Mother Nile

by Warren Adler

  Ezzat had fallen into a schedule of daily rounds in the late afternoon, but some endless meeting to arbitrate a petty squabble made it impossible to proceed on his round until dark. Lantern in hand, he traversed the wall, and moved past the coherent rubble of marked stones scheduled for transport and reassembly. The watchmen were squatting around a stove, sipping the coffee that topped their evening meal, and puffing on their hashish-loaded water pipes, talking in low voices punctuated by occasional laughter.

  Not wishing to disturb them, he switched off the lantern and moved deeper into the site by the light of a thin, crescent moon. Toward the rear of the second hall, he paused at a point where an acoustical aberration collected low hushed tones, the unmistakable babble of a small crowd.

  Carrying his unlit lantern, he moved deeper into the chamber, where he could make out the outlines of the four giant Ramses, at the base of which he could see a huddled line of squatting figures. He watched them until he could distinguish a pattern of movement. At intervals, someone would rise and move to the darkest recess of the chamber, where muted sounds could be distinguished, like the lowing of animals.

  It was strictly forbidden for anyone to be inside the temple site at this hour, a rule, like many in this baksheeshridden land, easily broken with the collusion of the caretakers. The objective of this security was to prevent the theft of artifacts.

  But the leisurely indifference of the squatting figures dismissed that possibility, and he proceeded toward them without fear.

  “Back of the line, mister,” one of the men grumbled in a hushed, urgent whisper. Ignoring the caveat, he proceeded toward the darkest part of the chamber following the sound. In a corner, he could make out what seemed like a thrashing animal, although the sounds of exertion and the outline of a dark shape indicated a human in the throes of some compelling seizure.

  When what he was watching became comprehensible, he waited until the movement ceased, either out of some pathetic sense of delicacy, or forewarning of imminent horror. Finally, a man stood up and in the vague light he could make out his movements clearly, the hitching up of trousers, a low clearing of the throat, then the sound of his footsteps against the ancient stone floor.

  It was only then that he dared flick the switch of his lantern, catching in the circle of his yellow spotlight that which he had dreaded, the supine form of Isis, alabaster thighs spread, revealing the raw, moist open womanhood. She lifted her face to the light, the green eyes glazed and glinting like gems, glowing with rapt indifference.

  “Damn you, Isis,” he called. Then, louder, as he moved the circle of light across the walls and into faces of the squatting, hungering men. The light, acting like a catalyst to their fear, roused them and soon their footsteps beat swiftly along the stone floor as they scrambled through the temple, lifting a cloud of stone dust in their wake.

  Switching off the light, he felt the rising bile of his anger, choking off the words that froze in his throat. She had risen, and was slumped now against this four-thousand-year-old wall, showing, for the first time since he had known her, a genuine outpouring of emotion.

  He came toward her, not knowing which side of the razor’s edge his inclination might fall. His mind wanted him to be angry, but she seemed so forlorn, devoid of defenses, her vulnerability like a cold stench in the dusty cavern, that he discovered himself moved to pity and he gathered her in his arms. She moved into them, shivering but tearless, offering only the mute explanation of her helplessness.

  In this sea of deprived men, she had become, as he should have seen, a logical target of their primordial urge, an accomplice in her own gang rape. He knew she was groping for an explanation amid the poor tools of her articulation. She was illiterate, and had been raised with such conversational indifference that she could barely summon the words to describe her feelings.

  “They wanted me,” she said, finally, leaning against him as they moved back toward the villa. For the first time in his life, ever since his mother had died when he was ten, he felt a sense of involvement in another person, responsible.

  Not that she wasn’t wary of his sudden affection. He could feel that, along with this epiphany, as he laved her mortified flesh with cool water, even those parts that had been more directly abused, with paternal, sexless piety.

  “We must not let this happen again,” he whispered to her, surprised at his use of the collective pronoun. It was then that she shook her head and the tears came in big shivery blobs, drowning her cheeks.

  “From now on, I will never let you out of my sight,” he said, hoping that she would see through the superficiality of the words to the core of his sincerity.

  That night, they moved the pallet that she had been using as a bed from that spot in the corridor where he had first put it to his bedroom. He knelt beside it, embracing her shoulder and kissing her eyes closed.

  “Will you love me?” she asked, lids fluttering open, pupils big as saucers in their green rims.

  “Of course, child,” he replied, gently, overwhelmed by this sense of possession.

  Chapter Forty

  He was immediately aware that this relationship provoked profound changes in the way he measured his life. He had bounced between looking backward and forward, vacillating like a roller coaster on an endless track, reversing himself in mid-loop, hurtling both forward and backward in time. After his disillusion with Nasser, the gears engaged to bring the conveyance to a sharp stop, reversed themselves, and brought the focus of his life back to the contemplation of what had occurred in past millenniums.

  By being a detective of the past, poking around in the relics of past manias, he could both sustain and refresh himself. Each new clue to the past encouraged the reverse action of the roller coaster, offering the surprises and satisfactions that were supposed to be the harbingers of the future. Now, suddenly, spurred by this new relationship to the future, he felt the damned conveyance shift gears again and start rolling upward toward the summit of the looped track.

  She rarely left his side now. He would take her on his twilight rounds of the temple, deliberately ignoring the empty-faced guards, dismissing what he knew must be their obscene fantasies of this relationship. He offered her a running account of the progress of the temple movement, but she seemed to show little interest in that, more curious as to why the figures were so big, wondering aloud if the people of these long ago times were actually as big as these images.

  “He wanted to be remembered,” he told her, unwilling to complicate the reply by a long rendition of why the obsessive, megalomaniac Ramses II had gone berserk, with his orgy of defacement and construction.

  “But why?” she asked, puzzled.

  “He believed that the gods would favor his being granted eternal life.”

  “You mean he thought he would live forever.”

  Ezzat nodded, knowing that the explanation was both mystifying and abstract. What he could not tell her was that Ramses’ persona did indeed have a kind of eternal life, that his spirit had taken on the hue of a living thing through the crazy genius of these monuments.

  “But who built these places?” she asked.

  “People,” he had answered, his mind wandering in the contemplation of those vast faceless minions whose toil had made these constructions possible.

  The explanation did not satisfy her. She had no response to broad abstractions.

  “They were the people,” he tried again, the pedant in him aroused. “They lived along the banks of the Nile. They tilled the soil, lived in the rhythm of the twice-yearly flood. When they were needed, the old Pharaohs would summon them to do the work, thousands of them, pounded into work gangs of common fury.”

  “But who were they?” she persisted. “What were their names?”

  How were such questions to be answered? What would she make of an explanation that dealt only in statistical estimates of countless thousands, hundreds of thousands,
millions, who had given the last ounce of their strength for these geegaws of civilization, these fanciful offerings to some self-chosen maniac determined to actualize his greedy fantasies of immortality?

  They were ferociously possessive of each other, and their fear increased proportionately. Zakki manifested himself in everything, like some gelatinous, consuming, impersonal mass moving downhill from the high cliffs overlooking Abu Simbel. He saw potential Zakkis in everyone and everything, watching them like the germinal Egyptian eye. The gang rape was not simply a foreshadowing. It appeared now as an act of aggression, rooted in revenge, perhaps promulgated by Zakki, the first, surely, of many planned terrors.

  Isis announced the suspicion of her pregnancy at about the same time that the Israelis swarmed over the Sinai borders to destroy the Egyptian army that Nasser, in a paroxysm of vainglory, had rattled like a saber down the nose of the trigger-nervous Jews.

  They heard it on the shortwave radio, the velvet Oxfordian tones of the BBC announcer providing an eerie counterpoint of dispassion to what Ezzat knew was cataclysmic. The Russians, always arrogant and inert, became surly and contemptuous, and the workmen, many of whom had been spared military service by this monumental toil, became unstuck by the national mortification.

  Tension and arguments increased, as the Russians tossed epithets at the Egyptian workers, including the archaeologists, stripped of their reticence to declare that the Egyptians were a pack of lazy assholes. Ezzat suffered the indignities out of fear that any reply on his part would call attention to himself and Isis. In his heart, although the logic was tenuous, he was almost convinced that the debacle, like the pregnancy, was more of Zakki’s handiwork to torment them.

  Yet he stayed on, if only to underline his conviction that what they were doing at Abu Simbel was a truly Egyptian enterprise, not like Nasser’s debacle, rooted in the miasma of some pan-Arab fantasy. The idea that the purity of the Egyptian heritage was somehow tied to the destiny of those Arabian primitives who had lived like wild goat herds while the ancients were inventing paper galled him.

  In his mind, Zakki became illuminated as the ultimate transgressor, the penultimate foreign body stuck in the bloodstream of the Egyptian race, the embodiment of all its evils. Nothing seemed safe from his centipede onslaught, each infested leg carrying the germ of some Assyrian, Nubian, Libyan, Persian, Mameluke, Circassian, Macedonian, Roman, Arabian, French, British, German, or Italian aggressor.

  As her belly blossomed with its nameless embryo, he brooded on some plan to escape from this inferno of ignorance and evil. Oddly, it was Isis’s naive innocence that pointed the way out. “But who were they? What were their names?” she had cried. Of course. There was only one true place to hide in this accursed land, to lose one’s fabricated identity and swim anonymously, at last, in the great flesh pond of Egypt’s life-giving excrescence.

  Trusting him implicitly, she did not ask where they were going as they moved out of the villa in the dead of night, loading only portable possessions, clothes, a few books, and some bits of light artifacts on a donkey cart. There were no formal resignations from the project, not a single good-bye, as the donkey cart rattled away from the half-displaced temple, caught four-cornered in limbo between proliferating technology, godhead fantasy, ancestor worship, and national vanity.

  She sat stoically in a corner of the cart, which jiggled and bounced over the stony, parched road heading northward over the ancient caravan route, sparsely lined by ramshackle but immaculate Nubian villages.

  They traversed the 168 miles from Abu Simbel to Aswan in the blazing heat of late June, sleeping under the cracked boards of the donkey cart and buying food from the Nubians along the way. They also acquired a goat and another donkey, which they tethered to the cart’s rear, using the goat for milk and the new gray donkey to spell the other. By then, too, he had eschewed Western clothes and donned a brown djellaba and white turban.

  Schooled by Bedouins and much younger, Isis was more attuned to the hardships of this nomadic life, while he had to harden himself to its effects. The hothouse of civilization had softened him, and soon he followed her example.

  They traveled mostly at night, escaping from the sun by camping in the shade of palm copses or reclining under the boards of the cart. She prepared meals of fava beans, softened in a mush and inserted into pita bread, which they washed down with goat milk.

  They talked little. She had grown up in silence, and for hours they could sit facing each other, locked in bottomless kayf, although he found it difficult to train his frenetic mind to empty itself. Knowledge had sensitized it to hum with energy and curiosity, and instead of floating in a maze of emptiness he used the silence to recall and unify the bits and pieces of past learnings, and to calculate his plan of anonymity.

  They would become fellaheen. That had all been determined in advance. What he must find now was a few hectares of land, enough for self-sustenance. Unfortunately, and he was amused by the image, there was no vengeful Judaic God to point the way to the promised land. He would have to find his own real estate, and he did not plan to spend forty years wandering in some haywire plan to destroy the generational memory of enslavement.

  They reached Aswan in a few weeks. There, he sold the artifacts to an underground dealer. He had already converted his savings to cash in Abu Simbel. In Aswan, he consulted a farm broker. His method of operation seemed slightly devious, but since he was also being devious in the method of his new identity, both parties were able to wink at the joint deception.

  After nearly a month of trudging through the countryside, they found an abandoned place of six hectares outside the village of Kom Grobe, thirty miles downriver from Aswan. The cluster of mudbrick houses were roofless, the fields were in need of care, the creaky Archimedes’ screw that provided irrigation was in disrepair. He had picked the place, not for its condition, but for its relative isolation, his prime consideration. The fields on either side of him were, he learned, in a cooperative venture, which the previous owner had apparently rejected and which eventually ruined him, forcing a migration to the slums of Cairo.

  But Ezzat, with his cache of money, and ability to absorb the facts of agricultural mysteries from books, was certain that, considering there were only two, potentially three, mouths to feed, he could make it work.

  That first night on their own land had an air of expectancy for both of them. She had begun to call him father, and he, in turn, called her daughter. He brooded about this relationship. In truth, it existed in just that way, and he thought of her in those terms. Yet there were practical considerations, and he was faced, ironically, with the single most pervasive consideration of a fellah’s survival. Progeny. He had not really confronted that immutable fact of life, determining and discarding options as quickly as they arrived in his mind. He had the means to purchase her a husband, but the thought of a stranger entering their conspiracy seemed more perverse than the course that persisted in his mind.

  He was over sixty, but his health was good, and although he had willfully submerged his libido, he knew from unmistakable physical signs that he was quite capable of reversing the process. Indeed, the recall of her bare, blatantly exhibited womanhood revealed in the circle of light had tugged at this protective veil of celibacy. Often now, when she moved close to him, soliciting what seemed like a fatherly embrace, he felt the beginning tumescence, distinct stirrings of an “incestuous” lust.

  He was not, after all, her father. Not that that would have mattered, he decided finally. The manic Ramses himself had fathered children from among his ninety-six daughters. He had 105 sons as well. It was argued by scholars that it was this propensity for incest that eventually watered down the genetic strength and capacity of the ancient Egyptians, a subject open to debate.

  But the die had been cast. Besides, he was engaged in what he believed was a compelling idea, to reverse the tide of his own history, which, centuries before, he was certain b
egan in some nameless patch of fertile earth just like the one he had purchased.

  It was not lost on him, as well, that she was in actual fact the living daughter of the last dynasty of Egypt. Slipping backward in time was the last refuge, the final hiding place. To be a fellah was the ultimate connection with the living history of the human race, the primordial urge to find harmony and life in the rhythms of the land and the seasons.

  On that first night, he prepared a pallet for them in one of the roofless buildings, the largest of the group. Tomorrow, they would go to town and purchase food, seeds, tools… the currency of a fellah’s life. He had discussed this with her at great length.

  “This is your place, too, Isis. Yours, forever.”

  The idea seemed to thrill her, and she moved closer to him on the pallet.

  “It will be hard work, backbreaking.” He felt foolish, explaining what was so self-apparent. “It will be home to all of our children,” he whispered, feeling the swell of her pregnant body, as his hands roamed its fullness.

  “I felt it move today,” she whispered. What did it matter how the random seed had been implanted, and by whom? he thought. The fact was that nature had spoken, and that, in itself, was the root of all knowledge, all mystery. He hoped, too, that he might one day empty his mind of all its science and logic, and believe, finally, in the mysterious, immutable force of Allah. There is no god but Allah! Could he ever believe that again?

  “Be fruitful and multiply,” he whispered, mocking the Koranic inflection. Lifting her malaya, he felt her moist womanly parts. The mysterious response of his own sexuality made him draw her close to him. Entering her, he felt certain that the offering of his seed would bond him to her. Perhaps, too, he thought, it would stake his own fatherly claim to the unborn fetus stirring inside her warm, honeyed womb.