Ancient Evenings (50 page)

“That place is a pestilence and a nightmare,” my mother said.

“No,” Menenhetet told her, “I came to like it. You could walk along the canals they cut into each island. They would put boats up in dry dock by the side of these canals, and the people of Tyre respected their boats as if they were Gods, and built them of the best timber from Lebanon—from the forests, indeed, through which I would soon pass—and from the oaks of Ananes. What boats they were! What crews! It was told to me that of all the ships in the Very Green, only the Phoenicians did not hug the shore and worry about making port each evening, but traveled instead through the darkness, daring every monster that came to the surface during the long night. These people could even steer by the stars, and if the one they followed was covered over by clouds, they would guide their trip by calling upon another star. Where there were none, have no fear, they would steer into the waves and wait for the sun. ‘We can sail to the land of the worst dreams,’ was one of their sayings. How can I tell you? These sailors were as proud as charioteers, and the poorest of them acted like a rich man in every beer-house. I saw fights in those dens that were good preparation for war.

“Then there were wine-parlors with long benches where you sipped your drink, and the elbow of your neighbor was on your neck. That was all right since your own elbow was on the next neck. One could not call one’s skin one’s own, and the wine was sour as vinegar, yet we lived in a happy delirium, for on a raised platform just large enough for one girl, there was a whore who took off her skirt and—since the boy is asleep I will tell you—showed the center of herself with such readiness that your eye might have been looking through a keyhole at another eye. She was some kind of Asiatic with the darkest hair, and a body the color of leather but the lips between her thighs were like an orchid whose petals are black at the tip and pink in the center and I do not know if till then I ever desired a woman so much. Perhaps it was the look on her face. She wanted all of us. As proof, she arched her back, put her belly up, and displayed herself in turn to each man. I remember I put my desire into my eyes, and her petals quivered before my look even as a lotus plant will wave slowly when you look on it hard enough. Then more desire rose in me out of what came back from her. In the circle around that whore, men were putting gifts on the platform, and when the music finished she went off with the highest bidder. I did not show my gold. It was the Pharaoh’s and to be used only for the purchase of information. So I was desperate. How had that woman put so much into my loins?

“Then I learned she was not only a prostitute of this quarter who went from wine-parlor to wine-parlor along the alley but was also on this night a priestess. Before the dawn, she would fornicate on the altar of Astarte in the dark temple near the dry docks. It was the belief of these Phoenicians that in the filthiest could be found the finest, and in the most debased, the colors of the rainbow, which is why they were so happy with their stinks of snail and the royal purple glistening on every wet stone. My head felt like thunder trying to comprehend their religion. For in showing herself to all of us, she had also been serving her Goddess Astarte (whom some called Ishtar), yes, the whore was working for Astarte, collecting the lust of all of us in her black (and pink) orchid just as a flower receives the blessings of Ra, except here in the new city of Tyre, they never saw the sun in their alleys, and so it had to be the heat in our belly that was served up to the Goddess, why that whore would collect enough of you to make a sacrifice splendid and glowing right out of the heart-meat of her thighs, yes, send it up to the roof of the Temple of Astarte.

“I was ready to burst. It was a common sight in these alleys to see people urinate, or expose their buttocks for the other relief, but my member was feeling horrendous now, and I felt so foolish and wild that I rushed back to my room to smother my fever. The truth is I was looking for a man as much as a woman. The thief had given me a taste for that. How I longed to be at Kadesh and with the battle begun.

“Yet as soon as I lay down in my bed, I felt an impulse to get up, that is not to stand for you couldn’t, but to squat under the beams and look out my window. There, another orchid was to be seen! It belonged, as I soon found out, to the secret whore of the King of Kadesh.

“In our own Egypt, we know what it is to live in the thoughts of another. We are famous for our power to lay the most effective curses, and this is due, of course, to the comfort with which we can leave our own mind and rest in the next. One has to know one’s enemy before one can curse him, and such power, I should think, comes naturally from our desert and our river. In great spaces, the mind can travel as well as the body. On this unspeakable island of congestion, however, this damp Tyre, given the closeness of all our bodies, no thought from one mind could ever penetrate another. In Memphi or Thebes, I would not have been surprised if the secret whore of the King of Kadesh had taken abode in a house across from me—assuming she was the person I had come to find. Our minds race ahead of us and summon strangers. But in this beehive, this ant-heap, no! Later, when I pondered it, I was amazed that I came upon the secret whore so easily. I did not yet understand that in Tyre, in the absence of every message that one mind can give silently to another, the tongue substitutes for the brain. Gossip is even more common than money in Tyre. So it was known that I was a strange charioteer, and, given the cleverness of these Phoenicians, was either a deserter, or an officer on a mission for Usermare-Setpenere and must certainly be the second since I did not have that unhappy look no deserter can avoid.”

“I agree,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “that this woman must have heard you were in town, but how could she know you wanted to see her?”

“That is the point, Good and Great God. She was the one who decided to meet me. Retaliation was what she wanted upon the King of Kadesh. Of course, I did not know that then. I saw only a woman who wore nothing, lying on a bed across the street from me, her window no more than an arm’s length from my window. She was beautiful in a way I had not known before. Later, over the years of my first life, and through the experience of lives I was yet to know, I would come to learn that women are as different from each other as our desert from the Very Green, but I knew nothing in those days except that there were beauties so lovely they lived in the Pharaoh’s gardens and were called little queens, and then there were the whores you found in beer-houses. Nor could I speak about ladies of good birth. I knew such noble ladies were not like other women, just as you could not speak the same word for courtesans and common prostitutes, but then, for all I knew to say to either, ladies and courtesans were more alike to me than not, by which I do not mean I was familiar with any of them, but only that ladies took pleasure in the way they spoke, and courtesans knew how to sing, and either way I was always completely uncomfortable with their splendid manners, whereas any woman who was lower than me felt comfortable, speak of the ugly farmgirls I knew when I was a boy and peasant, and the good-looking farmgirls and beer-house girls and servants when I was a soldier, I took what I could and thrust myself into all of them as if to shoot an arrow—there was hardly any difference between a man and a woman, except with a woman, you were more likely to see the face and that could be preferable. All the same, as I have said before, I made love like a soldier, simple as that.

“With this secret whore of the King of Kadesh, however, I was in the presence of a magician. Just as we all know when we are kneeling before a person of great power, so did I know, looking through my window, that this woman was no whore to make you eat out your eyes in a wine-parlor or carry your lust to the altar, no, she might be without clothes, and her gates open, she might lie on her back, knees out, yet never was a woman less unclothed. She was, if you take the fear in my heart, a temple. I felt no haste to go over to her. Just as one must make no error when offering a sacrifice to Amon, and try to go through each step in a ceremony with no faltering, so did I lift myself from my bed, remove my own white skirt and boots, and in the most grave and comfortable motion, as if I were a cat walking the rail of a balcony, leaned out of my window, four stories in the air, and leaped across to hers. Then, with a smile that had no triumph, only my courtesy, I approached the bed on which she lay—it was all of purple silk—and knelt at her feet and was ready to touch her ankle, but as I drew near, it became more difficult to move, no, not more difficult, more circuitous, as if I could not approach directly but must respect the air, and halt. I was not two steps away from the bed, yet I could as well have been climbing a long stairway for all the time it took, and through it, her eyes and mine looked into one another for so long that I came to understand how an eye does not have a surface like a shield but is deep and something of a passage, or so you may believe on the first time you look into eyes that are the equal of your own. Hers were more beautiful than any I had known until that day. Her hair was darker than the hair of any hawk, but she had eyes of violet-blue, and by the light of a candle, they were near black when she turned her head to the shadows, yet against the purple sheets, blue again, even a brilliant purple, except it was not their color I saw but the transparency of her eyes. I felt as if I were looking into a palace, and each of its gates would open, one by one, until I could look into another palace. Yet each eye was different, and each palace was wondrous in size and had the color of every gem. The longer I stared, the more I could swear I saw red rooms and golden pools and my eyes traveled toward her heart. Since I did not dare to kiss her (I did not know how to kiss a woman, having never done so) I put my hand on the bed near her thigh.

“Once, during those days I traveled alone, the mood of the forest had become so powerful I stopped. The air was too heavy to breathe. I raised my sword then from its scabbard and drew it down slowly as if to cut through invisibility itself. Such had been the stillness that I swear I heard one fine note as pure as the plucking of a string, at least so clearly had I cut the air of the mood, and in a resonance of all my senses that was now as deep, I laid my touch on her flesh, and she returned a sound from her throat as pure and musical as a rose if the flower could speak. I knew then that I would make no mistake. Every sound that came from her mouth was a guide where next I could lay my touch, and to my surprise, since I had never heard of such an act, nor even thought it possible, my head, like a ship rounding the point to harbor, came down past her knees and I put my nose into that place out of which all children are born and smelled the true heart of this woman. She was rich and cruel and lived with a terrible loneliness in the center of this congested old city of New Tyre, although with it all, there was such loveliness in the quiver of those lower lips, and such subtlety of experience that I began to kiss her there with all my face and heart, with all the happiness of an animal learning to speak. Never had I known that my lips could offer such delicacy of movement, it was as if splendid words I had never uttered were now at the tip of my tongue, and soon I was wet with her from eyelashes to chin, wet as a snail, and indeed she smelled like the sweetest snail and more, she was the only garden on the island. I felt as if I lived in a light close to violet itself. All the while she never stopped humming her song of encouragement, as unrestrained as the purring of a cat in pure heat. Again, I knew I could make no error, and before long was introduced to the pleasures of that two-backed beast which lives with one head at either end, and her tongue felt like three Goddesses bringing peace to all the clangor of sword on shield that had been the harsh sum of my testicles, my asshole, and my cock, may the Pharaoh forgive me for so speaking in His presence, but this is the Night of the Pig.”

“I am content that the child is asleep,” said my mother, but her voice was sweet and carried the nicest rough edge to stir through my chest as I lay by her knee. Having listened to my great-grandfather speak of wondrous palaces in an eye, I now felt a kingdom stirring in the forest of her thighs while his voice went on to tell us more.

“In that manner, with a sense of respect as wide as the tide of the sea when it washes against the beach, and so gently as if I were holding a small bird in my hand, I lay with the brow of my member on the edge of those lips I had kissed with such devotion and promises that were new to me pushed so powerfully within my belly that I was tempted to have it all now and live with the fire left behind. But I could feel an invitation to know her further, and so I entered this temple that was like a palace, and descended step by step in the pulsing of my muscles, and felt the brush of her hair against mine as we went down into a splendor of many lights, rose and violet and lemon-green were their hue, and then a great serpent of the sea washed over me and I was gasping in the rush of my seven souls and spirits for they leaped out of my body and into her, even as her seven parts were coming to me. Some battle took place while each of us made great swings of a sword that cut no heads, and we were in a garden again, her garden, and it was very sweet. Her loins kept pulling on me. It had not been bliss—not as I was to know it later—indeed, in the middle, my loins knotted, but I also knew for the first time what it was to make love and be given the full value of a woman’s heart, her greed, her beauty, her rage, and all equal to my own. May I say it was my first great fuck.

“There are men who measure their life by success in battle, or by the victories of their will over other men. There may even be a few like myself who can measure each life by other lives. In this, however, my first life, I had just learned that it can also be a journey from one extraordinary woman to another. The secret whore of the King of Kadesh was my first.”

“How did you know who she was?” asked my mother.

“How, I cannot say—maybe it was the sight of those palaces in her eyes. By the time we were done, however, I did not doubt that I knew the King I soon might meet in battle. I knew him. If I met this King of Kadesh on the battlefield, I would know how to fight him. His heart was in my possession. By the way she gave herself to me she held her King in contempt. Do not inquire how I, who knew so little about women, could now know so much—it was the gift she had to offer. Women’s gifts are never so profound as when they take revenge on a lover.