Ancient Evenings (25 page)

“So far as I know,” said Menenhetet with an easy smile and the powerful look of a virile man of sixty, “I am the only eye that still sees that battle.”

Now the Councillors could be seen to whisper again. The Battle of Kadesh, the greatest battle of them all, had indeed been fought one hundred and fifty years ago in the early years of the reign of Ramses II, and that Pharaoh had kept His Double-Crown for sixty-five years before Merneptah followed and Amenmeses and Siptah and Seti II and a Syrian usurper for a few years—I could feel the amusement of Ptah-nem-hotep’s mind as He observed the reckonings of His Councillors—yes, there had been Set-nakht, and Ramses III, Ramses IV, Ramses V, Ramses VI, Ramses VII, Ramses VIII and Ptah-nem-hotep Himself, our own Ramses IX, all of thirteen Pharaohs in the one hundred and fifty years that had passed since the Battle of Kadesh.

The Councillors lifted their foreheads and saluted Menenhetet. “Good,” said Ptah-nem-hotep to Himself, “now they are wondering if I will make him My Vizier instead of Khem-Usha.”

He had no more than finished this thought when I was brought back to myself on the couch in the rose-colored room. Hathfertiti was caressing me on the cheek. “Come,” she said, “it is time for you to return to the patio.” She smiled. “I would like you to see the awe with which they regard your great-grandfather.”

“I did not know,” I said to her out of all the surrender of this sleep that had been like a life, no, two lives—was it three if I counted myself?—“I did not know that Menenhetet was born one hundred and eighty years ago.”

For certain, Hathfertiti gave me a look. Then she touched my forehead with reverence. “Come,” she said, when she had control of her voice again, “I suppose it is time to tell you a little more of the truth. You see, it is possible that your great-grandfather has been born four times.”

SIX

When I did not know how to reply, she smiled tenderly. “Do not fear,” she said, “your wisdom is equal to a boy of fifteen, and sometimes you understand matters that are beyond the grasp of a man, but then I think you have such powers because you were conceived at the time of a great event.” She paused as though the sound of such words could injure the stillness of the air and added, “Let us say of what was almost a great event.”

“Almost?” I asked.

“It did not quite take place.”

As she said this, her fingertips passed around my forehead in a circle and I saw Menenhetet’s face appear in the center of her thoughts, his features as twisted as a rag squeezed out of its last moisture—a frightening sight to have of my great-grandfather, but I knew what she meant. Menenhetet had come near to death on the day I was conceived.

She spoke, however, of other things. “I have known,” she said, “that at times you enter the mind of those who are with you, but I did not know you could hear voices from another room.”

“Not until this hour,” I said.

“After I left you here?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think it is because of the room. Because”—and I did not understand why I added this—“because of the loveliness of this room,” but then I was learning what I meant by my words even as I spoke, indeed, I was recognizing that I could only learn what I knew as my voice passed into the air. For then I could feel the change I had made in what was before me, and thereby know the truth or error of what had just been said. So did I know at this moment that the loveliness of the room was like the bending of a fine bow and that was why my thoughts had flown so far.

“Yes, it may be time,” said my mother, “to tell you of secrets I wanted to keep until you were older. But if you can hear others from so far away, what hope have I to hide my thoughts! I cannot.”

“You can,” I said. “Sometimes you choose to do that.”

“At a price to myself,” murmured my mother, and drew her fingertips to her eyes with a gesture so attractive that we both began to laugh for we both knew she had an image of wrinkles beginning in the corners of her eyes if she tried to squeeze back her thoughts from me. “Oh, you are a darling,” she murmured, and kissed me carefully in order not to disturb the cosmetic on her lips. Her mouth had a flavor sweet as the heat of the air when bees are drowsy, and it may have been that I had risen too quickly from my curious sleep, but her lips laid a powerful languor over me. Then I felt a curl, some velvet and voluptuous turn beneath my navel, and I lived in my mother’s memory of an afternoon and night when Menenhetet and then my father had made love to her, yes, both men in this room, one for all of the late afternoon (no matter how the walls were painted red for evening), and one for the muted red walls of this same room, seen later by the flame of a candle, and although Eyaseyab’s full lips upon Sweet Finger had left many intimations of sensuous hours to come, still how could I commence to understand what went on in Hathfertiti’s luxurious bed if I had not been inflamed by the sweet kiss of my mother’s honeyed mouth? So I knew that the day in which I had been conceived might be one of the most remarkable of her life. Then, as if this languor she laid upon me left her less able to protect her own thoughts, so did I also acquire the knowledge that on the day of my conception, on that late afternoon, Menenhetet had made love to my mother, in a manner he had made love but three times before. At once, my mother tried to chase these pictures from her brain just so quickly as she thought them, but I had a true glimpse, as clean to the sight as the white of a stalk of grass when the root is pulled from the ground, yes, as intimate to my ear as the sibilance of that stalk surrendering its life in earth, the first light on the white root like a knife in the flank—so sudden is the pain of the grass—so did I come into the deepest secret of my family. For my mother’s mind offered it up without a word, although her lips certainly trembled as these confessions poured from her mind. I learned—and all at once!—that my great-grandfather had the power to escape his death in a way no other may have ever done. For he had been able, during an embrace, to ride his heart right over the last ridge and breathe his last thought as he passed into the womb of the woman and thereby could begin a new life, a true continuation of himself; his body died, but not the memory of his life. Soon, he would show fabulous powers in childhood. So I understood why my mother could no longer keep such knowledge from me. I, too, showed such powers!

What a disturbance did this confession produce in me! I felt as if, on a bolt of terror, I had jumped across the lip of one life into another. What a tumult of confusion! When Hathfertiti, by way of these unsprung thoughts, began to reveal how Menenhetet had made love to her in this hour, the foam and disorder of her mind was like a great rush of waves in my mind, and my thoughts did not know how to stay afloat against the current of such uproar in her, no, what did I know of how to make love!

Of course, I was in a flood of two confusions—one from myself and the other from my mother—hers whether to tell me more; mine to grasp at what I had just been told. For if Menenhetet could die, yet become himself once more, so did I wonder if I was supposed to have been the fifth appearance—could it be said?—of Menenhetet the First. Or was I intended to become Menenhetet the Second, his true son, not his own continuation? Might I, either way, have been given his power to father oneself?

That opened an immensity in my heart: I was given a glimpse of ambition in myself more fierce than fires of flaming oil. So I understood the woe that made me weep when I looked into the eye of the dog. For Tet-tut must have seen me dead at twenty-one. Then I thought of my poor Ka in the alcove at the center of the Great Pyramid—that same Pyramid I could now see painted on the rose wall of this room!—who was that young man there on his knees, mouth open to the force of another’s will? I looked at my mother in this confusion. Why had Menenhetet not entered his death at the moment he was ready?

I felt doors open in her mind. Again I saw the tortured face of Menenhetet in the center of a pool and was pulled through the mills of her thoughts in that moment when she felt death commencing in his heart. She was ready to catch his child with an exultation fierce as the roar of existence itself, all luminous with the vision of his death coming forth into the life she would bear for him, her great lover Menenhetet soon to become her child, but at that instant, he did not come forth, and lay instead on her body, half-dead for many minutes.

When, later, he withdrew, he said with a smile, “I do not know why I changed my mind.” He even put a finger to her chin and murmured, “On another occasion.” And departed from the body of his granddaughter, departed from that place where he had been ready to send his death, and I, comprehending this, could hardly know how much of me was similar to him—I knew only that I was kin to my great-grandfather in a hundred ways I could not name, my powers first, and remembered my mother saying, “Nef-khep-aukhem is your father and yet he is not.” So I had a hint of the toils of her body on that long day when I was conceived. For she must have been so certain a child would come to her by Menenhetet that what she would contribute herself was swimming already in her blood. Yet it was my father who must have put the seed into her that evening. I had a view of a night full of fevers as my father and mother rode from the bed to the floor and back again, my father slamming upon her skin with such savagery and such wild gusto—so much did he hate her, and adore her—that she was ablaze with a lust coming right out of the smelting of all contempt. My father’s lack of every quality a brave noble might possess made her desire him even more for his sly smells. At his best, he was something between a dog and a horse to her, there to enjoy and send back to his stall, as in fact she had enjoyed him from the time he was six and she was eight—used him for what he was, a younger brother. She could hardly endure his airs, his vanities, his weaknesses, his few brutal strengths. Yet the hair between her legs would stir when her brother was in the room. I was learning more about my father and my mother than she had ever wanted me to learn—I felt it now through Hathfertiti’s efforts to close her mind from mine. But I was forcing her—as if this was the only seduction I could perform—to strip away each thought. So did I penetrate into one more secret she might have wanted me not to find, and I could tell by the spasm in my chest, yes, the thrill and nausea of this recognition, that what I was about to learn was, by the first hand, awful, and next that I was jealous. If for the first time, I was nonetheless jealous. For I realized that my father was powerfully attractive to my mother because of his father, Shit-Collector. Now, I understood, as if engraved in the stone of my heart, that my mother had grown up in the shade of her mother’s desire for Fekh-futi—that uncontrollable desire!—and although I did not know how Fekh-futi looked, still my imagination insisted that he was one of the boys I had seen in my sleep this afternoon when I lived within Bone-Smasher’s eyes—and I saw those boys in the alley fighting again for the balls of manure. So could I see Fekh-futi fighting other boys for every piece of dung he could find in the city until he was enthroned on a heap, and ordering about the whores in his brothels as they went by with their transparent dresses and long blue wigs—I did not know if these were my thoughts now, or my mother’s, but I would certainly have been disgusted if not also near some old thrill as though I were two years old once more and still learning how not to soil myself (although mightily tempted).

Was it the pain of discovering my mother’s appetite for Fekh-futi? At this point, I realized that I had certainly lost her. Hathfertiti’s mind was closed.

She took me by the arm then. “It is time to return to the Pharaoh,” she said, and quick as that, as if I had just entered this rose-colored room for one glance, we departed and walked along that courtyard across which she had carried me an hour or two ago, screaming and upside-down.

SEVEN

What I had just learned was bound to affect me forever, yet the subject was so strange I might as well have awakened from a dream. Maybe that is why my confusion began to clear on our return to the Pharaoh’s balcony. There, everything was much as I had left it. While Menenhetet was now sitting on the other side of Ptah-nem-hotep, so, too, had my picture of where I had expected him to be also shifted. There was nothing to startle my eye.