The dig was ending. Most of the workers had been alerted early that morning by someone from the Meridien: by the time we arrived in the wheezing Darraq there was very little left standing. A few workers were gathered by Mesparo's tent: a white assistant in a galabeya was handing out pay packets. Emil and Carragher were helping to take down a marquee that had been erected over the food stores. Everything relating to the dig that remained was being loaded onto carts, or auctioned off to the locals.
Sir Edward was sat in the passenger seat of Mesparo's Renault while a servant who I recognised as Emil's car-washing friend fanned him. I left Emil and Carragher cheerfully instructing a gang of workers in folding the deconstructed canvas and approached my employer. He was gazing up at the crest of the hill beneath which the dig had been carried out. We were in a wide valley, so wide the opposite wall could only be spied as a gaseous and floating barrier far out, across the Nile. The dig had been concentrated at the highest point of the ridge on the East side of the river: the apex of the ridge rose a hundred feet or so above us, and the ascent to it was steep, with rough steps cut into the earth on one side. An outcrop overlooking the steps bulged like a crumbling guard tower.
On the steps lay empty baskets, a wooden pole that I guessed might be a shovel handle, and a discarded sandal. Sir Edward looked at the landscape that he had attacked with dynamite and pick and which still seemed hardly touched by his efforts.
"Is there anything I can do for you, Sir Edward?"
His gaze never lifted from the site.
"No thank-you, my dear."
The end of the dig seemed to have removed from his shoulders a great burden of time and responsibility. I pictured him as he stood only the night before, bottle in one hand, cigar smoke obscuring his face, threatening Aldridge with the spear-like, greased dome of his head lowered as if preparing to charge. With the dig finished, and his time in Egypt almost concluded, I could see memories swimming around in his skull, casting dark shades onto his outward expression. He had the look of a man returning to a place filled with painful remembrances who at last has let go of reassuring remorse and allowed it to sink beneath his feet, like pools of muddy water in the last stages of the drying up of a river bed.
With the clearing up finished, Emil drove me and Carragher up to a café on the East Bank of the Nile where we had arranged to meet up with the rest of the Meridien group. The Capurons had hired a car and were, Sir Edward informed us, to meet us at the next place of rest, Sir Edward's own private residence, off El-Mahata Street in Luxor City. We pushed through a throng of locals that suffocated the narrow streets: Postcards and plaster statues were thrust into the car and a host of rowdy Egyptian voices mingled pigeon English with the rasping howls of donkeys. Carragher climbed into the backseat, carrying on a running conversation with a number of vendors at once.
"I'm sure he's an excellent fellow… no I have plenty of picture postcards already thankyou…. Very good, very good… no, I'm positive he won't let me down on the way to the temples… No, thankyou… no, thankyou."
The furious smell of sewage and wild animals hung around the dark little alleys. Every now and then, when we reached a crossroads, I could see a curtain of dust lit by the sun where it dipped between the irregular foundations of the various tenements. There was, even here beneath the mantle of the tenements, currents that shifted the sand against the buildings and slowly buried them, imperceptibly, a grain at a time, pulling the horizon a little closer in, pushing the sky and dreams further away.
Emil turned into an alley and gently shunted his way through the crowd and a pair of gates guarded by a couple of solemn, neatly dressed Egyptians in fezzes. The crowd passed on down the road with the same bustle. A lonely donkey was left trying to force its head through the gates.
The house was considerably more homely than the Meridien had been. Sir Edward's residence filled four floors of a large tenement building; three servants carried our luggage from the car to our individual rooms: the house was staffed only basically. Aside from the three 'bellhops', there was a cook and a female cleaner known as Nana Mert, who could be expected to turn up any time between dawn and midnight to carry out her duties, shooing us aliens out of the way with a humming sound that reminded me of the wandering movements that the church organist would play as my father led me to mass. She seemed to be holding a constant conversation with one of us, but as Carragher commented on the very first day, "I don't think she is looking for any answers."
We ate four times a day; Sir Edward seemed intent on creating in that little dusty paradise a pleasure palace, to help us forget the desolation of the Meridien. Silk curtains hid all natural night: oil lamps were everywhere, clay vessels covered with ugly murals of frogs. The rooms were much smaller than the Meridien, with low ceilings. There was no lounge to speak of, just a steady succession of identical adjoining rooms with sofas and vast amounts of pillows and silk tapestries hugging all available surfaces.
I took up lodging in the airiest room in the house, at Sir Edward's suggestion. The downstairs rooms were stuffy as anything during the day, though bearable at night, and only the shady rooftop garden was suitable for the long hot week that we spent there while Sir Edward and Dr Aldridge talked through and developed their scheme.
On the first Thursday we had spent at the tenement I was watching Emil sketch in the shade of a canvas that covered half of the rooftop garden. He was drawing a lizard that had been sat still for four hours, since that lunchtime, on the wall that surrounded our little haven above the dust. If one looked over the east side of the house, their lay the alleyway and the entrance to the tenement: on all sides other tenements higher than our own surrounded us. Brightly coloured cloth hung from the balcony-less sills of the houses, which had nevertheless appeared unoccupied until the fourth day, the preceding Wednesday, when a young boy had stood for a few minutes, goggle-eyed at the sight of us red-skinned imposters with our expensive sunglasses and sunhats. Mrs Capuron, for the first time, took a positive interest in this young fellow, and even called out to him, in French, and in a playful voice, something none of the party quite caught, saving Mr Capuron (I imagined). He looked at his wife with an expression that to this day I could not fathom, but which seemed to me to resemble pity, or as close to that as he was able to achieve. They really were a bizarre couple; constantly in silent opposition to eachother, their entire vocal communication restricted to densely weighted and expertly realised condemnations of the other's conduct.
Carragher and Emil took me to the bazaar that evening. It was only a couple of miles from the tenement, but we took our time, savouring the evening. A short distance from our home, Emil took my left arm and linked it with his own, lifting his head in a ridiculously lofty gesture, half-stifling a smile. Carragher, for his part, offered me his arm and, with exaggerated swaggers, and with me in fits of giggles, we three friends rounded a corner and found ourselves as one in the chattering hustle of El-Qatar Bazaar.
There is nowhere in the world as vigorous with trade and rumour as an Egyptian bazaar. In England we move like a herd of sheep prime for shaving through our markets and city centres; we employ personal radars to weave our way through crowds if they slow us down: we idly lie back and follow the current if interested only in 'browsing'. We no longer entertain dreams of shop-keeping in the same way as when I was young: sons do not inherit a building and a reputation, only the very richest may receive a business that can really be called their own, and even that is like a net thrown out over a thousand miles. Businesses like that may run themselves for a number of years without anyone noticing the absence of a leader. The English no longer seek to take a small space, a shop floor, and build it, push back the walls, but instead they join an already livid organism and try to shift themselves to the most important organs, like parasites who suffer to support their host only if they see that it is dying.
The bazaar was composed of a covered mass of streets, here splitting into a criss-cross pattern of boulevards, there dipping into a thin chasm where two stalls laden with silk overhung the street like boxers, steaming in their corners, their eyes locked on the bruised and heaving limbs of the other. The various stalls supported eachother: barely anywhere were foundations visible. The stalls seemed to arise like thick bracken from the dirt, occasionally a rough post was decorated with a silver plated crucifix, here and there a piece of material hung, woven Arabic symbols shining in gold and red. Venerable elders with grey beards like the smoke of incense sat cross-legged on dirty mats: spiny limbed hookahs glowed like warm beating hearts as the old men chatted in articulate murmurs. Patrons surrounded us on the main drag; we soon picked up a straggler in the shape of a large-nosed and clean shaven Arab with glassy eyes who linked arms with Carragher and began to tell him about the very finest spices in Luxor and where they could be found. Rebuffed by Carragher, he switched tack and instead offered us his services as a tour-guide and protector in this most feral of hunting grounds. Emil gave him money and promised more if he could keep the various shop-keepers away from us as we wandered, and in a flash he became our beacon, warding off his countrymen, surrounding us with warnings and recommendations and oaths of fealty. We spent a wonderful evening under the oil lamps, haggling for carpets we had no wish to buy and tasting sweet liquids, purloined for us (for a small fee) from the choicest of purveyors by our guide, who repeatedly told us his name, which I have since completely forgotten."
All the time my grandmother had been telling the story, the smell of a Sunday morning fry-up had been emanating from beneath the kitchen door. When my father finally poked his head around the door and announced that it was ready, my grandmother apologised for having bored me. She pulled on my greasy hair and twirled it into a spike.
"You haven't bored me at all."
"I hope not."
She looked rather sad that morning. Perhaps, I thought, the effort of remembering so much from so long ago was tiring her out.
"You don't have to tell me if this stuff brings up bad memories."
The old girl gave me a rather disappointed look.
"I'm doing this to try to make you understand why I was never here, Will."
"I think I know why you weren't; and I don't blame you for it."
Their was a surprising amount of anger in her voice as she said:
"Why do you think I stayed away?"
Thinking of the story that lay untold, I hastily moved to suppress my opinions about her relationship with my mother. What else could I tell her?
"I thought…"
"You thought I never got on with your mother, that's it, isn't it? I never thought I'd say this Will but you disappoint me. I adore your mother, meeting her was the best thing that ever happened to David."
"Then why did you go away?"
A reply hovered on her lips; they twitched, and I noticed for the first time the hairs on her upper lip, and a path of wrinkled skin that passed like a mountain range at the very extremity of her jaw, beneath her ears. She was ageing before me, in the sharing of experiences, in the effort to make me see her as a part of myself. I realised then that she would die soon, and the more I questioned her with my eyes and put myself into her presence, like the attention seeker I have always been, and still am, the older she would grow, and the less memory would be left for her to live off. In recalling Emil's driving, and the Capurons unending and unfathomable warfare, and Aldridge and Sir Edward's bitter pact, in recalling to her mind those images that had molded her consciousness for fifty years, she was pouring out her lifeblood for me to dive into, like the pool at the Meridien, to rest my chin on the brink and breathe deep, arrogant and afloat above the abyss below, her mystery receding in the realisation that she was a small character in a story about other, much more interesting people.
Why had she come back if coming back meant suicide?
"Perhaps it seemed like a good ending. I am ready now, as never before, for that ending." She broke off, and, shifting herself onto the edge of the couch, she stood up.
"I am also ready for my breakfast."
15 Apr Spring Cleanings
14 Apr Super Science Fiction
8 Apr May, Eh
19 Mar MAY
28 Feb OMG
27 Feb Book Clubbing
27 Jan Lots of News
Take a look at the news archive.
"fresh from your loving I'll have fish for my supper"- Drums In Der Night
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