The Journeyer - Jennings Gary - Страница 110
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The pain was compounded of two different sorts of pain. One was that of my mihrab flesh tearing, front and back. Take a piece of skin and rip it, ruthlessly but slowly, and try to imagine how that feels to the skin, and then imagine that it is the skin between your own legs, from artichoke to anus. While that was happening to me, and making me scream, the head of the creature inside me was butting its way through the enclosing bones down there, and that made me bellow between my screams. The bones of that place are close together; they must be shoved apart and aside, with a grinding and grating like that of a boulder going implacably through a too narrow cleft of rocks. That is what I felt, and what I felt all at the same time: the sickening movement and pain inside me, the crunching and buckling of all the bones between my legs, the tearing and burning of the outside flesh. And God allows, even in that extremity, only screaming and bellowing; no swooning to get away from the unbearable agony.
I did not faint until after the creature came out, with a final brutal bulge and billow and rasp of pain like an audible screech—and the dark-brown head raised up between my thighs, slimy with blood and mucus, and said in Chiv’s voice, maliciously, “Something you cannot disown so easily …” Then I seemed to die.
5
WHEN I came back to myself, I was myself. I was still naked and supine on the hindora bed, but I was a male again, and the body appeared to be my own. I was scummed with dried sweat and my mouth was terribly dry and thirsty and I had a pounding headache, but I felt no pains anywhere else. There was not any mess of my body wastes on the pallet; it looked as clean as it ever looked. The room was very nearly clear of the smoke, and I saw my discarded clothes on the floor. Chiv was also there, and fully dressed. She was hunkered down, wrapping a small something, pale blue and purple, in the paper I had brought the hashish in.
“Was it all a dream, Chiv?” I asked. She did not speak or look up, but went on with what she was doing. “What happened to you in the meantime, Chiv?” She did not reply. “I thought I had a baby,” I said, with a dismissive laugh. No response. I added, “You were there. You were it.”
At that, she raised her head, and her face wore much the same expression it had worn in the dream or whatever that had been. She asked, “I was dark brown?”
“Why, er, yes.”
She shook her head. “Babies of the Romm do not get dark brown until later. They are the same color as white women’s babies when they are born.”
She stood up and carried her little package out of the room. When the door opened, I was surprised to see the brightness of daylight. Had I been here all through the night and into the next day? My companions would be much annoyed at my leaving them all the work to do. I began hurriedly putting on my clothes. When Chiv came back to the room, without her bundle, I said conversationally:
“For the life of me, I cannot believe that any sane woman would ever want to go through that horror. Would you, Chiv?”
“No.”
“Then I was right? You were only pretending before? You are really not with child?”
“I am not.” For a normally talkative person, she was being very brusque.
“Have no fear. I am not angry with you. I am glad, for your sake. Now I must get back to the karwansarai. I am going.”
“Yes. Go.”
She said it in a way that implied “do not come back.” I could not see any reason for her surliness. It was I who had done all the suffering, and I strongly suspected that she had contributed in some cunning way to the philter’s miscarriage of purpose.
“She is in a vile humor, as you said, Shimon,” I told the Jew, on my way out. “But I suppose I owe you more money, anyway, for all the time I spent.”
“Why, no,” he said. “You were not long. In conscience—here—I give you a dirham back. Here also is your squeeze knife. Shalom.”
So it was still the same day, then, and not really far into the afternoon, at that, and my travail had only seemed much, much longer. I got back to the inn to find my father and uncle and Nostril still collecting and packing our possessions, but having no immediate need of my assistance. I went down to the lakeside, where the washerwomen of Buzai Gumbad kept always a patch of water cleared of ice. The water was so blue-cold that it seemed to bite, so my bath was perfunctory—my hands and face, and then I briefly took off my upper garments to dash some few drops at my chest and armpits. That wetting was the first I had had all winter; I would probably have been revolted by my own smell, except that everyone else smelled the same or worse. At least it made me feel a trifle cleaner of the sweat that had dried on me in Chiv’s room. And, as the sweat got diluted, so did my worst recollections of my experience. Pain is like that; it is excruciating to endure, but easy to forget. I daresay that is the only reason why any woman, after having been agonized and riven by the extrusion of one child, can even contemplate chancing the ordeal of another.
On the eve of our departure from the Roof of the World, the Hakim Mimdad, whose own karwan train would also be leaving, but in a different direction, came to the karwansarai to say his goodbyes to us all, and to give Uncle Mafio a traveling supply of his medicine. Then, while my father and uncle looked rather agog, I told the Hakim how his philter had failed—or else had succeeded wildly far beyond his intent. I told him graphically what had happened, and I told it not at all enthusiastically, and not a little accusingly.
“The girl must have meddled,” he said. “I was afraid of that. But no experiment is a total failure if something can be learned from it. Did you learn anything?”
“Only that human life begins and ends in merda, or kut. No, one other thing: to be careful when I love in future. I will never condemn any woman I love to such a hideous fate as motherhood.”
“Well, there you are, then. You learned something. Perhaps you would like to try again? I have here another phial, another slight variant on the recipe. Take it along with you, and try it with some female who is not a Romni sorceress.”
My uncle grumbled ruefully, “There is a Dotor Balanzon for you. Gives me a stunting potion and, to level the scales, gives an enhancer to one too young and brisk to need it.”
I said, “I will take it, Mimdad, as a keepsake curiosity. The notion is appealing—to sample lovemaking in a multitude of shapes. But I have a long way to go before I exhaust all the possibilities of this body, and I will remain in it for now. Doubtless, when you have finally refined your philter to perfection, the word of it will be noised all about the world, and by then I may be jaded with my own possibilities, and I will seek you out and ask then to try your perfected potion. For now, I wish you success and salaam and farewell.”
I did not get to say even that much to Chiv, when that same evening I went to Shimon’s place.
“Earlier this afternoon,” he told me indifferently, “the Domm girl asked for her share of her income to date, and resigned from this establishment, and joined an Uzbek karwan train departing for Balkh. The Domm do things like that. When they are not being shiftless, they are being shifty. Ah, well. You still have the squeeze knife to remember her by.”
“Yes. And to remind me of her name. Chiv means blade.”
“Does it now. And she never stuck one into you.”
“I am not so sure of that.”
“There are still the other females. Will you have one, this last night?”
“I think not, Shimon. From the glances I have had of them, they are exceedingly unbeautiful.”
“By your reckoning as once expressed, then, they are nicely un-dangerous.”
“You know something? Old Mordecai never said so, but that may be a count against unbeautiful people, not in their favor. I think I will always prefer the beautiful, and take my chances. Now I thank you for your good offices, Tzaddik Shimon, and I bid you farewell.”
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