The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (11 page)

What a lovely name you have, especially in French: Rossignol. And may I say that I find your French charming, far superior to my jagged shards of English. I hope one day to learn English well enough to read Shakespeare without a dictionary.

We’ve dropped anchor downriver from Abu Simbel, in a little cove. I wonder if you are nearby and if you have yet seen the mammoth statues of Ramses that flank the great temple. Max is excavating one Ramses for the sake of the official photographs he
has been commissioned to make. (As I may have told you, I am documenting the monuments by making archaeological squeezes or molds of the inscriptions, though I am not an archaeologist.) I find it fascinating that the Egyptians and Nubians who live with these splendid monuments have so little feeling for them. They walk past them with no curiosity, as if they were old concert posters on a kiosk.

I regret that I did not meet your traveling companions, but perhaps the opportunity will yet present itself.

I have acquired an Arabic nickname,
Abu Chanab,
which means “Father Mustache.” Max is called “the Father of Thinness,” an apt description. Has your crew told you their nicknames for your party? Ask your dragoman and hope he is not too shy to tell you. Egypt seems a place where one requires an epithet. I shall call you Rossignol, my songbird, until you tell me another.

We shall be working here for at least another week, so perhaps we shall see you and your party again. I hope so.

I hereby swear that we have done no shooting among crowds, that we have shot only turtledoves for our larder and the odd eagle and lammergeier, the first for the sake of the feathers, the second because the sight of these huge, impatient buzzards strikes panic into my heart. (Max and I lay motionless for a time on the sand as an experiment the other day, and within minutes they began circling overhead.)

We are sailing in a twelve-meter-long cange painted blue (six windows to a side) and flying the tricolors from the stern. Are you sailing under the English flag? How would I know your boat?

From your humble servant,
Father Mustache, to the songbird,
Gustave Flaubert

He stoked his chibouk, lit it, inhaled, and blew a stream of bluish smoke into the night. At home, it was a rare day that he did not
smoke thirty bowls, particularly if he were writing. A pure pleasure, like masturbating. He watched the smoke curl upward and dissipate. Indistinguishable voices wafted across the river from the opposite shore, where a bonfire sent flames leaping into the sky. The palm trees behind it, washed in red light, looked like giant branches of sea coral.

He decided to reread the letter, not because he might change it, but because he was pleased with it.

Such an angelic tone! What propriety coming from the doyen of doxies, the connoisseur of cunts, the headmaster of hussies. But, of course, one could not be one’s self with women, especially a new acquaintance.

No, it seemed that only with whores could he be true to his nature, indulging the horny beast and following his lusty whims into every crack, hole, and fold of their bodies. As for sharing his intellectual side, his love of the arts and a well-reasoned dismissal of all things bourgeois, only men had proved to be satisfying partners.

Closing the envelope with his letter in it, he applied a glob of red sealing wax. What wife would wish to hear him curse with virtuosity and then discuss
King Lear
? One with the mind of a man and the obscenity of a whore? Such a woman did not exist. Nevertheless, he allowed himself to picture Miss Nightingale’s breasts, which would be small and perky, with nipples, he guessed, the color of stewed prunes.

• • •

After dinner, Max got out his guidebook and spread a map on the table, a twin of the one he’d given Madame Flaubert. No doubt she studied it longingly each evening, tacked to a wall in her boudoir.

The map appeared antique, the result of the lamplight and its many creases, smears, and fingerprints. Max had opened it so many times to pencil in notes and dates that the folds had the soft, fuzzy pile of velvet. Now he traced the river north from Abu Simbel with his finger, reciting the places they might visit on the second half of their Nile journey: Dendur, to see the Roman temple there, Philae, the jewel of the Nile, Edfu, Esneh again, Luxor, Karnak, and Thebes.

Esneh,
where Kuchuk Hanem lived. Gustave sat smoking quietly.

Max’s finger came to rest on Kenneh, a small city where the river veered sharply east, then flowed in a gentle arc northwesterly again. His finger began to tap. Instead of following the course of the river, it moved into the Arabian desert. “I wonder,” Max began. “Look at this!” He stood up, tipping over his stool. “I say,
Garçon
! Are you listening to me, Short Pants?” He rapped his knuckles on the table. “M. Descambeaux! I am calling on you, you dunce.”

“Descambeaux at your service, sir,” Gustave replied, suppressing a pang of sadness. Poor Alfred. And poor Caroline. Alfred had invented
Le Garçon,
and Caroline had given the imaginary clown his family name. “I just need to take a shit to clear my head.” He squatted and pretended to fart loudly.

“Point your ass in the other direction, please. I am trying to think.”

“Thinking? I’ve heard that’s dangerous. The grocer told me it makes your prick shrivel up and fall off. Thinking too much will make you go blind. Spend every spare moment jerking off. You’ve got to keep yourself well oiled, like a proper gun.”

“Oh,
Garçon
”—Max laughed—“have you not a single brain in your head?”

“Just one, like everybody else. And now, I must go shit out a word or two, inspired by the moonlight. I feel a poem coming on, like a cramp.”

“What a waste of time you are! But truly, Short Pants, I have a brilliant idea.” Max righted the stool and sat back down. He rotated the map toward Gustave. “Have a look. From Kenneh, we could travel east to Koseir.”

Gustave followed Max’s finger from Kenneh across a blank area to a circle. “What’s in Koseir?”

“
Garçon,
you are hopeless. What’s in Koseir? Have you never heard of it?”

The dot on the map was tiny; a squashed flea was bigger. “I haven’t, O great Sheik Abu Dimple.”

“I’ll tell you what,
Garçon—
the Red Sea.”

It was an electrifying proposition, and Max was correct: Kenneh appeared to be the closest jumping-off point anywhere along the Nile.

While Gustave flipped through Max’s guidebook, Max measured the distance between the two points. “How many days would it take to cross the desert there?” he wondered aloud.

Gustave read to him. “‘Travelers returning from India often pass through Koseir.’” He skimmed along, reading to himself. “Ah! Here’s something of interest. Instructions about thrashing. ‘The
fellah
should be thrashed beforehand, to remind him who is in authority. However, if you mistake a Bedouin for a
fellah,
he might kill you for striking him.’” He closed the book. “We shall have to buy a cudgel.”

“What’s a
fellah
?” Max asked.

“Don’t know.”

“Seriously, I shall talk to Captain Ibrahim. It’s our one chance for the Red Sea.”

Gustave, usually rather phlegmatic, jumped up and spun around. “Yes! I must swim in the Red Sea.” And he wanted to be able to
say
he swam in the Red Sea, and most of all, he wanted the
memory
of swimming in the Red Sea, for memory was wealth to him, and he was anxious to fill his coffers. Saint Anthony, he recalled, had spent the last fifty years of his life living on the shore of the Red Sea. Just in case he ever worked on the book again.

He leaned down to peer through the windows of the
cange
. In the sky hung a slender crescent moon, tilted backward. A bright C-shaped haze surrounded it, beyond which multitudinous stars glimmered through wispy clouds. He stuck his head out the window and breathed in the mist rising off the Nile, which was cool and damp, like the air after a soaking rain.

• • •

After Max and the crew had retired for the night, Gustave sat alone on deck with a candle. He could hear the crewmen snoring, rustling in their sleep. One lone fellow stood sentry at the stern.

To put things in proper perspective, he liked to read the newspaper
backward. As expected,
La Presse
was brimming with irrelevancies—events that had already occurred or about which he could do nothing. He enjoyed the engraved illustrations, the advertisements for opera capes and top hats, remedies for cold sores and backaches. The legal announcements, thick with veiled threats, ruined careers, and domestic melodramas, were like plots for novels with missing pieces.

He was half asleep when he came upon Louise’s name in a gossip column on page two. Named the defendant in a civil law suit, she’d taken the stand in self-defense. A gadfly by nature, she seemed to prefer trouble to inattention. Apparently she had stabbed a journalist in his apartment with a kitchen knife she had brought from home for the purpose. He was suing her for damages to his person and his reputation. Oh, too good! The injury had been to her, she had countered in the dock. The journalist had impugned the paternity of her daughter.

Gustave relished the image of Louise defending her honor. Too bad a duel was beyond her! Knowing her as he did, he figured it had been a paring knife and that she’d already found a way to parlay the trial into a poetry commission from the Academy. He was well rid of her. But in case they should meet by chance at a social evening, he saved the article. She’d be pleased that he had read about her (and therefore thought about her) in Egypt. Someday, he thought with glee, she should take up with Max. Obviously they disliked each other because they were so similar—both talented, both careerists and reputation builders with a flair for publicity.

6

MIRAGE

E
arly the next morning, Gustave had the good fortune to be on the deck of the
cange
when a slave ship was passing. A long, shallow craft, it resembled a huge dugout canoe with masts added at either end. At this cool hour after dawn, the sails were furled and the boat was drifting downriver with the current, toward Cairo. Over its midsection fluttered a tattered canopy rolled up on a metal frame, leaving the boat’s cargo in full view. A camel, tethered by its bridle to the mast, stood uncertainly at the stern, its legs widely planted. In front of the camel, seated in rows like oarsmen, a dozen or so Nubian girls huddled together.

The farther upriver Gustave traveled—the farther south—the more primitive the people had become. Alexandria had been cosmopolitan, an Eastern version of Paris, bustling with European, Egyptian, Turkish, African, and Arab denizens. Two hundred and eighty kilometers to the south, in Cairo, the first signs of the vast, untamed interior appeared: burlap bags of gum Arabic, salt, and dates piled up on the docks; covered bazaars where the products of metal, straw, leather, and wood workshops were arrayed; and, of course, the slave markets. Cairo was very much a city, with schools and policemen, soldiers and veiled women billowing through the streets, a steady rush of multifariously
intentioned traffic moving in all directions at once. Approaching Abu Simbel, a thousand kilometers farther south, he had sensed another order of change. With every passing kilometer, it seemed he moved back in time. Except for the pyramids at Giza, the monuments of Nubia were the biggest and oldest in Egypt, and they existed in isolation. Nearby were no mud brick houses, no mosques, schools, or gardens—in short, nothing but ancient temples and riverine way stations where a traveler might negotiate for food or flesh. Only stouthearted explorers ventured beyond the second cataracts or dared to leave the security of the riverbank for the unmapped hinterland.

The women in the slave boat did not refuse his gaze; in fact, they seemed emboldened by it. Because he detected no shame in their eyes, he gave himself permission to stare openly, to catalog every detail. The eldest might have been fifteen; the others were barely pubescent. He wondered how they had come to be slaves. Perhaps the girls’ families had sold them because they could not afford a dowry for a husband. He was convinced that matrimony was somehow involved in their fate, just as it was for European women. If he had been born a woman, he would have chosen the life of the mistress or the spinster rather than the wife.

It was this kind of thinking that had soured him on his sister’s marriage. He had never really accepted the fact that Caroline would one day cease to be the free-spirited painter and reader of books he adored, that she would spend an entire week in Paris hunting for pillowcases and blankets for her trousseau instead of suitable landscapes to sketch. She had always been a delightfully impish child and then a rowdy girl, following her big brother’s lead.

Grief tightened his throat. It seemed impossible that she would not dash through the doors and onto the lawn to greet him when he returned to Croisset. How many times had he caught himself pondering gifts for her along the Nile?

Though he had opposed the betrothal, he had said nothing to interfere with her happiness. But on the wedding day, when he saw her in her ivory peau de soie wedding gown, looking more like a pastry
than a person, he’d battled the impulse to lift the lace veil from her face, drag her from the church, and return her to her rightful place by his side as they mounted one of their spontaneous theatrical productions or skipped pebbles across the glass skin of the Seine. He had wanted to shake her—shake off her solemnity—and indulge in a session with
Le Garçon
—“Short Pants”—whose mediocre school history Caroline had fabricated.
M. Descambeaux has received from the École du Droit black balls in Torts, Contracts, and Procedures, and two red balls to match his own, one in Comedy and the other in Excuses.
How could Caroline have turned into a matron, depriving him of her good humor and beauty, of the jaunty swish of her skirts along the stone patio? For his
pauvre Caroline,
marriage had been worse than enslavement; it had been a death sentence. His beloved sister had died of a school friend’s hard-on, he thought now without rancor. He might as well have infected her with cholera or smallpox.