Ancient Evenings (109 page)

Then all of him came forth, and in great bitterness. His seed was like a purge, foul and bitter, and I would have liked to vomit but could not. I had to take into me the misery he felt, and all of his urge for revenge upon my mother.

So, with his phallus still in my mouth, I knew the shame of Menenhetet. Now, the Ka of my great-grandfather weighed upon my Ka as Usermare must have weighed on him.

I also knew his exhaustion. It came down upon me like a cataract. In none of his four lives had he found what he desired. That much I knew, and then I swallowed, and all the venom of his Khaibit came into me—from my great-grandfather’s seed came the pure venom of his Khaibit. That would now be my knowledge of the past.

I would live by the guidance of his shadow. My Ka would have to choose its way in the Land of the Dead by the light of his Khaibit. If his stories were untrue, I would not know what was before me. To recollect one’s past was the need of one’s Ka, but such wisdom must be evil when owned by another.

So I did not know whether to trust what I would see, and yet, not knowing, I began, nonetheless, to recall what happened to my parents and to me after the last night of my great-grandfather’s life. Of course, I had no choice. How could I not follow what came to me? It concerned nothing less than the events of my life after Menenhetet was gone—was it fifteen years from the day of his death to mine? That is what I seemed to remember (had death come upon me when I was twenty or twenty-one?) yes, my life had certainly continued into an early death—witness the land where I was now. And I even felt one pang of sympathy for the modest fashion in which Menenhetet had told us of his second life and his third life. For I could not see any more of my own.

But my great-grandfather, exhausted by the fury of his coming-forth, now placed himself beside me gently, and sat back against a wall of this alcove in the massive tomb of Khufu (with its empty sarcophagus—yes, that, too, I now recalled!). Side by side, our buttocks on the floor, we began to stare into the darkness until the wall across, not five paces away, began to shimmer. I saw sights that were like colored paintings on a temple wall. Yet each time such an image became clear, it was as if I looked into the bowl of water where I had seen the star and stirred it with my hand, for many waves spread out from each light. The pictures moved as if they lived within my head just so much as on the wall, and finally I could not know how I saw it—everything moved so often. Then I decided that to look at the living from these tombs of the dead was even more confusing than to see what happened through the memory of another. In truth, it was like reaching for a fish. One’s hand would never go where one’s eye could see, and the water bent one’s arm and darted away.

To show how little I could trust what was offered to me, the first sight proved disgusting, and I did not wish to believe it. The face of Ptah-nem-hotep came before me slyly eating a very small piece of flesh from the mutilated body of Menenhetet. That was what I saw, and as if the wall could speak, or at least give resonance to the feelings of those who moved upon its surface, I knew the Pharaoh’s passion for wisdom was more desperate now that Menenhetet was dead. As His teeth chewed on the fearful meat, it was all believable to me. It certainly explained why He changed so greatly over the remaining years of His life, and why I could not remember Him now as a good parent. Eating that morsel my great-grandfather must have altered Ptah-nem-hotep gravely, left Him mean. Lacking the courage of Menenhetet, He could only acquire ruthlessness.

My mother spoke then within my ear and said, “You are wrong to think harshly of your Father. Taking your great-grandfather into Himself has bound the Pharaoh to our family.” She had no more than to say such words, and much came before me: I saw Them together often, my Mother, now indeed the Queen, and beside Him on His throne. Then I recalled that not one year passed from the Night of the Pig before She gave Him a son, my half brother, yes, She was much His Queen and there at every great ceremony He conducted. He was present now at many more festivals than before, and whenever the Concubines of the Gods offered a song to the Pharaoh, my Mother, like Nefertiri, shook a sistrum. They were not unhappy in Their first year.

I also began to remember, however, that They often quarreled. While it could never be said that They ceased to delight in each other’s flesh (and indeed were a court scandal for the length of the hours They spent with one another) still, They were never content with one another’s little manners, and like most married people fought invariably over the same matter. For years I could hear Them quarrel about the shop of Nef-khep-aukhem in Memphi.

Indeed, so often must these quarrels have taken place that my memory revived sufficiently for the pictures to cease for a time. Thoughts of Nef-khep-aukhem came back to me instead, and I recalled the outrage he aroused in Ptah-nem-hotep on that morning when Khem-Usha’s troops occupied the Palace. For in the course of bargaining with the High Priest on that dawn, Ptah-nem-hotep learned that Nef-khep-aukhem, so soon as he had left the patio, hastened directly to Khem-Usha’s chambers in Memphi, and there gave much information to the High Priest about my great-grandfather’s ambitions as well as the Pharaoh’s increasing sympathy for them.

This story having come back to me from the outraged lips of my Mother, She thought it likely that neither the troops of Khem-Usha nor of Nes-Amon would have moved that night if not for Nef-khep-aukhem. The truth, as my Mother would have it, was that Nes-Amon did not assemble his men until he heard the sounds of Khem-Usha’s militia getting ready in the dark.

This treachery put my new Father into a greater rage than any other event of that dawn. Then, Nef-khep-aukhem, thinking it wise to collect his reward from the High Priest so soon as possible, made the error of appearing at the Palace too early. Ptah-nem-hotep declared to Khem-Usha that the way to commence a true equality between Pharaoh and High Priest was not to begin by taunting Him with the presence of his treacherous Overseer. Indeed, my Father resented such arrogance so much that Khem-Usha, comprehending how dear was this point, pretended for a time to be obdurate in his loyalty to Nef-khep-aukhem. Thereby, he gained many concessions in the exchange before agreeing that the former Overseer of the Cosmetic Box be banished from the Palace. Indeed, my Mother declared that if not for Her intervention, Nef-khep-aukhem would have been killed.

Now, I recalled that Her feelings soon altered. My former father, alert, as ever, to the needs of others, soon opened a shop in Memphi for the care of ladies. As far as anyone knew, this was the first enterprise of its sort ever in the Two-Lands. Which lady, until that hour, did not have her own servant to care for her hair? Since the hands of Nef-khep-aukhem, however, were known by all to have touched the head of the Pharaoh Himself, the shop was successful at once. My first father soon became prosperous. But there was not a day at the Palace when Hathfertiti did not quarrel with Her second husband about the presence in Memphi of Her first. She was hideously humiliated, She kept telling Him. Yet She could not convince Ptah-nem-hotep to put such commerce out of existence by an edict, or, at the least, buy Nef off with an estate in some provincial nome. Ptah-nem-hotep’s old affection for His Overseer had revived. I would hear Him tell Her that unfaithfulness for one night was forgivable. Consider the provocation!

This, of course, left the onus on my Mother. For that, She never had any patience. Like many beautiful women, She could not bear to be blamed. So She took pains to prove that the unfaithfulness of His old Cosmetic Box was considerably more serious. Nef-khep-aukhem, She declared, had not served as a spy for Khem-Usha just on this one night, but, to the contrary, had been his informant for years. Her evidence was slender, however, and Ptah-nem-hotep refused to accept it. I think the nearness of Nef-khep-aukhem was a way to remind Hathfertiti of how much She owed to Her second marriage. I expect He needed such a cudgel to keep Her in place. I could always hear Their quarrels. “You do not see how it demeans You,” She would tell Him. “People say You live with the woman of a wig-maker.”

“On the contrary,” He would reply, “there is not a lady in Memphi who does not admire him most prodigiously.” So forth. Over the years, it soured Hathfertiti. She could never forgive Him for not yielding to Her. Then, there were other matters to take away more of Her respect. I do not know which rights were given to Khem-Usha on the first morning, as opposed to those ceded later, but my Mother remained Queen of the Two-Lands for only three years before Her powers as well as my Father’s were reduced by half. In the Tenth Year of the Reign of Ramses the Ninth, it was promulgated that Amenhotep (the new appellation chosen by Khem-Usha—and equal to four Pharaohs!) was now raised in godliness equal to Ramses the Ninth. At a great festival, confirmed by many ceremonies, Amenhotep, High Priest of the Temple of Amon in Thebes, was given full sanction to govern all of Upper Egypt. A vast array of gold and silver vessels was presented to Him, and it was declared that all revenues in Upper Egypt from all sources would now go to the treasury of Amon directly and need not pass through the vaults of the Pharaoh. Amenhotep’s figure was also inscribed on many temple walls. He stood next to Ramses the Ninth, and both Gods were equal in height—four times higher They stood on such walls than all servants and officials next to Them.

I do not know whether my Mother kept any great love for Ptah-nem-hotep after this, but by what I now saw in my mind, I supposed that She did not. To my singular surprise, I saw Menenhetet again in my thoughts. He looked five, or might it be ten years older, and my Mother was heavier than She had been while he was still alive. So I was obliged to wonder if the story She had told me of his dismemberment had no truth. Was it a tale of horror chosen to make me wish never to think of Menenhetet again? For now, if my memory were not being fed by the eight Gods of the slime—just so slippery did it all become!—the truth seemed to be that Menenhetet had not killed himself, although doubtless given such an invitation by the Pharaoh. And I saw the intolerable agitation that my great-grandfather’s refusal caused in Ptah-nem-hotep. If He had most clearly deceived Menenhetet by offering no reward for the incalculable gifts presented to His mind on that long night, yet, like a true Monarch, He still felt betrayed. Menenhetet would not endow Him with the final gift of devotion—he chose not to serve as a substitute and kill himself.

Not to do so left Menenhetet, however, at Khem-Usha’s mercy. The High Priest soon succeeded in stripping my great-grandfather’s wealth. His estates in Upper Egypt were purchased for ridiculously low prices by the Temple, indeed, Khem-Usha set the prices, and if Menenhetet had not agreed, the Temple would most certainly have taken his lands. Then the rest of his holdings in Lower Egypt, including the great mansion (from whose rooftop I had watched him make love to my mother) were, at Hathfertiti’s insistence, acquired with equally low reimbursement by the Pharaoh. My Mother most certainly did not wish to have my great-grandfather near, and on this occasion, succeeded in Her desires. Menenhetet was obliged to live on a poor estate on the West Bank of Thebes purchased with what little he had been left.

So fixed was I at gazing into these images that I was startled by a movement from the Ka of Menenhetet beside me. His thigh began to shake against the side of my thigh, and I could hear his agitation in the sound of his breath. It offered the conviction that we shared this memory, that it was his, and he did not lie. For this, incontestably, would be the way he recalled it, that is, with much disquiet. Then these events became so extraordinary that I could not cease watching.

For Menenhetet did not live on his one poor estate in some solemn ingathering of the last years, no, he managed to join the thieves of Kurna, and thereby acquired another fortune while robbing the tombs of the Pharaohs. If he could not in any of his four lives wear the Double-Crown himself, and thereby enter the Land of the Dead as a God, then at least he could plunder Their crypts, and most skillfully he did, tunneling from one tomb to the next with no sign showing on the surface. Then, in the year Menenhetet felt himself close again to his death—which was late in my fifteenth year, and thereby the Sixteenth Year of the Reign of Ramses the Ninth—he slipped back into Memphi and succeeded in visiting my Mother.

Now, upon the wall, I saw him making love to Her. It was the last time. Even as he sat beside me, he gave an oath of expiration, yet I saw him die in Her arms, and knew, from the resonance of Her profound weeping, that he had been successful, and for the fourth time, in impregnating a woman with the ardors of his last act. His force upon Her must still have been great, for my Mother, despite every objection by Ptah-nem-hotep, took all the necessary steps to see that his body was most carefully embalmed.

In the second month of Her pregnancy, however, before my Father could be aware that She was carrying (although He would certainly have assumed it was His child, since no matter how much unpleasantness now lived between Them, one could count on the pleasure They took together) Hathfertiti, nonetheless, wrought a last revenge on Menenhetet. She took purges until She aborted the child. There would be no fifth life for my great-grandfather. He did not become my infant brother.

His Ka was left, therefore, most cruelly evicted. If it decided to return to the embalmed body of the old man, and took up abode there—which it must have done, or how else could he now sit beside me?—still I am not certain what escaped, and what was lost. Part of him, like a ghost, knowing no dwelling, may have attached itself to me. For at the age of sixteen, I certainly became ungovernable in the eyes of my parents.

My younger brother, Amen-khep-shu-ef the Second, an expression, I expect, of my Father’s desire that one of His Sons, at least, be a great warrior, was soon seen as He-Who-would-become-Ramses-the-Tenth. This never plagued me until my sixteenth year when Amen-Ka was nine. Then I grew defiant. Not only did I gamble and carouse, behave, in short, like a Prince, but I became impolite to Ptah-nem-hotep and was excruciatingly rude to my Mother on the subject of the chapel She built for the four mummies who made up the remains of my great-grandfather. After a good deal of expense and a long search by Her agents, She had finally been able to locate the first Menenhetet, and the second. If the third was not difficult to find—he was there in the same tomb his widow had built for him, and no thieves had yet broken in—the crypt of the High Priest was pillaged. It could not even be certain that the mummy who remained, stripped of amulets and gems, was Menenhetet until much study was given to the prayers written on the linen wrappings, but they, fortunately, proved sufficiently recondite to belong to a High Priest. However, the Menenhetet of the first life, the Master of the Secrets, was only found because Hathfertiti, despite a separation of near to ten years, was still able to live in the mind of my great-grandfather. On his last visit, as they made love, She journeyed with him into the depths of a trance. Thereby, She saw the place of his first death, and even watched the servants of Honey-Ball rescue his body from the pile of offal on which it had been thrown. Saved from decomposition by an immediate embalming, Honey-Ball, after the seventy days, commissioned a traveling merchant from the Delta to take the coffin downriver to Sais where she had him put in a modest tomb near her family vault. It was there that Queen Hathfertiti found the mummy of this first Menenhetet (with the mummy of Honey-Ball lying beside him) and now finding Herself at last in full possession of the remains, She prevailed upon Ptah-nem-hotep to permit each of these four well-wrapped eminences, each in its own heavy coffin, to be pulled around the Palace walls by teams of oxen. Afterward She kept the mummies in a chapel surrounded by a moat, and it had, for protection, a crocodile in the water. Just so prodigious, I believe, was Her fear of the Ka of Menenhetet.