On a Balcony (14 page)

For such is the limitation of our minds, that a belief in nothing is, after all, and on the contrary, a belief in something. So the act of belief itself sustains us, even when we call it disbelief. For then we believe in our disbelief. So even though we have long ago seen through those vices and virtues with which others play the game over us, we are still there keeping up
appearances
, since without our appearances our moral critics would have nothing to play their game on. Belief and disbelief in that sense are the same thing. It is merely a matter of where one happens to be standing in relation to the board at any given moment. And since in actuality one keeps hopping about all the time, the two alternate so rapidly that to our somewhat limited vision they seem to be quite stable and solid.

Therefore, no matter how much we may be given to doubt, our belief is for that very reason quite
unshakeable
, since in alternating between the two we perceive they are about the same. So in darkness he was indeed the glorious child of the Aton. And besides, he did like the sun.

But at the same time, having seen the board, it made him a little weary that he still had to go on pretending to believe in the relative moral permanence of the highly impermanent pieces. For instance, such pieces as himself, truth, Egypt, and the Queen.

For since truth also was merely a matter of keeping up appearances, it too must be equally true and
untrue
. So like everything else in this world, its very nature consisted in its having no nature whatsoever. Like all stable contraries, truth was only a matter of keeping up appearances.

It was strange that he, who so wanted to believe in things, could do so only in this way; whereas Ay, who believed in nothing, would have been shocked to the
very bottom of his tidy mathematical soul by such a system of essential sophistries.

There was only one piece he could not fit into this admirable system, whose firmness came from the fact it was so shaky, and that was death. For unlike good, evil, belief, disbelief, truth, and untruth, death, he was
uneasily
aware, could touch him. True, if one could believe there was life after death, then life and death became a like system of stable alternates, but he could not believe so. He had consulted the best spiritualists, but one could never be certain that what they said was true, for the best charlatans were the most convincing, the most truthful people were always lying.

Perhaps the matter was better ignored. For it was dawn, and under that soothing light, death seemed very far away, though not, perhaps, quite so far away as he assumed.

Nevertheless, while he had been so reasoning, the dawn had come. And really, dawn made reason
unnecessary
. The wind, by cooling his body’s surface temperature, had made a change in his thoughts
possible
. When we are asleep this produces nightmares, but when we are awake, geometry, philosophy, and other systems to prove that the actual is not there. However, though it is not there, still we have to move about in it, and for that we must needs keep up appearances.

Now the sky was full of light. As he turned, suddenly cold, to pick up his clothes, he saw that the light had kindled against the metal disc set in the centre of the altar, and glowed there like a great blob of incandescent silver. Instinctively he shoved his hands into that reflection, as though it had been some kind of celestial
hibachi
.

Meanwhile, one of the sentries who patrolled that cliff had seen him. “Halt, who goes there?” he
demanded
.

Ikhnaton picked up his loincloth and wig and
stepped back into his chariot, once more holding the reins firmly in his hand, or at least, as firmly as he was able. He, too, believed in keeping up appearances. “Pharaoh,” he said, and whirled back to the palace the way he had come.

So much for truth, and at breakfast it might be pleasant to play with the children, or even, in a slightly different way, with the Queen, though these days it was impertinent of her to appear in public at all. He loathed disease. Surely she must know that.

*

If she knew, she certainly refused to believe it. She had so many worries of vanity, that this real one had almost slipped by her notice. So she was not at
breakfast
. She had gone to Tutmose to be flattered. He had always flattered them. He, at least, knew she was still beautiful.

Alas, she had never realized that Tutmose’s theory of beauty was not at the mercy of any single flaw, but was rather enhanced by one, since the artist knows better than to expect a perfect beauty. Only a woman would demand that.

None the less she did demand it.

He was surprised to see her so early. He was sitting on the rim of a pool in his garden, with one leg
extended
, eating a honey cake, while the soft green and yellow light turned blue among the leaves of the
sycamores
. He looked a little tired, a little old; but he stood up, smiled, and came forward to greet her, with his usual amused gravity.

What did she want?

She wanted to see her portrait, the one she had given him so derisively, knowing it was only a pretty image he had made to take her in. Now, it appeared, it was she who wished to be taken in.

If he was shocked by her appearance, he said nothing. He led her into the studio.

At this hour of the morning it was a shadowy place. These faces, which were supposed to be bright images of heaven, were children of darkness after all. They had always seemed deceptively alive. That was his skill. But here in the half-gloom one saw what that
deception
was. The serenity was only a trick of the light. Here in the half-dark one could see they were really images of pain.

The kneeling statue of Pharaoh had been removed.

She must have looked up at her image on its bracket for a very long time, and even she could not control the expression which crossed her face.

“What are you doing now?” she asked at last.

He thought perhaps it would be kinder not to show her what he was doing now. Gently he led her aside and showed her a mask. He had made it five years ago, but there was no need to tell her that. It was her own face staring up at her. She examined it with care.

“Am I no longer beautiful?” she asked.

“You will always be beautiful.”

“Then why do you not make me like that,” she said, with a glance towards the bust on its bracket. “Why do you have to make me like this?” She tapped the mask of five years ago. “Surely I have not aged so much.”

The bitterness in her voice distressed him. But what could he say, except not to say that even as she could not repeat herself, neither could he.

“You have not aged at all,” he said, and almost meant it. For in a way it was true. Her mind could not age. It could only grow disillusioned.

“You lie,” she told him. “Why do all men always lie?”

It was not his place to tell her that in these matters lies were even more important to women. “Perhaps
because
it is a way of telling the truth.”

She gazed once more at the bust on its bracket. And
then, it was incredible, it was the last thing he would have expected of so dishonest and resourceful a creature, tears came into her eyes and worked slowly down her cheeks. She seemed startled herself. She
ignored
them. And out of politeness, so did he. She turned away and left the house.

For a long time the studio was quiet.

At last he got up, parted a curtain, and looked at the new work.

He might finish it or he might not, since it would never stand anywhere but here, behind its curtain. It showed her, a little older than she was now, walking out of the stone, serene, proud, worn, but indomitable. The eyes had the sadness animals have in their eyes. How is it animals look so sad, since they do not think the way we do? Really, they have not our
opportunities
to be sad. Yet the look in their eyes, when we come upon them by surprise, resting, is heartrending. And he had not lied to her. She was still beautiful. Indeed she was more beautiful than ever, for this to him was beauty.

It was a beauty, however, which made him angry. Later in the day he got up on a stool and knocked her left eyeball out of the statue on its bracket. By evening he had a polished pip of moonstone set in the empty place.

Why he did this he did not know, for the neck and chin were as proud as on the day he had sculpted them. Perhaps it was because he no longer wanted to see her as she had been. For the Queen had glaucoma. She, the most beautiful, had fallen victim to the most common disease in Egypt. A fly had laid an egg in her left eye. In another two or three months it would be as
gelatinous
and as blankly white, as the moonstone he held in his hand.

O
ne must understand Ikhnaton. He did have feelings. He had lived with her for ten years. But he could not help it. He loathed deformity.

She still sat with him on the throne. They were still as affectionate in public as ever. But now she must stand and sit on the other side, so that he could not see her eye.

It was one of those evenings when they had public music. There were perhaps forty people there. The hall was gay with tall stands of flowers and fruit, and the drinking had been heavy. Nefertiti seemed reassured. After all, he had not sent her away. This made her almost happy, and as a result her jaw-line was prouder than ever, her smile more austere. That was how she took happiness: as something beyond our self-control, to which we should be wiser not to give way.

The tumblers and dancing boys were replaced by drums and harpers. They came forward, to do the slow dance demanded by the strophe and antistrophe of what they were playing.

Blind harpers were essential to all temple rituals. Indeed the demand so exceeded the supply that it was sometimes necessary to blind them. They were thus, in a way, themselves holy. As with eunuchs, an operation which cut them off from life was their one means of obtaining a sinecure, and some of them had undergone it with as little compunction, and for the same
practical
reasons, as had the eunuchs. For what man would be whole, if success and security depended upon his disfigurement?

They had elected to sing that part of the hymn to the Aton in which all creatures sleeping and in darkness salute the dawn as the eternally renewed source of sight, warmth, and security. They shuffled in an
unpleasant
manner, like men edging their way down a cave with a lowering roof. Most had their eyelids shut, but some did not. One could see the empty socket or the gooey colourless mass within. But the ugliest thing about them was the silly satisfied inhuman look on their faces.

Ikhnaton could not stand it, nor would he. He stood up and ordered them out of the hall, while a muscle pulsed in Nefertiti’s cheek. “I will not have cripples around me,” he shouted. It was certainly shocking. In the following silence it was difficult for the guests to pick up the pieces again. Guards hesitated, and then led the harpers away, while all that silly satisfaction in their faces gave way to panic. While he was at it, he abolished them from the temple services, too. Then, losing control of himself, he went to his own rooms and left her alone there on the throne.

She found it hard to control herself.

Next day he behaved as though the scene had not happened. But since it had happened, she took the harpers under her protection, in the service of her own dawn temple. They scarcely knew what had happened. They fluttered round her like chickens bewildered by a cyclone. Nor did she find their ignorance displeasing, for those who know nothing have much to teach, and at last she had something under her control that he was afraid of.

Nor would she forgive him for that scene. It was the first time that that solid front they presented to the world had cracked in public, and since there was much advantage to be gained by taking sides, everyone at court would be there to drive a wedge.

The court might make profit out of his fear of
contamination
,
but she knew that nothing could save him from it. Contamination is unavoidable. Only two things in life are inevitable, starvation, if we cannot sing for our supper, and death, even though we can. As the most powerful person in the world, he was in no danger of the former. But the latter was now coming much more close and very rapidly.

News came from Thebes that Amenophis was
dying
.

Ikhnaton kept to his own quarters, but Tutmose was sent to Thebes, no one knew why. He returned in two weeks. Ikhnaton drove to the studio at once.
Amenophis
was the first of them to die, and he wanted to see how death looked. He was sure there could not possibly be any resemblance between that man dead and
himself
living.

Here he was wrong. For death returns the features to their primal condition. Amenophis dead
was
Ikhnaton living.

It had clearly not been an errand that Tutmose had cared for. He watched Ikhnaton anxiously. The mask itself lay on a bench in the centre of the room, Ikhnaton circled the bench as one would circle a dangerous animal securely caught, yet was any snare that secure?

So this was death. It was, at any rate, death at
fifty-four
. It looked startled and angry, but not after all so horrible, locked up in somebody else’s face and unable to get at him.

“Hold it up,” he ordered.

Tutmose held it up, so that it seemed to float in space. Out of those heavy, pain-raddled features the very shimmer and cast of youth stared leanly out, the eyes stubbornly turned inward, and the mouth set to get what it wanted, yet with some sort of shimmer on the cheek-bones less easy to define, a contradiction, if one liked, of cynicism. It was a face that knew more than it wanted to know, and very beautiful.

And also meaningless. For no matter how long it takes to die, it does not take long enough. Death is the worst abstraction we have. What does it refer to? Not to the dead, not to consciousness, not to the process of dying itself. Not to what was, or is, or will be. It does not even have a physiology. Dying does. Decay does. But death does not, for what happens to the body after death is only what happens to a house after its tenants have moved away for good. It doesn’t hurt
particularly
. It is the body that hurts.

The most one can say is that one watches oneself dying with a certain interest, as though one were
peering
out of an egg just as someone steps on it. One can hear the shell crack before it has cracked. No doubt that is what death is, a part of time that takes place outside time, a split second existent independent of duration. That is a natural death. But a sudden death must be quite different, since we have no time to get ready. Aplomb of necessity must go forewarned.

On the other hand it takes an age. One realizes that everything else in one is dead already. The arms, the legs, the emotions, have all been closed off. There is only the will left to go. So one sits and waits as though one were sitting on a chest, waiting to go off on a journey, with the horses late and the chariot nowhere in view. It is very tedious. One feels very tired. One had so looked forward to the outing. And now, despite
oneself
, when it is too late to change one’s mind, one finds oneself asking if after all one really wants to go. For the journey is a lie. One is not going anywhere. And if one is not going anywhere, why all this fuss about getting ready? Why can’t one stay where one is? Simply because one’s time is up. One has either paid one’s bill at the hotel or not paid it, but at any rate one’s room is lost. The condemned cell is needed for another man. If you come on Thursday, people say, I’ll arrange to have the coachman meet you at the cross-roads. But this
isn’t Thursday, and maybe the cross-roads aren’t even there. One can’t even get in touch with them, to say one is coming. At the last moment one lost their address.

In short, one cannot say anything about it. One simply has to give up and look the other way. Ikhnaton refused to look the other way. He had to prove himself different. He was the son of a god, and so could not die. He was not the son of his father. If his father had died, it was only because he was the son of a false god, Amon.

He did not like the way that mask caught the light. He asked Tutmose how he had taken it. And then he asked Tutmose to take a life mask of him.

Tutmose hesitated. He knew Pharaoh’s
claustrophobia
. He had always wanted to take his life mask, but had not suggested doing so, out of prudence. But now he shrugged his shoulders. To understand a thing, in this case Pharaoh, it is necessary to judge it by its own standards, not by ours. And not being a fanatic, but an urbane man, he did want to understand it, even though, trapped in that plaster, Ikhnaton might panic and so turn against him.

“Lie down,” he said. He inserted two straws into Ikhnaton’s nostrils, smeared his face with grease, put gauze over his eyelids, and began to apply the plaster. Ikhnaton trembled, but said nothing. Tutmose did not like what he was doing. It was always interesting to see which part of their faces his subjects most clearly
identified
with themselves. Some took the whole process with equanimity, but most would flinch and grow rigid when the plaster covered their mouth, their nostrils, their eyes, or even, in one case he could remember, their cheek-bones. He would have expected it to be the eyes in Pharaoh’s case.

It was not. It was the mouth, the mouth that gave him the voice to command.

The plaster was all applied. He looked at the body, the shapeless thighs, and the big belly. It occurred to him that perhaps Pharaoh was tubercular. His chest was so meagre. It now rose and fell convulsively. The room was still. The only sound was the laboured suck and hiss of air in and out through the straws.

He bent over. “You must keep very still,” he said. “The plaster is warm, but later it will grow cool and seem to tighten and grow heavier, as it contracts. Nothing can go wrong. I will wait here. It will take perhaps half an hour. Keep your eyes and mouth firmly shut, and try to breathe shallowly.”

He went to his workbench and honed a chisel. Then, aware that something was happening, he turned round to watch.

Pharaoh’s body was rigid, as though tensing itself for some ordeal. Tutmose frowned, and put his hand on Pharaoh’s belly. It was taut beneath its fat. The head jerked upward and Pharaoh turned on his side.
Tutmose
flipped him over, but the straws were crushed. He was having a seizure. Inserting his finger-nails hastily under the chin, Tutmose ripped off the mask.

The face glistened with grease and was utterly
expressionless
. Yet at the same time it seemed to smile. The body contracted again, the mouth gaped, but a sort of animal scream lost in the throat was followed by some kind of inner struggle. It was a body. At the moment there was no one inside it at all. Still holding the mask, Tutmose backed away. Then it was over. The body lay still, and slowly the breathing came back, at first very fast, then very slow, and then, with a final convulsive twitch of the body, more regular. Tutmose looked down at the flattened, faintly mauve and brittle nails of Pharaoh’s hand.

Then Ikhnaton opened his eyes. “Send for Pentu,” he said.

Pentu was sent for.

“Is the cast safe?”

Tutmose held it up.

“Can you make the mould now?”

Tutmose could and did, moving back and forth across the room, while Pentu came and went. No wonder Pharaoh was afraid of death. As an epileptic, he repeated the experience whenever he had to renew his nerves. But there was no real need for Pentu. Epilepsy was quite harmless, and frightening only to those who had to watch. Still, there was that instant before one became unconscious, when one realized one could no longer control one’s body and would so be at the mercy of outsiders for a while. That could not be pleasant.

Tutmose was not frightened, but he was sobered. He had not known. It explained much. No wonder
Ikhnaton
loved the sun. For when a capillary bursts in one’s brain, which happens once or twice in
everybody’s
lifetime, one has the same sensation as an epileptic, of a cool, overwhelming, yet somehow healthy, all-pervasive light that sweeps one
instantaneously
in and out of an hygienic void. It happens so seldom, and runs so counter to everything we are
accustomed
to, that most of us forget it. But an epileptic repeats it too often to forget it. Therefore he is often mystic and frequently devout.

The cast had set. He removed it, and at Pharaoh’s order set it beside that of Amenophis, propping it against the wall. Despite a difference in feature, the resemblance was exact, which, in turn, told one much about Amenophis. He had been a visionary, too, but one with nothing to look at. No wonder his death mask was so sad.

Ikhnaton saw no similarity at all. As far as he was concerned this difference he saw abolished death. He went away content.

He forgot that his father meant nothing to him. Yet
like an assassin, who closes in on us, by dodging from tree to tree, strangling first the outer sentries, and then the guard before our tent, death was moving closer. A month later, and it had reached his tent.

Since Tutmose did all the rest of them, he had done the princesses too. Their tiny shell-like heads were
perfectly
suited to small chunks of highly polished stone, and this was work he enjoyed, finishing them with as much care as a man, to relax, would lavish on the pip of an apricot. It was a sort of hobby, and of course we love our hobbies best for being so meaningless.

There were six of them now, and when he finished one he did another. Meritaten was twelve, too large to interest him any more. Maketaten was ten,
Ankesenpa’aten
, whose facial planes were the most satisfying, eight, and the other three three, two, and one
respectively
. If he wanted to please Pharaoh, he had only to hand over one of these scrimshaws of Maketaten, who was his favourite, though personally Tutmose found her the most insipid of the lot. He preferred Senpenra, the baby, in green serpentine, which he carried about with him in his pocket, to play with when the day was hot, because the stone was always cool. It was pleasant to twiddle with it when he was thinking.

Nor was the idea irreverent, for Pharaoh himself played with the children as though they were pet mice. And why not? Lonely children keep white mice, lonely men usually have a box of their old toys hidden away somewhere, and one must have something to lavish one’s affections on, without fear of reprisals. There is a good deal to be said for white mice.

What the children thought nobody knew. They were secretive children, and since the secrets of children are not ours, we should not understand them even if we knew them.