On a Balcony

by David Stacton

  Therefore, when he had managed to secure the chief priesthood of the family Aton cult he had been well pleased. It completely freed him from doctrinal disputes with his Amon colleagues, who did not happen to share his sense of humour, and it allowed him to keep an excellent table.

  He was altogether flattered by the attentions of the prince. For one thing, they meant more money for the temple, and therefore ultimately for him. The Amon priests, who scorned the Aton and him, would now be jealous. And besides, he found the prince bright, intelligent, remarkably well versed in theology for a layman, and given to the sort of puzzles with which he amused his spare time anyway.

  The prince had decided to enlarge the Aton temple, and this meant that they met daily. And really, if anything, the prince talked too much. For instance, he asked: “What is truth?”

  Meryra was delighted. It was one of those unanswerable riddles that one could discuss for hours, if the other person did not suddenly begin to shake like a whippet.

  One could answer cynically: truth is the prevailing prejudice of the greatest number at any given time, mystically, except that this tended to cut off the discussion: truth is the perception of God; erotically, truth is what we want others to see in us; militarily, truth is on the winning side; politically, truth is whatever justifies our self-interest; philosophically; truth is that invisible, impalpable reality of whose various aspects appearance is the pale momentary reflection; practically and pragmatically: truth is the best butter, and comes salted, plain, with garlic, and sometimes rancid.

  “But what is the truth?” asked the prince.

  “Why, whatever you think it is,” said Meryra.

  “And what do you think it is?”

  Meryra’s thoughts did not move in quite that terrifyingly adolescent way. He had never thought that truth was anything in particular. “Truth”, he answered blandly, “is illimitable. To define it, therefore, is to make it untrue.”

  The prince was not quite up to that sort of thing. Meryra was disappointed.

  So was the prince. “Is what I believe truth to be, true?” he asked.

  “Why, yes, of course, I suppose so,” said Meryra. He was watching the workmen set up the new columns which extended the forecourt of the temple. It would look splendid when they were all in place. “What do you believe truth to be?” he asked.

  “Honesty and frankness. Showing things as they are.”

  “In so far as you can never know what they are,” said Meryra, “that’s being merely literal-minded.”

  Fortunately the prince did not hear him. “Is Bek a good sculptor?” he asked.

  “No,” answered Meryra. “I don’t think so. That is, the effect is sure to be very fine.”

  “Is he deficient in Ma’at, in truth?”

  “How on earth should I know?” asked Meryra. “Sixteen statues, you say. The effect will be absolutely marvellous.”

  “Twenty-four,” corrected the prince. This matter of truth was important to him. As for example in the matter of his descent from Ra. If he was descended from Ra and not from Amon, he need never go to that Holy of Holies again. He asked Meryra about his descent from Ra.

  Meryra had been saving up his grudge against the Amon priests for years. He was delighted to tell the prince that, yes, he was quite right, Ra was the older god. He was descended from him. But in Thebes, he would still have to go to the Amon temple. Now if he was in Heliopolis, matters would be different.

  “You mean, if I went away, there would be nothing the Amon priests could do?”

  Meryra was not sure.

  And then the whole story of the Holy of Holies came tumbling out. Meryra was not impressed. “A painted doll,” he said, “moved by strings, with an echo box behind. Nothing more.”

  “I shall never go there again,” said the prince.

  Meryra looked guilty. He should not have spoken. It was never wise to give away trade secrets, if only because it meant that one then had to make up tricks of one’s own, which was fatiguing.

  “Then it was not a god,” said the prince.

  Reluctantly Meryra shook his head.

  “Then where is God?”

  “God”, said Meryra, hoping to end what had been an uncomfortable and indiscreet five minutes with a benign platitude, “is within you.”

  “I know,” said the prince.

  This, if anything, was even more disturbing than what had gone before. How on earth could the prince know anything of the sort? He was, of course, himself a god, but then that was purely a state manner. Meryra waited respectfully, wondering what to say.

  They had reached what had been the Holy of Holies. The prince was having it torn down, as part of his improvements. It was an activity Meryra could look upon with some equanimity. The old Holy of Holies had been bad for his arthritis; and it had been boring to duck in there and wait for the correct length of time, without anything to do, while pretending to receive a suitable message from the god. The new shrine, he trusted, would be larger, airier, and drier.

  The prince told him there would be no new shrine. “Aton is a god of light. All good comes from light. All bad comes from darkness. I will not have anything shut up. We will have an open altar and offering tables.”

  Meryra was astonished. And then he saw the possibilities. There would be a new ritual, priests, temples, new formulas, a whole system.

  “With flower sacrifices,” he said, and the prince nodded eagerly.

  Very well, then, thought Meryra, with flowers it will be, a very small and special cult, patronized by Pharaoh, aristocratic, with a limited clientéle and himself at the head of it. It would be a fascinating game. For so long as he could hold the prince’s attention, for so long would the Aton cult prosper.

  *

  But to Meryra, already dreaming his new dreams, was added Tutmose, the sculptor, dreaming his. For Tutmose, like Meryra, also combined indifference with ambition, and perhaps also liked to play with the game of appearances, though in a slightly different way. Much more than Meryra, Tutmose held the right keys to immortality. Tutmose, or rather his fingers, knew what Ma’at was very well.

  It was no accident that he should arrive at the temple on that day when the installation of the new statues was finished and the prince had come to see himself new, shiny, and reproduced twenty-four times.

  The day was mercilessly bright. Only the best work, delicately modelled, could stand up to such strong light, and Bek’s, as Tutmose knew, was not the best work. The effects of inferior craftsmanship and too much haste showed plainly. Besides, Bek did not know how to make a virtue of abnormality.

  For an instant the prince thought that Bek had made fun of him. He had asked for truth. But Bek had given him a literal-minded veracity so thoughtlessly done as to be a cruel caricature. The prince wanted to turn and run.

  From twenty-four pedestals twenty-four jeering parodies leered down at him. Bek was not to be blamed. The prince saw his own ugliness from the inside, where it was almost a grace; but no artist can ever give any subject a grace he does not possess himself, and so there was no veil of art between these statues and the prince’s ugliness.

  From a height of ten feet his own white face looked down at him, stretched taut like a piece of muslin drawn over the skull of a ferret. The eyes were beady, the skull misshapen, and the lower lip flapped down of its own weight. The pose was stiff and hieratic, after an Osiris mummy. The arms were like spindly cucumbers suffering from winter rot.

  Show me as I am, he had said, but this was not the same as sculpting him as he looked. The hips were a calamity, like gigantic white sponges six feet high. And there were twenty-four of them. It was his first defeat at the hands of the fine arts, and once the panic of being seen like that was over, he was furious with the artist. But where could he find a better man?

  As it happened the better man had come to find him. Tutmose stepped from the column behind which he had been lingering.

  “You should not blame the man,” he said. “He did his be
st.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  Tutmose shrugged. “I have been here all morning. But you are quite right. They have no truth. They are very bad.”

  The prince had been taken off guard, and taken off guard, Tutmose thought, he was charming, slightly spoiled, only a boy, potential of great mischief, but still charming. With his guard back up, on the other hand, he was shrill and difficult to put up with. Tutmose, however, wanted a government stipend and an adequate workshop.

  “You were talking about truth. And you are quite right. It cannot be shown from the outside. If you will come to my studio, I will show you. Unfortunately sculpture is not portable.”

  It was a daring thing to suggest. Pharaoh went to no one. But as he had been sure he could, he had caught the prince’s attention.

  They went.

  It was the prince who arrived first. Tutmose found him in the outer courtyard of the house, a little bewildered. And indeed, to an Egyptian, no doubt the house was bewildering. For one thing the trees in the garden were not planted in orderly rows, but scattered in no pattern. Tutmose preferred to find order rather than to impose it. For another, there were no clamorous servants. Tutmose did not care for servants. And for a third, the building was stripped of all ornament, with nothing but whitewashed walls, so that the rooms were full of light and the dancing shadows of water plants from the pool of the courtyard.

  When he led the way to the studio, there was no work in the studio at all. The room was empty, for Tutmose did not like his own works. There was only a chair on a dais and a work-table.

  “Sit down,” said Tutmose, and began to mix something in a tub. Rather unexpectedly the prince sat and even sent away his guards. For clearly he felt quite safe here. The room was flooded with light.

  “What shall I do?” he asked. To pose still made him self-conscious, particularly after having seen the best of which Bek was capable.

  “Do nothing. After all, you are,” said Tutmose, and began to slap wet plaster on an armature. He had prepared for this for weeks. He had made head after head and smashed them all. He had studied these features until he knew how these features wished to look, and until he could reconcile the way they wished to look with the way they did. For in these matters the prince was no fool. No matter how uncertain his taste, still, obviously, he had taste. Therefore the thing must be done just so, and it had to be done quickly. Well, it would be.

  Besides, the subject was interesting. There was some vigour in that boyish voice. All he needed was something to believe in, and then, even if it were an error, he would be worth sculpting indeed.

  The model grew. It only took three-quarters of an hour. Tutmose revolved its stand. The light came down through a hole in the ceiling. It played and leaped and altered the surface of everything, as Tutmose gently rotated the stand. And there, out of the still wet plaster, shimmered the prince’s very heart and voice, changeable, young, quick, eager, never for an instant the same, and always self-renewing. Tutmose had only to watch, to know that he had succeeded.

  “Yes,” said the prince. “That is truth.”

  For that was what Tutmose knew about the truth: the truth is always changing and always the same. And besides, it is pleasant to thrill the sitter sometimes. And the sitter is so easily flattered. All he wants to see is his own conception of himself. Tutmose was rewarded on the spot. It remained only for him to flatter Nefertiti, and about that he had no doubts. It would merely be necessary to make her beautiful. Women were like that.

  And so the pattern fell into place. First Meryra, and then Tutmose, the man who showed them the truth, flickering, changing, but always the same, and always beautiful, and always what they wanted to see. He would be personal portraitest to all of them.

  And what was the secret of that sudden rise, and of that no less sudden truth? Wet plaster, and a trick of modelling porous surfaces, so that they should always catch the light and so always seem to change.

  It was ridiculously easy. Yet it was not so easy as all that, for Tutmose, too, had his concept of the truth. Once the prince had gone he set his face aside and did another one, one on which he spent a lot of time and thought, and which utterly held his attention. The first had been a piece of sleight of hand. But this was a little more than that. It was a study of the prince a few months from now, when he was at last at the mercy of what he was really thinking; when his own fears, so badly nourished by other men’s ambition, had at last hardened into a system of belief. For after all, we are all other men’s means, even Tutmose, who more than any of them, hoped to save something out.

  He had this hope, because he knew what he was up to.

  Of course there were times, in the middle of the night, when he wondered if he was any good at all. But, since he also knew that it was only people who were good who had such doubts, these night thoughts, though profoundly disturbing, were also reassuring, for he knew that that very quality of badness which one perceives in oneself is nothing more than the sum of one’s merits, for only excellence shows us how we have failed. All the world’s most admired works are nothing more than a rubbing of the artist’s original idea, an uneven replica of something that at the time was quite clear. And, of course, such is the creative process that as soon as the rubbing is taken, we destroy the original.

  But only the artist knows this. It is his great trade secret, the secret perhaps of any trade, for only those at the top know how little is the distance they have climbed, how far there is they failed to go, for only at the top can we catch a glimpse of what lies beyond.

  *

  Meanwhile, at the palace, there were problems. Tiiy, Amenophis, and Horemheb were in the pavilion by the lake.

  It was difficult, these days, to get Amenophis to do anything, for he was completely wrapped up in the astonishing news that after all he was not dying. The light which this had flooded over his whole life had blinded him to everything else. Now his son was co-regent, he proposed, despite his pain, to enjoy himself. Except for the family hobby of building, he left matters of state to Tiiy.

  The great jewelled mortuary temple of the Memnonion, which he had erected to both of them was, they said, finished, and he was determined to see it. Beyond that, his responsibilities were over, so far as he was concerned.

  So Horemheb and Tiiy, with Ay for company, were forced to discuss political affairs in the Memnonion, a setting that was not exactly conducive to worry, for into this vast pile Amenophis had poured the luxury of a lifetime. Obscure revolutions in Syria and scrubby revolts in the Delta shrank into insignificance here.

  They carried him in in a litter, and even he looked lost in that wilderness of burnished marble, silver and gold inlay, prismatic jewels, shrines of lapis lazuli, and formal statues of himself all taller than he was. Even though they whispered, the walls reverberated to their voices. It was as useless to tell him the Empire was falling to pieces, as it was to tell the prince. Commander of the Armies Horemheb might be, but there was nothing he was to be allowed to command them to do.

  “After all, the boy is young. He will learn,” said Amenophis.

  That was exactly what they were afraid of.

  Ay asked if either of them had been to the Aton temple.

  Tiiy only half listened. Somewhere behind all this was her daughter, she knew that. And Nefertiti was sly. For Nefertiti now also went to the Aton temple. Meryra had tactfully adapted the ritual to fit her.

  “Who is this man Meryra?” demanded Tiiy.

  “The prince apparently sets great store by him.”

  “He must be a fanatic. Put a stop to him,” snapped Tiiy, and thought no more of the matter.

  By then Meryra could not have stopped himself.

  Horemheb had a moment of disillusionment. They were not busy, wise, good, and impersonal. They were not all understanding. They were not gods. They were only Amenophis and Tiiy, two intelligent and beautiful toys, who played with their Empire as though it, too, were a toy; and who would protect that Empire only as
a rich man would protect his investments, when at long last he came to realize that his income had shrunk.

  For the first time in his life he saw that, dwarfed by the dimensions of his own monument, Amenophis looked smaller, and Tiiy, just for an instant, irrelevant. It saddened him. He had always believed that loyalty was an emotional matter. Now he began to realize that it could also be abstract.

  And then the magic was back again. She laid her hand on his arm. She needed his help.

  Three

  In two years one can persuade oneself of almost anything. Familiarity, in that event, breeds confidence.

  Nefertiti had persuaded herself that she was happy. Since she had never been happy, this was not too difficult to do. She was now the first, or almost the first, woman in the Empire.

  The prince had persuaded himself he was Pharaoh, the ruler of his people, well loved, universally trusted, the eternal well-spring of favour, powerful, gracious and understanding. He had not persuaded Tiiy, and whether Ay believed it, or indeed anything, would have been difficult to judge. He was much too busy to believe in anything, for he virtually ran the government, and Tiiy ran him.

  As for Amenophis, nobody ever saw him, so he was able to believe, despite an inability to move about in cold weather and despite, or even because of, the pain, that he was still a remarkably vigorous man.

  Horemheb, who had grown less muscular, but not noticeably so, was almost convinced that it was the duty of a Commander of Armies to stay in the capital and amuse the court. He was still Tiiy’s lover. He could not help that. But sometimes, in the middle of the night, he wondered why her body made him so sad and so considerate, and why Nefertiti made him so nervous. He drilled the soldiers in the capital rigorously. Some might have called it discipline, others boredom. He called it strategy.