Tanner’s Virgin

“The husband of the sister of the wife of your brother.”

“Why, kâzzih, you understand my family ties better than I do myself! It is as you say. You tasted the sausages of Tarsheen? None better are sold in the streets of Kabul. In this wineshop, though, one may obtain the best food anywhere in the city.”

“I thought there was only wine.”

“For me there is food. For others, no. I eat here constantly, it is my pleasure in life.” He erupted with laughter. “As if I must tell you this, eh?” He slapped his abdomen. “As if my belly does not testify amply to my source of happiness?” He slapped it again. “But I eat and offer nothing, it is not seemly. You wish nourishment?”

“I ate not an hour ago.”

“An hour after eating I am famished. You wish wine?”

“Perhaps beer.”

He ordered it, and another of the ugly sisters brought it. Somewhere along the line I asked him why it tasted of cashews, and he explained about the nut with which they flavored it. When I finished the beer he ordered me another.

“Now, kâzzih,” he said eventually, “I suspect you wish to discuss business. Is it not so?”

“It is so.”

“And your business is what?”

“A woman.”

“Only one woman? I see. You buy or you sell?”

“I buy.”

“You have preference as to type? Young or old, tall or short, Eastern or Western? Fat? Slender? Dark or light? Or would you examine my poor stock and determine what strikes your fancy?”

“I want a girl named Phaedra,” I said.

“A name?” He shrugged massively. “But of what importance is a name? To be honest, I never bother learning the names of the girls I handle. But if you wish a girl with such a name – how is it called?”

“Phaedra.”

“A most unusual name in this part of the world. Is it Hindu?”

“It’s Greek.”

“How extraordinary! The name, though, what does it matter? You select a girl, you pay her price, she is yours to do with as you wish. If you wish to call her Phaedra, so she is called. If you wish to call her Dunghill, to Dunghill does she answer. Is it not so, kâzzih?”

I sighed. I wasn’t quite getting my point across. I took it from the top again and explained that I was looking for a girl whom he had already handled, a girl he had already purchased as a slave.

“A girl brought here to me?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, that is another matter entirely. When did this occur?”

I told him.

“So many months? A problem.” He picked up a roll, broke it in half, sopped up salad oil with it, and gobbled it up. “I bought and sold many girls that month, kâzzih. How would I know one from another?”

I told him the seller was an Englishman and that the girl was part of a shipment of half a dozen English girls. I dragged out my picture of Phaedra and gave him a look at it. He studied it for a long time.

“I remember the girl,” he said.

“Thank God.”

“She is Greek? I did not think-”

“She is American.”

“American, but her name is Greek. The world has more questions than answers, is it not so? I remember the girl, the others that she came with. The demand was strong at that time. All of those girls were placed almost immediately. You would do well to forget her, kâzzih.”

I stared. “Why?”

“It is sad.” He rolled his huge blue eyes. “Kâzzih, if you loved her, you should have purchased her freedom before ever she came to Afghanistan. A man falls in love with a slave girl, and he does not think she is ever taken from him. He does not anticipate this. And then she is sold, and sold again, and only then does he regret waiting so long. And by that time it is too late.”

“Why is it too late?”

“Ah, kâzzih, drink your beer. These are sad times.”

“Is she alive?”

“Do I know? When I have sold a woman my interest in her ceases. She is no longer my property. It would be immoral for me to maintain concern in her. She lives, she dies, I do not know. Nor does it matter.”

“But if she is alive I will purchase her freedom-”

“I knew you would say this, kâzzih. You are young, eh? You have few years and no white hairs. The young speak too quickly. There is a proverb in my country, a saying of the ancients, that the old lizard sleeps in the sun and the young lizard chases his tail. Do you understand?”

“Not really.”

“Ah, the sorrow of it! But this slave girl, this Phaedra, she has been two months in one of the houses, she has served for two months as maradóon. Do you not know what two months as maradóon does to a girl? You can use her no longer, my young friend. Let her remain with the rest of the maradóosh. Whatever you paid for her would be too much.”

“But that’s horrible!”

“The life of a slave is horrible. It is true. The whole system of humans owning humans, you might call me a firebrand to say so, kâzzih, but the entire institution of slavery should be brought to an end.”

“And yet you deal in slaves.”

“A man must eat,” he said, decimating the cheese. “A man must eat. If there are to be slaves bought and sold, it is as well that I profit by their purchase and sale as another.”

“But,” I said, and stopped. America is too full of socialists who work on Wall Street and humanitarians who sell guns; I had met Amanullah in sufficient other guises as to know the foolishness of arguing with him on this point.

“But,” I said, starting over, “you said that I neglected to purchase Phaedra when I might have done so.”

“Yes.”

“Before coming here, she was not a slave.”

“But this ca

“No.”

“But of course she was!” He lifted his mug and was less than thrilled to find it empty. He roared for beer, and the ugly sister came ru

“Of course she was a slave,” he repeated. “All of those girls, all the girls I buy are slaves. If they were not slaves, how could they be sold?”

“You do not know?”

“Kâzzih, what are you talking about?”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, I see. I’ll be damned. You didn’t know.”

“Kâzzih!”

So I went over it for him, the whole thing. I told him how Arthur Hook had worked his little gambit in London, co

Amanullah was horrified.

“But that ca

“These girls did.”

“One ca

“No question about it.”

“Unthinkable. A girl is sold into slavery by her parents, as with the girls of China and Japan. Or she is captured as booty in tribal warfare. Or she is the daughter of a slave and thus enslaved from birth. Or she chooses slavery as an alternative to death or imprisonment for her crimes. Or she is given in slavery by her husband when she proves barren, although I must say that this barbarism occurs only among several tribes to the west of us and I could no more strongly condemn it. But these methods which I mention, they are the ways in which a slave is brought to me, these are the elements of her background. ‘Neither sow in autumn nor harvest in the spring,’ it is a saying of ours, a saying of great antiquity. That someone should sell me a girl who was not already enslaved – and he has done this before, you say? This Englishman?”

“Yes.”

“He offends me and wrongs me. He makes me party to his evil. You must draw his likeness for me, and when he returns to Kabul I shall have him put to death.”

“That would be impossible.”

“I am not without influence in high places.”

“You’d really need it,” I said. “He’s already dead.”