say, and I can feel myself flushing bright red.

“Are you sure?” he asks gently.

“Yes,” I say, although now I’m not.

“And there are men who like to have sex with other men.”

I can’t think of anything to say to that. I mean, I’ve heard men call each other fags and buttfucks, but that’s just low men talking. I couldn’t say any of that to the doctor. I can’t believe I even said “sex” to the doctor. I’ve never said “sex” to a man before.

“Even if Akhmim wasn’t a prostitute,” the doctor says, “the kind of chimera he is, what you call a
harni,
is designed to be the perfect concubine. They’re the perfect lover, they put the needs of the human first and their needs second.”

I think maybe I won’t come here anymore.

“It’s hard for you to talk about these things,” the doctor says, “but I promise you, this is the one place you can ask questions and no one will think you are bad, no one will be shocked.”

I nod. I think about the
harni
all sitting on top of each other in Akhmim’s Spanish class. I almost ask about that, but I don’t.

I make my next appointment. I can always cancel it.

  SPECIAL_IMAGE-clip_image002.jpg-REPLACE_ME

We’re studying for our Spanish. To have:
tenir
. I have,
yo tengo;
you have,
tu tienes;
he has,
el tiene
. I have a question.
Yo tengo un amigo.
“Akhmim?”

He’s sitting across from me, working on his slate. The light from our main room lamp falls across his hair and his beautiful skin. Akhmim is the most beautiful man I have ever known. He looks up and his face is so much more beautiful than a housekeeper deserves that my heart breaks.

“Did you ever, you know, lay with the mistress?” My face grows hot.

“No,” he says. “You’re the only one. You’re the only one I love.
Yo tu quiero
.”

“I love you, too,” I say.

He smiles at me.

“Professor Malik said he knew some chimera you could meet,” I say.

He shrugs and looks back down at his slate. “Eventually, maybe.”

“Aren’t you lonely?”

“I have you,” he says.

“You told Professor Malik you were lonely,” I say.

He shrugs again. “That was different.”

I wait for him to explain, but the doesn’t. “How?” I finally say.

“He has a romantic idea of
harni
. He wanted me to be lonely, so I said I was.”

“How do I know you aren’t just saying that you aren’t to me?”

“Because I don’t lie to you,” he says.

I believe him.

  SPECIAL_IMAGE-clip_image002.jpg-REPLACE_ME

Miss Katrina, my facilitator, calls me. “Miss Hariba,” she says, “how’s your Spanish class going?”

“Well,” I say. I’ve been studying Spanish for six weeks, and for the last two weeks I have had to go to school five days, all day, and speak Spanish all the time with the other students. If I don’t know a word, like when we are eating lunch and I want salt, then I have to point and say, “That, please give me that.” I’ve learned a lot more than I ever thought I could.

“Do you have an address on your slate?”

“I do,” I say. “It’s Hariba635914.” I send all my homework to my teachers on my slate. There are only three people in my class from northern Africa, and they are both from Tunisia . Everybody else is from somewhere else in the E.C.U. or from North America , and they do everything on their slates. They shop for things, they talk to other people. I like to shop in stores.

“I have a job if you are interested,” she says.

“A job?” I ask.

“Yes. It won’t affect your subsidy, in fact, it won’t pay very well at all. Would you be interested in working with children at a school?”

“Children? I would love to.”

“You’ll have to do an orientation, but the job would be assisting at a childcare place. You’d help the people working with toddlers.

Children. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I have always been afraid of being around children because I knew that since I was jessed I would probably never have my own, and now that I’m with Akhmim, we can’t have children. But I love children. And I’m afraid to say no.

Miss Katrina is pleased. “I thought you would be perfect for this,” she says. “I’ll send you the information on your slate, all right?”

It comes just as my homework would. It’s in Spanish, but my slate can translate it for me. A job with children will be good. Children won’t care if I speak Spanish badly. I can imagine myself with them, holding a child in my lap, singing to him in Moroccan, while he looks up at me and people think, Hariba has such a way with children. I will be the most patient, even-tempered person ever and they will love me.

It’s three days a week, which allows me to keep studying my Spanish and meeting with my counselor. My counselor and I aren’t talking about Akhmim these days, we’re talking about how scared I am to try to speak Spanish. How hard it is to understand when people talk to me. How much I feel that I stand out wherever I go.

For my first day at my new job I wear a long shirt with sleeves to my wrists and long pants. The shirt is almost long enough to be a dress, so it doesn’t feel as if I am dressing like a man. The counselor and I agree that it’s a good outfit, that it’s modest without seeming quite so foreign. Akhmim braids my hair, but I don’t wear a veil.

I look in the mirror in the bathroom and I wish I were pretty. So many people here are pretty. But even in this strange costume, I still look like me.

I go to work in the dark. People have to leave their children at the daycare before they go to work, so it opens early. I get off the bus, a little afraid that I’ve gotten off a stop too early, but then I see the sign. The daycare looks like a house, except that in front is a complex of tunnels and a fort.