Ancient Evenings (6 page)

Yet if my recollections could offer no more feeling than is provided by a long scar on the skin, nonetheless I was myself. My face could still give others every delight. Had I ever made love to Hathfertiti? How could I know? But I felt no embarrassment to be thinking so of my mother—a mirror hardly had a mother. Why should I not be the coldest element of Meni’s heart? Yet, standing in the litter of his—my—violated tomb, I knew that the balance to these loveless thoughts was the rage I felt for Hathfertiti. At this instant, I could have killed her. For soon, I must leave this place, soon, if I dared, I would have to take the road through the western desert that led to the Duad and the Land of the Dead—did it really exist, as the priests said, with monsters and boiling lakes? How could I endure the trials when I could not remember my deeds and so would hardly be able to explain them? A fear of dying came over me for the first time, the true fear—I understood that I could cease. To die in the Land of the Dead, to perish with one’s Ka, was to die forever. The second death was the final death. Oh, how rank were my circumstances. How unjust! Hathfertiti had done so little for my tomb!

In this rage, I was hardly able to breathe. Anger was too powerful an emotion for the delicate lungs of the Ka. The Ka was reputed to be short of breath. That was why a sail was supposed to be painted on one wall of the tomb—it might encourage the breath of the Ka to return. But here, on these walls, was no painted sail. Suffocated by my fury I did try, nonetheless, to bring before me the image of one, and succeeded in stirring a breeze to titillate the hairs in the nostrils of my nose—how could I be dead if the hairs of my nose were so keen? Yet in taking this clear breath, the fear of dying a second time came over me with force equal to my rage. For Hathfertiti’s oversights would cost much. Where was the painted portrait to show me standing near water? What would I drink? Like an omen came a dry spot, fierce as a boil, to the back of my throat.

Nor had any of the four doors of the winds been drawn on the sides of my coffin. Of course I could not breathe easily if such an insult had been given to the winds. Curious mother! She had also neglected to prepare a box with my navel string. So, too, had I lost one more route through the Land of the Dead.

Here was another oversight. So soon as I examined the rolls of papyrus packed in my coffin with me, I could recognize that the texts of important prayers were missing. I was amazed at how many I could remember: the Chapter-of-not-dying-a-second-time, the Chapter-of-not-allowing-the-soul-of-a-man-to-be-shut-in, the Chapter-of-not-allowing-a-man-to-decay-in-his-tomb. I was beginning to feel an anger so large and so fortifying that my rage was calm. I felt a great desire to summon Hathfertiti.

As if to search for a sign, I knelt. Under the litter of linen, I discovered a dead beetle, yes, the dung beetle there before me. Just as it used its hind legs to push a ball of dung many times larger than itself up into a safe hole where this dung could feed its eggs, so did the priests used to tell us how Khepera, looking like a giant beetle, carried the Boat of Ra across the sky every day, rowing with His six legs through the heavens. That was a common explanation popular for children and peasants. I, however, had no need of such stories. I could believe that if a Great God chose to hide in a beetle, it was because Gods liked to conceal themselves in curious places. That was the first law of great secrets. Therefore I ate each of the dead beetle’s wings just as slowly as my palate could bear. The dry membranes cut like little knives, and the head, although I chewed it carefully, turned out to be only a small dry grit, but I confess that as I swallowed, I tried to picture the head of Hathfertiti. Calling upon no incantations, but most certainly filled with contempt for the iniquity of my mother, I said, “Great Khepera of the heavens, let justice prevail. Present me with the living Hathfertiti.” Through my closed eyes, I felt a sudden light and there was the muted sound of thunder through my feet. But when I lifted my head, it was not Hathfertiti I saw. Before me, instead, was the gaunt body of the Ka of old Menenhetet One. I cannot say I liked the way my great-grandfather looked at me.

SEVEN

He was dressed like a High Priest and for all I knew he was a High Priest. His head was shaved and he seemed to inhabit the air of his own presence, as if each morning his body was sanctified. Yet he looked like no High Priest I had ever seen. He was too dirty and very old. Ashen was the color of his white linen robes and the dust of years had beaten into the cloth. Ashen was the color of his skin, even darker than his garments, but rubbed in the same dust, and the toes of his bare feet looked like fingers of stone. His bracelets had turned to shades of green. The corrosion of his anklets was black. Only his eyes were bright. His pupils were as expressionless as the painted look of a fish or a snake, but the whites were like limestone in the light of the moon. By the light of my torch, it was only the white of his eyes that enabled me to be certain he was not a statue, for he remained motionless on a chair beside his coffin, and could have passed in age for a hundred years old, a thousand years old, if not for the fierce light of those eyes.

I felt a return of the oppression I knew when looking at his coffin. He was so old! One could not even describe his features for lack of knowing where the nose reached the flesh of the cheeks. Just that wrinkled were the terraces of his skin. He seemed close to lacking existence altogether, yet made me so uneasy by his presence, that I thought to rid myself of him. Quickly. As if he were some noxious insect. So I took a step to the Canopic jar nearest to his coffin—it was Tuamutef—and twisted its lid. The top came off easily. The jar was empty. No wrapping of the heart and lungs was in the vase of the jackal. I turned to Amset. Also empty.

“I have eaten them,” said Menenhetet One.

Had the thin air of his throat not been warmed by the sun since the day he died? The echo of a cold cavern was in his voice.

“Why,” I was about to ask, “why, great-grandfather, have you eaten your own blessing?” but the impertinence of the question was pulled from my mouth before I could ask it. I had never known such an experience. It was as if a rude hand reached into my throat deep enough for me to gag, seized my tongue, and shucked it from the root to the tip.

It was then I felt a fear clear as the finest moments of my mind. For I was dead, so I understood once more (again as if for the first time) and being dead, might now be obliged to meet every terror I had fled while living. Of these terrors could it be said that my ancestor, Menenhetet, might prove the first? For I could certainly recall how often we talked of him in my family and always as a man of unspeakable strength and sinister habits.

Now, as I stared at him, he spoke. “What,” he asked, “are your sentiments?”

“My sentiments?”

“Now that we are together.”

“I hope,” I said, “that we will begin to know each other.”

“At last.”

The same keen air was in my lungs that I had known in the tomb of Khufu. The best of myself must have come back to me for I felt the curious exhilaration, even the certainty, that I was meeting my enemy. Was I meeting the enemy of my life—now that I was dead? But speak not of death. It was without meaning to me. I had never felt more vital. It was as if I had decided on some terrible day to make an end of myself and had walked to the edge of a cliff, looked down into the gorge, knew I would certainly step into the space before me and in one fall be dead. At such a moment I might know fear in every drop of my blood, yet the future would feel as alive as lightning. Just now I had that sense. It was the happiness of being next to my fear, yet separate from it, so that I could be free at last to know all the ways I had failed to live my life, all the boredom I had swallowed, and each foul sentiment of wasted flesh. It was as if I had spent my days beneath a curse, and the sign of it—despite every lively pandemonium of gambling and debauch—was the state of immutable monotony that dwelt in my heart. The sense of being dead while alive—from what could it have come but a curse? I had an inkling then of the force of the desire to die when that is the only way to encounter one’s demon. No wonder I stood before him in an apprehension as invigorating as the iciest water of a well. For on how many lovely evenings in how many lovely gardens had I told funny stories about the filthy habits of the first holder of my name? How we cried with laughter at tales of his calculation, his cunning, his sacrilegious feasts of bat dung.

But now, as if he had heard my thought, he stood up for the first time, not a big man nor so small as he had first appeared, and dusty as the loneliest roads of the desert.

“Those stories,” he murmured, “left my name repulsive,” and by the air of self-possession with which he said this, I began to wonder whether I was most certainly his moral superior. That he was the guide to my final destruction, I did not cease to believe, but that he might also have a high purpose now occurred to me. If, in these curious intoxications of knowing I was dead, I had begun to feel as splendid as a hero, still I could not remember my heroism. Nonetheless, I had hardly doubted that my purposes (if I could ever find them) would be noble. Now, I was not as confident.

“Do you think,” he asked, “I am handsome? Or ugly?”

“Are you not too old to be either?”

“It is the only answer.” He laughed. In mockery of me, his finger idled from side to side. “Well, you are dead,” he said, “and certainly in danger of expiring a second time. Then you will be gone forever. Goodbye, sweet lad. Your face was more beautiful than your heart.” Abruptly, he gave an old man’s snigger, unspeakably lewd. “Are you content to let me be your guide in Khert-Neter?” he asked.

“Do I have a choice?”

“The navel string is already prepared. The portrait of Meni standing in the water has been commissioned to an artist most esteemed in the circle of my friends, and he will also do a painting of the sails that will catch the breath of evening in the delicate lungs of my son.” His voice had taken on the self-indulgence of Hathfertiti’s voice, her arch pleasure in hearing the full sounds of herself. “Of course I’ve had so much to do that the work never gets begun. I hear the tomb is a mess and all broken into and shit upon. Poor Meni. How, I wonder, are he and Old Guano getting along?”

I laughed. I had rarely heard such mimicry. If once I mocked the Gods, and fornicated with priests, it was never with ease equal to this. I was beginning to see the stimulations of my condition: to be dead yet more alive than before—that was as intoxicating as a night when you are ready for anything.

“Tell me of Khert-Neter,” I said in a merry tone, as if asking for another drink.

The old ravaged face, wrinkled as the shell of a turtle who has walked through fire, now showed a High Priest’s love of ceremony. “Strengthen my breath,” he said in his cavernous voice.

A transformation came to him with these words, however. The dirt about his body began to look like silver dust, and his right arm was raised toward the heavens. His eyes stayed in solemn contemplation of the ground. Yet, next, he winked at me. I was shocked. He seemed to delight in flinging my thoughts about in all directions. “We need,” he said, “to prepare you. After all, you have forgotten what you know. That is common to the Ka. It keeps a poor memory of our most sacred customs.”

But his shifts gave me no time to recover my wit. Now he spoke in ceremonious tones again. “O Lord Osiris,” he began, and touched his forefingers to his thumbs as though to form two eyes: “I have passed over rivers of fire and through geysers of boiling water. I have entered the dark night of the Land of the Dead and gone through the seven halls and mansions of Sekhet-Aaru. I have learned the names of the Gods at the door to each hall. Hear of the difficulty of this beautiful young man whose Ka would accompany me. How can he obtain the patience to learn the names of the three guards at the door to each hall when his memory is infirm? Know the hazards. The Doorkeeper at the Fourth Hall is named Khesefherashtkheru, and the Herald who examines those who die in the night only replies to the sound of Neteqaherkhesefatu. And these are but two of the twenty-one names which the Ka of this boy must learn if he is to pass through the gates of Sekhet-Aaru.” My great-grandfather paused, as if to contemplate those names. “Yes,” he said in a voice of much resonance, “I, who am Osiris Menenhetet One, have survived Your judgment, Lord Osiris, so give ear to my prayer that You spare the Ka of this young man from such fires, for he is no other than the splendid Osiris Menenhetet Two, my great-grandson, son of my granddaughter, the Lady Hathfertiti, who was my concubine in life and kept in carnal knowledge of me through the years of my death, may the scorpions continue to serve me.”

I was bewildered. The prayer was devout, yet not like any I knew, and I was much confused by the remarks he had just made about my mother.

“I could tell you more,” he said. “I can say the prayers for repulsing the serpent and spearing the crocodile. I can give you the wings of a hawk so you may fly above your foes. Or show you how to drink the ale in the body of the God Ptah. I can reveal the gates to the Field of Reeds and teach you to come forth from the fishing net. Yes, I will do all this if I am your guide.”