by elle`attend
FOR MATURE READERS ONLY
Queen’s Gambit
I was awakened by a hot band of gold creeping across my face, turning the insides of my eyelids a liquid crimson. I threw an arm across them, trying to block out the intrusive sunlight that was making my aching head pound even more sickeningly, and was almost overwhelmed by a rank animal musk that seemed to envelop me like a shroud. I groaned aloud, and shifted on the damp sheets.
It was then that I realized that I wasn’t alone.
I gave a little cry, and rolled away from the darkly furred hand resting with almost insulting familiarity on my bare crotch. I scrambled off of the sodden, filthy mattress, and crouched trembling at the edge of the bed. The man rolled over himself, and gave a stertorious snore.
I gagged, and covered my mouth with a hand as I lurched toward the bathroom, only just making the scum-encrusted toilet before I launched the contents of my stomach into it. I finished up with a gut-wrenching series of dry heaves, clinging to the filthy bowl as if it were a life preserver in a typhoon-maddened sea.
When my retching had resolved itself into a manageable set of rolling swells in my belly, I dragged myself shakily to my feet, and leaned on the sink, staring at the apparition in the clouded, cracked mirror. The creature in it stared back at me with haunted eyes set in deep, dark-rimmed sockets. Her cheeks were sunken, almost gaunt. A fading purplish-yellow bruise covered half her forehead, and her lower lip was scabbing over where it had been split open. Her body was varnished with a sickly, feverish sweat. I swallowed the scream I felt rising in my throat.
My God, I whispered at the reflection. What have they done to me?
The door to the tiny bath banged open, and I turned to face a swarthy, mustachioed man, completely naked as well, with an enormous purple erection that I could not tear my eyes from. My roomate, I thought deliriously, as he reached out with a fist the size of a small ham, and wrapped his fingers around my throat.
Without a word, he dragged me from the bathroom, and across the few short paces to the bed. He threw me down face first upon it, and entered me from the rear, with all the consideration and delicacy of a butcher spitting a prize lamb for the roasting pit. The smells of our previous ruttings assailed me as he drove his huge member into my tender anus, and I balled my fists in the soggy bed clothing as he rocked into me, the bed squealing in shrill protest. He began to curse me beneath his breath in Arabic, rhythmically driving away at me as his cock swelled and pulsed in my rectum. I felt as if I were being split two. I nearly fainted from the pain.
‘Salope,’ I caught; my new lover had a smattering of French, at least…
‘Sharmuta’…and I had enough Arabic to understand the commonly used appellation for a street whore…
I would have screamed, but it hardly seemed worth the effort, somehow.
He came mercifully quickly, his log exploding in my rectum like an overripe melon bursting, coating my insides with his sticky seed; I envisioned several days of the runs in my future…Charming, I thought woozily. Such an innovative way to contract Delhi belly…
He slid his cock out of me with a grunt, leaving me panting and limp on the bed, alone. I heard sounds of him dressing, and then a shower of crumpled banknotes rained down on my body, and around my face pressed into the reeking sheets. I heard the latch on the door, and the creak of ancient hinges as he opened it, then slammed it behind him. His steps echoed down the hallway, and faded entirely as he descended stairs. I would have been utterly incapable of explaining the sense of loneliness that overwhelmed me at the abrupt departure of my rapist.
I lay numbly on the bed, my fingers slowly relaxing their grip on the soggy sheets, my rectum spasming already, expelling some of the viscous semen from itself, to drip stickily along my perineum. I felt as one with filth, and utter depravity. My mind turned over feverishly, trying to remember something, to grasp some shadowy construct…
The door…
There had been no sound of the lock turning after the animal had left.
I pushed myself up weakly, my arms trembling, the sheet still clinging to my sticky breasts, and belly. I jacknifed up from the bed, wrapping the foul-smelling thing loosely around me as I moved to the door. I reached out an unsteady hand, hesitating a moment before closing on the chipped, painted brass knob. I turned it slowly, eyes closed, breathing a prayer to myself…
The door opened silently. I closed it almost immediately, turning the key in the lock on my side.
Not a prisoner, I thought…What, then?
(‘Sharmuta…’)
I looked aimlessly about the dingy room, taking in its sparse, cheap furnishings, its general air of desperation, the smell of the thousands of nameless, faceless couplings that seemed to permeate it. One needn’t have been in a brothel before to recognize this room instantly for what it was. I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering in spite of the heat that was already building in the room, though the sun was just barely clear of the eastern horizon. I stumbled to the single, tall window set in the mud brick wall, and leaned against its casement, shading my eyes with an arm against the hot glare of the morning sun. A single droplet of perspiration trickled from my unshaven armpit as I took in the minarets across the Bosporous, silhouetted against the blazing morning sun. I heard the lilting musical cries of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.
Istanbul. I was in a whorehouse in Turkey.
I shuddered, and my lower intestine loosened ominously. Again, I just made the toilet.
Half an hour later, I was zipping the skirt of the rumpled black suit I had found hanging in the tiny closet. I had managed to clean myself as best I could, using the tiny ceramic basin filled with tepid water, scrubbing myself furiously with the small piece of pumice stone that served in lieu of soap. I thought that perhaps I might pass for a normal American or European tourist, if no one got close enough to get too good a sniff of me.
I pulled on the wrinkled linen jacket, and buttoned it up. The top button fell distressingly short of covering me, as I had no blouse nor undergarments. I stepped into my shoes, clutching the lapels of the jacket together over my bosoms with my hand, and stealthily turned the door knob.
I put my eye to the crack, and surveyed the dim, dirty hallway. Satisfying myself that it was deserted, I crept quietly through the door, closing it softly behind me. To my right the hall ended rather abruptly in a staircase that descended to the left.
I turned, and started carefully down the hallway to my left.
I paused outside the first battered, scarred wooden door, and pressed my ear to it, holding my breath. Hearing nothing, I tentatively turned the knob. It yielded, and I pushed it slowly back, slipping around its edge as I did. I closed the door, and leaned back against it.
The room was the twin of the one I had just abandoned, right down to the rank, animal smells pervading it. Draped across the bed was an olive skinned, mahogany haired woman who had undoubtedly turned heads wherever she went once upon a time. She was nude, and her body was splayed across the bed in an attitude that was half-repose, half-wanton offering. Her skin was splotched with patches of drying, crusted semen, and her thighs lay open in an almost casual invitation to any passerby who might be inclined toward carnality at six am. I moved closer to the bed, watching her face closely. She stared back sightlessly with glazed, dark hazel eyes. Only the slight rise and fall of her breasts gave witness to the fact that she was alive at all. I had the unsettling feeling that I had seen this woman before.
It was Sabra al`Sayyid.
I took another step toward the bed, surveying her more closely. Her left cheek was swollen, and had the mate to the purple-yellow bruise that I wore on my own forehead. There were nasty scratches on her ample breasts, and on the insides of her thighs as well. My eyes traveled down her legs, to her slender ankle, and the old-fashioned iron ring and chain that held it fast to the bedstead. I shivered violently.
Not just whores, then, I thought numbly. Slaves.
I threw a last horrified look at the poor, drugged woman, and bolted for the door, flinging it open with a crash, not caring who or what saw me now. Now my only thought was running. I raced down the hallway, and plunged headlong toward the stairs, nearly going head over heels and breaking my neck, thus ending my troubles once for all.
I flew down the dark, narrow flight of steps that opened directly out onto the dusty street, and stood panting for a moment in the glaring sun, trying to get my bearings, and praying that a policeman did not happen by. I had no desire to make acquaintance of the Turkish harlot’s second home, a jail cell, now. Clutching the lapels of my jacket across my nearly bare breasts, I stumbled down the crowded streets, and lost myself in the bazaar.
Breakfast was an impossibility, but I forced myself to choke down some dried dates, and a few mouthfuls of flat bread that a kindly, sympathetic woman at one of the stalls forced into my hands. God knew how long it had been since I last had eaten; I knew I had to get something in myself if I was to have the strength to finish what needed to be done.
I only wished that I knew what that was.
I felt drained, emptied. Bereft. Of what, I couldn’t even begin to articulate. Just an overwhelming sense of loss, and of abandonment, that filled me with a nameless dread.
I staggered into the US Embassy just before noon, distraught, disheveled, all but raving. The young, attractive consular attaché blanched at the sight of me; they had obviously never covered half-naked women who smelled distinctly like prostitutes, clamoring for asylum, in her diplomatic protocol classes at Georgetown U. But she took my all but incoherent statement without comment, and then found me a cot to collapse on while she set the bureaucratic wheels in motion. By two the next afternoon, in clothes that she had loaned me, I was on an Airbus320, winging its way westward across the Mediterranean, staring unseeingly at an Inflight magazine as I chased the sun toward…toward what? Home? Husband? Children? My life? What life? I tried to conjure up the image of my children’s faces, closing my eyes tightly, willing them to appear in my mind. Nothing. I cried for them then, tears running silently down my cheeks, and for myself too. Not for the last time.
The stewardess came down the aisle, offering me a hot towel and a double Glenlivet rocks, on her. I smiled my thanks, and she smiled warmly back at me. God only knows what she must have thought of this strange, pale apparition with the purple-rimmed, haunted eyes. She was kind enough to keep it to herself, whatever it may have been. I drank the scotch gratefully, and pushed aside for the moment the impossibly snarled skein of my old life that awaited me on my return.
Like Katie Scarlett O’Hara, I would think about that tomorrow.
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© MEB 2002
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