The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [51]
In one reproduced ancient drawing I found as a boy and spent several hours amazedly pondering (until, from over my shoulder, the village librarian spotted it with a stifled shriek and confiscated the book, securing it in the sepulchral and sealed Patrons’ Private Reserve Section), solitary, tirelessly creative, and divinely flexible Atum performs a service on himself that most mortal men’s spines will not allow them to execute, though they all know it would be a marvellously convenient knack. (Although in my day, I once saw twin Chinese brothers, acrobats in a travelling circus passing through Kent, who matched the god’s feat while hanging quite nude and pale yellow from trapezes, an act of post-performance relaxation they indulged in upside-down and side by side like two eighth notes, late at night in the darkened tent after every show, while outside one could hear the drugged elephant being washed and in the shadowed seats, one unseen audience member secretly watched the meditative display and, probably alone in all of Kent, knew that the two Orientals were, in their twinned self-absorption, unknowingly paying tribute to the god Atum.)
To Margaret: My darling Queen, having spent several hours yesterday and this morning working on scholarly essays, I grew so sad thinking about Marlowe’s death and my distance from you that I decided to put work aside for the afternoon and strolled through my Cairo.
My Cairo, it affects me strangely still. Today was no exception: the remnants of religious miseducation drilled into the soft part of one’s head, or just dumb superstition embedded in our systems: for whatever reason, I walked through Cairo this afternoon handing out food and some of my remaining money to those who looked most desperate—the convincingly legless, the big-eyed infants innocent of drunkenness. I hope you would have approved, my sweet Queen. Perhaps I did it for you.
I watched the women, those caramelised confections, dark-irised behind long lashes. Some are veiled, nothing but shifting eyes, always downcast or glancing sideways. Others are uncovered, and one can glimpse faces in the distorting heat and the interfering shadows of palm fronds. One of these women was moving quickly from shade to sun, and in that very first instant my eye played tricks: I thought she was covered, forehead to collarbone, with the most intricate tattoo or henna-art, a leering cobra winking at me with every movement of her cheek. But no, that semi-instant was a play of light: as she stepped into the sun I saw the rage and range of her birthmark—no cobra, no shadow, but a purple splash across her face, too intricate not to imply special knowledge and a claim to unique beauty. She looked at me with a haughty sureness of her effect.
And playing off to her left, I saw one of those children dispatched by Atum, Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, the Great Set Decorator, to crack your heart in pieces, his poverty blurring his potential, his tiny face all huge eyes. I called him over and nearly emptied my pockets into his steady hands, laid bill after bill into his palm and watched him watching me. He seemed young enough to have faith still that someone would naturally care for him. I wished I could justify that faith, urge him never to lose it.
I walked in places tourists do not frequent, where lurk the spectacularly freakish, those who slide from poor to deformed to performer with a speed making them difficult to categorise: of course I give money to the blind