by John Fowles
‘Good heavens.’
The old man looked up at them with a sage smile. ‘A good rule is the more humble the object, the more likely it is to be genuine.’ He took the scarab back and set it affectionately beside the coffee-cups.
Jane murmured, ‘It’s very kind of you to show us.’
He opened his hands: his pleasure.
‘Caveat emptor? Yes? But you may trust our friend. His prices are fair.’
They thanked him again; made their purchases, nodded and smiled to the old man with the beard, who gravely bowed back; were ushered out by Mr Abdullam. But they had not gone more than a few steps back towards the boat before Jane suddenly stopped.
‘Would you wait here a minute, Dan?’ She said quickly, ‘Please. No questions.’
He watched her walk back to the shop and go in again. She came out three minutes later with a small round parcel of white tissue, like a wrapped orange, and handed it straight to him.
‘Oh Jane… for heaven’s sake.’
‘I couldn’t resist it. It was at the back of one of the cases. You didn’t see it.’
‘That’s thoroughly naughty.’
‘Do look at it.’
He broke the Scotch tape holding the tissue together and unwrapped the object. It was a broken fragment of a hollow pottery head, blandly broad-faced, mere slits for eyes and mouth.
She said, ‘Who does it remind you of?’
He stared a moment, then suddenly grinned up. ‘Assad.’ He looked again. ‘How fantastic. It’s the spitting image of him.’
‘It’s the top of a Coptic water-jar. Our German friend assured me they’re too common to be faked.’
‘How old is it?’
‘He thinks about 300 A.D. Give or take a century.’
Dan looked up at her, then caught her arm, leant forward and kissed her cheek; which embarrassed her. She smiled and looked down as if he was making too much of it.
‘As long as you didn’t pay…’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘It’s delicious.’
‘Token.’
‘No. I really love it.’
And he held it out again at arm’s length; the similarity really was extraordinary—and touching, the enduringness of race, the genes.
They set off again for the boat, talking about the shop, the niceness of the old scholar. But Dan was remembering that contretemps in the taxi that night before: her lesson, acted on before they left Cairo, about the true meaning of tokens of gratitude; and remembered too that little delay in her decision to buy the head, which somehow pleased him almost as much as the gift itself; the conquest of caution, shyness, frugality, whatever it was, by impulse. He had expected too much, in Cairo; a wholly unreasonable and immediate gift of her natural self or at least of their old kind of camaraderie.
Dan was very slowly realizing something: that he was looking or seeking for her old self as if it were a reality she was deliberately hiding from him; which was not only, of course, to dismiss the much greater reality of all that had happened since, but betrayed a retardation in himself, a quasi-Freudian searching for the eternally lost, his vanished mother. There too, as with his father, he was much more deeply conditioned than he could easily admit. Something in him must always look for that, even in much younger women one could invert the whole process and say he was looking for the Jenny in Jane still. All his close relationships with women, even his completely asexual ones (like that with Phoebe, which he had long recognized carried a very minor, comic, yet perceptible mother-son charge), were variations on the model; and broke down precisely because they could not support what his unconscious demanded of them. It was fundamentally absurd, a repetition compulsion, and his disappointments and vague resentments with Jane sprang very largely from it. He made a mental resolve: I must start treating this woman as she is.
They came on a more recently built arcade of shops, aimed at the tourist trade and full of gaudy tat, leading through to the corniche beside the Nile. They idled from window to window, looking at the prices. Jane wanted a basket to carry her things on the tours, so they went into one bazaar and poked round that; and emerged ten minutes later with a cheap rush bag. She lifted it to examine it as they came out under the arcade. A voice spoke from just behind them.
‘That is not ancient.’
It was the bearded old German on his own way back to the ship. He was rather formally dressed in a pale grey suit, a shirt and tie, a Panama hat with a black band and curled-up rims, as if it really wanted to be a homburg—he had an air about him of being an old hand in this climate, and from before the era of ‘leisure’ clothes. Perhaps it was the walking-stick or a white carnation he had in his buttonhole; a touch of the old cosmopolitan. They smiled at his little joke, and Dan thanked him again for having helped them, and in such excellent English; then, might they walk back with him?
They strolled on, with Jane between the two men. She said she was surprised to see so many antiquities on sale.
‘It is a very difficult problem. At least here, it is in the open. You do what the Turks are trying… ‘ He shrugged.
Dan asked what was going to happen to the scarab. The old man’s blue-grey eyes showed a faint frosty twinkle. ‘No doubt it will one day make some American museum very happy. It will pass through several hands. By then the true story of its provenance will, how shall I say—have been lost?’
‘I suppose, if it can deceive even an expert like yourself…’
He raised a hand. ‘It deceived me to look at. But I have had, oh, much experience. You learn never, but never, to believe your eyes. Even when you have dug up an object yourself. That is because many expeditions pay workers for good finds. So. Good finds are sometimes arranged.’ He pointed with his stick towards the Theban hills. ‘There is a village over there. Qurna. They are great masters at every kind of fake—and even at burying genuine things where they know you hope to find them. It is forgivable, from their point of view. Excavation means work, so why not?’ He smiled at them. ‘Egyptology is not a pastime for innocents.’
‘You trust Mr Abdullam?’
‘Trust is a grand word, madame. I trust his knowledge. He knows a great deal. A spurious piece has to be very exceptional to deceive him. He knows all their tricks, how do you say, their trademarks.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘He has many ears, as they say in Arabic.’
‘He’s been at it a long time?’
‘More than you may think, perhaps. He was at the opening of Tutankhamun’s grave in 1922. He was one of Howard Carter’s workmen.’
‘Good God.’
‘A very interesting man.’ Then, as if all this must be boring them, he asked Jane where they lived in England.
‘I live in Oxford.’
That pleased the old German so much that he missed what she had meant to be the operative word in the sentence.
‘Ah? So. I have worked at the Ashmolean Museum. I am very fond indeed of Oxford. One of the most charming cities in the world.’ He looked across at Dan. ‘And you, sir, perhaps you teach…’
That obliged Dan to explain the situation; that Jane had been very recently widowed… and that her late husband had indeed taught at Oxford. The old man expressed his regrets. Philosophy was a noble subject, as a young man he had thought of studying it himself. Though that ‘noble’ made them both suspect he had a very old-fashioned notion of philosophy, this academic status by association apparently allowed him to feel that his until then guarded courtesy might become more open. As they strolled down the corniche he told them a little about himself.
He was not primarily an excavation archaeologist—his field was the economy of Ancient Egypt. He had had a heart attack five years before and had given up his active professorship at Leipzig, and now lived in Cairo with a kind of emeritus status, pursuing papyri related to his specialization—which was what had brought him many times in the past to England.
He didn’t seem to feel it was necessary to apologize for his present role, and Jane
and Dan decided afterwards that they liked him for it. They supposed it brought him some extra money—perhaps, as the national of a socialist state, it was a condition of his emeritus appointment. He was seventy-two years old, and his name was Otto Kirnberger. Two years later Dan was to see his name again, in the Times obituary column; and to learn that this urbane and friendly old man was in fact a world authority on the pharaonic tribute and taxation systems, and a papyrologist of ‘unsurpassed breadth of knowledge’.
Jane said, as they came to the ship, that they wished they could speak German, and follow his section of the tour, but he turned the intended compliment aside.
‘I think you have the best of the bargain, madame. I am much the more pedantic.’
They parted, and Dan and Jane went down to their cabins.
‘What a civilized old man.’
‘Yes.’
‘I wonder what he makes of his charges.’
‘I expect slightly more civilized people, Dan.’
He smiled, knowing by the dryness in her voice that she knew what he had really asked: what she herself intended to make of them. True to his new resolution, he decided himself not snubbed this time, but deservedly and neatly turned.
Dan waited for Jane in his cabin before dinner—the bar promised to be overcrowded and the price of its nips of Scotch was hair-raising. The cabins gave just room for two to sit. Theirs had wide picture windows, and were on the starboard side, looking across the Nile towards the setting sun. He examined the Coptic head again. He was genuinely pleased with it, although he was not a collector of objects. It sat on the folding table by the window, in the last sun, in some way both slightly smug and slightly worried—the latter because of some scratched lines above the slit eyes.
Jane knocked on his cabin door and he called her in, then rung for some ice while she installed herself by the window. When it came and they had their drinks in hand, he sat on the end of his bunk. They watched the sunset, a magnificent sky of pinks and yellows and oranges. It changed, and died, with a tropical rapidity, but there was a superb afterglow, reflected even more delicately in the shot silk of the water. A pair of feluccas passed downstream, exquisite black silhouettes, their huge lateen sails hanging from the curved cross-masts; and the disturbed light was especially beautiful in their gently spreading wakes. Palm-groves on the far bank similarly stood a deep soft black against the luminous sky, and beyond them the cliffs of Thebes turned through pink to violet and then a deep grey. Bats began to weave past, the occasional one wheeling so close to the window that they could see the details of its body. There was a great softness, stillness, peace; in the cabin as well as outside. They fell almost silent while this peerless death of light took place.
She had put on a long skirt and a cream shirt, and one of the necklaces she had bought, in case it had some ancient curse on it. Dan had set one of his suitcases opposite where she sat in the only chair, so that she could rest her ‘bad’ leg. It ached a little, it wasn’t the walking, but the standing about. A black shoe, like a ballet slipper, rather girlish, cocked up; she sat holding an elbow, the glass in her other hand, watching the sunset, occasionally sipping, until her profile too was a silhouette against it.
But their peace was broken. They heard the engines rumble, then throb quietly, and a minute later the ship began to move. The cruise commenced downstream, away from Aswan and back towards Cairo, so that they could visit Abydos; they would be coming back to Luxor for their day in the Valley of the Kings. Jane went and got her coat and they went up on deck to see the departure, along with most of the other passengers. The dark shadows of the Luxor and Karnak temples slid past. Their voyage had started.
Dan knew that the discreet distances of lunch could not last the whole cruise; and sure enough they had hardly sat down to dinner when the computer man announced that he was Mitchell Hooper, and this was his wife Marcia; to which Dan returned that ‘this’, in his turn, was Jane Mallory, and… he had hoped his own name would mean nothing to them, but he was destined to immediate disappointment. The girl gave him a quick look. ‘The movie-writer?’
‘I’m afraid so.
‘I read about your being here. There was a piece in the Cairo English newspaper yesterday morning. Kitchener, right?’
‘We hope. It’s very early days yet.’
Her husband eyed the girl, then grinned at the English couple. ‘This is going to make her trip. Oh boy.’
‘Mitch.’
He ignored her reproachful voice, and went on grinning. ‘She’s the movie and books buff. I’m just a scientist.’
‘We’re on holiday. That’s all. Like you.’
‘Sure. Great.’
Dan’s voice had been a little too anxious to kill any further questioning, and Jane stepped in with a subtler diversion. She looked at the girl.
‘Could you manage to follow the guide?’
‘Kind of… you know. So so.’
‘If I can help.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Did you enjoy it?’
The girl raised her eyes. ‘Unbelievable.’ Then, ‘Didn’t you think?’
‘I was very impressed.’ Jane smiled. ‘Not to say overwhelmed.’
‘Oh I know, I was just saying to Mitch before you came. It’s all too much to take in.’
‘Yes, it is rather.’
The waiter came with the first course, and they broke off the conversation. For the merest fraction of a second Jane’s eyes met Dan’s, though with a studious correctness of expression. Perfidious Albion had struck again; and the key of duplicity was set. They talked, or Jane and Dan listened, between courses. The American couple came from Joliet, near Chicago, but ‘Mitch’ had worked for a couple of years in California. They liked Cairo, Egypt, the Egyptians. You just had to learn their methods. Like the man said, if you had no patience when you came, you learnt it; and if you came with patience you lost it. Mallesh, did they know that word?
Apparently it meant ‘sorry, it can’t be helped’; kismet. You had to learn to live with that. It was ‘the way their society was structured’. They didn’t want to go back to the States, they thought perhaps he’d try for another year here, or maybe Lebanon, they were really sold on Lebanon; or Europe some place. They didn’t know, they were playing it by ear.
Dan and Jane went up on deck after the meal. The desert air was sharp, especially in the slipstream of the ship’s passage, but tolerable.
They leant over a rail in the lee of the superstructure and watched the dark, silent shores slip by. Occasionally one glimpsed the white shadow of a house or a villa caught in the ship’s lights; here and there a dim-glowing point, as of an oil-lamp; the stars, the quiet rush of the water. They discussed their table companions.
‘I used to hate my mother, she used to be so cutting to them sometimes. But I don’t know if it isn’t more honest than playing games.’
‘You mustn’t expect subtlety from the backwoods of Illinois.’
‘I’m not blaming them, Dan.’
‘Just us.’
‘In a way.’
‘If anything stands accused, I suspect it’s the ridiculous notion that advanced technology produces richer human beings. When it’s become only too clear that the contrary is true. I think those two half know it. They’re on the defensive about something.’
‘Yes. I felt that.’
‘Probably about wanting out. I suppose we’re lucky. Being of a race where you’re born out.’
She stared at the bank three hundred yards away. ‘You forget what being English means. Until situations like this.’
‘I think I’ve become a tiny bit of a patriot in my old age. Perhaps it’s having spent so much time over there.’
She was amused. ‘Little Britain?’
He murmured. ‘If you hadn’t given me that lovely present…’
‘But we have just been Little British. At least they were being honest.’
‘According to an inadequate scale of values.’
‘But
we hide ours as if we’re ashamed of them.’
He stared down at the water. ‘I’m a highly principled lady Marxist? I won’t tolerate the glorification of the individual in any day or age? Do you think they’d buy that?’
He glanced, and saw the faintly impatient curve in her mouth.
‘I thought we’d decided I was just a confused idealist.’
‘Equally beyond their ken.’ She said nothing. ‘They’ve paid hard-earned money to see this. The guidebooks say it’s great stuff. How can they think otherwise?’
‘It is great stuff, Dan.’
‘Now you’re being naughty.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you know that’s not what I’m talking about.’
‘I know they’re not very imaginative as tourists. I’m just thinking of being at school there. They always seemed to be much more open, at least in terms of personal taste. Saying what they feel.’
‘I’m not accusing them of not saying what they feel.’
‘But of not feeling enough?’
‘Not even that. Not knowing enough. Not being allowed to know enough. That Gramsci thing you talked about.’ He added, ‘Always doing it by the book.’
She was silent a moment. ‘Peter said something like that in one of his letters. How first you love the straightforwardness… then long for the curves.’
‘That’s my experience. The transparency’s fine. Until you begin to realize it’s less based on an intrinsic honesty than on a lack of imagination. All that so-called frankness about sex. They don’t know what they’re missing.’
‘Some must.’
‘Of course. The lucky few.’
‘Isn’t that the same everywhere?’
‘Probably. But the basic opportunities to join the few are so much greater there. If they could only see it.’
‘I suppose. If you look at it like that.’
‘The absurdity is that they’ve managed to turn themselves into the most culturally deprived people in the advanced West. Outside the big cities. Therefore the most insular. How else could they have picked a pig like Nixon for president? And on that huge majority?’
