Mother Nile Read online

  “Very efficient fellow. He will do what is necessary,” Farouk muttered.

  In his mind, it was obvious, her predicament was a vague detail. He did not want to be bothered. She felt her anger rise, filling her with a sense of her helplessness.

  “What can he do?” she managed to ask, but her throat was constricting as the image of her parents’ hovel rose in her mind.

  “Whatever! Money.” Then he slapped her bare buttock playfully. “If it’s a boy, keep it. If it’s a girl, throw it into the Nile.” He enjoyed his little joke and his flesh jiggled.

  So he was washing his hands of her, she thought, throwing her to the mercy of her nemesis Zakki.

  “You can’t do this, Majesty,” she said, summoning her courage. “Not Zakki.”

  “He is an expert at these matters,” the king said, growing annoyed, waving a hand as if swatting a fly.

  “He wants to marry me,” she blurted. The king sat up, his big belly exploding into ripples. From deep inside of his bulk, she could hear the boyish laughter begin. Finally, his eyes were watering with the effort.

  “Marry you. That sly, dirty Arab,” he said, choking with glee. Calming finally, he said, “See. You are a lucky woman. We will have a double wedding. You can join us all on the honeymoon. Fantastic. We’ll be able to play this little game forever.” He shook his head with satisfaction. “You should be smiling.” He chucked her under the chin.

  “I won’t do it. I just won’t do it,” she cried. He stood up and put on his velvet robe hanging nearby. He hated disobedience. It destroyed the fantasy of his domination, and she saw, for the first time, the tantrum of the inner child. He pressed a nearby button. Zakki, she knew, was being summoned to pick up the pieces.

  “But it’s your baby,” she said.

  “A whore’s bastard,” he hissed, his lips curling into a tight, cruel smile. “What has it got to do with me?” He turned and walked slowly to his bedroom, slamming the door.

  ***

  “Fond farewells,” Zakki smirked as he pressed the accelerator of the big white Rolls.

  “Pig,” she hissed.

  “So, it’s ended with a little tiff,” he said, watching her, as the car moved slowly into the Cairo streets. It was still dark. “Of course, he’s a pig. What do you think I have been saying for five months?”

  “I meant you as well,” she said.

  “That was established long ago. So it’s over. You are a free woman.”

  Her fists clenched in frustration.

  “I’m pregnant,” she cried. “And he wants me to marry you.”

  He pulled over to the curb and stopped the car, turning her roughly by the shoulders until she faced him.

  “You little bitch. You told him. You told him about me.”

  “About wanting to marry me? Yes. I told him.” What concerned him most, she knew, was whether or not she had described the scene. “Not everything,” she admitted. “Just that.”

  It seemed to placate him and he started the car again.

  “And did you agree?”

  “To marry you?” She paused, watching his dark, repellent face. “I’d rather die.”

  “Maybe you will,” he muttered, again pulling the car to the curb with a screeching stop. He opened the door.

  “Get out,” he said. “Have your baby in the gutter.”

  “He said you would know what to do,” she said, suddenly panicked.

  “I know what to do,” he said, his eyes shining with anger and malevolence.

  “Money,” she blurted. “He said…”

  “Money. Money,” he shouted. “You filthy whore. Dung. That’s what you will get.”

  “He said…” she began, realizing suddenly that she had foreclosed on any help from him.

  “It’s his as well,” she cried, her voice rising.

  Zakki looked at her, his lips forming a sinister smile.

  “But how will I manage? The baby. It will grow in me.” She could not find the words, knowing that he would pocket whatever the king would provide.

  “You want my advice, whore?

  “A girl. Into the Nile. A boy. Cut off its head.”

  He opened the car door and pushed her out. She fell on the road.

  “Cunt,” he spat, gunning the motor. She rose then turned away, determined not to show him her tears.

  ***

  The next day, King Farouk married Narriman Sadek. The hundred-and-one-gun salute rocked the city and the pageant of Narriman’s entry to the square outside Qubbah Palace and later to Abdin, where the royal couple was married in the ornate Ismal Room, was viewed by thousands. Fireworks showered the city until the early hours and Auberge des Pyramides was filled with festive crowds.

  As for Farrah, the buoyancy of the crowds and the sound of the guns and fireworks only acerbated her gloom. To make matters worse, she was, as she hurried along the backstage corridors after the early show, confronted again by Thompson. His eyes, as before, rheumy and bloodshot with alcohol, offered again the same lugubrious view of the world as before. Only this time, it reflected her own mood.

  “Well, the old boy wasn’t kidding,” he said, with obvious mockery. Farrah shrugged and tried to pass him, but he blocked her way.

  “There’s money in it,” he said sadly. “Good money. My people will pay well.”

  “How much?” she asked. Thompson’s eyes opened wide.

  “So you are interested?” he asked, obviously surprised.

  “That would depend,” she said, cautiously. She couldn’t imagine that her story had any value at all. Everybody knew Farouk’s habits.

  “What would you write?” she asked.

  “I’m in a shit business. All the gory details. Gluttony. Greed. Satyriasis.”

  “What?”

  He chuckled.

  “The screwing part.”

  “Leave me alone,” she snapped, turning away, carrying with her the shreds of her wounded pride. Doing it was one thing, talking about it another.

  “I’ll be out there all night. In case you change your mind.” Beyond his voice, she could still hear the sound of the fireworks. His presence seemed to have been perfectly timed.

  Before the last show, the impresario’s assistant called her into his office.

  “Sorry, kid, we’re cutting the line.” He handed her an envelope.

  “Many are called. Few are chosen,” he said. She stood before him. He seemed to enjoy seeing her suffer. “Live by the royal sword. Die by the royal sword,” he said.

  She wanted to curse him, but she knew he was merely an agent. Zakki had worked fast.

  Only Mimi, the heavy dancer, showed her any measure of compassion when she announced to the others that she would be leaving as of tonight. They avoided her, as if somehow proximity might bring them bad luck.

  “The bastards.” She whispered the epithet in Farrah’s ear.

  “I’ll try the Hanya Palace,” Farrah told her bravely. The Hanya Palace was a competitor of the Auberge des Pyramides, although less large and classy. Farrah knew she had little chance there. Or anywhere. Zakki had undoubtedly passed the word around. Besides, she would soon be showing her pregnancy and that would be the end of dancing until after the birth. She had decided that under no circumstances would she abort the baby.

  “See. It’s not the end of the world,” the heavyset girl said.

  “But it is,” Farrah cried. Tears misted her eyes and the women embraced.

  “Nobody escapes,” Lily whispered.

  Farrah knew what she meant.

  Chapter Eleven

  Zakki had effectively stopped her employment at all the major clubs of Cairo. But the king and Zakki were away now on the king’s honeymoon in Europe. Alexandria, she hoped, might still be open territory for her, at least for the time being. She also calculated that she migh
t be able to hide the fact of her pregnancy, at least for the first weeks of the season.

  Anything, she reasoned, would be better than having to return to her parents’ hovel, to the double misery of her mother’s recriminations and her father’s disintegration. She resented him now for having siphoned off the money she might have saved, although she directed much of her disgust and aggression against herself. She should have gotten more money, demanded a whore’s profit. Her mother was right. There were no illusions left. She was a whore.

  She was a fool, she knew, goaded by pride and some ridiculous false image of herself. She was simply the teenaged cunt toy of the debauched king. By now, he had probably forgotten her name. Still, she did not yield to self-pity. The memory of her early life and the present horror of her family provided her with the impetus to rise above these temporary circumstances. Once the baby was born, she decided, she would find some new path to respectable survival.

  Landing a job at the Dancing Dolphin within a few hours of getting off the train in Alexandria lifted her spirits. She’d deliberately picked a second-rate club, one that would not be in the king’s orbit if he returned earlier than expected to Alexandria. He had his favorite haunts there as well. Mostly, the patrons were foreigners on short vacations, visiting Alexandria because it was still cheaper than the Côte d’Azur.

  The proprietors of the Dancing Dolphin, an Italian couple named Vivanti, gave her a little cubicle at the rear of the building, which she used as both living quarters and a dressing room. She soon discovered that the Vivantis waged a perpetual war with each other. Usually, the woman won. To everybody, she was the boss. Indeed, the woman’s proprietorship extended over the customers as well.

  “This is a cabaret,” she would say. “Not a bordello.” It was her principal admonition. Farrah’s belly dance, twice nightly, was the major entertainment.

  “She should talk,” her husband would whisper slyly to his favorite customers and cronies. “Where do you think I met her?”

  Mrs. Vivanti was a swarthy woman with a thick moustache and a surly, sarcastic tongue. She never smiled, although Farrah suspected, and later confirmed, that she was softer inside than she appeared. Her principal activity, besides watching the cash register, was bullying Mr. Vivanti, who scowled at her all day long, whispering counter insults to third parties.

  “Vivanti, you filthy wop. We’re running short on beer,” she would shout, disregarding the customers. Their battleground was everywhere. Sometimes, their arguments stretched long into the night, concluding temporarily when they would drop off with exhaustion.

  “His brains are between his legs,” she would shout, although to everyone Vivanti’s real interest lay in cheap red wine, gallons of it.

  “Better than the filthy bottomless ditch between her legs,” he grunted in retort.

  But despite their mutual enmity, they both treated Farrah with protective solicitude, keeping the lecherous customers at bay.

  “She is for sale as a dancer only,” Mrs. Vivanti would declare for all to hear. Farrah liked that, although Mrs. Vivanti’s scrutiny often irked her.

  The Vivantis were beached in Alexandria by Mussolini’s dreams of glory. They had followed the Italian troops to Libya, where they opened a bar and enjoyed some success until it became apparent that the Italian army in North Africa was doomed.

  “We were the first to desert,” Mrs. Vivanti told her. “We came across the Libyan Desert on a camel dressed as Arabs. Montgomery didn’t stop us at El Alamein.” She growled approval of what she must have thought was a wry joke.

  Farrah spent a great deal of time with Mrs. Vivanti. She envied her strength.

  “The principal business of men is war and screwing. The trick for a woman is to avoid them both.” This was the bedrock of her philosophy.

  She was impressed by Farrah’s apparent celibacy and her indifference to the customers’ blandishments.

  “Live without them. It is healthier. You’ll live longer.” She firmly believed that sex shortens a woman’s life, although she was perfectly content to have men pay for the titillation brought on by liquor and Farrah’s dancing.

  “They watch you and heat up. May it shorten their lives.”

  Mrs. Vivanti had many eccentricities. Her first name was Maria, but none, including Mr. Vivanti, dared call her that. Her dislikes were gargantuan, particularly contemporary men, animals, and countries. She had hated Italy and Libya, but her loudest recriminations were for Egypt and Egyptians.

  “Once they were organized, prosperous, hardworking. But that was thousands of years ago. They had something. Believe me, what they have now is a pale shadow of that.” She grew uncharacteristically wistful, describing her visits to the temples of Karnak, the Valley of the Kings. Abu Simbel. She knew their history and could catalogue their many gods. “Even their gods made sense. Now they have Allah. Male gods.” She spat.

  “What about your Jesus?” Farrah would ask. She had a dim idea of Christians. Even the Copts were a mystery.

  “Him!” Mrs. Vivanti said with contempt. “Only a fool would believe the circumstances of his birth.”

  “You will go to hell,” Mr. Vivanti cried when he heard such blasphemies.

  “I am in hell,” she would respond, coldly.

  ***

  “That belly is not from pasta,” she said to Farrah one night, pushing a finger in her navel. “Some brat is growing there.” She especially hated children, including her own, who had apparently all gone back to Italy.

  “I’m sorry,” Farrah said, as if somehow her condition was an offense to Mrs. Vivanti.

  “Raped, no doubt,” the Italian woman said with sarcasm.

  “In a way.”

  “Stupid fool,” Mrs. Vivanti exclaimed. “Who is the lucky father?”

  She looked across the room at her husband, who was playing dominoes. “Not him, thank God.” She shook her head, her anger directed now at her husband. “Besides, his thing is like a dead snake.” Then she looked at Farrah.

  “Coglioni,” she spat. “They will destroy the human race.” The men playing dominoes hid their smiles.

  Later, when her anger abated, she asked Farrah, “What will you do?”

  Farrah shrugged.

  She hissed, “Fool. With me, they always paid for their pleasure.”

  Mrs. Vivanti let her stay on even when she could no longer dance. Farrah paid for her board by doing odd jobs around the place, although she had to sleep on a pallet in the corridor.

  As near as she could calculate, the baby would be due before the end of the year. She was not yet sure what she would do with it.

  Mrs. Vivanti continued to observe her, shaking her head in despair as she watched Farrah’s growing belly.

  “The father must pay,” she would say. “Make him pay. Farrah. Don’t be an ass.”

  “Someday,” Farrah responded, more to placate Mrs. Vivanti. How does one make the all-powerful Farouk pay?

  When Farrah finished her work, she roamed the city and walked along the beaches. In the distance, she could see the palace where she had stayed with the king, and that spot in the sea where the shiny white yacht was kept at anchor. It was not there now. The king had apparently taken it on his honeymoon.

  Alexandria, with its art deco buildings ringing the Corniche, its babble of foreign tongues, its elegant casinos and restaurants, and its nightly round of lawn parties, seemed to lie on another planet, a forbidden island.

  For Farrah, the hardest part was holding back resentment. She would see pictures of the king on his honeymoon, glaring out from the newspapers. Invariably, he was photographed in a white dinner jacket and baggy silk pants with Narriman beside him wearing the same ridiculous costume. She tried to find the humor in it, but her condition made it impossible to laugh. Besides, her pregnancy was not an easy one.

  Perhaps this was the punishment her mother had
always predicted for her. She wondered about what name she would give the child.

  “It must have a name, a family name,” Farrah confided to Mrs. Vivanti.

  “Use the father’s.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why? To protect the bastard. I would have snipped off his cojones like ripe grapes.”

  When the labor pains came, Mrs. Vivanti summoned the midwife and stayed with her during the birth.

  “A girl,” the midwife announced as the baby slipped into the world.

  “A girl,” Mrs. Vivanti exclaimed with uncharacteristic disdain for that sex. “Your Allah has pissed on you.”

  The midwife, an indifferent leather-faced woman with tough sinewy arms and clawlike hands, wrapped the baby in swaddling clothes and placed it beside Farrah.

  “Green eyes, like mine,” she said with uncommon joy, as she felt the baby’s warmth against her breast.

  Even finding a first name for the baby gave Farrah trouble. She consulted Mrs. Vivanti, who, true to her hatred of the contemporary, offered a fertile suggestion.

  “Isis would be my vote. An Egyptian goddess. She had a husband, Osiris, who wound up without his cojones. But she knew what she was about.”

  Farrah thought about the name, whispering it to the baby. A goddess. She was, after all, the daughter of the king of Egypt.

  But the child’s illegitimacy gnawed at her, and she confided her fears to Mrs. Vivanti.

  “Find the father, then. Make him give her his name.”

  “It is impossible.”

  Farrah continued to brood, and Mrs. Vivanti finally took it upon herself to act. As usual, she laid the chore on her husband. After considerable argument, he registered the child’s birth in the city hall.

  “We’ve made her a wop,” Mr. Vivanti said. He did not tell her what name he had used.

  Farrah called the child Isis. After a while it didn’t matter about the family name. There was no need for it. After all, she was a genuine princess. Nothing could change that.

  When Farrah’s figure had snapped back and some of her strength had returned, Mrs. Vivanti gave her her old job.