Sphinx (21 page)

I wound my way back to the city centre, my mind a whirling mass as familiar axioms battled a multitude of new hypotheses. With each step, the astrarium in the rucksack on my back bounced against me. I kept thinking of Hermes’s warning about the power of the device; then I remembered Barry’s explanation of the Ancient Egyptians’ belief in magic, their intertwining of religious worship, intellectual pursuit, sorcery and science.

Walking helped me organise my thoughts; it was a habit borne of my childhood wanderings across the Cumbrian Fells. As the rhythm of the streets pounded up through my legs a destination began to take shape in my mind. A couple of old men were playing Shesh Besh outside a shoe stall. I glanced down at the backgammon pieces, calculating the moves necessary to win, and then made my own decision. I would go to the cemetery to talk to Isabella, to take her the astrarium.

It was illogical, but this time, unlike in the oilfield where I’d legitimised my decisions with science, I was relying solely on my intuition. Now I truly had become the Diviner - the realisation felt painfully ironic.

 

I walked on up Bab el-Mulouk back towards Rue Sherif and past the Antiques Market towards Cairo Station Square. My path was broken by two long queues of people; women in one, men in the other, all clutching their ration cards, snaking out of a gamaya - the ubiquitous co-op grocery store where the locals collected their rationed food: meat, rice, oil and flour. Such queues formed with each new shipment of rare imports, simple things like New Zealand lamb, butter and tea. Once commonplace, such items had now become scarce in the economic tumult created by Sadat opening up Egypt to the free market earlier that year.

Here, towards the centre of the city, the buildings became more Westernised, and the old cosmopolitan Alexandria, elegant and ostentatious, began to appear: the old Lloyds Bank building, the Banco di Roma and the Bank of Athens - all originally landmarks of colonialism that were now under the banner of the National Bank of Egypt. I passed Bank Misr with its balconies and arches, more Ottoman than classical, then walked past the Anglican church of St Mark, and the old offices located in ornate neoclassical city blocks. Along Fouad Street the grand villas started appearing: Villa Salvago, Villa Sursock, Villa Rolo - phantoms from a past world.

As I weaved between the pedestrians I became aware suddenly of the sound of a motorcycle behind me. I’d been so lost in thought that I didn’t know how long it had been trailing me. Realising I might have been followed from the moment I left Hermes’s apartment I glanced around wildly. A cab hooted next to me, the gesturing driver touting for business. I leaped in and instructed him to take me to Chatby Cemetery, just as the sound of the motorbike engine grew louder behind me.

As the cab pulled away I glanced out the rear window, trying to catch a glimpse of the motorcycle. There it was, weaving its way towards me, dodging in and out of the chaos of pedestrians and horse-drawn carts. For a terrifying moment I thought I saw the menacing face of the man who had been in the car with Omar earlier that day. Then a minibus crammed full of commuters got in the way, and by the time it had passed, the motorcycle was gone.

I stared at the engraved letters and numbers, their crisp edges confirming their newness. Isabella’s face, wryly smiling, gazed up from the black-and-white photograph set into the large marble headstone next to the oval portraits of her father and uncles. Once again, I noticed the absence of Giovanni’s photograph. It seemed inconceivable that he would not be buried with his family and I wondered about the etiquette of asking Francesca directly about it. I glanced back at Isabella’s photo: it looked as if it had been taken at her first communion; I barely recognised her. It represented a period of her life I’d never had access to and I found myself momentarily flooded by a strange jealousy.

It horrified me to think of Isabella lying in that grave incomplete. Had I failed her in death? Despite my own lack of spirituality, I couldn’t shake off the disturbing thought that Isabella would not be able to rest until her heart was returned to her, that her Ba might be trapped in this life for ever. I knew rationally that this couldn’t be the case but beneath it all I felt my pragmatism slowly beginning to erode. Despite my protestations to Hermes, I could feel myself being swept up in the great epic history of the astrarium. Stress, sheer physical exhaustion as well as my constant battle against grief had left me vulnerable, ungrounded. Had I begun to see meaning in arbitrary patterns? Imagined pursuers, ghosts in shadows, even symbols in dreams? Had I begun to imbue coincidence with meaning? Was I practising some kind of bizarre heuristics? Either way, it was undeniable - my parameters of reality were beginning to slip.

Carefully I laid the astrarium, still inside my rucksack, onto the marble slab covering Isabella’s grave. I waited - for what I wasn’t sure: perhaps a sign that she was finally united with the object she had spent years searching for. The seconds ticked by into minutes. There was nothing, just the creaking of a tree branch and a faint breeze; time breathing out.

I concentrated on an old wreath of lilies propped up against the headstone, the petals now brown and curling. One bloom had broken loose and fallen onto the grass. I crouched to pick it up and suddenly noticed a small hole at the far end of the marble slab. I kneeled down and looked closer: it was a chiselled hole about four inches deep and three inches across. Someone had even bothered to give it the appearance of a miniature door with an etched outline. I hadn’t seen it when we’d buried Isabella, yet somehow the image seemed hauntingly familiar.

‘Oliver?’

The voice was feminine, lilting and Italian in its accent. I looked up: Cecilia, Isabella’s mother, stood at the head of the grave, her expensive Chanel suit looking ridiculously out of place. In one hand she held a small bunch of chrysanthemums; the other was trying to stop the breeze ruining her coiffured hair.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I have disturbed you in a private moment.’

Realising she’d assumed I was in the middle of a prayer, I stood swiftly, dusted my knees and, worried that she might notice the chiselled hole in the tomb, stepped quickly back onto the pathway.

Cecilia reached out and took my hand between her gloved fingers, her gaze travelling over my tired face, new beard and crumpled clothing. ‘You poor man. We never think of the young and the talented dying. Such deaths are an obscenity, a joke against God, don’t you think?’

Unlike her daughter, Cecilia was tall and had a Tuscan blonde beauty honed by the polish of Rome. Slender and green-eyed, she seemed entirely aware of the power of her own attractiveness. She was only eight years older than me, which made her a very youthful forty-six. To my great chagrin, a spasm of involuntary desire shot through me like electricity. To make matters worse, I had the impression that Cecilia sensed my dilemma. I pulled my hand away.

Smiling faintly, she crouched down to place her bouquet next to the lilies. My words spilled out nervously as I tried to distract myself from the sight of her skirt riding up her thighs.

‘I couldn’t stop her making that dive. God knows I tried, but she was insistent. Still, I can’t help thinking that if I had . . .’

‘Oliver, it was an accident, the consequence of a chain of events that led to a moment you had no control over. Who is to say whether that moment might or might not otherwise have happened?’

She glanced apprehensively around the cemetery, then stepped closer. ‘I know Isabella would have told you terrible things about me.’ Cecilia’s voice was little more than a whisper. She paused, as if waiting for me to protest. I did not.

‘You have to understand,’ she continued, ‘I was bullied into letting Isabella go. I knew very quickly that I had made a grave mistake. But I was only twenty-five when I was widowed, and Giovanni Brambilla was a very frightening man. He was immoral, desperate to influence events beyond his control and he channelled a lot of that through Isabella. He even began to involve her in his activities - activities that were not appropriate for a child. He is powerful even now, even beyond the grave.’

‘What kind of activities?’ I asked, intrigued. I wasn’t convinced by her casting herself in the role of victim but there was something about Giovanni that I found immensely fascinating.

‘Once, when Isabella was about nine, Francesca wrote to tell me that she was worried about the way Giovanni had started to involve Isabella in some strange “performances”, rituals, with a group of followers. I immediately bought a plane ticket, but when I tried to get back into the country they refused me a visa. There was no reason for it and I couldn’t help but think that Giovanni had somehow used his influence to bar me. After that, whenever I confronted Francesca about it she denied she’d written to me at all.’

‘Isabella had nightmares,’ I told her. ‘The same one again and again. A gathering of people performing a ritual - one of the Ancient Egyptian rituals she’d studied . . .’

Cecilia’s face fell in horror. ‘
Mia povera figlia!
’ she murmured, near to tears. Her anguish was so real that I felt more sympathetic towards her. I was just about to speak when behind us a twig snapped and we both turned. I glimpsed a movement between the trees, the flash of a figure now hidden.

Cecilia’s expression changed instantly to one of fear. ‘We should go. People here will go to any lengths to reinvent their history, even their recent history,’ she whispered.

We started walking back to the entrance. The cemetery appeared empty but the strong sense of being observed remained. I shivered. Above us, the cawing of ravens filled the blank sky. I grasped Cecilia’s hand briefly. For the second time that afternoon she smiled.

‘You know, Isabella did finally contact me, about a month before her death. No letter, just a box of photographs from our early days, from when her father was alive. I cried when I opened it. But don’t you think it is strange? Not to hear from your daughter for so long, then out of the blue she sends you old photographs a month before she dies?’

 

As I waved Cecilia’s Mercedes off, my heart heavy with memories of Isabella and fear about her past, I suddenly remembered where I’d seen the miniature door before: it was like the portal engraved into the wall of an Ancient Egyptian tomb; the symbolic door that allowed the deceased’s Ba to fly in and out.

Who would have carved such a thing into Isabella’s gravestone? And who would have watched me make that discovery? I looked around one last time. But the cemetery lay deserted in the fading light of the afternoon.

 

When I arrived back at the villa I discovered that Mr Fartime, on behalf of the Alexandrian Oil Company, had engaged an extra guard at the gate for additional security. He’d told Ibrihim he’d been concerned by my interrogation after Isabella’s drowning. But also, with the growing food shortages and rationing, there had already been a few attacks on Westerners and I knew that Fartime felt responsible for my safety.

Although it was reassuring to see the burly but friendly guard, smiling in his makeshift uniform and waving from the gate, I still didn’t trust the security of the villa. Later that night, knowing that Ibrihim was away making his annual visit to his mother in Ar-Rashid, I waited until I noticed the guard dozing on his stool by the iron gate. Then, as quietly as possible, I made my way into the garden. I wrapped the astrarium in canvas and buried it in a wooden box beneath one of the magnolia trees - a temporary hiding place should anyone break into the villa. As I paused, spade in hand, I glanced up at the waxing moon. The Egyptians thought the moon was a resting place of ascending souls and, staring up at the luminous pock-marked surface of the orb, it seemed a strangely reasonable concept. Just then there was a rustling of wings and something flew across my gaze, too fast for a bird. Startled, I dropped the spade, then cursed myself for taking fright. Half an hour later I finished planting a small pomegranate bush with shallow roots over the top of the astrarium, smoothing down the soil so the earth didn’t look disturbed. It was only after I went back inside that I remembered how Persephone had been tricked by Hades into eating seven pomegranate seeds, condemning her to stay with him in the underworld for seven months of each year. It was a disturbing association.

 

It was past midnight. I sat on the edge of the bed clutching the Valium that the company doctor had prescribed for me, wondering if I could, again, face that wave of treacly darkness, the loss of sensory control that now allowed me to sleep.

I decided against taking the pill and climbed into bed. Staring at the ceiling and the shifting shadows of the tree branches thrown by the street lamp outside, my eyes closed finally, and I drifted off.

I dreamed I was in sunshine. Bright light, a beach perhaps, the sense of a soft grainy surface beneath my sun-warmed skin, then the soft weight of another body curling around me. I recognised the shape and scent instantly. I didn’t dare open my eyes in case I frightened her away, but the urge to see her overwhelmed me.