by Paul Sussman
He was silent for a moment, brow furrowed, and then tamped his cigarette out on the armrest of the swing and laughed. 'Listen to me. I bet you wish you'd stayed inside and helped with the washing up.'
Their eyes met again and, as if acting independently of the rest of their bodies, their fingers crept across the seat and touched. It was an innocent gesture, barely noticeable, and yet at the same time one loaded with intent. They looked away. Their fingertips, however, remained connected, something irreversible flowing between them.
They met in London three days later and within the week had become lovers.
It had been a magical time, the finest of her life. He had a flat off Gower Street – a tiny garret with two murky skylights and no central heating – and this had been their lair. They had made love day and night, played backgammon, eaten picnics among the sheets, made love again, devoured each other.
He was a brilliant draughtsman, and she had stretched naked on the bed, bashful and blushing, while he'd drawn her, in pencil, in charcoal, in crayon, covering sheet after sheet of paper with her image, as though each drawing was somehow an official affirmation of their togetherness.
A friend of his owned a battered old Triumph motorbike and at weekends the two of them rode out into the country, Tara's hands clutched around his waist, seeking out secret corners in which to be alone together – a silent forest, a deserted river-bank, an empty stretch of shoreline.
He took her round the British Museum, pointing out objects that were particularly special to him, enthusing about them, discussing their history: a cuneiform tablet from Amarna; a blue-glazed hippopotamus; a Ramessid ostrakon with a sketch of a man taking a woman from behind.
'Calm is the desire of my skin,' he said, translating the hieroglyphic text down one side of the stone.
'Not mine,' she laughed, grabbing his face and kissing him passionately, oblivious to the tourists eddying around them.
They visited other collections together – the Petrie, the Bodleian, the Sir John Soane Museum to see the sarcophagus of Seti I – and she in turn took him to London Zoo, where a friend of hers, who was working there, brought out a python for him to hold, which he hadn't enjoyed at all.
Her parents had finally broken apart at this time, but she had been so buried inside her life with Daniel that their separation barely affected her. She graduated from her course and enrolled to read for a PhD, still hardly aware of what was happening, as if it was going on in some parallel universe, far removed from the all-enveloping reality of her relationship. She had been so happy. So complete.
'What else is there?' she asked one night as they lay together after a particularly intense bout of love-making. 'What else could I want?'
'What else could you want?' asked Daniel.
'Nothing,' she replied, snuggling against him. 'Nothing on earth.'
'Daniel is a hugely talented person,' her father said when she told him of the relationship. 'One of the finest scholars it's ever been my privilege to teach. You make a very fine couple.'
He paused and then added, 'But be careful, Tara. Like all gifted people, he has a darkness to him. Don't let him hurt you.'
'He won't, Dad,' she said. 'I know he won't.'
Curiously, the fact that he did was something she had always, deep down, blamed on her father rather than Daniel, as though it was the warning that had fractured their relationship rather than the person being warned about.
The Ahwa Wadood tea-room was a shabby affair with sawdust on the floor and tables packed with old men sipping tea and playing dominoes. She saw him as soon as she walked in, at the far end of the room puffing on a shisha pipe, head bent over a backgammon board, lost in concentration. He looked much as he had done when she'd last seen him six years ago, although his hair was a little longer, his face more sunburnt. She stared for a moment, fighting back an urge to be sick, and then started forward. She was right in front of him before he looked up.
'Tara!'
His dark eyes widened. They looked at each other for a long moment, neither saying anything, and then, leaning over the table, she raised her hand and slapped him across the face.
'You cunt,' she hissed.
LUXOR, THE THEBAN HILLS
The madman squatted beside his fire, poking at the embers with a stick. Around him the cliffs loomed large and silent, the only other sign of life apart from himself being the occasional howling of a wild dog. Over his shoulder a dazzling white curve of moon hung suspended against the night.
He stared at the flickering flames, his face hollow and dusty, knots of filthy hair dangling over the shoulders of his torn djellaba. He could see gods in the fire: strange figures with human bodies and the heads of beasts. There was one with a jackal head and another like a bird, and another with a tall headdress and an elongated crocodile face. They frightened and delighted him. He began rocking on his haunches, lips quivering, mesmerized by the fiery images at his feet.
Now the flames showed him other secrets: a dark room, a coffin, jewellery, objects piled against a wall, swords, shields, knives. He gaped in wonder.
The flames went dark, but only for a moment, and when they brightened again the room was gone and in its place was something else. A desert. Mile after mile of burning sand and across it a great army marching. He heard the thud of hooves, the clink of armour, the swelling of a song. And another sound too, distant, like a lion roaring. It seemed to come from under the sand, growing louder until all other sounds were lost within it. The man's eyelids started to flicker and his breathing grew faster. He raised his thin hands and held them over his ears, for the roar was starting to hurt them. The flames leaped, a wind started to blow and then, as he looked on in horror, the sands of the desert started to bubble and foam like water. They swayed and surged, and then rose up high in front of him, swelling like a tidal wave, up and up and up, engulfing the entire army. He screamed and threw himself backwards, knowing he too would be lost beneath the sands if he didn't get away. He scrambled to his feet and ran madly into the hills, wailing.
'No!' His cries echoed into the night. 'Allah protect me! Allah have mercy on my soul! Nooooo!'
14
CAIRO
Jenny had described it as Tara's Mike Tyson week. First Daniel had left her, then, almost immediately, she had discovered her mother had inoperable cancer. Two vicious blows coming out of nowhere, one after the other, knocking her out.
'Yup,' Jenny had said, 'that's about as Mike Tyson as it gets.'
Looking back – and for the last six years she'd done nothing but look back, turning the whole thing over in her mind as if constantly replaying the same video – she could see the signs had been there from the start.
Despite their closeness, a part of Daniel had always held away from her. They would finish making love and straight away he would disappear into his reading, as though alarmed by the depth of feeling he had just displayed. They would talk and talk, and yet somehow he never revealed anything of himself. In more than a year together she had discovered almost nothing about his background, like an excavator who tries to dig downwards only to hit solid rock almost immediately beneath the surface. He had been born in Paris, lost his parents in a car crash when he was ten, come to live with an aunt in England, got a first at Oxford. That was about it. It was as if he immersed himself in the history of Egypt to make up for the lack of a past of his own.
Yes, the signs had been there. She had shut them out, however. Refused to acknowledge them. She had loved him so much.
The end had come completely without warning. She arrived at his flat one evening, eighteen months after they'd started going out, they hugged, even kissed, and then he drew away.
'I heard from the Supreme Council of Antiquities today,' he said, staring down at her, their eyes not quite meeting. 'I've been granted a concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings. To lead my own expedition.'
'Daniel, that's wonderful!' she cried, coming forward and throwing her arms around him. 'I'm so proud of you.'
She clung to his shoulders for a moment, then pulled back, sensing he wasn't responding to the embrace, that there was more to come.
'What?'
His eyes seemed even blacker than usual. 'It's going to mean me living in Egypt for a while.'
She laughed. 'Of course it's going to mean you living in Egypt. What were you expecting to do? Commute?'
He smiled, but there was something hollow about the expression. 'It's a huge responsibility, Tara. To be allowed to excavate at one of the greatest archaeological sites in the world. A huge honour. I'm going to need to . . . focus all my attention on it.'
'Of course you have to focus all your attention on it.'
'All my attention.'
Something in the way he emphasized the 'all' sent a slight tremor through her, like the warning of a more severe earthquake to come. She stepped back, chasing his eyes with her own but unable to bring them to bay.
'What are you saying, Daniel?' Silence. She came forward again, taking his hands in hers. 'It's OK. I can live without you for a few months. It'll be fine.'
There was a bottle of vodka on the desk behind him and, slipping his hands out of hers, he picked it up and poured himself a glass.
'It's more than that.'
Another tremor ran through her, stronger this time. 'I don't understand what you're saying.'
He downed the vodka in one.
'It's over, Tara.'
'Over?'
'I'm sorry to be so blunt, but I can't put it any other way. I've been waiting for an opportunity like this all my life. I can't let anything get in the way. Not even you.'
She continued to stare at him for a moment and then, as if she had been punched in the stomach, staggered backwards, grasping at the doorframe for support. The room around her thickened and became indistinct.
'How would I . . . get in the way?'
'I can't explain it, Tara. I just have to concentrate on my work. I mustn't have any . . . encumbrances.'
'Encumbrances!' She fought to control her voice, to find words. 'Is that what I am to you, Daniel? An encumbrance?'
'I didn't mean it like that. I just have to . . . be free to do my work. I can't have any ties. I'm sorry. Really I am. This last year's been the best time of my life. It's just that . . .'
'You've found something better.'
There was a pause.
'Yes,' he said eventually.
She crumpled to the floor then, shamed by her tears but unable to control them.
'Oh God.' She was choking. 'Oh God, Daniel, please don't do this to me.'
When she left twenty minutes later she felt as though everything inside her had been scraped out. For two days she heard nothing and eventually, unable to hold herself away, she returned to his flat. There was no answer to her banging.
'He's moved out,' a student living on the floor below told her. 'Gone to Egypt or something. There's a new tenant coming in next week.'
He hadn't even left her a note.
She had wanted to die. Had even gone so far as to buy five bottles of aspirin and one of vodka.
That same week, however, she had received news of her mother's cancer, and that had somehow diminished the painful but lesser sorrow of Daniel's departure, one agony cancelling out another.
She had nursed her mother for the four brief months she had left to live, and in the turmoil of watching her waste away she had somehow come to terms with the ending of the relationship. When her mother eventually died Tara had organized the funeral and then gone abroad for a year, first to Australia, then South America. On her return she had bought the flat, got the job at the zoo, reestablished some sort of equilibrium.
The pain, however, had never entirely left her. There had been other relationships but she had always held back, unwilling to risk even a fraction of the torment she had suffered over Daniel.
She had neither seen nor heard from him again. Until tonight.
'I guess I deserved that,' he said.
'Yes,' she replied. 'You did.'
They had left the tea-room, stares and whispers pushing against their backs, and were now walking down Ahmed Maher towards the heart of the city's Islamic quarter, past stalls selling lamps and shisha pipes and clothes and vegetables. The air was heavy with the bitter-sweet odour of spices and dung and rubbish; a hundred different noises assaulted their ears – hammering and music and beeping and, from one shop doorway, the slow, rhythmic grinding of a huge vermicelli-making machine.
They came to a crossroads and turned left through an ornately carved stone gateway, a pair of minarets rearing high above them. A narrow street stretched ahead, even more crowded than the one they had left. Fifty metres along they turned into a narrow alley and stopped in front of a heavy wooden door. A sign on the wall read 'Hotel Salah al-Din'. Daniel pushed the door open and they passed into a small, dusty courtyard with a dried-up fountain at its centre and a wooden gallery running above their heads.
'Home sweet home,' he said.
His room was on the upper floor, opening off the gallery, simple but clean. He flicked on a light, pushed back the window shutters, poured them both a large whisky. From below came the rattle of cart wheels and the babble of human voices. There was a long silence.
'I don't know what to say,' he said eventually.
'Sorry, maybe.'
'Would that do any good?'
'It would be a start.'
'Then I'm sorry, Tara. Genuinely so.'
There was a pack of cheroots lying on the table beside him and he pulled one out, lighting it and exhaling a cloud of dense smoke. He seemed uneasy, nervy, his eyes flicking over to her and away again. In the clear cold light of the room she could see that he'd aged more than she had at first thought. There were flecks of grey in his dark hair, and lines across his forehead. He was still handsome though. God, he was handsome.
'When did you start smoking those?' she asked.
He shrugged.
'A few years ago. Carter used to smoke them. I thought a bit of his luck might rub off on me.'
'And has it?'
'Not really.'
He refilled his glass and hers too. There was a loud beeping from below as a moped fought its way through the crowds.
'So how did you find me?' he asked. 'I take it you didn't just walk into the tea-room by accident.'
'I saw the note you left my father.'
'Of course. How is he?'
She told him.
'Oh Jesus. I'm sorry. I had no idea. Really I didn't.'
He laid aside his glass and came over to her, extending his arms as if to embrace her. She raised a hand, however, warding him off, and his arms dropped back to his side.
'I'm sorry, Tara. If there's anything I can do . . .?'
'It's all been taken care of.'
'Well, if you need . . .'
'It's all been taken care of.'
He nodded and backed away. There was another long silence. She wondered what she was doing here, what she was trying to achieve. Tendrils of cheroot smoke were curling around the light bulb.
'So what have you been doing for the last six years?' she asked eventually, conscious of how superficial the question sounded.
Daniel downed his whisky. 'The usual, I suppose. Excavating. A bit of lecturing. I've written a couple of books.'
