Tanner's Virgin (14 page)

W
e reached Kabul
two hours after dawn on the morning of November 24th. We rode trimphantly into town, I with a sash around my neck and a rifle over my shoulder and a pistol on my hip, Phaedra wearing men's clothing and carrying a British Army canteen and a German pistol. I pulled up on the reins and our horse neighed gratefully and went down to his knees. We dismounted. The horse stayed on his knees. I didn't really blame him, and I was surprised he hadn't dropped dead altogether.

We had stolen the horse. According to family legend, a great-great-uncle had done much the same thing in the Wyoming Territory, and had subsequently become, as far as I know, the only Tanner ever hanged in the Western Hemisphere. That sort of skeleton in the ancestral cupboard makes one a bit apprehensive about stealing horses, but the clown to whom the horse had belonged had really left us no choice.

He stopped at our signal, a tall slim Afghan who carried himself with military bearing. His moustache bristled, his eyes bored into mine. I told him I wanted to buy his horse. He said that the animal was not for sale. I told him I would pay its price in gold several times
over. He said that he had no use for gold and much use for the horse. I told him I would pay equally for a ride to Kabul. He said that he was going only so far as his village a few miles away. I suggested that I might borrow the horse, and that I would leave it for him to reclaim in Kabul, and that I would pay him enough gold to make his troubles worthwhile. He remarked that, if he wanted my gold, he could simply return for it when my woman and I had perished of thirst.

So I took out the gun and told him to get off the horse or I would shoot him dead. He took told of his rifle, and I squeezed the trigger of the handgun and nicked his earlobe. He touched it with his finger, looked at the bead of blood on his fingertip, and respectfully dismounted from the horse.

“You are a superb marksman,
kâzzih,
” he said. “My steed is yours.”

So were his rifle and his clothing. I forebore telling him that I was not a superb marksman at all. I had not been aiming for his earlobe. I had been aiming for the center of his forehead, because when someone draws a rifle to shoot me with I want to do more than scare him a little. My rotten shooting was his good fortune.

It turned out that Phaedra had never been on a horse before. I had her ride sidesaddle at first, but after a few miles of jogging along she swung her leg over the horse. I was right behind her and I watched her, and after a few minutes I figured out what she had in mind. She would start to breathe a little faster than normal, and as the horse bounced she would bounce along with it, and muscles worked in her thighs, and she made odd little noises deep in her throat, and then, finally,
she would give a little sigh and fall forward, her arms around the horse's neck.

She kept doing this.

 

Once we were in the city we got off the poor goddamned horse and sort of abandoned him. I suppose it's not good policy to abandon horses, and there's probably a local ordinance against it, but abandoning a horse can't be any worse than stealing it in the first place, and I had a hunch that whoever took over the horse's ownership would do at least as good a job as we had done. As far as I was concerned, if I never saw a horse again it would be fine. I had what are probably called saddle sores, except that this particular horse had not had a saddle, so I guess what I had were bareback sores, if there is such a thing. There was such a thing as far as I was concerned. I staggered along, cross-eyed and bowlegged and wholly out of sorts. Phaedra, too, looked a little bowlegged, but I don't know whether that was caused by the horse or by the way she had spent the past two months in Anardara. Bowleggedness is an occupational disease of maradóosh.

“I'm going to miss that horse,” she told me, on the way to Amanullah's house.

“I can believe it.”

“I never realized the rapport a human being and a horse can establish.”

“Yeah, rapport.”

“I mean—”

“I know what you mean.”

“Evan, I can't help it.”

“I know.”

“I just have to—”

“I know.”

“You always wanted me. In New York, in your apartment—”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“I just—”

“Forget it.”

“Maybe I should kill myself.”

“Yeah, kill yourself.”

“Evan, do you mean that?”

“Huh?” I snapped to attention. “No,” I said. “No, my mind must have been wandering. Don't kill yourself. Everything'll be all right. Believe me. Everything will be all right.”

“But you don't want me. You came halfway around the world to save my life and now you don't even want me anymore.”

“I'll get over it.”

“You hate me.”

“Oh, hell. I don't hate you.”

“You must. You came all the way to Afghanistan to save me from a fate worse than death and now you find out that I'm actually a whore at heart. Aren't I?”

“No.”

“But I am,” she wailed.

I turned on her. “Now shut up for a minute,” I roared. “This goddamned city is absolutely crawling with a bunch of crazy Russians. Crazy, murdering Russians. And I only know one man in the whole damned city, and he's the man who gave me that car. It was his car and he was very proud of it, and he loaned it to me and
now it's gone. And I have to tell him the car is gone, and that he'll never see it again—”

“Why do you have to tell him?”

“Shut up. I have to tell him this, and then I have to get him so mad at the Russians that he'll get the rest of the city equally mad at them. And then between the two of us, Amanullah and I have to lead mobs to root out the stupid Russians and hang them from the streetlamps, and I have a feeling that there are more Russians than streetlamps in this crazy city. And I have to do all this without getting killed, and without getting you killed, and then the two of us have to get the hell out of here. Do you understand what I'm talking about?”

“I guess so.”

“And do you understand why I have more important things on my mind than your twat?”

“I—”

“Come on.”

 

Amanullah was not at his house. We found him at the Café of the Seven Sisters. He was eating a leg of lamb.

I told him the whole story while he ate, and it hit home with such force he almost stopped eating. As it was, he quit while there was still a little meat clinging to the bone. He pounded the bone down on the top of the table and roared. Every eye in the place was on him.

“To attempt to destroy our country is an outrage,” he bellowed.

A murmur ran through the crowd.

“To attempt the assassination of my young friend and his woman is barbarism,” he cried out.

The crowd surged forward, muttering agreement, adding shouts of encouragement.

“But to destroy my automobile,” Amanullah screamed.
“To destroy my automobile,”
he shrieked. “MY AUTOMOBILE!”

The crowd was roaring its agreement.

“Twenty miles to the gallon,”
Amanullah bawled.

The crowd pressed at the doors of the café.

“Automatic transmission! You never had to shift!”

The crowd was in the streets.

“Snow tires!”

The crowd was adding new members. Lurking in the shadows I saw the Bulgarian with the pointed beard. “It's one of them,” I called out, “Don't let him get away!”

They didn't let him get away. Men and women, screaming hysterically, took hold of his arms and legs and tore him apart. Little children used his head for a soccer ball. And the crowd, wild with the taste of blood, surged down the street toward the Soviet Embassy.

“Vinyl seat covers,”
Amanullah screamed.
“A heater! A radio! An emergency brake! Oh, the villains!”

The Afghan police, reinforced by soldiers, took to the streets. They flooded the area around the Soviet Embassy. There were whispered exchanges between the police and the crowd.

The police joined the crowd.

The army joined the crowd.

“Onward,” shouted Amanullah. “For Kabul! For Afghanistan! For your lives and your country and your sacred honor!
For my car!
”

Those poor goddamned Russians.

I
sat cross-legged
on the ground. I was wearing a white loincloth and holding, in both hands, a yellow flower. I did not know the name of the flower. I knew that names were but an illusion, and that what one must seek to know is not the name of the flower but the essence of the flower, the flowerness of the flower, and through it the flowerness of oneself and the selfness of the universe. And I poured the selfness of myself into the flowerness of the flower, and time opened and flowed like wine, and I was the flower and the flower was I.

 

The Manishtana sat cross-legged beside me. I handed him the flower. He looked deep into its center and said nothing for a long time. He returned the flower to me. I looked at it some more.

“You meditate,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It is beauty, the flower, and you meditate upon it in the peace of the ashram, and you sense the beauty, and it becomes a part of you as you in turn become a part of it. And there are three parts to the beauty. There is the beauty that exists and is perceived, and there is the
beauty that exists but is not perceived, and there is the beauty that is perceived but does not exist.”

I studied the flower.

“You meditate, and your mind recovers.”

“It does.”

“You regain health.”

“I am much better. I have stopped vomiting.”

“That is good.”

“I can concentrate again. And I no longer break out in cold sweats all the time.”

“But you do not sleep,” said the Manishtana.

“No.”

“So you have not yet healed yourself.”

“I do not think that is to be healed.”

“Man is to sleep. There is the night that is for sleep and the day that is for wakefulness, and there is no time between the two, just as the Holinesses in their infinite wisdom give us no state between wakefulness and sleep, or between yin and yang, or man and woman, or good and evil. It is the principle of dualism.”

“It is my special difficulty,” I said. “I was wounded long ago in a forgotten war. The powers of light took the art of sleep from me, and they alone can return it.”

“The perfect man sleeps of night,” said the Manishtana.

“Nobody's perfect,” I said.

 

I found Phaedra sitting in the garden beside the waterfall. She was smelling a flower. She had her eyes closed, and she was curled up in the fetal posture clutching the flower in both hands. She had her nose in it and she seemed to be trying to inhale it.

“Good day,” I said.

“I am a flower, Evan. And the flower is a girl named Phaedra.”

“The beauty is the flower and the beauty is the girl.”

“You, too, are beautiful.”

“We are all flowers who would be as flowers.”

“I love you, Evan.”

“I love you, Phaedra.”

“I am better now.”

“And I, too.”

“We both talk funny. We talk like the Manishtana. We speak strangely, and converse of flowers, and the beautiness of things, and the wonderfulness and flowerness of our holy souls.”

“We do.”

“But we are well again.” She sat up, crossed one leg over the other. “Evan, I know what happened in that other country. I was with men, many men every day, day after day. I know this, but I cannot recall it.”

“This is your good fortune.”

“Evan, I know that I enjoyed it, that it was a sickness with me, and that I was so sick and so dominated by the yang of all, that you were sick at the touch of me. I know this, but I remember it not.”

“There are those parts of the lifeness of life which we must know but not remember, and there are those parts of the lifeness of life which we must remember but need not know.”

“The Manishtana told me that yesterday. Or something like it. There are times when I think that it does
not matter what the Manishtana says, but only that it sounds well to one's ears.”

“It is so with all of human speech. What one says is of less matter than the vibrations of the sounds one utters.”

“Evan, I am at peace again.”

I kissed her. Her mouth was honey and spice and cider and flowers and the songs of small birds and the purring of kittens and the petals of a rose. Her sighing was the wind in the trees and rain on a snug roof and flames on a hearth. Her skin was velvet and wool and cotton and satin and bedsheets and blankets and fur. Her flesh was food and water. Her body was my body and my body was her body, and thunder rolled in the hills and bolts of lightning skipped like rams.

“Ah,” she said.

Her body was my body and my body was her body, yin and yang, darkness and light, east and west. Hare krishna Hare krishna. Hare rama Hare rama. The twain shall meet.

Om.

“Never before,” said Phaedra Harrow.

A bead of sweat trickled down her golden breast. I flicked at it with my tongue. She purred. I flicked at other nonexistent beads of sweat. She giggled and purred some more.

“Never before,” she said again. “I thought I was all better a few minutes ago, and it turns out I didn't even know what all better was. Do you know what I mean?”

“Do I ever.”

“I don't even have to talk like the Manishtana any
more. That was sort of fun, but I can see where it might get to be a hangup. I mean, flowers are very nice.”

“Flowers are wonderful.”

“But you could get kind of dragged with doing nothing but grooving on flowers all day.”

“True.”

I put an arm around her and drew her close. Her mouth opened for my kiss. We held each other for a moment.

“Evan? Just now. It was really something.”

“You don't have to talk about it.”

“I know. I sort of want to. But I don't know the words.”

“Forget it. There aren't any.”

“In Afghanistan. That whorehouse. It never happened.”

“I know.”

“I was never there. My body was there but my soul left my body. It was off somewhere, frozen in ice.”

“It's not frozen now.”

“Oh, no. Oh, that feels good.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You do love me, don't you?”

“Of course.”

“How nice. Oh, that feels wonderful!”

“Ah.”

 

“Three steps to enlightenment,” said the Manishtana. “Three branches of the trinity. Three parts of time, past and present and future. Yesterday and today and tomorrow.”

“Ah.”

“Three precepts of the sanctity of the ashram. Piety and Poverty and Chastity.”

“We are pious,” I said.

“This is true.”

“And pover—And poor.”

“Yes. You gave over all of your gold to the ashram upon arriving. Yes, it is so.”

“Uh, the other thing. Well.”

“Yes,” said the Manishtana. His eyes seemed for a moment to twinkle in his wrinkled little head, but it was hard to be certain. He plucked a flower, inhaled it with his eyes. “Yes,” he said.

“Two out of three,” I said, “isn't all that bad an average.”

“Many of the supplicants at the ashram violate the precept of chastity,” he said.

“Well, exactly my point. Uh—”

“But not so often.”

“Well—”

“Rarely in the daytime.”

“Oh.”

“Never in the flower beds.”

“Uh.”

The Manishtana plucked another flower. “When you came here,” he said to me, “you could not blank your mind, you could not relax your hold upon the inner workings of yourself, you could not find peace, you could not relate to the unity, the oneness of self, the selfness of one.”

“True.”

“And now?”

“Now I no longer have this problem, Manishtana.”

“And you can meditate?”

“Yes.”

“And you cling to the mantra which I have given unto you?”

“I do.”

“Ah,” said the Manishtana. “And you, Phaedra. When you came first to the ashram, you were not yourself. Your mind had gone from your body, and in your body was a demon, and the demon drove you. And before the demon, before there was ever a demon within you, then there was ice and coldness, and even in the days before the demon you were not yourself. It is so?”

“It is so,” Phaedra said.

“And now the demon has departed, you have thought him away and felt him away and meditated beyond the powers of demonness and deviltry, and yet the ice is also gone, and you are yourself. It is so?”

“It is.”

“Then it is time. You may go now.”

“To meditate?”

He shook his head. “To America.”

 

“But we don't have any money,” Phaedra said, “and we don't know anyone around here, and all we have are these dumb clothes, and we have to leave the ashram. I don't know what we're going to do.”

“We're going to make love,” I said.

“But after that.”

“You heard the man. We're going home.”

“How?”

“We shall find a way. Rejoice in the nowness of now.
You are no longer a virgin and no longer a nymphomaniac. Instead you have retained the more desirable aspects of each facet of the youness of you. The thouness of thou.”

“The essence of ess.”

“The royal highness of royal high.”

“The finesse of fi.”

“Let's make love right over there. Right in the middle of all those fucking flowers.”

“He'll throw us out.”

“He already threw us out.”

“Oh. Let's, then.”

In the private jet of that famous recording group, the Cock-A-Roatches, Lloyd Jenkins took a deep drag on a brown cigarette, inhaled deeply, and spent a few moments smelling a flower that wasn't, as far as I could tell, there.

“What I say,” he said, “is if you can't ball a bird when you've a mind to, what's the point in meditating?”

“A point.”

“So when we saw the two of you, you know, and then that holy man went at you like that, why I thought to myself, here he is, driving them out of the Garden of Eden when they've just got the knack of enjoying Paradise. And I thought of all the birds in Liverpool, you know, and we've flowershops enough there, and not all those ruddy biting flies. The Mahawhatsit—”

“Manishtana.”

“Eh. He told us, he did, that the flies are part of the oneness of one and the threeness of three, and that the man of spirit makes himself think the ruddy flies aren't there. It's a good idea, I'd say, but I'd have to be smok
ing day and night before I could ignore it when I've a fly up my bleeding nose.”

“I love your records,” Phaedra said.

He looked longingly at her. “Ah, girl,” he said. To me he said, “She's yours, is she?”

“She's mine.”

“Ah, you're a fine bloke. We'll stop in New York, but only long enough to kiss the ground hello. Our birds are in Liverpool, y'know. Flowers are fine, but birds are better. Birds are worlds better than flowers.”

“Amen,” I said.