Ancient Evenings

  Of course, I had had an unexpected reward. For Menenhetet had gone on to make love to my mother. Or, as I saw it then, he moved with her in an act I could not recognize as grappling or a dance, nor yet as prayer, and it even looked at moments like the couplings of animals except that they did not present the stupid look that animals offer when they are joined.

  About the time they were licking at each other with many an aristocratic growl, more like birds than hogs, I slipped away in a quandary of heat and humiliation, descended the stairs, found the room with my bed, and being obliged to sob at the thought of my mother naked with my great-grandfather, was for the first time pacified in a special way by my nurse, Eyaseyab. The part of my body that grew between my legs, fierce until then only with the need to urinate, was christened Sweet Finger by her in the dark, and Eyaseyab put her Syrian lips on it and gave me sensations I would not otherwise have known. Even this morning when I looked across the water at her (for Eyaseyab was in the barge that followed with the servants) I would bring my hand to my nose and it would still smell of her mouth, a nice round odor of onions, oil and fish (since my palm had certainly held onto Sweet Finger long after Eyaseyab was gone) and so her lips left a pull on my memory equal to the lap of soft waves on our hull as barges rowed by in the other direction, and I laughed, to the astonishment of the others, when my father, hoping to enter the mood of his wife and her great-grandfather, if by no more than the bite of his teeth on the silence, now was heard to say, “This year, we’re well rid of the stink.”

  “No, its odor is fascinating, I confess,” said Menenhetet after the pause that followed my laughter.

  “Well, I find it curious,” said my mother, “on occasion.”

  And I was reminded of them licking each other. Of course, nothing was equal to our river when it began to rise and each old slime on the flats began to stir with its last odors as the water reached higher into the caked mud and old reeds while feasts of insects floated down on the foliage—a terrible smell for a week as if our earth was shucking its filthiest skin, each village, now an island with its own high ground offering the new stench of sheep and cattle pressed together for these few weeks close enough to sleep in the huts of their peasant masters, an atrocious condition but for nights of full moon when the villages would look like dark islands on a silver lake, and the poorest boat, not big enough for two men, just a tying and twisting of long dry reeds coated with pitch would appear as elegant in such light as the skiffs of papyrus on which my great-grandfather, my father, and their friends would now and then embark on a hunt.

  But on this fine morning when my father made his comment, the stench was gone, and the river was no longer green from the first sludge of the fields but high and red with the mud of the earth it had washed from cliffs upriver—a golden-red usually near to brown in color except on this exceptional morning when the sun was so brilliant that the gleam coming off the river was equal to a hundred suns, an emblazoning of gold upon red waters that lit up every passing bark until the meanest barge full of cabbages or jugs of oil, pots of grain, or near awash with a load of fine stone shimmered nonetheless in the light like a royal galley, and I remember one scow floating down beside us, its decks heaped with bales of papyrus that looked as white in their reflection as the best of treated linen. Try then to look into the blinding light that came from the gold and silver hull of a state barge of the King being rowed upstream with a group of royal officials to take on Pharaoh’s duties in towns to the South. They stood beside a huge altar of gold in the stern, larger than five men kneeling side by side, a gift no doubt from Ramses Nine to one of His temples, and the officials cheered as they saw the pennants on the golden falcon in the bow of Menenhetet’s ship and we nodded in our turn to the coiled cobras of gold on the raised cabin of this state barge. The royal ship was rowed by sixty oarsmen (for there was no wind) thirty in a row on either side, and with the speed they raised, no breeze could have taken them upriver as quickly. Their mast stood alone, its great red mainsail furled, the mast straight as Sweet Finger last night, but covered with gold: there was not anything on the boat that did not shine of gold or silver but for the straw matting on the decks, and the carved purple bulwarks of the oarlocks and the rail. In pace with its progress, a troop of charioteers guarded the treasures of the barge by marching down the road that led along the higher bank of the river, and an infantry of archers jogged with them in a trot to keep even with the pace of the oarsmen, their equipment jiggling, then a squadron of lances with colored flags and plumed Babylonian horses I saw, and two-man chariots. Purple, orange, red, and a yellow as saffron as the color of my own robes, were on the plumes and ribbons of the horses, and the painted medallions of the chariots. Naked children ran after them for as long as they could keep up—naked but for a bracelet or an armband. I saw a few stare at my yellow robes in awe, and when one boy my age looked at me, and I at him across the water, he bowed and kissed the ground. Meanwhile, every sound was going back and forth between the soldiers and the women they passed, a merriment as happy as the washing of the river, and greetings and even applause kept passing between our boat and the soldiers as though today were a festival, and open salutations were permitted. Just before we drew away from them around a bend in the river, so we came on some blacks by the bank playing tambourines in such a frenzy that my mother murmured, “The passing of the Pharaoh’s barge is what has excited them so.” Two beautiful black girls were also in this frolic, and squealed with delight when one of the mercenaries, a Mede with amazing blond hair, took off his helmet and bowed flirtatiously as his chariot pulled by. Even the harper on our boat, a sour priest who wore a leopard skin (of which he was very proud) over the white linen of his ceremonial dress, condescended to pluck a string of his lyre, and the Negroes whistled at the clarity of the tone. Red as the mud of the banks were the dates ripening on the trees, and I thought the state barge looked like the golden bark of Ra being rowed across the sky even as it went by the bend in the glare of the sun. It was the grandest sight I had ever seen on the river, but I was to witness a greater one in the next hour when we came to the outskirts of Memphi.

  For an obelisk of black marble, as long as the sixty paces of the wading pool in my great-grandfather’s garden, was being carried on the longest barge I had ever seen, and it was drawn by leather ropes, thick as a man’s arm, that were tied to eighteen smaller boats built only for towing, and therefore so narrow that they could hold no cargo but their own oarsmen pulling in two rows of fifteen men side by side. How great must have been the burden of that black marble obelisk with its golden tip! I remember Bone-Smasher and Eater-of-Shadows, seeing such an armada of oarsmen, stood up in our boat as though they were dogs trained for fights to the death, and were measuring the heat it would put on their seven souls and spirits to row the obelisk up the river. The long cry of that labor came across the water—a cry which did not come to an end. The separation between the eighteen boats was wide enough for each sound to reach us by a separate route, and so it was like the overlapping frenzy of a myriad of birds when their feeding is disturbed. For that matter, the true sound of birds could also have been in those cries since the armada had certainly attracted them. Hawks, herons and crows, turkey vultures and hoopoes kept to a circle above, as if at any moment one of the oarsmen would collapse and be thrown overboard, and behind the great barge carrying the obelisk, kingfishers glided over the water and dove in frequently for the catch. Something in its deep wake drew the fish—maybe it was no more than the unusual wash. Not many a boat went up the Nile opening such waves. Even while we watched, one kingfisher was sucked under by the curl and came up drowned. A vulture leaped away with that death, its cruel wings giving off an exuberance like the spring of a good sword in the bright morning air.

  On the bank, laid out on mats, catfish were drying in the sun with a net stretched over them on poles to protect the catch from the birds, and a boy balanced himself on top of one of the poles and kept trying to hit the larger hawks with a s
tick. A hare, cut off in the flood from the safety of the desert, came wandering by; the boy threw his stick at the hare, missed, and fell off his perch, so producing a merry laugh from Hathfertiti.

  We were coming to the temples for Baal and Astarte at the outskirts of Memphi, foreign temples put up by Syrians and other such people from the East, and I heard my parents speak of how they were not impressive as buildings. Although new, they were only made of wood and the paint was peeling. Their foundations were dirty with river mud. Indeed, they were surrounded by all the confusion of the foreign quarter with its miserable little houses, crooked streets narrower than the lanes of the Necropolis, and one-room hovels of unbaked brick so poor they had been built to share a common wall and leaned on each other. A dissatisfaction came into our mood at this sight, as if even the water reflected the squalor, and our priest in the leopard-skin cape made a point of spitting over the side as we passed the temples, for which act Menenhetet reached over and pinched his cheek as though to mock the fellow for the solemnity of his aversion. The priest returned a sickly smile and promptly bowed his shaved head to the floor. Menenhetet languidly removed a sandal, and offered his foot for the priest to kiss, which set my buttocks tingling once more, for the priest—slyly I thought—slipped his tongue like a snake in and out of Menenhetet’s toes.

  “Play on the strings,” said Menenhetet, withdrawing his leg, and the priest reached for the harp, and began to play a song about a white palette that asked to be loved by its red and black cakes of ink, a silly song and hardly to the taste of my parents and great-grandfather although I enjoyed it for I was still thinking of the look on the priest’s face when he bent over my great-grandfather’s toes—it had been so much like the happy snarl of a dog going at meat. My father, however, looked irritated as if the abominations of pride in that priest had been no more agreeable to witness than Menenhetet’s complacency before such caresses. If no one could make love to him without such abasement, where did that leave my mother?—leave it that my father detested chaos, filth, and inelegance. Not for too little was he the Overseer of the Cosmetic Box. Even as we were drifting past that abysmal foreign quarter, so blatant in its wretchedness as to destroy all good mood in someone like himself, my father said: “It’s not worth the burning.”

  “Well,” said Hathfertiti, “there could be a nicer approach to the city. Can’t they move these people inland?”

  “Too swampy back there,” said Menenhetet.

  “Why not up the hill?” asked Hathfertiti, pointing to a cliff that must have been a half-hour’s walk from the river.

  It was a hill I knew, and liked. Some servants had taken me there on a long walk, and those cliffs had bees’ nests high in the hollows of their rock. The boys who lived in the hovels here on the river used to climb halfway up the cliff, dare the bees, collect the honey, and descend. The servants with me laughed at how they had to suffer bee-stings on the way down with the honey, but from my protected place, flanked by two servants, I thought the boys were remarkable. So I listened carefully to talk of moving the foreign quarter onto the hill.

  “It can’t be done,” said Menenhetet. “That is exactly where Nine talks of building the new fort.”

  “I still don’t see,” Hathfertiti remarked, “why they can’t move these people—the fort will never get put up.”

  “You have a mind for military matters,” remarked my great-grandfather.

  I was merely hoping they would not build the fort too quickly so that some day, when old enough, I would also be brave enough to go up those cliffs for honey, and I thought of how little I knew of the manner in which such boys lived, poor boys who worked for their fathers in the fields near the river, and shivered so much at the picture that my mother drew me into the perfumed and wondrously delicate pillows of her scented breast and belly, and whispered, “The child dare not be ill again,” and my father looked gloomy. For when I was ill, he had to pay attention to Hathfertiti’s woes.

  “No, the boy will be all right,” said my father.

  My great-grandfather gave me a look out of his large pale-gray eyes which in this bright light were like clear sky, and asked, “What is the color of your blood?”

  I knew he was thinking of our last conversation, so I answered, “As red as it was last night.”

  He nodded. “And the sun?”

  “The sun is golden, but we call it yellow.”

  “He is truly intelligent,” breathed Hathfertiti.

  “And the sky,” said my great-grandfather, “is blue.”

  “Yes, it is blue.”

  “Explain then, if you can, the origin of such other colors as brown, orange, green and purple.”

  “Orange is the marriage of blood and the sun. So it is the color of fire.” My mother had told me that. She now added, “Green is the color of grass.”

  But I was annoyed. I had been ready to give the explanation myself. “Yes, grass,” I said, “is green, even as the sky is blue, and the sun is yellow.”

  Menenhetet did not smile. “Speak of the origin of the color of brown,” he said.

  I nodded. I did not feel at all like a child. Menenhetet’s thoughts lived so clearly with mine that I had only to take a breath and I could feel the power of his mind.

  “Brown,” I said, “is like the river. In the beginning, the Red Nile was a river of blood in the sky.”

  “Now, the child will certainly catch fever,” Hathfertiti murmured.

  “Nonsense,” said Menenhetet.

  “May the child not be ill,” said my father.

  I had certainly stopped shivering and my body felt lucid. “Is purple a mixture of blood and sky?” I asked Menenhetet.

  “Of course,” he replied. “That is why it is also the color of madness.” He nodded. “Just as rich earth is brown since all colors go back to it. Just so,” he said with an evil addition, “is your ca-ca brown.”

  I laughed with delight.

  “But what makes the color of white?” I asked.

  “The child is not stupid,” he murmured. He took me by the chin. “You are yet too young,” he said, “to comprehend the color of white. That is the most mysterious of hues.” He frowned at the look of disappointment on my face. “Think for now,” he said, “of white as the color of stone, for that is where the Gods take Their rest.”

  “Is this why temples are made of marble?”

  “Doubtless,” he said, and remarked to my mother, “an exceptional wit. It convinces me that our blood is brilliant.” He could not, however, keep from smiling. “Of course, given the intertwinings of the Ramses, it is a wonder we have any sense at all.”

  My father was in misery. “I implore you. Do not say such things,” he murmured as if even the small scratch of those sounds on his ear would leave telltale marks of disloyalty to the Pharaoh upon his face.

  The slow drift of our boat had stimulated the merchants of the foreign quarter, and a dozen came out to us in skiffs of every cheap description—some not better than a wooden case lashed to papyrus reeds. One was on a raft with two logs for pontoons, and others rowed up in small wooden scows. They bore down full of cargo for sale; some, for example, with vases of oil—lamp oil, castor-oil, oil of sesame; one idiot selling bowls of flax and barley actually tried to interest my mother in his bargains: “Exceptional fair price!” he kept calling out in atrocious Egyptian and became so persistent he almost lost his balance, for Bone-Smasher, wielding one of the long oars, kept swinging it through the air at him (although as casually as raising an arm in greeting) but the barley-man kept his boat just beyond the end of the oar-blade, until, perceiving at last from the indifference of my mother that he could yell his wares for hours and shift no affection in her to flax or barley, he bowed with courtesy and turned away to give space to another. They all came near: boats with every kind of fruit and spice, boats with raw clay to sell, and milk, and henna, and one with turfs of dung that stank so bad my mother cried out in annoyance and Bone-Smasher almost fell in the fury with which he
laid down his oar, took up his river pole and shoved the other prow away—indeed he left a hole in the dung boat, right through the dried reeds. Another came by with wigs, and Hathfertiti allowed it to come close, studied a few heads of hair across a little water—I know she was afraid of picking up lice and looked only for purposes of comparison to her own wigs, then waved the craft away. A skiff came by with two pigs for sale. At the look in Bone-Smasher’s eye it backed water quickly. Pig was not to be offered to us. Another boat had geese and cranes, ducks and hens. We were not buying. A scow with two wooden cages showed a hyena and a gazelle.

  “Is the hyena male or female?” my father asked of Eater-of-Shadows, who repeated the question to the boatman, and when the answer was given by way of making a circle with fingers and thumb, my father shook his head. “The Pharaoh has a female hyena already. I thought if there were a male …”

  “Has Ptah-nem-hotep succeeded in domesticating His hyena?” asked my great-grandfather.

  “The Pharaoh performs wonders in taming animals,” said my father with implacable piety. “I have seen Him walk the hyena on a leash.”

  My great-grandfather was reputed to have wrestled with a lion, but he merely smiled, and looked up at a covey of quail flying over our boat, their wings beating as fast as the tongues of hummingbirds.

  A little scow, brightly painted, came by. Its merchant was its only sailor: a young man dressed in a white skirt, his body well-painted in red ochre. He made an agreeable appearance, and Bone-Smasher, at a sign from Menenhetet, allowed him to draw near. He was selling cosmetics, but his oils, almond and sesame with perfume added, were of low quality. Since my mother did not wish to disappoint his attractive face, as if such cruelty might reduce the beauty of her own features, she settled at last on some Asiatic pomade, a peculiar mixture that the young merchant assured her—speaking with his head down and through the intermediary of our boatman—was of his own invention and used on his own hair. Since that was as dark as a black olive and as lustrous as its oil, Hathfertiti asked by way of Eater-of-Shadows if oil from black olives was the base of his cosmetic, and when he said yes, she was able also to analyze the odor. “You have used oil of dates for fragrance,” she said.