The Oracle
From the treetops high above the crossroads, parrots flew up in a green swarm; monkeys were balancing above the washing lines strung from the balconies; transistor radios were contradicting one another; and the cantankerous blaring of the car horns in traffic jams had an arrhythmic sound, like an Indonesian gamelan orchestra. The boy running alongside our car, so long as it kept crawling along at a walking pace, delivered his patter through the car window in several languages. He wasn’t trying to beg or demand anything from us, nor did he want to sell us anything. No, this city warrior wanted nothing except to have a conversation with us, to chat and have us respond, and to get to know strangers. We stopped, and I got out and went over to sit with the lad in a small park by the roadside. He had tattooed ear lobes and asked me:
‘So how much milk does your family’s cow produce?’
On this particular matter, I couldn’t really enlighten him, so the boy sat there hunched over, digesting what little I could tell him, while not grasping everything. Motionless, we looked at one another, two landscapes in conversation.
‘I’m a street kid,’ he announced, like it was his title.
‘Right,’ I replied. What else would you be? I thought.
‘I’ve seen things that a kid my age shouldn’t see.’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘So when you’re with your family, do you speak German English or English English?’
German German, I told him.
‘What do you say when you’re impressed by something, then?’
‘We say: Nicht schlecht, Herr Specht.’
He repeated it, and then asked me to teach him some more phrases, but I told him I had to go into the house opposite, where I was due to interview two eunuchs.
‘I know a transsexual, too,’ he piped up. ‘He was born a woman, but forced his ovaries to burst through sheer force of will. I’ll wait.’
‘What for?’
‘For you.’
‘How do you know what ovaries are?’
He gestured toward the street and said: ‘University of Life.’
I’d only got halfway across the street when it was suddenly filled with the cacophony of whores soliciting my custom. Their calls sounded curt and challenging, like they were trying to draw my attention to something:
‘Hey! Come here! Hey! Look here!’
They made it sound like I’d dropped something.
‘Sir! Watch out!’
I found myself gazing up the steep slope of a large, brown upper thigh, which had been thrust forward out of a sarong and was now being waggled to and fro on a bench like a kilo of liver.
‘Thank you,’ I shouted, and tried to arrange my face into an expression of frustrated desire. The woman responded by covering her naked wares with a theatrical sweep of her hand, as her face took on a look of wounded pride. She went all coy, making like she had been stripped naked against her will. I dived into the dark entrance behind where she was sitting.
I find myself climbing the stairs of a tenement block. Inside, the building’s core has been shot through with corridors, stairways, fire escapes, catacombs – a whole labyrinthine system of passageways opens up, in which I quickly lose my bearings. You dive deeper and deeper into it without getting anywhere; you take a turn and find yourself back where you started. The only light that penetrates the interior is the dim blue haze that filters through the tracery of the aerated concrete blocks that have been used to divide the external corridors from the courtyard and render the catacombs invisible from the outside. There’s a glow of a small lamp from inside, while far-off in the depths of the building, a coloured light bulb dangles on a cord; an eternal flame lighting the way for all the pilgrims to this place.
I latch onto a man carrying a plastic bag; its light colour acts as a beacon for me in the gloom. When he turns round, he turns out to be a woman, who isn’t exactly delighted at being followed. She quickly ducks under the washing hanging on the lines and disappears into a side passage. I keep following her, crouching low, but all of a sudden there’s a matronly woman blocking my path, holding a shovel, and a man with the eyes of a drug addict, who stares sullenly at me. At first he just stands there in his white shirt, leaning back as though propping himself against a wall, and then he lifts his hand – not to strike me, but to show me the way.
I turn off into the next corridor. It leads through a tiled, sanitary environment that’s long since ceased to be sanitary: the grouting between the tiles is covered in mould, and organisms have taken root in the cracks, bursting out from the stonework beneath. At a table to one side, two eunuchs sit eating a watery lentil soup; a couple of plastic chairs are pushed out of the way. An empty bed has shrugged off its pillows, but, as I draw closer, I see that it’s not empty at all; instead, a monstrous, naked woman is stretching her feet out towards me, the joints of her toes covered with black hairs. A fan installed in the top third of a window pane is running, stirring up the air but not cooling it. Another woman keeps tossing her thick mane of hair this way and that.
I sit myself down beside the eunuchs with their lentil soup. One of them has got his hair in a mud-pack, but the heat and humidity in the room is making the dye trickle down his face in long runnels; I’m reminded of the dying Gustav von Aschenbach at the Lido in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. One of the eunuchs is a sly ferret of a man, with the complexion of a pastrami roll and darting eyes. The other is a fair-skinned diva with the fleshy physiognomy of a boy in a Caravaggio painting and a broad, high forehead; he’s a whole assemblage of round shapes, and would be quite beautiful but for the mud-pack oozing its contents down his face.
As village lads from the south of India, he explains, he and his boyfriend of the time castrated themselves to make it easier for them to find clients in the big city. But his friend died of his self-mutilation. He, though, the glamorous one, earns a reasonable living because he looks after himself, only uses the best beauty products, and always wears perfume … he shifts closer to me. And it’s true, all the fragrances of the Orient waft up from him. Plus, he’s often invited to weddings as a good-luck talisman, and then, of course, there’s all the love.
Surely he means the great lovelessness, otherwise called prostitution. He can’t really mean love, can he?
‘I’m not useful for much anymore,’ he says. ‘But I do still know how to host a gentleman.’
He gives a smutty chuckle at this, then starts talking about how, in love, giving is more important than … I’ve heard all this before, but in a context where the next part of the sentence was about an inner beauty. And as he goes on about the giving aspect of love, the teardrop, which has for some time been welling up in the inner corner of his eye, yields to gravity and, swollen with mascara, trembles down his pale cheek. The queen lets its run, even though it leaves a dirty trail behind it.
As I step out into the hallway again, the shadows on both sides disappear. I grope my way down the dingy corridor, towards some glimmer of light or other. Blue plaster crumbles, or rather sloughs off in great scales, to the ground. Now the wall looks like a map of the ocean floor, with continents made of mortar, concrete, and exposed bits of stonework and tile. As I feel my way along, the wall opens up into cavities beneath my fingertips, through which I can see images of deities, snake-armed beings with calves’ heads, illuminated and charged with energy.
After a few steps down, a well-trodden staircase opens out – scarcely identifiably, like in a faded photo – into an openplan suite of rooms. Its separate compartments all lead off this single passageway, and each little niche is fitted out with a bed. People sit around in the darkness, staring like they’re customers, whores, children, fathers, relatives. In one booth, a wooden ladder leads up to a bunk bed, and even up there, all wrapped in ruffed fabric, sin waits, a great sin to judge by the ruffs, which tremble of their own accord, while from the abyss of darkness, punctuated by snatches of laughter, an old lady, who they call ‘the mother’, starts to cry.
The damp smell in these rooms seems to say: everything here is alive. Sheets, rags, clumps of dust, cats, bugs, pigeons, rats, even cockroaches gradually appear out of the gloom, and the faces of the people here are like those of ancient sibyls, dark like they’ve clambered out of a pit of history, with saturnine features, oppressed by a burden that’s invisible and which sometimes seems to have nested above their beetle brows. There’s a child with a swollen head sitting on the floor mat, too, groping about and forever clutching at something in front of it which isn’t there.
‘There’s something there,’ its mother says, sobbing. ‘My child can see something, I’m sure.’
Extravagance in misery: here, there’s a superfluity of the superfluous; the sheer extravagance of the malas – the garlands of flowers, the tattoos, the black kohl-lined eyes and twirled women’s beards, the red nail polish, the painted balloons, the checked throws, the scents that waft up from the dark fluff on the women’s cheeks and the devotional pictures of gods in their glass frames. Even the lush, flouncy fabrics of their garments, and the way their flesh billows in soft folds around their waists, are a kind of exuberant opulence. A couple of violet-coloured onions are lying on the ground, but my gaze drifts over them through the torn curtain. These tenement houses with their external corridors full of fans, washtubs, household appliances, rotary clothes lines, bowls and cloths are like a series of crickets’ cages, one inside the other. And the falsetto beeping of moped horns is incessant.
I shy away, heading for the depths of this warren. I still haven’t penetrated to the end of the corridor; I still don’t know what final promises it holds. A strong, hairless arm lies across the passage. It belongs to the barefoot, sleeping pimp, who lies there prone like he was suddenly poleaxed by sleep on the way to see the object of his desire, and because he’s not worth getting up for, the exhausted whore also fell asleep herself, on one of those sagging mattresses stained with the brown sweat rings of past orgies, which left behind their watermark on the sheets.
The fans are still humming away. Everywhere, clothes are moving and billowing in the wind, and everywhere there’s the sound of breathing or snoring. The hollow people are exhaling in the scum wreath of their sweaty deposits. Sandals, mops, plastic cutlery and toys. New, hitherto unseen clefts open up in the walls, out of which more and more people emerge, lurching towards me. Rooms that were ostensibly unoccupied suddenly come alive, with the cockroaches, dogs and rats running out first, followed by people. The pimps drag a curtain aside, rabidly when they arrive and casually when they leave. They’ve all got the same thin moustache and mouths with fleshy lips, and they all seem hung-over, uptight, jaded and listless. Between the bars hang photos of food, naked and shining like grocery pornography. Wet washing drips from the ceiling; all it can do in this humid heat is grow mildew, never actually dry.
And so deeper into Purgatory I go! This is a serious business. None of my greetings are answered, no smile returned, we’re not playing around here, we’re living. Only a Japanese man, amazingly misdirected, comes towards me, wishing everyone ‘Good Day!’
The whores live like troglodytic creatures, like naked mole rats in the smell of moist earth, in the exhalations of the many sleepers, in cubicles that are like coffins. In a puddle, some spilt blood is forming a rainbow; mangy dogs lap at it with their tongues. Even while they’re sleeping on the ground, the women still sport their full whores’ finery. The pimps tread carefully as they step over them, but noticing them the women wake up and rise briefly with a clink of gold jewellery, before slumping straight back down again.
A seventeen-year-old girl with a face that already betrays deep disillusionment lies draped over a bed like the Grande Odalisque by Ingres. She’s not for sale, she announces unbidden. But a year ago, someone whispers in my ear, her mother took her to a rich client, who paid handsomely to have such an innocent girl. Hereabouts, the popular belief is that anyone who can afford it should take a girl’s virginity once a year; it is thought to increase male potency.
On the floor, rice is being cooked on a camping gas stove, while fizzy drinks in unhealthily lurid colours are being thinned down from the tap. The little girls have been made up especially lavishly, draped with lots of gold chains and their faces heavy with make-up. The children who are a bit older already look at this world through knowing, possibly even corrupted, eyes. They are old before their time. The hardening evident in their faces is just the next stage on from cunning, cynicism and greed, and finally even this emotion is no longer fresh in eyes whose gaze encounters the person they’re looking at with a dead stare.
In the penultimate cubicle off the passageway sits the mother/ procuress on a dirty mattress. She’s like a queen on her throne there; after all, she’s offering something which in its own way is quite unique: her daughter. This mother, dressed in black, with black eyeliner and dripping with gold jewellery, still has the face of a girl. But something shifty has crept in too, and only when this face needs to exert its charm by making the smile linger just a bit too long, and the long earrings jingle coquettishly as she inclines her head, then, just for a fleeting moment, she’s a hard, enterprising woman who’s keen to get down to business. But her thickset eighteen-year-old with the greasy blue complexion is waiting all alone on her mattress in the last booth at the head of the corridor, where everything comes to an end. She sits there alone, playing with the ends of her hair and with a fixed, simple-minded stare. No, her daughter is among the youngest girls on this corridor, but not among the most attractive.
But what about desire? Where does it enter the scene here, and what are its outlets? Where does it fling itself into the arms of extravagance, of excess? Yes, where is the superfluous, the circumlocutory? Where does desire open up the space here for its boundless promise? The world-weariness of whores is an invention of the cultural superstructure. In these catacombs, too, there is no gesture that is not professional, not tactical. And indeed, why should the woman want to be anything other than ‘the juice extractor’, that mocking term men use, a machine simply designed to generate secretions.
Yet on the other hand, love in the West has evolved into its own unique sanitary realm. Suddenly, it’s all got to do with hygiene, and health puts Eros in the shade. But what if the true relief provided by sex consisted precisely in surmounting all these health-preserving caveats? In the moment of climax, at least. The scourge of AIDS has made the act of love more narrow-minded.
The mother accompanies me to the end of the corridor and presents her daughter: Mumtaz, the stocky attraction under a tall room fan. She eyes me briefly, but it’s clear she’d rather stare at the fan. Mumtaz is not just HIV-positive, she’s got full-blown AIDS. You can tell that just by looking at her.
With her hair tied back, and looking pale and a little hamster-cheeked, the girl keeps on masticating and staring blankly; it could be a piece of chewing gum that she’s chewing on, or perhaps she’s just sucking her own tongue. Then, abruptly, her mouth is still; there’s no further impulse reaching it. Now Mumtaz is just gawping. From a basic position of defiance, her facial expression transforms into one of annoyance. Mumtaz scratches her face, then the inside of her ears, and finally her hairline. Suddenly, she starts talking in a high-pitched voice, but her mother hushes her up.
‘Pay no attention,’ she says, ‘what she’s saying is all nonsense.’
Mumtaz opens her mouth to reveal a forest of teeth, so higgledy-piggledy that she looks really quite crazed when she laughs. Then her eyes fix on something on the blue rug across her lap, and she puts her head to one side, stops her mindless chewing and furrows her brow, holding this gesture for effect: a woman running through her repertoire of facial expressions, but then things start to swim before her eyes. She inadvertently bites her bottom lip and instantly starts sobbing, and does this a couple of times, long enough until she’s evidently forgotten how to proceed. No, she won’t cry after all, no, she’s lost the thread and is already somewhere else entirely.
While we’re still gazing at the girl’s face with interest, the mother takes the opportunity to begin her sales pitch again: of course, she says, anyone who’s already HIV-positive could have sex with Mumtaz without using any protection. If you stop to think about it, there’s no reason why not, and how wonderful it would be for those poor unfortunates to acquaint themselves once more with the joys of unprotected sex. Others, though, would be well advised to use protection, but then again, it might prove a fascinating experience – she actually uses the word ‘spellbinding’ – to sleep with someone who, as you can see for yourselves, is mentally disturbed.
‘Disturbed?’
Well, she continues, disturbed in the sense that she can sometimes pounce on a man and give him a right good seeing-to. She’s got amazing stamina, so when she’s like that you can take her long and hard. But at other times, it can happen that she’ll just push a man away and won’t let him lay a finger on her under any circumstances.
‘I can’t fathom it,’ she says, ‘but that’s just the way she is. Spellbinding!’
Saying this, the mother looks at her own daughter with disgust. Mumtaz is sweating. Her movements now appear to have no causation whatsoever. She’ll grab a face cloth without glancing at it first. When she rubs her face, it’s like she didn’t even know she had one. Her fingers, short and fat as they are, keep flying up and landing somewhere on her body and immediately start scratching, kneading, pinching or rubbing. Mumtaz isn’t wearing any make-up except for the thick deposits of kajal lining her eyes. Her skin is covered with a patina of grease, her earrings are tiny and in all likelihood the only pieces of jewellery she possesses. They dangle down on either side of her yokelish face, with its look of blank incomprehension, like a malicious gag by someone who was deliberately trying to draw attention to this face, of all faces.
‘Look,’ says her mother, ‘she’s well put together’. She proceeds to demonstrate on her own body. ‘Here, her heart’s below her head, so her feelings can never be stronger than her brain. Right, Mumtaz?’
The girl just scratches her belly through her black blouse.
‘But the least important thing for her is sex. It’s in the lowest position. Even eating’s more important than that. Right, Mumtaz?’
The question reaches her fine, but takes a long time to sink in:
‘Nah,’ says Mumtaz after a while, baring her collection of teeth, ‘nah,’ and actually manages to shrug her shoulders like a girl, smiling coyly, but grotesquely. Her mother responds by snatching everything from her – the words from her mouth, the cloth from her hand.
‘You’re being a real pain in the neck again!’ she shouts.
In the background, there’s the high tremolo sound of a song from a Bollywood movie, the raucous cry of a querulous old woman, a telephone ringing, the clatter of pots and pans, and cars honking. Now a tug of war’s begun between the mother and daughter over the cloth. They take turns pushing the grubby red flannel into each other’s faces, wiping off the sweat and the spittle round their mouths, and a faint smile plays across Mumtaz’s face all the while, a look of superiority, like she’s recalling some incredibly abstruse thought.
Then she yawns, without actually yawning; it looks more like an attempt to take the weight off her jaw. When the mother decides it’s time she made light of this all and attempts a joke Mumtaz doesn’t laugh, but instead takes the rag and uses it to wipe the dirt from the curve of her neck and the crook of her arm. She rubs and rubs until finally her mother slaps the back of her hand, whereupon Mumtaz starts using the flannel as a fan, but clumsily hits herself in the face several times.
Mumtaz: the serenely self-contained. Her face was surely never that of a woman, in any event it’s become mannish and puffy, picking up dirt and sweat and exuding it again like a man’s. It has a narrow range of expressions, and Mumtaz is even reluctant to utter her own name. She’s not happy being herself; rather she’s content at least to have the capacity to express what she doesn’t want to be. Nor does her tongue sit easily in her mouth, lolling about sullenly from one corner to the other; whenever she pokes the tip out, she wipes it away with the cloth.
So there she sits ensconced, at the end of a long corridor called the Descent into Hell, behind her the wall, and in front of her the pimps, the procurers, the sick people and the animals, surrounded by an empty existence and accompanied by the soundtrack of the twenty-first century. All wrapped up in herself along with her impulses, her emotions, her reflexes – ill but still just about useful, the princess of the lowest class of humanity.
And all that she’s capable of doing on her mattress-throne is to be that oracle which occasionally holds audiences with men, yielding to them with squeals of joy or driving them away and rejecting them. Who knows whether the men come to her for her bizarre desires or just out of curiosity, or whether they’re making fun of her or wanting to submit themselves to an oracle?
But as for this visitor, this fine young man in his beige- coloured union suit, he’s clearly visiting her with the best of intentions, and as he stretches his slim hand out to touch her cheek, she responds straight away by trustingly resting this plump cheek in his palm.
With a groan, the mother stands up and gestures to me to do likewise. The curtain is closed again. There is no reason to distrust the look of contentment on Mumtaz’s face, no reason at all except for that moment when, as I’m making my way out of the building and have almost reached the start of the corridor again, I hear a human voice begin to drone, then rise to a bellow as if from the lowest registers, the deepest bass notes, of an organ – it’s unlike any noise I’ve ever heard before. When it reaches the high notes, the voice twitters hysterically, flapping down the dingy passage; no one can say whether lust, pain or death is at the root of a howl like this. But then it dissipates into the wail of a child, a desperate screech like a baby kicking and screaming. The oracle has spoken: the gentleness of a man, his cajoling and his courting, was all in vain and his attempt to be affectionate towards Mumtaz was all to no avail.
No sooner have I made it out onto the street once more and taken a few steps than someone seizes my right hand from behind. But as I try to pull it away impulsively, the street kid who’s been sitting on the low wall opposite waiting, shouts out:
‘Leave him be!’
It was one of the eunuchs; he draws my hand up to his lips and then disappears.
‘Congratulations,’ says the boy, ‘there’s nothing luckier than having a eunuch kiss your hand.’
Involuntarily, I glance down at my hand.
‘So,’ the boys asks me, ‘how was it?’
I can still hear Mumtaz’s scream reverberating in my head. But the kid shoots me a reproachful look.
‘Nicht schlecht, Herr Specht?’