The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  Atum-Is-Aroused: we are on the verge of Creation. Our king was named for that throbbing instant immediately prior to the creation of the universe. And, in a fertile act of Atumic homage not dissimilar, clenched and trembling men like Harriman and Vassal cannot restrain themselves from spilling educated and less educated guesses over barren, tattered evidence, producing great, pregnant speculations, each bearing a book certain to resemble the father. (And, let us take a moment to enjoy the sight of Vassal, with Gallic shamelessness, accusing Harriman of the same paternity claims of which he is equally guilty.)

  In one reproduced ancient drawing I found as a boy and spent several hours amazedly pondering (until, from over my shoulder, the village librarian spotted it with a stifled shriek and confiscated the book, securing it in the sepulchral and sealed Patrons’ Private Reserve Section), solitary, tirelessly creative, and divinely flexible Atum performs a service on himself that most mortal men’s spines will not allow them to execute, though they all know it would be a marvellously convenient knack. (Although in my day, I once saw twin Chinese brothers, acrobats in a travelling circus passing through Kent, who matched the god’s feat while hanging quite nude and pale yellow from trapezes, an act of post-performance relaxation they indulged in upside-down and side by side like two eighth notes, late at night in the darkened tent after every show, while outside one could hear the drugged elephant being washed and in the shadowed seats, one unseen audience member secretly watched the meditative display and, probably alone in all of Kent, knew that the two Orientals were, in their twinned self-absorption, unknowingly paying tribute to the god Atum.)

  To Margaret: My darling Queen, having spent several hours yesterday and this morning working on scholarly essays, I grew so sad thinking about Marlowe’s death and my distance from you that I decided to put work aside for the afternoon and strolled through my Cairo.

  My Cairo, it affects me strangely still. Today was no exception: the remnants of religious miseducation drilled into the soft part of one’s head, or just dumb superstition embedded in our systems: for whatever reason, I walked through Cairo this afternoon handing out food and some of my remaining money to those who looked most desperate—the convincingly legless, the big-eyed infants innocent of drunkenness. I hope you would have approved, my sweet Queen. Perhaps I did it for you.

  I watched the women, those caramelised confections, dark-irised behind long lashes. Some are veiled, nothing but shifting eyes, always downcast or glancing sideways. Others are uncovered, and one can glimpse faces in the distorting heat and the interfering shadows of palm fronds. One of these women was moving quickly from shade to sun, and in that very first instant my eye played tricks: I thought she was covered, forehead to collarbone, with the most intricate tattoo or henna-art, a leering cobra winking at me with every movement of her cheek. But no, that semi-instant was a play of light: as she stepped into the sun I saw the rage and range of her birthmark—no cobra, no shadow, but a purple splash across her face, too intricate not to imply special knowledge and a claim to unique beauty. She looked at me with a haughty sureness of her effect.

  And playing off to her left, I saw one of those children dispatched by Atum, Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, the Great Set Decorator, to crack your heart in pieces, his poverty blurring his potential, his tiny face all huge eyes. I called him over and nearly emptied my pockets into his steady hands, laid bill after bill into his palm and watched him watching me. He seemed young enough to have faith still that someone would naturally care for him. I wished I could justify that faith, urge him never to lose it.

  I walked in places tourists do not frequent, where lurk the spectacularly freakish, those who slide from poor to deformed to performer with a speed making them difficult to categorise: of course I give money to the blind mothers cradling the blind infants next to the wall-eyed and incontinent dogs, and to the fused-digit flipper children, but what of the man tattooed all over in spider’s webs, as if he himself were the trapped fly? What of the man all knobbed joints and slippery-eel limbs whose knees rest comfortably on top of his shoulders?

  And everywhere young men glower with rage at everything and everyone, until I wonder if I am even able to understand the facial expression at all; it must be something I do not understand, since no one could be enraged by a tree, a cloud, the glowering friend he embraces.

  On the narrower streets, like canals cut through the high, yellow buildings, I press myself against the walls for the barefoot delivery boys to pass with trays on their heads. I overpay them to sample the bread and fruit and chicken legs moving at nose level as I roam. In front of me at a fruit market I find an old father and his grown son. The thin, bearded father selects from the wooden stand, talking to the grey grocer, plainly his old friend. Behind him, though, his son has some sort of palsy; his hands shake and try to fly away from his body while his head snaps back and forth on an uncomfortable axis. His whole body sways like a metronome set to largo. While the father chooses figs, the son’s condition worsens, and I have to take a step back not to be struck by flailing limbs. His legs begin vibrating, and then his feet alternate leaving the ground an inch at a time. The father, unhurried by what he must know is happening behind him, pays and at last turns: he gently places a hand on the boy’s forearm. With that light touch he absorbs the spasms and shudders, compels the boy to be still again, to take control of himself with the help of his father’s patience and presence. The boy calms down and turns his face up in a contorted smile to enjoy the sun and crunch a hard yellow date. His father keeps a hand on him a moment or two longer, grins a wrinkled grin, then turns back to address a few more words to the untroubled grocer, who has no doubt seen this every day for years. On their way past me, I slipped money into their bag.

  The money itself is not an issue, as the Partnership’s first wired payment is due presently. There is a mist of good luck, I suppose, hanging about the worthy or at least the entertaining poor—as if their one compensation for their lot is to decide upon your future, or as if they are an easy way to impress whichever gods one thinks will be judging one later or clearing one’s path sooner. Or, perhaps there is no surer way to prove to yourself that the poor are not you than by giving them your money.

  And then to the post, my Margaret, to find you waiting for me in the poste restante! I sniffed the envelope right there in the Cairo post office. Your precious scent was just discernible still, for all the distance travelled, each jealous, grasping mile snatching an atom of your fragrance. I tore open the envelope with a churning hunger for you and found your letter (?) of 19–21 Sep.

  I admit to spending some anxious hours pondering this fragment of correspondence, M., but obviously it was an error of dosage or postage; your sleeping draughts are quite seriously askew, or you lost the other pages. Nevertheless, while I invariably finish your letters wishing for more, in this case my ailment was extreme. I walked very slowly back to the Hotel of the Sphinx, loathing Cairo for being the place where you were not, the place where I could not take care of you as that father took care of his son.

  Sep. 19. Evening

  Dearest Ralph,

  Well, it seems you left today.

  Sep. 20. Evening

  R, I miss you.

  Sep. 21. Eve’s knees

  My Ralphie,

  Now you are on a boat, I think, or something like a boat. Something afloat.

  Sunset on the Bayview Nursing Home

  Sydney, Australia

  December 16, 1954

  Macy,

  I apologise for the lost days. I’ve been ill, not to bore you with the details, but today’s my first day standing in a week. I see on the faces of my keepers a little disappointment at the sight of me not yet dead, but they’ll be in my place someday, and that’s comfort enough for me.

  Writing about my trip to Boston daunts me. I’m just tired, I suppose, from my illness. But even as I recall stepping aboard the Angel of the Azores, preparing to cross the Atlantic, thanking heaven that a bloke like myself was
going to have the opportunity to see America because of my professional abilities, I sit here in the wretched heat of the games room (two incomplete sets of draughts and one of chess, some playing cards, and a heap of old droolers), and I’m having to overcome something in me that’s resisting buckling back to our work. I take no pleasure in re-creating this leg of my adventure. I recall too well the price I paid for my hard work and open heart in Boston. But here’s my stack of blank stationery. (Horrible, that emblem of the home, isn’t it? Did they think a little drawing of the sea would make it true? Take it from me, you can’t see the Bay from this building even if you jump from the roof. Which is tempting.)

  I made notes and notes, cataloguing my suspicions and the case’s loose ends on that weeklong trip across the Atlantic: Trilipush, Marlowe, and Quint are University mates, except that the University has never heard of Trilipush, though passing students have, years after he was there. Trilipush and Marlowe are friends, War chums, likely something else unspeakable, and Trilipush writes to Marlowe’s parents, referring fondly to time spent with the old folks, whose names he doesn’t know and who’ve never met him, though their son spoke often of him at Oxford. Where records indicate he was never a student. And the British Government claims to have no record of him participating in that War, though the unreliable Quint claims Trilipush was at Marlowe’s side until Gallipoli. But recall that no one has any recollection of Caldwell, who for his part, has no reason in the world to know Marlowe, a British officer, but Marlowe recommends him for promotions, and they vanish together on a nameless mission, after the War is over, while Trilipush is still far off in Turkey, “pulling through.” My case diagrams were more question marks than conclusions.

  I had a girl at Tailor HQ cable ahead to be sure of Trilipush’s presence at Harvard, using a false name as I didn’t want to spook him just yet, didn’t want to give him time to cover his tracks. No, I wanted this one flustered and bumbling when I got to grips with him. The girl, however, I later learned when I cabled back to London for explanation, had foolishly asked if Trilipush “taught” at Harvard, rather than if he was “at” Harvard.

  So, October 13th, 1922, I arrived at ivy-blanketed Harvard University, wandered from building to building looking for Egyptology, where I asked to see Mr. Trilipush, only to learn from a secretary that he’d departed for Egypt not even a month before on an exploration, and would be abroad well into 1923. So be it: I’d find what I could here and then have a holiday in sunny Egypt on the Marlowes’ and Davies’s shillings. So I asked for Trilipush’s chief and was brought to the office of a little round Dutchman named Terbroogan, the head of Harvard’s Egypt men. When I told him I was looking for some information about his Mr. Trilipush, he replied with a sort of spittly speech defect and Fritzy accent, “My dear man, vatever elth he may be, by no thtretch of the imathinathon ith he my Tchiliputh.”

  Terbroogan had few gentle (or dry) words for his employee, and the tenor of the conversation was soon fine and candid, quite to my taste when compared to the timid snobberies of the Marlowes and the shadowy half-truths of Quint. “Insubordinate, arrogant, and wrong,” chants the fellow. “Insubordinate, arrogant, and wrong. If one is arrogant, one should at least be right. But his book is a tissue of nonsense. I hope he is eaten by crocodiles out there.” For a moment I found this violent language suspicious, and wondered how Professor Terbroogan and his rough fantasies might fit into our emerging picture. I wouldn’t’ve been at all surprised to learn he’d been in the same dangerous regiment in the desert or had some other sinister connection, but no, it was a passing cloud: much of this language, Macy, I’ve come to understand, is quite common talk among University types, and I admit that while I meant to take careful notes of Terbroogan’s complaints about Trilipush, I lost interest rapidly and now I’m having some difficulty making out just what I meant by jottings such as “RT’s book is about Atoomadoo, who was or was not a king and was or was not a poet and is or is not buried where RT is going and Egyptian poems do or do not rhyme. This is what these men do all day? For work?” Maybe it was the climate or the tucker or the conversation, but I was already finding America rather exhausting and I felt more than just a bit ill. None of Terbroogan’s words have stayed with me, until I asked where in Egypt Trilipush had gone. “Deir el Bahari,” replied Terbroogan, and I made him spell it for me, to be sure. (“Do you see it, Macy?” I later ask my worthy but dim assistant, back at our hotel, poring over maps, but he shakes his head and chews his lip. You don’t mind, do you, Macy? Something of comic relief is how I’m picturing you now.)

  “And, because you have such trouble with Professor Trilipush,” I asked the turnip-faced chief, who was wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, “you sent him on this excavation? Expensive way to get him out of your hair, no?”

  He hadn’t. It had been Terbroogan’s option, and he’d refused Trilipush the money for the trip, precisely because of disagreements over the quality of Trilipush’s scholarship. (Honestly, Macy, these people were barking mad.) “Unt I happen to know he vath turned down by the MFA, the Met, and the Carnegie.” He’s travelling on his own money, then? “Not at all. He sold shares in his misadventure to some local businessmen.”

  My dear Macy, we now come to some language you may not appreciate. I’ve been wondering whether to soften certain hard truths as I found them in those days, and perhaps cast things in a more flattering light for you. Well, I will not do that. I’m too old for it, and you’ve asked me for an honest rendering, and frankly, it isn’t my manner to provide any other kind. Slippery slope, that one. I’m a truth man, me, and I think this must be exactly why I was so resistant this morning to getting started on the Boston leg of my tale. Right, then: I’ll apologise here, this once, and that will be the end of it: I’m sorry if you read things in this chronicle, Mr. Laurence Macy III, that are painful to you or upset your notion of your family, or your poor, late aunt Margaret.

  “Not at all. He sold shares in his misadventure to some local businessmen, unsavoury types, if I may say, with unfortunate reputations.” He mentioned your great-uncle Chester Finneran, as well as Heinz Kovacs.

  Why didn’t he just fire Trilipush, if he was such a thorn in their side? The fellow explained with a certain tone that “the University generally preferred not to do that” (honestly, these people). But “when he comes back from Egypt empty-handed, which he certainly will, that should be enough to shame the man out,” he added with a nice shot of venom. Noting how he sounded, the professor then visibly exerted himself to give his bloke a fair go: “Trilipush is a good teacher, he was a heroic soldier in Turkey, and he was educated at Oxford, which does add to our department’s credentials, and Atoomadoo is not uninteresting, only not definitive, and so when one has problems, one prefers simply to place people where they will quietly do their job, but this one, my Lord.” That about exhausted the old man’s goodwill. “When he was new here, last year, he was positively fawning towards me, but that did not last.”

  I think I must have said it something like this, Macy, though of course I made no note of the exact wording: “Would it be useful to you and the University to discreetly employ someone who may be able to provide you extra material in ‘shaming Mr. Trilipush out,’ as you put it. If, for example, discrepancies in his Oxford record were discovered—”

  “But I saw his credentials, everything stamped and sealed and signed, no question at all.”

  “Documents, Professor Terbroogan, are only pieces of paper that purport to represent the truth. They’re not truth itself. Surely in your field of study, you’ve seen misleading, even malicious documents.”

  You’ve never seen a happier little Dutch professor, Macy, and we had a new client in the Davies-Caldwell-Barry-Hoyt-Marlowe-Trilipush case.

  Terbroogan walked me down the hall decorated with sphinx statues and photographs of him in sandy pits, and I asked to see Trilipush’s office. This was a small, windowless room in the basement, with shelves of books and pictures of excavators and relics.
Trilipush’s desk was clean, but for a small stack of post which had arrived for him since his departure to Egypt. And right there on the top? An oversized envelope with a familiar return address, stamped with English postage. Oh, yes, Macy, from our Beverly Quint: he’d asked me for Trilipush’s address and must’ve set to writing this the minute I left his rooms: a warning or telltale reminiscence, certainly some proof of conspiracy in what I was beginning to suspect had been the Marlowe-Caldwell murders at the hands of Trilipush and with the leering knowledge of Quint. This envelope must’ve come over on my very boat. Quint and I had floated across the Atlantic, one on top of the other, quite unaware, and now we had arrived at our mutual destination, just inches apart. So much might be answered right there, but damn him, my newest client was hovering over me, asking if there was anything else I needed, and looking at me with one of those faces you see from time to time in our profession, Macy, that look of suspicious superiority from someone so removed from the dirty realities of life that he cannot distinguish between the filth of the criminal and the smudge on the fellow who had to wrestle the criminal in order to save the innocent. I could’ve throttled the professor right there, standing on toff ceremony, pushing me out the door when we might’ve saved so many middle steps, perhaps even saved two more lives, and your lovely aunt Margaret more suffering. No, we were out the door and into the hall, and the door was locked and Quint’s package sat undisturbed on Trilipush’s desk, waiting for his return. Professor Terbroogan meaningfully rattled the locked knob and looked at me looking at Quint’s package through the glass plate in the door. There it is, Macy: from across the globe a pom poofter could simply address an illicit package and count on the protection of some Dutch University snob he’d never met! Whatever’d happened to poor Paul Caldwell—and I had strong suspicions—was going to be devilish difficult to unravel, because as fast as I was unravelling, these toffs and poms and perverts and professors were going to ravel it up again, maybe to hide something wicked, maybe just because they liked things tidy and that meant not letting a simple Australian working man do his job. “Is there anything else you need, Mr. Ferrell?” Terbroogan asked with an unmistakable tone that meant, “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s post.” No, of course they don’t, even if gentlemen are murderers.