The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (6 page)

He hadn’t intended to be a hermit. Biology and destiny had set in motion a dire sequence of events that changed the climate of his life, reducing the seasons to a perpetual winter. He had to hibernate to survive the tragedies that befell him. The writing, he thought, had saved his sanity.

The run of bad luck began at Christmas of 1846, with what Dr. Flaubert dubbed “the fall from Grace”—Gustave’s first nervous attack. He was twenty-five, home from law school on vacation at the reins of a wagon beside his brother. All he remembered before passing out was a blaze of lights and a sudden draining of strength and sensation from his body, as if he had been painlessly incinerated. Achille had barely managed to retrieve the reins in time to avoid a spill.

The family had feared for his life. The word “epilepsy” being more a curse than a diagnosis, the doctors concluded that he suffered from an unknown neurological malady. Over the next few months, despite rest, bloodletting, and the insertion of a seton in the fatty folds of his neck to drain bad vapors from his body, he suffered more seizures. Dr. Flaubert decided Gustave should not risk the stresses of law school for at least a year.

Secretly, he was elated. He could write, which was all he wished to do in the first place and the only thing he’d ever done well. Although “the fall from Grace” was a joke, Gustave knew that his father was disappointed. He had ambitions for his sons: Achille had already risen to eminence in medicine and worked alongside him at the county hospital; he expected Gustave to excel in another profession, preferably the law.
Flaubert père
had no use for scribblers and
had paid scant attention to the plays Gustave wrote and performed as a boy. Nor had he shown interest later in the novel he completed at nineteen.

The following December, his father discovered a red lump on his own thigh. Achille recruited an expert and together they operated, but the site became infected, and in March, the great surgeon died.

Gustave’s life was beginning to read like the Book of Job.

Two months after his father’s death, tragedy befell Caroline, his only sister, his little tomboy. It had been difficult to watch her fall in love and marry a feckless old schoolmate of his. Madame Flaubert, ever the worrier, had insisted that the whole family accompany the newlyweds on their honeymoon to Italy, as if a hovering crowd could prevent her catching a sore throat or chest cold. If only Mother’s concern had extended to advice about birth control! For despite the appalling lack of privacy (ten of them traveling together by post chaise through the Midi and on to Genoa by boat), Caroline managed to become pregnant. Two weeks after Flaubert père passed to his Maker, she gave birth to baby Caroline. Within a week, mother Caroline was ailing and, two agonizing months later, died of childbed fever. Her husband fell to pieces; Madame Flaubert took the baby home to be raised by the Flauberts, reduced now to two in residence and Achille, four miles away at the hospital in Rouen.

His dear mother teetered on the verge of collapse. There were tears at every meal and wailing from her rooms when the lamps were extinguished at bedtime. Gustave feared she’d die of grief, even with the infant to love. He offered succor; she accepted. The irony of it! The son who had been a disaster in the making without prospects, who had failed his law school examinations twice, became indispensable. He was flattered to be so desperately needed and proud to save his sweet mother.

Law school was never again mentioned. To keep his sanity while he played the part of loyal son, doting uncle, and aspiring writer, he adopted an eccentric regimen that he stuck to for the next two years. He arose at noon and conducted himself like a family man; but at night,
when everyone was sleeping, he labored over his pages, shouting out words as he composed them, crying or laughing as the text dictated.

He was all the more aggrieved by the fourth and final loss, one that felt like a betrayal but was in fact another wedding. His closest friend—his hero—Alfred Le Poittivin, font of all he knew about cynicism, sex, and art, the man who had taken him to his first brothel and suggested Saint Anthony as the subject for the novel, had caved in to family pressures. He took a wife and cut off his former friends. Gustave never saw him again until he lay on his deathbed, the victim of tuberculosis, a scant two years later. Alfred’s absence had left a gaping hole in Gustave’s life only partially filled by Max and Bouilhet. Gustave often thought that if Alfred had lived, he would have known for sure if the novel were worthy, for Alfred had been peerless in matters of substance and taste. Gustave didn’t have the same confidence in Max and Bouilhet.

• • •

The odor of Turkish tobacco, stronger than its European counterpart, wafted toward him. Max had emerged from his tent to smoke. “You should write a travel book on Greece to launch your literary career,” he said. “You’ve read the ancient Greeks, you could insert literary landmarks. Or we could collaborate again.” Tubes of smoke issued from both nostrils.

Max’s timing could not be worse, given Gustave’s growing doubts about his literary insight. They
had
written an essay together following their walking tour of Brittany. Precisely four copies existed. He had never thought of it as anything but an exercise in friendship and literary description. To call it a book was preposterous.

“I want to launch my career with a bang,” he replied, “with a novel, possibly a play.” For the last year and a half, he and Bouilhet had been studying dramatic structure by reading the greatest playwright of all, Shakespeare. How he missed their Sundays together, smoking, eating, sharing manuscripts. “Travel writing is a lesser genre,” he added. Would Max take offense? Surely he sensed his sincerity. “I speak for myself, of course, but I must follow my own lights.”

Max smiled knowingly. “A lesser genre, perhaps, but a travel book is less risky. If it succeeds, fine. If it doesn’t, the critics ignore it.” He took a last drag on his cigarette. “And it wouldn’t take much work to add to the journal you’re already keeping. Just promise you’ll consider it.” He squashed the cigarette under his boot.

“I shall, Abu Dabu. Not to change the subject,
mon ami,
but I have solved the mystery of why these monuments are so neglected: the ancient Egyptians are as foreign to these Arabs as they are to you and me.”

Max nodded. “True. But any fool can see the monuments are extraordinary. Why treat them like rubble when the whole world reveres them? Think of the tourists and money they would attract if they were restored.”

Joseph appeared and stood next to Gustave’s blanket, glancing diffidently at the ground as he waited for a break in the conversation.

“It’s a marvel anything gets accomplished with the confusion of so many nations living cheek by jowl.”

“Speaking of confusion . . .” Max nipped into his tent and returned, holding an Ottoman calendar, its squares full of dizzying languages and symbols. Gustave had given up trying to decipher it. All he knew was that the Ottoman day began at sunset, making it nearly impossible to get times straight when meeting with officials of the empire outside major cities. “We will wake at sunrise,” Max announced. He consulted the calendar again. “Which is at six thirty-eight.” He went back inside.

“What is it, Joseph?” Gustave asked.

“A favor, effendi? A small favor?”

“Certainly. What can I do for you?

They’d hired Joseph based on a letter commending him as a reasonably reliable and honest man—high praise, the writer said, in a profession rife with scoundrels and swindlers. To date he had been a fine dragoman, never truculent, though often reserved. As he approached, Gustave inhaled the stink of aged sweat, sour ass, dirty hair, and other less identifiable bodily odors. He realized he had never
seen Joseph bathe or change clothes. In the morning, he passed a rag across his brow, sloshed water in his mouth, and spit. His complete toilette apparently.

“My new esposa is write,” he said, shyly pulling a packet of letters from his foul jacket. “She is young and
bellissima,
has not twenty years. She is been with French nuns.”

“It’s wonderful to receive a letter, isn’t it?”

“Ah, when she is write me.” Joseph raised his eyes to the sky.

The man reeked so bad that Gustave had to breathe through his mouth. Did he bathe at home with his young and beautiful wife? Surely the nuns had taught her good hygiene.

“Effendi,” Joseph began again, “you read them to me? She is write in français.”

“Oh, yes, of course. I didn’t realize.”

He opened the first letter and skimmed it. A demand for money. (“Send it immediately, I tell you.”) No salutation or valediction. Complete lack of courtesy and affection. The handwriting was faint, done in pencil. “She says she loves you very much.”

“And the other?” He handed it to him.

“Have you shown these to anyone else?”

“No, effendi. These sailors no read. And no privacy.”

“Here she is saying she misses you.” He touched the page with his finger. “And, again, she loves you.”

“You read fast, effendi. There is more?”

Telling the truth, he said, “She wants to buy a new frock.”

“I know this.” Joseph looked down at his hands.

The other six letters contained more shrill demands for money. She had run up bills with tradesmen. The dressmaker was insisting that she return a garment. The grocer was going to refuse her credit. (He threatens to cut off my balls, she’d written, parroting Joseph’s crudeness, or crude herself?) “She sounds lovely,” he said. He couldn’t wait to tell Max.

“She read,” Joseph said, smiling. “I love for that.” He frowned. “I no read, effendi. If I read, I no do this work, I join French Legion.”

• • •

Stretched on his blanket, Gustave marked time until everyone had bedded down. He enjoyed such perfect privacy in his study at Croisset that he could no longer so much as daydream if he thought someone were observing him.

Beyond the outline of his toes, the campfire crackled and glowed, while overhead, the stars inched through their celestial arcs. He located the Big Dipper, then connected the studs of Orion’s belt, which reminded him of Kuchuk Hanem’s extravagant jewelry. He liked the rhythm of her name—the little click like a snap of the fingers in the middle of it. KU-chuk HA-nem. Golden creature, instrument of pleasure.

Like other Arabs, she called him
Abu Chanab
—Father Mustache. Why, she asked, did he cover such a fine mouth? Twice she offered to shave it off, taking his face between her warm, oily hands to appraise it. Peering back at her, he had glimpsed her most alluring feature: a small rotten incisor amid an otherwise dazzling smile.

The day they met, she had declared her importance by sending an emissary named Bambeh to the
cange
when they docked in Esneh. Did they wish to see dancing girls? Though she also was an
alma,
Bambeh looked not like a trollop, but a pretty sprig of a girl. She had brought her mistress’s pet lamb with her. Hennaed with polka dots and muzzled in black velvet, the animal followed her like a dog. The sight of the two of them had brought tears to his eyes. They
did
wish to see dancing girls, Max told her, but they had plans for the morning. She’d waited two hours while he and Max visited a shop above a school to buy ink and scouted two more monuments. When they returned at noon, they found her perched demurely at Rais Ibrahim’s elbow, the crew at her feet, a trail of sheep pellets on the deck.

Attracting stares and cries for baksheesh from Arabs squatting outside mud huts, they followed Bambeh to a courtyard as different from the town that surrounded it as a dream is from waking life. Instead of the dust and mud of Esneh, the courtyard was tinted with
confectioners’ hues—the pink of desert roses and the brilliant scarlet of two flowering pomegranate trees. Walls painted pale aqua set off the vibrant green of plants in colorful glazed pots.

The first moment he saw Kuchuk Hanem something inside him had melted and not solidified since. The sensation was identical to looking at certain paintings. The plasm of his being streamed invisibly toward the canvas, completing it, as though the painting had been waiting for him since the artist finished it.

Clad in pink silk trousers, she was perfuming her hands. She had just completed her bath, Joseph explained. He caught the odor of rosewater and something like turpentine as she bent to replace a water jug, her bronze arms rippling in the sunlight. Through the filmy purple gauze wrapping her torso, he saw the clear outline of her breasts and felt himself stir.

A statuesque, coffee-colored Syrian, she embodied his fantasy of the East. Her eyes were dark, painted with antimony, her eyebrows black, her nostrils wide and flaring. Her costume was straight from the seraglio. On her head sat a tarboosh ornamented with a gold disk and fake emerald; a blue tassel fanned out over her shoulders like a cockade; and a spray of artificial white flowers was fastened to her hair from ear to ear. And what hair!—as elaborate as the wigs of the ancient Egyptians. Thick, black, and wavy, it was parted in the center into two long, bushy pigtails that were braided together at the nape.

She stepped toward him, accompanied by the faint tinkling of her gold jewelry. Bangles collided on her wrists, while her necklace, a triple rope of beads, whispered like brushed cymbals. Above this sea of sound, her hoop earrings swayed silently. A golden aura enveloped her, as if she had been dipped in that metal or fashioned directly from it, embellished with a goldsmith’s granules, globes, and darts to complement the iridescent undulations of her skin.

She greeted them in French. He took her hand and kissed it, noting a fine line of blue writing tattooed on her arm, which he later learned was a verse from the Koran, though not what it said. After
perfuming his and Max’s hands with attar of roses, she asked if they would like some entertainment. Before he could answer, Max took her arm, and the two vanished down a staircase.

Minutes later, Max shouted, and Gustave followed his voice to the lower level, where Kuchuk lay on a kilim-covered divan. After Max left the room, Gustave entered her for a rapid
coup
more like a greeting than lovemaking.