Ancient Evenings

by Norman Mailer

  We dismounted from the sedan chairs, and the bearers, after a nod from Menenhetet, gave a quick kiss to the seat (whose leather was marked with nothing less than the hieroglyph——which represents the Land of the Dead). My father, having handed the sedan-chair leader a copper utnu, and the officer at the door having recognized us—I could see by the look of relief on his face that he had been expecting his distinguished guest for half the morning—we passed with many a bow by the attendants into the green and verdant garden of the Pharaoh’s Court of Honor. There, trees with fruit I had never seen before grew at the edge of an oblong pool whose tiles were covered with gold.

  “When these trees were young,” my mother whispered to me, “their feet were set in pots, and they were put on boats and carried across many a storm until they reached our land.”

  “How does it look?” I asked, “where the river comes to the open waters?”

  “There are more birds,” she said, “than you have ever seen.”

  I was thinking of the squalling of those birds above that wet land, and how different they must be from the birds of this garden. Here, one flamingo had colors orange and pink and gold, and there was a black ibis, and plovers that raced from branch to branch showing feathers as brilliant as the tail of an ostrich. I remember when I was two, and still new to the thought of expressing myself, I had asked my mother why we put the heads of birds on so many of our Gods. (Having seen, long before I could read, how many of the sacred sticks our scribes drew on papyrus were of birds, I had assumed such hieroglyphs were given to us by the Gods as pictures of Themselves.) My mother had smiled then. “The child asks questions that bring peace to my mind,” she said, “I feel the feather when he speaks.” That was a reference to Maat I would understand only later—we had a saying that the edge of a feather was the closest you could come to touching the truth. Then, out of whatever composure my thought had given her, my mother said, “Birds are most respected—they fly.”

  Fly they did, and in this grove, they whipped and laced from branch to branch, and seemed to dart in delight at the reflection of themselves in the gold tile of the pool where their colors flew along the shallow bottom like rainbow-colored fish, yet even in their gaiety that rollicked through the shade of these foreign trees, I could hear the distant echo of panic. The sounds of these birds were stranger to me than the grunts of animals hard at work, for in those, at least, I could hear the sound of the earth—I suppose I mean to speak of that unheard sound that connects one’s feet to the earth. Birds, however, always twittered of some unrest that was in the agitation of their flesh forever fearful of our ground, no, the earth was not a place where a bird could rest.

  Nonetheless, this garden—after the glare of the courtyard—was a grove. Every smell of loam, and some I never smelled before, was in my nose, damp and mysterious as the cool I once discovered at the edge of a cave, and in this air, I felt the nearness of the Pharaoh. At the end of our walk, near to obscured by the foliage, was a small wooden villa painted in every bright color of the flowers of the garden, a peculiar building, on stilts perhaps, yet, like a house, built around all four sides of a patio, so that, walking beneath, we passed into deep shadow, then came out of the shadow to a place in the open center where the sun was shining.

  I had always dreamed that the Pharaoh would rest on a throne at the end of a great hall, and visitors would approach by crawling forward on their knees, and indeed Menenhetet had told us how Ramses Two used to give vast audiences at festival time in the middle of an immense place in the old city of Thebes, but then, even as I was trying to think of how large that could have been—was it larger than where we had seen the charioteers at their drill?—we entered the patio and I felt the Pharaoh, or certainly felt His force as the sun blinded my eyes on our sudden emergence into its glare. A weight came down upon the back of my head heavy as the sun, and before I knew it, had me prostrating myself on the ground in the way I had been instructed, my hips in the air, my knees and face to the earth—was there a smell of incense to this sacred earth?—and had no idea whether it was a force from the Pharaoh on the balcony above that had laid me low, or only the hand of my father kneeling next to me on the one side and my mother on the other. In front of us, honored by his rank, Menenhetet had merely lowered himself to one knee.

  In a moment, my mother and father rose with Menenhetet, their knees still to the ground, their arms extended—a position natural to my father (I could feel his happiness) and demeaning to my mother (I could sense now she detested it) but I, to my surprise, did not wish to move, as if, with mouth and nose pressed into the grit of the dirt, and my eyes not a finger’s width above, I felt the heavy peace of that great circle in which we revolve before we sleep. Not daring to look up at the Pharaoh (Who had, by His Presence, forced my mouth to kiss the ground) I did not know if the weight on my back still came from His eyes, the full heat of the sun, or both (and very much the same) since I had been told from the day I heard the name, Son of the Sun, that no man on earth was nearer to Ra than our Monarch, Si-Ra Ramses Ninth in all of His great titles: Nefer-Ka-Ra Setpenere Ramses Kham-uese Meriamon (for Ptah-nem-hotep was only the name of His boyhood by which old friends and high officials could call Him).

  Then, I do not know whether I passed through vertigo or bliss, but circles of color vibrated right up from the earth into my eyes, and I felt another force summoning me to rise until I lifted my eyes high enough to look up to the balcony for the face of the Pharaoh.

  He was seated between two columns, and leaned with His elbows upon a gold railing protected by a red embroidered cushion. I could see no more of His body than a collar of gold that covered His chest, and above was His great Double-Crown, high and full as two sails, and with the small jeweled body of a gold snake above His right eye. It was more like looking at a large shield than at a man, the tall white crown of the Pharaoh forming the upper arch, and His collar, the lower. Or, so I might have thought but for His beautiful face between. He had eyes that were very large, and the black lines of the cosmetic made them more prominent. As my mother had told me, His eyes were famous for change of color: now bright and clear as the sky, they would yet reflect the dark of a moonless night. He had a long sad nose, not at all like other noses. It was very thin, and His nostrils were narrow as a cat’s. As He turned His head I could see that the shape of this nose was curious, for the curve, by one view, gave to His elegant and aquiline face a fine scimitar, but from the other side, looked as mournful as a drop of water about to fall from a down-turned leaf. Beneath that narrow nose was a beautiful mouth, full and splendidly curved, and it lived in intimacy with the nose above, a most peculiar way to describe it, except it made me think of my nurse Eyaseyab standing next to me, since we did not look the least alike, and she was a slave, although I was never so comfortable as when I found myself with her, short fat Eyaseyab. As I looked at His mouth and nose, I could also see my nose against the thick skirt of Eyaseyab’s upper thigh, and recollected the smell of earth and fish and riverbank that came off her. That seemed kin to the care with which Ptah-nem-hotep’s narrow nostrils seemed to curl in the breath that came from His mouth, and I felt a strong desire to kiss Him. I wished to bury my sweet mouth—everyone assured me my mouth was sweet—on the lips of the Son of Ra, and this desire having come to me, gave permission to the next desire—and I saw myself straining at the tip of my toes to kiss the divine finger between the legs of the Pharaoh, an impulse I could hardly take in before my next thought was to do the same to my great-grandfather. There, beneath the spell of the Pharaoh’s nose, as bewitching to me as the powdered navel of my mother, I had a vision of myself in the future, and I was a young man in a dark room within a dark mountain, there on my knees before the Ka of my great-grandfather, and I do not know if all I now saw at the age of six was only a gift given back to me from the Ka of myself remembering, at last, a day of my life, or whether I was not, in truth, on the patio of Ptah-nem-hotep (for so I called Him at once in my heart as if we were old frie
nds) and therefore I was more alive here than in my Ka on its knees at the tomb of Khufu. Then—as if I rose from a night of awful dreams into the day—I became certain I was alive and six years old when, still kneeling with my arms before me, I looked up again to the face of the Pharaoh, and He spoke in a clear and ringing voice of the most distinguished tones, indeed a voice—I most certainly heard it—that, phrase for phrase, was equal to my great-grandfather at teasing a truth with quiet mockery.

  “Menenhetet,” said the Pharaoh, “can it be a small motive that encourages you to honor My invitation?”

  “Matters of the greatest concern for myself would seem of small import to Your Majesty,” said Menenhetet in a voice that floated forth like a leaf laid on water.

  “You could not have a small reason. Only a modest explanation,” said our Pharaoh, and pleased with this answer, added, “Rise, great Menenhetet. Take your family and join Me here.” He patted the cushion beside Him.

  An attendant led us to a painted stairway, and from there it was ten steps to the balcony. Ptah-nem-hotep embraced my great-grandfather and kissed my mother on the cheek. She bowed and kissed His toe, but demurely, like a cat, and my father, solemnly—he was received solemnly—knelt and gave an embrace to the other toe. “Tell me the name of Hathfertiti’s son,” said Ptah-nem-hotep.

  “It is Menenhetet the Second,” said Hathfertiti.

  “Menenhetet-Ka,” said the Pharaoh. “An ogre’s name for a lovely face.” He looked at me carefully and gave an exclamation. “Only the beauty of Hathfertiti could give birth to so perfect a face.”

  “Do not stand unmoving, my son,” said my father.

  “Yes,” said Ptah-nem-hotep tenderly, “you had better kiss My foot.”

  So I knelt, and saw that His toenails were painted blue, and His foot, when I kissed it, was perfumed, and like my mother’s scent, gave the odor of a dark red rose, or that I thought was the odor of His foot until I realized the floor had been washed in perfume. Kissing the space between the big toe and the next, my nose was pinched for an instant—the Pharaoh’s toes were fingering me—and I felt a flash of pain, not pain so much as a white light within my body, a light that must have come from the Pharaoh; its intensity made me feel like a flower plucked up from its roots—did a flower see this same white light? As if I lived again in more than one place at once, so did I know what it would be like to come forth into a woman, my flesh emblazoned in the white light of the God who came to meet me.

  Much stimulated by this power of living in two houses, my tongue began to lick the crotch of the Pharaoh’s foot, and I came away with more than an odor of rose. The faintest smell of earth and river and fish, all kin to the smell between Eyaseyab’s thighs, was also there, and even a remote hint of the fierce manly odor of urine that could often reek from the height above Menenhetet’s knees. I even felt full of the same kind of bemusement I used to know when smelling my wet fingers after tickling a little saliva over Sweet Finger or my hips and my navel. Living in the pocket of these odors, I felt the power once more of the Pharaoh’s presence and understood, as if never before instructed, that the Pharaoh was indeed the nearest of men to the Gods, yet I also knew He was a man who smelled a little like a woman, and His smells were near my own.

  I looked up, bowed my head, withdrew two steps upon my knees, and stood slowly. The Pharaoh did not take His eyes from me. “Your boy is extraordinary,” He said to Hathfertiti, “and has a sweet mouth. He will yet prove a scandal with his tongue.” Turning His look from myself to my great-grandfather in a movement just so full of the gravity of His mind as the change in mood of the sky when the sun is covered slowly by a cloud, He said to Menenhetet, “You will do well to increase every strength in this boy that sits below his mouth.”

  “That may be the search of all men,” said my great-grandfather.

  “For Pharaohs as well,” said Ptah-nem-hotep.

  My great-grandfather responded with a most unexpected speech. “O You Who live in the night, yet shine upon us in the day; Who are wise as the earth and as the river; You of the Two Great Houses, intimate of Set and Horus, You Who speak to the living and the dead, ask of Your servant, Menenhetet, any small question he can attempt to answer, but do not ask him to ponder whether a Pharaoh has need of strength in those mysterious regions that lie above the thigh and beneath the navel.”

  He said all this with such an absence of fear and such cold prowess that he separated himself from the pious sound of his praise. He had shown me once how a captured officer might hand over his sword while feeling contempt for the General to whom he surrendered—it was the only time he ever played such a game with me—and I was wondering if he showed contempt for the Pharaoh now by the words of his speech.

  “Tell Me, lovely Hathfertiti,” said our Ramses Nine, “does he speak of Me in this fashion when I am not with you?”

  “He lives,” said my mother, “for word of Your smile and mention of Your approval.”

  “Tell Me, great General,” the Pharaoh went on, with only a shrug of His fine shoulder for Hathfertiti’s reply (which had been too quick) “is this the manner in which you once spoke to My great ancestor?”

  Menenhetet bowed. “It was a young voice then. I have an old one now.”

  “Besides, the ancestor was a great Pharaoh,” Ptah-nem-hotep said.

  “The difference,” said Menenhetet, “between Ramses the Second and Ramses the Ninth is as the difference between Great Gods.”

  “Of which Great Gods do you speak?”

  “If I dare to name Them …”

  “I give you permission.”

  “Ramses the Second was called Horus-the-strong-bull-Who-loves-the-truth. Yet He would remind me more of the Great God Set.” Menenhetet took a pause for the effect of such boldness to be appreciated, and added, “Even as you, great Ninth of the Ramses, encourage me to invoke the presence of He Who is without compare, and is Osiris.”

  Menenhetet had made a splendid remark. Ptah-nem-hotep gave a rich laugh, almost as rich in the sound of its pleasure as the amusement I would sometimes hear in my mother’s voice, and I wondered then if Ptah-nem-hotep could also groan with the same profundity of expression as Hathfertiti.

  “They speak usually of Ptah, not Osiris,” He said. “I am most delighted you are here.” At an inclination of His head, servants brought cushions, and He beckoned for us to sit beside Him, even sharing the space on His own large cushion with my great-grandfather who, indeed, was embraced and kissed grudgingly on the mouth as soon as he sat down, after which Ptah-nem-hotep all but inquired of the taste left on His lips by a turn of tongue to the corner of His beautiful mouth. The Pharaoh, now inclining Himself to Hathfertiti, said, “While the servants anoint us, I will go on with this day’s work. I have audiences yet to give but must tell you that they can prove tedious. Would you prefer to be taken to your rooms?”

  “I would like to listen as the problems of the Two-Kingdoms are presented to Your wisdom.”

  “It will be a pleasure to have you at My side,” He whispered to her, and my father immediately gave a signal. A few servants came up with alabaster bowls of scented water that they set at the feet of Ptah-nem-hotep, Menenhetet, my mother and myself. It was then the Pharaoh indicated a fifth cushion for my father. “You need not oversee the eunuchs, Nef-khep-aukhem,” the Pharaoh told him.

  My father had a spark in his eye at this mention of himself. It suggested he was not always given such a gift as to hear his full name. “Good and Great God,” he replied, “I breathe the spirit of Your divine kindness but cannot rest upon my cushion for fear the eunuchs will commit an unpardonable error.”

  While my father did not often explain much of himself to me, once, unforgettably, I was told how his work as Overseer of the Cosmetic Box and Pencil could on occasion be as important as the post of the Vizier. For whenever times of trouble came to the Two-Lands, then the bearing of the Pharaoh, that is to say, His body, the clothing He wore, and the cosmetics put upon His face, was vital to
the good fortune of Egypt. Any gesture that the Pharaoh might make on such a day could shift the course of battles in distant places. The perfection of His eyes, painted pale-green and black, could give magnitude to each inclination of His head. When the Pharaoh was seated on His throne (which always faced the river) He had only to incline the royal neck to right or to left and a breeze would begin in the Upper or Lower Kingdom. So did He need no more than to turn the handle of His crook, and benedictions could be sent to shepherds in valleys we did not see, even as the smallest shake of His flail would inspire field-overseers to whip their labor-gangs. His sunshade, made from an ostrich tail, promoted the health of flowers; the great necklace that covered His chest was the golden ear of the Sun; and His crown of feathers (when He chose to wear it) gave joy or solemnity to the song of birds. My mother had frowned as my father instructed me in these stories. “Why don’t you tell the boy that it is only the ancient Kings Who could put on a leopard’s tail and stir the animals in the jungle. Our Ptah-nem-hotep does not possess such power.”

  But even as a child, I could see that my father, despite his desire for perfect decorum, was most practical. “The Pharaoh,” he answered, “would have infinite power if He were not constantly attacked by other powers who are also infinite.”

  “Why,” she asked, “is He attacked?”

  “Because of the weakness of the Pharaohs Who came before Him.” He looked back at me. “For this reason, it is more important than ever that any ornament which touches His body be without flaw, or His power is weakened further.”