On a Balcony

by David Stacton

  There were now four fixed religious ceremonies a day, each of which took two hours, not counting the morning and sunset services, at which Nefertiti presided alone.

  It made life very difficult. True, one could talk to Pharaoh along the route, but just as it seemed he might give some definite answer, the pylon was reached and he vanished alone into the inner shrine.

  In such circumstances those with private petitions were forced to make use of Meryra or Nefertiti. It enhanced both their folio wings. Meryra had as a consequence grown quite rich, and therefore now had many enemies. He had also been foolish enough to deputize too many of his offices to his chief assistant, a man called Pa-wah, with the result that Pa-wah also had a petty court around him, and was only waiting for the chance to make it a larger one.

  If anyone wished to speak to Pharaoh directly, as Ay and Horemheb did, the only way they could do so was to become as devout as he was. Up and down the avenues, the approaches, the ramps they would ceaselessly move, while secretaries came and went with despatches that somehow never did get delivered, for at the moment when they were to be delivered Pharaoh would always dodge into the inner shrine. Nor did he give an answer when he returned, for his worship was a form of sunbathing, and who can give a clever answer when his head is addled by the sun?

  They were waiting now, Horemheb and Ay, for Pharaoh to leave his inner shrine. The religion was no doubt sublime, but it was not without its embarrassments. Ay believed in making unavoidable burdens as light as possible. For this purpose a sceptical curiosity made an excellent fulcrum. But the effect on Horemheb was less pleasant. He had no scepticism. He could only remove doubt by pushing against it with his full weight, which was tiring.

  Ay did not wish to see him tired. He had great plans for him. He wished him to conserve his strength. Therefore, as he had to all the others, he became adviser to this man, too. For though his real career seemed to be to outlive the dynasty, this man would almost certainly outlive him.

  It was a pleasure, given those circumstances, to be congenial and kind. Besides, Horemheb sometimes surprised him by the possession of quite a different kind of nimbleness, the kind that would be needed very soon, the practical.

  But right now Horemheb was grumbling and restive. “I am surprised,” said Ay. “For can’t you see, that the Aton is intensely practical?”

  Horemheb could not see it.

  “But you must at least grant it is all very innocent and charming.”

  Horemheb saw nothing of the sort.

  “But it gives him something to believe in, and that in turn gives the court something to believe in. So in a sense it prevents anarchy. And since they do not understand it, they cannot be sure what would happen if they ignored it, so they believe it, and so keep out of mischief.”

  “But it’s ruining the country.”

  Ay shrugged. “The country is ruined already. This makes it easier to pick up the pieces when the time comes, that’s all. And since he would not do anything about the country in any case, perhaps it is as well that he does this. Besides, he does believe it. He is quite sincere.”

  Horemheb gave him a suspicious look. “And I suppose you believe it, too?”

  Ay smiled slowly. So much hard-headed honesty was inconvenient. He did not want Horemheb to say an incautious word and so fall from favour. “It is as easy to believe in one thing as in another. As for what one really believes in, who knows? Who would believe in it, if it were not a mystery?”

  To his surprise Horemheb seemed to find this entirely intelligible. It was for much these reasons that one believed in the army. But still, he did not trust Ay. “What are you trying to tell me?” he asked.

  “To have patience, for your own good. Believe in it while it is still here, for you will never be able to believe in it once it is over. And besides, in its own way it is rather grand and beautiful. Allow yourself to admire beauty for a little while.”

  “Beauty threw thirty thousand rioters from the cemeteries into the streets of Thebes.”

  “Undoubtedly it is a powerful force,” said Ay amiably. “But then its reign is comparatively brief. And a commander of the armies out of office is as helpless as an adviser with no one to advise.”

  They looked at each other for a while.

  “Yes,” said Ay, and glanced towards Pharaoh, who was leaving the inner shrine. In his eyes, as he watched that fluttering white figure, there was a remote but loving pity. For Pharoah was alone with his god, and no man should ever be wholly alone with himself, for of all things, the self alone is undeviatingly pitiless.

  *

  However, it is also remarkably clever. Its immediate duty was to cure Pharaoh of doubt, and Ay could see that there was no doubt that it would succeed in doing so. Observing which, and also the way in which Horemheb and Nefertiti avoided each other, he even found it possible to feel sorry for the Queen, though not much.

  For really did the Queen not know what was wrong with her?

  Apparently not. But Ay, whose medical knowledge was if anything better than Pentu’s, and whose admiration of beauty was none the less sincere for being tacit, felt profoundly sad for her.

  So, in his own apartments, did Pharaoh. For Ikhnaton, though he might be blind when it came to himself, saw the rest of the world all too clearly. He never underestimated a motive, or a fleeting expression in a courtier’s face, and so, though one deplored his stupidities, it would have been a mistake to under-rate his grip upon those whom he saw every day. Who knows, had the rebellious Syrian provinces been under his nose, he might have been able to do something about them, too, with that amazing instinct he had for playing one kind of greed off against another.

  A great statesman had been lost to theology, and Ay, for one, found that good cause for relief, for unlike competent bureaucrats, great statesmen are a perpetual source of endless harm, since their greatness depends upon the degree to which they change the status quo.

  Pharaoh had saved himself from disillusionment at the last moment, and in a quite remarkably severe way. It was a pity no one could have known how, for Ay, at least, who had had some insight into the gymnastics of which that mind was capable, would have admired the process for the contrivance it was.

  The tensions of Ikhnaton’s life were too much for him. He fell down in a fit. Fortunately only Pentu was with him. The fit sobered him. He called for his chariot and sent Pentu away. He knew he had to escape the palace for a while. It was about four in the morning when he left.

  The sky had the pre-dawn darkness of a man who allows himself to frown before breaking into a smile. The city was populous now, but there were still many vacant places. Grandiose buildings alternated with short sand grass, and slums with unfinished avenues. The flags of the Aton temples hung limp on their rods. The streets were empty, except that here and there a cat or a dog yowled. Under the silence ran the steady disturbing hunger of the Nile.

  Beneath the late stars, the cliffs shimmered and were still. He intended to ride to the top of them, He had not bothered to dress, and the night was cool. He whipped up the horses and raced through the city like a neglected ghost or a criminal fleeing his crime. And was that not true? Was he not called that criminal of Aketaten? And for him these fits of his were a crime, since he was helpless during them. To lose consciousness, to him, was the only crime there was.

  The wind woke him up. While the chariot was moving, he was always gay. He swept through the northern suburb, past the clumsy state palace Nefertiti maintained there as High Priestess of the dawn, and took the cliff road to the ancient quarries. Above him in the rock face the doorways of the unfinished tombs gaped like the blood-clotted sockets of extracted teeth.

  He knew very well where he was going. He whipped the horses at a dangerous corner, the horses whinneyed, the wheels jounced at the rim of the cliff, and he laughed. Half an hour later he was on the plateau above, bouncing along the meagre patrol road from which sentries guarded the city. He could see Aketaten below him as he drove, and really
, it did not seem much.

  An altar had been built up here, perhaps ten feet high and approached by ramps. He stopped the chariot, threw the reins over the horses’ heads, and ran up the ramp. The sky was already beginning to grow green, the stars indistinct. They went out like lamps that had used up their oil, though where, in this world, would you find an oil so pure?

  On top of the altar the wind was almost a gale. The flapping of his wig and loincloth bothered him. He took them off. The wind stirred a little that incompetent thing, his penis and its hair, but he did not find that unpleasant. His power, if he had any power, was not there.

  The city lay six hundred feet below him, somehow pushed up by the desert sand against the green band along the river. He could see, from here, very clearly, that those triumphal avenues led nowhere. Even the altars looked like transient bedouin tents. It was inert and lifeless down there. It was not impressive and it bored him. He turned the other way, shivering slightly, to that point on the eastern horizon from which the daylight was certain to spread. Down in the plain even the light made shadows. But here it would make none. Here they were high above the shadows, “they” being himself and his god, that merciless, abstract, dangerously dazzling, and truthful disembodiment. Yet, as the sky lightened, he knew he had to believe, and so he managed to. It was not so difficult. The mind, finally cornered, in order to survive exerts itself, and from nowhere finds the strength to leap over its ultimate boundaries. Then the chase is on again. From insanity to the water wheel, all great discoveries have been made that way. As it enriches itself, the mind moves through larger and larger rooms, and confronted at last with a wall without a door, it breaks through and makes a new addition.

  For even when one has seen through good and evil, there is still a moral responsibility, that which in the world of events we call keeping up appearances, a much higher one than mere good and evil. For good and evil are only toys, invented because in order to play any game it is necessary to have two sets of pieces. To tell them apart, we colour them differently, but they are made of the same stuff and have the same shapes. Good we use for evil purposes, and evil for good, and this makes no difference, for the board will be swept clean in any case. It is the board which allows us to play our little game of good and evil. It is this which keeps up our appearances.

  For such is the limitation of our minds, that a belief in nothing is, after all, and on the contrary, a belief in something. So the act of belief itself sustains us, even when we call it disbelief. For then we believe in our disbelief. So even though we have long ago seen through those vices and virtues with which others play the game over us, we are still there keeping up appearances, since without our appearances our moral critics would have nothing to play their game on. Belief and disbelief in that sense are the same thing. It is merely a matter of where one happens to be standing in relation to the board at any given moment. And since in actuality one keeps hopping about all the time, the two alternate so rapidly that to our somewhat limited vision they seem to be quite stable and solid.

  Therefore, no matter how much we may be given to doubt, our belief is for that very reason quite unshakeable, since in alternating between the two we perceive they are about the same. So in darkness he was indeed the glorious child of the Aton. And besides, he did like the sun.

  But at the same time, having seen the board, it made him a little weary that he still had to go on pretending to believe in the relative moral permanence of the highly impermanent pieces. For instance, such pieces as himself, truth, Egypt, and the Queen.

  For since truth also was merely a matter of keeping up appearances, it too must be equally true and untrue. So like everything else in this world, its very nature consisted in its having no nature whatsoever. Like all stable contraries, truth was only a matter of keeping up appearances.

  It was strange that he, who so wanted to believe in things, could do so only in this way; whereas Ay, who believed in nothing, would have been shocked to the very bottom of his tidy mathematical soul by such a system of essential sophistries.

  There was only one piece he could not fit into this admirable system, whose firmness came from the fact it was so shaky, and that was death. For unlike good, evil, belief, disbelief, truth, and untruth, death, he was uneasily aware, could touch him. True, if one could believe there was life after death, then life and death became a like system of stable alternates, but he could not believe so. He had consulted the best spiritualists, but one could never be certain that what they said was true, for the best charlatans were the most convincing, the most truthful people were always lying.

  Perhaps the matter was better ignored. For it was dawn, and under that soothing light, death seemed very far away, though not, perhaps, quite so far away as he assumed.

  Nevertheless, while he had been so reasoning, the dawn had come. And really, dawn made reason unnecessary. The wind, by cooling his body’s surface temperature, had made a change in his thoughts possible. When we are asleep this produces nightmares, but when we are awake, geometry, philosophy, and other systems to prove that the actual is not there. However, though it is not there, still we have to move about in it, and for that we must needs keep up appearances.

  Now the sky was full of light. As he turned, suddenly cold, to pick up his clothes, he saw that the light had kindled against the metal disc set in the centre of the altar, and glowed there like a great blob of incandescent silver. Instinctively he shoved his hands into that reflection, as though it had been some kind of celestial hibachi.

  Meanwhile, one of the sentries who patrolled that cliff had seen him. “Halt, who goes there?” he demanded.

  Ikhnaton picked up his loincloth and wig and stepped back into his chariot, once more holding the reins firmly in his hand, or at least, as firmly as he was able. He, too, believed in keeping up appearances. “Pharaoh,” he said, and whirled back to the palace the way he had come.

  So much for truth, and at breakfast it might be pleasant to play with the children, or even, in a slightly different way, with the Queen, though these days it was impertinent of her to appear in public at all. He loathed disease. Surely she must know that.

  *

  If she knew, she certainly refused to believe it. She had so many worries of vanity, that this real one had almost slipped by her notice. So she was not at breakfast. She had gone to Tutmose to be flattered. He had always flattered them. He, at least, knew she was still beautiful.

  Alas, she had never realized that Tutmose’s theory of beauty was not at the mercy of any single flaw, but was rather enhanced by one, since the artist knows better than to expect a perfect beauty. Only a woman would demand that.

  None the less she did demand it.

  He was surprised to see her so early. He was sitting on the rim of a pool in his garden, with one leg extended, eating a honey cake, while the soft green and yellow light turned blue among the leaves of the sycamores. He looked a little tired, a little old; but he stood up, smiled, and came forward to greet her, with his usual amused gravity.

  What did she want?

  She wanted to see her portrait, the one she had given him so derisively, knowing it was only a pretty image he had made to take her in. Now, it appeared, it was she who wished to be taken in.

  If he was shocked by her appearance, he said nothing. He led her into the studio.

  At this hour of the morning it was a shadowy place. These faces, which were supposed to be bright images of heaven, were children of darkness after all. They had always seemed deceptively alive. That was his skill. But here in the half-gloom one saw what that deception was. The serenity was only a trick of the light. Here in the half-dark one could see they were really images of pain.

  The kneeling statue of Pharaoh had been removed.

  She must have looked up at her image on its bracket for a very long time, and even she could not control the expression which crossed her face.

  “What are you doing now?” she asked at last.

  He thought perhaps
it would be kinder not to show her what he was doing now. Gently he led her aside and showed her a mask. He had made it five years ago, but there was no need to tell her that. It was her own face staring up at her. She examined it with care.

  “Am I no longer beautiful?” she asked.

  “You will always be beautiful.”

  “Then why do you not make me like that,” she said, with a glance towards the bust on its bracket. “Why do you have to make me like this?” She tapped the mask of five years ago. “Surely I have not aged so much.”

  The bitterness in her voice distressed him. But what could he say, except not to say that even as she could not repeat herself, neither could he.

  “You have not aged at all,” he said, and almost meant it. For in a way it was true. Her mind could not age. It could only grow disillusioned.

  “You lie,” she told him. “Why do all men always lie?”

  It was not his place to tell her that in these matters lies were even more important to women. “Perhaps because it is a way of telling the truth.”

  She gazed once more at the bust on its bracket. And then, it was incredible, it was the last thing he would have expected of so dishonest and resourceful a creature, tears came into her eyes and worked slowly down her cheeks. She seemed startled herself. She ignored them. And out of politeness, so did he. She turned away and left the house.

  For a long time the studio was quiet.

  At last he got up, parted a curtain, and looked at the new work.

  He might finish it or he might not, since it would never stand anywhere but here, behind its curtain. It showed her, a little older than she was now, walking out of the stone, serene, proud, worn, but indomitable. The eyes had the sadness animals have in their eyes. How is it animals look so sad, since they do not think the way we do? Really, they have not our opportunities to be sad. Yet the look in their eyes, when we come upon them by surprise, resting, is heartrending. And he had not lied to her. She was still beautiful. Indeed she was more beautiful than ever, for this to him was beauty.