Nekropolis (28 page)

“At the back,” she says. We walk toward the back, passing an open door that looks in on a room where another chimera, this one small and Asian-looking, but ugly like the one that let us in the door, sits watching an entertainment. Every surface of the room is covered with something shiny, so the room glints and glitters. The chimera doesn’t look up when we pass.

But there is space for four apartments at the back, and a door standing open. Akhmim calls hello, and a beautiful man comes to the door.

“Akhmim,” he says, “and Hariba, hello!”

His hair is straight and black and he looks as if he comes from India , but even though they look so different, he and Akhmim could be brothers. They’re the same height and they both have the same long legs, but it’s more than that. It’s the way they move. The way they stand, and both turn their faces to look at me.

Ari invites us in. There are six women all sitting there, all beautiful.

“This is where we live,” Ari says. “All the pleasure chimera.”

My Spanish isn’t so good so Ari fetches a slate and translates for us. The first two floors are all labor chimera, mostly from South America, although some from Indonesia . And on this floor the front rooms are all Indonesian.

“Except for poor Anna,” he says. He gestures toward a woman I didn’t notice. She’s standing in a doorway. She’s tall and broad and soft-looking, pale brown with placid brown eyes. “Anna is a nanny chimera. She’s only here until she can get work. But she needs a child, don’t you, Anna?”

She smiles sadly and tears well up in her eyes.

Nanny chimera, he explains through the slate, are very uncommon.

“Would you like something to drink?” Ari asks.

The other women are all sitting there and they look perfectly natural and very beautiful-four shades of blond, one redhead, and one dark-haired-but they aren’t doing anything and it feels as if they’re arranged, as if for a play. Their faces are all turned to me.

“Do you want to see the rest?” one of them asks me. Her name is Maria Inez, she says. She has a beautiful voice and I can understand her pretty well when she talks. The rooms all connect to each other, but other than the sitting room and the kitchen, I can’t tell what they’re for. Some of them have big, huge beds, and one has a mat that covers most of the floor, and one of them has a bunch of chests of drawers in it.

“Which is your room?” I ask.

Maria Inez is blond and her hair is the hundred shades of honey-clover, buckwheat, orange blossom. She says, “This room.” It’s one of the rooms with a big bed, but it doesn’t have anyplace to keep her things and it doesn’t have a door. None of the rooms have doors.

She’s…not watching me, exactly. When Akhmim looks at me, it doesn’t feel as if he’s watching me, but like Akhmim, she is always looking at me.

“You’re very beautiful,” I say.

“Thank you,” she says. “But it’s only because I’m a chimera. Your Spanish is very good.”

“Not so good,” I say.

When we get back to the sitting room, Akhmim is sitting, too, and they all look at me, and he’s one of them. One more beautiful face. The he scoots over for me to have a place to sit down and he’s my Akhmim again.

“Are you impressed?” I ask the woman sitting next to me.

“Oh yes,” she says. She is the redhead. All the women have long hair and it is soft and beautiful and they wear it down like children. “His name is Enrique.”

“Does he live here?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “We decided it was better if we lived apart.”

“Do you miss him?” I ask.

“Always,” she says. Her expression is like Akhmim’s. Calm, without pain. “But I’m happy here.”

I look at Akhmim.

He is looking at me, patient, calm. They are all looking at me. All alike.

“Would you like to live here?” I ask.

“It’s different for you and me,” he says. “I love you.”

It’s not, though. And now I know it.

* * *

I need him. I’m alone in a strange country. That’s the difference. I can make him happy, I know I can.

That night I ask him, “Do you want to make love?”

He sits down next to me on one of the big cushions we use and kisses me on the forehead. “My sweet Hariba,” he says.

“I love you,” I say. “You’re everything to me.”

“And you to me.”

“Do you feel as if…I mean, I know, men have urges,” I say.

“We’re not like other people,” he says. “Our love is based on what we have here.” He touches my chest.

It’s exactly what I would want him to say. Isn’t everything exactly what I would want him to say? “You’re saying that just for me.”

He strokes my face, his fingers delicate and precise. “What do you want?” he says.

“I want to know what you want,” I say.

“I’m here, I want to be here with you.”

“Do you want to be with the other
harni
?”

“I want you to be happy,” he says. “When you’re unhappy, it makes me unhappy.”

“I want you to make love to me,” I say.

“All right,” he says. He kisses my forehead, and then my mouth. “All right.” He kisses me gently on the lips, and then on my neck.

It will hurt the first time, but then it gets better. That’s what everyone says. But it will change us. It will be like a marriage. I can be a wife to him, I can give him what he wants. It can be as if we were jessed to each other-has anyone ever done that?

“Come,” he says, taking my hand and leading me to our bed. He sets me on the bed and kisses me again. I don’t feel anything. I’m waiting for some kind of feeling, some urge. I like when he kisses me, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel.

He takes his shirt off. “Do you want to take off your dress?” he asks.

“I…I guess,” I say. “Can we close the curtains?”

He closes the curtains so the room is dim. It’s not late enough that the sun has gone down, and the curtains let the light shine through so everything in the room is washed in red. I take off my dress, but I’m still wearing my shift. He’s seen me in my shift before. When I was sick, he saw me in my shift a lot.

“Do you want me to take my clothes off?” he asks.

“Yes,” I whisper. I wish he wouldn’t ask. I wish he would just do it. My face is hot from embarrassment.

He takes off his pants, and his underwear, and I can see what he looks like. I’ve never seen a naked man before, and I want to look, but I don’t, so I look at him a little, and then I look up at his face and promise myself I’ll just keep looking at his face.

He sits down next to me on the bed and kisses me again. “You have such nice skin,” he says. “And I love your hair, my Hariba. I think of you all the time.”

“I love you,” I say helplessly.

He kisses me and has me lay back on the bed. He carefully touches my breasts and I don’t flinch this time. I won’t flinch, no matter what he does.

He kisses me a lot, and strokes me with his hands. He kisses between my breasts, and then he has me sit up and he pulls my shift off me so I’m only wearing my underwear. He kisses between my breasts again, this time on the bare skin. I have goose bumps.

“Are you cold?” Akhmim asks.

“I’m okay,” I say. I will make him happy. I try to smile as if I’m happy. When I get more used to this, I’ll be better at it.

He touches my chest and my belly. He touches my knees and my arms and then my thighs. I try to smile at him.

“Does this feel good?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. I don’t care what it feels like.

He lays next to me and takes my hand. “I like this,” he says. “Just like this. I like being with you like this.”

I glance down to see if he’s aroused, and he is. I want to believe he likes lying here with me this way, but if he’s aroused, then surely he wants to go further. I try to think of what to do. I kiss him. “I want you,” I say.

He kisses me gently, and then he touches me. I don’t flinch. He rubs me and after a moment it feels good and I can really smile at him a little.

“That’s nice?” he says.

“Yes,” I say. I’m not perfect like the
harni
. I have little breasts and my belly is flabby, a little. My thighs are thick and my shins are thin. He is looking at me and I know he must be thinking of the
harni
. “I love you more than anyone else,” I say.

“I love you, too,” he says. “We’re together here.”

I slide off my underwear, awkward, scooting up my butt. Finally he eases on top of me and, holding it in his hand, he searches where to enter me. There’s not enough space for him to go in.

“Just relax,” he says.

“It’s okay,” I say. It isn’t, but I tell myself, Women have babies.

He pushes in. Who could imagine it would feel the way it does, all hard. It does hurt. All the good feeling is gone. He is in me for a moment, not moving.

I will make him happy. “Go on,” I whisper. This will be over soon. He is in me and he moves, and it doesn’t hurt so much, and then he groans and pulls away.

“Hariba, sweet,” he says, “are you all right?”

“Yes,” I say. “Was it good?”

“You are the loveliest,” he says.

I don’t feel different. Actually, I do. I feel as if I have done something wrong. But it’s done.

My mother would be ashamed.

I’m ashamed. He puts his arm around me and I lie there, trying to go to sleep. After a while, I get up and put on my underwear.

On the sheets there’s a spot of blood, like menstrual blood. I’m a little sore.

Akhmim raises up on his elbow. “Hariba?”

“I just want to clean up,” I say. I go and take a shower. I can cry in the shower.

He’s waiting in the now-dark room when I come back in. “Are you all right?” he asks.

“I’m okay,” I say. “Just tired. I have to go to school tomorrow.”

I get back into bed. He’s changed the sheets. I lay on my side, a little away from him. I’m so lonely. Nothing has changed.

Well, something has changed. I’m not fit to marry now.

* * *

The next morning I go to school and everything is different and nothing is different. Except that Akhmim is more far away from me and I’m different inside and no one can see.

Monday night I wait for him to get home from work. “I’ve been thinking,” I say without even saying hello. “I think you should go visit the
harni
during the day when I’m at work and at school.”

He stands there, looking at me in his calm way.

“But I need you for a while yet,” I say. “I’m all alone here.”

“All right,” he says. “You know I love you.”

“I know,” I say. “But it’s not enough, is it?”

For once he doesn’t answer.

In two weeks we arrange it so that he’s only home on weekends-since we rarely see each other during the week anyway. I tell my counselor, Dr. Esteban, and he asks me how I feel.

“Lonely,” I say.

“How do you feel when Akhmim is there?” he asks.

“Still lonely,” I say.

After two months, Akhmim stops coming home. I talk to him a couple of times by slate, and after that he calls me almost every day and we talk. It’s good to hear Moroccan.

He loves me. It’s good to be loved. But it isn’t enough.

* * *

About six months after Akhmim leaves, I decide that I’m going to learn accounting, because I like the numbers and the software, and one of my teachers recommends a book on business presentation. It talks a lot about professional appearance.

“Long hair,” it says, “looks naive and immature.”

For a week, I brush my heavy hair before braiding it and look at myself in the mirror, trying to imagine. I look at the other women on the street.

So finally I go to a place to get it cut, and Gabriel, the man who is going to cut it, puts my optical image on his slate and shows me different ways I can look. For the first time, the face staring back at me looks different.

“A haircut is a new beginning,” Gabriel says.

My Spanish is getting a lot better.

I choose a haircut that makes my hair slide in waves and rounds my face, a shining helmet of hair.

Gabriel gathers my hair in his hands. When it isn’t braided, it is long enough that I can sit on the ends. “You need to cut off the old hair,” he says. “Either that, or you need to make it healthy. But all this hair, it makes your face so tiny, and you will be pretty, I promise.” He cuts a long length of it off, and then he coils it and puts it in a box. “For you to have.”

He cuts and looks in the mirror and cuts and my head feels oddly light. I watch the new girl in the mirror. She looks like a Spanish girl who has Arab parents. She looks modern.

When he is finished, he shows me the hair all around, and I look so different. I shake my head and the hair falls back into place.

“So pretty,” he says.

Not pretty, I’m not pretty. I wish I were pretty. But maybe I look as if I am part of this place, even if I am not.

He puts the box of my old hair on my lap. It is coiled in the box like a wreath. I touch and I try to think of what to do with it. I could send it to Akhmim, but I don’t know what it would mean to him. It probably wouldn’t be a reproach. It probably wouldn’t even be a message.

I could send it to my mother, but it would break her heart. I could send it to Ayesha, but if I were Ayesha, I’d just burn it.

I think it belongs to no one at all, this smooth coil of black hair, and I run my fingers over it. My tears are so hot, they’re as hot as blood.

About the Author

Hugo Award winner Maureen F. McHugh has written both a provocative, powerfully dazzling novel of repression and reawakening and a uniquely moving love story that stands alongside the acclaimed works of Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood.