The Early Stories (135 page)

I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying
 

Clem came from buffalo and spoke in the neutral American accent that sends dictionary makers there. His pronunciation was clear and colorless, his manners were impeccable, his clothes freshly laundered and appropriate no matter where he was, however far from home. Rich and unmarried, he travelled a lot; he had been to Athens and Rio, Las Vegas and Hong Kong, Leningrad and Sydney, and now Cairo. His posture was perfect, but he walked without swing; people at first liked him, because his apparent perfection reflected flatteringly upon them, and then distrusted him, because his perfection disclosed no flaw. As he travelled, he studied the guidebooks conscientiously, picked up words of the local language, collected prints and artifacts. He was serious but not humorless; indeed, his smile, a creeping but finally complete revelation of utterly even and white front teeth, with a bit of tongue flirtatiously pinched between them, was one of the things that led people on, that led them to hope for the flaw, the entering crack. There were hopeful signs. At the bar he took one drink too many, the hurried last drink that robs the dinner wine of taste. Though he enjoyed human society, he couldn't dance, politely refusing always.

He had a fine fair square-shouldered body, surely masculine and yet somehow neutral, which he solicitously covered with oil against the sun that, as they moved up the Nile, grew sharper and more tropical. He fell asleep in deck chairs, uncannily immobile, glistening, as the two river-banks at their safe distance glided by—date palms, taut green fields irrigated by rotating donkeys, pyramids of white round pots, trapezoidal houses of elephant-colored mud, mud-colored children silently waving, and the roseate desert cliffs beyond, massive parentheses. Glistening like a mirror, he slept in this gliding parenthesis with a godlike calm that possessed the landscape, transformed it into a steady dreaming. Clem said of
himself, awaking, apologizing, smiling with that bit of pinched tongue, that he slept badly at night, suffered from insomnia. This also was a hopeful sign. People wanted to love him.

There were not many on the boat. The Six-Day War had discouraged tourists. Indeed, at Nag Hammadi they did pass under a bridge in which Israeli commandos had blasted three neat but not very conclusive holes; some wooden planks had been laid on top and the traffic of carts and rickety lorries continued. And at Aswan they saw anti-aircraft batteries defending the High Dam. For the cruise, the war figured as a luxurious amount of space on deck and a pleasant disproportion between the seventy crewmen and the twenty paying passengers. These twenty were:

Three English couples, middle-aged but for one miniskirted wife, who was thought for days to be a daughter.

Two German boys; they wore bathing trunks to all the temples, yet seemed to know the gods by name and perhaps were future archaeologists.

A French couple, in their sixties. The man had been tortured in World War II; his legs were unsteady, and his spine had fused in a curve. He moved over the desert rubble and uneven stairways with tiny shuffling steps and studied the murals by means of a mirror hung around his neck. Yet he, too, knew the gods and would murmur worshipfully.

Three Egyptians, a man and two women, in their thirties, of a professional class, teachers or museum curators, cosmopolitan and handsome, given to laughter among themselves, even while the guide, a cherubic old Bedouin called Poppa Omar, was lecturing.

A fluffy and sweet, ample and perfumed American widow and her escort, a short bald native of New Jersey who for fifteen years had run tours in Africa, armed with a fancy fly whisk and an impenetrable rudeness toward natives of the continent.

A small-time travelogue-maker from Green Bay working his way south to Cape Town with a hundred pounds of photographic equipment.

A stocky blond couple, fortyish, who kept to themselves, hired their own guides, and were presumed to be Russian.

A young Scandinavian woman, beautiful, alone.

Clem.

Clem had joined the cruise at the last minute; he had been in Amsterdam and become oppressed by the low sky and tight-packed houses, the cold canal touring boats and the bad Indonesian food and the prostitutes illuminated in their windows like garish great candy. He had flown to Cairo and not liked it better. A cheeseburger in the Hilton offended him by being gamy: a goatburger. In the plaza outside, a man rustled up to
him and asked if he had had any love last night. The city, with its incessant twinkle of car horns and furtive-eyed men in pajamas, seemed unusable, remote. The museum was full of sandbags. The heart of King Tut's treasure had been hidden in case of invasion; but his gold sarcophagus, feathered in lapis lazuli and carnelian, did touch Clem, with its hint of death, of flight, of floating. A pamphlet in the Hilton advertised a six-day trip on the Nile, Luxor north to Abydos, back to Luxor, and on south to Aswan, in a luxurious boat. It sounded passive and educational, which appealed to Clem; he had gone to college at the University of Rochester and felt a need to keep rounding off his education, to bring it up to Ivy League standards. Also, the tan would look great back in Buffalo.

Stepping from the old DC-3 at the Luxor airport, he was smitten by the beauty of the desert, rose-colored and motionless around him. His element, perhaps. What was his travelling, his bachelorhood, but a search for his element? He was thirty-four and still seemed to be merely visiting the world. Even in Buffalo, walking the straight shaded streets where he had played as a small boy, entering the homes and restaurants where he was greeted by name, sitting in the two-room office where he put in the hour or two of telephoning that managed the parcel of securities and property fallen to him from his father's death, he felt somehow light—limited to forty-four pounds of luggage, dressed with the unnatural rigor people assume at the outset of a trip. A puff of air off Lake Erie and he would be gone, and the city, with its savage blustery winters, its deep-set granite mansions, its factories, its iron bison in the railroad terminal, would not have noticed. He would leave only his name in gilt paint on a list of singles tennis champions above the bar of his country club. But he knew he had been a methodical, joyless player to watch, a back-courter too full of lessons to lose.

He knew a lot about himself: he knew that this lightness, the brittle unmarred something he carried, was his treasure, which his demon willed him to preserve. Stepping from the airplane at Luxor, he had greeted his demon in the air—air ideally clean, dry as a mirror. From the window of his cabin he sensed again, in the glittering width of the Nile—much bluer than he had expected—and in the unflecked alkaline sky and in the tapestry strip of anciently worked green between them, that he would be happy for this trip. He liked sunning on the deck that first afternoon. Only the Scandinavian girl, in an orange bikini, kept him company. Both were silent. The boat was still tied up at the Luxor dock, a flight of stone steps; a few yards away, across a gulf of water and paved banking, a traffic of peddlers and cart drivers stared across. Clem liked that gulf and liked it
when the boat cast loose and began gliding between the fields, the villages, the desert. He liked the first temples: gargantuan Karnak, its pillars upholding the bright blank sky; gentler Luxor, with its built-in mosque and its little naked queen touching her king's giant calf; Hollywoodish Dendera—its restored roofs had brought in darkness and dampness and bats that moved on the walls like intelligent black gloves.

Clem even, at first, liked the peddlers. Tourist-starved, they touched him in their hunger, thrusting scarabs and old coins and clay mummy dolls at him, moaning and grunting English: “How much? How much you give me? Very fine. Fifty. Both. Take both. Both for thirty-five.” Clem peeked down, caught his eye on a turquoise glint, and wavered; his mother liked keepsakes and he had friends in Buffalo who would be amused. Into this flaw, this tentative crack of interest, they stuffed more things, strange sullied objects salvaged from the desert, alabaster vases, necklaces of mummy heads. Their brown hands probed and rubbed; their faces looked stunned, unblinking, as if, under the glaring sun, they were conducting business in the dark. Indeed, some did have eyes whitened by trachoma. Hoping to placate them with a purchase, Clem bargained for the smallest thing he could see, a lapis-lazuli bug the size of a fingernail. “Ten, then,” the old peddler said, irritably making the “give me” gesture with his palm. Holding his wallet high, away from their hands, Clem leafed through the big notes for the absurdly small five-piaster bills, tattered and fragile with use. The purchase, amounting to little more than a dime, excited the peddlers; ignoring the other tourists, they multiplied and crowded against him. Something warm and hard was inserted into his hand, his other sleeve was plucked, his pockets were patted, and he wheeled, his tongue pinched between his teeth flirtatiously. It was a nightmare; the dream thought crossed his mind that he might be scratched, marred.

He broke away and rejoined the other tourists in the sanctum of a temple courtyard. One of the Egyptian women came up to him and said, “I do not mean to remonstrate, but you are torturing them by letting them see all those fifties and hundreds in your wallet.”

“I'm sorry.” He blushed like a scolded schoolboy. “I just didn't want to be rude.”

“You must be. There is no question of hurt feelings. You are the man in the moon to them. They have no comprehension of your charm.”

The strange phrasing of her last sentence, expressing not quite what she meant, restored his edge and dulled her rebuke. She was the shorter and the older of the two Egyptian women; her eyes were green and there was an earnest mischief, a slight pressure, in her upward glance. Clem
relaxed, almost slouching. “The sad part is, some of their things, I'd rather like to buy.”

“Then do,” she said, and walked away, her hips swinging. So a move had been made. He had expected it to come from the Scandinavian girl.

That evening the Egyptian trio invited him to their table in the bar. The green-eyed woman said, “I hope I was not scolding. I did not mean to remonstrate, merely to inform.”

“Of course,” Clem said. “Listen. I was being plucked to death. I needed rescuing.”

“Those men,” the Egyptian man said, “are in a bad way. They say that around the hotels the shoeshine boys are starving.” His face was triangular, pock-marked, saturnine. A heavy, weary courtesy slowed his speech.

“What did you buy?” the second woman asked. She was sallower than the other, and softer. Her English was the most British-accented.

Clem showed them. “Ah,” the man said, “a scarab.”

“The incarnation of Khepri,” the green-eyed woman said. “The symbol of immortality. You will live forever.” She smiled at everything she said; he remembered her smiling with the word “remonstrate.”

“They're jolly things,” the other woman pronounced, in her stately way. “Dung beetles. They roll a ball of dung along ahead of them, which appealed to the ancient Egyptians. Reminded them of themselves, I suppose.”

“Life is that,” the man said. “A ball of dung we push along.”

The waiter came and Clem said, “Another whiskey sour. And another round of whatever they're having.” Beer for the man, Scotch for the taller lady, lemonade for his first friend.

Having bought, he felt, the right to some education, Clem asked, “Seriously. Has the”—he couldn't bring himself to call it a war, and he had noticed that in Egypt the words “Israel” and “Israeli” were never pronounced—“trouble cut down on tourism?”

“Oh, immensely,” the taller lady said. “Before the war, one had to book for this boat months ahead. Now my husband was granted two weeks and we were able to come at the last moment. It is pathetic.”

“What do you do?” Clem asked.

The man made a self-deprecatory and evasive gesture, as a deity might have, asked for employment papers.

“My brother,” the green-eyed woman stated, smiling, “works for the government. In, what do you call it, planning?”