by John Updike
“The air grows worse,” my accomplice muttered.
I ventured to say, though my larynx was clogged by fear as by a cloth stopper, “Mayhap we are approaching the House of Gold, where the mummy reigns, with his rotting nose and urn of foul innards. A pox on Horus! May Anubis dine on his own excrement in the life everlasting!” Insulting the dead and their gods braced our courage. We had come through the First Divine Passage, whose triple doorway had forced upon us two months’ worth of gnawing circumvention, done in the secret stretches of the night, while the priests’ guards slept, content with their bribes and stupid on fermented barley. We had negotiated the Hall of Hindering; its tangle of decoy corridors and stairs had been long ago decoded by a trail of henna powder, left by a thief himself now as dead as the Ruler of All in his onyx sarcophagus. Along the walls of a long sloping corridor, bright colors leaped forward into the lights of our lamps—scenes, crowded yet tranquil, of seasonal pleasures along the Nile, of seed being sown and grain being harvested, of fish being plucked from the transparent river waves painted as zigzags of a blue weaving, of cattle being herded and a hippopotamus being hunted, of workmen assembling a temple and dancing girls with heads of abundant knitted hair applying kohl to the rims of their softly staring eyes. Feathered ibises and ducks, solemn oryxes and monkeys accompanied the brown broad-shouldered human figures undergoing the rites of daily life, a life the dead king in his House of Gold was still enjoying amid his jewelled furniture and dolls of faïence—the faithful ushabtiu—in the chamber we had not yet reached.
Now the walls on both sides showed a procession bearing treasures toward this chamber, and hieroglyphic lists of the prayers that must be said to Thoth and Ra on the boat journey to the land of the dead. The masses of the stone around and above us pressed on our spirits, making it still harder to breathe. Centuries of stillness had thickened the air’s taste. Carefully picking our way through an area of collapsed rubble, we came to the Hall of Truth, where murals showed the monarch’s heart being weighed by Osiris, with Ammut squatting near at hand waiting to devour the heart if it was found unworthy. By the flutter of our lamps, the paintings were hasty, sketchy. The king must have died before the tomb was quite completed, because the murals ceased. The walls grew rough—the chisel marks slashing frantically in the wavering light of our naked flames—and the ceiling grew lower. Of the narrowing passageway that loomed to our lamps it was difficult to say whether it was fortuitously unfinished or an intended trap. The slanting ceiling compelled us to lower our heads and bend our knees. When crouching became impossible, we crawled in the pale dust like crippled animals, hobbled by the necessity of carefully moving the lamps ahead of us. A spidering of our double shadows filled the dwindling space. The walls squeezed inward so that we could no longer crawl side by side. A faint breath, damp as if from a ghost of the Nile, brushed our faces and made our delicate flames stagger. When they had regained steadiness I made out in the dim dust a lintel leaning at an angle above a spill of rubble. The irregular aperture might have admitted, with not an inch to spare, the head and shoulders of a slithering man.
My young companion had pressed up beside me, in a space scarcely wide enough for one body, and joined his lamp to mine to cast light into the space beyond. We saw at the very edge of our lamps’ merged glow what appeared to be a giant gold face. Gold: the skin of deity. Black irises glared from within whites pieced together of alabaster flakes. Shadows flickered across the immutable great features in a counterfeit of agitation. The inert weight of the stone all about us seemed to be meditating an action. We talked in whispers, so as not to blow out our lamps with our words.
“You go first,” I said.
“No,” came the sighed response, causing my flame to shrink to its blue root on the fibrous wick before regaining, orange and erect, its strength. “You, master,” his light voice urged huskily in my ear. He was in a sweat of fear; I could smell it even through the dust.
“You are younger and more slender,” I explained.
“But you are stronger and more courageous. You have lived more life.”
“There is nothing in there,” I stated, fighting panic as his slippery, fragrant body pressed upon mine in our corset of mute stone.
“There is something.”
“Our fortune, it may be,” I insisted, attempting to wriggle backward, to let him slide forward. “Loot for a lifetime’s worth of feasting. Go in, I tell you. There is nothing”
“Nothing is not nothing,” he moaned. His gritty naked knees flexed convulsively into my chest; in the suffocating closeness I smelled his uncircumcised sex. As if by an impatient breath, both our lamps were blown out. Absolute darkness encased us.
ii. The Dollhouse
WHITE LIGHT knifes beneath the window shade a minute or two earlier each morning, in strict accordance with the planetary clockworks. The light is bald, assaultive, a supernal revolution removed from the lulling, sifting dawns of December and January, dawns which bid us roll over and drink another half-hour of delicious grainy gray sleep. On the bare roads strewn with salt and sand, on the scruffy lawns and fields whose grass lies matted in brown swirls like a species of carpet, on the metallic branches and twigs of winter’s stripped trees, on the pebbles gouged up from beside the driveway by the snowplows and scattered across the asphalt, this light presses with a blank urgency, beckoning everything into a painful precision. The earth is like a nude woman flash-bulbed in her bathroom at an awkward transitional moment of her toilette. Despite her wrinkled ugliness, we lust for her.
Other signs of earliest spring: On a wet day the lilac buds are visibly yellow, pointilles daily growing plumper and wetter in the gray atmosphere. Little mossy patches appear in the lawn, even before green snowdrop noses break the crust in the border beds. The birds are noisier in the woods; the crows gather in shuffling, ominous clumps in our oaks, and the mourning doves double and redouble their throaty cooing as they cluster in the thicket of mountain ash, sumac, and sassafras to the right of the driveway, below the little straightaway. Cumulus clouds appear, spaced in a sky of a guileless, powdery blue, and there is a twinkly carefree quality about the way the sea now wears its whitecaps. Even though a perishable March snowfall restores us for a few days to picture-book winter, these vernal signs persist and expand—cracks in the comforting encasement of hibernal sterility. Farther afield, willows yellow down by the pond on the Willowbank golf course, and along Route 128, where there used to be miles of overhanging trees, the surviving maples show a distilled red vapor in their massed ranks.
I was a student at U. Mass, in Amherst when I first rode Route 128.1 was nineteen, soon to be twenty. In the spring, when the white light hit and the air warmed the trees into a chartreuse froth, a thirst would arise in our throats, there in that desolate inland campus at Amherst, that drab Satanic diploma mill, for the sight of the sea, and the sensation of sand beneath our bare feet, and the aristocratic scent of salt air. Josh Greenstein, my roommate, owned a white ′69 Pontiac Trans Am convertible that looked like a bumpy long bathtub; we would giggle getting into it, as if it were brimful. Josh and his steady, Hester Rosenthal, who went against racial type by being blonde and blue-eyed, sat up front while we in back got the full benefit of the wind, which battered our eardrums and dried our faces tight as drumheads. We would drive north to Route 2 and then east through Concord to 128. The road, flecked with the beginnings of the glassy high-tech boom, passed through Burlington, Wake field, Lynnfield, Peabody, Danvers, Beverly, and Manchester on the way to Wingershaek Beach in West Gloucester. Or we turned north on Route 1 to Crane Beach, in Ipswich, or farther north to Plum Island, off Newburyport. The terrain held clapboard houses few and far between, perched on the edge of greening lawns and fresh-plowed fields, amid steel-blue ponds and spatterings of forest in bud. Forsythia, dogwood, magnolia, cherry, and apple overlapped in a quilt of blossoms. In Topsfield, Route 1 dipped down to cross the gush of a swollen brown river. This antique superhighway went straight as a ruler from Boston t
o Newburyport, taking the hills as if with seven-league boots. When we crossed over to 1A, along the coast, winter-blanched salt marshes reached to where sky and sea joined. There were wooded islands in the marshes, and long straight ditches. Salt hay (can it be?) had been picturesquely gathered into stacks on wooden staddles. The air battering our faces had salt in it, and Josh and Hester sang along with the radio: “Delta Dawn,” “Rocky Mountain High,” “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” Arrival at the beach parking lot had something heroic about it—we had had the vision and now, after many miles and many songs and not too many stops to pee and eat a hot dog, had attained it.
And who is this sitting beside me, wearing a wind-whipped red bandana and a squint that makes the planes of her face look romantic and detached, like a lean Indian squaw’s? It is my steady, my girl and first wife, the fair Perdita. She was a lanky, taciturn, frequently tan art major who was to bear me five children and remain, loyal if unenraptured, my spouse to nearly the end of the twentieth century. Our children, though slower to marry and breed than we were, have now produced ten grandchildren—nine boys, and a final, adorable female infant. Born so close together, our children were fed and bathed and taken for outings as a close group, and to this day exhibit toward each other a symbiotic deference and regard. They married, for instance, strictly in the order in which they were born, and bore their children—two each—with the same sense of priority. Their generational mode is to have stable small families, in contrast to the large and messy and eventually doomed households in which they were raised. In further evidence of their conservatism, all reside within this state, strung out within an hour’s drive along Route 128, so that the ancient highway bears familial as well as romantic associations for me. Its hinterland, out of sight beyond the thinned trees and hazardously sharp turnoffs, is rich for me with small backyards and electronically overequipped living rooms and soccer fields and elementary-school auditoriums where I have attempted, however ill-rehearsed, to play the role of grandfather.
The catastrophic dip in world population has not, oddly, brought back the stretches of forest through Peabody and Danvers that I recall. Perhaps there can be no replacing the landscape of youth. The towering, freshly leafing branches scudded past Perdita’s profile; she squinted with stoic calm while an edge of the red bandana beat at her temple like a frantic pulse, her hazel eyes mere slits, her pursed lips cracked and dry. We smoked, and our cigarettes kept flinging sparks and hot ash on our faces and clothes. We whisperingly would confer, the destination at last reached, about asking Josh to put the top up on our return drive. A chem. major, on the gastroenterologist track, he wore thick glasses, had a bad complexion, and could be prickly about what he fancied his prerogatives. Hester, that flaxen-haired JAP, was oblivious to the discomfort of those in the back seat. In the tumult of the wind and scudding scenery my eyes fastened on Perdita’s exposed knee, already tanned by sessions of semi-undress on the grassy slopes encircling squarish Campus Pond. When we at last arrived at the beach, and clamorously went forward to dip our toes over the edge of the continent, she would hoist up her winter skirt and expose her lean legs to mid-thigh. Holding her skirt with one hand, she would bend over the shallow, sliding shore waves like some kind of gatherer, a timeless figure from Millet, posing thus until the tumbling water’s frigid grip hurt her ankles and she scampered back, laughing with the pain. When we all lay together behind a hot dune the grains of sand would fall from her drying bare feet one by one, like the sands in an hourglass that silently steal away even the most tranquil and disaster-spared life. I vowed I would live in sight of the sea, and I have.
Her feet were exquisite, now that I think about them—the pads of the soles thick and rounded, the little toes lifted off the ground and clearly vestigial. She was the most placid, the most adrift in nature’s currents, of the women I have known, or perhaps that is the way I prefer to remember her, memory being no less self-serving than our other faculties. Her genes now float up toward me from the faces of my grandchildren, diluted by a quarter. My daughters startle me at times by their resemblance to Perdita, her way of absent-mindedly posing, with a certain graceful solidity, as if letting some invisible current flow through them. The middle of my daughters has married an African, from Togo, and it has changed the temper of the entire family, for the better. Split, or extended, by divorce, we did not quite know how to be a family until the Africans showed us. Adrien has many brothers and sisters, in many countries, getting advanced degrees. Though very slender, he speaks in a deep voice, slowly, in an accent in which French and English elements are charmingly mingled. His great-great-grandfather, a clerk and translator for the occupiers, spoke German; Togoland was a German territory until 1914, when Allied colonial armies from the Gold Coast and Dahomey invaded. Would that the trench war in Europe had been resolved as quickly!—the entire maimed and vindictive century now past would have been different. Adrien presides over my children in a way I never did. My status, shadowy at best since my defection from their mother, a matter of sneak college visitations and shamefaced appearances at weddings and baptisms, took on a sudden refulgence with his arrival among us. My sins were brushed aside. His own father had lived in Tanzania, across the great continent, an implementor of Nyerere’s ujamaa, and with an array of informal wives had bestowed upon Adrien a number of half-siblings. This was patriarchal behavior. I was given a Togolese robe of many colors, and took my place in the outdooring ceremonies whereby my two brown grandsons were presented to the sky god. I was given cards in which the appropriate blessings in Kwa were phonetically spelled; pronouncing in a loud voice, I tipped the glass of gin, a substitute for palm wine, three times (inwards, toward my breast, not outwards) to offer libation to the ancestors within the earth. Being an African grandfather was made realer to me than being an American father. My adult children, thanks to Adrien’s African magic, suddenly had permission to love me again.
Adrien and Irene and little Olympe and étienne live in one of Boston’s endless western suburbs, a slice of land wedged, with its lone factory, strip mall, and playing field, a thrifty distance beyond fashionable Concord and Lincoln. I drive along 128, and then miles of 62. Their house stands in a tract of development on a hillside, with a view of muddy yards and abandoned plastic tricycles. Adrien and Irene go out, after a few grave and girlish, respectively, remarks to me, to dinner and a local movie house, while the boys and I watch some unintelligible (to me) cartoon video that has been thoughtfully provided, and then I try to put them to bed before their parents come back. This is the game, and they know we are playing it, and they tumble and frisk upstairs and down not quite defiantly, just making everything, from getting into their pajamas to brushing their teeth, maddeningly difficult. The house is full of masks and knotted, braided, beaded pagan symbolizations from Togo; a studio portrait of me, taken at the request of the firm at some stage of my advancement through the ranks of Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise, occupies a place of honor in the exiguous living room. Yet this fetish does not ensure discipline. The boys, dodging my bedtime attentions, have lovely pearly smiles, like mischievous Irene’s when she was their age, but with lavender gums. Their eyes are of an astonishing inky solemnity—not a fleck of even nutmeg in the blackness of the irises. Their hair is pure Adrien: helmets of kinky frizz, pleasingly springy to touch. I can’t stop petting their heads. Where else can I touch an African coiffure? It was something my life hadn’t promised me. I wonder what barber, in this nearly all-white town, knows how to give them a haircut. They are seven and five. They like, amazingly, being read to, which I would have thought was too tame an entertainment for children raised among VCRs and PCs and CD players; Adrien teaches computer science at a local prep school and the baseboards of his house crawl with wires, plugs, adaptors, and winking power-surge preventers. So, lying between my grandsons on the bottom bunk of their bunk beds, I drone through one battered, shiny tale after another of fire engines and milk trucks, of elephants wearing trousers and party gowns, of bewildered king
s and gentle giants and witches in shingled huts in forests where medieval Germany merges, in terms of housing, with the round huts of Togoland. After a while the springy soft heads nestling against my cheeks become less restive, and I make my first attempt at abandoning them to their dreams, an attempt which usually collapses in a flurry of scampering footsteps and brotherly blows and cries of recrimination. With a weary imitation of indignation and surprise I mount the stairs again and resettle them in their beds, only to find, on my next return up the creaking stairs, them together in the lower bunk, Olympe asleep but a glitter of wakeful black still caught in étienne’s long curved eyelashes. He fidgets against sleep’s tightening grip. His bottom lightly touches that of his older brother, through their flannel pajamas; their round heads are side by side on one pillow. I never had a brother. Any moment, Adrien and Irene will be coming back, with a loud crack of the front door that often wakes the boys into a scamper of gleeful welcome. I notice, as Etienne in the dusk of the lower bunk settles into self-forgetfulness, that his bare foot, dilutedly brown, bears a cashew-shaped little toe as vestigially uplifted as Perdita’s.
This is set down, I suppose, in the search for meaning. As one supernatural connection after another fails, the chain of ancestors and descendants—the transcendent entity of family—offers to solace us. But the dissolution of ego, which family demands, is just what we fight. Immortal DNA offers as cold a comfort as the transmigration of souls. If we can’t take our memories with us, why go?
Spring for me has always been the season to fear death. I wake heavily, with something undigestible gnawing my stomach, in the intensifying white light. My idiot subconscious, meanwhile, responds to the time of year with dreams of sex. Last night, as Deirdre’s lean body rested light on the mattress beside me—her long tanned bony back is heart-breakingly boyish—I dreamed I was making love to, of all people, Grace Wren. My woken self could not believe the passion with which I lay my body on top of hers (trumping it) and I ground my pelvis against the auburn-haired ace of hearts at the juncture of her legs. Her breathless face, her ample (but more youthfully, jauntily so; this was the Grace of twenty years ago) breasts, and that hairy crotch holding its responsive buds and folds were all under me with such passionate reality that my poor hard-on ached like a bursting bladder. In my dream the focus of my pain had recourse to her warm mouth, she was blowing me, she was giving me pure head, for she had no body, there was just her severed head with its closed eyes sucking. Horrors! I awoke with the monstrousness of it, the Dahmeresque atrociousness. It was as bad as something in Greek mythology or Aztec religion. The sexual parts are fiends, sacrificing everything to that aching point of contact. Society and simple decency keep trying to remind us of everything else—the rest of the body, the whole person, with its soul and intellect and estimable socioeconomic constituents—but in the truth of the night our dismembering needs arise and chop up the figments of our acquaintance like a Mogul swordsman gone berserk, and revolt us with our revealed nature.