The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (37 page)

“Would you like some sand?” He interrupted her to forestall a fact-filled disquisition on bugs. “It’s as good as a bed warmer.”

“Oh. Yes, I shall try a little.” She extended her hand, palm up, and he filled it. The first stars were out, the sky a regal purple with pink and orange banners.

“Mm,” she hummed. “That is pleasant.”

“How is our fish doing?”

“Travel is completely wasted on Trout.” She sighed and studied the ground as if consigning her thoughts there, possibly envisioning her maid there, too.

“I hope I was not rude yesterday,” he said. What was it about men and women who didn’t know each other well? he wondered. Though romance was not his object, there was awkwardness simply because he was a man and she was a woman. Each time they met, they had to reestablish their footing, treading carefully, putting on their best faces. The brothel was easier, Caroline was easier, his dear mother, even, was easier. The pussyfooting about reminded him of taking exams at school. So exhausting, so much precision required!

“Rude?”

“When I cut you off talking about the baron’s book.”

“Oh, yes.”

An expression settled on her face that he had come to recognize. Her eyes seemed to lighten and her face to slacken, as if an inner vision were replacing whatever artifice or intention had held it taut. She inclined her head quizzically, and a smile gradually formed. When her lips parted and the teeth showed, she would have formulated a thought and was likely to say anything.

“You only startled me. You see, sometimes I talk too much.” She said this without any self-consciousness, trepidation, or shame, the way another woman might say, “I like apples.”

He was relieved; he had passed the exam and now they were back in the cave on Philae. “I thought you were ill at ease.”

“I don’t know if I was. It just happens. And once I start, I can’t abide silence, nor can I be derailed, except by a shock. I understood from your reply that I must stop.” She spilled the last few grains of warm sand from her hand. “Do you think it strange?”

“No.” He dribbled more warm sand on her hand and wrist. He had the urge to bury her in it as if they were children playing on the beach on a hot August day, baking together in the sun. “Not strange. It is . . . feminine. A feminine trait.”

“Oh?”

He explained that when he didn’t understand a woman he assumed it was because her experience was different from his. She listened dutifully. Only a few glimmers of twilight remained at the horizon. On the plain beyond the camp, he could see the outlines of Trout and Max, Trout with her hand on her straw hat.

In the light of the oil lamp, Miss Nightingale’s face glowed. A sudden tenderness came over him. She was lovely and also pitiful. He knew she must be rich and yet she suffered—clearly she suffered—because she had nothing to do in the world. He felt their connection come alive again like a foot gone numb prickling awake.

“That is sweet,” she pronounced. “But in my experience, women
are not so different from men as they are made out to be. Still, they are expected to act differently, to want different things, and most important, not to want too much.”

“Mon ami,”
he whispered. “I understand.” At that moment, he realized what he and the intense, birdlike Englishwoman had in common: ambition; hers to accomplish something in the world, his to accomplish something in
spite
of that world. “I know you wish to do good—”

“I do. Desperately.”

“But the world is a much nastier place than you imagine.” Her purpose was so virtuous, her motives so pure and unreasonable. It would be easy to worry about her, to wish to rescue her, though obviously she did not wish to be rescued by him or anyone.

“I am sure you are right. You have seen more of the world than I.”

Their conversation always followed this pattern—dark silences punctuated by profoundly bright and intimate jabs, like shining knives laying them painlessly open to each other.

A small commotion was under way beyond the encampment. Trout and Max were waving and shouting. He stood to get a better view.

“I hear something,” Rossignol said.

The sound of an animal running—pounding at top speed—catapulted through the empty air. And then, just as rapidly as he had vanished, Joseph materialized, galloping hard on his camel and weeping with joy.

16 April 1850

Two gory complications today: the salted lamb carcass was reeking by noon and we discarded it. The moment it hit the sand, vultures descended upon it, rending it in bloody chunks. The feeding was so brutal Miss Nightingale averted her gaze. Later in the afternoon, one of the pack camels broke a leg. Mohammed slit its throat and gave it to an Abadi tribesman
.

We have now ridden through a khamsin, which appeared at the horizon as a plume of dark brown with rusty margins that swept back and forth like a broom. The name derives from the Arabic for “fifty,” because the storm sometimes lasts as many days, long enough to drive man and beast insane. Khamsin sand is a horizontal as well as a vertical force. It pours like salt, ascends in billows, and slashes sideways like rain, wrapping the traveler in its stinging net. In the eyes, it cuts like splinters of glass. It can move or make mountains. One camel driver told Joseph that he saw an entire caravan buried in less than an hour
.

Max is sick. He ate something at the Ababdeh village and has been puking and shitting ever since. He has a fever and speaks to no one. The rest of us are hale and hearty
.

Despite bad food and water, my mind has been a beehive, producing ideas to fill the emptiness of the desert. Three schemes for a book are buzzing in my head, all stories of insatiable love, whether earthly or mystical, and all, no doubt, the unconscious plotting of that stubborn romantic who lives, much beleaguered, in my heart (and who had such a pitiful second visit to Kuchuk Hanem)
.

The first, “A Night with Don Juan,” worries me—wouldn’t it still entail writing about whores? And if he fucks everyone, where is the suspense, where the makings of a plot? The second, still lacking a title, is the mythological legend of the Egyptian woman, Anubis, who wished to screw a god. Same problems as the first idea. Finally, I am considering writing about a rural Flemish girl, a young mystic who dies a virgin. (I don’t know what she dies of, but she will have to expire if she won’t fuck!) No whore here, but a heroine who succumbs to spiritual masturbation after practicing the manual kind. Is there anyone I would not offend no matter how delicately I approach her obsessions?

While I agonize over my writing, my mother hatches plans for me. In her last letter, she again mentioned her wish that I find a little job. To remain respectable, she thinks I must do something
visible that other people can verify. Appearances impress her inordinately. I wrote back immediately, pointing out that the pittance I could earn would be inconsequential and that it is a delusion to believe that one can work a day job and still write in the evening. Finally, I sealed my fate, I hope, by hinting that a job would keep me from spending time with her. When I get home, I shall explain the great undertaking I am about to begin—as soon as I know what it is myself
.

Gustave had little inclination to converse after spending eleven hours a day on a camel. First, fatigue settled in like lead weights. The landscape was exhausting—unremittingly splendid or unceasingly boring. Either way it deadened the mind.

Max, normally gregarious and loquacious, was in a stupor from drinking rakı. Since water was in short supply, he sipped it straight, hoping to settle his guts or numb them into submission. Gustave had lost track of the number of times Max dismounted to shit or puke. The women stared off in the other direction for modesty’s sake. Their camels couldn’t abide each other and began to spit if they came too close.

After three days in the desert, Gustave hungered for a color other than brown. Especially green. There was nothing green. The desert was a gigantic theater hung with numberless scrims in shades of tan, ecru, ivory, beige, and mauve. When the wind blew, he passed through them as if through scratchy tulle. Though he had never enjoyed the taste of plain water, he’d never again take it for granted, nor for that matter small beer, the cheapest blended cabernet, coffee, or tea. Nor the transforming power of sugar, though not even sugar had made the water at Hagee Soolayman palatable that day. Execrable taste and odor! Rotten eggs with a smear of fresh dog shit.

They ate the last two chickens for dinner and afterward Max and Trout went to bed. Everyone was exhausted, having ridden an extra two hours by moonlight before the meal.

Gustave and Miss Nightingale stretched out on blankets in the open air. Her logorrhea seemed to have subsided completely. They lounged in a comfortable, even velvety silence together. How pleasant it was simply to enjoy each other’s presence.

Gustave stared up at the sky. The darkness seemed to absorb him the way air drank in moisture. “The desert at night is so mysterious,” he said. “It’s like walking across a room in which the ceiling disappears. Suddenly, instead of plaster rosettes overhead there are stars.”

“Mm,” she agreed, leaning forward slightly.

“Then a little farther, the walls dissolve. Now you do not know what obstacles lie in your path. You might be treading the edge of the earth, about to walk into the ocean, or off a cliff. Every molecule has lost its reflective shine, its very identity, to the darkness.”

“I do like your rhapsodies,” she said.

Could she see his face in the darkness? He could barely discern hers. He was avid to continue. “Daylight is different here, too, because you see everything without interruption and for a great distance; on the other hand, there is only nothingness to see. Night: a sponge that sucks you up inside it. Daytime: a bright nothingness that spits you out.”

Rossignol continued the thread. “This explains perfectly what I have been feeling—claustrophobia at night, and in the daylight, a sort of paralyzing humility.”

“Yes.”

“Mm.”

They both lay back, content to return to the rich silence.

The third night, my dear friend:

If Plato buried his proverbial table in the eastern desert, it would quickly be eaten away by the sun and scouring gusts, proving what he said about reality—that ultimately, it consists not of things but of abstractions—ideas about things, i.e., the idea of a table buried in sand. My dear Bouilhet: reality is mental! Any
other explanation is wishful thinking. Reality is therefore unreliable, something perceived through thought and dedication, or, if you are a writer, by judicious decanting into words. Today as I scanned the huge surround in vain for a trace of greenery, it struck me that if reality is not substance—the thing described—then it must be the way it is described—which means style! Style is everything. When I realized this, a spasm passed through me ten times stronger than any orgasm. I must focus on my style; everything else is negotiable. (Though I still need an ostensible subject other than whores and saints.) This insight was the gift and the lesson of the desert’s style, which consists not of sand or mountains, but the light, which creates mirages and other optical fascinations. If I were Max, I’d photograph the emptiness of the desert instead of all the man-made attempts to subdue or outlast it, for to ride in the desert is to experience firsthand the shifting and shifty nature of what we call reality or truth
.

These realizations so thrilled me, that as my camel dipped down for me to alight, I lost my footing and tumbled to the ground. (A camel is like a boat: when one dismounts, the earth feels strange, the legs even stranger.) Good old Max rushed over, worried I was in the throes of an attack
.

These past three days, thrown together in close quarters, I have learned that despite my dismissal of most people in theory, once I’ve spent time with someone, my sympathy seeps out against my will like mother’s milk at her infant’s cries. My curiosity also makes it difficult to remain aloof. In short, I have taken an interest in Trout. Her stoicism moves me. Also, the unpredictability of her questions and answers, some of which are naive and some worldly. She and I have conversed in short bursts with Miss Nightingale or Max translating. Miss Nightingale seems grateful for the attention to her maid, as it lightens her burden of being the woman’s only human connection
.

Like most working people, Trout knows nothing of politics and revolution and yet I don’t think I am mistaken when I say
that revolutions are always undertaken in the name of people like Trout. Her family lives in straitened circumstances, working on farms or, worse, as colliers
.

Tomorrow we reach Koseir. Writing the name raises my pulse. This is the farthest east we shall travel, at least in Egypt
.

I hope the gods continue to send poems and plays your way. Read some Shakespeare aloud for me. And now, my oil lamp sputters, my eyes close
. Adieu,
dear friend
.

Je t’embrasse.
G. Bourgeoisophobus

19

KOSEIR

G
ustave was excitable and nervous on the last day of the caravan. It was his habit, he explained, to grow increasingly impatient the closer he came to his goal. He hounded Joseph with questions: How many kilometers until Koseir? How many more hours? At midday, when the wind shifted, he sniffed the air, clapped his hands, and howled like a wolf, convinced he smelled the Red Sea. Dismounting his camel, he charged over the next rise. Flo sniffed the air, too—not a hint of coolness or salt. Moments later he returned, crestfallen. For the next two hours he alternated between clownish prattle and strained silences during which she thought he might spontaneously combust from the heat of his anticipation.