by John Updike
He knew a lot about himself: he knew that this lightness, the brittle unmarred something he carried, was his treasure, which his demon willed him to preserve. Stepping from the airplane at Luxor, he had greeted his demon in the air—air ideally clean, dry as a mirror. From the window of his cabin he sensed again, in the glittering width of the Nile—much bluer than he had expected—and in the unflecked alkaline sky and in the tapestry strip of anciently worked green between them, that he would be happy for this trip. He liked sunning on the deck that first afternoon. Only the Scandinavian girl, in an orange bikini, kept him company. Both were silent. The boat was still tied up at the Luxor dock, a flight of stone steps; a few yards away, across a gulf of water and paved banking, a traffic of peddlers and cart drivers stared across. Clem liked that gulf and liked it when the boat cast loose and began gliding between the fields, the villages, the desert. He liked the first temples: gargantuan Karnak, its pillars upholding the bright blank sky; gentler Luxor, with its built-in mosque and its little naked queen touching her king’s giant calf; Hollywoodish Dendera—its restored roofs had brought in darkness and dampness and bats that moved on the walls like intelligent black gloves.
Clem even, at first, liked the peddlers. Tourist-starved, they touched him in their hunger, thrusting scarabs and old coins and clay mummy dolls at him, moaning and grunting English: “How much? How much you give me? Very fine. Fifty. Both. Take both. Both for thirty-five.” Clem peeked down, caught his eye on a turquoise glint, and wavered; his mother liked keepsakes and he had friends in Buffalo who would be amused. Into this flaw, this tentative crack of interest, they stuffed more things, strange sullied objects salvaged from the desert, alabaster vases, necklaces of mummy heads. Their brown hands probed and rubbed; their faces looked stunned, unblinking, as if, under the glaring sun, they were conducting business in the dark. Indeed, some did have eyes whitened by trachoma. Hoping to placate them with a purchase, Clem bargained for the smallest thing he could see, a lapis-lazuli bug the size of a fingernail. “Ten, then,” the old peddler said, irritably making the “give me” gesture with his palm. Holding his wallet high, away from their hands, Clem leafed through the big notes for the absurdly small five-piaster bills, tattered and fragile with use. The purchase, amounting to little more than a dime, excited the peddlers; ignoring the other tourists, they multiplied and crowded against him. Something warm and hard was inserted into his hand, his other sleeve was plucked, his pockets were patted, and he wheeled, his tongue pinched between his teeth flirtatiously. It was a nightmare; the dream thought crossed his mind that he might be scratched, marred.
He broke away and rejoined the other tourists in the sanctum of a temple courtyard. One of the Egyptian women came up to him and said, “I do not mean to remonstrate, but you are torturing them by letting them see all those fifties and hundreds in your wallet.”
“I’m sorry.” He blushed like a scolded schoolboy. “I just didn’t want to be rude.”
“You must be. There is no question of hurt feelings. You are the man in the moon to them. They have no comprehension of your charm.”
The strange phrasing of her last sentence, expressing not quite what she meant, restored his edge and dulled her rebuke. She was the shorter and the older of the two Egyptian women; her eyes were green and there was an earnest mischief, a slight pressure, in her upward glance. Clem relaxed, almost slouching. “The sad part is, some of their things, I’d rather like to buy.”
“Then do,” she said, and walked away, her hips swinging. So a move had been made. He had expected it to come from the Scandinavian girl.
That evening the Egyptian trio invited him to their table in the bar. The green-eyed woman said, “I hope I was not scolding. I did not mean to remonstrate, merely to inform.”
“Of course,” Clem said. “Listen. I was being plucked to death. I needed rescuing.”
“Those men,” the Egyptian man said, “are in a bad way. They say that around the hotels the shoeshine boys are starving.” His face was triangular, pock-marked, saturnine. A heavy, weary courtesy slowed his speech.
“What did you buy?” the second woman asked. She was sallower than the other, and softer. Her English was the most British-accented.
Clem showed them. “Ah,” the man said, “a scarab.”
“The incarnation of Khepri,” the green-eyed woman said. “The symbol of immortality. You will live forever.” She smiled at everything she said; he remembered her smiling with the word “remonstrate.”
“They’re jolly things,” the other woman pronounced, in her stately way. “Dung beetles. They roll a ball of dung along ahead of them, which appealed to the ancient Egyptians. Reminded them of themselves, I suppose.”
“Life is that,” the man said. “A ball of dung we push along.”
The waiter came and Clem said, “Another whiskey sour. And another round of whatever they’re having.” Beer for the man, Scotch for the taller lady, lemonade for his first friend.
Having bought, he felt, the right to some education, Clem asked, “Seriously. Has the”—he couldn’t bring himself to call it a war, and he had noticed that in Egypt the words “Israel” and “Israeli” were never pronounced—“trouble cut down on tourism?”
“Oh, immensely,” the taller lady said. “Before the war, one had to book for this boat months ahead. Now my husband was granted two weeks and we were able to come at the last moment. It is pathetic.”
“What do you do?” Clem asked.
The man made a self-deprecatory and evasive gesture, as a deity might have, asked for employment papers.
“My brother,” the green-eyed woman stated, smiling, “works for the government. In, what do you call it, planning?”
As if in apology for having been reticent, her brother abruptly said, “The shoeshine boys and the dragomen suffer for us all. In everyone in my country, you have now a deep distress of humiliation.”
“I noticed,” Clem said, very carefully, “those holes in the bridge we passed under.”
“They brought Jeeps in, Jeeps. By helicopter. The papers said bombs from a plane, but it was Jeeps by helicopters from the Red Sea. They drove onto the bridge, set the charges, and drove away. We are not warriors. We are farmers. For thousands of years now, we have had others do our fighting for us—Sudanese, Libyans, Arabs. We are not Arabs. We are Egyptians. The Syrians and Jordanians, they are Arabs—crazy men. But we, we don’t know who we are, except we are very old. The man who seeks to make warriors of us creates distress.”
His wife put her hand on his to silence him while the waiter brought the drinks. His sister said to Clem, “Are you enjoying our temples?”
“Quite.” But the temples within him, giant slices of limestone and sun, lay mute. “I also quite like,” he went on, “our guide. I admire the way he says everything in English to some of us and then in French to the rest.”
“Most Egyptians are trilingual,” the wife stated. “Arabic, English, French.”
“Which do you think in?” Clem was concerned, for he was conscious in himself of an absence of verbal thoughts; instead, there were merely glints and reflections.
The sister smiled. “In English, the thoughts are clearest. French is better for passion.”
“And Arabic?”
“Also for passion. Is it not so, Amina?”
“What so, Leila?” She had been murmuring with her husband.
The question was restated in French.
“Oh, c’est vrai, vrai.”
“How strange,” Clem said. “English doesn’t seem precise to me; quite the contrary. It’s a mess of synonyms and lazy grammar.”
“No,” the wife said firmly—she never, he suddenly noticed, smiled—“English is clear and cold, but not nuancé in the emotions, as is French.”
“And is Arabic nuancé in the same way?”
The green-eyed sister considered. “More angoisse.”
Her brother said, “We have ninety-nine words for ‘camel dung.’ All different
states of camel dung. Camel dung, we understand.”
“Of course,” Leila said to Clem, “Arabic here is nothing compared with the pure Arabic you would hear among the Saudis. The language of the Koran is so much more—can I say it?—gutsy. So guttural, nasal: strange, wonderful sounds. Amina, does it still affect you inwardly, to hear it chanted? The Koran.”
Amina solemnly agreed, “It is terrible. It tears me all apart. It is too much passion.”
Italian rock music had entered the bar via an unseen radio, and one of the middle-aged English couples was trying to waltz to it. Noticing how intently Clem watched, the sister asked him, “Do you like to dance?”
He took it as an invitation; he blushed. “No, thanks, the fact is I can’t.”
“Can’t dance? Not at all?”
“I’ve never been able to learn. My mother says I have Methodist feet.”
“Your mother says that?” She laughed: a short shocking noise, the bark of a fox. She called to Amina, “Sa mère dit que l’américain a les pieds méthodistes!”
“Les pieds méthodiques?”
“Non, non, aucune méthode, la secte chrétienne—méthodisme!”
Both barked, and the man grunted. Clem sat there rigidly, immaculate in his embarrassment. Leila’s green eyes, curious, pressed on him like gems scratching glass. The three Egyptians became overanimated, beginning sentences in one language and ending in another, and Clem understood that he was being laughed at. Yet the sensation, like the blurred plucking of the scarab salesmen, was better than untouched emptiness. He had another drink before dinner, the drink that was one too many, and when he went in to his single table, everything—the tablecloths, the little red lamps, the waiting droves of waiters in blue, the black windows beyond which the Nile glided—looked triumphant and glazed.
He slept badly. There were bumps and scraping above him, footsteps in the hall, the rumble of the motors, and, at four o’clock, the sounds of docking at another temple site. Once, he had found peace in hotel rooms, strange virgin corners where his mind could curl into itself, cut off from all nagging familiarities, and painlessly wink out. But he had known too many hotel rooms, so they had become themselves familiar, with their excessively crisp sheets and gleaming plumbing and easy chairs one never sat in but used as clothes racks. Only the pillows varied—neck-cracking fat bolsters in Leningrad, in Amsterdam hard little wads the size of a lady’s purse, and as lumpy. Here on the floating hotel Osiris, two bulky pillows were provided and, toward morning, Clem discovered it relaxed him to put his head on one and his arms around the other. Some other weight in the bed seemed to be the balance that his agitated body, oscillating with hieroglyphs and sharp remonstrative glances, was craving. In his dream, the Egyptian women promised him something marvellous and showed him two tall limestone columns with blue sky between them. He awoke unrefreshed but conscious of having dreamed. On his ceiling there was a dance of light, puzzling in its telegraphic rapidity, more like electronic art than anything natural. He analyzed it as sunlight bouncing off the tremulous Nile through the slats of his venetian blinds. He pulled the blinds and there it was again, stunning in its clarity: the blue river, the green strip, the pink cliffs, the unflecked sky. Only the village had changed. The other tourists—the Frenchman being slowly steered, like a fragile cart, by an Arab boy—were already heading up a flight of wooden stairs toward a bus. Clem ran after them, into the broad day, without shaving.
Their guide, Poppa Omar, sat them down in the sun in a temple courtyard and told them the story of Queen Hatshepsut. “Remember it like this,” he said, touching his head and rubbing his chest. “Hat—cheap—suit. She was wonderful woman here. Always building the temples, always winning the war and getting the nigger to be slaves. She marry her brother Tuthmosis and he grow tired here of jealous and insultation. He say to her, ‘O.K., you done a lot for Egypt, take it more easy now.’ She say to him, ‘No, I think I just keep rolling along.’ What happen? Tuthmosis die. The new king also Tuthmosis, her niece. He is a little boy. Hatshepsut show herself in all big statues wearing false beard and all flatness here.” He rubbed his chest. “Tuthmosis get bigger and go say to her now, ‘Too much jealous and insultation. Take it easy for Egypt now.’ She say, ‘No.’ Then she die, and all over Egypt here, he take all her statue and smash, hit, hit, so not one face of Hatshepsut left and everywhere her name in all the walls here become Tuthmosis!” Clem looked around, and the statues had, indeed, been mutilated, thousands of years ago. He touched his own face and the whiskers scratched.
On the way back in the bus, the Green Bay travelogue-maker asked them to stop so he could photograph a water wheel with his movie camera. A tiny child met them, weeping, on the path, holding one arm as if crippled. “Baksheesh, baksheesh,” he said. “Musha, musha.” One of the British men flicked at him with a whisk. The bald American announced aloud that the child was faking. Clem reached into his pocket for a piaster coin, but then remembered himself as torturer. Seeing his gesture, the child, and six others, chased after him. First they shouted, then they tossed pebbles at his heels. From within the haven of the bus, the tourists could all see the child’s arm unbend. But the weeping continued and was evidently real. The travelogist was still doing the water wheel, and the peddlers began to pry open the windows and thrust in scarabs, dolls, alabaster vases not without beauty. The window beside Clem’s face slid back and a brown hand insinuated an irregular parcel about six inches long, wrapped in brown cloth. “Feesh mummy,” a disembodied voice said, and to Clem it seemed hysterically funny. He couldn’t stop laughing; the tip of his tongue began to hurt from being bitten. The Scandinavian girl, across the aisle, glanced at him hopefully. Perhaps the crack in his surface was appearing.
Back on the Osiris, they basked in deck chairs. The white boat had detached itself from the brown land, and men in blue brought them lemonade, daiquiris, salty peanuts called soudani. Though Clem, luminous with suntan oil, appeared to be asleep, his lips moved in answer to Ingrid beside him. Her bikini was chartreuse today. “In my country,” she said, “the summers are so short, naturally we take off our clothes. But it is absurd, this myth other countries have of our paganism, our happy sex. We are a harsh people. My father, he was like a man in the Bergman films. I was forbidden everything growing up—to play cards, lipstick, to dance.”
“I never did learn to dance,” Clem said, slightly shifting.
“Yes,” she said, “I saw in you, too, a stern childhood. In a place of harsh winters.”
“We had two yards of snow the other year,” Clem told her. “In one storm. Two meters.”
“And yet,” Ingrid said, “I think the thaw, when at last it comes in such places, is so dramatic, so intense.” She glanced toward him hopefully.
Clem appeared oblivious within his gleaming placenta of suntan oil.
The German boy who spoke a little English was on the other side of him. By now, the third day, the sunbathers had declared themselves: Clem, Ingrid, the two young Germans, the bald-headed American, the young English wife, whose skirted bathing suits were less immodest than her ordinary dresses. The rest of the British sat on the deck in the shade of the canopy and drank; the three Egyptians sat in the lounge and talked; the supposed Russians kept out of sight altogether. The travelogist was talking to the purser about the immense chain of tickets and reservations that would get him to Cape Town; the widow was in her cabin with Egyptian stomach and a burning passion to play bridge; the French couple sat by the rail, in the sun but fully dressed, reading guidebooks, his chair tipped back precariously, so he could see the gliding landscape.
The German boy asked Clem, “Haff you bot a caftan?”
He had been nearly asleep, beneath a light, transparent headache. He said, “Bitte?”
“Ein caftan. You shoot. In Luxor; vee go back tonight. He vill measure you and haff it by morning, ven vee go. Sey are good—wery cheap.”
Hatcheapsuit, Clem thought, but grunted that he might do it. His frozen poise contended wit
hin him with a promiscuous and American quality that must go forth and test, and purchase. He felt, having spurned so many scarabs and alabaster vases, that he owed Egypt some of the large-leafed money that fattened his wallet uncomfortably.
“It vood be wery handsome on you.”
“Ravishing,” the young English wife said behind them. She had been listening. Clem sometimes felt like a mirror that everyone glanced into before moving on.
“You’re all kidding me,” he announced. “But I confess, I’m a sucker for costumes.”
“Again,” Ingrid said, “like a Bergman film.” And languorously she shifted her long arms and legs; the impression of flesh in the side of his vision disturbingly merged, in his sleepless state, with a floating sensation of hollowness, of being in parentheses.
That afternoon they toured the necropolis in the Valley of the Kings. King Tut’s small two-chambered tomb—how had they crammed so much treasure in? The immense tunnels of Ramses III; or was it Ramses IV? Passageways hollowed from the limestone chip by chip, lit by systems of tilted mirrors, painted with festive stiff figures banqueting, fishing, carrying offerings of fruit forward, which was always slightly down, down past pits dug to entrap grave-robbers, past vast false chambers, toward the real and final one, a square room that would have made a nice nightclub. Its murals had been left unfinished, sketched in gray ink but uncolored. The tremors of the artist’s hand, his nervous strokes, were still there, over three millennia later.
Abdul, the Egyptian planner, murmured to him, “Always they left something unfinished; it is a part of their religion that no one understands. It is thought perhaps they dreaded finishing, as closing in the dead, limiting the life beyond.” They climbed up the long slanting passageway, threaded with electric lights, past hundreds of immaculate bodies carried without swing. “The dead, you see, are not dead. In their language, the word for ‘death’ and the word for ‘life’ are the same. The death they feared was the second one, the one that would come if the tomb lacked provisions for life. In the tombs of the nobles, more than here, the scenes of life are all about, like a musical—you say ‘score’?—that only the dead have the instrument to play. These hieroglyphs are all instructions to the dead man, how to behave, how to make the safe journey.”
