The high walls of the house near Bi’r Tefawi, some miles from Aswan, were heavily but discreetly guarded. The gardens were beautiful, watered by a special system all the way from the oasis and shaded just enough so that the sun did not destroy them. As in most Arab gardens of this quality there were tiled fountains, though al-Habashiya had a preference, she said, for English flowers. There were poppies and roses, geraniums and hibiscus, most of them maintained by expensive fertilisers. The walls were white, trimmed in royal blue. Through the great part of the day I remained in the deepest chambers. Here I discovered I was not the only foreigner in al-Habashiya’s collection. They were all, however, male, female or neuter, completely addicted to morphine. I pitied them, knowing I could never succumb to a narcotic as they had. It is not in my metabolism. I must admit I found most of them despicable, even when I discovered how the younger ones had all been blinded or had been subjected to disgusting surgery. This increased my alarm and I determined to escape at my first opportunity, even though I was now beyond the edge of any kind of civilisation. Indeed, all my fellow-prisoners were quick to tell me how I was beyond any form of salvation. Most of the horizon seen from the roof of the house was Nubia.
My Master found it amusing, during those first days, to have me coupled with every other creature in his collection. It was, he said, the best way of getting to know people. Sir Ranalf sometimes came and went. I think he was organising the distribution of various commodities, including the films and still photographs. I prayed they would not use our footage with Mrs Cornelius. (I learned later that this had gone with Quelch who, typically, stole the only commercially worthless reels! Al-Habashiya asked me if I didn’t find it a capital joke and we laughed.)
My Master had a whim one day to play the gramophone again. He asked me if I were an aficionado of music. He adored Beethoven but he had particular fondness he said for the English moderns. Did I like Elgar? I had not heard of him. Now I am familiar with them all. I cannot bear them, perhaps because of the associations. Hoist, Delius, Williams, Britten and the rest are all the same. Sentimental mystic bum-boys producing formless rubbish worse even than the French! Make no mistake, I give the same time to Ravel and Debussy. Tchaikovsky was the last great composer. All the rest is nonsense. I wish I could find a copy of Song of the Nile. I advertised for it in the Gazette but the only answers I had were from ‘fans’ full of nostalgia for a non-existent past.
One cold night I am taken to the large courtyard and the building called The Temple. It is decorated in some bastard, chiefly Ptolemaic, style and dedicated to the lioness and the crocodile, the female and male forms of Set. There is an altar shaped like a couch, covered in fabric whose dark designs seem to my untrained eye more alchemical than Egyptian (perhaps the vestments of some Masonic Lodge) and behind this a great, tall throne surmounted by the head of a serpent, which is another form of Set. Thick candles cast fitful light, their tallow impaled upon ornate iron sticks and the thick yellow wax dripping heavily, as if stalagmites form in a cave. Before the altar fumes a red-hot brazier in which is placed a single iron. Al-Habashiya enters and sits carefully down in the throne, arranging fastidious silks as always, but now upon my Master’s head is the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, the wig and false beard of the Pharaoh, and al-Habashiya’s beauty is extraordinarily enhanced, grown vastly alien like the strangest of Akhenaton’s breed, the flesh beneath the silks wrapped in white gauze through which the dark brown fat rolls and ripples as if composed of a thousand other bodies, all struggling to be free. I have been fasted and I am glad of it, for I want to vomit. My terror has come back at the moment I thought I had learned to exist beyond it, separate from it, obedient enough to keep the worst pain at bay. I had not expected the agony to increase.
When the iron was put to my shoulder, the mark of the scarab, it was of little consequence. I was already contemplating an even more terrifying future. Today you can hardly see it. People think it is a birthmark, a tattoo, a scar. I tell them it is something I got at sea.
‘From this time on,’ says the hermaphrodite, ‘you will address me as God. Do you understand me?’ Al-Habashiya uses the English word.
‘Yes, God,’ I reply. Acquiescence is the only defence against inevitable horror. I did not think it blasphemy. In those days I had a more secular bent. In the camps, too, one had to lose such refinements.
God says He is pleased with me. He says I am thoroughly submissive and obedient. It is, He says, the Jew’s natural state. Surely I now feel that certainty of truth, deep in my soul, that resonance telling me I am fulfilling my properly ordained role in life. Yes, God, I am dutiful. I am fulfilled. I do not know if this is true or not. Sekhet is called the Eye of Ra, the Destroyer of Men. A pitiless lioness, she has no mercy. Her cold claws reach into your breast and clutch your heart. She says she is Set. She manifests herself as Set and becomes a male crocodile. That night we explore new depths of fear and humiliation and the snapping fangs seemed to draw back in a great grin but the darkness, though it grows very strong, is now familiar to me. I am almost part of it. Two are injured, a girl and a boy. God explains that He is the only healer and today He chooses to let them die. They are left in the garden to die. They are there for days. The flies become a nuisance.
God takes me to the garden where, on green lawns, little daisies and wild flowers blossom, a summer meadow where the eunuchs and the hermaphrodites and the blind girls and boys play. ‘What kind of religion dismisses the natural world in all her beauty and variety to praise an invisible world which it claims to be better than this?’ God has developed a habit of discoursing on comparative religions and on occasion His tone becomes somewhat hectoring, defending the Moslem faith while ascribing to Himself a pagan divinity. ‘What could be better than the world I have created here?’ He adds. He is massive in green and blue silks, a monstrous scarlet turban. ‘What is more like paradise than a tranquil English country garden in the glory of summer? What better can one do for oneself than provide some little sanctuary like this. Lie back for a moment against those roses.’ And while my back grows bloody from the thorns He uses me casually amongst His flowers, crushing me down amongst the nasturtiums, lilies and sunflowers - red, blue and yellow - green and blazing orange in the poppies - while the tranquil water plays - while the eunuchs and hermaphrodites whisper like the last of the summer’s wheat and the blind boys and girls smile into a blank future. And yet because there is hope in all beauty I remember that perfume, I recall those crushed leaves with all the pleasure of childhood nostalgia, the broken stems and scattered petals spreading across the tiles like wedding confetti (and our audience the ululating guests) while the damp, red earth, the old, almost lifeless earth, sustained only by Man’s constant nurturing, that dank mould clings to our bodies and enters our mouths as it entered the mouths of thousands before us, and clings to our flesh as it clung to the flesh of the dead, so many dead. And my body is bent over shrubbery of subtle greens and pinks and dark yellows, of white flowers with little scatterings of brown-red and myriad shades and shapes of green against the blue of a cloudless African sky. And you would condemn me if now I understand no other reality? What else can I know? I am the property of a god in some forgotten corner of Paradise where only He determines what should be called pleasure and what should count as pain, on what deserves to exist and what should be wiped out. I tell Him I am in anguish. He tells me I am not. I have no choice but to accept this and eventually grow as mad as God. I become a complement to God’s utterly lonely pursuits as bleakly He vanquishes boredom sometimes for hours, sometimes only for minutes when my pleasure or my pain is at its most intense. I can no longer distinguish these things, for my mind has left my body. I begin to suspect that God, too, feels little contact with His gigantic bulk and knows we are joined in a pact not to curb this condition but rather to maintain it. He hates His own flesh. This condition becomes our principal addiction, our mutual escape, and I begin to forget entirely the cause of my pain or my desire to escape. We grow together. My only reason for God’s permitting me to exist is that I am inventive in finding ways to relieve God’s ennui. There is a state of terror so absolute that it becomes an unconscious way of life. One exists in that state just as one might exist in a hostile geographical environment, on familiar terms with it, but never free of it. One performs the functions necessary to one’s survival but thought, as it is generally understood, disappears completely. One becomes a rapid instinctive reactor to familiar stimuli and, when unfamiliar, one adapts very quickly to learn what one must do to remain alive. I have known this high terror only a few times, in Russia, in America, in Egypt and in Germany. It would be obscene to pass moral judgement on anyone who was ever exposed to it. It amused God to explain how the subject (myself, for instance) was taught obedience by providing him or her with a series of narrowing choices. This, of course, was the scientific principle by which discipline and order in the camps was maintained. After my first arrest I witnessed it personally. God had one of the blind girls killed. He said it was a punishment and we must all watch her through the hours of her dying, but I think He was demonstrating something else, perhaps for me. I think I understood what I must do, but God would not tell me. This is another means by which you are controlled, He said. By uncertainty. From time to time, therefore, He changed the rules. We had to learn the new ones very quickly. I was terrified He would grow bored with me, as He had grown, He implied, with the blind girl. She was useless, He said. He asked me if I could guess why He felt secure enough to tell me these things, to discuss the nature of His power over me and the nature of my will to serve Him. It is because You are God, I said. But I was wrong. He slapped my face impatiently and grew angry because I could not weep. There are no tears left in you. You are drying up, little Jew-angel. We must make you more interesting. Under the surgery you will begin to guess why I feel so secure. I am so glad you are intelligent. Most of these creatures, they hardly understand a word I say. I might as well talk to myself. But then you are part of myself, aren’t you, sweet, filthy Jewshit? And I must whisper that I love Her, that I love my mother, my goddess, Sekhet, who yearns with such bitter longing for Her own death and the death of the world. Yet still I am not ready to serve Her in the next world, She says. I have yet to yearn for death as She yearns for it, to want it more than life. God promises me the time will inevitably come to me as it comes to all Her creatures. It had come to the blind girl, God said. She had wanted to die. At any rate, towards the end. As we laugh at this I realise my own time has become finite.