Duke of Egypt

by Margriet de Moor

  Many years later Joseph would feel comfortable with a woman watching him go through the orchard with a disheveled head of hair after having just blinked when he says: “I’m going tomorrow, Lucie.”

  They emerged from the bicycle tunnel. In front of the station people were walking along in the sunshine, talking and greeting each other.

  And on top of that, she was pregnant the first time. Incomprehensible, isn’t it? She had quite a belly when she saw him getting into his car in the cool spring weather for the first time and knew for certain — and I know for certain that she knew for certain — that he would have put her out of his mind by the time he reached the electricity substation. I can’t creep under his skin. I can’t get behind his eyes to see how green his landscape is, how golden his sun, how fiery red his blood. So I’ll just stay with her. After all, she’s the one who has shared his sleep for the whole winter, with arms and legs and everything, who with her knees pulled up has managed to find a hollow in which a farmer’s wife and a vagabond fit perfectly. A miracle like that can make me cry. I’ll stay with Lucie. Because look, though he may drive off wherever he wants, I’ll be following him anyway. That may be by slipping into the car with him and looking at him from the side, his true face could well be like that six-month belly of hers.

  When she took to her bed one afternoon under the sloping roof with the splendor of August outside a bay window, her husband wasn’t there. He had been away for the whole summer. In the village people had talked about it, of course. Most of them had known Lucie since she was a girl, a creature with a strange character, and people had gradually assumed she didn’t have any emotions and therefore couldn’t suffer. There wasn’t much to speculate about. How bad was a husband who’d run off as in her case? They’d liked the Gypsy that first winter. He went to The Tap. He had a way with animals. But nevertheless there were a lot of people who didn’t realize until weeks later that he had abandoned their village. Only a few people sensed it immediately with a strange instinct.

  The day after his departure Christina Cruyse was wheeling a cart of groceries out of the market when she saw Lucie walking across the parking lot toward her car with a box on her hip. Christina left her groceries at the door and made a beeline for Lucie, almost running, and greeting her like a long-lost friend.

  “So he’s gone, then?” she said immediately.

  Her eyes slid probingly from Lucie’s face to the long plait across her breast and came to rest by her belly. “I saw him taking the Hengelo turnoff yesterday. Shall I keep my fingers crossed for you that he comes back?”

  Lucie looked at the other woman with her usual vacant stare. Instead of answering, she handed the platinum blond woman the cardboard box full of cat food that she’d just bought.

  “Sixteen,” she said enigmatically. “Sometimes twenty. Depends.” She pushed the trunk of the car open with both hands and took back the box.

  Three days later Christina Cruyse started phoning her.

  “Not back yet, is he?”

  It was very early in the morning. Still asleep, she mumbled, “No, not yet.”

  A day later it happened again, toward evening this time. Had he called yet? The next afternoon: Hadn’t he left any forwarding address? When she picked up the telephone on the seventh day and the infuriating voice asked whether he might at least have thought of the baby, she couldn’t say anything for a moment because of a lump in her throat.

  “Bitch,” she finally said.

  It wasn’t anger. It was a simple reaction to the malevolence of her questions, they weren’t questions but a tactic, a method of disruption with no other target than the small compass of her soul.

  “You rotten cow,” she said more precisely.

  There was a perplexed silence at the other end of the line. Lucie was about to hang up when, as if a familiar sharp voice within her was dictating to her what to say next, “May the maggots get you,” she heard herself say, “and may your ugly flesh rot if you call me again.”

  Greatly comforted, she hung up.

  The summer was hot and full of thundery showers. Apples dragged the branches of the trees toward the ground. The horses were so fiery that extra schoolgirls were required to ride them and exercise them. She worked every day until dusk. By then she had washed tails, combed manes, scraped out hooves, then she had slaughtered chickens in the afternoon and put them in the deep freeze, and in between, growing larger and larger in her blue dress, she had picked up the telephone and ordered a number of glazed pots for the terrace so determinedly that even her father became convinced of the order of things and swallowed any objections to an absent son-in-law.

  He already looked old then, bent, with impenetrable fierce blue eyes. Instead of modernizing as everyone had done since the end of the 1950s, he sold off, without apparent regret, large sections of the land of his forebears. There was something contrary about him, which according to some people was almost certainly linked with the loss of his wife, a very pretty girl from IJlst, whose warm, strong character had unfortunately lost the battle against her translucent skin in the winter of 1951. Gerard was left with a daughter of ten. Although he was popular in the area, good- looking, and had the reputation of a resistance past, he didn’t remarry. He raised horses, grew oats and corn and feed beets with the help of casual laborers, and looked after the little girl, Lucie, with a succession of different servants, so that she didn’t grow up without the care of a woman. This summer he was in a milder and friendlier mood than he had been for a long time.

  He liked his daughter’s girth. Why shouldn’t he feel happy about his impending grandfatherhood? You could often see him standing and looking with his hands on his back. Do you see the bulging side of the stables? For three days he mixed mortar and built a new wall against a stretched rope, and then he went to The Tap, bought a few drinks and accepted a few, and on the way home stopped off at the supermarket on impulse to buy a six-by-six roll of film. A day later he wound the film into an old Ikoflex with a sticking shutter. They were silly snaps, of course, of a horse, a dog, a barn. You see that there is a thick stripe of gold over the cornfield? Yes, and of course he also took a picture of Lucie.

  “Go and stand over there,” he said, and pointed to the exuberant garden.

  She obeyed. She peered willingly into the lens while her father started turning the light and timing rings. That morning he asked her, “Have you got a name for the baby yet?” Then he said she mustn’t move another muscle and pressed the shutter.

  The photo still exists. I saw it lying in a box of junk in Gerard’s room. She omits the smile this time. Serious, arms at her sides, she looks at a terribly distant point and meanwhile thinks as hard as she can about boys’ and girls’ names.

  Can you see the vagabond, perhaps, Lucie? He’s not thinking of you for a moment. And still he wants you to have a beautiful child. Can you perhaps see him with his typical Gypsy arrogance when he’s about his business in the market in front of the pilgrimage church of Kobryn? His eyes have been intently calculating, now the deal is sealed, someone sticks out his hand, he gives it a firm slap. Really he ought to be home. Every woman wants to feel her husband’s hand on the shuffling feet of the baby behind her abdominal wall. But yes, as for Lucie, you can’t make her out. Of all possible worlds, she thinks her own little world is the best. Yet she doesn’t get angry at someone who stays away from it for a month or so. Shortly Joseph and his friends will visit a drinking establishment on the market square. They’ll tap ash off the ends of their cigars and order green bottles of beer. When they get back to the camp, they’ll see that there’s definitely something to celebrate. A patsjiv is the party that you give for an unexpected meeting. Drink, songs, family and friends, the sense of time must be completely disrupted! Life proceeds from reunion to reunion. In the evening there’s dancing. Old and young men perform dances that start innocently but, under the hot sound of a violin, can soon become menacing. I’m talking about real irony here. Of course there’s food too. You bake he
dgehogs packed in clay in an oven of white-hot stones. The spines stick to the clay shell. You only dig out the guts at the last moment.

  The shutter clicked.

  “Katharina,” said Lucie, “or Kattela. If it’s a boy he’ll be called Hanzi.”

  The baby was born without complications. The doctor lifted him up by his ankles. “A giant,” he said. “About eight pounds.” Lucie, still resting on her elbows, was completely lost. She had seen new life appearing through all kinds of birth canals since her childhood. The past hour was part of the darker side of the world that didn’t fit anywhere and left no memories. They laid the boy in her arms. Some newborn babies have folds in their faces, as though they’ve already experienced a few serious things. “They’ll go,” said Lucie to a worried Gerard. “Really, Dad.”

  She wasn’t wrong. When they heard a three-note horn four weeks later and the dogs charged onto the path wild with joy, the baby’s cheeks were completely round and pink. There he is, she thought, yes, I had an inkling. She waited for him in the doorway. In another minute she would let that man back into the house, hand him the infant, and make sure that he supported its head with his left hand. Now she was still standing in the doorway and saw the Gypsy strolling toward her past the black plastic ground cover. It was an autumn like all autumns. With an eternal smell of grass and muck in the air. The perennial first fairy ring under the trees. As she watched him approach, her face was set. Not the face, you would say, of a woman who wants to know love. Who wants to meet the same man for the next fourteen or fifteen years, draw him to her with always the same — homeward-bound — look.

  2

  Like the first time.

  When Joseph’s car broke down on A3 5 near Stepelo in September 1963, he was actually on his way to the caravan site near Groningen. The year before, his wife had returned to Bosnia with her family. At the beginning of August, Uncle Nikolaus had died, and after wandering through Silesia and Pomerania he felt the urge to go into business as a car-parts dealer in the Groningen area. Although the obvious thing was to go north from Haaksbergen, he decided on impulse to turn off just outside Stepelo and dive into the farmland where he’d been with his family at the beginning of the summer. He could then deal with a couple of urgent phone calls in a pub in Benckelo, with a telephone to the right of the bar.

  After fifteen minutes the warning light showed that the temperature was rising, which could only mean a leaking radiator. He could have reached the gas pump at the crossroads, but he turned off down the path to a farm with the intention of simply asking for water. He got out of the car and two yellow Labradors dashed toward him barking, but immediately quieted down after a growl from Joseph. The farmhouse had four windows at the front, with the door at the side. He knocked. There was no sound anywhere. Inside he saw a clock and a vase of red flowers. His instinct told him that there was no one in the house.

  He was right. Gerard had driven to the auctions early that morning in an optimistic mood. The harvest of his four acres of potatoes might, he thought, be as much as fifty tons. Lucie was in the last empty stall of the large stable turning straw. She was particularly busy. Now that the stable boy had failed to turn up to work for the third time, she knew that she could no longer rely on him. So she ignored the barking dogs, put the fork away, and walked over to the only horse still stabled indoors.

  “And how are you, Timone?” she asked softly.

  The horse, a golden-brown mare who had been off her feed for the last two days, pushed her neck down. Lucy felt her ears. They were no longer so hot. In the mare’s eyes she saw a powerful longing for the herd. She opened the stall door, caught hold of the halter, and walked the animal across the concrete, under the lean-to outside, to the trees and the wind. The Gypsy, about thirty yards away, still among the asters of the farmhouse, suddenly heard stamping and snorting. He turned his head and saw a woman and a horse looming up from the stables on the other side.

  He straightened his back. He saw a young woman with copper-colored hair that lay in a braid over her shoulder. A woman in pants and boots and a half-buttoned greenish blouse, coming out of the stall with a horse in a halter surprised by the morning light. The pair turned, the woman raised her arm — her face turned toward him — and tethered the mare to one of the posts of the lean-to. Then she again raised her soft white woman’s arm, said something kind, unintelligible, and put her forefinger and middle fingers firmly inside the bottom jaw of the mare. She was counting. He knew that she was counting, she was counting the horse’s heartbeats because there was something wrong with the animal and it was almost feverish. The moment she dropped her arm and was about to let her gaze wander off to be able to think, her eyes met his and her whole face froze.

  He began walking toward her. Dazzled, and with a dullness inside that in fact was nothing else than the beginning of a lifelong shudder at the thought of a world, a possible world, without Lucie. He crossed the courtyard and walked over to the woman who stood waiting for him motionless with her face turned toward the neck of the mare. Paying no attention to the smile that appeared around her mouth, he focused on the horse. He took the head, looked in its nose, laid his hands against the lower jaw exactly as she had done and silently counted the pulses of the artery. . . forty, fifty. Then he looked at the woman with all the authority he could muster.

  “She was no doubt lying on pea straw.”

  Lucie nodded at once. It was quite possible.

  “That’s right,” she said. “That’s quite possible. That straw lay in the field for quite a while, damn it. At first in the rain, you understand, then in the sun ...”

  She stopped, burst out laughing, thought, and frowned.

  He said, “Moldy pea straw.”

  “And to think Daddy wanted to chop it up immediately.”

  They looked at each other, both swept along by a fit of hilarity in which you go so high that both of you can look down at the world together with the sun and the clouds. And what a sight! To climb is to be silent. Words are one thing, the dark side of a human being is something else. I see a man in black, with a hat on, and a woman, falling for each other from the very first second.

  Again he heard her voice.

  “And Timone is stupid, I mean she’s young. But good blood, you know. Soon there’ll be the competition in Enschede, so I’m training her already, you know, with a nice line on a trotting bar, cavalletti and then two galloping jumps away an oxer. And she goes over them perfectly.. . .”

  He said nothing but looked at the hand with which she was gesturing.

  “Yes,” she said. “She’s been lying on pea straw. You’re right. And that means she’s eaten some.”

  She untied the horse in order to lead it down the sandy track past her father’s agricultural junk to the meadow. Joseph walked with her. While he kept a careful eye on the crates and the barbed wire and a peeling red tractor, his full attention was focused on the woman who told him that she would shortly have to trim two large riding horses because the stable lad hadn’t shown up. Without imagining how or where, he knew that a moment was conceivable when his hand would follow the line of her neck and breast.

  “Here,” she said. She opened the gate. The mare was immediately chased into the farthest corner of the meadow by an older horse.

  He walked to the meadow pump showing signs of interest. The woman told him that the thing had been put there in the previous century by her great-grandfather. He stared at the green-painted cast-iron pump. Purely for pleasure he pressed down the handle, and enjoyed the water splashing from deep under the ground into the concrete trough. A little later he hunted through his pockets for cigarettes and they both lit up. The tobacco smoke, the grass, and the water had a better memory than she did.

  “I’ve seen you before,” said Joseph.

  She tried her inane laugh for a moment. Then she said, “I know. Yes, it was on the tip of my tongue just now.”

  Shortly afterward they were standing in the grooming shed trimming the two horses. J
oseph was handy. He grabbed the struggling horse firmly by the lip, ordered it to be calm, and went over its neck with the small clippers. Lucie, working next to him, felt that she had to say something memorable.

  “That horse is called Delaleen. Her mother is the heavy Gelderland mare that you must have seen by the gate.”

  Without interrupting his work, he said, “Then the father is wonderfully fast and has good shoulders.”

  Only now did she hear his strange accent. “A thoroughbred,” she said. “Oh yes, an Anglo-Arab from Hengelo.”

  After that they said nothing more because the shed, fragrant with sweat and bay grease, into which sparse sunlight fell, changed into an enchanted world that demanded all their attention. They were trimming the horses, yes, and when they looked at each other they did so from the side. And yet for a whole hour that shed was filled with a declaration of love repeated from minute to minute. Lucie finished first. When she was about to put the strop away, and raised her eyes, she met a man’s gaze that made the blood course through her cheeks. Was this the moment? Joseph thought it was, at any rate. We want each other, what about going over to that pile of soft gray horse blankets? He took a step forward, almost touched her shoulder, when she suddenly began laughing so stupidly again.