Daniel Martin (70 page)

That was Jane’s view, at any rate, and Dan did not dispute it. He tried to be nicer, the girl was a little bit awed by his ‘fame’ and movie-world background; wanted precisely the sort of tattle and crumbs of gossip that he did not want to give in front of Jane… yet he took his cue from her, this simple curiosity was to be placated.

Jane was rather rapidly cast as someone understanding—even at table the girl spoke much more to her, as if she knew she would meet more indulgence there. Once, at Edfu, Dan caught her looking secretly at Jane, who had by then told Marcia of the recent tragedy in her own life; a strange look, wistful, almost canine in its lack of envy. She told Dan one day, when he happened to come into lunch before Jane, that ‘Mrs Mallory’ reminded her of an English girl she’d known at Michigan. It was as if she saw Britain peopled with understanding and gently spoken women. She had never been there, and he did not disillusion her.

There was no real need by then to find out why the couple had left the United States, but Dan and Jane pieced together a picture: they were two young people whose values were changing, partly because of world events, partly because of their private misfortune. It was much more patent in the female of the species. Obviously the revelation of barrenness had hurt her more deeply. They were both Democrats, but there was a schism over Vietnam—all this came up at lunch one day. Marcia wanted out, they had no right being there; but her husband, with a sort of tattered chauvinism he conceded they ought never to have gone in—felt they should see it through. The two of them became quite heated. She had a small armoury of statistics, the waste, the cost. ‘I’m not arguing, Marcia. I know the figures. If it was just figures, no argument. We cut our losses, we quit.’

The girl looked down. ‘Since when did you carry on with a programme after you discovered a bug?’

‘It’s not the same thing, for Christ’s sake. These are human beings. So we abort the whole project. Only just don’t ask me to explain it to all the guys whose lives it’s wrecked. I mean, what do you say? Sorry, you men, we kind of accidentally sent you to the wrong ballgame?’

‘There’s no need to get aggressive about it.’

‘Jesus. Aggressive.’ Poor hard-put-upon young man, he nodded his head several times, then managed a grin at Dan. ‘Sorry. We get mad over all this. Maybe we are short of experience of backing down.’

The girl seemed unmollifled and she glanced at Jane.

‘What do people in England think?’

‘I think we’re rather split. As you are.’

Dan said, ‘Jane was an active member of the Anti-Vietnam Campaign at Oxford.’

‘If being active is distributing a few leaflets.’

Marcia said, ‘You’re against?’

‘I’m afraid so. Very much against.’

The girl flicked her husband a look. ‘Mitch is against, really. He just won’t admit it.’

‘He just won’t admit he’s certain. That’s all.’ He looked across at Dan. ‘Europe, right? I appreciate, it’s all one hell of a way away. But the way I see it it’s like World War Two. How it was with you then, and the Nazis. I mean, if you don’t fight them all the way, where the hell are they going to stop?’

Jane said, ‘I think Hitler did announce his intention of invading Britain. I don’t believe the North Vietnamese intend to cross the Pacific.’

Marcia said fiercely, ‘Exactly.’

‘Hold on. Forgive me, but isn’t that a kind of simplistic assumption to make about Communism? What I’ve heard, someone else is behind Hanoi.’

Marcia broke in before Jane could answer. ‘Okay, so we face that when it happens.’

‘Baby, it’s happening. Jesus.’

The argument went on several minutes more; and it seemed to Dan to be more and more a linguistic problem—perhaps in this case also a psychological one, a case of a threatened personal virility fearing a threatened national one—rather than a political issue; a lack of a register of discourse, of other horizons. He could see what really disturbed Mitchell, it was the question of freedom; even though he seemed to an outsider a largely conditioned young man, he had a terrifying belief in it as a universal panacea. Jane suggested the corruption of the South Vietnamese government hardly argued a free society; but he wouldn’t wear that. There must be free elections. Perhaps that was a fortunate privilege of advanced democracies? But he symptomatically jumped on such monstrous elitism and pessimism. He didn’t think ‘anyone’ had the right to decide people were so damn ignorant they couldn’t be allowed to choose; and Dan was left once again wondering how the idea that pragmatism was the bedrock of American character had ever entered the world.

It seemed to Dan yet another Ancient Egyptian aspect of the United States. He had picked up a fact (been shown it with a smile by Jane) in the guidebook. For the Egyptians the land of death had been where the sun set, in the West; and their euphemism for the dead became ‘the Westerners’. That once all-pervasive fear of death had turned into this all-pervasive fear of non-freedom; and it was as pathetic, or as futile, in the exaggeration of attitude and the blindness of reason that it induced, as all the pharaonic mania for assuring an afterlife. A million Asian peasants must die so that the illusion could be kept whole. The real and archetypal Red under the bed was determinism; and all the more terrifying for having its fifth column, its agents and subversives and brainwashers, in every act of life… and not least in the everyday language of life.

They left the table to get ready for their afternoon tour without any resolution of the argument. Marcia was silent by then, and she did not appear when twenty minutes later they assembled by the gangway to go ashore. Mitchell said she was tired, she hadn’t slept too well the previous night. But during the tour he suddenly told Dan, when they were on their own for a minute or two and as if only another male could understand, about the childlessness problem; evidently he didn’t realize that Jane had already been told. It made Marcia difficult at times, she kind of switched what she felt about that, and couldn’t say, on to her feelings about the war. He guessed he shouldn’t have argued.

Dan said, ‘That’s tough.’ He smiled sympathetically. ‘Life can be a shit when it wants.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘You have tried…?’

‘The lot. I have a doctor friend. He keeps me up-to-date with all the latest research. If there’s a breakthrough, we fly tomorrow.’

And Dan was left with this sad little faith in technology as the key to the best of all possible worlds. That celebrated and pernicious myth seemed to underlie all his companion’s attitudes. In the baseball imagery Mitchell was rather fond of, he had struck out; but he could not yet imagine not having another turn at bat—or that there was not even a pitcher involved, but simply the nature of things. For this kind of innocence, Virgil and Voltaire were still to come. He hardly photographed that day, but drifted glumly around, and Dan felt sorry for him.

However, Marcia appeared again at dinner. She seemed recovered, she had slept, evidently marital peace had been made; and as if to demonstrate it they talked about the Lebanon and Syria, a holiday they had had there soon after they came: Beirut, Damascus, Byblos, Palmyra… the latter especially, it was incredible, the strangest damned place on earth. Jane had heard the same from someone once at Oxford. Wasn’t there a Crusader castle? That was feeding Christians to hungry lions—they’d been there too. The Krak des Chevaliers, out of this world, Dan and Jane couldn’t imagine… it was such a pity Mitch hadn’t brought some fantastic shots he took. With which Dan secretly agreed; their enthusiasm grew more and more boring. A little travelling was a dangerous thing. Yet he listened and smiled and raised his eyebrows under the impression that he was obeying a humble Jane-inspired version of Nelson’s famous signal at Trafalgar.

In fact, and although he had not, during that dull dinner, perhaps because of the too exactly pictured and specific set of Egyptian divinities closest on his mind, had the least realization of the honour he was being accorded, he was not just doing his expected duty—but meeting incarnate the darkest, strangest and most omnipotent god of them all.

A pleasure for Dan during the cruising—one Jane did not share, though she showed an occasional interest—was the bird life of the river. He had not this time made the mistake of leaving his field-glasses at home. The Nile is both a major migration route and a wintering place, and there were birds everywhere: hundreds of wagtails on every shore, and often on the ship itself; weaving clouds of swifts and beautiful blood-red and indigo swallows; endless flocks of duck—pintail, mallard, pochard, teal and others he could not identify; the Egyptian wild geese whose remote ancestors he also saw much closer at hand, painted on temple walls; herons and egrets, hawks and falcons. All landscapes acquired, in his eyes, a most characteristic emblematic bird; and here he decided it was the spur-winged plover, a cousin of the English lapwings he sometimes saw on the Thorncombe meadows, but a far more elegant little creature, Nefertiti to a dowd. As in New Mexico, and everywhere else in his life, all this nature delighted and reassured him. The earth abided, and behind surfaces and plumages there was no new thing under the sun.

In a way the birds were a primeval version of the fellaheen; they endured through simplicity, they formed an alternative world to the one on the ship, a sanctuary from the neuroses, the oversensitivities, the time-wastings, the illusions and dilemmas of his own hyper-sophisticated species. They also brought him back into conversation with the Herr Professor. It happened when they were sailing back from Abydos to visit Dendera. Dan was at the rail at a place where the Nile stretched very wide and sandbanks showed. There was a voice beside him.

‘You are watching the birds?’

Dan lowered his glasses.

‘Yes. Though I’m a bit out of my depth here.’

The old man pointed with his stick at a distant gathering. ‘That is Chenalopex aegyptiacus. The Egyptian Goose.’

‘I’ve just been looking at them.’ He smiled again at the professor. ‘You’re an ornithologist as well?’

The old man raised his hand in a quick disclaimer. ‘I have had to learn their names as part of my work. They were sometimes paid in tribute.’

‘We saw a marvellous bird at Karnak. Green… a bee-eater?’

‘Bee… ah, yes. Bien enfresser. Green like a parrot? That is Merops superciliosus.’ He shrugged, as if his knowing the Latin name was indeed pedantic. ‘That too was given in tribute. For its feathers. At least we think. The hieroglyph is in dispute.’ Then he said, ‘You know the Egyptians paid a great compliment to the bird? They allowed it to symbolize the most important word in every language. The soul. The spirit.’

‘I didn’t realize.’

Jane had until then been lying on a chaise-longue some yards away, reading the Kitchener biography. But now she came to join them. The old man raised his Panama.

Dan said, ‘I shan’t have my bird-watching laughed at again. Professor Kirnberger has finally justified it for me.’ And he passed on what he had just been told. She bowed her head in mock repentance, then addressed the old man.

‘I come with a much more banal question, professor. I wondered what that plant is they grow along the river bank.’ She pointed back across the deck to the nearer side, where the river was bordered down to the water with little plots of vivid green.

‘That is barsim. A kind of winter clover. For their animals.’

‘I suppose they’ve been growing the same crops for thousands of years.’

‘Not at all. It is the methods that have not changed.’

A waiter came round with coffee, and they persuaded the old man to sit with them. He perched upright, with his hands cupped and folded over his walking-stick. Every so often he would acknowledge with a nod of the head some member of his flock who happened to pass. Jane had smiled at him when they sat down.

‘Am I being very wicked in finding the fellaheen as interesting as the temples?’

He hesitated, in a way he had, as if he had to compose his sentences carefully before he spoke. There was a little glint in his look.

‘Madame, I suspect you know that your sex is never more charming than when it is being wicked.’ The sere skin beside his eyes crinkled. ‘So perhaps I should not tell you that you are not being wicked.’ He glanced out towards the bank. ‘We used to spend all our time digging for the past.’ He smiled back at them. ‘When the past was still living all about us. That is changing now. Our colleagues in anthropology are discovering many things.’

And he began to tell them—they connived a little, already knowing some of it from Jane’s booklet—about the fellaheen. The word came from falaha, to till. Their villages were both Coptic and Moslem, usually but not always separate. The curse of their history was the lack of rural landed gentry. They had always been exploited by absentee landlords, who for millennia had relied on a ruthless caste of overseers. But all that was rapidly changing since the Nasser land reforms. Dan and Jane must not be misled by the apparent tranquillity they saw; there were violent clan vendettas and rivalries, a great deal of thieving of livestock. They were forbidden guns, but they all had them; and they were also very fierce over female honour. Fellaheen versions of Romeo and Juliet, said the old man, were still enacted every day.

Jane asked if they sympathized with the new socialist trend in Egyptian politics. The old man shook his head.

‘It is beyond their conception. Cairo is as far away here as Berlin or London. They are very old, they have seen many so-called superior civilizations pass—with all their cruelties, their lies, their promises. For them all that remains is their river, and their land. That is all they care about. For them socialism is no more than another foreign culture. Perhaps good, perhaps bad. Colonel Nasser gave them some of their land back. So good. But he also built the Aswan Dam, which means their soil is no longer refreshed by alluvium every year. That is very bad. What need have they of hydro-electricity? They wait and see—yes? From the beginning of time, and I think to the end of it.’ He looked out to the bank. ‘I admire them. For all their faults. They are brave people.’

And finally he told them two words, without which one could never decipher the fellaheen character. One was qadim, which meant ancient, holding power from the past, therefore never to be relinquished. It was their key of life, their passport to survival. The other word was kayf, which meant sitting, thinking and doing nothing, existence as a waiting-room for a train that will never come. That was the image he used.

Jane said, ‘I find that very sad.’

The old man shrugged. ‘It is a philosophy of necessity. They are always sad.’

‘But you have sympathy for it?’

‘Let us say I have lived too long in this country not to understand.’ He looked down, with a minute, faintly birdlike tilt of his head, his hands still clasped over the handle of his stick. ‘It is for old men.’ Then he wrily sought their eyes. ‘And perhaps above all for old Egyptologists?’

Jane said, ‘Professor, I suspect you have far too good a sense of humour to be a fatalist.’

That brought the old German short a little. He gave her a severe glance, as if he knew he was being teased, then looked down with another of his hesitations.

‘I was taught humour at the source, madame. Many years ago I did something no true German, no very serious young scholar, should ever do. I fell in love with an Englishwoman. And what is worse, I married her.’ For a moment he enjoyed their surprise, their smiles. ‘She is long dead, alas. But in our most happy years together she did manage to persuade me that scholarship and solemnity are not always quite the same thing.’ Then he said, in a gentler voice, ‘A lesson it is a pleasure to be reminded of.’

‘When did she die?’

‘Many years ago. just after the war.’

‘She was an archaeologist?’

‘No, madame. A doctor. I believe almost the first woman doctor in Cairo.’

He mentioned her maiden name, which meant nothing to Jane and Dan; but her father had also been a doctor, had headed a Cairo hospital during the Protectorate. It was a name still remembered ‘with much honour’ in the capital, the old man said; and despite the anglophobic side of Egyptian nationalism. There were two children, both sons. One now lived in East Germany, the younger in America: he too had become an archaeologist, though his field was the Mayan. The old man was a grandfather several times over.

He left them soon after that, and they speculated about the gaps in what he had said: his present political beliefs, how he had managed during the Nazi period. They felt he must have travelled beyond all that: behind his self-irony, his authority, his knowledge there lay a stillness, almost that of an Indian sage… but one didn’t know if it came from qadirn or kayf, from his profession and long expatriation or from his heart condition. Perhaps he was living now on borrowed time, waiting for the final stroke.

From then on they spoke quite often with him. They felt distinctly envious of the East Europeans when their party set off at the various sites. The French were beginning to get restless at the oratorical overkill of their own Egyptian chaperone; and Dan and Jane were to have one small direct proof of what they were missing when by chance the two parties were close to each other, and given ten minutes’ rest, at Queen Hatshepsut’s temple at Thebes. The Herr Professor beckoned to them—and led them into the Punt Hall to show Dan some bird details in one of the paintings recording the queen’s naval expedition to Somaliland; and he told them briefly about the queen and her history. It was the difference between mechanically repeated and lived knowledge.

They strolled back with the bearded old man down the incline to the waiting coaches, and gently probed him on this seemingly rather menial task he was performing. But he was quick to the defence of his flock. They were all experts in their own fields, they were doing invaluable work for Egypt, he was the fortunate one; and besides, he liked to have news of home, to meet people with other interests. He learnt, always on such excursions, far more than he taught. And did not Oxford professors do such things, guide tours to Greece and Turkey? Dan and Jane agreed that they did, but couldn’t quite convey to the old man that they felt he was doing something rather different, more truly democratic. Dan ventured one oblique question. He asked if there was a Marxist approach to Ancient Egypt. Their companion gave an inclination of the head.

‘Most certainly. From that point of view Egypt is the most studied of ancient cultures. With Greece and Rome.’ It was a carefully neutral reply, but perhaps he guessed the real drift behind Dan’s questions. He gave him an oblique look. ‘You understand what ka means, Mr Martin?’

‘The soul?’

The old man raised a finger.

‘Not quite soul. Etymologically it means the Greek pneuma—breath? It was personal. Each had his own ka. So to say, it was a man’s ideal image of his own life. It could survive death only in connection with the personal body, which is why the ancients were so anxious to preserve their corpses. You understand it best by contrast with ba. That was not attached to the body. It was individual, but after death it joined the khu—the divine spirit, yes—which could not take bodily form. It is complicated. But we may say that ka and ba are ways of seeing man first as an individual… and then as one.’ He pointed to one side with his stick as they slowly walked. ‘As the artist does.’ He pointed to the other. ‘As the scientist. As a unique experience. As a processus.’ He looked ahead to where the two parties were boarding their coaches, then gave Jane and Dan a little smile. ‘Speaking for myself, I do not know which way is better. I think the ancients were wise. They knew neither was sufficient in itself. You understand?’

Dan smiled at the old man, then briefly across him at Jane, and then down at the ground.

‘Yes. And agree.’

‘Good.’

So they were left a shade wiser about the old man and Dan had gained a new concept—that of ha, or personal immortality based on the body and its belongings and leavings, even if no more remained than Mrs Dalloway’s memories in other minds.

He and Jane talked about it before dinner that evening, overtly in connection with Kitchener, because Dan had immediately seized on an idea there… some scene between Kitchener and a Victorian Egyptologist, just such an explanation of what ka and ba meant, a light in the soldier’s eyes; or if not as explicit as that, certainly a scene where the shrewd old self-promoter saw the valency of the concept in some ancient monument… the methods of conquering time; to each his pyramid. Although they did not argue about all this, Dan secretly thought that these two terms, ka and ba, applied also to their own relationship. He was the first, Jane the second; a would-be ambition, a would-be selflessness; and equally insufficient.

They persuaded the professor to sit with them again one morning, when coffee was brought round, though this time the Czech mining engineer was also there. Dan had revealed the real reason for his presence on the cruise, and the old man was interested. He had not come to Egypt until after the British Protectorate was ended in 1922, but he had memories of those days. His English father-in-law had even met Kitchener several times as a young man, as well as Lord Cromer; and he still seemed to hold these two in a reflected reverence. Dan was able to do some instructing in his turn; and with his new scene in mind ended by suggesting that the more megalomaniac pharaohs must have set a bad example to the proconsul. The old German was amused, and turned to the Czech.

‘These English set a very bad example for us other nations. They have no respect for their heroes.’ But he got no support. That was one of the things, the engineer declared, that he admired in the British. The old man nodded at Dan. ‘Very well. You may be rude to Lord Kitchener. But not to Ramses the Second.’