by Jodi Picoult
He runs a hand through his hair. “I started excavation in 2013, and it took three seasons to clear the material from the front of the tomb and record it all in order to even reach the burial shaft. One year we lost our funding and I had to find a new benefactor—which I did. But I’m still full-time at Yale, which means that I only get two to three months in the field here each year. Which brings me to Minya, in the beginning of August.” Wyatt turns, leaning his shoulder into the wooden door, facing me. “So maybe you came to Egypt on a whim,” he says. “Or maybe the universe knew you belonged right here, right now.”
Brian would roll his eyes at that and say it’s just the laws of physics splitting you into many different versions of yourself, each of which thinks that the path you’re on is unique and providential.
In one world, I’m in Boston.
In another world, I am with Wyatt when he opens that coffin, and sees the Book of Two Ways.
In yet another world, the antiquities director refuses me a permit.
A shadow falls over us, and I squint up to see a man whose edges are lit by the sun. I cannot make out his face as he points to me. “Don’t I know you?” he says.
* * *
—
MOSTAFA AWAD, THE director of antiquities, had—in 2003—been an inspector who came to the dig site to record anything Dumphries and the expedition discovered. He had been young then, and eager to learn about his country’s own history. I remember Wyatt teaching him the signs of the ancient Egyptian alphabet; him waving his hands and laughing and crying uncle when the grammar reached nominatives and pronouns and complications that were over his head. Now, he is twice as big around the middle as he was fifteen years ago, and his hair and beard are peppered with gray.
He serves us tea in his air-conditioned office. Wyatt leans back in a chair too small for his frame, sips from his cup. “I completely forgot you knew Dawn.”
“I never forget a face,” Mostafa says, winking at me. “And yours, I saw for three seasons.”
I smile back at him. “How long have you been the director?”
“Well. Let’s see. In 2009 I did my two years of military service, and then I got this position, Alhamdulillah.” Praise be to God. He turns to Wyatt. “I admit to being startled when I saw you in the doorway, like a vagrant. I am coming out to your site tomorrow, after all.”
“Yes, well, there was something that couldn’t wait,” Wyatt begins, sliding a glance toward me. “I’d like Dawn to work with the Yale concession.”
“Ah.” Mostafa gets up and rattles through a desk, searching in files. “I have the forms for next December’s permits right here—”
“I beg your pardon,” Wyatt interrupts. “Actually, I meant now.” He levels a look at Mostafa. “Tomorrow.”
Mostafa sinks into his desk chair, steepling his fingers. “I see.” He looks at Wyatt. “Are you asking me as the director of antiquities?”
Wyatt starts to nod, but Mostafa cuts him off. “Because of course, as the director, I could never compromise the high standard for which Egyptian archaeological excavations are known. You can imagine what might happen if word got out that I made an exception for one concession. How others might come begging for a favor, too.”
My hands grip the arms of my chair. “Of course,” Wyatt says smoothly. “Which is why I am asking you as my friend.”
A wide smile breaks across Mostafa’s face. “Now that is a different story. If you happened to have a visitor that you brought to the site—a personal guest—I might not be looking in her direction if she does more than just observe.”
He holds out his hand to me. “Welcome back, Dawn.”
* * *
—
ANY ANCIENT EGYPTIAN would tell you that words have great power. There were myths in which knowing the true name of a god could give you dominion over them. There were gates in the Book of Two Ways that could not be passed through unless you knew how to address their beastly guards. The tomb itself, where the ba soul reunited with the corpse each night, was also fueled with words. Visitors to the tomb would read the written spells, a peret kheru, a going forth by voice. There were lists of fish and fowl, beer and boats, bread and oxen, everything someone would want or need in the Netherworld, and when you spoke them out loud, they magically appeared for your loved one.
That’s what I’d been thinking about one afternoon in the tomb of Djehutyhotep II, during my first dig season, as Wyatt and I attempted to trace different sections of the inner chamber. It was nearly lunchtime, and I was starving—having been awake since 4:30 A.M. Staring at a giant palette of painted food, I listened to my stomach grumble.
“I heard that,” Wyatt murmured.
I was sketching, on Mylar, a roast goose. It looked more like a turkey, but there were no turkeys in Ancient Egypt. Even in modern times, it was called dik rumi, for Roman chicken.
When my stomach rumbled again, Wyatt glanced up from his own work. “If you don’t stop that, we’re going to be ambushed by those bats.”
I glanced up to the ceiling of the tomb, which rippled like a dark curtain. “They don’t even know we’re here.”
“Last season we had a postdoc here who said they wouldn’t hit us if they started to fly, because of echolocation. Then one smacked him in the face.”
I squinted at them, watching one bat detach itself from the rest to crawl to a clear part of the tomb ceiling. As if it had torn open the corner of a grain bag, a spill of black followed it. I took out my mirror and tried to bounce light upward, so that I could see how many there actually were.
Wyatt caught my wrist. “For God’s sake, don’t do that. They’ll go everywhere.”
I shuddered.
“There must be a word for an angry group of bats,” Wyatt said. “You know, like a bloat of hippopotamuses. Or a business of ferrets.”
“You made up that last one.”
“Swear to God. There’s also a conspiracy of lemurs.”
“A coven,” I announce. “That’s what a bunch of bats should be.”
“Hey, can you look at this damage?”
I crawled toward the right-hand wall in the inner chamber. Wyatt was scrutinizing a section that had, centuries ago, been hacked away or disintegrated. He pointed to the remnant of a hieroglyph. “It’s a bird,” I said, after a moment.
“Thank you, Sherlock,” he said. “But what’s the shape of the back of its head? Is it an aleph vulture or a tiw buzzard…?”
“It looks like an aleph to me.”
Wyatt grins. “Then, no offense, but it’s probably a tiw.”
I didn’t pretend to be as good at epigraphy as Wyatt was, but if I were the one drawing that vulture, it would look a lot better than what was materializing on the Mylar in front of him. I turned away, staring at a long line of Djehutyhotep’s family and retinue. The skin colors ranged across all different tones, but the women were usually painted yellow, and the men red. If you were a well-paid official in Ancient Egypt, your wife worked indoors and not in the fields. Even back then, there was privilege connected to being light-skinned.
Below a line of well-dressed ladies was a row of seal bearers carrying everything from a bow and arrows to spears and shields and axes and a litter. With them walked a spotted, curly-tailed basenji, scaled not to the other figures but larger than life, to signify his importance to Djehutyhotep.
Wyatt saw what had grabbed my attention. “Did you know that the Ancient Egyptians gave dogs the names of people, but all cats were just called ‘cat’?”
“Seems right,” I said.
The dog’s name was clearly marked over his back: the hieroglyph for “life”—ankh—and the quail chick that represented the letter u. “Ankhu,” I murmured, smiling. “Do you have a dog?”
“It was my brother’s.”
“He didn’t share?”
“He didn
’t have to,” Wyatt said, cryptic. He sat back, dropping his Sharpie and massaging his hand. “You know what Ankhu means?”
“Living one.”
“Yes. But it has the same root as the word for concubine: ankhet.”
“Is that all you think about?” I said. “Sex?”
“Looks like it’s all our boy Djehutyhotep thought about.” He pointed to the left of the image, where the image of Djehutyhotep had been hacked out or eroded, leaving only a general large blank spot with a remnant of a painted kilt. Facing him was a female figure—his wife, Hathorhotep. Then came a parade of eleven women—some who were labeled and some who weren’t.
“We know this is his wife because of the inscription above her,” Wyatt said, pointing all the way to the left. “And this is likely his mother, Sat-kheper-ka. There’s a sprinkling of daughters, a sister or two…but these three were his concubines, nestled for eternity right between his wife and children. How cozy.”
“You can’t know that for sure.”
He grabbed a book from his knapsack—Newberry’s publication of the tomb from 1895, and scrolled to a page. “There’s a block in the Cairo museum that’s been attributed to this tomb by Fraser.”
I leaned over his shoulder, listening to him translate a column of hieroglyphs. “The Ankhet, his beloved one…who wins his praise…daily,” Wyatt read.
I stared at the signs in the book, then took the Sharpie from his hand. With the cap on, I drew in the dirt floor of the tomb.
“You’re saying this means courtesan,” I said, redrawing the hieroglyphs for Ankhet: the ankh, the n of water, the kh of placenta, the t of the bread loaf.
“But we know for sure these hieroglyphs aren’t always crystal clear.” I held out my hands as scales. “Aleph vulture?” I offered as an example. “Or tiw buzzard?” I bent down to the dirt again. “So let’s say that Newberry made a tiny error transcribing the sign in 1895.”
I wiped away the third sign, replacing the third h with the very similar niwt, the sign for city.
“If you make one little artistic correction, the whole meaning changes,” I said. “It’s a female citizen now. A married woman who has a town council position. The opposite of a concubine, basically.”
Wyatt looked at me, nonplussed. Then he burst out laughing. “Well done, Olive. If only the status of women today could be elevated due to a grammatical error.”
In the distance we could hear the muffled loudspeaker of the midday call to prayer, vying for dominance over the Coptic church bells. He rolled to his feet, extending a hand to pull me up. “Come on. We’re going to miss all the gourmet offerings.”
The moment we stepped out of the tomb, the light and heat shrank around us like a second skin. I wrapped my scarf around my head as we picked our way down the necropolis to the gaffir’s hut. Hasib had packed a field lunch of bread, peppers, and tomatoes, and some of the other grad students already sat with Dumphries. “Thought we’d lost you in there,” he said, as I sat down cross-legged. I took a pita and began to mash a Laughing Cow cheese onto it as Dumphries passed me his coveted personal stash of Asian five-spice. My first bite was full of sand, as usual.
I watched Wyatt spread peanut butter on a pita. “Professor Dumphries,” I asked, “what’s the word for a group of lemurs?”
“Why do you—oh, hell, I don’t care,” he said. “It’s called a conspiracy.”
Wyatt looked up at me and grinned.
* * *
—
ON THE WAY back to the Dig House is the Rameses Café, a little open-air hut set like an oasis in the middle of the desert, with picnic tables beneath a thatched, patchy roof. There is a cat yowling on the elbow of the road in front of the restaurant, faded framed advertisements for Egyptian beer on the corrugated metal wall, and absolutely no customers. Wyatt suggests we stop for lunch, and then laughs when he sees my face. “It’s fine,” he insists. “I’ve eaten here many times on my way back from Minya, and I’m still standing.”
I sit across from him at one of the tables, resting my elbows on the sticky red-and-white checked plastic tablecloth. Wyatt takes off his hat and sets it beside a roll of paper towels and a basket of cutlery, then squints up at the thatch. “Once,” he says, “I was here with Dumphries, and there was a cat on the roof with diarrhea.”
“I do not want to know how that story ends,” I say.
“Neither did Dumphries,” Wyatt replies.
“I once read that he taught his dog how to read Middle Egyptian.”
“That’s true. But only the twenty-four uniliteral signs,” Wyatt says. “And yes, she was a basenji. She always messed up k and t.”
In all fairness, they were quite similar.
“The obituary you wrote in the Yale Alumni Magazine was perfect,” I tell him.
Wyatt studies me. “So the alumni association was able to track you down.”
I hear all the words he is not saying: He couldn’t. Or maybe he never tried.
Lightening my tone, I shrug. “I think Yale would call out the CIA to find alums, just for the capital giving campaigns.” Then I look up at him. “It must have been hard for you. When Dumphries died.”
“I spent a lot of nights wishing for his position,” Wyatt admits. “But I’ve spent more nights wishing that I’d had several more years to learn from him first. I was thirty-six when I took over as the head of the department. It’s been seven years and there’s a good percentage of the Egyptology community that thinks I’m still cutting my teeth in the field.”
“Publishing the new tomb should shut them all up.”
Wyatt raises a brow. “Such loyalty.”
“I’m trying to impress my new boss.”
He laughs. “You know, there was a time when you would have gotten on the first plane rather than let me give you orders.”
He has no idea how close to the bone his words strike. I force myself to meet his gaze. “I know you went out of your way for this. For me.” I hesitate. Now is the moment of reckoning; now is when I need to tell Wyatt why I am here. But it feels like the truth is at the top of a mountain, and I am standing at the bottom.
I am saved by the arrival of a waiter, who approaches us impatiently, as if we are the ones who kept him waiting. Wyatt asks for a Coke, and the waiter turns to me. “Can I have bottled water?” I ask.
The waiter shrugs dispassionately. “Why not.” He walks to a cooler and takes out a bottle, hands it to me. As Wyatt orders baba ghanoush and hummus, I twist the cap and accidentally spill water all over the waiter. He drops his pen, looks at me sourly, and heads back to the kitchen to place—and probably cook—our order.
Wyatt mops up the table with a paper towel. “An Egyptian would say if you spill water on someone, you won’t speak to them again.”
“I’m ninety-nine percent sure that waiter didn’t want to speak to me again anyway.”
“Are you still superstitious?” he asks. “Like your mom?”
Surprised, I glance at him. “I can’t believe you remember that.”
“I remember everything.” His voice is low, soft. It pulls at me. “Dawn. Ghosts don’t reappear after fifteen years. What’s going on?”
People do not get to rewind their lives, to rewrite the outcome. We make our beds, and we lie in them. Literally, in my case.
I have had a good life. I have loved, and have been loved. I have helped people. I’ve found a career—maybe not the one I intended, but one that has been rewarding all the same. If I die today, I would be able to say with honesty that I left this world a tiny bit better than how I found it.
I have had a good life. But, maybe, I could have had a great one.
How do I tell the man I left behind that I think I might have made a mistake?
“I’m not here to finish my dissertation,” I confess.
Wyatt nods, his eyes never leavi
ng my face. “Then why come to Egypt?”
Because, I think. You’re here.
Because I didn’t get to see how this might have turned out. How I might have turned out.
Because if there is a garden of maybes, you are the invasive plant I can’t ever get rid of.
But instead, I shake my head. “I don’t know. My life is chaos.”
Wyatt is silent for so long that I think I’ve offended him. Maybe I seem like a whiny woman in the throes of a midlife crisis, or a bored housewife. Then Wyatt idly picks up the pen that the waiter left behind. “Does he know you’re here?”
I know who he is talking about. I shake my head.
Wyatt begins doodling on a folded piece of paper towel. “Chaos isn’t such a bad place,” he says, and he excuses himself to go to the bathroom.
On the napkin, he has drawn the hieroglyphic signs that write nun.
Chaotic waters, I translate, surprised that I can still decipher this. It could be referring to rain, or it could be referring to inundation. It can be positive, like when the Nile floods and waters the crops. Or it can be devastating, and demolish a city. Ancient Egyptians believed that the first and most necessary ingredient in the universe was chaos. It could sweep you away, but it was also the place from which all things start anew.
* * *
—
BECAUSE THE DIG House is not full of grad students as it would be during a true season, there is space for me. Harbi sets up a room down the hall from where I stayed fifteen years ago. When I step inside, there is a clean Disney Princess mattress on the bed frame, and a stack of folded white sheets. A flat pillow sits, thin-lipped, at the head of the bed. Someone has found me a tiny tube of toothpaste. The clothes I arrived in are folded neatly on the nightstand.
“Thank you,” I tell Harbi. I sit down as he closes the door behind himself, and run my palm over Cinderella and Prince Charming, Beauty and the Beast, Aurora and Prince Phillip, Ariel and Prince Eric. All these happily ever afters.