Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Virgin

“I think so.”

“Thus although she may have been sold to a house of maradóosh, they cannot own her. But, because I must do business with these people, and because it was proper for them to trust me and foolish for me to trust this Englishman, the burden must fall upon me. Do you see?”

“I’m not sure.”

He sighed. “But it is elementary, kâzzih. I shall buy the girl’s freedom. If.”

“Pardon.”

A shadow darkened his face. “If she is alive. If you find her… worth taking. The men who work in the mines live in grim villages devoid of women. There are no women anywhere about except for the houses of the maradóosh. And when they receive their pay, the mine workers rush to these houses and stand in long lines to wait their turns with the slave girls. They are men of no culture, these miners. In Kabul it is a joke to call them Yâ’ahâddashún. But you are a foreigner, you would not understand. It is remarkable enough that you speak our language as well as you do.”

“Thank you.”

“Often I can understand almost all the words you say.”

“Oh.”

“But these mine workers, they are crude. Rough boorish men. They use women cruelly.” He lowered his head, and a tear trembled in the corner of one big blue eye. “I could not say with assurance that your woman, your girl, is alive today.”

“I must find her.”

“Or that you would want her. So many women, the experience ruins them. Some have in their lifetimes known only a handful of men, and then to embrace thirty or forty or fifty a day-”

“Thirty or forty or fifty!”

“Life is hard for a maradóon,” Amanullah said. “There is a labor shortage.”

“No wonder.”

“Ah. If you will permit a delicate question, had this Phaedra considerable experience before she was brought here?”

I burned my mouth on my coffee. I barely felt the pain. I remembered a taxi racing through garbage-laden streets, a head on my shoulder, a voice at my ear. I have things to tell you. I am Phaedra Harrow. I am eighteen years old. I am a virgin. I’m not anti-sex or frigid or a lesbian or anything. And I don’t want to be seduced or talked into it. People try all the time but it’s not what I want. Not now. I want to see the whole world. I want to find things out. I want to grow. I am a virgin. I am Phaedra Harrow. I am a virgin. I am eighteen years old. I am a virgin. I am a virgin. I am –

“-a virgin,” I said.

“Eh?”

“She is eighteen years old,” I said. “She was never with a man in all her life.”

“Extraordinary!”

“A virgin.”

“Eighteen years without knowing a man!”

“Yes.”

“And the likeness you showed me – she is a beauty, is it not so?”

“It may not be so now,” I said. “It was so then. A beauty.” I thought for a moment. “A beautiful face and body, and a beautiful spirit, my friend Amanullah.”

“It is rare, this beauty of the spirit.”

“Yes.”

“Beauty and purity.”

“Yes.”

“You go to find her,” he sobbed. “You take my car. My driver returns in a week’s time and he drives you to look for her, to search for her.”

“Search?”

“Ah, there are four houses where she might be, kâzzih. Four houses scattered far apart in the vastness of Afghanistan. And I do not know to which house I sold which girls.”

“Oh.”

“But my driver returns in a week, and he and my car are at your disposal.”

“A week,” I said.

“And until then my house is your house and my refrigerator is your refrigerator.”

“A week is a long time,” I said. A week in Kabul, I thought, could turn out to be an exceedingly long time. That meant I wouldn’t get out of the city until the 21st of the month, and the coup was scheduled for the 25th, which meant the city would be in Russian hands before I got back to it. And I would have to get back to it if I had Amanullah’s car and driver along. And-

“-an excellent driver,” he was saying. “A Pakistani, and when his mother lay on her deathbed, of course I told him to go to her. In a week’s time he flies home from Karachi.”

“He flies?”

“We have an airport in Kabul. It is most modern.”

“Then the car is here.”

“Of course.”

“I could take it myself.”

He stared at me. “You do not mean to say that you are familiar with automobiles?”

“Why, yes, I am.”

“You know how to drive them?”

“Certainly.”

“It is extraordinary. To think that you are able to drive automobiles. Quite extraordinary.”

“Well,” I said.

“Then there is no question,” said Amanullah. “You leave in the morning. Now we drink beer.”

After Amanullah turned infor the night, I sat around for a couple of hours drinking fresh coffee and trying to read a local newspaper. I didn’t do very well at it. An hour or so before dawn I wandered out to his garden and browsed around out there. I had suspected that a man oriented as was Amanullah would grow nothing that he couldn’t eat, but I turned out to be completely wrong. The moonlight was bright enough for me to make out bed after bed of rather spectacular flowers. Some were easy enough to identify, even for a New Yorker. Others were unlike anything I had ever seen in the states.

He certainly did well for himself, I thought. The house was modern and well appointed, the garden obviously received at least one employee’s full-time attention. In the Café of the Four Sisters I had not thought of him as a particularly wealthy man, but it seemed evident that he went there because he liked the cooking. Slave trading seemed highly profitable. Arthur Hook had said that he received a thousand pounds apiece for the girls, and there was no reason to doubt the figure. If Amanullah paid that sort of money, he would be likely to ask at least double that figure from the houses of maradóosh.

(This bit with the Afghan words isn’t entirely to impress you with my erudition. If I wanted to do that I’d pick a language that I was better at. But maradóon is hard to translate into English. It doesn’t exactly mean whore, nor does it exactly mean slave. Sort of a combination of the two, with overtones of sluttish abandon. And as for kâzzih, I offer that in Afghan because I have no idea what the English for it might be. Everybody says it, but it’s not in any of the dictionaries – not that there are that many English-Pushtu dictionaries to begin with. Kâzzih seems to be something one says to people for whom one has at least a moderately favorable regard. It is applied indiscriminately to males and females with no change in pronunciation. I do not know whether or not you address an elder as kâzzih ; I rather think not, but I’d hate to bet money one way or the other. It might mean dear little friend, or it might mean fella, or it might mean trusted comrade. Then again, it might just as easily mean motherfucker. Work it all out for yourself, kâzzih. )

Well. I wandered around his garden, meditating upon the inhumanity of man to man and vice versa, and contemplating the possible profits in white slavery, and trying to think of rhymes for maradóosh and Kâzzih, and trying, in short, everything I knew of that would keep my mind off Phaedra. Nothing worked particularly well. Aside from Minna, who was really too young to count, Phaedra Harrow had been the only virgin I knew. And the thought of that frightened little child of nature being enjoyed and abused by thirty or forty or fifty men a day-

She had to be dead, I thought. Death before dishonor – no doubt that had been her credo, and my heart tore at the picture of her fighting valiantly to preserve her chastity until first that and then her very life was torn away from her.