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The Book of the Dead

Page 28

by Carriger, Gail


  The Bit-U-Men bars with the Unique Flavor and the Marvelous Name sell and sell, to children and to soldiers, to housewives and to workers, to teachers and to Army medics in their kits. The mummy has one leg, and now none. Miss Klein carries the mummy up the marble staircase. Miss Klein stretches beside the mummy, and the mummy unwraps. Miss Klein unbraids her hair, puts out her tongue, licks gently at the mummy, and the mummy arches, eaten. Miss Klein is still Miss Klein, though when she goes with Chet to fancy dress balls in Chicago, she spins around the floor, her hair pinned with scarabs, her dress emerald green, and some men tell him they envy him his wife, and others look at him too long.

  Chet walks in the park, looking at the men and longing for a flavor other than simple syrup. He walks the halls in his slippers, to hear the moans from outside the bedroom door.

  He longs hopelessly for salt, for spice, to bury his face in someone with a pounding heart. At night, he sees Miss Klein walking in the long hallway of their house, her silk robe sweeping the floor, her hair loose. He feels the mummy waiting, and sometimes he looks into the room where the mummy sleeps, a small bundle beneath bedsheets. He thinks about its heart, preserved in a jar of honey, given away to someone long dead, and then he thinks about his own heart. He feels it swelling, swelling, with a love that has never made sense.

  All over the country, the bars stick in teeth, press against gums, pull out fillings.

  Chet touches his stomach and finds it rounded. He pats his pockets. There are no wonders in them, no pulverized lemon, no candied cricket. The factory is all Bit-U-Men Bars now, and the things his father brought, the sweetmeats from secret stashes, the fenugreek seeds and the balls of Turkish Delight are stale in their jars. The newsreels are salutes and stars.

  It’s 1943. On the radio, a voice talks about orchestrated hell.

  Chet climbs the stairs in his wonderful house and finds Miss Klein taking dictation. The mummy and Miss Klein look at him, and he stands there a moment, in the doorway, before he sighs and turns away. In the bathroom, he finds first one silver hair, and then another. In his chest, he finds a cluster of silver just over his heart, threads unraveled from a spun sugar machine. In the factory, Bit-U-Men bars flip from their conveyors, and into their wrappings, winding themselves up, tightly bound and safe for future generations. Twenty-four bars in each box, each box sealed perfectly for shipping, each box full of bits of the mummy and the world the mummy came from.

  In the bellies of dead American soldiers in the jungles of the Pacific Front, there are bits of mellified man, slowly dissolving. In Germany, a bar is smuggled into a camp, and analyzed. A new experiment is done, a quiet death in a tank of honey. Everything that has ever been thought of in the history of horrible is tried again.

  Then it’s 1945, and the commander eats a slice of newly mellified man, a prisoner converted into confection, and feels nothingness surge through him, the casual curse of a volunteer. He raises his pistol to his temple, and pulls the trigger.

  The soldiers come home. All around the country there’s a craving, a sweet tooth. All around the country, babies are conceived, a generation born in fear of the lonely dark. Babies fill maternity wards, and ticker tape mixes with candy wrappers, men returning from the war, factories filling again, cars spinning down the roads and women in yellow dresses unwrapping bars full of unbearable sweetness.

  The mummy gives the company its hollow chest. It gives its crackling spine.

  Chet Savor stoops to pick up a button and feels something unbuttoning deep in his body, a ping in his ribcage. He goes to the doctor, who listens with a stethoscope and recommends less drink, less meat, less everything. In the park he watches a returning soldier embracing his bride. Savor’s Sweets supplied the war effort with sugar, but Chet never fought. He claimed injuries preexisting. Now he has regret.

  Miss Klein, naked but for her scarab beetles, braids her hair, and twists it on top of her head, extends a long leg and rolls her stockings up it, inch by inch. The mummy watches her, and says “Now unwrap.”

  She unrolls her stockings, unpins her hair, and brings the mummy a sip of hot milk. After a moment, she kisses the mummy on the mouth, and the mummy kisses back.

  The 1950’s are glass jars full of Technicolor jawbreakers, glittering colored candy, bars dipped in chocolate and filled with marshmallow nothing. Children look skeptically at the Bit-U-Men, and the label changes, to look more fetching, less worrying. Black bits in a golden field. Children begin to feel they are eating ashes, when they want to eat red dye. Bit-U-Men bars sit stale in candy counters.

  It’s 1961. The Bit-U-Men brand becomes an uncertainty, despite the bees on the label, now dancing, despite the eye on the label, now winking. Chet hires an advertising company, and attempts to make it into a beach-blanket staple, a singing teenager with a guitar, a bunch of girls in bathing suits, all giddily twirling around a Bit-U-Men like it’s a campfire. Chet sits morosely in a corner watching the teenagers shimmy in the center of a pile of shipped-in sand. The boy with the guitar eats a bite of the bar, and Chet observes as mellified joy fills him. Chet watches the boy, his tanned skin, his white teeth, and considers saving him from a life of sugar.

  The boy turns to Chet and says “Can I help you? Aren’t you Old Mr. Savor?”

  Miss Klein carries the mummy wrapped in a warm blanket. It is only a head and throat now.

  Chet Savor dies of a heart attack, his buttons bursting and flying off into the sky, each one turning as it goes into something with wings. There is a small swarm of locusts, but it isn’t long before they die too, falling into the streets where cars crush their wings. Chet Savor’s last words, written in a dark brown ink, are I was lonely in the dark.

  The mummy smiles, but says nothing. Chet Savor’s pen has been left on his desk next to a dry jar of the ink called Mummy Brown.

  Miss Klein attends the funeral. The mummy wears black wrappings and travels in a handbag. The mourners think she’s lost her mind with grief when she holds the handbag to her lips and whispers to it. She is still tall and thin, and her hair, now striped with silver and gold, is twisted into complicated patterns. Her mouth is covered in red lipstick. Her dress, beneath the black, is a red silk slip embroidered with hieroglyphs.

  “Of use,” says the mummy when they return home, up the marble staircase, into the marble bathroom where Miss Klein washes honey from her fingers.

  “You have been of use,” says Miss Klein.

  “Sweetness doesn’t last forever. Other things do. That ink,” says the mummy. “What is it made of?”

  “They don’t make it anymore,” says Miss Klein. “His father used it too. Nothing lasts forever.”

  She unwraps the mummy, and looks at the mummy’s smooth, sleek face.

  “I’m lonely,” says the mummy. “I want to see the world.”

  Shira Klein inhales, exhales.

  “The world isn’t so much,” she says, and for the first time in forty years, her voice wobbles.

  “I’m not so much either,” says the mummy. “I’ve been in Chicago a long time. Come see the world with me.”

  Miss Klein looks at the label on the ink bottle. She nods. She takes out a small notebook and writes down the name of the company. She dials an international operator in London, and connects with C. Roberson’s Color Makers.

  Miss Klein dresses in a traveling suit, and takes an airplane to Rome. The mummy, now gone below the lips, travels with her, in a soft bag made of snakeskin and lined in silk.

  “I loved the light,” the mummy whispers, over and over throughout the flight. Shira Klein feeds it as she did long ago, this time a mixture of hot water and whiskey administered with her finger, a drop at a time.

  In Rome, the mummy looks up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In Venice, they ride in a gondola. In Paris, they see the Eiffel tower and at a small café in the dark, Shira Klein drinks a glass of sparkling wine and the mummy sits across the table, gazing.

  In London, at the factory, Shira Klein settles the
bag on the desk of the managing director. He looks apologetic.

  “We might have a few limbs lying around, a finger, a hand,” he says. “But it’s been at least twenty years since we’ve been able to get an entire mummy. It’s frowned upon now. That ink’s discontinued. It’s in paintings and old correspondence all over London, though, if you’d like to see it. Edward Burne-Jones buried a tube in his garden when he realized he’d been painting with the dead.”

  He laughs.

  Miss Klein opens the bag, and there it is, the scent of honey, white flowers, forgetfulness, heaven.

  The mummy looks up at him.

  “I want to be of use,” says the mummy. “I want to be painted onto canvas. I want to be written into books.”

  The managing director looks flummoxed into the eyes of the mummy.

  “I want to be a portrait,” says the mummy. “A portrait of my wife.”

  Miss Klein looks at the director. The director smiles uncertainly. Miss Klein shakes out her long silver, black and gold hair. She smiles back at him. There are tears running down her cheeks. Her traveling suit unbuttons itself, and stretches its arms on the chair she’s sitting in.

  “This is what we want,” says Shira Klein.

  The mummy whispers. “Oh, I’ve loved the light.”

  “We can make a batch of ink for you,” says the managing director, uncertain, bewildered, why is he doing what he’s doing? He can’t say. “The last batch of Mummy Brown.”

  Now, the portrait of Shira Klein hangs in a museum in New York City. It has a creamy background, and the portrait itself is done in a chocolate-colored ink. It’s skillful, in a style unusually abstract for the time in which it was painted, crosshatched precisely, but the woman’s hair is done in messy pools of spilt ink. There are several sticky prints along the border of the paper. The ink is sweet-smelling and from across a room it can bring to mind things no one has ever seen.

  Shira Klein’s mouth, the only part of the portrait that is painted in a different color, a dark red, is quirked at one corner. Around her neck, there is a strand of scarab beetles which look intriguingly alive.

  Miss Klein lives in an apartment near the museum, and walks a circuit of the city every day, her hair straight and white and falling to her ankles now, a pair of red Lucite glasses balancing on her face like some kind of butterfly. She does not look her age. Her spine is straight, and her waist is encircled with her scarabs, and when she hails a taxi, she whistles in such a piercing tone that every driver in the city finds himself halted against his will.

  In the room next to her gallery, the funeral portraits taken without permission from Egypt are in glass cases, these papyrus faces painted to show souls, all in a row of the dry dead, but in the room where Shira Klein’s portrait is displayed, the light bounces off the mysterious object painted into her left hand, a large carved insect, which, if looked at from a slightly sideways angle, is revealed to be a heart, the ink still wet with something sweeter and more complicated than blood.

  Egyptian death and the afterlife: mummies

  (Rooms 62-3)

  Jonathan Green

  “I am here and will come wherever you bid me.”

  He sits by the door, barely noticed, barely moving, almost like one of the exhibits. But he sees them, he notices them: the French language students; the Japanese tourists; the Americans holidaymakers. The museum is thick with them. These galleries in particular heave with visitors; the living marvelling at the dead.

  He sits on his chair by the door in his uniform and he watches them all flow in and out, not one of them realising the privilege they enjoy in even being allowed within her presence. They stare at the coffins and the funerary artefacts, their faces agog, but not one of them appreciates the honour they have been afforded, in being permitted to stand mere inches from an Egyptian goddess. They only see the mummy. They do not see what he sees. They do not see the woman within.

  Not one of them sees him. He is old, his skin parchment thin; the colour of cedar wood. He is unimportant, his emaciated body swamped by the uniform he wears.

  The tide of people ebbs and flows throughout the day, as the shadows shift and change with the passage of the sun god’s chariot across the firmament. Ra’s radiant beams penetrate the magnificent glass and steel roof of the Great Court, bars of light and shade falling across the gleaming white stone of the Reading Room rotunda. But it is not as bright, nor as clean, as the pyramids of Giza had once appeared, their gold-cased summits blazing as if on fire with the sun god’s fury, the shining white structures almost impossible to gaze upon as they reflected the splendour of the ancient kings buried within.

  Never was there a sight like it, not even here, in this new Egypt, in this city of wonders; this new Heliopolis.

  And then the last of the visitors are gone. A few of the other gallery attendants are the last people he sees as they pass through Room 63 on their way home. The glow beyond the roof of the Great Court fades until the stars of Nut’s body can just be seen twinkling above this unsleeping city of kings.

  He is alone again. Except for her.

  He rises stiffly from his seat beside the door – the entrance to the gallery so like the entrance to a tomb – his old bones aching. Just as Anubis watches over the desert cemeteries of the West Bank, so he is cast in the role of guardian of this place that is now her tomb.

  With slow steps he follows his familiar route between the glass cases, reading the text printed on the display cards again (even though he has read it all a thousand times before) barely taking in what he reads, knowing every last detail by heart anyway.

  His eyes linger on the ancient papyri, preserved behind layers of glass and plastic; the so-called Book of the Dead. In the modern world it might be considered a cartoon or even a road map to the afterlife rather than a book, as the term is understood now, although even that is changing.

  Everything changes, except for her, and him.

  He takes in the stylised image of a dead man as he embarks upon his journey to the Fields of Yalu, as related in the picture script of the hieroglyphs painted on the beaten papyrus with practised care. He considers how the Lady Henutmehyt began her contrasting journey into the afterlife.

  And he remembers…

  He had met Howard Carter once, amidst the hustle and bustle of a ferry wharf on the west bank of the Nile, the air thick with noise and flies and the stink of cow dung. He had been younger then, carrying the tomb hunter’s bags off the boat for a shilling. That had been before the discovery of the boy king’s tomb as well.

  He had been younger but he had been wise as well. He had seen what was coming –Egyptology’s own gold rush was an inevitability by then. There had been only one way to ensure the Lady’s safety, to ensure that they remained protected.

  And so the deal was done and the two of them had left the black land together, passing into the protective custody of the British Museum. They had never been apart in all the years since, not even when war had come to this new Egypt.

  Burial assemblage of the lady Henutmehyt

  This rich assemblage of objects was found by inhabitants of the Theban West Bank in or before 1904. The majority of the pieces were purchased for the British Museum between 1905 and 1913. From the style of the individual items the burial can be dated to the 19th Dynasty, probably to within the reign of Ramesses II (about 1279-1213 BC).

  The card in the bottom of the case describes the objects within as “Four magic bricks”. But those simple words belittle the divine power that is manifested within the blue-glazed faience Djed pillar, the cooked clay figure of Anubis, the mummiform figure carved from wood and the reed lamp.

  All four, acting together, keep evil influences from invading the resting place of the Lady Henutmehyt and causing the priestess’ body harm, while she sleeps the sleep of ages. These amuletic “bricks”, inscribed with the enchantments that described their function, had been placed with all due care and ceremony, at the cardinal points of Lady Henutmehyt’s tomb,
in niches cut into the walls of her burial chamber, to keep the servants of Seth at bay.

  He moves on, his every footfall ringing from the marble tiled floor of the chamber – the Lady Henutmehyt’s new sepulchre. He passes preserved coffin fragments, thick with funerary prayers. He passes pieces of plaster, still bearing the gesso-painted image of Osiris, king of the underworld, the first mummy, a benevolent smile on his lips, his natron-impregnated flesh as green as the papyrus fronds swaying in the breeze in the shallows of the Nile delta.

  And he remembers…

  The funerary temple, where the Lady’s mortal remains had been preserved for eternity, ready for her journey into the afterlife – consumed by the hungry desert. The temples where Lady Henutmehyt had given adoration to the Theban triad – Amun-Re, celestial sun-father, Mut, divine mother, and Montu, war-god and son – lost to the encroaching sands. The arid wind coming in off the desert smelled of dust and the distant campfires of the Mamluk tribesmen.

  The soldiers had come through the valley, past the sleeping colossi, the white and blue of their uniforms stained a uniform ochre by the dust those rose with every regimented step they took. They had come with their guns, fighting for their own king, their pharaoh – Emperor, they called him – but he had seen kings come and go; entire dynasties rise and fall. They had marvelled at the sand-blown stones that rose from the desert even after all these years – so many, many years.

  And then they had come with shovels and pickaxes, their new orders to save the lost kingdom of the pharaohs from the predations of the waterless wilderness. And he had joined them in reclaiming the ruins from the Seth’s desert domain.

  Osiris, ruler of the underworld

  This myth of Osiris had a major impact on Egyptian funerary practices and beliefs. Osiris, son of the earth-god Geb and the sky-goddess Nut, was a wise and beneficent king of Egypt. He was murdered by his jealous brother Seth, who cut Osiris’ body into pieces. Isis, his sister and wife of Osiris, restored him to life to become ruler of the kingdom of the dead, while their son Horus ascended the throne of Egypt. Osiris’ resurrection was brought about through mummification and hence the god was usually depicted as shrouded in mummy wrappings.

 

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