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  “Through an odd stroke of fate, I have wound up as his pimp and his yes-man. Zakki, the dirty Arab.” He stabbed a thumb back toward the direction of the palace. “He is a mix of Albanian, Circassian, French, and Turk. There isn’t a drop of Arab blood in his veins. Not a drop. Yet he wants them to make him officially the direct descendant of Mohammed.” He mumbled a curse under his breath. The army plots against him. He knows all about that, but does nothing, as if he wants them to nail him. He is content instead with his own greed, his collections, his pleasures. Pastries and pussy.”

  She winced at the reference, but remained silent.

  “Good for him. Let him piss on Egypt. What is it but a wayside brothel. Everyone has raped it. Why not him? Why not everybody? He is a good teacher.” The reference confused her. Teacher? But he was quick to explain, as if it was necessary.

  “He has taught me the true meaning of greed. Take as much as you can cram in. Take everything.” He suddenly acknowledged Farrah’s presence again, and he looked at her, revealing his own frustration. “He cannot get enough possessions. Everything. Everybody.”

  “Then why isn’t he happy?” she asked, annoyed that she could attribute a measure of wisdom to this man whom she despised.

  “Because,” Zakki said solemnly, “it is impossible to get everything. There is always more.” He sighed. “I loved him once,” he mumbled. She knew it was not intended for her ears, and he coughed as if to mask the reference.

  He remained silent for a long time. The car moved steadily, crossing the flowing slate-colored Nile at El Gamma bridge, swinging past the zoo, through El Gaza, on to the sparsely settled Giza Road. His political references were beyond her, she decided. Better not to think too deeply.

  “Don’t expect this to happen every night,” Zakki said, breaking the silence. It annoyed her to have such a prominent place in his thoughts. “He is predictable to a point. Of course, he can be directed… manipulated.” There it was again, she thought, the implied threat. She knew what was coming next.

  “I can help you, not only with him. There are lots of ways.”

  He seemed to be retreating, showing some diffidence. Perhaps he was mistaking her silence for acquiescence. He moved a hand across the seat and stroked her thigh. She quickly removed it as if it were carrying some disease.

  “I’m a better man than him,” he whispered. “I can help you.” She detected, for the first time, a sense of weakness, and she enjoyed the observation. “I can be negative as well. The sword cuts both ways.”

  She moved as far away as possible, pressing against the door.

  “Sooner or later it will happen,” he said.

  “I’ll tell him.”

  Zakki croaked out a smug little laugh.

  “He expects it. We often compare notes. He will mock you. That is, if you see him again. You are all interchangeable little cunts to him. Just cunts. One is like the other. Don’t flatter yourself.” His voice rose, and he gunned the motor in a tantrum of anger.

  The car shot forward out of the line of traffic onto the grass shoulder, actually hitting the flank of a donkey, who screeched out in pain, toppling a flatbed little cart. An old man fell to the ground. Zakki paid little attention, directing the car back into the lane. The incident seemed a deliberate illustration of his threat, and she shuddered. What frightened her most was not his sly transparent pursuit. She had a sixth sense about that. Her profession, she knew, encouraged, activated the fantasy of sexuality. But his craving seemed beyond that, as if she were a stalked animal in his gun sights, and he had a finger on the trigger.

  “You can let me off here,” she said, seeing the club in the distance. He did not slow the car. “Here,” she demanded.

  “Afraid someone will see you with Zakki and surmise that you are the king’s new whore?” He enjoyed the articulation of the accurate insight with obvious delight. “You have too much pride. Someone will have to beat that out of you.”

  She decided that any attempt at retaining a special dignity had vanished last night when she sat down with the king in the crowded nightclub.

  He deliberately pulled the car up to the front entrance where the employees and some of her fellow dancers milled about, casting discreet, knowing glances. Dipping a hand into an inside pocket, he pulled out an envelope. Tapping it against the wheel, he ripped it open.

  “A fifty note,” he exclaimed. “You must have pleased the lard-assed bastard.” He tossed the note onto her lap. “You have won his balls, my dear.” He chucked her under the chin.

  “Pig,” she cried, the anger running through her like flaming oil. She crumpled the note and tossed it at him, then opened the door and slammed it hard. Curious eyes turned to watch. He opened the window of the car and tossed out the crumpled note as if it were garbage. It fell at her feet. She stood rooted to the spot, feeling humiliated, her pride spent.

  At the edge of the parking lot, squatting in the dust in his tattered djellaba, she saw the gaunt gray face of her father. He had come, as always, to collect his weekly stipend, the key to unlock his dreams. He watched her, his eyes empty with futility and the agony of his cluttered mind. A little breeze caught in the folds of the crumpled bill, carrying it rolling along the mist of dust. Running after it, she retrieved it. Zakki sped away, leaving her to wallow in her humiliation.

  Chapter Seven

  The king’s attention to her persisted and she took pride in that. Perhaps Zakki was wrong, she decided. Perhaps she meant more to the king than simply an object of his pleasure. Yet when Zakki’s eyes caught hers, she felt his sarcasm. “Sooner or later it will happen,” he had said.

  Farouk would sit at his regular table every night at the Auberge des Pyramides looking very much like the mischievous, sad little boy she knew he was. As always, Zakki, surly and arrogant, when out of the king’s sight, would collect her after the last show and the little troupe of flunkies and guards would proceed on their restless orbit.

  “You are not the only one,” Zakki would tell her at every opportunity. “There were two this afternoon alone.”

  When she looked at him incredulously, he would retort: “Pigeon juice.” He laughed his croaking obscene laugh and explained, “Pigeon. The great aphrodisiac. He keeps one chef busy all night melting down the juice of thirty-six pigeons. Then he drinks it for breakfast. Makes the cock crow, Farrah. Who would know better than you?”

  It was futile to react. It was enough merely to try to avoid his relentless pursuit.

  “Sooner or later,” he would say. It was his litany.

  The group would spend the better part of the early morning hours gambling at the Royal Automobile Club. Farouk was, Farrah believed, convinced that she was bringing him luck, to the point that she began to watch the little steel ball with growing anxiety, as if a long losing streak would spell the death knell of his interest. What money the king offered her, through his agent, Zakki, was quickly soaked up by the sponge of her father’s habit. Of course, she knew that Zakki always took his cut.

  The people at the nightclub, she noted, began to treat her differently. The continued liaison with the king gave her status. Even the arrogant assistant who lined them up nightly seemed deferential, and the other girls became standoffish and silent, all except the Nubian, Tina, who could not contain her contempt.

  “It won’t matter,” she would say in a meant-to-be-heard whisper. “She will still wind up with the river rats.”

  Farrah ignored her, trying to dispel all the imagined implications and jealousies. She tried her best to ignore Zakki, but that was increasingly difficult. In her life, the selfanointed king’s pimp was ubiquitous, a leering sinister shadow of doom. Nor did she dare make the king aware of his conduct as if his role in the king’s favor was clearly and secretly defined between them.

  And, yet, even in Zakki’s threatening, cruel taunting, his arrogance and crudeness, he provided her with insights into
Farouk’s character and habits, as if he were preparing her for the end. Although she was passive in accepting her relationship with the king, she became better adept at reading his moods, helped by Zakki’s steady barrage of gratuitous information. In her mind it was as if she had accepted a role in a bizarre play, knowing it was both temporary and dangerous, but keeping up the pretense for the benefit it could provide.

  “The bastard is in deep political trouble.” That was Zakki’s favorite theme, and he delighted in recounting it, between his tormenting pursuit and insults. “The day will come when he’ll be lined up against the wall and shot. Me with him and all the other flunkies… and cunts like you.”

  She had, she thought, steeled herself against these references, but they always inflamed her when he uttered them. On her part, she had stopped threatening to tell the king, not wishing to disturb the situation. Besides, she was not sure of what the king’s reaction might be. He and Zakki had an odd love-hate relationship, and she began to view the king’s almost sadistic abuse of Zakki as an accepted method of communication between them.

  “Dirty Arab,” Farouk would rail at him at every opportunity. “Dung of a camel.”

  It confused her at first to hear the King of Egypt use Arab as a term of derision. Egypt was, despite its Christian Copts, an Arab country. Once, she asked Zakki what it meant.

  “The fat bastard’s a European, an aristo. He would have loved to be a Brit. It’s the mentality he hates, himself as well.”

  She did not understand. Nor did she dare press further to decipher what it meant.

  But, despite the barrage of insults that Farouk rained on Zakki’s head, the bull-necked chauffeur was always the first man he saw when he awakened, and the last man he saw when he went to sleep. Zakki bore it all with outward stoicism, except when he was out of the king’s presence. Even his pursuit of her took on the quality of competition with the king. He had, she knew, approached that point when rape alone would not have satisfied him. He wanted an offering, a gift of herself, a capitulation.

  Deliberately holding back taunted him. That knowledge relieved her, since she would never willingly give herself to someone so repelling and stomach churning.

  “Isn’t it time for a real man?” he would say. Always, when it came like that, it seemed more furious and obscene than his usual attacks. “Why settle for gruel when you can get caviar?”

  “I’d rather take poison than you,” she would answer boldly.

  In the king’s presence, Zakki’s dark covetous eyes pursued her, and even when she was alone with Farouk she could not shake the idea that Zakki was watching them play out the king’s fantasies.

  Once he stopped the car and pointed to two dogs fornicating in the street. “Familiar, eh,” he said, pinching her arm. “Short and quick.” She turned away in disgust, although she had flushed with her own sense of overwhelming shame. The fact was that she had become adept at dissembling.

  “Zakki’s day will come,” he muttered. Never, she vowed.

  When the king talked politics, and those moments were rare, he seemed incomprehensible. Sometimes he would get angry and fling a newspaper in front of her.

  “You see. They accuse me of corruption, when they are more corrupt. Ten times, a hundred times more.” Since she could not read, she merely nodded in sympathy. “What good is a king who cannot punish his enemies?”

  “He is growing angrier and angrier,” Zakki confided. “Naturally, he resents their corruption. Only he, the king, is allowed corruption. That is the royal province. He has his fingers in everything. The smuggling, the arms, the hashish, the brothels.”

  But Zakki’s drumbeat of vituperation did not disturb her own view of Farouk, the vulnerable boy king who had determined that pleasure was a goal of life. Perhaps this is wisdom, she told herself, although she could not understand even the concept of pleasure.

  “When it comes, the revolution, they will have their revenge on everything he ever did or touched,” Zakki warned, hoping to frighten her. She listened with indifference. What did all this mean to her?

  She reveled in the king’s attention, and its monetary rewards, which she turned over to her father.

  But she did not know really how the affair was being observed by others until two men arrived at the club one night and insisted on speaking with her.

  The king was not present, and although it was no longer obligatory for her to be nice to the customers, she consented, more as a break from the chatter of her fellow dancers than for any other reason.

  Joining the men at their table, she ordered a cola and observed them. They were both about the same age, fortyish. One of them, Thompson, was an American, a weary parchment-faced man with an air of knowing cynicism, perhaps emphasized by the contrasting personality of the other man, a “Dr.” Ezzat. He had an alert and pedantic air, very intense, with dark eyes that seemed to burn with penetrating fire and tension. His spare, aesthetic face looked as if it would break if he smiled.

  “I’m a kind of freelance journalist,” Thompson said, after he had run out of a long string of platitudes.

  “Dr. Ezzat here is a professor of archaeology at Cairo University.”

  What do they want with me? Farrah wondered.

  “I hope you won’t be insulted,” Thompson said. He seemed very uncomfortable, out of his element, but he spoke Arabic very well. “I hope we can count on your confidence.”

  “Secrets?” she asked, startled. “From whom?”

  “Farouk,” Ezzat said. He seemed embarrassed and looked helplessly at Thompson.

  “You see, Farrah, I’d like to do your story. You and Farouk.” He lifted a hand and pointed a finger to the ceiling. “Not necessarily now. But the time will come when you might like to tell it. We would, of course, be generous in our payment.”

  “Payment?” She hovered between being insulted and purely curious. “I don’t understand.”

  “You see,” Thompson said, interrupting Dr. Ezzat, who was winding up to speak, “people are very interested in Farouk, his style of life, his habits. And the impressions of a young girl, who was having a… a liaison with him… would be terribly interesting to the readers of many publications.”

  “I don’t see why,” Farrah said. She looked at the men for some hint of humor. Certainly, it was a joke.

  “You just give it some thought,” Thompson said, obviously backing off.

  “I don’t think I would be interested, gentlemen,” she said. “No. I don’t think so.” She shook her head vigorously.

  “Not now, of course,” Thompson said, delicately.

  “No. But perhaps you will change your mind in the future,” Ezzat said. He did not hide his disappointment.

  “I don’t believe so,” she said politely.

  Thompson groped in his pocket and pulled out a white card, handing it to her.

  “You might wish to call me sometime,” he said pleasantly. “You never know about the future.”

  “I really don’t think so,” she said, looking blankly at the card.

  “So be it,” Ezzat said, slapping his thighs and rising, obviously dissatisfied with the interview. Thompson scowled at him, visibly annoyed by his display of impatience.

  “I know you will keep this between us,” Thompson said softly. “It would do none of us any good to mention it. Especially yourself.”

  “Of course,” she nodded. He was certainly right about that.

  She watched them thread their way through the aisles lined with tables. Being illiterate, she could not read the card, although she slipped it in her bodice. Undressing later, she saw it flutter to the floor, and she put it carelessly in her purse without giving it a moment’s thought.

  “They are crazy,” she decided.

  Chapter Eight

  The king did not come every night. When he stayed away for long periods, a week or two, she detected a diff
erence in the attitude of people around her. Little things. The impresario’s assistant would be surlier. Tina, the Nubian, would snicker sardonically. “The novelty has worn off,” she told everybody in her perpetual stage whisper. And Mimi, the heaviest of the dancers, would expound on the fickleness of man’s lust. “A woman’s body is a backgammon board. When the game is over, they fold it up and put it away.”

  It did, of course, burst the bubble of her secret illusion that she was more than just another “cunt,” that she was a person, and that the king saw in her more than sexual fantasy. Hadn’t she pierced his crust, become his companion, his friend? Perhaps, in her wildest dream, a queen.

  “Don’t get too comfortable, Farrah,” Zakki had said with his usual poisonous tongue. “His attention span is limited. Ultimately, he grows bored with everything. Everything. Especially women.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” she had responded belligerently. But she still harbored secret dreams.

  She had always feared her own wish-fulfilling dreams, and because of that, she expunged them as fast as they surfaced in her mind. Instinctively, she understood the dangers of obsessive aspirations although she failed to resist them. That she had gotten from her mother, whose single dream in life seemed to have been to have an indoor sink. “If only I can have an indoor sink.” She could remember the litany as almost her earliest recollection of her mother, a woman who seemed always a stranger.

  When Farouk did come again to the club, her status once again changed, at least for a while.

  One night, after they had made love, he lay back on the pillows and she nestled against him. It was then that her most illusionary secret dream was expunged for all time.

  “I will marry again soon,” he said. It was not meant as a confession. He might have been talking to the air.

  At first, she did not comment on the announcement, nor did he have any inkling, she was certain, that the news meant more to her than the unconscious flicking away of a persistent fly.