Requiem (16 page)

27

‘I can’t breathe, I
can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.  I can’t breathe because HE can’t
breathe.’

28

Why do it? Why do this work for
no money? Oh, let's have a look. A lucky, lucky look. Damned scrolls. All the
scribes were liars. Scribes and writers and editors and copyists and
pen-pushing, quill-dipping scriptorium scrotum-scribblers. Let's have a look.

Ahmed was a tidy
scholar. He pinned out the scroll-cloth on his spotless work desk, placing
spectacles case, pens, pin-sharp pencils and writing implements around it like
cutlery laid for a banquet. His work desk was an island in the
djinn
-and-hashish inspired vortex of his life. It was an
altar, a place of sacrament, a refuge.

He picked up
a large magnifying glass and peered first at the back of his hand to see if it
had stopped shaking after another bad night wrestling with the
djinn
.
There was a discernible tremor. The
magnified image of his left hand revolted him. His nails were cracked and
bitten, with a possible greenish tint, and the tips of his fingers were stained
the colour of polished oak from nicotine. His knuckles were swollen and red, as
if he'd been in a fist-fight and the dark hairs on the back of his hand
quivered in indignation at this examination. Was it possible, he considered, to
become a
djinn
oneself in the process
of a lifetime? He let his hand drop at the thought, and his attention turned
back to the scroll fragments pinned out before him.

Stinking
scroll, and for no money. Why am I doing this, if not because I dream about a
night spent wandering the desert thighs of that glorious Jewish slut, for whom
I would gladly die, for whom I would cheerfully fling myself from the heights
of
Masada
in the hope of a perfumed kiss on the way
down? Slut! Bitch! Whore! God, I would love you for eternity, and instead you
bring me Englishmen with fragments of rotting scroll to translate! Pieces in
spiral form disappearing into a dark shaft like a woman's hole, a cervix with
no meaning. Sharon, do you realize, do you understand, that if only I had you
in my bed, then, then, the
djinn
might
leave
me alone.
This is hopeless. I need something to smoke before I can look at
this.

Ahmed
got up from his desk and with miraculous speed crafted two elegant reefers, one
of which he lit. The other he laid alongside his writing implements, like a
specialist tool. Exhaling a great plume of blue smoke through his nostrils, he sat
once again at his desk.

Fumbling
with his tortoiseshell-framed spectacles, he began to make a cursory study of
the outer tail of the spiral. After two minutes, his heart sank.

'Genealogies!
Fuck! Fuck! Why do I do this, if not for some futile dream of spreading your
legs across the magic carpet? Hateful and consummately beautiful mother of all
sluts!'

Ahmed
had some experience of scrolls, both copies and original fragments: enough to
know that most of them yielded nothing of interest. Many contained obsessively
detailed instructions on how the temple should be rebuilt, or tiresome family
trees beginning and ending with historical nonentities. The spiral scroll
before him appeared to be of the latter type.

The Arab
scholar also had some knowledge of palaeography and the system of dating
manuscripts by the shapes of the letters they contain. Hebrew script changed
somewhat between the earliest scrolls and the latest, and the one before him
was clearly a later scroll, written, or at least copied, around the
Herodian
period. It could have been one of the last
documents that came out of Qumran before the siege of
Masada
,
or it could simply have been a copy of a much older document.

Ahmed
picked up his magnifying glass and squinted at the collision of Hebrew letters
at the very centre of the spiral. Here the writing was almost indecipherable
and the lettering impossibly small. Ahmed put down his magnifying glass in
disgust.

'Sharon,'
he said. 'Oh, Rose of Sharon. I am sick of love.'

29

Stopped. The voice in
his head had stopped. The unruly narrative. It had suddenly stopped with the
words
I
can't breathe.
What had happened to make it stop?

He'd
been dreaming. A nightmare in which he couldn't breathe. Some terrible weight
had settled on his chest in the night. As he struggled to surface from his
sleep, he realized it was not he who was unable to breathe. It was the voice.

The
voice, the tongue, the presence, the haunting; the thing that had spread its
wings about him since his arrival in Jerusalem. Every day, a whispering at the
back of his mind. Not constant, but always waiting, always ready to pick up
where it had left off, speaking to him out of nowhere. Now, as mysteriously as
it had appeared, it had gone. One minute it had been there, like a sub-
audial
humming from a defective hi-fi, and then it had been
switched off.

He hadn't meant this
thing to happen with Sharon. That wasn't why he'd come to Jerusalem. It
couldn't go anywhere. He felt vaguely guilty, unable to guess at Sharon's
expectations. He hoped he wasn't going to have to disappoint her. And there was
Katie. Ridiculous as it seemed, he had in his head a picture of Katie observing
them from a high place, watching them make love, coldly scrutinizing his
performance. Had he been the one who'd died, he wondered, would he have
preferred Katie to take comfort in the arms of a close friend or a stranger?
The answer, of course, would have been: whichever one was sincere.

Sharon had gone to work,
but the sharp odour of her was all over him. The smell of her sex had drenched
him. The intoxicating scent of her
cunt
was on his
fingers.

What was it
people were after with sex? The answer wasn't as obvious as it seemed. There were
things beyond what the professional could offer: a prostitute can only take
care of the need to sneeze. Then comes the yearning, the voracious hunger for
the intimate moment of transcendence in another's arms. That was exclusively,
and would always remain exclusively, in the gift of one person to another. It
could be given or withheld; it might even be simulated, but it could never be
bought.

It was
natural magic, a human miracle. It was the thing religion had always tried to
replicate and sustain, and the point at which religion had always failed. All
religions. Everywhere.

The great
Semitic religions had tried to replace it by defining the thing it could never
imitate as sinful and corrupting; they had sought to regulate it by moral
censure; they had tried to suppress it by spelling out the destructive energies
of its frightening magic.

It was
simple: sex was diabolic in its origins, and, since men were defining the
terms, women made an easy shape for demons to squat in.

Tom knew all
about those demons and how they worked. He sniffed at his hands, tingling at
Sharon's marine odours still on his fingers. Memories winged in on that smell,
like angels, like demons.

At the
school, after reprimanding the youth who'd scrawled obscenities on the
blackboard, Tom began to notice the girl who'd been the cause of the boy's jealousies.
He saw how she watched his every move, absorbed his every word, blushed when
spoken to, cringed at even the tiniest reproach.

At
fifteen she was as pretty as a silk flower, down to the last eyelash.  Her
copper hair winked under the classroom lights, and her complexion had a
delicate
undershine
, like the gloss on an apple. He
could see how the boy might be crazy for her; why shouldn't he be? She always
sat at the front, under Tom's nose, wearing a starched white blouse through
which he could see the outline of her young breasts. Over her left breast, the
bleeding rose of her school-blazer badge. He remembered being momentarily
distracted by the breast badge; whatever it was he was saying to the class, he
missed a beat.

She noticed.
She smiled at him; a minor triumph for her. He didn't return the smile.

Girls
at this age had mysterious allure. No wonder mature women hated men who preyed on
young girls, and there were plenty of men who did. But even after the first
eighteen years that extraordinary bloom, that gloss, began to dry. Society,
projecting a woman's sexually active years into psychological maturity, was at
odds with nature, which scheduled her prime reproductive years in her
schoolgirl period. How it must shadow women, Tom thought, much more than men.
He knew it concerned Katie, with her jars of cosmetics and creams and her
regimes; yet he'd always tried to convince her that it really didn't matter,
that they'd gone beyond all that. He was sure he wasn't lying. He was positive
he wasn't lying.

He
eyed the young girl's legs as she tripped out of the classroom with the other
students. Some of these girls attired in dull school uniforms were sirens.
Provocative, short skirts. Black tights hissing in the corridors. Shoes shined
to a wink. Flattering heels, high as they could get away with. Painted
fingernails. Stretched necks. Bud-like breasts. Hearts beating beneath the
starched white cotton and the bleeding rose. And under all of it was the
fragrance of probable virginity, filling the air with wild pheromones, like
poppy seed.

Mysterious
allure? There was nothing mysterious about it.

Stop it,
Tom had said to himself after the classroom had
emptied.
Just stop it.
Every male teacher was torched by schoolgirl
fantasies, and you either indulged them or you checked them. It was as simple
as that. You checked them. These girls were only fourteen or fifteen years old.
Fantasies of that order were distasteful, corrupt and predatory.

And impossible to stop.

30

The tape-recorded second
call to prayer of the day vibrated across the baked rooftops as Tom walked
through the narrow streets of the Muslim quarter. The streets smelled of
rotting fruit, spices, warm dust. Early shadows were like moist ectoplasm
leaking from walls and doorways. He had no difficulty remembering the place.
He'd not told Sharon he was coming here.

He rang the
bell and waited. Remembering, he rang a second, third and fourth time,
whereupon a face and a tousled black head of hair appeared above him. A pair of
blood-shot eyes peered down without recognition. Then a bunch of keys hit the
dust at his feet, and the head retreated.

Inside
the building the door at the top of the stone stairway stood open. He hesitated
on the threshold.

'Welcome,'
Ahmed said, somewhat vaguely. The Arab scratched his head uncertainly. He wore
a white cotton robe, and his feet were bare. 'Sit, while I make some tea.'

Tom
squatted on a floor cushion and spent twenty minutes looking at wall-hangings.
Ahmed seemed to have forgotten him. Finally he reappeared with a tray of mint
tea and small pastries.

'You
must forgive my appearance and my lack of orientation,’ he said, 'but last
night I had one of my worst fights with the
djinn
.
The city is disturbed. They were in an appalling mood, and I was unable to
conciliate them at all. I got barely a moment's sleep.'

Tom
felt less than equipped to deal with these remarks, offered as they were with
yawns and dismissive gestures. Ahmed alluded to his demons as one might refer
to the oppressiveness of the weather; yet he did indeed look like a man who had
spent the night grappling — physically wrestling - with muscular enemies.

'Are there .
. . more than one to contend with?' Tom felt slightly stupid in asking.

Ahmed
regarded him steadily, surprised perhaps that someone might be interested in
the subject of his tormentors. Tom took a sip of the delicious mint tea, if
only to deflect his gaze. 'Oh, yes. That is, there is, of course, the one which
divides into seven, and these in turn into seven, and so on unless I can stop
them.' He got up, fetched a small carved, wooden box and sat down again. Tom
thought Ahmed was about to show him something in the box, but he merely
withdrew cigarette papers and a packet of hashish. He rolled expertly and
offered the reefer to the Englishman, lighting it only after Tom declined. 'I
mean, that is the thing, to stop the
djinn
from
multiplying, isn't it?'

'Yes. I'm sure.'

'Last night,
Tom, they came with the faces of baboons to trick me.'

'You remembered my name!'

'I
don't forget intelligent company. Also I think it is beautiful how you blush
and sip your tea. So I spoke sharply to them.
Don't think you can torment me
as a pack of monkeys. Either we fight as men or not at all.
They understand
that.'

'They do?'

'Oh,
yes. What's in it for them if you give up? They need you to fight them,
otherwise they die.'

Tom was baffled. 'Isn't that what you
want?'