Ancient Evenings

by Norman Mailer

  By way of my mother’s teachings, I knew of course that the right hand was to be treated like a temple. (Indeed, as she said with a pout, I would never see a drawing of a noble Egyptian whose right hand crossed his body—that was only for workers and wrestlers.) No, the right hand was reserved for bearing arms and touching food, and therefore was to be washed in oil of lotus before every meal, whereas the left hand could perform those tasks we would not wish others to observe, particularly the wiping of oneself, in which practice I was not to linger. So I could see that this separation we made between servants who brought food and removed it was connected to the right and left hand. I knew our blacks were not happy in their share of the task. Often I would hear arguments with the Syrians, although such dispute could come to no more than grumbling since, sooner or later, the Overseer of the Kitchen would shrug and say, “It is the Master’s orders.” Still, I used to think the blacks were remarkable for the depth of the bad mood they could present, and sometimes I would even decide that the poorest black servant had more ability to call upon the foul humor of his Gods than anyone but Menenhetet, Khem-Usha, or my mother (who was kin to both in the power of her worst temper).

  Tonight, however, the blacks were surprisingly cheerful, and soon burst into giggles. At one moment, I knew no reason for their mirth; at the next instant, I could have told it all. The Pharaoh was eating the very last of His pig using His left hand. How the blacks smirked.

  “They love pig,” He cried aloud as they left the room. “They love pig in the lands south of us,” and He laughed and added, “yes, the blacker the skin, the sweeter is the taste of the pork, they say,” and He looked around the table. “Tell me stories about black people,” He demanded abruptly, “for I am fascinated with them. Their customs offer light.” He thumped His tail for emphasis, as if to tell us that the time had most certainly come to entertain Him, and for this I was prepared since my mother had already informed me that when the Pharaoh wished to be amused, we should be ready with our stories. They must gleam like swords or be as beautiful as the flowers of the garden.

  “I have heard,” said my father, “that when an agreement is made on the exchange of property between black chieftains, one spits in the other’s mouth, bows, opens his mouth and receives the other’s spit in return. That is how they make the bargain legal.”

  “Can you see?” asked the Pharaoh, “Khem-Usha and I in such a practice?”

  He was certainly in a most peculiar mood, in misery, yet most excited. While no one spoke, the air was full of conversation, or so it felt. My thoughts were drawn to His thoughts, and never did I enter more easily into His mind. But He had only one word in His head: Poison!

  He looked at us, and shook His head. “Let us,” He said, “speak of poison.” He smiled at my great-grandfather. “Tell Me, learned Menenhetet, of its nature.”

  My great-grandfather smiled carefully. “It is a purity that does not cease,” he said to the surprise of all of us. Until now he had returned few attempts to bring him into the conversation.

  “I like,” said our Pharaoh, “the manner in which you bring clarity to difficult matters. The purity-that-does-not-cease. Could one describe love in such a manner?”

  “I could,” said Menenhetet. “I have often thought that poison and love may come from the same place.”

  “Your remark is malignant,” said Hathfertiti.

  “Not at all,” said Ptah-nem-hotep. “There is something poisonous about the act of love.”

  “The pig has put You, Good and Great God, into a foul mood,” said my mother.

  “Oh, not foul,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “poisonous!” He thumped His tail once more, one sharp thump to reward the precision of His humor. “Yes,” He said, “poison is everything that we are not.”

  “Remarkable,” murmured Menenhetet. “I must say Your mind is remarkable.”

  “A compliment,” said the Pharaoh. “A true compliment from the old dog. Listen to Me, you ancient man, you’ve known them all, known My ancestors better than anyone, so tell us, was there one whose mind proved better than your humble Ptah-nem-hotep’s?”

  “None quicker,” said Menenhetet.

  “But stronger in mind?”

  “My King of Upper Egypt and my King of Lower Egypt is the strongest in mind,” said Menenhetet through the thinnest lips his mouth could form.

  “Oh, let us talk of something else,” said the Good God. “Let us”—He looked about—“speak of moon-blood.”

  “But that’s awful,” said my mother.

  “Have you heard the views of black people on such a matter?” He asked.

  It was obvious she did not wish to accept the subject. “I think children know little of the views and habits of people who live in the lands to the south,” she said with a nod of her head at me.

  Eyaseyab having slept with no clothing in my room on many a night, there was little about the occurrence of moon-blood I had yet to learn. Once a month, as regularly as the first passing of the full moon, she would come to bed for a few days with a girdle around her hips, and an odor, no matter how often she bathed, which made me think, if I awakened suddenly, that the river had made a turn in the night and was flowing past our room, I did not dislike the odor so much as I was curious about it. For I had heard the children of our servants whisper to me that all women during the fourteen days of the coming of the moon and the fourteen days of its going were (at one time or another) deep in moon-blood, and some women were even steadfast on such a course, and always of the same day.

  I had asked if this were also true for my mother, and my playmate, the son of the blacksmith in our stables, acted as if he were in much trouble, for he dropped to his knees and kissed my toe—a disagreeable sensation since his lips were as chapped and rough (from the glare of his father’s fires) as a lizard’s skin. Then he told me that my mother was the relative of a Goddess and so could not have moon-blood. I nodded, as if both of us knew this for certain, but in fact I was puzzled since I was always hugging my mother’s hips and burying my nose above her knees, higher and higher above her knees as I grew older, and I never knew such happiness as then. Certainly, my mother smelled of the best oil from the petals of the lotus, but she had other odors as well, and now and again, faint as the scent of one departed fish, there was a hint of the climate of Eyaseyab on the fifteenth night of the moon when I felt as if I lived in those lands I had never seen to the south where all the blacks were born and trees half as high as the Great Pyramid of Khufu grew foliage to cover the sky while the plants grew in such heat one could not breathe next to them—so would I feel on the fifteenth night of the moon if Eyaseyab was in pain, and I wondered how its light could lay such a wound upon women.

  It can be seen that the conversation from which my mother wished to shield me could hardly be new to my ears, and Ptah-nem-hotep not only chose to ignore her protest, but gave a smile to me. “Remarkable children must never be protected from what we say,” He said, and added, “don’t you think?” to which I replied with a nod, as if the thought were between the two of us. In fact I agreed. I always felt as if something dreadful would happen if I could not hear every word at every feast.

  “I had a black slave,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “who told Me that in the village of his grandfather, they did not allow women full of moon-blood near the cattle. I cannot tell you how dangerous they believe a woman to be at such a time. If she touches one of her husband’s weapons, he is convinced he will find himself dead in the next battle.”

  “They are barbarians,” said my mother.

  “I’m not so certain,” said Ptah-nem-hotep. “There is much to learn from them.”

  “Even their temples are made of mud. They do not know how to cut a piece of stone. Nor how to write,” my mother said. “Did You ever notice how a slave acts when a scribe is at his palette? He whimpers like a monkey and breaks into a sweat.”

  “Yes,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “but they know of matters we do not know.” He paused. “From Memphi,
should I wish to send a message to Thebes, how quickly could I get it there?”

  “Why, by horse,” said my father, “if there are changes of horse, and the riders are fresh and do not sleep, it could be done in two days and two nights.”

  “More like three days,” said the Pharaoh. “But no matter. Further to the south, beyond Cush and Nubia, the same message can be passed through the jungles and from the summit of one great hill to the peak of the next mountain, and down through the great bush of the valleys across the rivers—all of this has been described to Me—yes, across distances equal to the seven days of drifting and rowing down the Nile from Thebes to Memphi, or the two or three days by horse, yes, across all of such distance can the black people send a message in no more than the time it takes for our sun to pass from overhead in the middle of the day to its setting in the West by evening. That is how fast the black people may send a message over such a distance and without roads or trails. I do not call that barbaric.”

  “How do they do it?” asked my mother.

  “By their drums,” said Ptah-nem-hotep. “They do not know how to write, nor do they know the secrets and skills of our temples.”

  “Nor our tombs,” said Menenhetet.

  “No, not the cunning work of our tombs. But the black people know how to speak with their drums, and very well. They send messages rapidly.”

  “They are barbarians,” said my mother. “We do better. We pluck a silent thought from the air.”

  “Yes,” said my father. “Our Divine Two-House hears many such thoughts.”

  “My messages are usually incorrect,” Ptah-nem-hotep answered. He began to laugh with sufficient force to thump His tail, yet, so soon as He was done, His face became curious and cruel. “At this moment, for instance, a butcher from the market of Ptah has killed his wife in a drunken fit—I see it clearly. Even as he is waiting for his neighbors to seize him, he appeals to Me for mercy. I hear him, but I choose to ignore his voice. He is guilty and a brute. The coarseness of his thought displeases Me.”

  “Yet, You have heard him?” asked Hathfertiti.

  “Tomorrow, if I make inquiries, I will discover that a murder did take place, but not near the market of Ptah. Rather it was in the poor quarter behind the wall back of the Avenue of Amon. The murderer was a brick-maker, I will discover, not a butcher, and it was his brother he killed, not his wife. Or maybe it was his mother. You see, I receive thoughts from My people, but at what a great rate. And in such a din! If I open My ears!” He proceeded to open His eyes instead with a look of pain as if all His senses, ears first, had been assaulted by a clap of sound. “No, I do not often care to listen with all that is best in Me. It is too exhausting. Thoughts, after all, do not travel like arrows, but flutter like feathers, and come up one side or the other. So, I respect the blacks and their drums. They speak clearly to each other across great distances.”

  My mother said, “I, too, have a story on how to send a message. It concerns a woman who was married to an Egyptian officer, but she is now dead. He is alive and wishes to pass on a few words to her.” I heard something delicious in my mother’s voice. “One needs more than drums for that,” she said.

  She was terribly pleased with herself, as if she had learned at last how to make Ptah-nem-hotep—even in His drear mood!—follow her inclination.

  “Go on,” He said.

  “The officer is in love with a charming woman. Yet he feels cursed. His dead wife will not forgive him. At night, in the arms of his new beloved, his member will not stay firm.”

  “Poor cursed fellow,” said Ptah-nem-hotep.

  “I expect the same would happen to me,” said my father.

  “It could never, old friend Nef,” said my mother.

  “Do go on,” said Ptah-nem-hotep.

  “Like most army officers,” my mother said, “he can’t stand priests. Yet he is desperate. So this officer goes to the High Priest.”

  “Do you know the officer?”

  “I cannot say.”

  Ptah-nem-hotep began to laugh with true pleasure. “If you were a Queen, I would not know what to believe.”

  “You would never be bored,” said my mother.

  “Nor could I run My affairs properly.”

  “I would try to be good for such a reason alone,” said Hathfertiti, “that the people of Egypt not suffer.”

  “Your wife is charming,” the Pharaoh said to my father.

  “She is blessed by Your presence,” said Nef-khep-aukhem.

  “Hathfertiti,” our Pharaoh said, “what did the High Priest advise the officer?”

  “He said to write a letter to the departed wife, and put it in the hand of any good person who had just died.”

  “Well, what happened?”

  “The letter was sent in just such fashion, and the dead woman stopped haunting her husband. His member is firm once more.”

  “Only with great difficulty can a live woman forgive a man,” Ptah-nem-hotep remarked. “I should think a dead woman cannot. Tell me what the officer wrote. It must have been a remarkable letter.”

  “I do not know what was in the letter.”

  “That is not enough for Me,” said Ptah-nem-hotep. “What would you have said?” He asked Nef-khep-aukhem.

  Now, I was amazed by my father. “I would have written to my dead wife that I miss her very much,” he said. “Then I would declare that I feel close to her when I make love to other women. ‘For I do not think of the other woman then,’ I would say, ‘only of you. Therefore, restore my strength. Let it come forth that I may be near you.’ ”

  “I think we can appreciate such a speech more than the dead,” said my great-grandfather.

  “Why, what would you have told her?” asked Hathfertiti.

  “I would speak to her as to a subordinate. The dead do not share our strength, you see. They are to us as one part in seven. So their curses can be blown away. We need only concentrate on the one part in seven. That is, after all, why few of us look forward to dying. In my letter, therefore, I would list the amulets I could employ against her, and the prayers purchased for me in the Temple. That should be enough to frighten her.”

  “Cold treatment of a dead mate,” said Ptah-nem-hotep.

  “I do not think we should allow anyone to weaken our member,” said Menenhetet.

  We were silent after this remark.

  “You do not ask me what I would have written,” said Hathfertiti.

  “I am afraid to,” said Ptah-nem-hotep.

  “I will tell You later,” my mother said. “The moment has passed.” She paused, and looked at me, and for the first time I felt the point of her cruelty. “Ask my son,” she said. “He has been listening.”

  “I would,” I said, “I could write …” I did not know how to finish. Something of the same woe that came over me when I looked into the eyes of the dog was in my heart again, and finally I said, “It may be the most terrible story I ever heard,” and I began, not to weep—I was determined not to weep before the servants—but I sat with my head down and the tears rolling over my face.

  For I heard my mother’s thought. I heard the letter she would write. “If you do not restore my strength, I will kill our child,” was what she would have said.

  In the time that passed, conversations did not take place, but their silence rose and fell. In this uncertainty, much bruised by the cruelty of the letter my mother would have written, I tried to enter her mind again in the hope she would treat me more tenderly, but was given instead the peculiar sensation of looking out on everyone in this room from the eyes of the Pharaoh. Thereby I saw my mother, my father, Menenhetet, and even myself from the Pharaoh’s seat. That seemed natural, if most peculiar, and I realized that in trying to slip into my mother’s head, I had entered—with obvious success!—into the Pharaoh’s thoughts. It could only be due to my mother making her own attempt—at the same moment!—to pass into Ptah-nem-hotep’s mind. And succeeding! Looking out through His eyes, it was not hard to compreh
end that my mother’s powers were hardly smaller than my own.

  Next instant, this peculiar, agreeable and natural sensation was gone. Like the noble who touched pig, I was dipped into the river of the Pharaoh’s misery. Indeed, it was not misery He felt but an emotion for which I hardly knew the word, kin to the feeling I could fear on awakening that a wretched event was certain to occur in the day to come. So did I feel the meat of the pig rest like wax in the Pharaoh’s chest—not even to His stomach had the food descended—and some oppression in this room weighed upon Him, some woe before the presence of all things to come, as if indeed He could only keep all troubles from Himself until His strength was gone. Feeling as if I had entered a cave where every hue was dark as the purple dye that came from the snails of Tyre, so did I also have the incomparable experience of studying my mother, my father and my great-grandfather through the Pharaoh’s eyes, and my family was not as I knew them, indeed their expressions were not the same to Him as to me. Portrayed on my father’s face was a fine cunning I would never have supposed him to have, and Menenhetet showed an obduracy as merciless as the power of stone to crush one’s flesh. Indeed, no matter how little my great-grandfather had said at dinner, the man Ptah-nem-hotep saw was more mysterious than stone, a boulder, in truth, that might shatter in a great fall to reveal at its center a gem—or would it be a live scorpion? With just such awe and just such doubt did Ptah-nem-hotep look at Menenhetet.

  As for my mother, but for the story she had just told, I would not have recognized her. She looked more beautiful and more murderous than my mother. As for myself, looking on myself through His eyes, I was startled not by my good features but because I was the brightest little animal I had ever seen, and more alive than I could ever suppose. Yet my face knew such sorrow and horror! I had not expected that. Nor was I ready for the love I felt in the Pharaoh’s heart when He looked at me. Nor for the sudden extinction of such love beneath the awful oppression of the pig’s meat in His belly, and I, on this shift of attention, was put back into myself as abruptly as I had left.