“My dear girl, get out of there! My God, child, what can you be thinking!” The fair-haired one came running up to her and threw a coarse jacket over her shoulders. “You poor, mad thing,” he said as he drew her away from the majesty of the sea and the admiring crowd of men who had gathered on the deck below.
“Why do you call me mad?” she asked him. She was hot with anger that this impudent human being would so describe her. How dare he make comment on his betters?
They went into the large room full of machineries and glowing screens that lay behind the long row of forward-facing windows. He pushed at her, his impotent strength expending itself against her shoulder. “God, she’s strong.”
“As a demon,” Abdel Tahrir said.
“Look, you put down any talk like that, Mr. T. I’ve got the little bitch on my passenger manifest now. If the men do anything to her—anything at all, Abdel, my friend—there’s going to be trouble in New York.” He switched into another language. “Do you understand English, missy? Look at her, Abdel, what do you think?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then we’ll use English. My God, how could anybody be so beautiful? Look at her, look at her!”
“It’s a caution.”
“A caution? They’ll tear her apart. I want her up here at all times. Either in my cabin or Officer’s Rec or here. And one of us—you or me—we must keep her in sight at all times. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir. But I think that the men will not rape her. They fear her too much.”
“Oh, then it’s a shiv across the damned throat, eh? Kill the beast. I’ve already had one death aboard. If I have another, it’ll be my ticket, no questions asked. You remember that.” He advanced toward the other man. “Because if they take my ticket, I’ll take your balls. Custom of the sea!”
Whatever the long string of gutturals had been about, they ended with Kurt bursting out laughing. He did not seem to understand how angry he had made Abdel. When an Egyptian smiles like that, he has been humiliated, and should be feared.
However, Lilith was enjoying this loud, rough northerner, and feeling a distinct sense of conflict. She thought that she would like to lie with him. Look at all that muscle, that youth and health. But also he was food, rich, satisfying food. There was in his eyes a sweetness made the more endearing because the gruffness in his voice said that he himself did not know that it was there.
Abdel yanked her arm, causing the still-tender parts within her to smart. He drew her along the corridor to a chamber. In this chamber was a bedstead, a chair that at least was not covered with those odd, plump cloths of theirs, and a basin. It also had a window that overlooked the ocean, a most wonderful window.
“I’m placing you under house arrest,” he said. “Do you understand me?”
“No.”
With the speed of an enraged cat, he leaped at her. “You’ll be locked in here, see! You’ll not come out, not even for meals. Because if the captain loses his ticket, I lose mine. And some damn—I don’t know what—some damn crazy female isn’t going to be the reason.”
His hands were shaking, his eyes blinking rapidly, which indicated unsureness in a human being. He closed and locked the door.
She waited for some time, lying on the bed until she grew restless at the idea of being imprisoned. Just a little while ago, she would have been content to remain here forever, or anywhere she happened to be, as long as she could eat what she needed. She had been empty, incurious, and, she realized now, so afraid of the ominous presence of time that she had reduced herself almost to a state of catalepsy. She thought that she had slept for days, for months—how long, she did not know, perhaps would rather not guess.
But now all that had changed. She had successfully escaped from Cairo, had eluded the men who wanted to kill her—and they had been good hunters, oh, indeed. With such ones about, the day of her capture would certainly come, perhaps already had. The door was locked, although she could break through it. Where then?
She got up and went to the small, round window. Outside, there was nothing but great Ocean. She knew that they were beyond the Pillars of Hercules, where the ships of man had not gone in vast immemorial ages.
She paced uneasily to the door and shook it, assuming that she would shake the simple iron tumblers right off their stems. But it did not happen. There was no sound of grating metal from within, no click of a lock tongue falling free.
A flash of anger crossed through her, making her stamp and growl. She ought to tear the door off—that, she knew, she could certainly do. But then they would only find some hole deep in the ship for her, a place enclosed by iron.
She stepped back from the door. She’d seen the way they looked at her. She knew the effect that she had on the male, her own kind or human. So she went to the mirror and patted some color into her cheeks, then began smoothing her hair. Once, she would have wanted to paint her eyes, but she had seen women as they were now, and knew that the formal making up of home was no longer done here. Her careful fingers worked long on the hair, until the sun had gone low and the waves turned gold with his last grace. Then she made from the tight-woven bedclothes a stola of sorts, ripping strips until she had a band to raise her bosom, and a flowing skirt to conceal the curves of her hips. Her arms she left bare. She smelled her skin, which was as sweet now as the juice of the pomegranate. Her sweetness mingled with the scents of human cooking coming up from below.
As she had expected, it was not long before the men returned. It was Abdel and a bearded servant with a tray. The food was strange—two round slabs of bread with slices of cooked muscle between them. A glass contained more of the candied liquid, hissing like a baby serpent. Both men’s faces had been impassive until they saw her. Then they changed, in ways that made her so happy that she tossed her hair and laughed. Abdel’s eyes became hooded and his cheeks flushed as humans did when they were agitated. The servant began trembling, his spittle running in his beard.
“There is your supper,” Abdel mumbled. The two of them left at once, locking the door. She went and gazed out at the last light, watching as much of the orange horizon ahead of them as she could see. This window, she thought, could be forced. But she did not think it necessary. In a mirror, Lilith could see many things, and in this mirror she saw a man coming, the northerner, and she saw herself drawing him to her breast, and singing to him…
And indeed Kurt Regen soon said to Abdel, “I’m leaving the bridge for the night.”
As he headed toward the meeting he had imagined already a thousand different ways, Abdel’s long fingers came down upon his shoulders. “Kurt, no.”
“Abdel—”
“You know I don’t believe any of those superstitions. They’re nonsense.”
“Well, yeah, that’s one way of putting it.” He moved on.
Abdel followed him. “Kurt! Listen. Listen to me. I will tell you, I had experiences with her—”
Kurt laughed, but he was angry. “Already? Before me?”
“No, no, not that. For God’s sake. I mean that she has—she has a very strange effect. Stranger, I have to tell you—really, Kurt—than you can know. She’s come onto this ship from nowhere—out of a coffin—” He laughed, a quick, false sound in which Kurt heard all the superstition of his world, heard it and quietly scorned it. Then he added, “And that clothing—I mean, did you look at it?”
“Of course I did.”
“The stitching isn’t just fine, it’s microscopic. You’d go blind to do that—a seamstress, I mean. And the leather—that is not calfskin, Kurt. That’s something…” He trailed off. “Not calfskin.”
“So what is it?”
“It must be something exotic,” Abdel said at last.
Kurt went on. “I’ll ask her.”
Abdel said no more, and Kurt did not turn around. He proceeded along the corridor, thinking that he had beer and whisky in his cabin, and plenty of excellent American cigarettes. He wondered what music she might care for, what food.
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He stopped at her door, inserted the key. Before he entered, he tapped lightly. “Lilith?” There was no response. He opened the door to a dark room, his immediate thought being that she had somehow escaped, or jumped out of the porthole into the sea. That thought had worried him most of the day. If she really wanted to, she might open one of these ports. It would be death, of course, either sucked up in the propellers, drowned, or torn to pieces by sharks, whichever came first. But with a crazy woman, maybe it would happen that way.
As he stepped into the room, he noticed an extraordinary sweetness in the air, an odor of jasmine or some exotic southern flower like gardenias. He turned on the light—and almost cried out, she was so close to him and so still. “Oh,” he said. “I thought you had gone.”
She smiled slightly and raised her hand to his cheek. In his surprise, he had spoken German and thought she would not have understood. But she said, also in German, “I had not gone.”
“Oh,” he said, “oh.” He forced himself to smile. This was not going at all as he had expected. “You speak German,” he blurted, and said to himself, What a fool you are, Kurt, can’t you be a little cool?
“I speak German,” she replied, but like a schoolchild enunciating before her teacher.
“Are you German, then? I don’t place the accent.”
“You don’t place the accent. I am not German.”
He realized, to his great astonishment, that she did not speak German at all. She was actually constructing her replies out of his questions and statements. “From Norway, then? Sweden?”
“Not from Norway, not from Sweden.”
“Will you come into my cabin and have a little entertainment with me? We can pick up satellite very nicely, and I’ve got some good Scotch, we can settle down and perhaps you can tell me a bit. I might be able to help you, you know. It isn’t going to be pleasant with the INS.”
The gravity of her eyes, the innocent seriousness of her expression—it was literally thrilling. No other word for it. Dressed up even in that sheet, the woman was making him feel feelings he had not known since he was a boy and Ingeborg Schleicher had unzipped his fly while he lay back against a tree trunk. She had reached in, and paralyzed him with pleasure when her cool fingers contacted his rigid shaft. “Does that feel like anything?” she had asked, and he had thought that his whole body was going to explode.
Lilith said, “I will come into your cabin and have the entertainment.” He reached out and took the lightest, most delicate hand he had ever held. He drew her along the corridor as if he was luring a recalcitrant kitten. She laughed a little in her throat.
He got her in, got the door closed and locked. She moved into the middle of the sitting room and twirled around very prettily indeed. “I have come into your cabin and will have a little entertainment.”
“How much German do you know?”
She smiled, leaned her head to one side. Oh, how beautiful, how incredibly, wonderfully beautiful she was. “I know as much German as you are entertaining me with.”
“You’re picking it up from talking to me! That’s exactly it, isn’t it?”
“I am picking up German from talking to you. This is it exactly.”
She must have one of those wonderful minds of the idiot-savant that one read about, the sort of person who could calculate out numbers to the thousandth place and such. “How many languages do you speak?”
“Speak. Yes. As many as I hear.”
He wanted to be the cool, imposing captain, to give her a drink and a fine cigarette and perhaps watch a little television with her beforehand. But instead he stepped forward like a schoolboy ordered to the front of the class, seized her hand, and kissed her cheek in an absurdly clumsy manner. He was like some sort of old German militarist. Almost, he had clicked his heels. Absurd, he was becoming a cliché of himself. But as he kissed the milk of her skin, the soft, almost airlike coolness of it just brushing his lips, he also inhaled a scent so wonderful that for a moment he could not move. Again, he smelled her skin—it was the odor that had permeated her room after she had bathed, the very soul of the sweetest flower in all the world. Nothing like a damn bath. What a change.
“How is it that you have perfume?” he asked her. “There is none in the ship.”
“I may say in Arabic?”
“Yes, of course.”
“There is no perfume in me. Perfume is the sweetness of myself when there is kindness in keeping me clean.” She held out her hand, dangling it before him. “Yes,” she said, “thank you, please.”
He took it and smelled the scent of her. It was marvelous beyond words, this scent, it almost split him in half with desire, almost caused him to actually cry out. Then he saw, beneath the blouse she had made of the sheet, her nipples making small points behind the cloth. The nipples, the curve of her skin down into the neckline, the suggestion of her perfect breasts, seemed to combine with the scent of her to challenge his very consciousness.
“My God, you’re beautiful.”
“I am beautiful,” she said again in German.
“And you know it?”
“I know it.”
“How does it feel to be so beautiful? Do you find yourself beautiful? Because I do, I say this, I find you so awfully beautiful.”
“You say awful. But you—” She smiled, oh, so wonderfully, like Botticelli’s Venus standing in her clamshell in the Uffizi in Florence.
“Awful, it is a word we may use also to mean, very serious. I am finding you very seriously beautiful.”
She went to the couch and sat down, then swiveled herself and rested her legs along it. “Come you here,” she said, pointing to the cushion. He slid the coffee table aside and sat. It was impossible not to sit close. “Now,” she said. Her tongue appeared behind her teeth—a curiously narrow, questing, tongue. He thought it must be a bit deformed, and perhaps that was why her accent was so odd, as odd, really, in German as in Arabic.
“May I ask you some questions?” He switched to Arabic, doing his best. “Questions. Do you know? Your surname, your place of origin?” Oh, what a fool! Why was he doing this now? Could he never escape the compulsive Ordnung of his nationality, his fool genetics? But it was not that, it was a lifetime of being careful, of learning one bit of technical knowledge after another, of pass-exams and politics, up the ladder rung by rung. Now a senior captain, he was obliged to ask his foolish questions of this maiden who reclined beside him.
“I am Lilith,” she said. “Of Egypt.”
If he did not make love to this woman, he would go mad. It was that simple, he would jump off the damned boat and let Mr. T. get his ticket at last. Let him sail the damned thing into the Statue of Liberty. He went to the bar. “Scotch? Or Baileys Irish Cream, or rum, you name it—ha ha! Yes, what’s your preference?”
“Come back here.”
She had risen to a sitting position. He went and stood. With a deft motion, she reached up and drew down his zipper. Before he could say or do another thing, her fingers were meeting his shaft, which was broaching like a whale. Her touch made it seem as if Ingeborg’s fingers had been made of cold, wet clay. They slid around it with a motion that made him imagine them as tendrils of smoke. Then she said, “May I—I wish to gaze upon your nakedness.”
It was Arabic, but so peculiar, out of some old book. Her voice was a whisper of breeze in summer trees, the sigh of a long wave upon a surrendered shore. She withdrew her hand, then rose and stood before him. Smiling slightly, she offered her moist lips to him.
Her mouth tasted of some unknown fruit, heady with spice, dense with a suggestion of…something raw. One of her hands had come behind his head, or he would have turned away, so surprising and so awful was this flavor. Her other arm, around his waist, seemed to lie lightly until he attempted to break off. Then, to his horror, he realized that he was not able to move away from her. He was not able to at all, because she was as strong as steel. It was not as if he was encountering even a superior animal strength, but
something far stranger and more perplexing. It was like being in the grip of a machine, yes, a vise.
She’d been going to make love to him! She had no intention of—oh, but her belly contracted, her tongue jabbed, and she was eating, her body doing what her spirit denied. He poured into her, the sheer enjoyment of it making it completely impossible to stop. His heels drummed and his body convulsed. Death agony. She embraced it tens of thousands of times.
The suck ended with a wet snap, its vacuum breaking as she withdrew her lips from his neck. As the body slumped to the floor, she followed it, cradling it. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she raised an agonized face to the emptiness of heaven, and felt inside her the fire of knowing that she had killed somebody who was completely alive, and had deserved the right to live fully and as long as he could, and express his essence into the world.
She bent then, kneeling, covering her face with her hands. The silence that joins to death settled into the room. She had to hate man, but she could not—man had become too beautiful, a dark god of machines, a wonderful god.
But her stomach spoke, too: You have a right to live. You have a right to eat the only food that will sustain you.
“Only an hour…”
She remembered flowing stands of grain, and fat, sizzling cakes in the morning, and the slow fish that lived in the town’s fountain, looking up out of their sweet, intelligent eyes.
No, she didn’t. She couldn’t. All of those dreams—they were nothing but the fantasies of a creature who did not know who or what she was except that she was different from every other creature in the world, even her own kind, and was lonely unto perishing. She’d never come from another world. She’d appeared out of the clay, the sky. Whatever cunning dark muscle in the concealed meanings of nature had formed her and her kind to need humans for food was monstrous evil.
She tossed her hair, making it flow back from her face like a falls, and went to the door and opened it, and went out into the corridor. Nobody about. So she took the remnant down to the end, and found her way out into the roaring air of the ocean night. As she threw the remnant overboard, she heard a mad howl behind her.