“I am no stranger,” I said warmly. “Do you not know me?”

Less than warmly, he said, “I know no one. That is how I stay in business in a place rife with contradictory laws.”

“But I am Marco!”

“Here, you drop your name when you drop your lower garment. If I am questioned by some meddling mufti, I can say truthfully that I know no names except my own, which is Shimon.”

“The Tzaddik Shimon?” I asked impudently. “One of the Lamed-vav? Or all thirty-six of them?”

He looked either alarmed or suspicious. “You speak the Ivrit? You are no Jew! What do you know of the Lamed-vav?”

“Only that I seem to keep meeting them.” I sighed. “A woman named Esther told me what they are called and what they do.”

He said disgustedly, “She could not have told you very accurately, if you can mistake a brothel keeper for a tzaddik.”

“She said the tzaddikim do good for men. So does a brothel, in my opinion. Now—are you not going to warn me, as always before?”

“I just did. The karwan muftis can often be meddlesome. Do not go braying your name around here.”

“I mean about the bloodthirstiness of beauty.”

He snorted. “If at your age, Nameless, you have not yet learned the danger of beauty, I will not attempt to instruct a fool. Now, one dirham or the equivalent, or begone.”

I dropped the coin into his callused palm and said, “I should like a woman who is not Muslim. Or at least not tabzir in her parts. Also, if possible, I should like one I can talk to for a change.”

“Take the Domm girl,” he grunted. “She never stops talking. Through that door, second room on the right.” He bent again to the scythe and the wheel, and the rasping noise and the flying sparks again filled the shop.

The brothel consisted, like the one in Balkh, of a number of rooms that would better have been called cubicles, opening off a corridor. The Domm girl’s cubicle was sketchily furnished: a dung-fired brazier for warmth and light—and smoke and smell—and, for the business transaction, the sort of bed called a hindora. This is a pallet that does not stand on legs, but is hung from a ceiling beam by four ropes, and adds some movement of its own to the movements that go on in it.

Never having heard the word Domm before, I did not know what sort of girl to expect. The one sitting and swinging idly on the hindora turned out to be something new in my experience, a girl so dark-brown she was almost black. Apart from that, though, she was sufficiently pleasing of face and figure. Her features were finely shaped, not Ethiope gross, and her body was small and slight but well formed. She spoke several languages, among them Farsi, so we were able to converse. Her name, she told me, was Chiv, which in her native Romm tongue meant Blade.

“Romm? The Jew said you were Domm.”

“Not the Domm!” she protested fiercely. “I am a Romni! I am a juvel, a young woman, of the Romm!”

Since I had no idea what either a Domm or a Romm was, I avoided argument by getting on with what I had come for. And I soon discovered that, whatever else the juvel Chiv might be—and she claimed to be of the Muslim religion—she was anyhow a complete juvel, not Muslimly deprived of any of her female parts. And those parts, once I got past the dark-brown entryway, were as prettily pink as those of any other female. Also, I could tell that Chiv was not feigning delight, but truly did enjoy the frolic as much as I did. When, afterward, I lazily inquired how she had come to this brothel occupation, she did not spin me any tale of having been brought low by woe, but said blithely:

“I would be doing zina anyway, what we call surata, because I like to. Getting paid for making surata is an extra bounty, but I like that, too. Would you refuse a wage, if it were offered, for every time you have the pleasure of making water?”

Well, I thought, Chiv might not be a girl of flowery sentiments, but she was honest. I even gave her a dirham that she would not have to share with the Jew. And, on my way out through the grinding shop, I was pleased to be able to make a snide remark to that person:

“You were mistaken, old Shimon. As I have found you to be on other occasions. The girl is of the Romm.”

“Romm, Domm, those wretched people call themselves anything they take a mind to,” he said uncaringly. But he went on, more amiably talkative than he had been when I came in. “They were originally the Dhoma, one of the lowest classes of all the Hindu jati of India. The Dhoma are among the untouchables, the loathed and detested. So they are continually seeping out of India to seek better situations elsewhere. God knows how, since they have no trades but dancing and whoring and tinkering and thieving. And dissimulation. When they call themselves Romm, it is to pretend descent from the Western Caesars. When they call themselves Atzigàn, it is to pretend descent from the conqueror Alexander. When they call themselves Egypsies, it is to pretend descent from the ancient Pharaones.” He laughed. “They descended only from the swinish Dhoma, but they are descending on all the lands of the earth.”

I said, “You Jews have also dispersed widely about the world. Who are you to look down on others for doing the same?”

He gave me a look, but he answered with deliberation, as if I had not spoken spitefully. “True, we Jews adapt to the circumstances in which our dispersal puts us. But one thing the Domm do which we never will. And that is to seek acceptance by cravenly adopting the prevailing local religion.” He laughed again. “You see? Any despised people can always discern some more lowly people to look down on and despise.”

I sniffed and said, “It follows, then, that the Domm also have someone to look down on.”

“Oh, yes. Everyone else in creation. To them, you and I and all others are the Gazhi. Which means only ‘the dupes, the victims,’ those who are to be cheated and swindled and deceived.”

“Surely a pretty girl, like your Chiv yonder, need not deceive—”

He gave an impatient shake of his head. “You walked in here yammering about beauty as a basis for suspicion. Were you carrying any valuables when you came?”

“Do you take me for an ass, to carry anything of worth into a whorehouse? I brought only a few coins and my belt knife. Where is my knife?”

Shimon smiled pityingly. I brushed past him, stormed into the back room and found Chiv happily counting a handful of coppers.

“Your knife? I already sold it, was that not quick of me?” she said, as I stood over her, fuming. “I did not expect you to miss it so soon. I sold it to a Tazhik herdsman just now passing at the back door, so it is gone. But do not be angry with me. I will steal a better blade from someone else, and keep it until you come again, and give it to you. This I will do—out of my great esteem for your handsomeness and your generosity and your exceptional prowess at surata.”

Being so liberally praised, I of course stopped being angry, and said I would look forward to visiting her soon again. Nevertheless, in making my second departure from the place, I slunk past Shimon at his wheel, much as I had slunk from another brothel at another time in female raiment.

2

I think Nostril could have produced for us, if we had required it, a fish in a desert. When my father asked him to seek out a physician to give us an opinion on the seeming improvement of Uncle Mafìo’s tisichezza, Nostril had no trouble in finding one, even on the Roof of the World. And the elderly, bald Hakim Mimdad impressed us as being a competent doctor. He was a Persian, and that alone certified him as a civilized man. He was traveling as karwan keeper-of-the-health in a train of Persian qali merchants. In just his general conversation, he gave evidence of having more than just routine knowledge of his profession. I remember his telling us: