Nekropolis Read Online Free PDF Page A

think?” I ask. “Was it what you expected?”
    Akhmim shrugs. “I didn’t know what to expect.”
    I stack plates and dump them on a tray. Akhmim boosts the tray, balancing it at his shoulder like a waiter. He’s really much stronger than he looks. “You don’t like it,” he says finally.
    I shake my head.
    “Why not? Because it’s not real?”
    “All this violence,” I say. Nobody would want to live this way. Nobody would want these things to happen to them.” I’m collecting wineglasses, colored transparent blue and rose like soap bubbles.
    He stands looking at me, observing me the way he did the women, I think. What do we look like to harni ? He’s beautiful, the tray balanced effortlessly, the muscles of his bare arm and shoulder visible. He looks enough like an infidel in his white robe, with his perfect, timeless face. Even his long curly hair seems right.
    I try to explain. “They entertain themselves with suffering.”
    “They’re only projections,” he says.
    “But they seem real. The whole point is to forget they’re projections, isn’t it?” The glasses ring against each other as I collect them.
    Softly he says, “They are bored women. What else do they have in their lives?”
    I want him to understand how I’m different. “You can’t tell me it doesn’t affect the way they see people. Look at the way the mistress treats Fadina!” Akhmim tries to interrupt me, but I want to finish what I’m saying. “She wants excitement, even if it means watching death. Watching a seizure, that’s not entertaining, not unless there’s something wrong. It’s decadent, what they do, it’s…it’s sinful! Death isn’t entertainment.”
    “Hariba!” he says.
    Then the mistress grabs my hair and yanks me around and all the glasses in my arms fall to the floor and shatter.
     
    * * *
     
    Sweet childhood. Adulthood is salty. Not that it’s not rewarding, mind you, just different. The rewards of childhood are joy and pleasure, but the reward of adulthood is strength.
    I’m punished, but it is light punishment, praise God. The mistress beats me. She doesn’t really hurt me much. It’s noisy and frightening, and I cut my knee where I kneel in broken glass, but it’s nothing serious. I’m locked in my room and only allowed punishment food: bread, mint tea, and a little soup. But I can have all the paper I want, and I fill my rooms with flowers. White paper roses, ice-pale irises with petals curling down to reveal their centers, snowy calla lilies like trumpets, and poppies and tulips of luscious paper with nap like velvet. My walls are white and the world is white, filled with white flowers.
    “How about daisies?” Akhmim asks. He comes to bring me my food and my paper.
    “Too innocent,” I say. “Daisies are only for children.”
    Fadina recommended to the mistress that Akhmim be my jailer. She thinks that I hate to have him near me, but I couldn’t have asked for better company than the harni . He’s never impatient, never comes to me asking for attention for his own problems. He wants to learn how to make flowers. I try to teach him, but he can’t learn to do anything but awkwardly copy my model. “You make them out of your own head,” he says. His clever fingers stumble and crease the paper or turn it.
    “My mother makes birds, too,” I say.
    “Can you make birds?” he asks.
    I don’t want to make birds, just flowers.
    I think about the Nekropolis. Akhmim is doing his duties and mine, too. He’s busy during the day and mostly I’m alone. When I’m not making flowers, I sit and look out my window, watching the street, or I sleep. It is probably because I’m not getting much to eat, but I can sleep for hours. A week passes, then two. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve got to get out of this room, but then I ask myself where I’d want to go and I realize that it doesn’t make any difference. This room, the outside, they’re all the same place, except that this room is safe.
    If