On a Balcony

by David Stacton

  He felt no panic, though he was dimly aware that he should feel panic. When he got back he must set down the process in detail, and he felt rather pleased with himself on the whole, because no one else had ever been able to report it before. It was being watched, but it must look very different from the outside.

  Then he realized it had touched him. It had lapped round his will, until he had no desire to do anything but go along with it, like a log, safely rooted to the bank, that of its own volition abruptly, with a sort of comic sigh, shoots out into the main stream, and is sucked away even as it at last realizes what is happening. It was like being lapped by a tight, viscous honey, full of drowned midges, up to his ankles. It was pleasant; and then, frighteningly, it took hold.

  In that moment he knew that he had only the second between the grip wrapping round him and tightening to escape. Otherwise he would be swept away with it. But there was nothing he could hold on to. He couldn’t raise his body. The connective muscles would not respond. The luxury of that vertigo was too intense. He was covered with fur and couldn’t move. He knew the only way to escape was to feel frightened, but he couldn’t feel frightened. It was too much of an effort.

  But that part of his will which was untouchable even by his will got him to his feet. There was a sort of wrenching plop, and he was standing up. He noticed that though he was now vertical, his consciousness was still somehow rushing unconsciously through those horizontal tunnels. If he could get his body away from there, perhaps it would be all right.

  It did not occur to him that he could not get his body away from his body. He did not know what part of him was directing what part of him. Perhaps his muscles were more tenacious of life than he, but since, having lost his brain, he could no longer communicate with them, he let his body go where it would, only impersonally concerned with whether it would win out this time or not, but inwardly smiling, because he knew it wouldn’t, he had caught it out at last, but still, you had to admire the stubbornness with which it was trying.

  At the last moment, it was said, you were overwhelmed by light. He knew perfectly well what was happening, but had been so busy to prevent its doing so that he had not had the time to think. Now, abruptly, his head was almost clear. He opened his eyes.

  For a moment the room was unfamiliar. Egyptian bedrooms were too strait. He needed space. His hearing, for the first time in his life, was acute. He could listen to the contented, snake-like slither of the flames in every lamp, echoed from the cornice of golden uraei beneath the ceiling. He struggled to his feet, swaying and bald without his wig, and lurched out into the corridor. He moved automatically through swirling shadows, towards the light, and so came out into a garden courtyard.

  Why was everything so restless? It was as though death were everywhere, quietly stalking him through the reeds. Here and there he seemed to catch the glimmer of its plump, sturdy, bare calves. The wind was warm and blew every which way. He could hear a snarl from the zoo, the fretful piping of a thousand birds who had had the feathers on their bottoms stirred. And there was another sound, quite dreadful, an echo of the sound he had pretended to hear years ago at that temple up the river from Thebes, and now really heard, the sighing sound of the desert, as the sand danced over its surface like beige snow. And how it mocked.

  He felt weak. He vomited. Clutching a pillar, he forced himself on, towards a glow of light somewhere in the distance. For he had been wrong to doubt, he never had doubted, he never now would doubt, the glorious power of light. His eyelids were granulated and painful. He had always believed. It was only the other believers of whom he made mock. He had only to live until dawn, to reach that light ahead, to be well again. He would live for ever.

  But why was he alone here, and why were there not more lamps? The light seemed closer now, brighter, higher, and soon the sun would be almost visible, and he would be safe. His vision had narrowed to that oblong of light ahead, and he struggled towards it. He had to reach it, and he did reach it. He held on to the doorway and peered out.

  It was the mortuary yard.

  The workers looked up, saw who it was, and dropped their tools. For what they saw was the very image of the death they were carving. He saw the row of ushabtis, tightly bound in, like Osiris, with his head on each of them.

  Their sweaty unshaved faces stared at him in shocked disbelief. “And the dead king, Amen-em-het, said to his son: hold thyself apart from those subordinate to thee, lest that should happen to whose terrors no attention has been given.” It had happened. He turned and fled. He called out for Pentu, for Nefertiti, for Smenkara, even for Ay and Horemheb. There was no answer. For the things of the mind are irreversible. They go right along their road to the end, right to the end of the night. Even his own god had failed.

  It was the death of a grasshopper. And ants are sanctimonious. Grasshoppers suffer horribly. For to be amusing and to give generously is not the same as credit. Our debtors have no charity. Their only mercy in the winter is to tell us how foolish we were to have given them anything. No doubt they are right, but there is nothing to be gained from a lesson in morality after the act has been done.

  He had reached the shadowy banqueting hall. There stood the throne. He lurched towards it. For after all, God or no God, he was still Pharaoh. He swayed up the steps of the dais. Vision narrowed down. He turned to confront that empty hall. The first thing he had thrown away was now the last thing he wanted, for it was the only thing he could have. He smiled.

  And then, at last, it was dawn. The light lapped and caught at the gardens and the pillars of the hall and slid smoothly across the painted floor and up his face. It might have been a benediction.

  His only mistake had been a slight confusion. Pharaoh had always been worshipped as a god, and he was the glorious child of the Aton, so why should they not worship him? But men do not worship the source of life. They worshipped Pharaoh only for what they worshipped in themselves, the source of favour, wealth, and power. For men do not adore anything. Men who do we avoid as absent-minded fools, worthy of our hate because, after all, there is the uneasy suspicion that they may have something we cannot lay our hands on, and nothing is so infuriating as intangible wealth, for it cannot be stolen. Real men worship only what they fear, and what they fear to lose. Religion is not insight. Religion is only a system of bribes and indulgences, rewards and benefits, a matter of making ourselves comfortable at God’s expense, as we do at Pharaoh’s. Insight is something we should do better to keep to ourselves, otherwise someone will find a way to take it away from us. For men are clever. Give them time and they will pull anything down, including the roof over their heads.

  He did well to die there, on the throne.

  And there they found him, early in the morning, crumpled up at the foot of the dais, dead and fallen from the throne, and what he had spewed up was like plump white maggots, who had eaten him away from within.

  As soon as they heard the news, the mortuary workers struck at once. It was what they had planned to do all along. In that hot climate a body could not wait. It was what they always did. Each new death always meant slightly higher wages.

  And in Thebes, even before they knew he was dead, for the course of cholera was certain, at the temple of Amon, with solemn seriousness, the priests rolled out that horrible jointed doll again, and freshened up their vestments, too. For them it was a great victory, and as they had known, they had only had to wait.

  There was not even enough money in the treasury at Aketaten to bury him.

  In the palace everything was chaos. It was not only the endless, undulant wailing of the professional mourners, or even the anxieties of Pa-wah, caught without a precedent or a ritual and incompetent besides. Nefertiti appeared with a small guard and her own corps of nobles, but even they were loyal only by circumstances. It was that everywhere everyone was packing up, prepared to take refuge with Smenkara at Thebes. He was a weakling. They would swiftly overpower him with loyalty, seize the government, and make their peace with Amon af
terwards. Nefertiti could do nothing. It was all very well for Pa-wah to hold processions in the streets and swear to the eternal life of the Aton. He found no compurgators, even among his own priests. The Aton was no more than a foible of Pharaoh’s. Naturally being loyal to Pharaoh had meant humouring him in this. But the nobles already had new arguments ready. With Pharaoh dead, loyalty to his foibles would be disloyalty to his successor, and that meant disgrace, dishonour, and confiscation of their property.

  Unfortunately no matter is so easily solved, for even an empire takes a while to die.

  Horemheb, already on his way back from Thebes in any case, arrived, took over the police, paid the mortuary workers, and established order. Ay remained at Thebes. Until some answer came from Smenkara, everyone was to stay where he was. To make sure that they did, Horemheb closed off the harbour and set heavy guards to patrol the streets.

  Meanwhile Tutmose had appeared at the palace. He had taken their faces for almost twenty years. He would also take this one, since the mortuary artists needed a model from which to work. That was not, however, his real purpose.

  He had grown older himself. It made him sympathetic with death.

  Pharaoh had been carried back to his own apartments and deposited rather unceremoniously on his own wooden bed. It was late afternoon and the room was deserted. Tutmose’s slave put down his master’s tools and withdrew. Tutmose went over to the bed and looked down.

  Ikhnaton dead was not agreeable. He had the distended belly of a dog drowned in the river, and the body stripped, one could see that pathetic little penis was the black colour of a shrivelled artichoke. But while he watched the face became beautiful. Pharaoh had not lost faith after all, for we never lose what we are born with. We slide back as easily as we slide away, for some things are bred in the bone, and though the flesh may engulf them, they show up again quite readily, when the bones show through at the end.

  It was like the difference between playing the harp and performing on it. About a performance there is always something hard and brittle. It is the thing exhibited from the outside, for public view. Thus the parody of the last years. But if the performer is also a player, he never quite loses his contact with the music, no matter what he may do to it extrinsically, parody it though he may be forced to do. Understanding and virtuosity are poles apart, but precisely because they are, they manage to co-exist.

  And if you know the musician in that late virtuoso stage, as Tutmose had done for many years, you may still come upon him unexpectedly and find him actually playing. He will not then play very well, for he is not trying to impress anybody. But he is totally selfless and intrinsic with the work. He plays then with love and understanding, until one realizes that he doesn’t believe in the concert version either, and never did. From a sort of admiring scorn one is thus forced to turn to a genuine admiration. For what he believes in, in private, behind all that flashy and necessary cynicism and rubato, is becoming one with the work. And so, idly listening, one understands it too, for after all, the point of any composition does not reside precisely either in the notes or in the accuracy with which they are played.

  Looking down at Ikhnaton’s already withdrawn face, Tutmose could see that very well, and it did not displease him. It only made him sad. For he himself did not share that certainty. When you come right down to it, though other people may believe in the integrity of the artist’s beliefs, the artist knows that he has no beliefs about anything. All he believes in is the validity, indeed the paramount importance, of the quality and process of the act of believing.

  So the artist whose subject matter is religion itself is always the victim of scepticism, for he alone knows it has no object, but is only a process. In the circumstances he has nothing ahead of him but disillusion. So Tutmose had the more rewarding task, for as a different kind of artist, he did not have to concern himself with ends. To him everything was merely a means.

  And yet, at these ultimate moments, one believes in something. He had a lifetime filled with faces to show it forth. But he was very glad that, unlike Ikhnaton, he had never had to be certain as to what that something was.

  Having taken his cast, he went back to his studio. Insight is very dangerous. It disqualifies one for the immediate concerns of life. Unless one has the strength always to remember that what is true in one world can never be true in the other, one is apt to break oneself to pieces on the sharp edges of the incongruities between them. For this reason the Orientals are wise, to put off meditation until middle age, when the immediate involvements of life are usually over, for having become a physiological spectator, one is quite willing to admit that, after all, we do live in plural worlds, through which we most wisely proceed as the body shuts behind us one door after another on the now discarded physical delights. For one cannot furnish an altar with chairs and tables appropriate to a bedroom, or a bedroom with the bare walls of heaven.

  It is only reasonable. One cannot breathe until one is born; one cannot talk until one has learned to breathe; one cannot take action until one has learned to move; one cannot think until one has learned that action is limited; one cannot concentrate until one has learned to think; one cannot meditate until concentration has taught one how limited is thought; one cannot perceive until one learns that meditation is not concerned with perception; and one cannot die until one has been reborn. And one certainly cannot have eternal life until one learns that it has nothing to do with mortality. And to do anything backwards, or at the wrong time or position, causes severe cramp and often deformation.

  Nor, unfortunately, does the artist create. That is an illusion of the non-creative, who still believe that all things are made somewhere and had a moment when they did not exist. But an artist, in seeing that things are and are not simultaneously, knows he can only set down the appearance of one or the other at a particular moment and from a particular angle from which, perhaps, it may be true, since we call him creative, no one else had thought to look.

  So he made a mask from the mould and set it up with the others. He had now the whole family, or almost the whole family, and the others would come with time.

  That afternoon Nefertiti came to the studio. She had not set foot there for two years. He did not find her older. On the contrary, he found her congruent with that statue he had never shown her, the one behind the curtain, in a niche of its own.

  She looked at the mask intently. “What does it mean,” she said at last.

  “What difference does it make? I never judge. I let my hands do that.”

  “You’ve collected all of us. Why?”

  He stirred uneasily, for she had moved him. “Not all art has a meaning. Sometimes one plays, and that is when one does one’s best work. When one forgets one is playing. But as for being earnest about it, ah, you will never do anything that way. It is our great secret, we so-called artists. You know how it is. The incompetent like things they have to admire to be a little difficult. They’ve gone to all that trouble to admire them, even asked someone what they should admire, which is humiliating, it may have taken them years to see what you’re getting at, and naturally they want it to be hard for you, too. You can’t blame them. They never understand that the inconsequential is such hard work. It takes a lifetime.

  “One has to be alone, you see. Oh not to think. Nothing as serious-minded as that. But it is such an effort, you know, to learn how not to think. One needs quiet for that. Sometimes I sit here all day and nothing happens. The sun comes up and goes down. Or sometimes I listen to the fish. And then my fingers get hungry. They feed on plaster, you know. And then they show me what I have to say.”

  “And what do you have to say?”

  “Nothing. Oh, always nothing. But that sound when the fish jump, like a fifth and a second on a harp. A sort of plonk, and yet a sort of silence. You can find it between the eyelid and the eye, that little fold between the eyelid and the eye couldn’t have happened on any other face, though I don’t even remember whose face it was. Perhaps neither does
he. So that is what one does, you know: work every day, watch as much as you can, and wait. For the artist isn’t a mystic any more than the mystic is a mystic. They’re both too busy looking to go to the bother of living up to a name. And these aren’t portraits. They are just the faces one always needed, and a face is only a mask for what we mean.”

  “You’ve never talked that way before.”

  “My subject matter never died before, either.”

  She glanced round the studio and smiled slowly, but with such a different smile from the smile on her bust up there, on its bracket above them.

  “You’ll wait to do me now,” she said. “You’ll need that.”

  For that he had no answer.

  On the bench the mask of Ikhnaton seemed to glow and shift. It was a trick of the still wet plaster, and that was all his work was, really. They owed their immortality, and he his life, to nothing more than the properties of plaster. But it was a pity that she had grown so wise. “What’s behind it all?” she asked.

  Again he could not say anything helpful. “One goes through reality like a series of rooms,” he said. “Always looking for what is behind appearance. And then, when one is tired, one thinks one has found the ultimate door, opens it, and comes out on the other side. Then one looks back, and sees nothing but the opposite façade, and one wonders what is behind that, the habit of searching is so strong, forgetting of course that one has been through the rooms, otherwise one would not have seen that the back façade and the front are identical. So it’s easy to become confused. All one can say is that at last one has seen both. That’s all we can ever hope to do. To see both.”