Ancient Evenings

by Norman Mailer

  “When I asked him if he hated Moses, he shook his head. Not at all. Moses had passed on a great secret. It was how, on your last breath, you could put yourself into the belly of your wife.

  “Here he was. This Nefesh-Besher, this Ukhu-As—dying—yet he spoke of living. And not at all in the way some speak of continuing one’s name through the respect of one’s descendants. No, he told me, the child you make in your last moments of life can become a new body for yourself. To hear this said with confidence out of the mouth of a sick man was unforgettable. While he could not give me the Hebrew words for the last prayer to be said within your woman’s body, there, at the last moment, still, I had been his benefactor, so he would pass it on to me through his flesh. And he instructed me to do something most disagreeable, but I did it on the night after he died. It is not easy to tell. I have explained how Hera-Ra taught me the ferocious virtues to be obtained from eating the flesh of others, but that was in the thick of the night which followed the day at Kadesh. When you grabbed a bite from a roasted limb, you did not ask from where it came—blood mixed as easily with blood as meat with meat. Here, however, the fellow had been sickly, now he was gone. And he had told me to wait no longer than one day after he expired. In that way, he could serve as my guide without a prayer.”

  “How disgusting and unforgettable is this thought,” said Hathfertiti, but her voice was without strength. Menenhetet merely looked solemn. “I could not,” he said, “have done what he asked except there was nothing to greet me at Eshuranib but the old boredom. Still, I approached this little meal with such revulsion that it took many attempts to swallow one morsel. Yet I held it down. I felt no new knowledge within me, yet I did—I could not say.

  “A few weeks after Ukhu-As died, his wife told me she was pregnant. Nefesh-Besher had been well named. His spirit was certainly in her flesh. It was just that he did not survive as well in her loyalty. She had taken such good care of him that she had used up her affection. When I saw the look in her eye, I began to do little favors for the widow. Soon enough, she became my mistress.

  “I was weary of the smell that rose from the cheeks of men weaker than myself. So I kept this woman. Her name was Renpu-Rept, and that was a good name. When she gave herself up to the joys of making love, she was to me—in these harsh ovens of Eshuranib—like a young plant and a Goddess of the Nile. How I enjoyed speaking to the little Ukhu-As who was now within her. Soon I came to realize that one’s member can say much to an unborn child. Do you know, I felt the ambition and the great rage of the new Ukhu-As, still unborn. Of course I had no fear of him, and I laughed. His former wife was such a pleasure. Why, Renpu-Rept taught me as much of his wisdom as he had known himself. He used to make love without letting his seed come forth, she told me, and I was quick to acquire his practice. To believe that the longer one waits, the greater will be your reward, was the only belief to keep you alive at Eshuranib. So I became acquainted with living at length in the cave of a woman, and many were the litanies she taught me to say to myself until I was the master of my own river and could send it curling back to my groin. That offered me one more road to the Land of the Dead. There were times, lying with her through those hours, when I felt as if I floated on the brink of my own extinction so long and so well did I hold my breath, and my heart within it, indeed, so high did I rise on the very roar of the sounds within myself that I could have been above a cataract that would wash me out of myself forever into her. So I knew the way. I could run those waters. So I speak of it, but I was not curious to try. For steeped in the sentiments that rose from her flesh, I was happier to meditate through the night, and such hours were sweet for me. I felt as fortunate as a Pharaoh in the House of the Secluded and had splendid thoughts, and lived in the reverberation of all things.

  “Sometimes, during our long embrace, Hera-Ra would come to visit, and whether it was his true ghost I cannot say, but he was near and I was like an animal myself, and thereby close to the sound of all languages. In the arms of Renpu-Rept, the cries of the wild creatures outside, and the babble that rose at night from the huts of the village, began to speak to me of the mystery of many languages, and I came to see how certain sounds may say the same thing in all tongues. I would ponder over each word for mother among the different people of Eshuranib, for they all had the sound of ‘m’ within, and would ask myself why a barbarian had only to speak in rage to remind you of the roar that is heard in the letter ‘r.’ Homage to Hera-Ra! Deep in the going-forth and the back and forth of nak-nak, I would ask myself if ‘k’ was the sound of all knocking, even as ‘pa’ might be there for the sound of men, like the sound I made in her cave with my club—pa! pa!

  “Through the long days at Eshuranib, I had made efforts to learn how to read, and it had been simple so long as there was a sacred mark for each of our sounds, but now I began to ponder some of the more curious tones for which there were no hieroglyphs. ‘Eh’ is without one, and ‘oh’ came out of my throat like the long note of the wind, and needed no mark. Nor was there a writing you could make for the scream you hear when someone feels a pain that cannot be endured—‘eee’ is that sound of pain, even as ‘oh’ is the reverberation of the belly, and again there is no sign for that. I had heard such cries all my life, but I began to listen to them more closely in the gold mines of Eshuranib where our barbarian guards were always beating the prisoners. And now, at night, there were also other sounds, softer cries, oo and ah—those moans that come from the lowest part of the stomach where one feels the pleasure common to all. At evening, you might expect such murmurs in every street and house of Memphi, but it was different to hear it rising in the dark out of the shacks of the workers of Eshuranib, their pleasures coming to my ear like the trip across water from one island to another. After all, we live in a sea of sound.

  “Afloat on such thoughts, deep inside her, close to that heaven where Nut meets Geb, there, through those hours of bathing in her waters, while the rage of the unborn child moved against me, I brooded on these matters of language and longed for a sight of our Nile, and the baby grew larger in her belly.

  “Then, there came a day when I knew great excitement, for I saw Ukhu-As again. He was right. He possessed the power he claimed.

  “I saw him on the day he was reborn. Two separate eyes looked out at me from the face of the infant just delivered, and those eyes hated me. For yesterday and tomorrow! What pleasure I had enjoyed with Renpu-Rept! Yet this tiny creature was too powerless to offer a curse, and could only wave his fists. Never had I felt such excitement looking at an infant just born. You know, I would have been ready to raise that child. What could prove more interesting at Eshuranib?

  “It never happened. The dust of the mines came into the baby’s eyes and Ukhu-As-of-his-second-life was blind at the age of three months, and soon died. That taught me more about these arts of being born out of yourself. It is not enough, I learned, to conceive your next life in the last minute of this one—that may be a bold art, but you need enough sense to pick the right woman for your mother.

  “Yet how I liked my tender young shoot, my Goddess of the Nile. I stayed in that hut at Eshuranib with Renpu-Rept for many a year, and was not too desperate, for in time she became nearly so beautiful in these practices is all of my first life I can say that I never knew such peace as with her—but at a mean price, for each day, out in the sun, the stone was raised, the stone was dropped, the quartz was crushed, and the waters ran over the sloping tables to wash out the dirt from the gold. More gold! The beatings went on, the cries resounded in the night. There were times in my despair when I came near to gambling most dangerously with the gifts given by Nefesh-Besher and I thought to die and be born again. But what folly to be born in that place! Yet one time I all but expired before I brought myself back, and a child was conceived. When, nine months later, I saw her face, I loved her, and when she died, I mourned her loss like my own limb, but I also knew I could not live forever in Eshuranib.

  “Then it became a question of w
hether I would take Renpu-Rept with me. I came face to face with the cold features of my own heart. How much would I value this woman if I were back in Thebes? She was not a wife for a Master of the Horse, or, better, a General—which I was determined to become—more than ever after the loss of these years. Then—I do not know if it was misery at the death of our daughter, or horror at the cold she sensed in my heart—but my only true wife, Renpu-Rept, also died of a terrible fever. I could not believe how I mourned her. ‘No one,’ she said to me at the last, ‘will ever be so near to you again.’

  “How long I might have survived alone I cannot say, but I was released from my captivity one hot afternoon fourteen years after arrival, and this sum resounded in my mind for the rest of my first life. It was equal to the pieces of Osiris’ body. Therefore, in the hour of my release, I wondered who my true God could be—Amon or Osiris—and the question never left my first life. But more intoxicating than my wonder at these fourteen years was the sight before me of a detachment of new soldiers. A charioteer was with them. My replacement. He handed over a papyrus to tell of my orders to return.”

  “So the King had forgiven you?”

  Menenhetet nodded.

  “I would expect of My ancestor, Ramses the Great,” said our Pharaoh, “that He would never forget, and He would never forgive.”

  “He never forgot, but there came a year when He needed my help.”

  “Can you tell Me truly that this was the year?”

  “No,” my great-grandfather confessed, “it was not.”

  My mother found a weakness in the composure of my great-grandfather. By way of her mind, I entered his mind, and my great-grandfather’s thoughts were full of shame. He could speak of eating from the ham of a dead man, but he could not bear to confess cheap practice. He sat becalmed in his seat.

  “You bought your way out of Eshuranib,” said my mother. “You are no better than Fekh-futi.”

  THIRTEEN

  There was an exclamation from my father at this mention of his father, but a glint came into Menenhetet’s eye like the light I had once seen on a merchant’s face in the sharpest moment of the bargaining.

  “Yes,” he said, “I bought my way out of Eshuranib. But I cannot boast that it was clever, merely that I was able after fourteen years to put aside enough gold to make arrangements for a large payment to a General in Thebes. In return, my name was put on the list of charioteers assigned to the Royal Household.”

  Ptah-nem-hotep asked, “How many of the officers who drill in My outer courtyard have been promoted by comparable payments?”

  Menenhetet did not look away. “What matters is that they ride well. There is no cure for injustice other than committing another injustice to correct the first—let the river wash away the bad blood.”

  My father nodded profoundly as if this last remark were the thighbone of all wisdom.

  “Not the least,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “of your qualities as a Vizier will be your ability to take our petty vices and return them to us as virtue.”

  “That is the way it may now seem,” agreed my great-grandfather, “but I can tell You, Divine Two-House, it was not easy then. I had to wait a year after I made the payment. All the while, since I did not tell Renpu-Rept, I began to wonder if I could desert her, and after she died, I thought of those Hittite hands we collected at Kadesh and was terrified that my own would soon be added to such a pile. Remembering those exceptional cities Hera-Ra saw while eating his last meal, I decided the most terrible punishment must be to lose your hands, for it would prove the same as loneliness. Without our hands, we cannot know the thoughts of others. We are left only to our own thoughts. Do not ask me why this is so, but I know it. To reassure myself, I looked again and again at the papyrus I had been sent from Thebes. It told of my ‘zeal to guard the gold of the Pharaoh from all who would steal it.’ Well, I did my best to believe this.”

  “I must leave you to the Lord Osiris,” laughed Ptah-nem-hotep.

  Menenhetet touched his head lightly to the floor. “Good and Great God,” he said, “I brooded much on the nature of proper behavior in those days. Since this papyrus bought with stolen gold testified to my honesty, I came to realize that a man who lies can be as comfortable as anyone who tells the truth, provided he keeps lying. For then no one can catch him. Such a man has a life as true as an honest life. Consider it. An honest man is miserable once he begins to lie. For then he must remember the truth, and what he said that was not the truth. So is the liar miserable so soon as he speaks in an honest voice.

  “I say this because Ramses the Second—as I soon learned on my return to Thebes—had become a liar. Forgive me, but it is the Night of the Pig. I discovered I was known to all, and for the worst of reasons. My name was on every new temple wall, and I can promise that in the years I was gone, many temples had been built. Usermare was always erecting some monument to Himself, large or small. You could not fail to see His statue at any bend of the river, and commemorative pillars in every grove. Be certain that in each new temple was an account of the Battle of Kadesh and there was I with my name on the wall, forever crying out, ‘O my Lord, we are lost, we must flee!’ and I would shake my head on seeing it as if that could erase the sacred marks. ‘Go, Menni,’ He would answer, ‘I will fight alone.’ Even my name was wrong. I, who had learned to recognize MN on a papyrus now found it cut into the stone as MNN. I was still ignorant. I did not see how there could be any error on a temple wall. I did not know then, as I would learn in my second life, that scribes know less than priests but are all too ready to inscribe a stone. I did not realize I was looking at a crude error. I stepped backward, as if the temple wall could fall on me. I thought of all the prayers I had offered to great and little Gods, ten hundred such Gods, but I had addressed Them with the wrong sacred marks in my heart. ‘MN beseeches You,’ I had been saying when I should have said MNN.

  “Now, if the misspelling of my name bothered me so greatly, think of my confusion about what was written in stone. That could not be false. I must have said things in the battle that I had no memory of saying. Yet in the same temple, on another wall, as if the truth was no better than the wall at which you looked, I would read, word by word: ‘Lo, His Majesty hastened to His horses and stormed forward—He alone.’ I would awake in fever that night with the wall pressing on my chest. Had the Pharaoh been alone in His Chariot through all of the Battle of Kadesh? It took me years to comprehend that, to Himself, He was by Himself. He was a God. I had been no more than the wood of His Chariot.

  “All the while, as if to mock me, I became renowned. My name was cut in stone. My deeds might count no larger than the works of a worm, but I was a sacred worm. In the barracks, among the charioteers, a subtle derision greeted me. One or another would always cry out on my arrival, ‘Here is our hero of Kadesh.’

  “ ‘What do you mean by that?’ I would ask. I did not like the word he used for hero. It could also mean ‘bird’ or ‘coward.’

  “ ‘I mean that you are a hero. We know that.’ There would be much laughter. I could do nothing about it. These charioteers from the best families of Memphi and Thebes were not about to fight. It was well known there was no officer I could not defeat. So they mocked me in their noble manner, which was to play with words until the meaning was as hard to catch as a minnow with one’s hands. I took a vow they would serve under me before I was done.

  “Then an event took place which did, indeed, teach me new ways. Word came to Thebes that Metella had died.

  “Now, while I had been in Eshuranib, many small wars had been fought with the Hittites, but so soon as Metella was gone, his brother, Khetasar, proposed peace, and was accepted. It may be that our Ramses was tired of war. Each year for fifteen years, He had found Himself in the field. So, at Tanis, in a splendid temple just completed, He received the new King of the Hittites. Khetasar brought with him a silver tablet on which were more than a hundred lines of writing clearly engraved into the metals, and I still recall what it said, for
all of us in the Household Guard who were at Tanis looked at it closely: ‘This is the treaty which the great chief of the Hittites, Khetasar, the valiant, son of Merasar, the valiant, and grandson of Seplel, the valiant, has made on a silver tablet for Usermare-Setpenere, great ruler of Egypt, son of Seti I, the valiant; grandson of Ramses I, the valiant: This good treaty of peace and brotherhood sets peace between these nations forever.’

  “I read all of it, taking in the words one by one, and was much impressed that it had been composed by the Hittite King, for our Pharaoh would not have spoken in such a way. I may say that this tablet of silver had the light that comes from the moon, and that gave me a new fear of these Hittites. With their dirty beards and clumsy chariots, they had seemed crude, yet how wise was this tablet. The phrases were in such fine balance that you could feel peace was near: ‘Between the great Prince of the Hittites, and Ramses the Second, the great Monarch of Egypt, let there be a beautiful peace and a beautiful alliance, and let the children’s children of the great Prince of the Hittites remain in a beautiful peace and a beautiful alliance with the children’s children of Ramses the Second, great Monarch of Egypt. Let no hostilities arise between them.’

  “Why, this Khetasar even said: ‘If a man flee from the country of Egypt to the Hittites, then shall the great Prince of the Hittites take him into custody and cause him to be brought back to Ramses the Second, the great Monarch of Egypt. But when he is brought back, let not his crime be brought against him, nor shall his house be burned, nor his wives and children killed, nor his mother slain, and he shall not be beaten in his eyes, or in his mouth, or on his feet.’ And it would be the same for any Hittites,” said Menenhetet, “who fled from their country to ours. I was much impressed with the good sense of this. It takes no great effort to make people go back to the land from which they have fled, if they are not afraid of terrible punishment. I was even more impressed when our Ramses allowed the name of the Prince of the Hittites to come before His own. That had to be due to His respect for all these fine words written on silver. Besides, the treaty concluded with the names of the most powerful strange Gods. It was said, ‘A thousand of the male and female Gods of the country of the Hittites, together with a thousand of the male and female Gods of the country of Egypt, will be with us as witnesses to these words: ‘The God of Zeyetheklirer, the Gods of Kerzot, the God of Kherpenteres, the Goddess of the city of Kerephen, the Goddess of Khewek, the Goddess of Zen, the God of Zen, the God of Serep, the God of Khenbet, the Queen of the Heavens, and the Gods and all the Lords of Swearing, the Goddess and the Mistress of the Soil, the Mistress of the Mountains and the rivers of the land of the Hittites, of the heavens, the soil, the great sea, the wind and the storms.’