The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (30 page)

Gustave seemed unperturbed by her directness. He lifted his glass and turned it in the striped shade of the reed awning. Splinters of sunlight swarmed there, like fireflies in a jar. “As you wish, Rossignol.”

Hearing the nickname, Charles looked up, his features sharpening. It occurred to Flo that her nickname suggested a greater intimacy between her and Gustave than Charles would have been aware of. The truth was, she liked it when he called her “Rossignol.” The word had the physicality of a touch, as if he had taken her hand or tapped her shoulder. Also, no one else had ever thought to call her by a nickname. Was that because she appeared too serious, too stern?

The three sat sipping at their beverages, Charles observing them, Flo noticed, as intently as a man expecting rain with his hand out the window. Gustave was apparently oblivious to the alarm he had raised. Finally, as if satisfied that nothing more would be revealed to him, Charles spoke: “And where will you make these squeezes? You will be staying on the island, will you not?”

Good grief, Flo thought, did he expect her to run off with Gustave? “I would not worry you by going far afield,” she replied.

“I’ll look after your charge,” Gustave assured him. “We shall be at the Temple of Isis with my man, not fifteen minutes’ walk from here.”

“Good, good,” Charles said, tamping his pipe with tobacco. “I shall be interested to see the results of your expedition.” He struck a match and inhaled, sucking furiously.

“Oh, Charles,” Flo said, once again not quite in control of her
emotions, “you make it sound as if we are going to Timbuktu. We shall be back by luncheon. Not to worry.”

Charles rose and planted a kiss on top of her head, then offered his hand to Gustave. “I shall see you later, then.”

Gustave half rose from his seat.
“Oui, monsieur.”

Flo raised her hand in farewell.

After Charles was out of earshot, Gustave said, “I think he suspects us of something.”

“That is what I thought, too.” She finished her tea. “He’s being protective of me, that’s all.”

“But it will be a shame to disappoint him.”

• • •

The making of squeezes turned out to be simple and repetitious, rather like hanging wallpaper.

It was ironic, Gustave pointed out, that the archaeologist’s record of carved stone should be so flimsy and inimical to permanence. The massive pylons of the Temple to Isis would become thin, translucent sheets with the texture of old newspaper.

“So a stone and its squeeze,” Flo said, “are as unlike a pair of objects as a candle and a flame.”

“True. I’ve been thinking of a death mask and the living human, but I like your analogy better.”

They began with the pylon on the eastern side of the temple. Aouadallah placed the implements wrapped in a linen roll on the rocky earth. With a small knife, he slit the string on a bundle of folio-size paper. “Five hundred sheets,” Gustave said, fanning the edge of the pile with his thumb. “A ream. Can you guess how many reams we brought on our trip?”

“Twenty?”

“More than two hundred.”

Flo was silent.

“Max arrived at this number, I believe, by multiplying his ambition by his insanity.”

She laughed. What a splendid time she was going to have on the desert trip listening to the Frenchmen cleverly bait each other.

“There are three steps in the manufacture of squeezes,” he explained. “The first is to remove debris from the reliefs.” He picked up one of several brushes and began to sweep the stone surface. She watched as he inserted the bristles into each incised line. He handed her an identical brush and indicated where she should begin.

Kneeling at the base of the pylon, Flo sensed the magnitude of the job. On close inspection, the stone was thick with the grit and grime of the ages. “Do you think we are the first to clean these stones since they were carved?” she asked. “That would be at least a millennium.” She loved the idea; it endowed her hands with the wise golden light of history.

He stopped his brushing to beam at her. “I see you have a penchant for the dramatic, Rossignol.”

Her cheeks were suddenly warm.
Rossignol
was the tolling of a bell that she wished for and waited to answer. She had felt the same eagerness in the library at home as a child. A hidden door in the shelves led to a secret room that WEN allowed her to enter when she performed recitations especially well or answered a difficult question. How fervidly she had craved her father’s approval, his pride in her intellect. “The dramatic? Is it dramatic to imagine that the last hand that touched this surface belonged to an ancient artisan?”

“I am certain the priests of the temple kept the place presentable. So perhaps it has been half a millennium. Would that please you as well?” He changed brushes, selecting a narrow one with stiffer bristles. She watched as he loosened dirt caught in the kilt of an Egyptian soldier. Or did only royalty wear the white linen skirts? “We must be careful,” he said, grunting between strokes, “when using the harder brush. It abrades the stone. Just flick it back and forth, like so.”

They continued to broom the surface for half an hour. Aouadallah, clad in only a loincloth and turban, joined them, working at a faster pace than either of them. Flo marveled at the rich hue of his skin, identical to the walnut chiffonier in her bedroom at Lea Hurst.
The sound of the whisking was pleasant, like a servant methodically sweeping a walkway.

The sun crept higher. Flo reached an area where the carving was obliterated, hacked out like the name of a friend fallen from favor. She touched his sleeve.

“Change of regime, I bet,” he said.

“Yes.” The redactors, she knew, had been impassioned, executing their erasures violently. They especially detested Pharaoh Akhenaten, who had decreed that the Egyptians worship only the sun god Aten. Everywhere his name was carved, they’d axed it out, a death sentence on a man already deceased.

Aouadallah retrieved a goatskin from his pack. “Wine, effendi?”

“Yes.
Merci.
” Taking the skin, he dispatched Aouadallah to the riverbank. They would need water for the next step in the process.

She watched him raise the goatskin above his head and, without spilling a drop, squeeze it until a red stream arced gracefully into his open mouth. She’d never manage that on the first try. She was no Saracen, no Bedouin, but a woman from Hampshire. The thought deflated her. She sighed as he repeated the performance.

“I shall help you,” he said, reading her thoughts. How much he communicated with his eyes!—the pleasure he’d take in teaching her, his certainty she’d succeed, the deep satisfaction of cool wine in a dry throat.

“All right.”

“I shall shoot the wine directly into your mouth.”

Was that a leer on his face?

“Do you still feel safe?” He pointed with one hand to the dark square of Aouadallah’s burnished back retreating down the hillside and lifted the goatskin with the other.

Why should she not feel safe? Safe if he squeezed the wine into her mouth (which proposal seemed mildly obscene)? If he were teasing, making fun of her, she didn’t care for it one bit. Just then, a globule of sweat fell from her nose onto her bodice. She withdrew a lace handkerchief from her sleeve and blotted it, turning away from him.
What time was it? The sun was still aslant—11
A.M
.? Nearly time to return, though they’d hardly begun. “I have no idea what you are talking about,” she snapped.

“I meant only that our chaperone has left us.”

She said nothing, still unsure of his meaning.

“I thought perhaps you hadn’t noticed we were alone,” he continued. “And then I thought it might amuse you to realize it.” His tone lent no closure to the words, which hung light as a bird in the air, as if he were prepared to continue flying explanations until she accepted one. “Have I offended you?” He looked crestfallen.

Had she once again overreacted? She worried that her brief flashes of temper were harbingers of imminent bitterness and pettiness—the fruits of a stifled and vague ambition. “I am not offended. I was merely confused. And”—she decided to follow his example of candor—“a bit frightened. I thought you were joking at my expense.”

He stared at her and she stared back, two birds that had just landed on the same branch. “I know that feeling,” he said at last, “of not knowing another’s intention and thinking it—”

“Thinking it,” she interrupted, “a weakness in yourself?” This, too, was bolder than she’d intended.

“Exactly.” He looked pleased, as if in light of the edginess of the subject, he admired her ability to identify it. He wiped his wet forehead with the sleeve of his robe. “We should stop cleaning now. Here comes the water.”

Bowed under a yoke with two buckets of river water, Aouadallah trudged toward them. He was breathing hard as he set the yoke down. The water looked like lime aspic.

From a knapsack, Gustave withdrew a sponge and submerged it. “This is the messy part!” he shouted with glee. Working rapidly with the sopping sponge, he wet down the stone, flinging small jeweled arcs and scattered beads of water. Flo followed suit with the enthusiasm of a child. In their wake, Aouadallah pasted sheets of paper onto the wet surface. Using a stiffer wire brush, Gustave pushed the paper into the reliefs until it adhered. Together, the three established
a smooth, mechanical movement, working until they’d papered the lower third of the wall. “That’s good,” said Gustave.

Wiping her brow, she stepped back to regard the result.

In the thin sliver of shade cast by the temple wall, Aouadallah dropped to the ground and lit a short-stemmed pipe. “Now we simply wait,” Gustave said. “This is the boring part.”

“The work is so physical,” Flo said. She felt clammy circles of sweat spreading out from her armpits. She hadn’t noticed the heat before, enjoying herself thoroughly. She’d always liked manual labor. Fanny considered it drudgery. Ironing, mucking out stalls, and grooming the ponies, all done on the sly.

“I think your dress may be ruined.” He touched a patch of the garment that had dried to a lighter shade than the rest.

“I don’t care.” She removed her bonnet and fanned herself. “When do we take them down?”

“As soon as they are dry. Not long.” He dipped a sponge in the bucket and mopped his neck with it, then shook back his hood to dribble water on his head. Flo felt much hotter watching him refresh himself. He stopped, dipped the sponge again, wrung it out, and leaned toward her. “May I?”

Before she could answer, he began carefully patting her face, the way a medical man would bathe a febrile patient. She remembered the story of his sister, Caroline. Had he sat by her bed when she was feverish? Was he reenacting the kindnesses he had lavished on her while she was dying? The thought was disquieting, and she pushed it from her mind. “Oh,” she said, “that feels quite wonderful.”

“Yes.” He continued to apply the sponge to her cheeks and temples, careful to avoid her sleeves. “I would make a terrible woman,” he said, “if only because of the clothing you must endure, though no one admires a well-cut frock more than I.”

She had closed her eyes, but opened them as he led her by the arm to a spot where they sat in a small wedge of dappled shade cast by a locust tree growing out of the temple floor.

“I have often tried to imagine what it must be like.”

“What what is like?” She was happy to listen to whatever he had to say as long as the sponging continued.

“Being a woman. Wearing all those petticoats and whalebone corsets. Shawls that catch on doorknobs and in wheel spokes. And tiaras.”

“Tiaras?”

“You know what I mean—the gewgaws, the paraphernalia.”

She did; still, she wished to draw him out. “But is not a man equally constrained in a vest and trousers, cravat, coat, and hat?” Water trickled down between her breasts. “None of us lives nearly so simply as the Nubians,” she added.

“True.”

“But I do understand,” she continued. “It’s a question of degree. How much whalebone? How many petticoats and hoops? I, for example, will not wear a hooped skirt.”

“Exactly! But a man’s clothing is more practical and less confining.”

“Yet you yourself have complained about the lack of freedom in middle-class life.” She touched the coarse cloth of his djellaba. “And here, you dress in robes.”

“I suppose we are both prisoners of our privilege.”

“Yes.” She felt suddenly anxious. This was the stopping point in her own contemplations, the place beyond which she could venture no further because her life was at odds with her beliefs, the place where self-doubt crept in to ruin her moral clarity. For the very privilege that so confined her had also spared her from bondage and hopelessness of a different sort.

“I should like to spend a month as a man,” she said, her face as frank as the sun.

“I can understand that.”

It was pleasant to talk with no boundaries and in the middle of an ancient temple with a whiff of Aouadallah’s pipe tobacco on the air, which she equated with serious male topics of discussion. She felt completely unconstrained, a child at play. “Are they dry yet? What if the wind comes up?”

Gustave rose and tested an edge of paper. “About another twenty
minutes, I think, though leaving them longer doesn’t hurt.” He folded his arms beneath his head and lay on the ground.

“Good,” said Flo. She thought fleetingly of Trout—surely it was past noon—and decided that she could be late. She’d stay until they took the squeezes down.

The sun was overhead, withdrawing any remaining shade, beating down directly on them.

Aouadallah had dozed off, his pipe beside him on the ground, his worry beads slipped from his fingers.

Gustave stood up again. “Can you picture me all tricked out in laces and fichus and millinery with beaded flowers? Or, conversely, beneath a veil?” He twisted his hood around so that the black pompoms dangled below his eyes.

She laughed until she was out of breath as he dramatized his femininity, shaking his hips, stringing a few Arabic words together into a song. “Habibi!” he croaked in a falsetto. “Darling, Allah, Karnak, Asiyoot, Edfu.” When he had reduced her to hiccups and tears, he tested the paper again. “Done,” he declared. His voice was naturally loud, she realized.