Abbas Khider - The Village Indian

‘I’m talking of a real one — a real porno!’

‘What?’

‘First, you have to promise you won’t breathe a word about this. Not a word outisde these four walls!’

‘I promise.’

‘Good! Now we just have to wait until midnight!’

At midnight, the Syrian removed a brick from the wall. ‘Let the show begin!’

One after the other, we peeped through the hole in the wall. On the other side were the landlord’s daughters in their bedroom. By the time it was my turn, they were lying on the bed, right in front of the hole, and pleasuring each other in the most exhilarating way. The Egyptian explained that they’d removed a brick too and were equally pleasured in sharing with us the mysterious things they got up to at night. Things continued like this for another half hour before one of them got up and put their brick back. My flatmates did the same. Lights out. Show over.

The next day, at work, I could feel the urge to write rising in me again and my heart beginning to beat faster. I sat at a table, grabbed a bunch of receipts from the cafe and began to write, feverishly. That day, I wrote a lot.

In the evening, when I got home, exhausted, an unpleasant surprise awaited me. A crowd of people were standing with the police outside the building. ‘Are you the new guy here?’ a resident from the first floor asked me softly.

‘Yes, what’s happened?’

‘Piss off quick! They’ve discovered it!’

‘Discovered what?’

‘The hole!’

Thereafter I lived as if on a ghost ship. I drifted aimlessly from one job to another, from one town to another, from one country to another, from one escape to another. Women came and went, even writing abandoned me for a long time. It’s true that I tried from time to time to commit a few lines to paper but what was missing was the passion. Nor did I feel the urge to steal paper — there was no need for it now. After the peephole incident, my temple dream had suddenly faded away. Only a considerable time later, in Achaea in Greece, did it surface again.

Achaea, about an hour from the town of Patras, was a tiny village. I’d never wanted to go there, nor live and work there. I’d been camping in Patras when I had the thought of going to Achaea. After several failed attempts to reach Italy illegally from Patras, and after spending all my money, I began to look for a job in this part of the world. One day, I heard from a refugee that there were a lot of gypsy traders in Achaea and they were looking for men to help carry their carpets. Without a moment’s thought, I headed in their direction.

I lived with six other men in a flat in an old building at the edge of the village. Two rooms. No electricity, no water, no toilet. We fetched water from a next door, we used candles. For our toilet — we went beneath the sky, outside the village. But at least I was earning, and that would keep me going for a while.

My job was to stand in the village square from morning till evening, waiting for someone to ask for a carrier to load his lorry with carpets. I transported carpets produced in a variety of countries: India, Persia, Arabia — wherever carpets are still produced. I needed neither language skills nor any special training to know what I had to do. And the people explained with whatever gestures it took what I needed to understand.

You couldn’t miss the gypsy presence in this village — strings of garlic on the doors and the cautious, if not wary, behaviour round strangers, especially of the gypsy women with their brightly coloured dresses and lots of jewellery. When it came to the women, a stranger could very quickly be in serious trouble. You weren’t permitted to speak to them under any circumstances. They liked to go for an afternoon walk along the village streets but always under the beady eyes of the gypsy men. Any approach by a stranger was made utterly impossible. The menacing muscles and big strong hands of their escorts stifled any hint of a wish on my part to approach those pretty women.

I did manage to meet one of them, though. This is how. If there were no carpets that needed to be carried, I carried all kinds of other things. And so, one day, an old lady came up to me and gestured to me to accompany her home. There, a young girl was waiting, wearing a bright house frock. The old lady left me with the girl in the yard and sat down on a chair at the front door. I looked at the girl curiously. She was about twenty, well built and with the kind of flaming beauty you find only in gypsy women. With a few words and many gestures, she tried to explain what I had to do. I was to help her rearrange the furniture in the bedroom — the bed was to go in the corner, the wardrobe beside the window. . But I could hardly concentrate on the job. With every move, I could peep into her coffee-coloured cleavage. Spotting my nervousness, she began to play a dangerous game — she raised her house frock and tied it round her hips in such a way that I could see more than half of her muscled legs. The colour of chocolate, they were. A wild, highly erotic vision. We worked very slowly and without a word. Sometimes, we touched when we both reached for the same piece of furniture. Each time it happened I felt my heart beat faster, a mad horse galloping away. The job could have been done in fifteen minutes. But we took almost an hour. The old lady noticed. She said something to the girl and then the girl began to work faster. The old lady turned round her chair so that she could watch us. Which is why my job, sadly, was soon done.

This girl whose name I didn’t know let loose a hurricane in me. I began to tremble. My vice returned in full force. I noticed how it drew me to a carpet shop. At the entrance was a gigantic container and, beside it, a heap of yellow and white paper that had been used to wrap carpets. I grabbed some quickly, as much as I could, and ran.

I ended up with what you could call ‘writing diarrhoea’. That night, the dream attacked me again. I wrote as if possessed, and every time I saw a gypsy woman— any gypsy woman — my whole body shook like a bee sucking nectar. I stole paper from almost every carpet shop but didn’t see the girl again. Whenever I passed the house I saw the old lady on her chair — but the girl. .?

I rode the writing dragon for about a week, a very exciting and successful week, given the long bout of writing constipation that preceded it. I wrote a number of poems and I wrote them for all gypsy women. The fiery girl, though — whom I labelled, in my passion, ‘a gypsy priest’s daughter’—had almost an entire collection dedicated to her.

As suddenly as it had arrived, the trembling stopped. No earthquake, no dream, no paper raids. The gypsy muse eluded me too, as a butterfly would the winter frost. I decided to remain in Achaea no longer. I’d saved enough to keep me going for a little while. And so I returned to Patras, from where my journey would continue.

I reached Germany. In Passau — a small town on the border between Germany and Austria, at the foot of the Bavarian Forest mountains, where the Danube becomes two rivers richer — the dream caught up with me.

I discovered many things there, including a totally new ideal of female beauty. Until then, I’d only known what I called ‘the cow beauty’. As you can perhaps guess, the ‘cow beauty’ looks like a well-fed, well-nourished and happy dairy cow living a tranquil life on some grassy meadow. She is as strong and fleshy as the Greek goddess Aphrodite, her role model. To this category belong Arabian, Turkish and Greek women as well as many others of Mediterranean origin. The new ideal I got to know in Passau was ‘the goat beauty’. Such a woman seems emaciated — even famished — to me. As good as no stomach; thin, strung-out legs; firm, little breasts; and a tiny, barely visible arse. Much like a goat back home. This I understood to be the Western ideal of a desirable woman — flaunted, as it was, in every magazine, on every TV channel and on every billboard.