On a Balcony

by David Stacton

  It was a beauty, however, which made him angry. Later in the day he got up on a stool and knocked her left eyeball out of the statue on its bracket. By evening he had a polished pip of moonstone set in the empty place.

  Why he did this he did not know, for the neck and chin were as proud as on the day he had sculpted them. Perhaps it was because he no longer wanted to see her as she had been. For the Queen had glaucoma. She, the most beautiful, had fallen victim to the most common disease in Egypt. A fly had laid an egg in her left eye. In another two or three months it would be as gelatinous and as blankly white, as the moonstone he held in his hand.

  Nine

  One must understand Ikhnaton. He did have feelings. He had lived with her for ten years. But he could not help it. He loathed deformity.

  She still sat with him on the throne. They were still as affectionate in public as ever. But now she must stand and sit on the other side, so that he could not see her eye.

  It was one of those evenings when they had public music. There were perhaps forty people there. The hall was gay with tall stands of flowers and fruit, and the drinking had been heavy. Nefertiti seemed reassured. After all, he had not sent her away. This made her almost happy, and as a result her jaw-line was prouder than ever, her smile more austere. That was how she took happiness: as something beyond our self-control, to which we should be wiser not to give way.

  The tumblers and dancing boys were replaced by drums and harpers. They came forward, to do the slow dance demanded by the strophe and antistrophe of what they were playing.

  Blind harpers were essential to all temple rituals. Indeed the demand so exceeded the supply that it was sometimes necessary to blind them. They were thus, in a way, themselves holy. As with eunuchs, an operation which cut them off from life was their one means of obtaining a sinecure, and some of them had undergone it with as little compunction, and for the same practical reasons, as had the eunuchs. For what man would be whole, if success and security depended upon his disfigurement?

  They had elected to sing that part of the hymn to the Aton in which all creatures sleeping and in darkness salute the dawn as the eternally renewed source of sight, warmth, and security. They shuffled in an unpleasant manner, like men edging their way down a cave with a lowering roof. Most had their eyelids shut, but some did not. One could see the empty socket or the gooey colourless mass within. But the ugliest thing about them was the silly satisfied inhuman look on their faces.

  Ikhnaton could not stand it, nor would he. He stood up and ordered them out of the hall, while a muscle pulsed in Nefertiti’s cheek. “I will not have cripples around me,” he shouted. It was certainly shocking. In the following silence it was difficult for the guests to pick up the pieces again. Guards hesitated, and then led the harpers away, while all that silly satisfaction in their faces gave way to panic. While he was at it, he abolished them from the temple services, too. Then, losing control of himself, he went to his own rooms and left her alone there on the throne.

  She found it hard to control herself.

  Next day he behaved as though the scene had not happened. But since it had happened, she took the harpers under her protection, in the service of her own dawn temple. They scarcely knew what had happened. They fluttered round her like chickens bewildered by a cyclone. Nor did she find their ignorance displeasing, for those who know nothing have much to teach, and at last she had something under her control that he was afraid of.

  Nor would she forgive him for that scene. It was the first time that that solid front they presented to the world had cracked in public, and since there was much advantage to be gained by taking sides, everyone at court would be there to drive a wedge.

  The court might make profit out of his fear of contamination, but she knew that nothing could save him from it. Contamination is unavoidable. Only two things in life are inevitable, starvation, if we cannot sing for our supper, and death, even though we can. As the most powerful person in the world, he was in no danger of the former. But the latter was now coming much more close and very rapidly.

  News came from Thebes that Amenophis was dying.

  Ikhnaton kept to his own quarters, but Tutmose was sent to Thebes, no one knew why. He returned in two weeks. Ikhnaton drove to the studio at once. Amenophis was the first of them to die, and he wanted to see how death looked. He was sure there could not possibly be any resemblance between that man dead and himself living.

  Here he was wrong. For death returns the features to their primal condition. Amenophis dead was Ikhnaton living.

  It had clearly not been an errand that Tutmose had cared for. He watched Ikhnaton anxiously. The mask itself lay on a bench in the centre of the room, Ikhnaton circled the bench as one would circle a dangerous animal securely caught, yet was any snare that secure?

  So this was death. It was, at any rate, death at fifty-four. It looked startled and angry, but not after all so horrible, locked up in somebody else’s face and unable to get at him.

  “Hold it up,” he ordered.

  Tutmose held it up, so that it seemed to float in space. Out of those heavy, pain-raddled features the very shimmer and cast of youth stared leanly out, the eyes stubbornly turned inward, and the mouth set to get what it wanted, yet with some sort of shimmer on the cheek-bones less easy to define, a contradiction, if one liked, of cynicism. It was a face that knew more than it wanted to know, and very beautiful.

  And also meaningless. For no matter how long it takes to die, it does not take long enough. Death is the worst abstraction we have. What does it refer to? Not to the dead, not to consciousness, not to the process of dying itself. Not to what was, or is, or will be. It does not even have a physiology. Dying does. Decay does. But death does not, for what happens to the body after death is only what happens to a house after its tenants have moved away for good. It doesn’t hurt particularly. It is the body that hurts.

  The most one can say is that one watches oneself dying with a certain interest, as though one were peering out of an egg just as someone steps on it. One can hear the shell crack before it has cracked. No doubt that is what death is, a part of time that takes place outside time, a split second existent independent of duration. That is a natural death. But a sudden death must be quite different, since we have no time to get ready. Aplomb of necessity must go forewarned.

  On the other hand it takes an age. One realizes that everything else in one is dead already. The arms, the legs, the emotions, have all been closed off. There is only the will left to go. So one sits and waits as though one were sitting on a chest, waiting to go off on a journey, with the horses late and the chariot nowhere in view. It is very tedious. One feels very tired. One had so looked forward to the outing. And now, despite oneself, when it is too late to change one’s mind, one finds oneself asking if after all one really wants to go. For the journey is a lie. One is not going anywhere. And if one is not going anywhere, why all this fuss about getting ready? Why can’t one stay where one is? Simply because one’s time is up. One has either paid one’s bill at the hotel or not paid it, but at any rate one’s room is lost. The condemned cell is needed for another man. If you come on Thursday, people say, I’ll arrange to have the coachman meet you at the cross-roads. But this isn’t Thursday, and maybe the cross-roads aren’t even there. One can’t even get in touch with them, to say one is coming. At the last moment one lost their address.

  In short, one cannot say anything about it. One simply has to give up and look the other way. Ikhnaton refused to look the other way. He had to prove himself different. He was the son of a god, and so could not die. He was not the son of his father. If his father had died, it was only because he was the son of a false god, Amon.

  He did not like the way that mask caught the light. He asked Tutmose how he had taken it. And then he asked Tutmose to take a life mask of him.

  Tutmose hesitated. He knew Pharaoh’s claustrophobia. He had always wanted to take his life mask, but had not suggested doing so, out of prudence. But now
he shrugged his shoulders. To understand a thing, in this case Pharaoh, it is necessary to judge it by its own standards, not by ours. And not being a fanatic, but an urbane man, he did want to understand it, even though, trapped in that plaster, Ikhnaton might panic and so turn against him.

  “Lie down,” he said. He inserted two straws into Ikhnaton’s nostrils, smeared his face with grease, put gauze over his eyelids, and began to apply the plaster. Ikhnaton trembled, but said nothing. Tutmose did not like what he was doing. It was always interesting to see which part of their faces his subjects most clearly identified with themselves. Some took the whole process with equanimity, but most would flinch and grow rigid when the plaster covered their mouth, their nostrils, their eyes, or even, in one case he could remember, their cheek-bones. He would have expected it to be the eyes in Pharaoh’s case.

  It was not. It was the mouth, the mouth that gave him the voice to command.

  The plaster was all applied. He looked at the body, the shapeless thighs, and the big belly. It occurred to him that perhaps Pharaoh was tubercular. His chest was so meagre. It now rose and fell convulsively. The room was still. The only sound was the laboured suck and hiss of air in and out through the straws.

  He bent over. “You must keep very still,” he said. “The plaster is warm, but later it will grow cool and seem to tighten and grow heavier, as it contracts. Nothing can go wrong. I will wait here. It will take perhaps half an hour. Keep your eyes and mouth firmly shut, and try to breathe shallowly.”

  He went to his workbench and honed a chisel. Then, aware that something was happening, he turned round to watch.

  Pharaoh’s body was rigid, as though tensing itself for some ordeal. Tutmose frowned, and put his hand on Pharaoh’s belly. It was taut beneath its fat. The head jerked upward and Pharaoh turned on his side. Tutmose flipped him over, but the straws were crushed. He was having a seizure. Inserting his finger-nails hastily under the chin, Tutmose ripped off the mask.

  The face glistened with grease and was utterly expressionless. Yet at the same time it seemed to smile. The body contracted again, the mouth gaped, but a sort of animal scream lost in the throat was followed by some kind of inner struggle. It was a body. At the moment there was no one inside it at all. Still holding the mask, Tutmose backed away. Then it was over. The body lay still, and slowly the breathing came back, at first very fast, then very slow, and then, with a final convulsive twitch of the body, more regular. Tutmose looked down at the flattened, faintly mauve and brittle nails of Pharaoh’s hand.

  Then Ikhnaton opened his eyes. “Send for Pentu,” he said.

  Pentu was sent for.

  “Is the cast safe?”

  Tutmose held it up.

  “Can you make the mould now?”

  Tutmose could and did, moving back and forth across the room, while Pentu came and went. No wonder Pharaoh was afraid of death. As an epileptic, he repeated the experience whenever he had to renew his nerves. But there was no real need for Pentu. Epilepsy was quite harmless, and frightening only to those who had to watch. Still, there was that instant before one became unconscious, when one realized one could no longer control one’s body and would so be at the mercy of outsiders for a while. That could not be pleasant.

  Tutmose was not frightened, but he was sobered. He had not known. It explained much. No wonder Ikhnaton loved the sun. For when a capillary bursts in one’s brain, which happens once or twice in everybody’s lifetime, one has the same sensation as an epileptic, of a cool, overwhelming, yet somehow healthy, all-pervasive light that sweeps one instantaneously in and out of an hygienic void. It happens so seldom, and runs so counter to everything we are accustomed to, that most of us forget it. But an epileptic repeats it too often to forget it. Therefore he is often mystic and frequently devout.

  The cast had set. He removed it, and at Pharaoh’s order set it beside that of Amenophis, propping it against the wall. Despite a difference in feature, the resemblance was exact, which, in turn, told one much about Amenophis. He had been a visionary, too, but one with nothing to look at. No wonder his death mask was so sad.

  Ikhnaton saw no similarity at all. As far as he was concerned this difference he saw abolished death. He went away content.

  He forgot that his father meant nothing to him. Yet like an assassin, who closes in on us, by dodging from tree to tree, strangling first the outer sentries, and then the guard before our tent, death was moving closer. A month later, and it had reached his tent.

  Since Tutmose did all the rest of them, he had done the princesses too. Their tiny shell-like heads were perfectly suited to small chunks of highly polished stone, and this was work he enjoyed, finishing them with as much care as a man, to relax, would lavish on the pip of an apricot. It was a sort of hobby, and of course we love our hobbies best for being so meaningless.

  There were six of them now, and when he finished one he did another. Meritaten was twelve, too large to interest him any more. Maketaten was ten, Ankesenpa’aten, whose facial planes were the most satisfying, eight, and the other three three, two, and one respectively. If he wanted to please Pharaoh, he had only to hand over one of these scrimshaws of Maketaten, who was his favourite, though personally Tutmose found her the most insipid of the lot. He preferred Senpenra, the baby, in green serpentine, which he carried about with him in his pocket, to play with when the day was hot, because the stone was always cool. It was pleasant to twiddle with it when he was thinking.

  Nor was the idea irreverent, for Pharaoh himself played with the children as though they were pet mice. And why not? Lonely children keep white mice, lonely men usually have a box of their old toys hidden away somewhere, and one must have something to lavish one’s affections on, without fear of reprisals. There is a good deal to be said for white mice.

  What the children thought nobody knew. They were secretive children, and since the secrets of children are not ours, we should not understand them even if we knew them.

  Then, quite suddenly, Maketaten died.

  Tired of being little, she had circled up like a dormouse under a shrub in the garden and gone to sleep, partly because it was so hot, and partly because she didn’t want to play hide-and-seek any more.

  It was well on towards evening when Ikhnaton found her, for Meritaten, who at twelve insisted on running the others, had said she had gone off to sulk, and please, couldn’t they go on playing. She was a little old to play tag, but she enjoyed it, because it gave her a chance to be close to her father, who had a passion, so it seemed, for tag.

  There was a light breeze off the river. It was time to go indoors. In the declining sun the stalks of the plants already looked blue. So he pattered up and down the paths, while the others waited, bubbling happily to himself and calling for Maketaten, while Meritaten, who was jealous of her younger sister, watched scornfully from the doorway.

  Then he found her, circled up in a ball, in the long untrimmed grasses under a persea tree. He stuck his hand into the warm flesh between her drawn-up knees and belly, and it wasn’t warm at all.

  “Sleepy,” he said, “Wake up. Wake up.” He bent down, scooped her up, and jounced her in his arms, the very favourite of all his children.

  That high-pitched, febrile scream must have been pent up for thirty-four years. It echoed endlessly across the water, while the rushes danced and waved along the shore. At long last death had reached Aketaten.

  He advanced, tears streaming down his cheeks, which tingled as though they had been slapped, while her legs dangled helplessly below his arms. Servants came to the door. Meritaten stared.

  “Get out,” he shouted. “Get out, all of you.”

  He must have sat there for hours, on the garden seat, with her body across his lap. For this was not his father. This was different.

  He had made the ultimate discovery. Once they are gone, they are irreplaceable. They take away that part of us that loved them. It and they will never be there any more. There is nothing to say. It is as though one had lost a
ll one’s teeth.

  He would not even see the Queen.

  Ten

  The embalmers had an unvarying schedule. To reduce the body to immortality took eighty days. But there were no embalmers at Aketaten. He had refused to have them there. He had to send to Thebes. And Thebes refused to send them. It was unheard of. They would come only if the princess should be buried after the traditional ritual.

  He blinked, but said nothing. He gave in. The men came, and an area for them to work in was set up at the northern end of the palace.

  No one knew what he was thinking. No one dared to ask. Only Meritaten, being most like Maketaten, was allowed to see him. She was most like, but even she was not the same. Still, at this time she got what she had not even wanted, complete dominion over him.

  He spared himself none of it. He had to see it all for himself. But there should be no dancing and feasting, as was traditional, before this mummy, before it was settled in its tomb. He could not have borne that. He would have ripped apart the cases and the wrappings, to get her alive again, only to find a shrivelled, contracted, bituminous skin, like the shed skin of a snake. Immortal life, there was no immortal life, unless immortal life could be mortal. What was the use of an immortality you could not touch?

  He had that section of the garden shut off. Like the banqueting hall, it was a place where no one would ever again go.

  The procession formed before the gates of the palace. There was no rite in the temple, for no rite had ever been devised to deal with such a thing. Under the hot sun the party moved up the final gorge to the royal tomb. Carried in a litter, he jounced ahead of the Queen in hers, and bit his lip. It was a distance of five miles. Nor was there any hymn he would have sung, except the eternal hymn to the Aton, which was now a mockery. There was no formula to deal with such an event, except the noble’s petition to Pharaoh, as the glorious child of the Aton, to grant them eternal life.