The Widows of Eastwick

by John Updike

  At last, the Pyramid circumnavigated, the driver with a few guttural commands and cursory gestures of his switch signalled the camel to kneel. Alexandra fought toppling forward and losing the last particles of her dignity; she stepped onto the stable earth with legs trembling as if they had been packed in ice. The camel, his segmented, velour-soft face suddenly next to hers, exposed long corn-yellow teeth and, batting his double eyelashes superciliously, produced the sound of flatulence with his absurdly flexible lips, as glad to be rid of her as she of him. The driver received his payment with a salaam so deep that she realized she had overtipped him. Groping for some international form of disclaimer, she murmured “Pas de quoi” and, feeling overheated and tousled, simpered like a maiden flirt; but the man was already looking beyond her, hungrily scanning the camel-shy other tourists for his next victim.

  Jane did not flatter her courage or applaud her survival. She greeted her saying, “Don’t you feel filthy? How many fleas and germy little things do you think live in a camel’s coat?”

  After her sleepless hours of torment by Jane’s snore, Alexandra was in no mood for further insult. “No more than in most places, I would think. If you’re going to be obsessed with germs, Jane, you shouldn’t have come to Africa.” To soften this scolding, she asked, “How did I look?”

  “You didn’t look like Lawrence of Arabia, if that’s what you wanted.”

  “Did you get a picture of me?” Before entrusting herself to the camel, she had given Jane her camera, a little predigital Canon. “With the Pyramid in the background?”

  “Yes, I think I did, though I hate other people’s cameras. Things snapped and whirred inside. I’m not so sure about the Pyramid. The angle wasn’t easy, and you never held ssstill.”

  “Don’t I know it? I do hope you didn’t mess up, Jane. It would have made an amusing print to send my grandchildren. But without the Pyramid it could be in some zoo.”

  “Oh, grandchildren. They don’t care about us, face it, dear. They find us boring and embarrassing. Only we care about us.”

  It was a desire to smooth away the negativity from Jane that had so soon entered their joint adventure that led her to ask the other, as they sat together over their tea looking out through glittering beads upon the Great Pyramid, “What do you think of it? What does it say to you?”

  “It ssays to me,” Jane said, “what idiots people are and always have been. Imagine all that labor and engineering so one man could imagine he was going to cheat his own death.”

  “But hasn’t he? We know his name, all these years later. Cheops. Or Khufu. Jane, you must admit, the thing itself is stupendous. What did the guide in the bus say—over two million blocks, ranging from two to fifteen tons in weight? Archaeologists still don’t know how they got the stones up there.”

  “Very simple. A ramp.” When Alexandra became enthusiastic, Jane tended to sulk.

  “But think of it—all the material a ramp would have used, where would they have put it afterwards? And the effect is so simple, so elegant—so modest, really. And the other one, by his son, nearly as big. And the little one, like Baby Bear, built by the grandson. I love them. I’m so glad we’re here. I feel wiser. How can you not?”

  “I don’t know,” Jane confessed. “I often fail to be moved by what moves other people. It frightens me. Like those people born with missing nerves, who chew up their own tongues because they feel no pain.”

  Alexandra was moved to touch the other woman, quickly, on the exposed skin of the back of her hand. They had been asked by the tour to cover their arms and wear long skirts; it was not yet necessary for female tourists to conceal the hair on the heads. A revived religious faith as monolithic as the Pyramids was still held at partial bay by the government’s military. “Don’t say that, dear,” Alexandra urged. “You have all the nerves the rest of us do. You don’t have to like the Great Pyramid, just try to respect it. It was your idea to come to Egypt, remember?”

  Jane looked aged in the harsh desert light, shrunken. Blue veins writhed on the backs of her hands. “There’s this sstink to the past,” she said, “of magic that stopped working. It never really did work, of course. Just gave the priests more power than was good for them.”

  “If they believed it worked, maybe it did. It made them less anxious. As I remember us in Eastwick, we used to believe that there was an old religion, before men came in and took it over just like they took over midwifing and haute couture. It was a nature religion that never died—women carried it on even when they were tortured and killed.”

  “What are you saying? That women built the Pyramids?”

  “No, but they went along with it, the queens at least. There’s something delicate and gentle about the ancient Egyptians. They loved Nature—look at the tomb paintings that are on all the postcards they keep trying to sell us, the reeds and flowers and food they wanted the dead to have. To them the afterlife was this life, going on forever. That’s what the Pyramids say: Give us more life. More, more, please. They made them enormous so everybody could see them—could see that the Pharaoh had believed in another life, and would take them all with him into it.”

  “I don’t think that was part of the bargain,” Jane said dryly. “The Pharaoh was a special case. He sailed on alone.”

  “They were like our Presidents,” Alexandra urged. “We won’t elect people who don’t believe in God, or pretend they do. They believe on behalf of everybody. They make us all feel better, the way even an awful Pope used to do.”

  Jane sighed and said, “I’ll be all right, Lexa. Once we get on the river. Nat loved being on the water. I hated it, and discouraged his sailing. That’s on my conscience, with everything else.”

  But before they caught the plane to Luxor, where they would board their sightseeing vessel, the Horus, another day in dismal vast decaying Cairo was scheduled; their bus carried them through the clogged streets to the bustling forecourt of the great museum of pharaonic antiquities. Their group of tourists, dwarfed, shuffled docilely through security gates and then room after room of colossal doorways, entablatures, sarcophagi. Pharaohs, broad-faced and bare-shouldered, with high cheekbones and slight feline smiles, were bodied forth in granite, some of it mottled pink and gray, some of it pure black, all quarried and carried and carved and painstakingly polished by men whose eyes and hands and even bones had long since evaporated in the cauldron of time. Life’s airy spell, asking more, more, was silenced by the solemn ponderosity of death. The first floor had the highest ceilings and the biggest statues. A huge Ramses II stood near the entrance, a colossus with arms frozen at his sides, his gaze locked in the stark sky of his divinity. Elsewhere, a wide-hipped, long-faced Akhenaten bodied forth with a spectacular and repulsive androgeny a momentary lapse, in the rustling procession of pharaohs and dynasties and deities, into monotheism and sun-worship. His wide hips, sagging fat lips, and lack of male genitals made Alexandra ponder gender—sex’s monstrous, ecstatic gene-swapping, now found to exist in even the bacteria. Nature’s deep sweet secret, a dimming memory for her now. Upstairs, detached from the group, she yielded to the low temptation, as if to a country fair’s freak show, of the well-guarded mummy room. Placards in English and Arabic urged respect for the dead. Little brown dried bodies, the hands and facial muscles forever snagged on their final contraction, were swaddled like babies, their tiny feet exposed—as stringy as beef jerky, as dark as if charred. Alexandra’s eyes rested on the label of an especially shriveled, pathetic one, its lips pulled back in a snarl and its skull snapped back like a stargazer’s. The label read RAMSES II. The great statue downstairs. The same person. The god-man couldn’t save himself. History’s depths, she saw, were as sickeningly precipitous as Nature’s.

  On the museum’s upper floor the leg-weary, eye-weary tourists and their semi-intelligible, slightly crippled guide came to the treasures of the teen-aged king Tutankhamun, whose tomb, almost uniquely in the Valley of the Kings, escaped plunder until modern times. There were life-size ebony
statues that stood guard in the king’s burial chamber as well as the king’s ostrich-feather fan and his gameboards and hunting equipment—boomerangs, staves, a buckler—and model hoes, baskets, and other amulets intended to give the boy, dead so young, all he needed in the afterlife.

  “Don’t you hate stuff?” Jane asked at Alexandra’s side.

  “You think you need it at the time,” Alexandra whispered.

  The limping guide explained in stiff, high-pitched English, “Tutankhamun’s entombed priceless treasures were discovered by the Englishman Howard Carter in 1922. He found them in a jumbled state, left as if by tomb robbers whose crime was interrupted, or by priests fulfilling their duties in unseemly haste.”

  Room after airless room held young King Tut’s possessions: ebony statues, plain and gilded; various thrones and stools, all beautifully designed, including the famous golden throne; alabaster vases; model boats containing mummified food and magical emblems; various beds, including a folding camp bed and two large beds used in the embalming, a process supervised by the modelled heads of the goddess Hathor’s cow and the hippopotamus goddess, Tawaret. In yet another high-ceilinged chamber, the two American women paused at an alabaster canopic chest with its four cavities for the boy-king’s embalmed viscera. Dusty cases held crumbling textiles; the numbed tourists viewed a realistic bust in wood and stucco of Tutankhamun, and an “Osiris bed” shaped like the pharaoh’s profile and filled with earth, on a linen bed, sewn with grain and moistened so that it would germinate in his tomb, symbolizing resurrection. Late rooms sequestered the pharaoh’s solid-gold sarcophagus and the famous and gorgeous gold mask that covered the mummy’s head, and scarabs and red-gold buckles and earrings and rings and, invading from another, crueler, future world, a knife with a blade of iron. Final rooms held spells for the dead king’s guidance from the Book of the Dead and depicted figures of various deities to be encountered in the Underworld. Like spectres viewing their own corpses, the women inspected the detritus of a magical system as elaborate as it was useless. “They believed,” the guide explained, his voice growing thin and irritated, “each person had five selves: your name, your ka, your ba, your heart, and your shadow. At the gateway of the afterlife, your heart was weighed against a feather, the feather of truth and justice. If it failed to balance, it fell to the Devourer—part hippo, part crocodile.”

  “How are you doing, doll?” Alexandra solicitously asked Jane. Last night her snoring had been not so bad—less a succession of infuriating hooks than a steady, rasping background noise, and Alexandra was so exhausted, the nervous shocks of travel ebbing from her system and being gradually replaced by habituation and acceptance, that she accepted this flaw in the room’s silence, reflecting that at least she was not troubled, as she had been in Canada, by small noises and red safety lights in the room. In Egypt, there seemed to be no safety lights.

  Jane answered, “I’m numb. How much more crap can there be in this attic?”

  “Jane, so much of it is so beautifully made. So tender. To them, death was a journey to the Field of Reeds.”

  “Yess? If so, why did they put the corpse in so many stone boxes within boxes? They didn’t want him ever to get out.”

  “They were tucking him in,” Alexandra fantasized. “They wanted his ba to be able to use his body. Or was it his ka?” She had become the one who cared about Egypt, who wanted to rescue these fragile ancients from themselves, though Egypt had been Jane’s idea. But Alexandra had been a widow for over two years and Jane had only had ten months to adjust. She kept mentioning Nat Tinker, as if she could bring him back with incantation. But he, too, was encased in stone boxes within boxes.

  Once they had flown, next day, to Luxor and transferred to the Horus, it was, as Nat could have predicted, bliss. Each night, as the boat prowled to the next docking, the next temple, the thrumming of the engine absorbed much of Jane’s snore, though the beds were close together in the little cabin. By day, the banks of the Nile passed as if an endless scroll was being unrolled. Oxen plodding in circles and shadoofs lifting and falling like wooden oil rigs ministered to the green fields with irrigation, under a sky as smoothly blue as a painted dome, while on board the Horus the tourists, smiling and nodding at one another through the many language barriers, swam in the little pool, a square no more than two strokes across, and basked on deck chairs, drank alcoholic drinks, nibbled peanuts called soudani, and gradually turned brown in the strengthening sun.

  “Why are Egyptians so happy?” Jane asked Alexandra from her adjacent deck chair.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “They’re in de-Nile.”

  “Ouch.”

  The cruise first took them south from Luxor, to Esna in its sunken site beside a market where unappetizing parts of butchered oxen like the roofs of their mouths were displayed. Their guide was now a woman, a chic, unveiled Muslim in flared black silk slacks and broad silver bracelets and necklaces that flattered her olive skin. “The great dam at Aswan,” she explained, “has raised the water levels in the Nile valley. Esna’s foundations have become a set of wet cookies.” It was true, the ground beneath their feet was soft, almost mud. Next day, they disembarked at sunstruck Edfu on its precipice, the best preserved of all the Late Dynasty temples. “The three B’s,” the guide told them, her heavily ringed fingers flicking toward the delicate reliefs. “Butts, boobs, and belly buttons—that is how we recognize the Graeco-Roman style. The sculptors tried to follow the old conventions but their hands and eyes wouldn’t let them. They rounded limbs, they showed knees and little toes. The older style, always seeking the ideal, put the same feet on both legs, with the big toe toward the viewer. The Graeco-Romans couldn’t do that, it was too ridiculous. They showed one foot with the little toe toward the viewer, the way it is. Heresy!” She laughed with dazzling teeth, beneath her big sunglasses and the straw hat with its curled brim that sat strictly level on her head. The next day brought them to lovable Kom Ombo, a double temple to the crocodile god Sobek and the late Horus—Haroeris, the falcon-headed, out to kill his uncle Seth, who had slain his father, Osiris. The guide, with her gleaming wristlets and flexible silver collar, led them to a room whose ceiling held the image of the sky-goddess Nut stretched across the sky, one end of her giving birth to baby Horus, Harpakhrad. Next day, the good ship Horus came to the temple of Philae, moved stone by stone to an island out of the reach of the rising waters of Lake Nasser. “This,” their Muslim guide told them, in the hushed halls of transplanted stone, “was the last place the old religion was practiced. It lasted until the sixth century A.D., for two hundred years after the Christian edict of Theodosius the First in 378 A.D. Then, it became a church. Here”—she pointed with her aubergine fingernails at a nearly illegible small carving—“Isis suckling Horus became the Virgin Mary suckling Jesus. The cult of Isis spread widely through the Roman empire. She was the perfect widow, collecting fourteen pieces of the fifteen of her husband’s body which the evil Seth had hidden in sarcophagi sunk in the Nile. The fifteenth piece she never found. You ladies can guess what it was.”

  The Nile boat had floated them to Aswan, site of the great dam the Russians had built, and of the Aga Khan’s tomb and Lord Kitchener’s gardens, reached by picturesque felucca, its crude sail tilting, on its return, in the sunset’s blood-red light. As the two widows sat on the Horus’s cooling deck, waiting for the chimed summons to dinner to sound, bats flickered through the darkening sky. Jane extended her arm toward them and pronounced in an even harsher, deeper voice than her usual one the lethal words “Mortibus, mortibus, necesse est. Tzabaoth, Elchim, Messiach, and Yod: audite!”

  Against the sanguine blush of the western sky—the eastern sky was already black and sprinkled with emerging stars —Alexandra saw one of the tiny black shapes, flicking back and forth above the river harvesting insects, cease its darting motion and plummet like a small broken umbrella into the river’s lingering sheen.

  “Jane!” Alexandra exclaimed. “Why did you do th
at?”

  “To see if I still could. All those phony spells on the temple walls pissed me off, a little.”

  “The poor innocent bat—it wasn’t ‘a little’ to him.”

  “Don’t be sentimental, Angel. You know what a heartless stew Nature is. Think of the dragonflies I just saved from being crunched by nasty sharp bat teeth.”

  “Oh, Jane. After what we did to poor Jenny, I can’t bear to think there’s anything to it. Hexes and curses and so on. I want to believe we didn’t do anything.”

  “She trespasssed,” Jane decreed, with the same malevolent sibilance with which she had pronounced, Necesse est. “She went beyond her bounds.”

  “All she did was say yes when Darryl asked her to marry him. And the way he fell apart later should make us glad he didn’t ask us.”

  “If he’d asked one of us, maybe he wouldn’t have fallen apart.”

  “I say fallen apart, but really he never looked quite put together. He was a hoax,” Alexandra concluded, a bit smugly.

  “Darryl was, and Horus wasn’t? Really, ssweetie, those old Egyptian priests must have laughed themselves silly, thinking of the nonsense they put over on everybody, not for a day or a week but for millennia! What did the guide at Edfu tell us? The Temple of Amun at Thebes was given fifteen hundred square kilometers by Ramses III alone? Ten percent of all the cultivatable land at the time? No wonder the Nubians and Hyksos and whoever kept pushing in. It was a very ssick situation.”