Ancient Evenings

by Norman Mailer

  “The eyes with which I saw my dead body belonged, of course, to my Ka, and he, poor fellow, was able to return into the belly of Nub-Utchat only on the next night while she was tremendously distracted with the ardors of making love to one of her favorite clients, a most powerful brigand from Kurna. But as, in the months to come, I grew in her belly, my Ka could not rest with the calm that is so essential for the term we live in the womb. On the contrary, my Ka and the rest of me came forth much wrenched and poked by the grossness of strangers who pounded upon my head for all the while I was in my new mother’s belly, and I think that many of the memories of my first and second existence were so nearly beaten out of me that it has taken all of my fourth life to recover them.”

  FOUR

  “I was raised by Nub-Utchat, and once again grew up in a harem, although here was no Pharaoh. Any male of Thebes was free to enter. Nor had I chosen my mother with good sense. While she had seized my wealth in the Eastern Desert and quickly gave up the brothel to purchase a great mansion for herself, she had the appetite of a Queen, and the itch to gamble of a charioteer, so the money was soon gone and she was a whore again. Before I was eighteen, she died of high fevers. Black water passed in her urine. I was then a big strong fellow with much congealed in my heart. I had few good sentiments, but I knew how to talk to people: I could, as our saying goes, ‘Sell a feather to a Pharaoh and charge Him for gold.’ I understood women as well as you could from living in a brothel, and men I appreciated by their manners or lack of them. Rude manners, after all, had belabored my unborn head.

  “Let us say I knew how to find my way. I was making a living at the time in my mother’s trade: I had become a brothel-keeper and a good one. We were more than ever a city of priests, so by the balance of Maat, we had roistering brothels, and mine, I could say, was the best. With two lives in preparation for such a trade, why not?

  “All the same, even in the pots of Thebes, I was aware of the chaos at the Court in Memphi. There was a new Pharaoh every few years and not one but two famines in that era. I may even have suffered some hunger myself. Still, I had the good fortune to trust my dreams, and they told me to go north to the Delta where the papyrus plant grows most profusely. There I must start a papyrus workshop and export the product to Syria and other lands. If I did so, why then this dream told me, I would recover the treasure my mother had spent.

  “I was still no more than a fat fellow with a merry disposition and a good tongue, but I succeeded while passing through Memphi to talk to the Chief Scribe of the Vizier of the Pharaoh Setnakht (which Chief Scribe had visited my brothel often when in Thebes—for he liked not only the women, but the food I served, and the baths I kept). Now, I convinced him that my venture in papyrus was worthy of consideration. To speed my way, he gave me a charter (with a special tax to be paid directly to him) and I could now begin a Royal Workshop. I spent much of the rest of my third life in Sais, and before it was over, amassed a fortune. How my papyrus was in demand throughout Syria!

  “They were eager in the East to replace their heavy clay tablets and so be able to send more messages on the same donkey. Before, you could put fifty clay tablets on the beast’s back and half would arrive in a broken state; now you could pack five hundred rolls of papyrus, and all would be as you sent them unless harm came to the caravan itself. These people of Syria and Lebanon, and even the Hittites, began to use our papyrus so much that before all was done, they succeeded in improving their chariots as well. For so soon as they could copy our drawings of chariots, so they also learned how to make them. If no piece of papyrus could show them how to turn a horse by the reins around one’s waist, still they may yet learn that as well, and then it will be said that I, in my third life, was one of those Egyptians who helped to hasten the downfall of Egypt. Too many secrets have been revealed to the Syrians by the gift of papyrus. They have begun to copy our sacred letters and, in so doing, have polluted them. One can no longer discern at a glance whether it is the flowing style of the old Secluded, the legible presentations of the bookkeeper, or the mysterious curves we added to our drawings in the Inner Temple. In former days, one did not always have to take the same meaning from the same mark, and that was a security. Now, because of the Syrians, everyone can read each other, and even a common scribe will look upon the finest writing without awe. He does not have to suppose that the words contain more than one message. It means that the wise and the foolish, the generous and the greedy, are all informed equally well. So, we have fewer secrets from other lands. Indeed, we used to have another saying in those years: ‘He who has our handwriting, knows our Ka.’ ”

  “You find nothing good to say of yourself,” observed my Father.

  “It was not an era when one could approve of much. I have lived in greater times. I remember that I hired many Libyans and Syrians to work for me. More product came forth from their hands than from my fellow Egyptians who, having almost as many holidays as workdays, did not seem determined to offer their best labor, and were always ready to strike. It was certainly not as it had been under Usermare. Now, the Libyans and Syrians worked harder, made more papyrus, and took their arts back to their lands, yet I was content to employ them for they made me a rich man in a few years.”

  “Surely the papyrus was not the only source of your fortune?”

  “I also speculated on the purchase and sale of Necropolis plots. The wisdom of my second life was with me in that manner. Thereby, I built another fortune on the first. It is the only road to wealth. One needs a small fortune to fertilize a greater one. You see, the removal of the capital to Memphi, which seemed, at that time, equal to the downfall of Thebes, ended by enriching the old city. For, now, only the Temple of Amon could hold together the Two-Lands. Pharaohs might be weak, but the Temple grew strong. So did the price of land increase in each alley of the City of the Dead, and, for that matter, through all of Thebes. The same mansion my mother purchased for little was now worth more than the palace of an Eastern King, and it could be said that men of substance like myself either congregated in the Delta, or at Thebes, and often spent no more than a night in Memphi on the trip back and forth.”

  “What you tell Me is of value, although not remarkable,” Ptah-nem-hotep now said. “From your remarks I learn that rich men act much like one another. I prefer to ask instead: What of the woman you picked to be your mother for a fourth life? Can it be said that you had more wisdom by now?”

  “Hopefully, it can be said,” replied Menenhetet, but I could feel how his voice had lost the power to protect himself well. “The times were troubled,” he repeated, “and married life was full of scandal. I had a friend who married a Princess from the sturdy line of Esonefret. But he was soon murdered by his wife’s lover. Then my friend’s child by this same Princess was sent to a peasant village. There the boy died of fever. That was not a story to inspire me with faith in noble mothers. It made a most powerful impression on me.”

  “Given what you had learned from your first life, and your second, surely there was no surprise for you in such a story?” my Father now said.

  “In each life, I had to develop the power to recollect what happened before. In my third life, good natural judgment may have lived in my flesh even when it did not rise to my thoughts, but I can only say that the ill fortune of my friend shocked me greatly. So I looked in the other direction and chose a woman of the people who was strong and loyal. She had grown up in a peasant village and in childhood lived through our two famines. That gave me the confidence she could survive in troubled times. I wanted a woman to protect my wealth. That is exactly what my third wife, soon to be my fourth mother, was able to do for me.

  “I can say that I was not in good health. I had succeeded in satisfying the buried appetites of my second life, but paid the cost. Conceived by Nub-Utchat with much disturbance to my seven souls and spirits, I had hardly cleansed myself by a life spent in commerce and pleasure. I drank a great deal and took many spices to stimulate my blood and was sick before I was
thirty. I had all the ailments one could reasonably aquire: gout, obesity, inflammation of my eyes, and curvature of the spine. If there had been earlier years when I made love with all the force of a fat young bull, I was, by now, much used up. Invariably, I needed the ministrations of my wife to arouse me. But then, I may as well confess that she was not my true choice—I would, indeed, have preferred a Princess (just like the one who did my dead friend in) yet, given my squalid beginnings, none would have me. I admit that was the true bruise upon my feelings in those years. To have wealth unleavened by distinction is to know the plenitudes and miseries of a sow. Still, I took what I could get, and was resigned. For the first time in three lives, death would come at an appropriate time. I was older at thirty-three than at any age I had known before, and lived in profound gloom. For by the end of my third life I had become interested in all the matters I scorned when young. I wished devoutly to recapture my first and second lives but no longer had the strength to pursue those well-buried memories. Then I made my poor condition worse by taking, to the horror of my good wife, many herbs and poisons to encourage the distant recollections for which I searched, and thereby purchased many fevers that sent my mind on far-off journeys. I conceived myself for the last time out of the depths of a trance I entered through no more skill than my choice of poison—whores and their pimps know as much about herbs as any doctor or witch. So I came forth for a last time even as I collapsed. It was what I desired. All that was gross in me fell back into the ruins of my body, but my seed was sent across the bridge, and that seed, I hope, was not like me, but finer. I believe we have the power, when unhappy with ourselves, to prepare a few virtues we do not possess and pass them to our seed. I looked, therefore, to find a new life that would put much emphasis on wisdom, understanding, and the best use of many subtle arts.

  “My plans were well formulated. If, in my first life, I was born as Meni, the son of a peasant woman, I was still the son of a peasant woman when I entered my fourth existence. My wealth, however, was preserved this time. That enabled me to live as I wished. So I have been a General again (although of no consequence in comparison to my first life), a doctor, a nobleman by my marriage to a Princess (descended from no one less than Kham-Uese!) and because of my wealth, I was also a Notable, a true pillar of our society. Or so,” he said mockingly, “so, hopefully, I would be described.”

  “But you know perfectly well. You have been a figure of constant interest among us for years,” my Father replied, and added, “Yes, even when I was a young priest in the Temple of Ptah, I used, behind our white walls, to hear of you. They said that all the hundred and sixty years—it was one hundred and sixty years then—of your four lives were equally alive for you.” He smiled. He could not resist the unkind words. “They said that when you were drunk you bragged of it.”

  “Oh, it is not true,” said Menenhetet. “I was merely indiscreet. I made the mistake of telling a few close friends. Word could not have passed more quickly. I learned that a close friend is not the equal of a great secret.”

  “But how do you awake these sleeping powers? It seems to be different in every life, is it not?” My Father spoke, however, in a voice to betray as little interest as possible.

  “Even,” replied Menenhetet, “as Amenhotep the Second had the determination to slay more lions than any Pharaoh, so do You pursue the secrets that live in the root of the tongue.”

  “Is it not,” asked my Father, and I could see He was displeased, “that you refuse to tell Me?”

  “Or do You give me credit for knowledge I may not possess?”

  “Your last remark is a subtle discourtesy, and by it, you sully the light that has shone upon us this evening.”

  “Tell Him how you awake these powers,” said Hathfertiti.

  My great-grandfather pretended she had not spoken. “In my fourth life, unlike the others, I was born with more sense of what had gone before. I do not know why. But, as a child, many a piece of papyrus with which I played was soon inscribed by me with sacred marks familiar only to the Inner Temple of Thebes during the last years of Usermare. My skills with sword and chariot were also brilliant when I was young, and for the first time it could be said that I was wise enough to have an early marriage with an attractive young woman of my own class. Not only had my mother not remained a widow, but she proved sensible enough to better our social position by marrying an illegitimate descendant of Amen-khep-shu-ef. Since my old rival (now my ancestor!) had always been too busy at sieges to have more than a few children, the line, while not in the channel of Succession, had grown more elevated with every new Pharaoh. So the new family I entered by my mother’s second marriage was as well regarded as the line of my bride, and many entertainments were given for us. I can only say that the early years of my fourth life were so agreeable, and my daughter, the mother of Your own Hathfertiti, Ast-en-Ra, was so beautiful and charming, that if my wife had not died while I was away in Libya campaigning (where I was the youngest General to reach such rank) I might have spent my life in prominent office and have had many other children. The death of my wife, however, taught one frightful lesson. I did not mourn her as I expected to. The memory of my first three lives hovered in my mind like three ghosts standing before my door. I understood that I could hardly rush into a public life when the multitudinous desires of other lives lay unfulfilled behind me, or half-fulfilled, or much unremembered. So I resigned from the army and took up the learning of medicine as a way, I now suspect, of slowly approaching my true interest which was magic. I spent years studying such intricate matters as how to press the oil for the easement of gout in the evening when the air is soft, or in discerning which of our three seasons is most efficacious for the use of each herb on our pharmacological lists. I kept records of the curative properties of the roe of fish against sterility, and made studies of which substances were best taken by each of the three mouths, or by application to the flesh itself. Also which powders could be inhaled as steam through a reed. A gentleman of luxury, I preferred to be comprehensive, and inscribed on papyrus all that I did, and noted the results, even when it was a question of listing prescriptions compounded from twenty-five or thirty substances, indeed, I could not ignore how many cures depended on the judicious use of all that is revolting. I soon discovered that the most dependable ingredients were varieties of dung, and pondering this, ceremonies practiced with Honey-Ball came back to me, and I embarked on the study of magic that has been the consolation of my fourth life. I do not know that it has been the happiest study. For I have come to see that Amon may have visited my first mother, but I, as yet, have not honored the gift with any great deed. If I failed in my first life, and betrayed much in my second, fouled every nest with my third, so I must see my fourth life as the one where I sought to use what I learned in order to learn much more. Why else would I offer secrets on this night that I have told to no one else?”

  “Still,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “I cannot begin to think of high service for you next to Me when I do not even have an explanation for your use of bats.”

  In a tone of much resignation, Menenhetet said, “They are filthy creatures, hysterical as monkeys, restless as vermin. They are shrill and cling to one another. But their leavings contain all they cannot use. They are endowed, therefore, with the power to endure loneliness.”

  “I begin to understand your curious habit,” said my Father in a voice of surprising sympathy. “That vile paste must offer strength to bear the loneliness of your hundred and eighty years.”

  Menenhetet bowed his head at the understanding of the Pharaoh. But I was aware of another wisdom in my Father, and it was not one I had felt before. At this instant, I knew He had come to a grave decision. Menenhetet would not be His Vizier. He did not wish to gaze upon one hundred and eighty years of loneliness each day.

  My great-grandfather shifted in his seat. I do not know if he, too, was now alert to the difference in the air, but he only nodded morosely when Ptah-nem-hotep, as if to conceal where His tho
ughts had taken Him, went on: “Neither do you tell Me of your trances.”

  “Tell Him,” said Hathfertiti.

  “Yes,” said our Pharaoh, “I would like to know more of your trances.”

  “If you do not tell Him, I will,” my mother declared.

  When Menenhetet did not reply, my mother startled us. “It is dreadful,” she said to Menenhetet. “I have regarded you as greater than all but the greatest Gods. Now, I cannot believe how you are silent. I think you are stupid.”

  “No, how can he be stupid?” exclaimed Ptah-nem-hotep.

  “He is. He does not know what is true at this moment for me. I, who have always had two hearts, one to love a man, and the other to despise him, am now devoted to one man with both my hearts.” What she said next was most powerful for she did not utter the words, but allowed us to hear them in her thoughts, “I loved to tell a lie to every lover, but now I know the virtue of the truth.”

  “Only a Pharaoh can reach the depths of your Two-Lands,” Menenhetet said to her, and bowed.

  “Why don’t you tell the Ninth how I was used? Do you know,” she said to Ptah-nem-hotep, “that I became the inspiration for his magic? Tell Him,” she said again to Menenhetet. “Tell Him how I entered your ceremonies when I was twelve. Tell how you seduced me.”