Ancient Evenings (29 page)

The roe of fish came next, served on a plate with a curious egg whose shell was not speckled but white, and my mother cried out, “Is this the egg from the bird of Babylon?”

“Most certainly it is,” said Ptah-nem-hotep.

“The bird that does not fly?” asked my father.

“Yes. The Babylonian bird that does not like water and does not fly.”

“What does it do?” asked my mother.

“It makes noise, and is stupid, filthy, and useless, but for its eggs.”

“Are they as good as duck eggs?”

“Only if you are from Babylon,” said Ptah-nem-hotep and everyone laughed. He told us then of how He had had these creatures brought to Him by ship. A tame bird, He kept repeating, but they made such a din of cackling and strutting and crying out that the oarsmen thought the birds were calling to their Babylonian Gods. So the crew was ready to slaughter their cargo at the first sign of a storm. “Fortunately, no big winds came. Now, I have the birds in a corner of My garden, and they take to the soil of Egypt. They multiply. Soon I will be able to send you some. In fact—I whisper to you—I like these filthy little cacklers. Their eggs seem good for My thoughts.”

I was feeling gloomy, however. The heat of the great candles, the war of spices in my nose, my chest, and my belly, and the sad salty taste of the roe sat in me with sorrow. I did not know what to make of the egg from Babylon. It was raw and yellow in the yolk, not green, and it had a taste like cheese and wet walls and sulphur and flour-paste and I even thought it smelled a little like ca-ca on certain mornings, yet even as I could like such a smell on one day or another—if it came from me—so did I like the egg. It was as yellow as the Pharaoh’s own butter that the servants were passing out now on sweet little cakes of the finest flour.

Still, the combination of fish eggs and bird eggs had certainly affected my mother for she began to talk to Ptah-nem-hotep of the day of my birth as if I were not there, speaking of how she had kept my birth back by holding her knees together, and said this with her bare breast leaning toward the Pharaoh. “I would not have him born,” she said, “until the lucky hour was there. I did not want Meni, my Men-ka, to see the day until the sun was at its height and yellow as this egg,” but when the Pharaoh merely nodded, and did not seem wholly rescued from the boredom that surrounded Him (the way death is always near a man who is wasting) my mother pushed away her roe and cried out, “You don’t mean to tell me that these red little jellies might all have become fish.”

“All,” said my father. “There are always enough fish in the sea.”

There was now a pause, not so much for the rebuke to my mother, as for the solemnity of my father’s remark. We had eight or ten sayings such as “one thread saves seven stitches,” “right-thinking is the husband of right-doing,” or “enough fish in the sea,” as my father had just observed. Such comments never asked for a reply, and so there was now, as I said, a pause, but it did not seem to leave any animosity against my father. It was as if everyone knew that he must have stopped the conversation for a reason. Since he thought only of the Pharaoh’s wishes and knew them even as they were forming, everyone assumed, including the Pharaoh, that our Good God must have some desire to pause. In truth, He did.

“It is time,” Ptah-nem-hotep said, “for
rep
and
repi
,” and to the laughter of everyone, He stood up, and left the room. I knew my parents were shocked.
Repi
had been the word taught to me as a polite way of announcing that I must urinate. But,
rep
, at least in the way Ptah-nem-hotep had spoken it, could only suggest an ugly beast breathing hot wind in every direction. In truth,
rep
was our most awful word for ca-ca, and the two together,
rep
and
repi
, were so terrible that no one, not even the Pharaoh, would care to say it on any night other than the Feast of the Pig. I suppose it was His way of reminding us that on this night not only could we speak of matters considered improper on all other nights, but indeed, were supposed to.

Once Ptah-nem-hotep had left, however, we were on guard against the servants for we could feel their ears come alive. Hathfertiti became conspicuously silent, and Menenhetet and Nef-khep-aukhem had a conversation about the best kind of throwing-stick to take out in the swamps for ducks. But their talk lapsed. I could hear my mother whisper to my father.

“Is He never like this on other nights?”

My father looked up from the last of his conversation with Menenhetet and shook his head.

Now, a dark and bearded Syrian in a heavy woolen ill-smelling garment was allowed to enter and he bowed profoundly before each of us, and poured out a liquid from a heavy vat barrel he carried in his arms, his own body reeking of the beer he served. So soon as he had filled our mugs, he was gone, but I could see the servants found the smell of his wet beer, old body-oil, sweat and damp wool altogether ferocious. The beer, however, to my parents’ surprise, was exceptionally good, or, at least, so they declared, since they would not let me drink any. Then Ptah-nem-hotep returned, and related to us, as if there had been nothing exceptional in His departure, a charming story about the brewer.

“One night, I told Overseer of the Royal Kitchen to bring Me the best beer in Memphi, and next day he groveled on the floor at what he had to confess, but it seems our best brewer in all of this city is a filthy fellow named Ravah, the same one you saw, and he declared he would not send his beer to Twin-Gates unless he could accompany it. ‘Didn’t you flog the fool?’ I asked. ‘I did,’ Overseer told me, ‘and Ravah poured his beer on the ground. I could beat him half to death, he said, but there would be no beer unless he could serve the Pharaoh himself.’ Well, it made Me curious. I told Overseer to bring the fool. Had to keep him at a distance because of his stench, but what a beer! Ravah claims it is his vat that makes it special, and I must say the drink gets better all the time. He says that since I have been sharing his beer, the cracks in his vat have more power than ever to flavor well. “Joy-Bringer’ he calls his filthy stuff, but it is good.”

“He speaks of You, Divine Two-House, as sharing his beer?” asked my mother.

“Yes. Ravah says the power of the brew is promiscuous, and must be shared by all. That is the center of its strength. Do you know, I believe him? I sip this stuff and feel close to My people. I never feel that while sipping Unguent of the Heart”—he pointed to one amphora of wine—“or”—pointing to another—“Cellared in this Preserve. No,” said Ptah-nem-hotep sadly, “then I feel close only to the priests.”

“I do not know how you can speak that way,” my mother said to Him in an intimate voice, as if at last, comfortable with her new manners on the Night of the Pig, she could scold Him just so naturally as if they had been married for ten years or more. “You are renowned for the quality of Your wine.” Here she smiled a little drunkenly, as if she knew she was going to reveal her pet name for my father—“Why our good friend, Nef, has eyes as dull as muddy water when he speaks to me. But when he speaks of You”—she paused as if taking a dare with herself—“his eyes look like diamonds.”

She gave a hiccup without covering her mouth, an act she would never have allowed on other nights, and said, “You may adore the snail, but I adore the Night of the Pig. You see, I think there is pig enough in each of us to make one feast a year. Of course,” she smiled deliciously, “on this night we have a fear that restrains us. We fear we are nothing but pigs, whereas You are a God as well, Great-are-Your-Two-Houses-of-the-Pig!”

I felt an immense commotion in my ears, yet not a sound was uttered. The attention of the servants was equal to the silence of fish after one of their number has been pulled from the sea. My father’s mouth did not close: so I had the first look of my life at the full size of his tongue—he had an immense tongue! Even Menenhetet stirred in disbelief. “You may not speak that way,” he said sharply to Hathfertiti.

Ptah-nem-hotep, however, saluted her with the last of His beer. “I have been called Two-Lions, Two-Trees, and once I was called Two-Divine-Hippopotami. I have been termed Son of Horus and Son of Set, as well as Prince of Isis and Osiris, I have even been named as heir to Thoth and Anubis, but, never, dear company, has anyone had the wit to think of My Double-House as the Pig-Sty of the North and the Pig-Sty of the South. I must only ask: where is the pig? You can bring it to us,” He said over His shoulder to the servants, and gave back my mother something of the same delicious smile she had offered to Him. Yet each of His cheeks had a touch of red no larger than the pinch of a cruel finger, a red just so bright as blood in a boil beneath the skin, and anger rocked through the air. I felt as if the space between them had a red hue different from the air between others. The power of my mother and Menenhetet to glare at each other out of the very depths of their blood was equaled now as my mother stared into the face of the Pharaoh. While the heat of the great candles in the room became greater, the flame rose and my mother and Ptah-nem-hotep sat motionless.

Then she looked away. “Not even on the Night of the Pig may a woman gaze into the eyes of the Good God.”

“Look into them,” cried Ptah-nem-hotep. “On this night, the God is gone.”

To me, He seemed at this instant more like a God than He had appeared all day. When my mother did not reply, He made a harsh and barking sound of triumph. “This is a marvelous night,” He said, and took up His leopard’s tail to hold the tip before His nose. “The tail of the leopard,” He added, “was worn first by My great ancestor, Khufu, who taught the people of Egypt how to raise the weight of great stone. To the Pyramids!” and He pounded His tail on the table, as if pulling into Himself the strength of the stones. I thought I had never seen Him look so alive.

Nor so attractive to my mother. I knew jealousy again. Like a lover climbing a wall, so did my thoughts climb my mother’s dark hair, my jealousy taking me through all of her reluctance to let me in—but then she could hardly keep me out. She was in more of a hurry to protect herself from the desire of the Pharaoh to enter.

She had cause not to let Him know what she thought. Intimate as I expected to be, I was not prepared to feel so quickly the carnal breath of her true mind, and knew in an instant why she had spoken—incredible still was the ring of those sounds in my memory: Two-Houses-of-the-Pig!—but then the words, high on the wave of the last swallow of Joy-Bringer, had only broken out of a sudden disturbance between her legs. My mind being in her mind, my body was in her body, and my legs among hers—so did I know that she had one thumping exchange of meat with Ravah in the passing of her thoughts. That way, I learned again what I had known before: not only servants like Eyaseyab, but ladies like my mother could take Sweet Finger in their mouth, except that Ravah did not have a Sweet Finger, for by way of my mother I saw a warty club, heavy-veined as a forearm, and as red in color as the spots on Ptah-nem-hotep’s cheeks. She was still thinking of her mouth on Ravah, her nostrils breathing in his pubic hair, her head overtaken by old sweat, old beer and Syrian wool while through her thoughts went Ptah-nem-hotep’s words on cabbage—“sluttish!”—and she shivered in recollection, and saw the genitals of other men as well, Bone-Smasher for the first, even as she had glimpsed his groin through the parting of his breechcloth on the boat that morning, and I knew Ravah was a handle to the jug, no more, of her great recollection of Fekh-futi and how as a child, tickled at every recollection that his name was Shit-Collector, she used to sit on his lap and try to catch a whiff of the old trade—gardens being the root and breath of childhood pleasures. She had a moment when she passed through an orgy of embraces, taken by every hole in her body, a roar of sensations bloody as meat, and so she had cried the words aloud (furious at Ptah-nem-hotep for allowing the beer of Ravah to be laid on her tongue) had then, yes, indeed, said, or so I heard it now: “Great Double Pig-Sty.”

Yes, I had much to learn about my mother. If I could feel the Pharaoh’s pleasure that Hathfertiti had cast down her eyes after trying to stare into His, I also knew His anger at what she had said, and so must she, for now, as if His only wish were for the pleasures of quiet conversation to absorb His new pleasures and calm His anger, so she said in her very best voice, “Were You only jesting when You spoke of wine as inferior to beer?”

“On, not inferior,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “but priestly. I’m too much of a priest Myself, you see.”

“Not at all,” said my mother.

“Your kindness is voluptuous,” said Ptah-nem-hotep. He reached forward and touched the tip of His middle finger to the tip of her bare breast. “Here comes the entertainment,” He said cheerfully.

NINE

A Beautiful girl, nude but for a girdle around her hips, entered with a three-stringed lyre. Taking no pause, she began to play a love song.

“How beautiful is my prince