Duke of Egypt

by Margriet de Moor

  He is young. She puts him at thirty at most. Impressed by his smooth-shaven face, his hooked nose, the eyes that again have the passionate seriousness that immediately won her over many years ago, her eyes glide toward his clothes. He’s wearing a Moroccan leather jacket with embroidered sleeves that she hasn’t seen before.

  “I’m glad you’re back.” She sighs.

  He looks contentedly from the farm to the potato field on the other side. “I always liked coming here.”

  “If you only knew how much I’ve missed you.”

  “I felt at home at first glance, it’s unbelievable.”

  “For the first time I was wondering where the hell you’d got to.”

  “I saw right away that you’re not one of those women who’s always walking around yelling.”

  A few flies, sun, not a sound anywhere. Lucie and Joseph sit talking perfectly at ease. The two voices carry a long way. She looks filthy, with smudges across her face. He on the other hand looks cool and clean. There’s a flat gold chain around his neck.

  “I’m so sorry,” she suddenly blurts out.

  “Sorry? Stop it now. The dead don’t like sorry.”

  “I’ve always stayed so terribly angry about it. She’d ironed your shirt. If you ask me, she’d even starched the collar and cuffs.”

  “To hell with her!”

  “Now I’m ashamed. I shall be sorry for all eternity that I didn’t forgive you.”

  He shrugs his shoulders. Indifferently he says, “Well, do it now.”

  “Can I still do it?”

  He brushes his cheeks with his hand and appears to think. “Not really, no. You exchange forgiveness when you’re alive.”

  “Well, but. ..”

  “But what?”

  Silence, and still the flies. He looks at her a little teas- ingly from the side.

  “Come on, give me a kiss!”

  She gives him a kiss on the cheek.

  Then he reminds her of his talents with his dark cunning eyes.

  “There’s so much that can’t be done, Luce. For Christ’s sake, you know I sometimes smuggle things over the border!”

  She presses her chin against his chest and breathes in deeply. When she relaxes and exhales, she feels something oppressive flow out of her and then flow back, already weakened, and then flow out of her again.

  “You always smell so good,” she murmurs, relieved to the depths of her soul.

  With a grin he says, “To be honest, you don’t at all right now.”

  She leaps up. She looks in dismay at her smeared clothes and notices the flies.

  “Why don’t you go and get washed?” he says.

  You gave him the space. You gave him the opportunity to do what he wanted and you followed him without taking a step. After summer workdays you sat under the trees in a state of sweet drowsiness. Although no one was talking to you, there was someone talking to you. Although no one was reasoning with you, you drew fantastic conclusions. Thinking is actually listening. Why should you not transfer the adventure of the mind to the hearing? Tell me! I’m the extension of your prehistories. Blow your top, lie, swear for all you’re worth. I’m your sacred vessel. With the help of your unique tone and your very personal meter I am gradually filling up. When Joseph was gone, Lucie found her way to his soul purely by ear. Just leave the windows open, let it rain, the sun makes a checked pattern behind the garden gate, in everything that happens there’s something of you. The separation didn’t mean much to her.

  She starts on the painting of the house in the first week of May. Two children help, but when they’re at school she continues by herself, working hard but carelessly. Perhaps she’s tired. No less than five times she leaves the blowtorch on the wood for too long and has to grab the garden hose in a hurry. In the evening she forgets to take the ladder off the front of the house. In order to paint the fascia she climbs onto the roof via the hayloft. She walks so nonchalantly over the rungs that you wonder if she knows what she’s doing. On Friday something really does happen: She is lying on one elbow, on a bale of straw that’s been taken out of the stack, near the ladder, her face chalky white, a shiny bruise on her cheek. Now and then she closes her eyes and opens them again. Then she looks right through me as if from a mirror and with the face of someone who’s far from awake. I get cold shivers down my spine.

  “Come on, take your shoes off!”

  From the direction of the outside pump Joseph arrives with a dripping cloth, which he wraps around one of her ankles after taking off her shoes. Again it is immediately striking how handsome he looks. Morocco leather jacket. This time a hat of fox tails as well.

  “It’s already stopped hurting, you know,” she says. She holds out a hand, lets herself be pulled up by him, and again looks at the roof where her paintbrushes are still waiting for her behind the fascia.

  And so a moment or two later the two of them follow each other up the ladder into the gutter and then via the tiles up onto the ridge. Where they sit down. Just like that, and obviously so familiar with the situation that it strikes me as something they’ve prearranged. And then when I hear him launch into some story or other and when she listens, blinking as she always used to, a peace comes over me, a boundless carefree feeling that I only knew when I was a child, in the village, still in bed at daybreak.

  “From that direction,” he says. His voice sounds imperious. “We came from that direction.”

  “Where?” She peers. She wants an answer. “Where then —”

  He gestures. “There.”

  And then I see it too. The landscape has suddenly shifted. The clouds have lurched and a couple of birds dive down headlong at a strange angle. Where the Twente countryside had been, there is now a river flowing from south to north, a wide waterway with a town on its right bank with towers and double towers behind Gothic walls.

  “Deventer,” I hear him say. “I assure you that it was five or at most six days’ journey.”

  It’s 2:22 P.M. and clear weather. Along an eastern access road, which is so well maintained that you can certainly imagine needing only a scant week to travel from Westphalia to the Hanseatic town on the Ijissel, a group of at least two hundred horsemen approaches. They are men, women, and children on unusually fiery horses. They are surrounded by packs of dogs. At their head rides a man with a fierce, haughty appearance. He wears a hat of fox tails. It is Joseph Andrias, Duke of Egypt.

  5

  That last part of the journey, Lucie, was a stretch with scores of windmills. None of us had ever seen anything like it. The city gate was already in sight, a stone gate at the end of the road which rose slightly there. Then there was that industrial area, grain and oil mills, a wind was blowing, the sails demanded every bit of our attention, our thoughts were whirled around and around. Up to then the area had been green. With streams and ditches along which black and white cows grazed without any supervision. A hospitable region. Geese and teal were dead easy to catch. Well, then: Surrounded by the raging sails we held a final council.”

  Six horsemen went on ahead. Clever, shameless, and dressed in expensive clothes, they galloped posthaste to the Noordenberg Gate, where they arrived on the dot of twelve. The guards were amazed by their regal appearance.

  “Make haste,” ordered Joseph. “Notify the town council. Announce our arrival!”

  Following their own instinct, his group was already turning into Bisschopstraat. Immediately they felt the pulse of the town. At the spot where the Schipbeek emerges into the IJssel, they found the old merchants’ houses. When they got to the Bokkingshaven, they stood staring silently at the ships. They turned around and rode behind a tall church in a direct line from Assenstraat, Sandrasteeg, Halvesteeg, and Bruynsteeg to the north side to emerge via the Graven near another very old church. A curious crowd was growing. The people looked at the outsized horses and felt the need to talk about life to the foreigners who were carrying gold-handled whips. The streets filled with the smell of tantalizingly exotic things. Joseph A
ndrias’s group looked with interest at the houses with the wavy gables.

  “Imagine, Luce, in the warehouses you saw ceilings with blue skies and gleaming gilded suns!”

  They rode in procession across the Brink, where despite its being afternoon a roaring trade in dried fish was still being done, and then decided they might as well enter the town hall, on the corner of Tolstraat.

  “Where exactly do you come from? Where are your lands?” asked the two burgomasters who approached them in the chamber. Tax-collectors and masters of guilds made pleasant faces. Respect spoke from their souls. Such horses, this gold, this lofty way of behaving: The Duke of Egypt could certainly make claims in Western Europe.

  “I didn’t answer at once. I wanted to encourage their respect and curiosity. They looked at the gold of our accessories. Then I said: ‘History knows us under many names, gentlemen, and assigns areas to us in all points of the compass. The oldest mention of us you can find in one of our patriarchs from Ionia, called because of his blindness Ho me horon. He, a man of many words, had heard and retained something about our descent from the Sinti who lived on Lemnos. Centuries come, and go again, but long before the birth of the Divine Son another narrator, also a great Greek but with Carian blood, alludes to the horse-rearing Sig- ynnes in the river basin of the Danube. What is a people, a race? Our descent is manifold, to mention a single country of origin is misleading. It is said that the Atsingani, who were magicians and performed with the bear, are among our ancestors, but don’t take that as the last word. We have been associated with those rescued from Atlantis. Are we Syrians by origin? Canaanites? My dear sirs: Of the facts, which are full of gaps, I can’t keep from you those about India, because along the upper reaches of the Indus our language is understood, understood and spoken to this day. Because of the limited time, I shall ignore here the mountain people of the Sakas who fought Mithridates, and will say nothing of the Rajputs, all of whom were kings’ sons. So as not to take up your time unnecessarily, my information will race quickly from our presence in India at the time of the Parthians to our exodus after the arrival of the Muslims. This is what happened: Our two hundred thousand horsemen and five thousand elephants fought on the side of the Rajputs against Mohammed of Gur, a rogue but a creditable general, and won the first battle. The second was under a godforsaken star. So it happened, and so it was to continue: some of us escaped via Afghanistan to Europe and we settled in Lower Egypt.’”

  Silence. But the words lingered and demanded expansion. The aldermen wanted to know what happened next. Thereupon Joseph Andrias changed his voice because he wanted to appeal to the virtue of the heart and to Christian, evangelical virtue. This is well known: Hospitality to wandering pilgrims, that’s number one, and number two is death to everything Turkish in the Balkans and far beyond. He told the town council of Deventer that they, Egyptians, had been converted to Christianity generations before, and had been driven out by the Turks on account of their faith.

  “And we wandered for seven years, just imagine, if you can, it isn’t pleasant: seven years of enduring banishment.” And he continued about the generally very bad roads, the cold and the wind, that would put you completely out of sorts if you didn’t simply take those things for granted in order to do penance for your sins.. . .

  Oh, he spoke like a man of principle. The burgomasters offered the six princes, offered the people outside the gates, shelter without hesitation.

  Here Joseph starts grinning. He casts his cunning look at Lucie, who sits there as impassive as usual. “They didn’t even ask for our papers!”

  She takes it as a joke. “Which, of course, you had!”

  He takes her hand, she can still feel his rather forceful, lively fingers and, like that, in the languor of the afternoon, they look out over the streets where people already feel like celebrating. The sun is warm. The wind timeless. A bunch of children tries with sticks to catch a young goose that has found its way into the stinking window of a cod-drying shed, and the two follow his escape into the shiny green trees along Rijkmansstraat where the prosperous citizens of Deventer live.

  “Yes! Indeed. Never had such a nice passport before!”

  Wait. Joseph Andrias made a theatrical gesture, pushed aside the lining of his jacket, and produced a letter. Before opening the document, he looked around the council chamber. Those present fell silent as though enchanted by a secret performance.

  “We, Sigismund,” he read aloud, “by the grace of God King of Hungary, Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, and other territories,” whereupon there followed in forceful terms the charge to do everything to help the Duke of Egypt and his people in all lands of the Holy Roman Empire, hence also in Deventer. And the letter was passed around open afterward. It was the king’s hand, definitely.

  “Let them all in! Prepare the Wantshuis!”

  To be on the safe side someone asked Joseph, “How many of you are there?”

  “Two hundred.”

  “Book the Köln inn as well!”

  “Well, Lucie, that’s what happened. The gates were opened and our people filled the town with their horses and dogs.”

  The festive atmosphere immediately continued. While the Egyptians rode to the Wantshuis and installed themselves among the piles of woolen and cloth fabrics, while they watered their horses in the courtyard and lit their cooking fires in the square in front of the deanery, the town took out its accordions, its prize pigs, its flags, and straw was strewn on the Brink in advance because nobody doubted that the following day there would be horse trading. It became dark in the streets. That night, by the light of wax candles, you could meet brightly dressed women who spread your hand open and looked at it and then prophesied something light and happy for you from the lines.

  The morning began with the tolling of bells. And with the clip-clop of hooves — heavy native working horses and riding horses so tall, black, and impatient that they can only be associated with immortally beautiful stories — they made their way to the Brink.

  “Good God, Joseph, those coldbloods! Look!”

  “You’re telling me, wonderful nags. We bought four.”

  Do you remember Ulaleen?”

  “The grandmother of Bellaheleen?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was standing by the gate when I drove up in 1963.”

  You came past the orchard. You parked next to the barn. By the gate there was a heavy horse with broad hooves.”

  “She may well have had something in her of these primeval types, don’t you think? Hard, willing, slow. It was a wonderful breed, Luce, then, from the country around Deventer. But they made us laugh, you know. They’d pulled the teeth of some of the very young mares.”

  “To sell them as mature horses, I suppose.”

  “Yes. Yes, and in order to palm them off onto us as mares who could already carry a stallion.”

  Horse trading in the far distance. Sun, wind. By about noon the bustle and the money result mainly in music. The Egyptians populate the pubs and pavements around the square with large-scale exuberance. Their strange singing voices, the shuffling of their feet and hands, their eight- stringed fiddles, are answered by the astonished but scarcely hesitating people of Deventer led by six young master carpenters with drinking and guild songs. And in the afternoon there are equestrian games. At full gallop farmers’ sons, who have managed to round up their stallions like pedigree animals, spear a ring hung over the road with a poplar branch, which they stick out like a lance. And the Egyptians make everyone think by jumping on their horses over three beet carts placed next to each other, while another group make their decked-out stallions step to the side and backward to the music of the carillon in front of the Lebuinuskerk.

  Wonderful images. Which take up two whole days. Absorbing them is not difficult, reporting on them is, because the moment called “now” is timeless and hence a piece of “forever.” Here is a town in which for once the people quite calmly leave the doors of their houses open, in which they sleep when they fee
l like it and eat when they feel like it because the firmly anchored residence has been overcome by the most powerful of all intoxications, a life within life in which everything is a little different. You can find the dark Egyptians everywhere. They tell good fortunes. They do business. They accept smoked herrings, straw, beer, and twenty-ounce loaves as presents from a town that has been admonished by its king and bears the eagle in its coat of arms. They tell anyone who will listen about the situation in the far corners of the world, but in reality they are announcing their departure. They’re leaving, and if anyone asks where to, they will roll their eyes and see land, hills, and seas. For convenience, however, they will answer: We’re going to the holy relics in Saint-Laurent-les-Mâcon, we’re making a pilgrimage to Aachen, we are on our way to the Abbey of Saint-Adelbert in Egmond.. . .

  That morning when the town is completely unsuspecting because it’s living in the present, there is a harsh wind. Suddenly the Egyptians are riding through the streets. They are already approaching the Bergkerk when they’re noticed, by a begging student from a Latin school, and make for the gate. A great crowd, suddenly realizing what’s happening, has gathered to look at them and wave them goodbye with feelings of intense loss. The people see the six familiar men riding in front, in their middle, dark, watchful, and with an indescribable atmosphere of good humor, their leader. They look at the flickering of the gold on his chest and his hat of fox tails, but none of them looks at him at such length as the farmer’s girl, a sturdy lass with watery eyes and that high- Gothic, ginger hair, who knows that her life will have no further meaning at all if. . .