Ancient Evenings (22 page)

He gave a special clap to His hands, and called out. “Tet-tut!”

I heard a dog stirring beneath the house, then moving slowly up the stairs to the balcony with steps that, for an animal, were as full of decorum as two servants ascending on four well-trained feet.

A silver greyhound came into view. He had a most intent and serious expression.

“Tet-tut,” said the Pharaoh quietly, “you may sit down.”

The dog obeyed with no sign of agitation.

“I will introduce all of you,” said Ptah-nem-hotep. “After I speak your name, please Me to keep thinking of it.” He then proceeded to point out each of us to the animal. “All right, Tet-tut,” said Ptah-nem-hotep. “Go to Hathfertiti.” When the dog took a step forward and hesitated, He repeated, “Yes, My darling, go to the Lady Hathfertiti.”

Tet-tut looked at my mother, then approached her. Before she could applaud this effort, Ptah-nem-hotep said, “Go to Menenhetet.”

The dog backed away from Hathfertiti, turned once in a circle, and walked directly to my great-grandfather. When he was within two feet of him, he knelt, put his long muzzle to the floor, and began to moan.

“Are you afraid of this man?” asked the Pharaoh.

Tet-tut gave a long whimper eloquent as the stirring of flesh in a wound.
Tyiu
,
tyiuu
, was something like the sound he made.

“Do you hear?” asked Ptah-nem-hotep. “He is saying ‘yes.’ ”

“I would complain of a lack of exactitude,” said Menenhetet.

“Tu, tu,” said Ptah-nem-hotep to Tet-tut, “say ‘tooooo,’ not ‘tyoo.’ Toooo!”

Tet-tut rolled on his back.

“You’re a scamp,” said Ptah-nem-hotep. “Go to the boy.”

The dog looked about.

“To the boy. To Meni-Ka.”

Now, he came to me. We looked into each other’s eyes, and I began to weep. I had not been in the least prepared for this—I thought I would laugh—but sorrow seemed to come right out of Tet-tut’s heart and into mine as directly as someone might pour water from a jar, no, that is not so, it was more like the kiss Eyaseyab would give my mouth when her day had been unhappy. On such an embrace I would feel myself living in all the sad stories of the servant quarter. A melancholy now came to me from the dog just so complete as the woe I felt when Eyaseyab told me about her relatives who worked in a quarry and had to load great slabs of granite on sledges and pull them up ramps with ropes. Sometimes, while working, they were whipped until they dropped because the overseer had had too much to drink the night before and was angry in the sun. Therefore, on the night Eyaseyab told me about her relatives, I lived in the sorrow of her voice. She had a heavy voice full of burden, yet it was not poor, for it spoke of the enjoyment in her muscles when she lay down to rest. She grieved for the men and women of her family she had known in her childhood and told me they visited her at night in the depth of her heart, not as in a dream where she might be afraid of them, but more as if she were able to think of them when evening came, even if she had not seen them in years, and she believed they must be sending her the messages of their twisted bones because pains that felt like tortured strings came into her limbs then and told her of their lives just as a bow can send an arrow flying.

I do not know what I remembered of her stories, nor how much came to me from the dog, but it was more sadness than I could understand. The sorrow in Tet-tut’s eyes was like the look I had seen in the expression of many an intelligent slave. Worse. It was as if the dog’s eyes spoke of something he wanted to accomplish but never would.

So I wept. I could hardly believe the loudness of my clamor. I squalled. The dog had managed to tell me of a terrible fright in a far-off place and I was more afraid than I had ever been, as if I might not live like a slave but still knew the fear that sooner or later I, too, would know a life I did not want, and be powerless to go where I wished, and this feeling was great enough to set me shaking with a force that shattered the steadiness of the light. Then it was as if I lived in the sun, and in the dark, but quickly, in the tremors, as if I were blinking. Yet my eyes stayed wide open. I saw two existences at once: myself at six debauched into tears, and myself in the dark, weeping in shame as I gorged on Menenhetet’s cock, the tears so powerful my nostrils poured two rivers all over the old man’s phenomenon of a grand member, yes, at six had a sight of myself debased in the Land of the Dead when I was twenty-one, and then Hathfertiti caught me up and shook me and suffocated me in an embrace, and removed me from the sight of the Pharaoh.

FOUR

By the way I was carried, I could feel her fury. My stomach was on her shoulder, and my head below her breast. The ground rose toward me and dropped away on every step as if I were swinging upside-down. But I was so scalded with fright that I might as well have been a small beast just dropped into boiling water, my life screaming out of me even as my flesh was being cooked. When we came to a stop and she set me down, I thought for a moment I had died—we were standing in a room so beautiful I did not know at first if we were in a house, a garden, or a pond.

Trees surrounded me. They were painted on every wall. I stood upon a watery marsh-grass floor, a golden marsh grass, and painted fish were swimming between the painted blades of grass. Above, stars were shining out of a painted evening sky, and in the red light of the western wall, the sun was setting, even as it had set last night to the west of my great-grandfather’s roof, only now the view was of the Pyramids, and they were red as the meat of the pomegranate in this light, sitting on the painted plain of Jizeh between two of the four golden trees that held up the corners of this room. Doves and butterflies hovered in the steaming air, lapwings and green siskins flew in and out of the horns of oxen in the swamp reeds on the wall, water-lilies bloomed beneath my feet, and blue lotus almost concealed the rat who was stealing eggs from a crocodile’s nest. In the midst of my weeping I began to laugh at the expression on the crocodile’s face.

Now my mother put an arm around my waist and asked me to look at her, but I was staring at the ivory leg of the couch on which she sat. It was like the limb and hoof of an ox, or would have been if the hoof did not rest upon the polished floor instead of sinking into it, although as I continued to stare, the glaze was so high on the painted water that I could see my own reflection and my mother’s which gave, therefore, the look of light on water after all.

We stood among all the birds and animals who lived in the paint and I could even see flies and scorpions placed by the artist in the roots of the grass through which the fish were swimming. I smiled finally at my mother.

“I’m ready to go back,” I said.

She looked at me, and asked, “Do you like this room?”

I nodded.

“It is my favorite room,” she said. “I used to play here when I was a child.”

“I think I would like to play here,” I said.

“In this room I learned that I was supposed to marry the Pharaoh.”

I could see my mother on a throne beside Ptah-nem-hotep and they were both wearing blue wigs. A boy with a face different from mine played between them.

“If you had married Him,” I said, “I wouldn’t be here.”

My mother’s deep black eyes stared for a long while into my eyes. “You would still be my son,” she said. Now she put me on her thigh and I felt myself sink very slowly into the flesh of her lap, a tender settling that did not seem to stop even when her flesh gave way no more; the reverberation of this delicious sensation went out like the last remembrance of evening and now I lived with bliss to equal the desolation I had known while staring into the face of the dog. How I loved the red light of the Pyramids as they reflected on the marsh-green polish of the floor.

“Yes, I was supposed to have married the Pharaoh. Would you have liked Him for a father? Is that why you began to cry?”

I lied. “I do not know why the dog made me sad,” I told her.

“I think it is because you could have been a Prince.”

“I do not think so.”

“I was supposed to be the first wife of the Pharaoh.”

“But you married my father instead.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you do that?”

Hathfertiti, as if aware of my power to visit—I never knew when—into the thoughts of others, now seemed to have no thoughts at all.

“Yes, you married my father, and I am his son, and now I’m happy you took me to this room.” I did not know really what I was saying, except I knew I had somehow been sly enough to say what would encourage her to tell me more.

“You are not your father’s son,” she said, and her eyes looked for an instant into her own terror, so she added, “that is, you are, but you are not,” and I knew she had thought of Menenhetet. “It does not matter,” she went on, “whose son you are, since I called for you. I prayed for you to come forth, and in truth I will never again be so splendid as I was in the hour when all that was inside me called for you.” She held my face in her palms, and her hands were so alive that I felt as though I lay in bed between two lovely bodies. “You came forth into my belief that I would give birth to a Pharaoh, and that is a belief I have continued to have even after I married your father.”

“Do you still have such a belief?”

“I don’t know. You have never been like other children. When I am alone with you, I do not feel a large difference in age between us. And when we are not together, I often think of what you say. Sometimes I believe thoughts come to you from other people’s thoughts. Indeed, you see into the mind of others. You are most noble in such powers. Yet I do not think you will ever be a Pharaoh. In my dreams, I do not see the Double-Crown on you.”

“What do you see for me?”

I had never been more sensitive to each wind that stirred in her mind, and so I saw again the black speck of the body louse that had frightened her, and I knew her fear. A worm might just as well have crawled over my own throat.

That, however, was only one of the two houses of my mother. The blood of a warrior like my great-grandfather must have inhabited the other, because when she looked at me again her eyes were as flat as an officer measuring the value of a captive. “Why did you begin to cry?” she asked. “Did the dog’s eyes speak of a poor future?”

“They spoke to me of shame,” I said, and thought of my mother and Menenhetet in their embrace on the roof garden. I must have sent my thoughts to her for the blood came to my mother’s cheeks and she was angry.

“Do not speak of shame,” she said, “after you have embarrassed me with the Pharaoh.” I felt a flare of the fury with which she had picked me up and taken me from the room. “I do not think you will become a Pharaoh, for the same reason that the dog made you cry. You have the courage of a dog.”

We spoke often to each other in this manner—one cruelty to pay for another. I enjoyed such contests. I was better at them than Hathfertiti.

“Oh,” I said, “I did not cry for lack of courage but for simple misery that my father commands no respect. If, as you say, he is my father.”

She slapped my face. Furious tears rolled down my cheeks. They must have cut into her sight like a hard stone scratching a softer one, for the flat look in her eyes, dull as black rock when she was angry, now cracked, and I saw the same sorrow in her that I had known when looking into the eyes of the dog. Something of the unspoken misery of my mother’s life was in her expression. “Why,” I asked, “did you not become the first wife of the Pharaoh?”

Again she did not answer me. Instead, she said, “I married your father because he was my half brother,” and that was a useless reply considering how a good number of royal marriages (if not to speak of half the marriages of the poor) were between brother and sister, or half brother with half sister. It was not an answer at all. But I was still able to see in my mother’s mind how my father looked when he was young, and to my surprise he was strong in face and even a little crude—not crude, yet young and smug and cruel in a way that many women might like. Today, he was different. His face was pinched. The air that came into his nostrils was finer but meaner than when he was young—only seven or eight years ago!—and I wondered if such a change was connected to the whispered hints with which I had lived for years while present at many an angry silence between my mother, my father, and my great-grandfather. Some discomfort often passed between them as if all were suffering the same indigestible meal. Afterward, coaxing my mother to tell me more, bullying her thoughts and pursuing them, I was finally informed of the family shame: The daughter of Menenhetet, my mother’s own mother, Ast-en-Ra, had been married to a legitimate younger brother of Ramses III, but after this Prince’s death and my mother’s birth (in the same month) Ast-en-Ra next married a very wealthy man who came from a peasant family in the worst quarter of Memphi. As a boy, he had worked as a cleaner of latrines. That was the shame. He soon rose so high as to become a brothel-keeper (for by his reputation in bed he was near to the God Geb!) and on these profits succeeded in making a fortune. My grandmother, Ast-en-Ra, had married him, I was told, to avenge herself on Menenhetet, who treated her as his mistress from the time she was twelve, but ignored her once she married the Prince. In retaliation—so my mother insisted—Ast-en-Ra chose the man whose success would offend my great-grandfather most. Menenhetet only spoke of this second husband as Fekh-futi. It was our commonest expression for Shit-Collector, and my mother giggled as she told me, “Oh, Menenhetet was so jealous. He hated to hear that his daughter had married the most fabulous lover in Memphi. That’s why he detested your father from the day he was born.”