Adam & Eve (7 page)

Dutifully, I explored the extensive display, starting with the Gospel of Philip, Nag Hammadi Codex II. I read, “God is a dyer,” that “good dyes, true dyes” dissolved into the fabrics dipped into them. So it is with heat, I thought: when I am plunged into heat, it becomes part of me and I of it.

The Gospel of Philip suggested that Adam and Eve were originally one androgynous figure. I wanted to drink to the idea.
Let Adam and Eve absorb one
another,
I amended. But most of the Gospel of Philip was about the Christian era, not Genesis. I studied the Willis Barnstone English versification of Philip’s meditation on names:

I, too, believed in the ineffable. As an art therapist, I believed that the hand that draws inner realities is the friend of the anguished soul. A picture can evoke what cannot be said. But what would I myself do without language? Without Freud, without neighbor Sylvia? Without explanation? Philip in early Christian times had an answer, disregarding any shame at contradicting himself. He conceded, “Truth made names in the world; without words we cannot think.” I added,
But to weigh any word as solid gold is a snare and delusion. Admire language as we admire pyrite, for its lovely glitter.

I walked on through the display to read a hilarious idea from the early days of Christendom: “Some people are afraid they will ascend from death naked.” This expression of anxious modesty had been written probably in the third century, in Greek, perhaps in the land of Syria, and, I read, it had come down as a Coptic translation found in Egypt. But had not certain sincere, God-drenched nineteenth-century American sects made for themselves ascension robes to avoid just that problem of nakedness? For how many centuries would people languish in their foolishness?

My globed and sagging grandmother had often emerged stark naked from our only bathroom looking like the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf as she shuffled her bare, lumpy flesh to her bedroom for clothes. “Too steamy to dress in there,” she sometimes explained. Thom had liked to sleep half nude in a thin T-shirt, but I had said, laughing, that if I slept entirely in the nude (the
way he liked) then he had to, too. Yet, in the morning, he often was wearing a T-shirt, grinning like a bad boy. “Gray curls above, gray curls below,” I teased when he emerged from the sheets. I always added the exclamation, “Beautiful!” Had Thom ever said a cross or unkind word in his life? Not that I could remember. Not to me. Our life had been full of hard work, for both of us, but it had been paradise.

Perhaps because of its name, I felt most interested in the Gospel of Thomas and walked to that display. A good Jew, my own Thomas had regarded Jesus as a teacher, a prophet—as did the respectful Muslims who had created the Nag Hammadi exhibition.

While surveying the Swedish translation for familiar cognates, I realized that a man standing nearby was looking steadfastly at me. For a moment, I continued to consider the enlarged page exhibited before me—it was hand-lettered onto tawny “aged” papyrus. Then, because he still stared, I took a deep breath of the cooled, delicious air and turned to encounter the gaze of a middle-aged Arab with golden eyes. Though suspended between crutches, he took three quick steps toward me. I must have looked frightened, because he immediately not only turned away from me but also hobbled toward the exit and out of the building.

Half an hour later, I was ready to exit, but at the open door the heat of the desert drove me back. I retreated to a restroom and took off my bra and underpants and stuffed them in my small suitcase. My long skirt wrapped around me twice and fastened securely with a tie. I was perfectly decent. When I left the information center, the outdoor brightness of the Middle Eastern sun surprised me again—a sun more blinding than illuminating. But I felt freer and cooler. No one could really study the meaning of texts while standing before a display case, I grumbled to myself. I felt vaguely disappointed with my pilgrimage.

While I had been inside, protestors from the Christian religious right had convened to march in a tight, pointless circle around the jar fountain; their placards read: “Beware the Lies of the So-Called Gospels!” “Trust the True Bible,” “COUNTERFEIT!” “Beware the Snares of SATAN!” Though these
Christian fundamentalists were marching peacefully, all the signs were printed in bloodred. They were like an inexorable clock in their circumambulation. I walked through their circle to approach the fountain. The bronze placard inset beside the jar fountain was inscribed in Arabic, German, and English, and it identified the sculptor as a woman. I was pleased.

The fountain was only a year old, installed in the year 2019. Water bubbled, sometimes seeped, from apertures piercing the alabaster of the fountain jar, one opening for each of the thirteen books the actual ancient jar had contained. The meticulous sculptor had gone to the trouble of examining the site of the discovered stone jar and had reproduced that slope here as the base for the fountain.

I envisioned the moment in 1945 when just the lip of the mouth of the original jar had made its way to the surface after having been buried for some fifteen hundred years. It was as though the jar had wanted to speak. Chasing a goat, perhaps, a peasant boy had stubbed his toe against the curved protrusion.

Beside me, someone female said, “It makes one wonder, doesn’t it, how many other stone jars lie buried in the sand and rocks, all of them with suppressed messages?”

Turning, I saw a young Middle Eastern woman; she had spoken confident English with an American accent. Her black hair—uncovered, tucked behind her ear on one side—hung loosely almost to her shoulders. She had perched her black-framed sunglasses on top of her dark hair, like a headband. The young woman—perhaps twenty-five—was tall and pretty, unpretentious.

“No,” I answered slowly. “I wasn’t thinking that. I was just admiring the fountain.”

“Do you like it?” she asked. “Aesthetically?” A smile still hovered around her lips, but instead of looking at me, she was gazing fondly at the fountain.

“Very much,” I answered.

“I’m glad,” she answered. “I made it.” She pointed to the bronze plaque. “I am Arielle Saad. I believe you know my father.”

“No,” I said again, but I suddenly felt better than I had for a long time—interested and eager. The circle of protestors had removed themselves to flank the entrance to the museum.

“My father’s name is Pierre Saad; he knew your husband.”

I realized that the Egyptian woman’s father had been the host for the symposium. “I’m sorry to have missed getting acquainted with your father,” I said.

“Perhaps you’d like to talk with him now?” Arielle Saad suggested. “I could take you to him. Only a three-minute walk from here.”

I took a breath. “So you are a sculptor?” I said evasively.

“Yes,” Arielle answered. “And a pilot, as you are.”

I drew back. How would this young woman know that fact about me?

Arielle laughed. Perfectly at ease, she added, “I’ve frightened you. I’m sorry. We have a favor to ask of you, but my father can explain it better than I can.”

“A favor? Couldn’t he come here?”

“Here we are watched. Soldiers with telescopic lenses—don’t look—are on the tops of all these buildings.”

“You think he would be shot?”

“They use the lens, binoculars, too, to read lips.”

“Perhaps they are reading our lips,” I suggested shrewdly.

“I made this fountain. Why shouldn’t I come here to admire my work?” she asked. “Notice I’m facing the desert.” She seemed not only composed but happy with our conversation. Yes, Arielle Saad stood with her back to the two brown-clad guards high up on the structure of the information center.

“Where is your father?”

“He is in the back part of a house that tourists visit, one that sells figures carved from camel bone and also essential oils, Egyptian-woven carpets, objects for tourists. Follow me.” She lowered her sunglasses and strode away.

For a moment I hesitated. Arielle Saad? She did not look back as she stepped into the deep shade of a narrow street. I looked around. Three soldiers were dispersing the sign-carrying protestors from the tourist attraction. I began to follow Arielle Saad.

It was not easy to keep the young woman in sight. Walking quickly, Arielle turned the stucco corner of a thick-walled building. A man with a donkey steered his onion cart to one side so she could pass. She had to skirt a large hairy lump of a camel sitting in the narrow street and chewing its cud. The
smell of animal hair pervaded the passage. Glancing back, to try to memorize the return route, I saw soldiers arresting some Egyptian men in turbans. Veiled women looked at me curiously and quickly glanced away. After my next hurried turn, I looked back again. Ahead, Arielle had disappeared. I concluded the young woman must have turned down another narrow street. As I rounded a stuccoed corner, a film of sweat veiled my skin.

Ah! My guide had paused in the blue arched doorway of a white building. She had lowered her dark glasses, but she smiled slightly at me. Arielle looked a bit like old photos of Jackie Onassis, but younger, more confident, browner, of course. A man passed by, leading a billy goat, its horns tipped with red balls. While I hurried toward my guide, Arielle extended her hand, palm up, beckoning.

“Come speak with my father.”

I stepped inside. Though the floor was made of packed dirt, paradoxically it seemed clean; the room was painted a vibrant turquoise blue throughout. Its walls were lined with mud-brick benches, like buttresses, against the wall. The benches were wide enough to serve as beds and were covered in places with woven mats, orange and red. No one was inside the turquoise room.

“Back here,” Arielle encouraged.

Passing an open, waist-high square formed of white-painted mud bricks, I glanced down into it. The enclosure sank below the surface of the floor—a pit for small crocodiles, each about as long as my forearm. One baby croc stood up in a corner with an open pink mouth, full of sharp teeth.

“You can buy one.” Arielle tossed back the sentence over her shoulder.

“What for?”

“For dinner,” Arielle answered. She shrugged. “For a pet. For a wallet.”

We pushed aside a curtain into a room with chalk-white walls and ceiling. Under the high, vaulted ceiling a lone man with drooping head sat dozing at a wooden table. A wooden crutch, with a sponge-padded shoulder rest, slanted against the table, and on the rough table rested a book bound in black leather. Like so many objects I had seen in Egypt, the old-fashioned crutch suggested American items discarded many decades earlier.

The man lifted his sleepy eyes, but he did not rise. “Enchanté,” he said.
His eyes were golden. “Je m’appelle Pierre Saad.” He seemed to be still asleep, speaking from a dream.

“I’m Lucy Bergmann,” I said firmly. “We spoke briefly in Cairo. I believe you knew my husband.”

“Only a little,” he answered. His accent was like a fragrance—sandal-wood; it had wafted my way before. “I knew of Thom Bergmann…. I knew his voice,” he murmured, his lips barely moving.

Suddenly he became fully awake. “Before Professor Bergmann’s unfortunate death, we had spoken several times on the telephone.”

“I’m sorry; I didn’t feel up to conversation in Cairo.” I remembered Pierre Saad’s concern, his kindness. Trying to be polite, I stammered, “I … I appreciate your sympathy.”

“But you are better now?” He smiled. “Your journey on the Nile has soothed you?”

I felt embarrassed. “You wanted to speak with me. A favor?”

“Yes.” He merely gazed at me. Now he was fully alert—a stranger, but my having watched him return by degrees to consciousness had enveloped us in an aura of intimacy. A hypnotic spell. His eyes were the color of wet sand, tawny like a lion’s eyes, and he was comely in a manner that seemed some mixture of French and Egyptian. His beard—gray at the edges—was trimmed in the typical Arabic manner. Without hurry, he returned my gaze.

Finally he opened the book before him, looked at me again, and recited: “‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ You know these words?”

“The first verse of the first chapter of Genesis, King James version.” I felt uncomfortable, but I remembered he was an anthropologist—surely not some sort of hybrid guru.

He asked, “And do you believe them? Do you believe these words of Genesis that give us Adam and Eve?”

“I’m not religious,” I answered. It was a relief to establish my footing with him.

“Who wrote those words?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Probably no one knows. Some ancient scribe.”

“I know who wrote them.”

A shudder ran through me. Was he mad? What kind of trap had I walked into? I looked to Arielle for connection. Off to one side, the young woman stood perfectly still, regarding her father with her luminous brown eyes flecked with gold. In spite of her physical presence, she had absented herself from our exchange.

“You wished to ask a favor of me,” I gently reminded him. I recognized my tone of voice: it was the neutral, nonthreatening, noncolluding voice I used when speaking to the mental patients who had come for art therapy.

“You came here to learn more about the Nag Hammadi texts,” he said. “But we have found a new text, here in Egypt, not about Jesus. A newly discovered text but older than the ones found in 1945. Our codex of 2020, these pages, place the book of Genesis in a new context. They refer to the genesis of Genesis.
Malheureusement—
unfortunately—their existence is known to certain religious fundamentalists who would like to destroy them.”

“Right-wing Christians,” I said, readily enough.

“Yes, and—”

“Literalist Jews,” I added.

“And?”

“Muslim extremists,” Arielle put in. “I myself am a Muslim, but not a fundamentalist.”