by Paula Guran
On payday there were forgeries to be exposed. A number of intriguing little carvings had begun to show up, all found by the same pair of brothers. The recent ones were simply too intriguing. Mallick made a show of dismissing the culprits as a lesson to the rest. It was all very good-natured. Even the brothers laughed at their exposure, left with a cheerful round of goodbyes. It was, no doubt, a great disappointment to Miss Whitfield, who had been looking forward to the confrontation ever since Mallick showed us the tiny forged bear.
None of the workmen would be back until their money ran out, which meant that we would start again in two days’ time with a whole new crew. Yusef, who’d found the golden goat, had been paid its weight in gold and wouldn’t be back for weeks. This was a shame as he was one of our most skilled workers and a natural diplomat as well. Diplomats were always needed on our mixed crew of Armenians, Arabs, and Kurds.
The site was quiet with everyone gone. I missed the rhythmic chanting, the scraping of stone on stone, the pleasure of dim and distant laughter.
Davis and I used the day off to drive Miss Whitfield to the holy shrine of the Yezedis. Davis said that the Yezedis worship Lucifer and represent him with the symbol of the peacock. We bounced along the road, the dust so thick I had to stop every fifteen minutes and wipe down the car windows. The last few miles can only be done on foot, but by this time you’ve risen into the pure air and walking is a pleasure. The shrine is breathtakingly white and intricate as a wedding cake. Streams pour through descending basins in the cool courtyard and acolytes tiptoe in to bring you tea. Clearly their Lucifer is not the same as our Lucifer.
Still, we’d done our best to work Miss Whitfield up with stories of Satan worshippers so that the tranquil, restorative scene would be a nasty surprise. I figured I was getting to know what Miss Whitfield wanted. I whispered to her that the priest, whom we did not see, was said to be kept drugged so that his aunt could rule in his name; I didn’t want the trip to be a complete disappointment.
Davis sat holding his small, black cup of tea in two hands and smiling sweetly. The steam from the tea clouded his spectacles. I was across from him, growing sleepy from the sun and the sound of water. Miss Whitfield had knelt by the lowest of the fountain pools. She broke the surface with her hand, so her submerged fingers seemed larger than the dry hand to which they were attached. “Tell me,” Davis said to Miss Whitfield. “When you come to a place like this, even at a place like this, do you find yourself imagining a murder?”
And I thought how easy it would be to push Miss Whitfield’s head under and hold it. It wasn’t even a complete thought, just a flicker, really, ephemeral as the steam from Davis’ tea, no emotional content, no actual desire. I put it instantly out of my mind, which was easy enough since it had hardly been there to begin with.
“Would you think I was a ghoul if I said yes?” Miss Whitfield’s black hair shivered in the slight breeze. She smoothed it back with her wet fingers, dipped her hand and wet her hair again.
“I’d think you the complete professional,” Davis said politely. “But it’s a ghoulish profession.”
“So’s yours,” she answered.
And then to me, “So’s yours,” even though I hadn’t said a thing.
On our way back we stopped in town to buy bread and chocolate to add to our supper of mutton and goat cheese and wine. Davis had gotten too much sun during our outing; he was as pink as if he’d been boiled. When he came to the table he sat on a chair that wasn’t solidly beneath him and fell on to the stone floor with a loud cry of alarm. I’d never seen Patwin enjoy anything so much. He could hardly chew he was laughing so hard.
Miss Whitfield was too tired to eat. Ferhid took her untouched plate back to the kitchen, where he dropped knives and slammed pot lids to communicate his disapproval until Mallick went out to mollify him.
When I was sure no one was watching, I slipped away and took three more pictures of Tu-api, moving the light between each shot. If I stared long enough through the rangefinder into the coffin, I could conjure her face just the way my photograph had recorded it, floating over her skull. If I looked directly, then the face disappeared.
When I developed the new pictures, there was no face. I took another print off my original exposure, and her face didn’t show up there, either. Perhaps this should have persuaded me that the image wasn’t to be trusted, was a fault of the paper and therefore unreal. But I was even more persuaded in the event, which was proving so singular and so intimate. Tu-api had shown her face only once and only to me.
“I have a bone to pick with you.” Patwin caught me as I came out of the bathroom. “You’re always riding me about my politics.”
Patwin didn’t use American idioms, so I figured he was merely repeating what some native speaker had said to him, and I figured I knew who that would be. I was outraged by the collusion, but also by the sentiment.
“You must be joking,” I said. “The way you lecture me . . . ”
“Live and let live is all I’m saying.” And he brushed by without another word.
I passed Davis on the way to my bedroom. “That really hurt when I fell,” he said. “I may have cracked a bone.”
“I didn’t laugh as hard as Patwin did,” I told him.
Miss Whitfield asked us all what it was about a dig that we liked. We were sitting in the courtyard of the expedition house and only Mallick was missing, trapped in town by a heavy rain that had turned the roads to mud. The air was washed and wonderful, and the sky an ocean of cool, gray clouds. Davis and Miss Jackson were playing a game on a stone board more than four thousand years old. Four thousand years ago they would have played with colored pebbles, but they were making do with buttons. Seven such boards had been found in Tu-api’s tomb, and the rules were inscribed in cuneiform though not in our dig, but back in Egypt at Carter’s. This same game had been played as far away as India. Ferhid was a demon at it.
“Not the fleas,” Patwin said. He was scratching at his ankles.
“Not the dust.” That was Miss Jackson.
“Not the way the workmen smell,” I said.
“Not the way you smell,” Patwin added, all loyalty to the working class. But then, placatingly, “Not the way I smell.”
“I like a routine,” Davis told her. “I actually enjoy picky, painstaking work. And, of course, we’re all fond of a puzzle. We all like to put things together, guess what they mean.”
“I like that it’s backwards.” Miss Jackson won a free turn and then a second. All six of her buttons were on the board now. “You dig down from the surface and you move backwards in time as you go. Have you never wanted, desperately wanted, to go backwards in time?”
Miss Whitfield paused for a thoughtful moment. “Of course. A person might want to erase a mistake,” she suggested. “Or some stupid thing said without thinking.”
“I like the monotony.” Patwin had his eyes closed and his face turned up to the cool sky. “Day after day after day with nothing but your own thoughts. You begin to think things that surprise you.”
Davis bumped one of Miss Jackson’s buttons back to the beginning. “There you go backwards in time,” he said, but Miss Jackson was speaking, too, only much quieter so it took a moment to hear.
“You have to be in love with the dead,” she said. She took two of her stones off the board in a single turn and bumped one of Davis’. A third stone occupied a safe square, leaving Davis no move.
He shook his fist at her, smiling. “You’re a lucky woman.”
“Do you know how many bodies have been found on this site alone?” Miss Jackson asked Miss Whitfield. Her voice stayed low and colorless. “Almost two thousand. Just imagine writing one of your books with two thousand dead bodies to explain. And every single one of them left someone behind, begging their gods to undo it. Bargaining. Screaming. Weeping. You can only manage a dig if you already feel so much you can’t take in another thing.”
A long silence followed. “Excuse me,” Miss Jackson said and
left the courtyard.
Miss Jackson seldom made speeches. She never, ever referred to her losses; I’d always admired that about her. I only knew about them because Patwin, who’d worked with her three seasons now, had heard it from Mallick. Patwin had hinted that she was sleeping with Mallick, but I’d seen no signs and hoped it wasn’t true. Miss Jackson was not a young woman, or a pretty one, but she was too young and too pretty for Mallick. I don’t mean that Mallick’s not a good guy. But honestly, few women wouldn’t be.
I thought back on how she’d also told us she’d seen the face of God in the sky and how that speech, too, had been uncharacteristic. I hoped there was a simple explanation; I liked Miss Jackson and didn’t want to see her handling things badly—sleeping with Mallick and rushing from a room in tears. Maybe we’d come up on some anniversary of something.
Or maybe Miss Whitfield was to blame. Miss Whitfield might make me edgy and snappish, but maybe Miss Jackson had finally melted in the sympathetic presence of another female.
“Well.” The sympathetic female wrote a few words in her notebook. “I hope it wasn’t something I said.” She addressed me. “You’re very quiet. Are you in love with the dead?”
Since I’d been thinking about Miss Jackson and not about myself, I had nothing prepared to say. I’m not good on the fly. “I’m not sure I do like a dig,” I answered. “I’m still deciding.” My heart was thudding oddly; the question had unnerved me more than it should have. So I kept talking, just to demonstrate a steadier voice. “I wanted to see some things I wouldn’t see in Michigan. Mallick gave a lecture at the university and I asked some questions that he liked and he said if I could make my own way here, he could use me.”
Miss Whitfield was staring at me through little eyes. From her vantage point, I could see how culpable I’d sounded, how unresponsive to the actual question. So I kept talking, which wasn’t like me. “A photograph is simple. It’s about the thing in the moment. I can take a picture of a dead baby and not be trying to guess why it’s dead, when I’d never know if I was right. A photograph is never wrong.”
She was still staring. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, but every day we build Rome,” I told her. I meant to use that to explain why a story was different from a photograph, but I stopped, because the longer I talked, the more suspicious she seemed. I felt unjustly accused, but also terribly, visibly guilty. “It’s not a ghoulish profession,” I said with as much dignity as I could find. There was a letter opener on a table by the doorway. I pictured myself picking it up and opening Miss Whitfield’s throat in one clean swipe.
At that exact moment, I heard Patwin laugh, and the tension I’d been feeling vanished with the sound of it. “What?” Davis asked him. “What’s so funny?”
“I was just remembering when you fell off your chair,” Patwin said. He was still laughing. “How your arms flew up!”
I’d begun visiting Tu-api’s tomb at night when no one would know. I’d like to say that there was nothing at all odd in this, but how defensive would that sound? I won’t persuade you, so let’s just skip that part.
In fact, I was disturbed by the murderous images coming over me, and the tomb seemed a quiet place to figure things out. I wasn’t the sort to hurt anyone. People rarely upset or angered me. I’d never been a bully at school, didn’t fight, didn’t really engage much with people at all. Didn’t care about anyone but myself, my mother had said once after my father died. She’d never said it again, but she hinted it. Buried it beneath the surface in every letter. Her own grief had been an awful thing to see for a six-year-old boy who’d just lost his father. If that was love, who could blame me for not wanting any part of it?
But I didn’t think of myself as unengaged from the world so much as careful in it. Like many other people, I preferred watching to doing, only I preferred to do my watching within the spatial and temporal limits of the camera. A photograph is a moment you can spend your whole life looking at. I like the paradox of that.
A photograph isn’t a narrative, so it’s harder to impose on it. The only person who sees a photographer in a photograph is another photographer. And that’s what I was doing in the privacy of the tomb. I was remembering those brief violent images of mine; I was trying to see the photographer.
They’d started up shortly after Miss Whitfield’s arrival, and so they might have come from her. But they’d also begun shortly after Tu-api had shown me her face, a possibility I liked a lot less. If I remembered honestly, at the moment I’d taken Tu-api’s first picture the word murder had been hanging in the air. The smell of smoke. The white light of the electric torches. “If you were going to murder someone,” Miss Whitfield had been asking, “who would it be?”
No doubt Tu-api was herself a murderess. Patwin was always reminding me of this. The seven women in her antechamber, the groomsmen, the musician, the animals—all killed on her behalf. But I’d no wish to condemn her. In the context of those rows of dead babies, it didn’t seem like much. In the history of the world, nothing at all.
What ruler in what land in what era has ever done otherwise? Name me one president, elected by and acting for us, who hasn’t promised that we’ll have peace just as soon as he’s done killing people. Sixteen million soldiers (many of them killers themselves) dead in the Great War. Does anyone know why?
Does anyone believe we are done?
Besides, Tu-api was sorry. I’d been wrong to think that was longing in her face when it was clearly remorse. She’d wanted company in death, but that hadn’t worked out. Was it possible she now wanted company in some unending world of guilt?
I found it easier to think Miss Whitfield was to blame than that Tu-api wished me ill. I’d begun to carry the print of her face in my pocket so I could pull it out and look at it whenever I was alone. I would sit on the dirt by her coffin and stare until her beautiful face floated up out of the darkness and we were, for a moment, together.
One night, walking back to my bedroom as silently as possible, I nearly collided with Mallick in the central hallway. He was wearing a nightshirt that left his saggy old knees bare. “Going to the lavatory,” he explained unnecessarily, so that I knew it was true what Patwin had told me, that he’d been in the women’s wing, visiting Miss Jackson. I tried not to judge her for it, but really, what comfort could sleeping with Mallick have been?
“Me, too,” I said with an equal lack of conviction.
We stood a moment, carefully not meeting each other’s eyes. “So Miss Whitfield leaves tomorrow,” Mallick offered finally. “She’s been a lively addition.” I realized then that he thought I’d been visiting Miss Whitfield. As if that wouldn’t be worth your life!
A woman’s face appeared in a doorway, white and sudden.
When my heart began beating again, I recognized Miss Whitfield. She didn’t speak, merely noted my suspicious, nighttime rambling, my covert meeting with Mallick, and disappeared as quickly as she’d come, no doubt to write it all down before she forgot. “Taking my pictures,” she called it once, as if what she did and what I did were the same, as if her imposed judgments could be compared to my dispassionate records.
If I’d wanted to murder her, this would have been my last opportunity. Not that I wanted to murder her. Plus Mallick had seen me; I’d never get away with it. I went to my room and into a night of troubled dreams.
Miss Whitfield left the next morning. At Patwin’s insistence, I took a group picture before she went. Patwin was always reminding me to document the work as well as the artifacts. “Take some pictures of live people today,” he would say, fingering his beard with that annoying scratching sound. “Take some pictures of me.”
Everyone lined up in the expedition-house courtyard, staring into the morning sun. Miss Whitfield was so eager to leave that she couldn’t stand still and ruined two exposures before I got one that showed her clearly. It’s a formal portrait; no one is touching anyone else in our strained little arrangement of bodies.
“Was there a curse on Tu-api�
�s tomb?” Miss Whitfield had asked us shortly after her arrival. According to the newspapers, Carter had a curse; it was one more way in which we disappointed. Though Mallick, who had his own sources, said no one could find the actual site or text of Carter’s curse. Other tombs had them, so, of course, Carter couldn’t be expected to do without.
The very day Carter found the entrance to Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb, a cobra ate his pet canary. “Some curse,” Patwin scoffed when we read this, but Davis reminded us how canaries in mines died just to warn you death was coming for you next. And sure enough, last week, we had a telegram from Lord Wallis that Lord Carnarvon, who sponsored Carter’s dig, had suddenly died in Cairo. The cause was indeterminate, but might have been a fever carried by an insect bite on his cheek. Back in England his dog had also died—this curse was most unkind to pets.
It was the dog that put Miss Whitfield over the top. She cared little for mountains of copper, gold, and ebony. She was, as Patwin had noted, being nothing but fair, no materialist. But she did love a suspicious death. She left us for Egypt just as quick as an invitation could be wangled and transport arranged.
I believe we were all a bit disappointed to realize that none of us was to be the murderer or victim in her next book. All those murderous thoughts I’d obligingly had, all the probing we’d withstood, all the petty disputes we’d engaged in, all for nothing. The one to reap the benefit would, of course, be Carter.
We stood at the entry to the expedition house and waved. She was turned around to us, her face in the car window, smaller and smaller until it and then the car that carried her vanished entirely. “A dangerous woman,” Patwin said.
