A Son of the Circus

“On some glass,” she said. “It was sort of near Anjuna.”

This conversation, and watching her climb the stairs, exhausted Dr. Daruwalla. He preceded the girl into his rooms; he wanted to alert Julia that he’d found a patient on the beach, or that she’d found him.

Farrokh and Julia waited on the balcony while the young woman took a bath. They waited quite a long time, staring—with little comment—at the girl’s battered canvas rucksack, which she’d left with them on the balcony. Apparently, she wasn’t considering a change of clothes, or else the clothes in the rucksack were dirtier than the clothes she wore, although this was hard to imagine. Odd cloth badges were sewn to the rucksack—the insignia of the times, Dr. Daruwalla supposed. He recognized the peace symbol, the pastel flowers, Bugs Bunny, a U.S. flag with the face of a pig superimposed on it, and another silver skull and crossbones. He didn’t recognize the black-and-yellow cartoon bird with the menacing expression; he doubted it was a version of the American eagle. There was no way the doctor could have been familiar with Herky the Hawk, the wrathful symbol of athletic teams from the University of Iowa. Looking more closely, Farrokh read the words under the black-and-yellow bird: GO, HAWKEYES!

“She must belong to some sort of strange club,” the doctor said to his wife. In response, Julia sighed. It was the way she feigned indifference; Julia was still somewhat in shock at the sight of the huge young woman, not to mention the great clumps of blond hair the girl had grown in her armpits.

In the bathroom, the girl filled and emptied the tub twice. The first time was to shave her legs, but not her underarms—she valued the hair in her armpits as an indication of her rebellion; she thought of it and her pubic hair as her “fur.” She used Dr. Daruwalla’s razor; she thought about stealing it, but then she remembered she’d left her rucksack out on the balcony. The memory distracted her; she shrugged, and put the razor back where she’d found it. As she settled into the second tub of water, she fell instantly asleep—she was so exhausted—but she woke up as soon as her mouth dipped below the water. She soaped herself, she shampooed her hair, she rinsed. Then she emptied the tub and drew a third bath, letting the water rise around her.

r /> What puzzled her about the murders was that she couldn’t locate in herself the slightest feeling of remorse. The murders weren’t her fault—whether or not they might be judged her unwitting responsibility. She refused to feel guilty, because there was absolutely nothing she could have done to save the victims. She thought only vaguely about the fact that she hadn’t tried to prevent the murders. After all, she decided, she was also a victim and, as such, a kind of eternal absolution appeared to hover over her, as detectable as the steam ascending from her bathwater.

She groaned; the water was as hot as she could stand it. She was amazed at the scum on the surface of the water. It was her third bath, but the dirt was still coming out of her.

11

THE DILDO

Behind Every Journey Is a Reason

It was her parents’ fault, she decided. Her name was Nancy, she came from an Iowa pig-farming family of German descent and she’d been a good girl all through high school in a small Iowa town; then she’d gone to the university in Iowa City. Because she was so blond and bosomy, she’d been a popular candidate for the cheerleading squad, although she lacked the requisite personality and wasn’t chosen; still, it was her contact with the cheerleaders that led her to meet so many football players. There was a lot of partying, which Nancy was unfamiliar with, and she’d not only slept with a boy for the first time; she’d slept with her first black person, her first Hawaiian person, and the first person she’d ever known who came from New England—he was from somewhere in Maine, or maybe it was Massachusetts.

She flunked out of the University of Iowa at the end of her first semester; when she went home to the small town she’d grown up in, she was pregnant. She thought she was still a good girl, to the degree that she submitted to her parents’ recommendation without questioning it: she would have the baby, put it up for adoption and get a job. She went to work at the local hardware store, in feed-and-grain supply, while she was still carrying the child; soon she began to doubt the wisdom of her parents’ recommendation—men her father’s age began propositioning her, while she was pregnant.

She delivered the child in Texas, where the orphanage physician never let her see it—the nurses never even let her know which sex it was—and when she came home, her parents sat her down and told her that they hoped she’d learned her “lesson”; they hoped she would “behave.” Her mother said she prayed that some decent man in the town would be “forgiving” enough to marry her, one day. Her father said that God had been “lenient” with her; he implied that God was disinclined toward leniency twice.

For a while, Nancy tried to comply, but so many men of the town attempted to seduce her—they assumed she’d be easy—and so many women were worse; they assumed she was already sleeping with everyone. This punitive experience had a strange effect on her; it didn’t make her revile the football players who’d contributed to her downfall—oddly, what she loathed most was her own innocence. She refused to believe she was immoral. What degraded her was to feel stupid. And with this feeling came an anger she was unfamiliar with—it felt foreign; yet this anger was as much a part of her as the fetus she’d carried for so long but had never seen.

She applied for a passport. When it came, she robbed the hardware store—feed-and-grain, especially—of every cent she could steal. She knew that her family originally came from Germany; she thought she should go there. The cheapest flight (from Chicago) was to Frankfurt; but if Iowa City had been too sophisticated for her, Nancy was unprepared for the enterprising young Germans who frequented the area of the Hauptbahnhof and the Kaiserstrasse, where almost immediately she met a tall, dark drug dealer named Dieter. He was enduringly small-time.

The first thrilling, albeit petty, crime he introduced her to involved her posing as a prostitute on those nasty side streets off the Kaiserstrasse—the ones named after the German rivers. She’d ask for so much money that only the wealthiest, stupidest tourist or businessman would follow her to a shabby room on the Elbestrasse or the Moselstrasse; Dieter would be waiting there. Nancy made the man pay her before she unlocked the door of the room; once they were inside, Dieter would pretend to surprise her—grabbing her roughly and throwing her on the bed, abusing her for her faithlessness and her dishonesty, threatening to kill her while the man who’d paid for her services invariably fled. Not one of the men ever tried to help her. Nancy enjoyed taking advantage of their lust, and there was something gratifying about their uniform cowardice. In her mind, she was repaying those men who’d made her feel so miserable in feed-and-grain supply.

It was Dieter’s theory that all Germans were sexually ashamed of themselves. That was why he preferred India; it was both a spiritual and a sensual country. What he meant was that, for very little, you could buy anything there. He meant women and young girls, in addition to the bhang and the ganja, but he told her only about the quality of the hashish—what he would pay for it there, and what he would get for it back in Germany. He didn’t tell her the whole plan—specifically, that her American passport and her farm-girl looks were the means by which he would get the stuff through German customs. Nancy was also the means by which he’d planned to get the Deutsche marks through Indian customs. (It was marks he took to India; it was hashish he brought back.) Dieter had made the trip with American girls before; he’d also used Canadian girls—their passports aroused even less suspicion.

With both nationalities, Dieter followed a simple procedure: he never flew on the same plane with them; he made sure they’d arrived and passed through customs before he boarded a plane for Bombay. He always told them he wanted them to recover from the jet lag in a comfortable room at the Taj, because, when he got there, they’d be doing some “serious business”; he meant they’d be staying in less conspicuous lodgings, and he knew that the bus ride from Bombay to Goa could be disagreeable. Dieter could buy what he wanted in Bombay; but, inevitably, he’d be persuaded—usually by the friend of a friend—to do his buying in Goa. The hash was more expensive there, because the European and American hippies bought up the stuff like bottled water, but the quality was more reliable. It was the quality that fetched a good price in Frankfurt.

As for the trip back to Germany, Dieter would precede the designated young woman by a day; if she were ever delayed in German customs, Dieter would take this as a sign that he shouldn’t meet her. But Dieter had a system, and not one of his young women had ever been caught—at either end.

Dieter’s women were outfitted with the kind of well-worn travel guides and paperback novels that suggested earnestness in the extreme. The travel guides were dog-eared and scribbled in to draw the attention of customs officials to those areas of cultural or historical importance so keenly boring that they attracted only graduate students in the field. As for the paperback novels, by Hermann Hesse or Lawrence Durrell, they were fairly standard indications of their readers’ proclivities for the mystical and poetic; these latter tendencies were dismissed by customs officials as the habitual concerns of young women who’d never been motivated by money. Without a profit motive, surely drug trafficking could be of no interest to them.

However, these young women were not above suspicion as occasional drug users; their personal effects were thoroughly searched for a modest stash. Not once had a shred of evidence been found. Dieter was undeniably clever; a large amount of the stuff was always successfully secreted in a dog-proof container of unflinchingly crass but basic ingenuity.

In retrospect, poor Nancy would agree that the enslavement of sexual corruption empowered all of Dieter’s other abilities. In the relative safety of the Daruwallas’ bathtub at the Hotel Bardez, Nancy supposed that she’d gone along with Dieter strictly because of the sex. Her football players had been friendly oafs, and most of the time she’d been drunk on beer. With Dieter, she smoked just the right amount of hashish or marijuana—Dieter was no oaf. He had the gaunt good looks of a young man who’d recently recovered from a life-threatening illness; had he not been murdered, he doubtless would have become one of those men who progress through a number of increasingly young and naïve women, his sexual appetite growing confused with his desire to introduce the innocent to a series of successively degrading experiences. For as soon as he gave Nancy some courage in her sexual potential, he undermined what slight self-esteem she had; he made her doubt herself and hate herself in ways she’d never thought possible.

In the beginning, Dieter had simply asked her, “What is the first sexual experience that you had some confidence in?” And when she didn’t answer him—because she was thinking to herself that masturbation was the only sexual experience that she had any confidence in—he suddenly said, “Masturbation, right?”

“Yes,” Nancy said quietly. He was very gentle with her. At first, they’d just talked about it.

“Everyone is different,” Dieter said philosophically. “You just have to learn what your own best way is.”

Then he told her some stories to relax her. One time, as an adolescent, he’d actually stolen a pair of panties from the lingerie drawer of his best friend’s mother. “When they lost whatever scent they had, I put them back in her drawer and stole a fresh pair,” he told Nancy. “The thing about masturbation was that I was always afraid I’d be caught. I knew a girl who could make it work only when she was standing up.”

Nancy told him, “I have to be lying down.”

This conversation itself was more intimate than anything she’d known. It seemed so natural, how he’d led her to show him how she masturbated. She would lie rigidly on her back with her left hand clenching her left buttock; she wouldn’t actually touch the spot (it never worked when she did). Instead, she’d rub herself just above the spot with three fingers of her right hand—her thumb and pinky finger spread like wings. She turned her face to the side and Dieter would lie beside her, kissing her, until she needed to turn away from him to breathe. When she finished, he entered her; at that point, she was always aroused.

One time, when she’d finished, he said, “Roll over on your stomach. Just wait right there. I have a surprise for you.” When he came back to their

bed, he snuggled beside her, kissing her again and again—deep kisses, with his tongue—while he moved one hand underneath her until he could touch her with his fingers, exactly as she’d touched herself. The first time, she never saw the dildo.