I do not dramatize; if anything, I fail to find language gorgeous enough to describe what I felt and what I did. The death-giver is beyond language, beyond thought, he enters another region of experience. No wonder the Society of Assassins, the SS, the Cheka took on the character of religious brotherhoods. They knew secrets other men dared not seize. It was only afterward, looking at those ragged blood-stained bodies, that I realized what I had done, and what my act meant in terms of the future. The dead men, in themselves, still had no reality for me. Only the act of killing had meaning. I realized that I had loved killing them. The after-emotion was similar, I think, to that which must be felt by a man who acts out an obsessive sexual fantasy. He dreams for years, lurks about schoolyards, reads in the newspaper of more courageous maniacs. At last he rapes a child. Joy is what he feels in fact; horror and remorse is what he knows he must feel in theory. He instructs his mind to repel the memory of ecstasy. The mind obeys, but the primitive brain lies down for a little happy sleep: he knows it will awake again, overpower the mind, and insist on a repetition of the crime. He watches over its cot with tenderness.
Of course I knew who the victims were. Pathetic dolls manipulated by men like me. We plant the germ of an idea in them and send them out to die of their infection. Perhaps they were as happy when the bullets ripped into them as their ancestors would have been to receive the spear-blade that sent them to Allah. As they died in the moonlight did visions of Marx pass before them? Did an incantation by V. I. Lenin echo in their ears? The wretched will always find something they do not understand to die for. Death itself is their reward: Christ, Mohammed, and Beria must all have expired with a final little shiver of spiritual avarice, knowing that they had been the brokers of so much joy.
Tonight-life! Or Kalash’s vision of it. He has himself been rather glum, but for different reasons from mine. To be the object of murder is not, for Kalash, a religious mystery but an insult to his position at the apex of the human species. Apparently he and his father have worked out some suitable revenge, for today he was cheerful again. Late in the afternoon he had Paul and Nigel and me summoned to one of the gardens inside the walls of this astonishing palace. We found him sitting under a baobab tree whose branches provide a canopy above the little courtyard. A lion slept under a stone table a few feet away. (These beasts are household pets of the Khatar; slaves are specially trained to capture them as cubs and to acquaint them with human customs. They seem to be decorative rather than functional; I don’t believe they act as watchdogs, for example. Kalash in his blunt way had told Zofia and Ilona to be careful of them. “Girls who go near lions when they are menstruating often are killed. The beast smells blood and attacks. No amount of training can remedy this behavior. Otherwise they are quite harmless.” Kalash pays less attention to the lions than an Englishman to a dozing terrier. He is magnificent in his lack of sentimentality.)
Kalash told us that he had arranged a party for us. Since Geneva he has talked about Somali girls, who are much valued here for their beauty and sexual ingenuity. From somewhere (probably the same corner of the palace where my sister and Ilona are sleeping) he had collected eight Somali girls-two for each of us. He had laid on a supper. Suitable clothing would be supplied to us by our servant boys. “Miernik,” he said, “I shouldn’t want your fastidiousness to interfere with your pleasure. I give you my word you have no disease to fear from these girls.” He set a time for the commencement of the party and left us.
I had brought my diary with me and I remained in the garden after the others left with the lion snoring gently beside me. As I was writing a few moments later, Kalash reappeared. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “I have to go out into the mountains on an errand. There are some rather interesting ruins along the way, and it occurred to me you might like to see them. I can only take one of you as I will be accompanied by a couple of my father’s men. You are the obvious companion. Paul and Nigel haven’t your interest in archaeology.” It developed that he was talking about the stone relicts of the Darfur dynasties, so of course I agreed to go. He assured me that he expected to spend a peaceful day. “I shouldn’t think you’ll need your Sten gun this time,” he said. On some of these ruins are paintings of Christian saints on horseback. It is an interesting cultural puzzle that no one will ever solve. I suspect that Kalash is as much descended from these wild kings as from the Prophet.
Just after dark my boy appeared and helped me into the regalia Kalash had provided-robes and a turban, which the child, giggling, wound around my head, walking in circles with the end of the cloth in his hand while I sat on a stool; Going before me with a lamp, he guided me through the passageways of the palace and into a square room hung with mirrors. The mirrors were placed at floor level-sensible enough, since one sits on cushions laid on the carpets. Kalash and the others were already on hand, reclining behind low tables laid with platters of food. I joined them and was given a glass of tea by the boy, who then withdrew. We were quite alone, the first time I had been out of sight of servants since we arrived at the palace. Nigel gazed frankly at his reflection in the mirrors. “I rather like the look of myself in this outfit,” he said. “I think I have the figure for it. As for you, Miernik…” I did look odd, but if one is going to wear fancy dress it’s good to wear it in a place where masculine beauty is meaningless.
Music began to play, filtering through a screened door. I suppose the musicians were in the next room. With the first notes, the Somali girls entered. Not one of them could have been more than fifteen. Their faces were gentle, unmarked by experience, and wreathed in smiles. They approached Kalash on their knees. In Arabic he said to them, “You are late and we are hungry.” They rose with a collective giggle and two of them joined each of us. One immediately unbuckled my sandals and began to rub my feet. The other sat beside me and put bits of food into my mouth with her fingers. After each mouthful she would wipe my lips with a cloth. Variations of this went on with Kalash and Paul and Nigel and their girls. I tried to speak to them in Arabic but discovered that they did not understand the language. It was not a verbal experience that Kalash had arranged for us.
After a time the girls danced. They were not particularly graceful, but they believed that they were, and that was rather charming. One or the other of them from time to time would sing. There was much giggling. The girls neither ate nor drank. Kalash lay back, utterly relaxed, and accepted the food and the caresses. Paul and Nigel seemed able to approximate his nonchalance. As for me, I gradually lost the excruciating self-consciousness I had felt on entering the room in Arab clothing. The girls were so eager to please, and so obviously unable to imagine any life but the one they led, that inhibitions were irrelevant. In Europe what we were doing would have been an orgy which could only have taken place in a pornographic novel; in the Amir’s palace it was as ordinary as prayer.
At length I was no longer hungry. The girls kept trying to feed me until I refused three or four times. (I suppose this is part of the etiquette.) Then they led me to an alcove, where we lay down again. They arranged my limbs, glancing and nodding at me until I indicated that I was in a position of perfect comfort. They then removed their clothes and lay down beside me. Their bodies were remarkably beautifuclass="underline" perfect breasts, long tapered rib cages, round buttocks carried high at the back, and the straight-calved long legs of their race. The only flaw, to my Central European eye, were the navels, which were protuberant and about the size of a walnut. One girl knelt and stroked my face with her breasts. The other rubbed my legs. I was still fully clothed; she reached under the skirts of my robe. Soon she left off this massage, which was intensely pleasurable (she seemed to know the location of all the nerve centers in the joints of the toes, ankles, and knees).