by John Updike
The thought hung there, in air so still Alexandra imagined she could hear the wiry high peeping of the remaining bats, frantically working their sonar. Black-haired Jane had taken a deep tan these days on the Nile, and her face blended into the dark. Her smile, and a glint of jewelry at her neck, and a crescent gleam from her Daiquiri glass betrayed her presence in the shadows of the afterdeck. To break the silence, Alexandra said, “I wonder how the bartenders and waiters feel, feeding us alcoholic drinks all the time?”
“Disgusted,” Jane agreed. “Yet they do it very well. My Daiquiri is excellent. How’s your whiskey sour?”
“Fine, actually. It’s interesting—there’s a whole population, of Muslims catering to Westerners, that’s going to be thrown out of work when Al Qaeda takes over. Or will they be executed, as hopelessly impure?”
“Al Qaeda won’t take over. Who on earth would want what they have to offer?”
“Not you and me, but . . . the people? The poor and miserable and so on. They need religion, whatever it costs. That’s why I wonder if you aren’t hard on the old Egyptian priesthood.”
“It makes me wonder about the Jews,” Jane said, her tongue rambling as the rum took hold. “How did they ever get mixed up in religion? They’re too smart, usually. Abraham about to sslit his own ssson’s throat because God told him to—what an idiot!”
Alexandra offered, placatingly, “I’ve read somewhere the whole Captivity and Exodus wasn’t historical. There’s no Egyptian record of it—Moses and the bulrushes and ‘let my people go.’ ”
“I never believed it,” Jane said. “Any of it. Even as a tiny child. Nat was a churchgoer—Episcopalian, high church like his ridiculous mother—but I never went with him except to weddings and funerals. The whole fraud made me furious. I want to be cremated and stuck in the ground and everybody else walk away glad it’s not them. No mumbo-jumbo, Lexa. Promise.”
“Jane,” her friend said. “You’re too hard on us. All of us.” Jane might have replied, but the dinner chime broadcast its pretty tune, which sounded like the first six notes of “Oh Come, All You Faithful” but probably wasn’t.
That night, with a throttling of engines and churning of water that woke Alexandra in her bunk from her first solid sleep in ages, the boat undocked and turned around and headed back to Luxor and the pointed obelisks and rounded temple pillars of Karnak, from which the cult of the ithyphallic Amun, “the great god,” had extended tentacles throughout the Nile’s fertile valley. The tourists on the Horus had already paid some homage to the outdoor wonders of the east bank. Alexandra had coiled in her little predigital Canon many images of the massive ruins, of the deep-carved hieroglyphs and royal cartouches that, however long bombarded by photons sent from the blank blue sky, held their knife-sharp relief and decisive shadows in the sere air. The tourists’ turn had come to visit the opposite side of the Nile, the western side, death’s side, the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, the Colossi of Memnon, and the lovely memorial temple of Queen Hatshepsut, widow of her half brother Thutmose II; upon his death she became regent for her infant half nephew and stepson, Thutmose III, and reigned with full pharaonic authority, wearing in her monuments masculine attire even to the beard, though she was still labelled with the feminine gender in her inscriptions. After her death a reaction, led by her ungrateful nephew, set in; her cartouches were defaced and her monuments eclipsed, and her peaceful, intelligent reign was stricken from the official lists. “Poor old witch,” said Jane.
Building pyramids lapsed from favor after the Old and Middle Kingdoms. Monarchs of the New, for four centuries, sought safety while their kas journeyed to the Field of Reeds by digging their tombs into the limestone cliffs of the The-ban hills, by the bay of Deir el-Bahri. Illumination into their depths had been provided by linseed-oil lamps and by mirrors held to ricochet sunlight into what had been solid limestone; the excavators chipped and tunnelled and carted away the rubble by this borrowed light. The artists who followed them painted processions—head and legs in profile, chest seen frontally—of servants carrying, to the immured, supplies of fruit and drink and fresh candles to sustain their journey through the netherworld. Scenes of banquets and harvests and fishing parties illustrated the life they had left behind and the similar life they would reach. These scenes have been likened to music scores that only the dead have the instruments to play. The first mural on the left, traditionally, depicted offerings to Amun in his aspect as Rē, the falcon-headed sun-god, who reappeared further along in both his aged and nascent form—ram and beetle—within the solar disc, circumscribed between two of his enemies, the serpent and the crocodile.
The tourists shuffled downward by the light not of mirrors but of wan electric bulbs strung from a ceiling of limestone bearing countless chisel marks, down at a gentle slant on boardwalks that took them over pits dug to entrap tomb robbers and sealed false portals meant to bewilder them, down corridors adorned with scenes of priests performing the mouth-opening ceremony before the pharaoh’s statue, into the pillared hall that led to the burial chamber itself, where the sarcophagus was sunk in its rectangular recess. “Amusingly,” their guide—a goateed man in a tattered dusty suit and wire-rimmed glasses, an archaeology scholar hunched and desiccated by a life spent in tombs—announced to them, “Merneptah’s anthropoid granite sarcophagus evidently proved too massive to carry all the way into the burial chamber, so here it sits at an angle, cockeyed, abandoned for three thousand years!” He managed a dry chuckle, took off his glasses, wiped the dust from their lenses with a handkerchief, restored the handkerchief to his hip pocket and the spectacles (their curved earpieces sheathed in flesh-colored sleeves) nicely to his nose, and confided to his stifling little audience, “The gravediggers were not superhuman but human—lazy and corrupt and distractible. Look, here in this side chamber—the murals were sketched in gray ink, but never finished, never colored in! I think they are charming, unfinished. You can feel the painter’s hand, you can see his impatient strokes, made millennia ago. Even with so much time before him, he was in a hurry. He didn’t know we would come and critique his work!”
Alexandra was fighting for breath. As if in a misstep, in the gloomy tilted space, she deliberately brushed against Jane, to feel another warm, still-living body. No escape, everything around her proclaimed. No escape, however energetically and luxuriously religions make a show of rescuing us from death. There is no magic, the world is solid, clear through, like the depths of limestone above her.
After emerging from the tomb of Merneptah, the tour group, blind as bats in the oppressive sun, trooped to the tomb of Ramses VI, one of the biggest, and to that of Tutankhamun, one of the smallest, its entrance lost for three thousand years under the rubble created by the excavation of the former. “They are touching, are they not?” their guide asked. “These small bare chambers hastily devoted to the dead boy-king. They seem too small for a king. It is thought that they might have been created for his chief minister, Ay, who succeeded him as pharaoh and may have poisoned him. Adding insult to injury, as you English say, Ay then may have taken over for himself the tomb intended for Tutankhamun in the Western Valley, near that of his grandfather Amen-hotep III—who may have been, in fact, his father. This is said, but to the serious scholar it is merely gossip. It seems beyond dispute, however, that Tutankhamun was the instrument, if not the instigator, of the restoration of the cult of Amun, undoing the revolution of Amenhotep IV, who called himself Akhenaten. You have heard enough, from other guides no doubt, about Akhenaten, a religious radical, perhaps a crazy man, who wished to abolish the cult of Amun and many gods in favor of Aton, the solar disk. He transferred the capital of Egypt from Thebes to a city he built and called Akhetaton. Tutankhamun, his successor after his son-in-law Smenkhkare—Tutankhamun was also his son-in-law, having married Akhenaten’s third daughter when both were children. Tutankhamun was a sad small boy of ten when he ascended the throne and nineteen when he died. He was originally called Tutankhaton, after the
solar disk. But he then turned coattails—is that a phrase?— and restored the priesthood of Amun, whose name means ‘the hidden god,’ to its old domination. Had he not turned his coat, who knows? Egypt might have embraced monotheism before the invasion of Islam. I believe you have all seen the Tutankhamun treasures, the glory of the Cairo museum. Can you imagine them crammed and jumbled into these little chambers? It makes us sad, no? The little fellow was used by the priests to bring back Amun and then was bundled off to the afterlife, possibly poisoned. The ancient politics was no more edifying than politics now.”
This earned him a polite, tired, mystified titter. If he was alluding to Mubarak, he was playing with fire. If he meant Bush and Sharon, it was a cheap shot. In any case, the entombed tourists were thirsty, and it was time to return to the boat, return to the bar for soudani and iced arrack, and fly back next morning to Cairo, to Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, New York. At Kennedy, that shabby old port on the ocean of the air, Jane and Alexandra, having been together without remission for twelve days, having shared bathrooms and the dark of the night, all talked out, rather sick of each other if truth be known, were ready to part—Alexandra to Fort Worth–Dallas and then Albuquerque, and Jane to La Guardia and a shuttle flight to Boston. “That was great fun,” Jane purred in a voice that didn’t seem greatly to mean it. “Such fun to be with you, Gorgeous.”
“I loved every minute,” Alexandra lied. “The Nile, the heat, the boat, the pyramids and tombs. The paintings on the walls of the brown people with straight hair and long eyes doing their daily things. Squatting, eating, carrying, gathering papyrus. Playing the harp, remember that one? They loved life. Ankh, isn’t that the word?”
“It was. Let’s do another trip soon.”
“How soon? I’m not like you. I have to save up, and rest up.”
“A year or two?”
“Wouldn’t it be fun,” Alexandra shyly wondered, “if Sukie could come along? You and I both tend to be depressive. One’s up, the other’s down. Not Sukie. She’s steady. But she’s still married,” she reminded herself.
Jane gave a strange look, askance, from her bright-brown tortoiseshell eyes. “Is she, though?” she asked. She tucked the hint of a smile into her left cheek, and there, in the ramshackle international airport, the two wicked women, not quite kissing each other on the lips, embraced and parted.
Suzanne Mitchell, as she had become with her marriage to jaunty, sandy-haired Lennie Mitchell, was a writer of a lowly sort—small-town journalism, paperback romance novels—but a writer nevertheless, married furthermore to a fast-talking computer salesman, so it was second nature to her to sit down before a humming, glaring screen and type out her thoughts as they darted through her brain. Alexandra unfolded the several smooth, laser-printed pages and read:
Dear, dear Lexa:
Jane, whom I’ve seen a fair amount of since the sad event I will describe in a minute, has been after me to phone you, but it’s been so long since we’ve been in touch obviously I’ve felt shy. The kind of closeness the three of us had in East-wick depends really on being there every day, and bumping into one another by accident on Dock Street where you could spontaneously say “Let’s duck into Nemo’s for a cup of coffee,” and having children in the same local schools with the same teachers to bitch to each other about, and all experiencing the same wretched weather and the same tedious cocktail parties, and hearing without even knowing you’re hearing it the same town fire siren go off at every noon, cutting the day in two, and sharing the same sense of cozy isolation, Boston and New York way over the horizon in different directions and Providence though closer always somehow, maybe because of the repulsive religious name, a place you stayed away from.
Connecticut turned out not to be like that. The towns are closer together, though not crammed together so one runs right into the next as in northern New Jersey—that is really repulsive—and have a more monied look (I hate to write it, it sounds so snobby), even the sections where the handymen and babysitters live. There aren’t any of those delicious lost corners, marshy waste spaces with abandoned duck blinds and rotting striped mattresses somebody dumped, that you find in Rhode Island, small as it is. The dumps, speaking of dumps, are terribly well organized for recycling—paper in one Dumpster and glass in another and colored glass in a third and cans in a fourth, all of it arranged so you just drive up and drop your nicely sorted trash down from above—and even the woods they set aside as natural Nature places seem weeded, with the fallen timber taken away and the underbrush cleared so they have that carpeted look of English beech woods in those movies about Robin Hood that even we could see as credulous children were Hollywood sets. The little downtowns all have uniform antique signage (love that word, like “dotage”) and the school grounds and children’s playgrounds are tended right to the edges. For that wasteland look you have to go to Bridgeport, which nobody does. As you may remember I came from upstate New York where everything had the look of not belonging to this century, by which I mean of course the century that’s dead and gone by now, the good old twentieth. Upstate was all nineteenth. When Lennie Mitchell brought me down here to live I couldn’t believe how self-conscious everything was, everybody facing New York City in their minds, even in Stamford when it was just Greenwich’s poor cousin, before all the companies getting away from city taxes opened branches here and put up one blue glass skyscraper after another, almost as bad as Hartford. Our section, on the edge closest to the Merritt, hasn’t been too affected yet—that “our” is a slip, Lennie’s and mine, I must get a grip. I’ve started to sniffle and get that raw-throat feeling, thinking about him. But the thing about all these suburbs is that having such a big city, the big city as far as the U.S. is concerned, keeps us on our toes and at the same time is rather demoralizing, because we don’t quite live there, we just live in its aura, so to speak. The restaurants and shops and beauty parlors aren’t quite up to Manhattan standards but they try, and even all those who don’t commute in and out, the local tradesmen and so on, share a certain New York attitude, chip on the shoulder and gritting it out and standing tall and so on, like I imagine the English when they had an Empire and then the Blitz. But people don’t know each other the way they did in Eastwick; they come and go, moving to more upscale houses or towns, and everybody terribly competitive underneath, measuring each other by the standards of New York. It was a lesson to me and I couldn’t have had the success with my writing that I have had living anywhere else. My agent lives right next door in South Norwalk and without him I’d be still doing small-town gossip columns, except all those little local newspapers are dying off, killed by blogs and e-mails, and in a strange way there aren’t any small towns any more, just malls and commercial strips and assisted-living developments between them, and there isn’t even gossip any more, the way there was when everybody was more sexually repressed. I think repression was the key to the kind of energy people used to have, we weren’t burnt-out the way people are in their twenties now, all this hooking up the young people do. Now don’t I sound prudish? And you know I’m not.
My news, in case you’re wondering why I’m writing after all these years, is that Lennie died two months ago, quite suddenly, and Jane thought you should know. She’s come back into my life almost as if she foresaw it coming. But how could she have?—he was in lovely health, never fat, always active, and gave up smoking about the time I met him, while I stupidly puffed on, though mostly only at parties and when trying to write, so they tell me my lung function is less than fifty percent. He still liked to do the organized dancing when we went to Florida for January, and tennis, just doubles, and jogged on the town paths (the local town boards plan for everything) and played squash and paddleball all winter. He dropped over in a squash court after making what the other man in there with him said was a marvellous retrieve. Just dropped there, against this wall full of dirty ball marks, and even though the other man was a doctor he was a gynecologist and couldn’t even do resuscitation properly. By the time the parame
dics came Lennie was quite gone. After eight minutes, they told me, there’s bound to be brain damage, and I wouldn’t have wanted to live with that. I suppose so but I wish they had let me decide. I still didn’t like hearing it from them after the fact and can’t help resenting that Lennie’s so-called friend, being an M.D. with a cell phone right on him, didn’t get help sooner. The squash courts are in the sub-basement of a big brassy new corporate building and hard to find if you haven’t been there before.
Jane and I have been back-and-forthing a bit lately—I drive up more to her house than she to mine. Her ancient mother-in-law is rather a dear, though Jane thinks the old lady ruined her marriage to Nat Tinker. She also thinks it would do me good in my grief if I took a trip with her. With the two of you, ideally, if the trip to Egypt with just Jane Pain didn’t do you in. It sounds terribly dry and educational and brave with all those Muslims giving you dirty looks for not wearing a veil, but I don’t see how you stood all that death the Egyptians dwelt on. Those long deep passageways, I doubt I could have stood it and don’t know how you did, being such an outdoors person. Jane said you rode a camel and got a sunburn on the boat where she got a great tan. I don’t know how many steps you had to climb but I can’t do many with my emphysema. Steps were where I first noticed that I wasn’t my girlish self any more. If we ever were to go anywhere together—and I’m not sure it’s a good idea, maybe we all had our fun in life —I think it should be China. It seemed everybody we knew socially in Stamford had been to China but when I’d suggest it Lennie would say he’d rather go have a Chinese meal and pay for it and leave. He didn’t like Communists even if we had won the Cold War, as if everybody didn’t know that the Chinese are only Communists in name anymore. I picture it as a wide-open sort of place, with a big sky and huge open city squares and people eating noodles in the little alleys. The hutongs, aren’t they called? I’ve had a romantic thing about China ever since seeing Ingrid Bergman in that movie about leading a pack of children to safety in some kind of an inn. Of the sixth happiness, it just came to me. Think about it, dearest. Jane will be in touch with you also. She seems to want to devour the whole world before she leaves it, or else she just wants to stay away from her mother-in-law, who ancient or not doesn’t miss much. She has Jane’s number, is my impression when we talk (the old lady and I) briefly.
