Hob Broun - Odditorium

They passed under a stone arch furrowed by several hundred years of windblown sand and entered the souk. It was a scene in suspension and the only sound was the buzzing of flies. Goats nosed around in the dust, too listless to heed tethering. The more prosperous merchants had been able to put together stalls of lumber rescued from cooking fires and rubbish heaps, while the rest just sat on the ground with a few articles before them on a cloth — one woman with henna-stained palms offered a rusted flywheel, assorted nuts and bolts, a pile of tiny airline soap bars. Next to her, a crippled boy had loose cigarettes and a half-dead chicken that twitched feebly at the edge of his ragged blanket, its feet bound with reeds.

Christo felt a queer internal tremor as he realized there were no other customers.

“Don’t be fooled by what shows,” Tomas murmured as he stopped to purchase ten centimes’ worth of dried chick peas. “This one here, his real business is in virgin boys.”

Christo lurched as an olive vendor tugged his flapping sleeve. Tomas smiled thinly and said it might be wise for him to buy.

“Good will?”

“A gesture. Gestures and ceremony, these things are paramount here.”

“Back home we call it public relations.” Christo thought: A clever line, I must be doing better.

With olive juice dripping down his arm from the paper cone, Christo followed his guide into a hut that smelled like wet dog. The counter was a plank laid across two kegs, and the little girl behind it (she could not have been more than ten) had a whore’s tired, smirking face. She opened two warm Cokes without being asked, listened with meandering eyes as Tomas instructed her, then dropped the coins he gave her in a cloth sack that hung under her skirts.

Back outside, Christo tossed away his olives and collapsed against the wall, caught by the sensation of a mental fissure through which dizziness rushed in a torrent. He was marinated in sweat.

Tomas gulped Coke, wiped his mouth. “These Arabs love the sugar. That’s why most of them have brass teeth.”

Christo rocked on his heels, touched the crease in his trousers for reassurance. “What now?” he managed.

“Nothing now. We wait. The girl will take my message and after a while they will come for us. For now we just sit.”

“Sorry. I must have left my patience on the plane.”

Christo closed his eyes to the glare and tried to fold his arms and legs into a napping posture. But recent images whiplashed across his inner eye: Tomas’s dank garage, the threatening clutter of the city, aboriginal faces self-righteously blank.

“ Maktub ,” Tomas said.

“What?”

“Fate. What will be, will be.”

Yes, Christo silently commented, that’s just what I’m afraid of.

A noise like an electric shaver cut the air followed in a burst by music from the other side of the wall: dolorous yodeling embroidered by an epileptic clarinet. In the thin belt of shadow that intersected the square, boys had been playing a game with round stones; now they broke away and moved briskly in a pack.

“ Hashish? Monsieur pour hashish ?”

“English? Deutsch ? Good dope for you. Ich haben .”

Christo rose to his feet as they pressed in, but Tomas pulled him back down. “Don’t encourage them.”

More and more came, as if a chemical signal had been released drawing them like insects to a food source, Christo felt waves of sour boy-breath on his face as they shoved and clamored, cried their incantation: “Hashish! Hashish!”

Slapping heads, an older boy thrust his way to the front. “You waste your time with these filthy childs. I take you somewhere no big noise. You sit, have tea, smoke best hashish all you want, no problem. Listen all new tapes just flown in. Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones.”

“ Cessez donc !” Tomas cocked his fist “ Cessez .”

They recoiled momentarily, then surged forward, giggling and aping Tomas—“ Cessez !”—in shrill, taunting voices. The first brave hands shot out to poke and tug; the first rumble of animal menace rose like heat from the ground.

Tomas stood quickly. “Let’s walk.” They drove through wild puppy furor, but were clear for only a few seconds before it reformed around them in a circular dance that combined entreaty and defiance.

It was eerie, the way they froze all at once, went mute. Christo tensed, expecting the worst, but the pack began to dismantle, boys drifting away in bashful groups of three and four. From the direction in which they carefully did not look, it was possible to detect the cause of their submission.

He was tall and elegantly slim in his Western clothes, his dark face dominated by eyes like a pair of ray-gun apertures, one sweep of them more than enough; a terrible power quickly flashed. Just from the way he set himself, it was clear he had the juice, that he would be a chieftain of the streets anywhere — Bedji or Lima or Chicago.

“Ibrahim.” Tomas approached him. “ Salaam aleikum .”

“ Aleikum salaam .”

They grasped wrists in a kind of Indian-wrestle greeting. Christo was introduced as an “American businessman.” Ibrahim bowed deeply, emitting a powerful fume of bay rum.

“You come yourself to meet us,” Tomas intoned. “We are most honored.”

“We in turn are honored by your visit.” Ibrahim had a rolling, staff-announcer’s baritone. “This way please, and we shall ride.”

The car was long and black, and pitted by rust and by the sharp stones that were everywhere. It had to be the only Oldsmobile in town. Ibrahim drove at cortege speed through several miles of dismal countryside, gray-green succulents and disintegrating rock. Tomas whispered urgent cultural lore.

“From now on, we are in the care of the family. They will dictate the atmosphere. They will decide how and when to complete the transaction. In Islam, the most important thing is how one provides or accepts hospitality.”

“Okay, okay,” Christo said irritably. And to himself: Good manners? Something else I don’t have.

Turning off the main road and passing through a chicken-wire gate, they pulled up at a low, oblong warehouse with a shining tin roof. Ibrahim’s curt horn beeps fetched out a fervently obsequious little man who opened doors and ushered them inside; where his nose should have been, there was a tan hole.

Everyone wore sunglasses except Ali Mustafa, the patriarch, a generous dumpling of a man in a crisp linen tunic, who soaked up deference with the careless inveteracy of a mullah. Clearly, he was running the show. Welcoming his guests to a fragrant sanctum where carpets had been laid over the floor, he bade them recline among the cushions that encircled a brass table. He snapped his fingers and a tray of sweet mint tea in glasses was brought. Christo took his cues from Tomas during the long Arabic toast. The tea was like syrup and made him sweat even more profusely inside the djellabah. The glasses were replenished and a young relative played a halting version of “My Blue Heaven” on the flageolet. Ali Mustafa beamed.

“We thank you for your long trip,” he said.

“Yeah, great to be here,” Christo said, like someone on a talk show.

“Your wisdom in coming is to your credit. It pleases me much to open my doors for citizens of the world. Since I am a child and my father teaches me to sift kif through horsehair, I am dedicated to a search for better and better ways to make and preserve hashish. Please to come now with me and see for yourself.”

More sunglasses, more relatives. They were busy as beavers in the processing room. Ali Mustafa knelt beside one of his cleaners, dipped into the man’s wide metal pan and rubbed fine powder through his fingers.