The Egyptologist Page 5
If you prefer not to hump on just one bump
Then you’d best be wary of the dromedary.
But if you’d like to jump and scrump and pump
Between two big lumps—
“Not so fast, boys,” interrupts CCF, and the music stumbles to silence one instrument at a time, a sizzling cymbal the last to get the message, “because we’ve got a little surprise,” and CCF calls up Kendall and Hilly Mitchell, Beacon Hill jollies I had met at an investors’ meeting and then again when, at CCF’s request, I had gone for some very discreet cocktails with Kendall at his exceedingly discreet club, where he interviewed me about my background and Egypt with alarming tenacity and secrecy, an interrogation I simply could not understand until this very moment, when Hilly laughingly tossed her scarcely sheathed hips and bumped the Negro from the piano bench, and Kendall loosened his tie and struck a boulevardier pose. While Margaret struggled to prop her heavy eyelids, I listened to our musical tribute, composed by these two party personalities, delirious with cash and inherited real estate, undeterrable donors of personalised song lyrics for gala events on Beacon Hill and in Back Bay. I transcribe here from the drink-ringed dedication copy of the lyrics I was subsequently presented (“To Ralphie! Here’s hopin’ ya dig up a ‘mummy’ fer yer new ‘daddy’! Lotsa good good luck, from your Yank pals H & K Mitchell!”). Kendall warbled while Hilly jangled up and down the keyboard with clumsy fists:
Pushed early down from Oxford,
With his trousers ’round his ankles,
Came young R. M. Trilipush
And he’ll admit the mem’ry rankles.
Well, off he went to Egypt
Where he was meant to fight the Kaiser,
But after several years at war
He left the Kaiser none the wiser.
Instead he sweated in the Orient
Upon his knees and hands.
(Now, try not to be prurient,
I mean that he was digging in the sands!)
He dug and dug with another limey
Until, as Boche guns assailed them,
Those two Brits, they shouted “Blimey!”
For their spades had sure not failed them.
[“Unlike ours!” I recall CCF bellowing at this point, referring to, I believe, some waiters who were slow in fetching him another drink. “Oh, Daddy, really,” my Margaret gently chided him, her knees pulled up under her chin.]
What they found that day
All of us surely know
It keeps our wives awake at night
And makes our (ahem!) imaginations grow.
They found terrific hieroglyphics,
The writings of some Pharaoh,
Which Pushy published in plain English,
And thrilled the market to its marrow.
[At his club, I had corrected Mitchell several times, explaining with increasing frustration that hieroglyphic was an adjective and hieroglyph the noun, and that his use of the term Pharaoh for an Egyptian king prior to the XVIIIth or XIXth Dynasty was thoroughly anachronistic and, frankly, grated on my ear. The XIIIth-Dynasty Atum-hadu would have been referred to as “King” not by the Hebraicised metonymical device per-o. I repeated this easily a dozen times as silver shaker after silver shaker came to the table, filled (the waiter loudly announced each time, for the benefit of whom I cannot say) with “your iced tea, Mr. Mitchell!” That said, his use of hieroglyphic when he meant to say hieroglyph I now grudgingly acknowledge as a possible debt to rhyming.]
Well, old R. M. Trilipush made some money and his name,
And found across the pond a place to build his worldly fame.
Harvard gave him fresh-faced youths to teach, and then he met a gal,
And now the rest of us know all too well he’s CCF’s best pal!
So back to the Nile our Pushy goes with Margaret’s heart in tow
As well as Chester’s cash,
[music stops, Kendall shouts the words]
“And mine, too! And mine, too!”
“And mine, too! And mine, too!”
[pointing to guests who, like him, had invested in Hand-of-Atum]
For he sure came to implore us,
And for an hour or so did bore us,
But now, by Isis, Ra, and Horus,
Ol’ Pushy will reward us!
[I should discuss the word implore for, if it was not used simply to make the Mitchells’ task of rhyming more manageable, it merits clarification. To say the least. I will come back to this point, as to just who was imploring whom.]
By Isis, Ra, and Horus,
Ol’ Pushy will reward us!
The crowd soon mastered this couplet and chanted it for some exhilarating minutes while, to my infinitely deeper pleasure, Margaret glowed and glittered under the full moon splashing through the ballroom’s glass ceiling, the silver light licking her blue and sparkling eyelids (a Cleopatran effect she and Inge had devised for the evening), and whether she had fallen asleep or was merely savouring the entertainment behind closed eyes, her beauty was then, as always, overwhelming. I felt at that instant as if I had achieved everything I ever dreamt of. A paradox, to be sure, as I had not yet set off on this expedition. I cradled her delicate, pliant hand in mine, each of her long, slender fingers articulated into the graceful arch of riverside narcissi, and she was then, in her drowsy languor, as always, the personification of so many ancient drawings, lounging beauties carved in calcite and lime to line the halls of palaces, the long-fingered serving girls and goddesses painted on tomb walls to beckon, to arouse, to accompany the homesick dead into the next world.
Having carried my exhausted beauty upstairs and kissed her off to slumber, pulling her bedclothes up to her carved ivory chin, I re-descended and danced with Inge and the Partners’ wives, some of whom found the close contact of a bona-fide Egyptian explorer rather too heady a draught for their natural Boston modesty, and more than once I felt the firm, caressing need to remind the ladies of the proper hand positions for certain popular dances.
After midnight, the party spilled out of Finneran’s ballroom and across Arlington Street. (An image to cherish forever: my future father-in-law, self-described “gentle as a lamb,” kicking with grunts of exertion and boyish joy the prone figure of a man who had, as the party crossed into the Public Garden, attempted to grab Finneran’s pocket watch on the run. The regretful robber called out for help from the police. “Here we are, son, not to worry,” immediately cried four members of the Boston constabulary whom Finneran had at the party to protect himself from any liquor-control inspection. And with a quiet “Thank you, officers,” Finneran retreated and allowed the bobbies to deliver their more professional beating to the cutpurse, interrupting them just once, in order to withdraw from his whimpering assailant’s pocket enough money to cover “the polishing of my blood-spattered boots, you hooligan.”)
CCF had had tents and roasting spits brought out to the Public Garden; the visible aromas of roast suckling pig rose towards the slender blue-grey clouds, and guests circled the waitresses in their skimpy Egyptian servant-girl costumes, grabbing—depending on their ruling appetite—at the waitresses’ trays or their buttocks, while other, alcoholically calmer revellers wandered down to the duck pond to commandeer the public pedal boats shaped as gigantic swans, or—in rolled shirtsleeves and sheer slip dresses—waded into the cool water, falling into each other’s slick, goose-pimpled arms.
I stood aside, content in my natural role as an observant explorer, released, for the moment, from my duties as guest of honour, and I was happy, so very happy, when from my left, in the shadow between low-drooping willows that swayed like giant, green jellyfish, I heard my name gruffly called. Under a dome of willow branches, as fully enclosed as if we were circus dwarves waiting for a cue to emerge from under the bearded lady’s close, musty hoopskirt, I found myself pleasantly hypnotised by the perfect, pulsing orange circle of Finneran’s cigar end, illuminating at its brightest a few filaments of blue smoke (and presumably my own
face), but nothing else. “Wanted to wish you good luck,” said my invisible patron, and the orange circle faded to a coiled spring of dully glowing grey. “We’ve all taken our measure of you. Don’t let us down.” Orange circle swells and recedes, swells and recedes. “I never will, CC.” “I’ll always do what’s best for my Margaret, you know, father and mother both to that little girl.” “Of course, CC, of course.” “Happy to have you in the family.” “Many thanks.” “She picked you and I approved. I picked you and she approved. Doesn’t matter which, you know.” “Of course, CC.” Orange circle glows bright and fades. “Don’t know about you English gentry, but family in our country’s a serious issue.” “Of course, CC.” Orange circle. Pause. “Keep that in mind is all.” “Of course, CC.” “People counting on you, Ralph. Lot of people. Lot riding on you. Lot of trust in you.” All of which was CCF’s shy preamble to presenting me with this large wooden humidor inlaid with swirling black ornamentation and filled with cigars, each chosen specially by Boston’s finest tobacconist and banded with the black label with silver monogram: CCF. And the orange circle of his cigar end fades and grows, fades and grows . . .
. . . just as this morning, this dawn of 12 October, an orange light is now appearing over the Nile’s eastern bank. I have spent the night working here on my balcony, sustained by gin-lemonades and sweet mint tea in glass tumblers painted gold, tracing my finger over the inlaid ebony swirls of my humidor, now containing a set of fine brushes and inks to copy the wall illustrations I hope to find in Atum-hadu’s tomb. (I do not smoke cigars, but they should make fine baksheesh, and the box is lovely.) I sit on the still-warm balcony, watch my sun rise, and examine the lump of sugar half-dissolved in my tea, for all the world like the crumbling foundation stone of a temple ruin.
I shall be, in some six weeks, thirty years old, an age I have long hoped to celebrate in this, the country of my dreams, achieving, by that milestone age, the necessary unparalleled victory to justify thirty years of life. And, as I consider the party for my departure from Boston, as I consider the king who has rested undiscovered some 3500 years, I could almost wish that this moment—here on the fast-brightening balcony of my Cairo hotel—might never end.
I mean something more by this than merely blurting out that I do not wish to grow older, that I would prefer to be excused from blundering into corpulent middle age and bleary post-prime. I mean, rather, that here, in the early summer of one’s life, with preparatory glory still thrumming behind one and seismic triumph perhaps mere weeks ahead, one desires to hear the soprano of this one particular mosquito singing in one’s ear forever, to see these precise midges waver forever in their nervous indecision, hypnotised by the very sun which will soon scorch them, to feel the pinprick heat of this glass of mint tea, warming each crevice of three fingertips forever, to see that sugar’s disintegration pause forever. One’s blood roars with the desire that somehow this instant of possibility and potential be seized and held, vibrating and glowing orange in one’s softly closed fist. That one might stroke and examine this captured moment, feel its velvety tread in one’s palm, that I might remain quivering on the brink rather than tumbling headlong into the future, until I have had my fill of the present. Or, think of it like this, Reader: one climbs a high, steep hill. Then, after years and years of climbing, one sees the crest within reach and one realises that, upon achieving that crest, only two possibilities remain: up and over, to begin an accelerating descent, or . . . to continue moving in the same direction one has grown accustomed to and fond of, to continue the way one has come, up and up, to ignore the fallible earth that ceases to rise, but to rise oneself nevertheless.
And if you should sit up for a moment from your soft easy chair and wonder, Why? Why Egypt? Why the desire to rummage in the dust? I can only suggest that the kings of Egypt kept climbing. They mastered those frilly, fleeting moments, imprisoned them in soft cages. In their wrapped corpses with their organs bottled in canopic jars, and in their picture-alphabet and in their beast-headed gods, the best Egyptians lived with the certainty that they were owed eternity, that they lived and would live forever in a present of their own choosing, unhaunted by the past, unthreatened by the future, luxuriously entertained in a present they could extend as long as they wished, releasing these savoury moments on their own terms, not at the imperious demand of mere days, nights, suns, moons.
Margaret, may I share with you a darker memory of my shining youth? It is not the sort you prefer, but it makes a point. As a boy, I recall a village vicar berating me (r optional) for my obsessive interest in the Egyptians. (This would, of course, happen only when my father was abroad on expedition and unable to protect me from the vile clergyman, and I would wander away from the Hall, roam into the village near our estate. Where the vicar did not realise who I was, so far from my family grounds.) At any rate, time after time, he would appear unannounced. I was easy to surprise, as from a very early age I was generally bent over my labours, wonderfully ignorant of all that happened around me. And he would snatch my work from me, crumple up hard-won hieroglyphs. He would, with a noisy, liquorish menace, uncork the usual cant: “Boy, how can you think it wise to truck with this culture of death?” Even at ten I knew the correct answer to that cataclysmic catechism: “Right you are, Father. Much better to stick with the life-embracing imagery of a cult that worships a bleeding corpse nailed to bits of wood.” Of course, I had to be in the mood for a thrashing, or worse, if I chose that path.
But the point, which I understood even at that age: Egypt was not—I must repeat for Readers who still do not know it—a culture of death, for all the mummies and bottled lungs, the jackal-men and cobra-queens. The Egyptians were the inventors of immortality, the first men who saw they could live forever.
Atum-hadu wrote:
The gods and I walk slowly arm in arm
And sometimes we do not walk at all,
But sit upon a rock and watch the charm
Of two goats f—ing behind a peasant’s wall.
—(Quatrain 13, Fragment C only, from Desire
and Deceit in Ancient Egypt by Ralph M. Trilipush,
Collins Amorous Literature, 1920)
Sunset on the Bayview Nursing Home
Sydney, Australia
December 6, 1954
Mr. Macy,
In my experience of human behaviour (and I’ve seen all there is to see, it’s fair to say), I’ve concluded there aren’t but five motivations for a man to do anything. They’re hardly mysterious, you know: money, hunger, lust, power, survival. That’s all there is. You hear in the courtrooms and in the cinema all sorts of fancy-dress explanations why someone becomes Prime Minister or kills his neighbours. But if you listen hard, it’s all just the same five balls, juggled up in the air, decorated with distracting words. No one ever did a damn thing but for one of those five.
Which brings us to the tale of Paul Caldwell and Catherine Barry, Bolshevik and former librarian, a tale of a power-hungry traitor, a manipulative woman playing on the emotions of a vulnerable young man, leading the weak into corruption. The story of Paul’s tragic death in Egypt begins right here, when he’s eight or nine years old in Sydney, pushed towards his doom by Catherine Barry, cold, dangerous, terribly beautiful.
I am surrounded by my reconstructions of Miss Barry’s words (July 10th, 1922), a typically self-justifying letter from her, an interview I did with her brother (July 11th, 1922), and the summary I wrote for my final report back to London. I also have the letter from Ronald Barry (the brother), engaging me to find any evidence of Paul Caldwell’s survival and, if he was alive, to procure his address discreetly. Ronald, I’m sure, meant to kill Caldwell. It obviously never came to that, and it’s fair to point out no one’d ever hired me to protect Paul Caldwell.
So my memory’s feeling well-primed, no matter the shouting coming from some of my housemates, feebly battling for control of a partial set of torn playing cards. When you consider that I took notes, expanded them into full speeches when
I got home, rewrote them again for my report to London, and am now fleshing them out further for you here, our readers should get a convincing pre-sentation, but by all means you should add whatever you feel they still need.