Ilja Pfeijffer - La Superba

When you woke up, it was quiet. There was no sound of hoofbeats, drums, or trumpets. You cautiously opened your eyes. You looked into the eyes of a black woman. “Black” wasn’t the right word. She was as smooth and dark and shiny as an olive. Her skin gleamed with sweat, power, and truth, and her coal-black eyes could turn entire legions to ashes. She was holding a glittering knife to your throat. She said something in her tongue, which you accurately interpreted as a threat. You felt yourself grow moist with fear. And fearfully, because you were in such a panic you might have done anything, you rose slowly to your feet. She kept her knife to your throat but didn’t cut. You moved upwards to her lips and kissed her and you were sure you were going to die. But she didn’t cut.

“Why?”

She replied in that scraping dry language you didn’t understand. She spat in your face, kissed you passionately, hit you, and put you on a mule. “Hee!” she screamed. “Hee!”

Months later you were sitting next to her father in the blue tent. He held the holy scepter tight as he begged the new god and the new prophet to keep you both safe. There were tears in his eyes during the final prayer. She touched your hand for a moment. After the sword dance, you talked in their language about everything she’d taught you. You spoke of water and fire, harmony in mathematical proportions, the philosophy of submission to the truth, and your love of your new wife. The applause bubbled over like water in a desert.

And that night, still enjoying the afterglow of the honey and the lukewarm, salty sea of her unconditional surrender, you heard hoofbeats outside the camp. You pushed aside the books by Arabic philosophers, grabbed your sword, and went outside. But there were many of them. They wore the cursed sign of the flaming red cross of revenge on the off-white ground of hypocrisy. There was nothing you could do with your scimitar. You got yourself and her father to safety. There wasn’t a trace of her. The encampment was massacred and burned. The books by the wise men were burned as repellant heresy. The women were raped, time and time again, until someone was merciful enough to ram a sword in their bleeding cunts instead of taking them again. You saw her die that way.

From that night on, your only desire was to stop living. Her father nodded. And so your second desire became to take revenge.

“But the warriors of the blood-red cross are always too great in number.”

You nodded. “But they have one weakness.”

“What is it?”

“Their city. The city of Saint George and the dragon. I shall wreak revenge for your daughter on that city.”

“What’s the name of the city, my son? Genoa? I’ve heard that it’s the most beautiful city ever built.”

“Genoa,” you said, “is the place I hate most on earth. I promise you, Father, I shall return. Allow me to rob myself of my own life and to haunt it as the spirit of vengeance for the victims of the cross.”

14.

It was nighttime. But I was having trouble falling asleep. Ghosts from my past popped up in dreams that didn’t want to become dreams. Specters from my fatherland appeared. My publisher’s flabby face loomed dangerously close and gave me an accusing look. He was silent but I knew exactly what he meant. He drummed his fingers impatiently on the table. I tried to hide from him behind a pile of letters, but for some reason or other, you were loitering there, my good friend, and your face didn’t look too friendly. And you were right, too. I’m sorry I still haven’t paid back the money I borrowed from you. And I hardly dare to ask, but that whole business with my so-called rich mistress only cost me money. I saw Monia’s face before me. I tried to repress it, but then she pushed her scandalously big tits in my face. I jerked awake out of my insomnia because I couldn’t breathe. I smelled the sour stench of her cavities. She stank of an amputated woman’s leg in a garbage bag. She stuck both her fiery red tongues out and hissed that she was my bride. Her head turned three hundred and sixty degrees. “Is there anything you don’t know?” she asked me. “Fuck me. Or are you a vegetarian?” She spread her legs and kicked off one shoe. It was full of vomit. “Oi, oi,” the downstairs neighbor said. “Oi, oi.” The cast iron portcullis halfway down the stairs clicked shut.

I got up and went to the bathroom to wash my face. I didn’t turn on the light so as not to make myself any more awake than I already was. I had to throw up. And then when I looked in the dark mirror, I saw her. She could only be seen in mirrors. I leaned forward cautiously to give her a kiss. She responded to my gesture. My lips touched her cool, glassy lips.

“You’re the most beautiful girl in Genoa.”

“Do you always say that to your own reflection?”

“What are you doing here?”

“You live in your imagination too much.”

“You’ve always been the only girl I’ve ever loved.”

“Step back. Slowly.”

As I slowly distanced myself from the mirror, she did the same, at exactly the same pace, until instead of just her face, I could see her entire body. She was wearing her uniform from the bar. One of her feet was pink with disinfectant. Her trouser leg was rolled up, probably because the seam would rub too much otherwise and irritate her wounds. I couldn’t see her other foot.

“What happened?”

Instead of replying, she began to take her trousers off.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m showing you how real you are.”

She had already undone her belt. She undid the top button and then the zipper. She held on to her trousers.

“Are you ready?” she asked, and before I could reply she had dropped her trousers and stood naked before me in the mirror. She only had one leg.

15.

I turned on the light. She had disappeared. I washed my face again. I involuntarily stroked the mirror in the way a person strokes an eastern lamp in the hope the story’s true. But the only genie that appeared was my own naked reflection telling me I needed to get some sleep.

But I couldn’t sleep anymore. My hard little IKEA bed felt like the narrow bunk of the lower deck of a creaking galleon on its way to the holy land or like the third-class sleeping quarters of an ocean steamer on its way to La Merica. “ Fatou yo ,” I sang softly. “We all live in a yellow submarine.” Outside there was some noise. Someone shouted something in Arabic. He began to kick and hit doors, including mine. I pulled the sheets over my head. Then he shouted in Italian that he wanted revenge. The neighbor on the other side of the street knew what to do. She opened her shutters and threw a flowerpot onto his head from the fifth floor. He disappeared weeping into the labyrinth. But the neighbor stayed there, discussing the incident in a loud voice with my upstairs neighbor, who’d clearly also woken up. And that woke up various other neighbors who found the discussion even more annoying than the thing that had induced it, which set off a kind of chain reaction and led to even angrier discussions that in the end pretty much the entire street took part in. Everyone was leaning out of their open windows, screaming that the others shouldn’t scream so much. There were people sleeping here, they screamed, who, unlike all the other screaming freeloaders, had to go to work in the morning to earn their keep, for fuck’s sake.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I got dressed and went outside. There was nobody left on the street. My footsteps echoed hollowly through the high, peeling house intent, and stoic fronts. Rats shot away into the cracks and crevices between the street and the houses. Dark and forbidding, I walked randomly. Here and there, white teeth shone in murky alcoves. Chances were weighed up. But I wasn’t drunk. I was big and angry. I’d have bitten off any thrust knife at the shoulder, arm and all. And they knew it.