Ancient Evenings

by Norman Mailer

  I do not know if I would have been able to understand what they now said, but by way of my mother’s thoughts, I was able to see a thick bed of stone on which were laid hot coals in a narrow channel. When the bed had taken the heat of the coals, water was poured on. I listened to the hiss of steam, and saw the wet ash wiped away. A myriad of cracks were left in the groove, numerous as the cracks in clay when the flood is gone and the sun bakes the earth. I saw men chipping at these cracks with copper chisels and wooden mallets. After they were done, the channel, wide as a man’s hand, had been deepened by the thickness of a finger. That was half a morning’s work for two men. They would do it until the channel was deep enough to split the rock, sometimes, cubits deep.

  I had already been taught to make measurements by these cubits, and was told the size had first been taken from the tip of Ramses II’s middle finger to His elbow. I went around telling everyone that I measured more than two cubits tall—two cubits, one hand, two fingers—large for a child my age, was it not? and kept doing it until my mother told me to cease. Two cubits was nothing, she let me know, next to a man of four cubits. She had even seen a giant of five cubits. I ceased then to be concerned with this measure. But such talk now between the Pharaoh and Rock-Cutter refreshed my mother’s memory of a cubit and she began to think about a great Pharaoh, tall and beautiful and vastly more like a God than Ptah-nem-hotep. I knew this could be no other than Ramses II but my mother saw Him as if He were alive before us, His arm extended and prayers said by the priests as the measurement was taken by the Royal String of the Royal Scribe. This was my mother’s offering to me of how the cubit had first been measured, but she was so full of pleasure, the late afternoon sun on the balcony now shining on her thighs, that she took her own measure of the cubit, and held the Royal String herself. Lo, the mighty phallus of Ramses II was equal to half the length, but since she saw Him, equal to Himself, before a mirror, the two phalluses, nose to nose, were the perfect royal measure if you took it from the root of one set of testicles over completely to the other. Then my mother left off thinking of cubits. She had just recognized that my mind was again in hers. I, in my turn, realized why she could never do arithmetic. She was not certain whether to be pleased at our closeness, or appalled at the rush of my education, but she smiled at me, and most tenderly (a naughty smile) and opening her mind to me again as easily as she might open her arms, so I rushed into the trap of her amusement for she now saw it as her motherly duty to instruct me in sad thoughts. I was therefore now obliged to contemplate all the poor stone-cutters who were going blind from the dust that flew out of pounding one stone upon another while dressing the face of an extracted rock. I saw some with red-rimmed eyes and others with blood from open cuts above their brows. One danced in pain, a stone splinter sticking to his eyeball, an atrocious set of sights until I realized my mother had put them together for me, and I was seeing, all at once, the quarry injuries of a full year.

  Now, my mother, as if to make amends for her scandalous thoughts about the length of the cubit of Ramses II, began to listen again to Ptah-nem-hotep. He wished to know the time it took to make a channel in stone when cedar chips were used for the coals, as compared to how long it required when chips from date-palm, sycamore, tamarisk or acacia were employed. So he questioned Rut-sekh closely.

  Rut-sekh assured our Pharaoh that he had put three of his best men on the cut while using the cedar chips. It still had taken fourteen days for a cut two cubits long and four deep to be accomplished by this gang. That had only been one day less than a cut of equal size done with sycamore chips whose coals had already been found superior to acacia, date-palm or tamarisk.

  “If your fastest gang,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “is only one day faster than your average gang, the fires of cedar can hardly be more effective than the fires of sycamore.”

  Rut-sekh touched his forehead to the ground.

  “Yet your first reports,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “told of cracks made by coals of cedar that were half a finger deeper than the hottest embers of sycamore.”

  “That is still true, Great Two-House.”

  “Then why is the job not done faster?”

  As if the intimate discussion of these matters allowed Rut-sekh to forget to whom he spoke, he shrugged. It was the gesture of one workingman speaking to another, and only a momentary flaw in the immense respect he showed the Pharaoh, but, by the measure of disgust on my father’s face, Rock-Cutter might as well have allowed an indiscreet sound to come popping out of his buttocks.

  The Overseer must have taken in my father’s face for he touched his forehead quickly to the ground, and said in sorrow, “My Pharaoh, I thought it would be quicker.”

  Then all was silent. Ptah-nem-hotep’s lips pressed against one another but He said nothing. In the silence, I could smell the smoke of cedar chips, and understood that I was in Rock-Cutter’s thoughts—by way of my mother or myself I hardly knew, but I was in his thoughts—except he hardly had them, it was more as if he moved from odor to odor when he was not ruminating over his figures to the Pharaoh. Then his head was like a shaduf—lifting a pail of water in one sturdy movement, emptying it, repeating the work. Now, with the memory of the smoke in his nostrils, he said, “Great Two-House, it was faster with the cedar, but the men made more mistakes.” Rock-Cutter sighed.

  “We had more injuries when working with the cedar. The men said it was cursed.”

  “How did you reply?”

  “I whipped them.”

  “Now you are here before Me. You may speak the truth. Your Pharaoh is blind and dumb if none speak the truth.”

  “I would speak it, Great Two-House.”

  “Do. Even liars do well to speak the truth on the Day of the Pig.”

  “Great Two-House, I whipped my men with a heart so full I became afraid of the pains in my chest.”

  “Why did you feel such clamor?”

  “Because, my Pharaoh, I could not disagree with my men. The odor of the smoke was strange.”

  Ptah-nem-hotep nodded. “Cedar comes from the shores of Byblos where the coffin of Osiris came to rest in such a tree.”

  “Yes, my Lord,” said Rock-Cutter.

  “If cedar was once the home of the Great God Osiris, the chips of the tree can never be cursed.”

  “Yes, my Lord.” Rock-Cutter stood there. “It is the Day of the Pig, Great Two-House,” he said at last.

  “Speak the truth.”

  “My men do not often talk of the God Osiris. For us, it is better to go to the Temple of Amon.” Rock-Cutter bowed his head once more to the dust.

  “Don’t you know,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “that Osiris is the God who will judge you in the Land of the Dead?”

  Rock-Cutter shook his head. “I am only an Overseer. It is not for me to journey through the Land of the Dead.”

  “But you are a Royal Overseer. You may travel with your Pharaoh.” Ptah-nem-hotep turned to my father. “Can there be many Royal Overseers,” He asked, “who do not understand this value of the office?”

  “Not many, Great Ptah-nem-hotep,” said my father.

  “One is too many,” said the Pharaoh, and gave back His attention to Rut-sekh. “The honor that I offer,” He said, “incites the light of no gratitude in your eyes.”

  “Great Two-House, I know that I will never be a voyager in the Land of the Dead.”

  “Is it because you cannot afford to be buried properly?” asked Ptah-nem-hotep. “Do not despair. Poorer men than you have become wealthy in My service.”

  “When I die, I shall be dead, Great God.”

  “How do you know?” asked Ptah-nem-hotep.

  “I hear it in the sound one stone makes when it pounds against another.”

  Ptah-nem-hotep said, “That is an interesting remark.” Abruptly, He yawned.

  In the Court, everyone immediately yawned.

  “We will not use the cedar chips,” the Pharaoh said. “Their fires are hotter, their cracks go deeper, it is even a wood blessed
by Osiris, but to a simple mind the fire is strange.”

  “It may go easier, Great Two-House,” said Rut-sekh, “if my men work with smoke to which they are accustomed.”

  Ptah-nem-hotep nodded. Rut-sekh was dismissed with a small movement of His hand.

  Other officials came in, to be followed by others. I could not give my attention to all they said, and soon could not give any attention. My mother frowned when I would scratch my navel, or rub my toes on the tiles of the floor, but then she was small help. Her mind had become as empty as mine and drifted like a boat of reeds. I began to wish I were back in the rose room where I could enter again into the mind of my Pharaoh. Here, not five cubits from His throne, I could not follow His words nor know His thoughts. Memories came to me of the banquet my family would enjoy with Ptah-nem-hotep that evening, a curious way to express it, but I did not feel as if I looked forward to the Night of the Pig so much as that it had already taken place and I need only remember what I must have already forgotten. Going forth in one life was much like recollecting another. Thinking of that, then thinking of nothing at all, I listened while officials came and went and spoke of many matters.

  Of course, I could not follow all that was said. One official reported on the condition of the dikes around Busiris in the Delta and another spoke of work on the dams. A third told of the draining of the lakes, and the difficulties of drying and salting the mud eels found on the bottom. I drifted back to the wonders of that golden morning so long ago, yet just this morning, when I had seen a few fishing boats with their catch hanging on ropes that ran from the top of the mast to the prow and stern. They had gutted their fish and hung them up like clothes to dry. We came close to one such craft and the odor was clean and stinking at once, as if the blood of the river, which is to say the blood of the fish, had been washed in the sun, and that took me so far away from the Pharaoh and His serious concerns that I did not listen to the report on work in the mines nor to the Pharaoh’s recommendation for using the horn of a gazelle as a socket superior to ivory for the spindle of a rock drill—I could not follow that either—and by way of my mother’s drowsy opinion, thought little of a General of the Armies whose face was covered with scars and open ulcers. He was a tall fierce-looking man, but had only defeats to report and spoke of towns on the borders of Lower Egypt being burned by Syrian raiders.

  “Do I never hear talk of victory?” asked the Pharaoh, and the General began to shake from the onslaught of a fever he had caught in his campaigns—I do not think it was fear he felt so much as a great chill, but he could not stop shivering.

  There was a long inquiry by Ptah-nem-hotep into the ownership of the banks of an irrigation canal where two adjoining estates were in dispute over the amounts of water to be removed from the canal. This soon turned into another dispute between the same noblemen about the shifting of boundary stones. Accounts were brought by Royal Officials against merchants accused of mixing sand in the Palace flour, and one official read out from a list the names of ships that must be declared lost at sea. No word had been received from them in three years.

  I amused myself by trying to come near my mother’s mind once more. I do not know if it was my thoughts, or her thoughts, but I had started to think of the strangeness of fire, and wondered if in the flame lived the voice of all that was burning, that is not only the material which burned but the thoughts of the Gods Who lived in that country. At this instant, I felt the Pharaoh looking at me, opened my eyes and realized I had been passing through His thoughts. For the look in our eyes belonged to each of us, and we were in this way equal, and brothers.

  I realized that I had certainly been asleep. The officials were gone, evening had come to the patio, and the Pharaoh was smiling. “Come, little Prince,” He said, “it is time for us to eat,” and He took me by the hand, while I felt the fatigue of His blood for all the long work of this afternoon.

  EIGHT

  On our walk through the gardens to the chamber where we would dine with the Pharaoh, my mother began to think of a conversation she did not wish to recall. Yet, once commenced, there was nothing but to remember all of it. How could one not? A few days ago, my father, knowing how the news would chew on my mother’s heart, had told her the Pharaoh said that Menenhetet ate the dung of bats. To which my mother replied, “He takes it as a medicine,” only to hear my father reply, “No, it is not so. He takes it for the contentment of his palate. The Pharaoh heard it most reliably from Khem-Usha. It was a long time ago but He cannot get it out of His mind. I think that is why there has been no invitation to Menenhetet for so long a time.”

  “Nor have I been invited,” my mother could not restrain herself from saying.

  “He would hardly think of you,” said my father, “without remembering Menenhetet.”

  More recently, my father had begun to speak of Ptah-nem-hotep’s interest in pigs. He talked about them constantly. “Did you know,” Ptah-nem-hotep would say, “if a nobleman touches pig, he must go into the river immediately, and with his clothes on, no matter how good they are. That’s to wash off the taint.”

  “I have, Good and Great God, never touched the beast,” said Nef-khep-aukhem. “I have heard that leprosy may be caused by drinking pig’s milk.”

  “No one I know has tried it,” said Ptah-nem-hotep. He added: “Of course, it’s not the sort of thing that would give your relative, Menenhetet, much pause.” Which my father made a point of telling my mother.

  Two days later, Ptah-nem-hotep was bemused again by the pig. “I spoke to Khem-Usha,” He told Nef-khep-aukhem. “As I suspected, it is true. Swineherds, on pain of the removal of their nose, are forbidden from entering any temple. ‘How would you know,’ I asked Khem-Usha, ‘if they came in disguise?’ ‘We would know,’ he told Me. There is a priest for you. It is the perfect remark for a High Priest.”

  At this point, Ptah-nem-hotep took off His wig, handed it to Nef-khep-aukhem, inclined His head to receive another, studied the polished surface of His bronze mirror (or such, at least, was the view my mother imagined) and then said to my father, “I’m going to celebrate the Feast of the Pig this year.” At the look in my father’s face, He added, “Yes, we will eat of pig’s flesh, you and Me, just like every other Egyptian at the fires in the markets guzzling on fat and tasty pieces, and, yes”—He paused—“I’ve not had your family here in a long time. Let’s have a small dinner that night. Tell Menenhetet”—here, Ptah-nem-hotep gave His delicious smile—“to bring one of his bats.”

  “It would give me greater happiness, Good God, if it were You to tell him.”

  Ptah-nem-hotep smiled. “There’ll be surprises. I wish to delight your wife and child on the Night of the Pig.”

  I did not know what to expect. When my parents or my great-grandfather gave a feast we had many musicians who not only played at harps and lyres but knew guitars and the cithara and the barbiton, and after the banquet would come many surprises. Jugglers would appear, acrobats, and wrestlers. Skilled slaves would throw knives at painted wooden blocks, and once, my great-grandfather even brought his guests down to the river and there, by his embankment, boatmen decorated with colored ribbons and wearing feather headdresses had used their oars like poles to try to knock each other into the water, a dangerous sport, I heard the guests whisper. In the excitement a good boatman could be drowned. None perished that night, and my great-grandfather had salts sprinkled on the torches so that we stood among fires of green and scarlet and in the midst of purple flames while the din rolled back across the water. That had been a great feast.

  Tonight would not be the same. My mother said we would be only five for dinner. Still, the thought she passed to me was clear: Our Pharaoh, having given many lavish parties, would find more amusement in our small evening where we might linger over the exquisite refinement and brilliance of His conversation. I could already hear her speaking like this to friends in days to come. Yet, by the light in her eye, gleaming with marvels of anticipation, I knew she did not lie. The Feast o
f the Pig, no matter what my father had told her, was going to be wondrous.

  It was. On this night I learned almost as soon as we began that I would eat food I never tasted before and hear conversation on topics unfamiliar to me. Indeed, I soon learned something on the secrets of purple contained in the snail, as well as how to put a letter in a dead person’s hand, and was given hints of the virtues of cannibalism. And much else. And much else again.

  As the dinner went on, and one strange food followed another into my stomach, my spirits played through perfumed fires, and my thoughts became inflamed. What my mother had told me about the hour I was made might as well have become a seed growing in the silence of my heart. The cheeks of my face were red, the conversation of my parents—was I to look to Menenhetet or Nef-khep-aukhem as my father?—squirmed in my stomach like sun-heated snakes, and I was feeling that wild merriment peculiar to childhood when every moment can bring a new, incalculable pleasure or, as easily, a clap of disaster. Since I could not begin to cry out with the uproar I would have liked to put forth, stimulation built fever upon fever in me, and passed from hardly tasting the food to moments when I was trembling to recover from all the directions in which my senses were scattered by each flavor.

  We reclined by a low table of ebony on which were golden plates so thin they weighed less than my mother’s alabaster, and the room was like a forest on fire and lit by so many great candles it brought us near to feeling the presence of the sun in the middle of the night; yet we were only inside a chamber of wood panels of a grain like the fur of a leopard, and I noticed that the Pharaoh, having changed His costume to another of pleated white linen that left His chest bare but for one shoulder, wore less ornament than any of us, indeed He wore no decoration except a leopard’s tail attached to the rear of his skirt. He would reach about from time to time and catch the stem of this tail by His hand in order to thump the tip on the table, as though to indicate His excitement at something my mother or Menenhetet had said, and once, in the high vigor of amusement with which He did this, having struck the tail several times on the table and flung it back with a whoop—for He seemed in as much of a fever of laughter as myself—He succeeded in lashing that leopard’s tail up into the middle of a great ostrich fan on a stand behind His seat, and the fan tottered and would have fallen if a servant had not caught it.