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Mahmoud was ogling passing women in a way that violated the norms of behaviour in the City of Red and Grey. This is a habit that people coming from your world are forced to abandon grudgingly after staying for some time, because almost no one in the city stares at anyone, let alone casts lecherous glances at the breasts and bottoms of passing women. It’s even worse for a man to look back at a woman who has already walked past him. This is wholly improper. When you see someone do that, you can bet he’s a newcomer to the city, and you rarely lose your bet. That doesn’t mean it’s a virtuous city, because vice also exists, with its own market and customers. Vice is a packaged commodity: there are people who buy it and people who sell it. When you first analysed this you attributed it to capitalism itself, which commodifies everything, including the human body and human desires. Then you were uncertain how to categorise it, and in the end you saw it as a mixture of commodification and irremediable human defects. You don’t deny that in the city you saw types of perversion you had never heard of before. Don’t panic, it wasn’t first-hand experience, but in the magazines displayed on the uppermost racks in newspaper shops (which you would sometimes peek into). From browsing nervously through these magazines, you learnt that there were devotees of feet, of shoes, of underwear and body odours, and that there were people who were turned on only by handcuffs, whips, canes and slave chains. Do you remember the Conservative member of parliament who was found hanging from a tree in a public garden, in women’s underwear? People on their way early to work came across him hanging there, in lingerie, a conservative who advocated maintaining values and family cohesion. That made you wonder. Then you remember another strange incident that happened to you personally, but not here. It might not have been perverse but it seemed strange, and at the time you didn’t find any explanation for it. Anyway, you hadn’t come across it before. It involved a young widow, the wife of a colleague killed in the City of Siege and War. You had gone to her apartment to pay your condolences. You were surprised how the situation changed so quickly. From patting her on the shoulder, to putting your hand on hers to comfort her, to hugging her firmly, and then with desire, then with passionate kisses, and taking off her black mourning clothes and scattering them across the small sitting room. It wasn’t the sudden surge of carnal desire that struck you as strange at the time but the words she used. In her husky voice, she asked you to have sex with her in the most explicit and vulgar terms. After frantic sex, and perhaps because of the vulgarity, which stemmed from a moment when you were both emotionally confused and carried away by raw instincts, she started to cry, almost hysterically. Sex without any preliminaries whatsoever. Unconsciously you were both swept away in its raging torrent. As she apologised, between copious sobs, you reassured her that it didn’t matter. ‘Please don’t get a bad impression of me,’ she said. She kept repeating this phrase until you left. Just as, in the heat of erotic excitement, she had repeatedly asked you to have sex with her in words that would ordinarily sound crude. This spontaneous erotic encounter with your colleague’s widow was not the end of the story. When you again felt the urge to taste the unfamiliar fruit that unexpectedly hung within your reach, you went back to her. In fact you never forgot the strange squealing noises she made, nor the vulgar words she used. It excited you to go back to her, specifically the vulgarities of which you silently disapproved when you heard them for the first time.
    As quick as a flash your memory came up with a much older reminiscence. One that was even stranger. From the depths of your memory there floated to the surface the image of an officer in Hamiya who, on a