Ancient Evenings

by Norman Mailer

  I thought there had to be some error in my father’s argument. Certainly, he was not always to be found in the presence of the Pharaoh. He was often at home. So he could hardly oversee every last cosmetic. Wondering about this, I saw that my father now stood to the side and did not really interfere with the work of the eunuchs who had come in with all the friendliness of puppies and all the grace of dancing girls while two of them began (humming little tunes and smiling at us) to wash Ptah-nem-hotep’s feet with great playfulness, as if indeed like puppies they had something of a right to nip and gnaw on His ankles. Three others served Menenhetet, my mother, and myself. With a considerable amount of merriment, their teeth shining, they tickled the soles of our feet and wiggled their fingers like minnows between our toes, only to scourge the dead skin from our heels with their blunt fingernails.

  After a while, they finished with our feet and began to massage our legs. They were handsome men and probably had been chosen from the same village in Nubia or Rush for they were all about the same size, and of the same deep black, and their resemblance to one another was increased by the shining ivory pin that passed through their nose, each pin set at the same angle to their mouth as if they had all been born with one decoration from one womb.

  They knew their work and, with or without my father, would hardly make an error. Soon they were massaging not only our legs, but our necks and shoulders, and the eunuch serving Hathfertiti began to rub an oil in exquisite circles around her navel to which she gave unabashed grunts of pleasure, curiously clear and loud as if such a forceful sound was certainly part of a noblewoman’s etiquette.

  “I must purchase this eunuch from You,” she said to Ptah-nem-hotep, Who smiled agreeably. “Are they not delightful?” He asked, and looked at the dark bodies of these five slaves with the same love I had seen my great-grandfather give to a team of matched horses or twin white bulls, and indeed, since the slaves wore nothing, one could see not only their plump and muscular haunches, but the shiny stump where their testicles had been and this gave them a nice resemblance to geldings.

  Ptah-nem-hotep remarked, “You cannot imagine what joy these boys bring to My harem. If I were still a very young man, I might suffer a lover’s jealousy at the thought of what their hands can give to My little queens, but fortunately, I am sensible and appreciate that the eunuch is a blessing for a Prince. No woman can soothe a man as well, nor massage him into the same peace,” Ptah-nem-hotep sighed. “Yes, they even pacify the animals.”

  “They sound,” said Menenhetet, “more agreeable than the Gods.”

  “They are certainly,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “less wicked.”

  Menenhetet nodded profoundly.

  Hathfertiti said, “It is only in Your presence, Twice-Great-House, that I can listen to such conversation without trembling.” But her words were too flattering. Ptah-nem-hotep replied, “Even as a slave may relieve the boredom of his master by teasing him, so may we speak lightly of the Gods,” but now He looked captured by boredom.

  My father chose this moment to say, “To be in the presence of the Twice-Great-House is to live without fear,” except he looked not at all free of fear as he said it, for at just this moment, a servant came in to present a cooling drink, and Ptah-nem-hotep, making a gesture of annoyance, waved it away. “You and Hathfertiti,” He remarked to my father, “certainly speak like brother and sister,” and His enormous eyes lifted in the gentlest curve of surprise as if He could not comprehend how a Princess like my mother, so perfect in her manner (except for her occasional descent into piety) was not only married, but half sister, to a man so common in his birth as my father. I winced with certainty that the Pharaoh was thinking this, but knew whether He did or not that I would still think it because my mother had told me this was the first cause of shame in our family.

  Yet, with an obvious concern for His guests—as if His mood might also wither if conversation did not improve—our Pharaoh now turned to my mother and said, “Do you favor the shade of blue in the wig I am wearing?” and asked the question with enough force in His voice to strike a spark of fire in her, so that she replied, “It is not as blue as the sky,” at which they both laughed. My father gave a hurried signal to his assistant, the Overseer of the Royal Wig, who promptly came in with a large silver platter on which rested two black wigs, one straight, one with curls, and two new blue wigs, of which one was curled. I was cheered by the gaiety shown now by my mother and Ptah-nem-hotep. If the warmth of the Pharaoh’s greeting had been put into misery by just one of her remarks, it had now been restored by way of what she last said, as if it were natural for Him to balance the gloom with which He responded to a flaw in manners by quickness to applaud any exhibition of skillful speech, even an acceptable—that is, very small—insult, at least when the mood, like a soup, was in need of some stirring.

  Now He picked up a wig with straight fine hair and held it aloft for examination. “Nothing,” He said sadly, “will come close to the blue of the sky. The best of pigments are ugly next to the hue I would like to place on My head, but cannot find.”

  “The child may have Your answer,” murmured Menenhetet.

  “You must be as clever as you are beautiful,” said Ptah-nem-hotep to me.

  My head was empty except for the powerful impulse to say yes. So I nodded.

  “Do you know the source of blue dye?” He asked.

  I would not have to wander far for an answer. It came to me by way of my great-grandfather. My mind felt like a bowl of water, and the least movement in Menenhetet’s thought rippled through it.

  “Why, Divine Double-House, the berry that is blue is the source of the liquid dye.” My tongue felt empty after the remark, and I waited for what might come next.

  “Excellent,” said Ptah-nem-hotep. “Now tell me of a light-blue dye that is not a liquid but a powder. Where could you find its root?”

  “Good and Great God,” I said, “it is not in a root but in the salts of copper that such a powder can be found.”

  “He speaks as well as yourself,” said the Pharaoh.

  “He is my second house,” said Menenhetet.

  “Explain to me, little Meni, why My wig can never reveal the same blue as the sky.”

  “The color of the wig, Good and Great God, comes from the earth. Whereas the blue of the sky is composed of air.”

  “Then I will never find the blue I desire?” He asked. His voice was full of a sympathetic mockery that drew me near to Him. Even as I answered, “Never,” I went on to add as easily, “Never, Great Pharaoh, until You find a bird with feathers as blue as the air.”

  Menenhetet struck his thigh in surprise. “The boy hears only the best voices,” he said.

  “He hears more than one voice,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, and flicked my great-grandfather with His flail. “It’s splendid you are here,” He said. “And you,” He said, now touching Hathfertiti with the same flail.

  She responded with her best smile. “Never have I seen You looking more handsome,” she told Him.

  “I confess,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “that I am like a dead fellow, well wrapped. I am bored.”

  “That cannot be so,” said Hathfertiti, “when Your eyes are like the lion, and Your voice is the companion of the air.”

  “My nostrils smell everything,” He said, “including the oppression of every breath I take.” He sighed. “When alone, I utter bird cries in order to amuse Myself.” He gave a sharp little hoot in imitation of a bird protecting her nest. “Does that amuse you?” He asked. “Sometimes I think it is only by amusing others that I escape for an instant from the smell of everything. Here, little boy, little Meni-Ka, would you like to hear a dog speak in our tongue, not his?”

  I nodded. At the simple look of amusement on my face, Ptah-nem-hotep added, “Even your great-grandfather cannot make a dog speak.”

  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 t
o 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?”