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Kamila and the King of KandyGarry Craig Powell
Malsiri had been on his feet so long that the plinking of the piano was turning into the tinkling of the lobby fountain and the tingling in his back. A trained masseur, he knew which muscles were seizing up—deltoids, calves and quadriceps—and stretched as much as was seemly for a man in his position. His promotion two weeks ago had come as a surprise: all the other managers in the Al Khaleej Hotel were westerners or Arabs. He felt smart in his black suit, if also a trifle comical, as he performed shallow knee-bends. Maintaining his dignity was essential, of course. At home in Sri Lanka his wife and daughters depended on him, and he never forgot it.
Yet for all his stretching, Malsiri couldn’t help tensing up when he saw the white girl lurching through the date-palms, her bare feet flapping soundlessly on the red marble floor, her hair clumped like flax. She wore a cream miniskirt and a misbuttoned blouse that looked torn. As she passed the coffee shop, Emirati men in dish-dashas stared. She was no older than his eldest, Yosodhara. He had often seen her talking to older white men with florid faces and Hawaiian shirts, and Arabs in business suits. Usually she smoldered or smiled; today, her eyes were shuttered. Even so, she was walking with a purpose. She glanced at Angie and Edna but had obviously picked him out. Her arms and neck were bruised and scratched, Malsiri saw as she came closer, and she wasn’t wearing a brassiere. Something red spotted her skirt—nail polish or blood? But her karma would not unsettle him: he would stay serene.She sagged over the black marble counter. Her breasts reposed on it like plastic bags of milk. She raised her head and pushed herself back. Two of her fingernails were broken; one was bleeding. “Call the police,” she said in English, with an accent like a Russian in a James Bond film. Her eyes were as blue as tropical fish, yet seemed not to see him; or rather they detected his presence but looked through him as if he were a shadow. She reeked of scent, alcohol and cigarettes, and a cocktail of other smells, glandular and primal. Twenty-five years of massaging naked people had given him a sensitive nose. “Miss—Madam,” he corrected himself, masking his distaste. If he was not mistaken, he smelled burning. “I hope we can avoid—”“The police,” she said, eyes brimming. Like him, she was controlling herself. Again he was reminded of Yosodhara and wished he could comfort her. “It’s better to keep the police out of things in the UAE. Why don’t you tell me what is the problem?”“Room 424,” she said, rolling her R’s. “Three Arabs. Drunk.”“This is bad,” Malsiri said in his soft baritone. His voice had become as soothing as a saxophone over the years, as he rubbed clenched muscles with sandalwood, cedar-oil and myrrh, while tapes of chimes, streams, waterfalls, wind-blown leaves and songbirds played in the background. “But in a hotel like this the police usually have blind eyes to such things. Who are these Arabs?”“Locals.”He couldn’t recall having seen her with locals; she seemed a cut above that kind of customer. So much the worse, if true. “You are sure?”Her upper lip curled. “They speak Arabic. They have dish-dashas and sandals. Beards. Two of them wear ghutras on their heads. One, a baseball cap.”“A baseball cap?”“Backwards.”Malsiri shook his head. “Very bad.”Her surprise came through her hollow tone. “The baseball cap is bad?”“No,” he said, though it was—Emirati youths who wore baseball caps backwards were invariably troublesome. Many had “studied” in America, where it seemed they learned nothing but bad English and worse manners. “No, I mean it is bad that they are locals. You are Russian?”“Polish.”“Ah.” Poland was near Sweden, where he had taken courses. Those were cold countries; people had to run like machines there. Love, it had seemed to him in Sweden, was in the process of being abolished. It was each person for himself. Malsiri was acutely and constantly aware of the racial hierarchy in the Gulf. Whites were above Asians and Africans, but below locals, who were God’s favorites. He thought aloud. “A Polish girl—lady. And they are men, Emiratis.”“You are saying the police will not believe me?”“You must understand: the police in the UAE are most of them Moroccans. Some Sudanese, some Yemenis. Only the officers are Emiratis. It is not a question of who they believe. They are afraid. The Emiratis have the wasta.”Malsiri could generally mute the background music, but now it intruded, the tuneless plinking giving way to a melodramatic swell that reminded him of scores in black and white American movies. It echoed horribly amid the marble columns and palm trees of the foyer. The pianist was a Pole, he recalled. Her name began like his, Mal-something. She was a pretty blonde in her thirties with a Yemeni lover. Rich, no doubt. “They pay me for sex,” her tattered compatriot proclaimed.Malsiri had learned not to show emotion when clients, face down on the massage table, revealed their shameful secrets. Angie and Edna were listening, slyly glancing at her, at him, and one another. The Filipinas were a mystery to him, deferential, eager to please, childish in size and manner, and yet seductive—in spite of himself, Malsiri lusted for them sometimes—and also, if he was not mistaken, cool and calculating. He was sure they despised this girl. But he was a Buddhist and all living creatures deserved his compassion. He looked at the courtesan, as he thought of her in the Victorian English he had learned at school, until her expression softened. “Miss,” he began, and this time did not correct himself, “if you are…if this is your profession, the police will say you are the guilty—you are the guilty, too, at least. You understand? I can make a complaint only if you stay and give your name.”She gave him a defiant look. “No problem.”Imagining how badly they must have hurt or humiliated her, he wanted to whip the Arabs. Thank goodness his daughters would have college educations—Yosodhara was already doing her BA in Public Relations in Colombo. In their brick bungalow in the sacred city of Kandy, they had air conditioning, a Sony TV, a satellite dish, a computer. On his biennial vacations, neighbors joked that he was the King of Kandy, and indeed according to family legend his great-grandfather had been an illegitimate son of the nineteenth century monarch. “The police will take you,” he said, the possible consequences playing out like a Sinhalese melodrama. “And you will go to prison.” Malsiri saw himself being fired and returning in ignominy to Sri Lanka. The Tigers would bomb Kandy again, and this time they would destroy his house. If his daughters survived, they would have to marry beneath them, take jobs as secretaries—even come to the Gulf to work as housemaids. He pictured his wife in the loonybin. “It is better you forget this.”“I don’t mind if I go to prison, if they go also.”Her eyes were so blue that he thought of the ocean, and recalled the time his parents had taken him to visit a fisherman, a distant kinsman. Malsiri had been so proud when his “uncle” let him steer the wooden boat. But then the men cast lines over the stern and hooked two kingfish, fierce warriors in armor, which were left to thrash in a tin bowl. Soon they weakened, and lay with sides heaving, gills flapping and mouths agape, astonished at what had happened to them. When would his father throw them back? He didn’t dare ask. At length he put the question to his mother, who said the fisherman would eat them later. He begged her to save them. When she didn’t respond, he whispered that he would throw them into the sea. His mother gave him a menacing glare. In the end, he had watched helplessly as the creatures suffocated, and this, he had realized, was what it meant to be a man: you must be cruel and hard. His mother praised him afterwards for not crying. But even then Malsiri knew that it was only cowardice that kept him from flipping the fish into the ocean. Afterwards he must have repressed the memory, for he did not think about it for years. It was much later before it troubled him again—only when he was grown did he begin to ask himself what a man truly was. After his brief trance faded, the courtesan was looking at him with Yosodhara’s trustful eyes. “I do not know what did they do,” he said, satisfied that she could see him now, that he was no longer just a faceless flunkey to her, “but adultery is a serious crime in the UAE.” He told her what was supposed to happen. Their names and photos would be published in the newspapers. They would go to prison and be flogged. And this might actually happen—if the Emiratis were from poor families with no wasta. But how could he say anything so tactless? How could he warn her that they would probably get off scot-free, because they were men and locals and she was nothing but a foreign whore? Yet to him, she was a child needing reassurance that justice would prevail. What was the right thing to do?He could still have Mahesh escort her out. That was what he should do, in her interest and his. It was what the GM would expect of him, too. He took a deep breath, settled into himself, pictured the oblong lake in Kandy and the Temple of the Tooth with its seated gilded Buddha; he muttered a Pali mantra from the Dhammapada, and the chakra at the top of his skull opened, buzzing and crackling. Should he be kind or tell the truth? What sort of man was he? His Buddha-nature would decide.
She heard the wheezing and panting of a dog having nightmares, but of course there were no dogs in five star hotels in the Gulf. It was her own breathing. “What is your good name, madam?” asked the man—Malsiri, according to the black tag with white letters on his lapel. He had brandy-brown eyes and a receding hairline, and was as glossy as the furniture in her parents’ flat in Krakow. She didn’t say Sonya, which she’d been calling herself since she’d seduced the Englishman in Lord Jim’s, with a gaucheness that was incredible to her now. Kamila, she said, her real name sounding sonorous and regal to her after so long. He wrote it down with a fat fountain pen like her grandfather’s, which spoke to her of fireside folktales in the Tatra Mountains. He asked more questions. Was she sure she was doing the right thing? She had better wait until she was no longer so upset. Kamila told him she didn’t care what happened to her, as long as the pigs were punished. It was impossible to explain why she was willing to go to prison. She had no desire to relive all she had been through since arriving in Dubai—resigning from her hotel job after the Egyptian GM had almost raped her, working illegally in nightclubs for a while, then slipping into prostitution when she could no longer pay her way at Andrzej’s. She didn’t admit that she couldn’t face telling her parents what she had become. She didn’t try to depict the images of home that appeared in her mind with the sudden sadness of a diminished chord: the ashen apartment blocks in the suburbs, five stories high and kilometers long, where Poles roosted like battery hens; the cellulose factory of Nowa Huta that made the medieval city smell as if it were rotting; and Auschwitz-Birkenau, which clung to Krakow’s skirts like a festering sore, out of sight but never out of mind. Why mention the squandering of her talent—who would believe that theater critics had once praised her roles in Chekhov and Ibsen? And was there any point in declaring that she was finished, that she could not turn another trick, not one, even with the shy, affable middle-aged men Andrzej did his best to pick out for her from the colleges and Internet City? She was aware that she wasn’t being rational. Nevertheless, she knew what she was doing, she assured the man in the black suit, who nodded like her father. But it was too late for sympathy, compassion, or even love, to save her. She was Hedda Gabler. Only self-annihilation could satisfy her now. “Hurry, please,” she begged. “They will leave.” Malgosia, a fellow Pole whom Kamila knew, was pounding out Penny Lane, a cheerful song with wistful undertones, even in her heavy-handed delivery. An Omani was checking in, some dignitary with a silver belt and curved khanjar—Kamila had an impulse to snatch it, run to room 424, and stab and slash and cover herself with gore. Maybe if she went to jail she could expiate her shame, like Lord Jim on his island. She knew what women’s prisons in the Emirates were like: in Al Ain she had visited one of Andrzej’s Somali girls, who had been sentenced to seven years for “adultery” when she had a baby. Kamila thought she might be able to comfort the despairing maids from the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Indonesia who had become pregnant after being raped by their masters; she could teach their children to read, make up plays for them to perform. A blood vessel above her right eye pulsed as if fit to burst. She yearned for extinction, but maybe she could do some good first. “Call the police.” She put on her Clytemnestra face and cast all her imperiousness into her voice. She had been renowned for her withering looks. Your eyes lacerate like broken glass, the great Kieslowski had once told her. “Tell me what happened first,” Malsiri said. “How did you get away?”Musabbah, the ringleader, had gone to the bathroom and the one with the Hard Rock Café cap had passed out. The last of the trio, a skinny boy wearing kohl and mascara, she kneed in the balls, making him yelp like a puppy, and then she jabbed her claws into his eyes. Leaving her shoes and purse where they’d fallen, she dashed into the corridor, wadding her panties to stanch the blood, and dressed in a frenzy, lest one of them dragged her back in. No time to comb her hair, wipe her face, rinse her mouth. In the elevator a woman in a sari pretended not to see her. Her stomach heaved. She told Malsiri this, but wouldn’t tell what they had done, she decided. “But why did you agree to go to with three men?”The fountain burbled, hissed, and foamed. The Omani with the dagger had gone and the receptionists stole glances at her. Piano notes sprayed over a scene that came back in stroboscopic flashes. I knew it was wrong to trust him. In the coffee shop, the three shabob had sat beside her. Musabbah, a short, muscular man who boasted that he could lift a baby camel with one hand, had invited her to drink Scotch and watch a porno film—Very excited, he said. There were three rules in this game, Andrzej had taught her. Rule number one: never accept a client unless I’m there to protect you. The Somali girls had seconded him. Andrzej was not like some pimps, who did business with men they knew to be violent. Rule number two: no locals, however much they offered. Andrzej had been known to break this rule when he was short on blow, but only with the Somalis, not his principal asset. The going rate was a hundred dirhams a trick, just under thirty dollars, but as a natural blonde Kamila could charge wealthy businessmen five hundred or even more. Come, Musabbah said, we give you thousand. We, she noted. Rule number three: never, never, never take more than one at a time. But the sirens were singing more seductively each day. A hair-dryer in the bath, they chanted. Pills. Poison. Stuff the exhaust pipes of a client’s car. Slip into the amniotic waters of the Creek. Or this? “One thousand each?” she asked hopefully. Musabbah and his friends grinned at each other. “Inshallah.”She would be able to fly to Warsaw and pay her train fare to Krakow. “What do you want me to do?”The Emiratis sniggered like schoolboys. “Everything,” said the pretty boy with the Hard Rock Dubai cap. He had a fluffy beard, pimples, and candid eyes. The skinny one with eyeliner sneered. “Everything, no,” Musabbah said. “What you like. You say.”Kamila sipped her cappuccino and sized him up. He gave her a disarming grin, all crooked teeth and flaring eyes. Something about him, and the skinny one, made her queasy. For some reason she thought of the Tartar hordes who had overrun Krakow in the fourteenth century. She was changing her mind when she heard the opening chords of a Chopin Prelude. In spite of Malgosia’s clumsy rendition, a wave of homesickness swept over her. “All right, I suck your dicks,” Kamila said, not without revulsion, however often she had used such terms. “You understand?”Musabbah and the Hard Rock Café had to explain to Eyeliner.Oral sex gave her a measure of control; at least she wouldn’t be pinned beneath the weight of a man, and if one of them tried anything, he was in a vulnerable position. One of the Somalis claimed she had bitten off a Chinaman’s cock, when he had pinched her nipples. “Only sucking,” she said, to make it clear. “No fucking.” “You are poet,” Musabbah joked.She ignored him. “Agreed?” “Agree.”Three in the room, though, spelled danger. “One at a time,” she said.“Shu?”“Not all together,” she explained. “First you, then you, then him.” The Chopin cascaded around her, bright as a waterfall or shattering glass, sharp, piercing. Musabbah raised his eyebrows. “We not hurt you. I swear. We Muslim.”One last time she repeated her terms and the boys nodded.“Yalla,” she said, standing. She preferred Arabic when she was playing Sonya.“What happened?” Malsiri asked her pointblank. She found herself telling him most of it. They drank Johnny Walker and for a few minutes didn’t touch her. They put on the video and she saw a woman sucking off a donkey and a man pissing in a woman’s mouth. She wanted to run but one of them was standing by the door. The other two touched themselves, pawed her. She asked them to turn the movie off but they laughed. The room had gold velvet curtains, like a theater. She made a break for it, but Musabbah caught her and slammed her against the wall, hurled her down on the bed. They roared. She didn’t tell Malsiri about the black horse rearing over her, a beast of fire, striking her down, smothering her. The Arabs’ movements were synchronized. The Hard Rock and Eyeliner held her down and splayed her legs, while Musabbah stubbed cigarettes on her inner thighs, and Arab pop music drowned her screams. His eyes were those of the stuffed stoat in her grandfather’s cabin in Zakopane. Help me, Jesus. It all ran together and backwards. The Hard Rock pulled up the skirt of his dish-dasha, unwrapped his loincloth and straddled her face. He was limp. He slapped her face, screamed at her to suck. She opened her mouth. Maybe they would stop hurting her if she were submissive. The Tartars had raped in packs, swarming like rodents over women, using every orifice in their victims’ bodies and opening more with their knives. God couldn’t exist. When the pimple-faced savage pissed in her mouth, it knocked the breath out of her and she sputtered and choked. She couldn’t bring herself to relate this, but she told Malsiri what the thin one had done to her with the whisky bottle. She forced herself to go on. They had turned her over on her stomach and done what she never allowed clients to do. Fucked her up the ass. Twice. “And the bastards didn’t even pay me,” she ended. Malsiri shut his eyes. “I am sorry,” he said, compressing his lips. His voice almost broke. “I understand that you want to punish them. But if I call the police, you will go to prison. It will be better for you to leave.”“I know what will happen to me. I want them to lock me away. I want them to take these animals off the streets. Please.”Malsiri gazed into her eyes longer than her boyfriend Jacek had ever done. She felt no awkwardness, but rather a stillness that reminded her of taking communion or cocaine. She gazed back, unafraid and unashamed. For the first time in months, someone saw her as a human being. This stranger was looking into her soul, accepting her—loving her—as Jesus once had. Malgosia thumped the keys as if she were angry and bored, which she surely was, but Kamila no longer felt agitated. “I am certain,” she said.And yet Malsiri still seemed unsure. What was he thinking? How could he save her? He’d explained that she would go to prison. He was about to ask Mahesh to lead her away when he realized that she would take it as a betrayal. A pang of longing overwhelmed him. If only he could see Yosodhara now; if he could just spend a single hour with his family in Kandy. “If they have wasta, they may go free,” he said. Her eyes were blue, clear, cold. I’ll take that chance, they told him plainly.He was strong enough to accept his dharma. But what about his family? What about Yosodhara? His daughter was too plain and dark-skinned to attract suitors, although she was clever, and the purest, sweetest person he had ever known. As he wavered, her presence touched him, flickering like a candle, bathing him in mysterious light. Like Kamila, she didn’t speak, or need to. From the look in her eyes, steadfast and selfless, he knew he had to honor this poor girl’s confidence in him. Yosodhara would be disappointed if he put himself or even his family first. “Call the police,” he told Angie, without taking his eyes off Kamila.“Sir?”“Call the police.”The Filipina sidled over to him. “Maybe we should speak first with the GM, sir,” she said in her little girl voice.“All right. Call him.”“In this moment he is with the sheikh.”He frowned. “I’m not going to wait. Call the police.”“The GM will be angry with us, sir.”“I will take responsibility.” “Sir.” As Angie turned away and picked up the phone, Kamila thanked Malsiri with her eyes. Near collapse though she was, and knowing the police would humiliate her and prison might be the end of her, aware that she had made a mess of her life—yet she would demand justice, no matter what the cost. Her communion with this stranger had given her the strength to endure. She had stood up and would stay on her feet or go down fighting. Only when the gray uniforms and black boots pressed around her did she feel herself swooning, just as a messy mazurka blurred into a jerky polka. How could a Pole butcher Chopin like that?
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