The Sacred River (19 page)

Picking up his scalpel, he began with its sharp, silver point to scrape dried bat droppings from a scarab he had found a few days earlier. The scarab was green, made of malachite, and smaller than his thumbnail. The humble beetle had been for the ancient Egyptians the symbol of resurrection, for the way it rolled its ball of muck, mimicking the sun rising to roll across the sky each day. This one had survived some two and a half thousand years. It was crudely carved, the workmanship unremarkable. There had been shoddy workers among the scribes and craftsmen of ancient Egypt, as well as fine ones. It touched him, to realize it. He had a tenderness toward the imperfect. He reached for a brush and dusted away the specks of dirt and dust he’d dislodged from the carved lines of the beetle’s back.

As he did so, Eberhardt saw again the white, oval face, the sideways tilt of it as it rested on the long, linked fingers. The woman had been so very still as she looked out over the river. As if, he could not help thinking, she too inhabited that space between the lands of the living and the dead.

“
Ach
,” he said aloud. “Such nonsense. Be quiet now.”

He’d gotten into the regrettable habit of talking to himself. He spoke Arabic fluently, had exchanges all day long with the workers at the site and the foreman who managed the hiring and firing, distributed the wages. He could speak with them but he couldn’t talk to them. They understood each other to a serviceable degree and no further. If he had anything important to discuss, he conversed with himself. Or sometimes with Kati.

He put down the scarab and went to the far side of the room, to where the Bösendorfer stood, opened the lid. Pulling up his shirtsleeves, inclining his sore back over the ivories, he lowered his fingers to the keys and heard the first notes enter the room like party guests, dancing over the air, reaching the mud ceiling and the rounded corners, drifting out through the netted door to the verandah. He closed his eyes and played on, Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved filling his head and heart and mind.

“Kati,” he said, his voice drowned out by the music. “Where are you? Where are you now?”

THIRTY

The air in Luxor was dry and clean, composed mainly of sunlight, it seemed to Harriet as she inhaled it. Her chest had gradually ceased to ache and her breathing grew deeper and easier with each day that passed. Sitting in the grass-topped shelter in the hotel garden with Louisa, inhaling the scent of the jasmine that grew up the wooden supports, the muddy, underlying tang of the great river, she felt as if she might take in so much air she could float away like a balloon.

Each morning, Arab men came to the hotel gates to offer their services as guides to the west bank. They pressed around European visitors, offering to procure donkeys on the other side, ladies’ saddles, cold water,
antikis
for a good price.

Harriet and Louisa watched from where they sat on the stone terrace at the front of the hotel.

“Why don’t we go, Mother?” Harriet said. “I’d like to.”

Monsieur Andreas, hovering by a bed of leggy roses in the garden, cleared his throat.

“I will find the best guide for Madame,” he said. “The very best.”

Louisa lifted her green veil, threw it back over her hat, and smiled at him.

“I fear it may overtax Harriet’s strength, Monsieur,” she said. “And for myself I consider visiting tombs a macabre occupation.”

Monsieur Andreas nodded, looking at Louisa, dipping his dark head up and down.

“As Madame wishes,” he said.

Harriet decided not to quarrel with her mother. She would find a way to get to the west bank. When she was fully recovered, she would insist on it. If Louisa refused, she would go alone, with Fouad.

Until she could reach the Necropolis, Harriet occupied herself at the Luxor temple, a short walk from the hotel. She settled to sketching a section of wall that bore a carved depiction of a king offering two round vessels to a god. The king looked boyish, his chest bare and his profile grave and smooth under an elaborate crown. Attached to the front of his crown was his uraeus, the raised head of a cobra, ready to spit in the eyes of enemies.

The deity to whom he offered vessels of wine wore the plumes of Amun, the hidden one, and held a scepter, or
was
, emblem of the power of the gods, in his left hand. In Amun’s right hand, hanging from his fingers, was an ankh, the symbol of life and breath. Amun held the ankh
loosely, almost casually, as if it was a gift to be lightly given and as lightly withheld.

Above the two figures and running down between them were vertical lines of hieroglyphs, the characters large and beautifully formed. Harriet recognized the seated woman with a single feather on her head that signified the goddess Maat, or truth. The ankh was repeated again and again on the panel of stone. Had some invisible god handed her an ankh, she wondered as she worked. Had she been given the gift of breath, of life, in this place?

While she sketched, Fouad held the parasol over Harriet’s head, keeping curious children at bay by means of a narrowed gaze or click of his tongue. Far from Alexandria, out of the shadow of Mustapha, their dragoman appeared taller than he had, and a more effective protector.
Dragoman
came from a Turkish word meaning
to explain
and Fouad, encouraged by her interest in the life of the present as well as the past, had begun to explain all that he could to Harriet.

“Good, Miss Harry?” he said when she raised her head and found him looking at her work.

“
Kwayis
?”

“
Kwayis
, Fouad,” she replied.

THIRTY-ONE

Harriet seemed well, which gave Louisa some peace. She was out for long hours, accompanied by Fouad, sketching at the temple. Alone in the hotel room, or continuing with her tatting in the large garden, Louisa found herself once more reliving the days of her girlhood. Through the long years of her marriage to Blundell, she’d never dared to recall that time. Now, considering the events from a distance of half a lifetime, she saw them differently.

All the while she stood naked before him, Augustus had complained of her form. Her legs were bandy; had she had the rickets? She assured him that she had not. Her breasts were overdeveloped. Her hair made her look like a gypsy, and that, as it happened, he liked. It distinguished her from the prissy misses crowding every London salon and now being aped even by the country girls. Gypsy she was and Gypsy she should be called. But her expression was that of a frightened hare, for Christ’s sake. How was he expected to render her as a goddess when she looked like a hare? What Thetis ever chewed her own nails? Bit her lip?

Louisa grew accustomed to the judgments. She was clothed by them, armored. Knowing he did not find her pleasing but that he wanted her presence all the same, grew angry if she was late to arrive at the door of the barn, she became bold. Looking at the paintings of other women, she informed him of her opinions, wondered that such an old man could persuade such beauties to pose for him. Sometimes, at the end of the sitting, when he laid down his brushes, he caught hold of her by her hair and drew her close.

“Here, Gypsy. Come to me.”

He put his nose to her neck, tightened his hands around her waist. Then released her, instructing her to put on her clothes and be gone.

Later, when her form was complete, she had to don the red velvet robe of Thetis. It smelled of another woman’s sweat and perfume and one of the silver buttons on the front of the costume lolled on a length of twisted red thread, ready to roll away. She disliked the way the garment trailed on the floor, emphasizing her modest height. Augustus brushed off her objections. The robe concealed a number of her imperfections, he pronounced, arranging it so that it fell open to the waist. It lent her an air of mystery no woman of her age could hope to possess. Having been already naked before him, Louisa felt no shame in appearing half clothed. In the airy studio that was a world in itself, she became someone different. Her second self, the one in the picture, gave her a power over Augustus.

In the long hours of posing for him, she felt hypnotized by the repetitive swishing of the flat sable brush over the canvas, the earthy, musky smell on the air of linseed oil, the sharp interruption of turpentine. The image forming on the canvas was and wasn’t her. This woman’s skin was made of lead white, of rose madder and Naples yellow, with cerulean blue in the shadows under her eyes; her hair was umber, the raw and the burnt, the robe orange and Chinese vermilion. In the long afternoons, he taught her the names of the pigments, made her recite them to keep herself awake. Burnt sienna, lake, ultramarine. Cobalt and cadmium. Ivory black. Ivory black was made from the burned tusks of elephants, ground up with oil. Bone char, he called it. Umber was from the Latin.
Umbra
. Shadow.

Her second self was made of color, of Augustus’s sighs and squintings, his sallies toward the canvas and his steppings back from it, his under-the-breath curses, laughs, expletives, they too were in the thick, daubed texture of the picture that was taking shape on the canvas, coming to life, as if the black-haired, sullen-eyed woman might at any moment speak, or sing, or sigh. Drop her gaze. Louisa felt altered by the existence of the other woman. The painting was something born between them.

Often, the real shadow passed over the doorway. Augustus, standing with his back to it, could not see it but Louisa could. It appeared in its full outline one day and stopped, remained motionless for a minute or more. Louisa saw what she already knew. It was the boy, standing somewhere beyond the half-open door. His shadow, thrown into the room by the afternoon sun, was elongated, taller than his father. Seeing the hang of his arms by his sides, their powerless drop, she flinched.

“What is it?”

Too late, Augustus turned his head. Surveyed the bright empty slant of sunlight.

“Only look, Gypsy. Don’t see.”

•  •  •

At the end of July, when the cornfields had been cut, when the charred smell of burnt stubble hung in the air and the fields of gold were black, Augustus announced that she was to don the embellishments.

“What are embellishments?”

He produced a pair of what he called sandals, no more than soles and straps. Knelt down and put them on her feet, laced them up her ankles. Lying on a great carved tray, throughout the sittings, were a number of strange and beautiful objects. Louisa sometimes examined them, picking up the sheaf of peacock feathers and brushing them against her cheek, peering with one eye through the stone with a hole through its center or pricking her finger on the pointed ears of a cat carved in black basalt. At the center of the collection was a silver ornament. A ribbed, shallow bowl of a shell, of a type she had never seen on their own beach. She’d never dared to touch it.

Augustus selected the shell, threaded it onto a fine strip of leather. He came and stood behind Louisa, so close that she felt the hairs on the nape of her neck rise. He felt with his finger for the hollow in the center of her throat, then laid the shell over the spot, tied the straps on her neck clumsily, methodically. The piece was cold on her skin, heavy, its edges smooth and rounded.

As he turned her around, pulling her by one hand so that she faced him, she giggled.

“It feels so strange. Not like me at all.”

He took hold of her by both arms, his thumbs digging into her flesh.

“It isn’t you.”

His voice was hoarse, like stones being rubbed together. He was looking at her mouth. She felt a shift in temperature, slight, as if the sun had gone behind a cloud.

“What do you—”

Augustus released her arm and slid his hand inside the open robe as his mouth closed on hers. The sensation of his lips, his tongue in her mouth, was overpoweringly strange. He pulled away from her.

“Go and lie down.”

Walking toward the couch, Louisa felt a blossoming between her legs like a flower opening. She lay down, listening to the sound of his belt buckle. She’d known from when she first saw him on the beach that this, whatever it was, was going to happen. That she, because she loved him, was going to allow it to happen.