Adam & Eve (19 page)

“Really?” Pierre had asked. He would have labeled her as one of those secular Americans who dwelt in some sort of perpetual quest for spirituality.

“Her parents are Christian missionaries. She’s still in some sort of eighteen-year-old rebellion.”

“And you?” Pierre had presumed to ask in his least intrusive tone.

“Church of England. I’m a Brit, you know.”

“Wonder where her parents do their work? Africa?”

“Japan. They went off and left her with her old grandmother when she was a child. She’s never forgiven them.”

“I don’t think she’s safe traveling alone in Egypt,” Pierre said.

“I’ll go fetch her when the symposium is over.”

Foolish man, Pierre thought.

At that moment, Lucy’s usefulness had occurred to Pierre. Even before the symposium officially ended, Pierre had left for Nag Hammadi and contacted his daughter to meet him there.

As his conversation with the British scientist evaporated from his thoughts, Pierre’s hand strayed to a blank page on his desk. While he had only seen photographs of the parietal art at Chauvet, he had memorized every curving line drawn on the cave wall. The angle from which the photographs were taken made the curves balloon or shrink; it was difficult to tell which shape had been most intended by the artist. From his memory of a photograph, Pierre began to draw the heads of two rhinoceroses. Their keratinous horns almost interlocked, and they were often interpreted as engaging in a confrontation. But were they? he wondered. Interpretations of any depiction of two animals constituting a single painting often varied diametrically. Some saw the animals as fighting or preparing for conflict; others saw them simply as meeting, perhaps trying to make connection.

The cave drawings often came to him as emblems of his own inner states. They were like dream images, suggestive of inaccessible feelings and ideas. Did he have two conflicting attitudes toward Lucy Bergmann—was his sympathy in conflict with his predatory impulses? Or was he simply acknowledging his own willingness to use her? He had thought in terms of animal imagery since he was a very young child—not of course the cave drawings. Parietal art had come into his life as a college student in France. As a child in Egypt he had found strange kinship in the images of gods that combined human bodies with the heads of animals.
Amun
with his ram’s head;
Bastet
the cat,
Horus
the beaked falcon,
Hathor
the cow …

In Nag Hammadi, while he masqueraded as a man with a broken leg, Lucy had brought out the politeness in him. For a few moments, in her presence, he had become the person she thought him to be. He remembered himself as having truly felt what she seemed to assume he felt.

In Cairo, standing behind the podium, when she lifted her bowed head and showed her full round face to the group, she had impressed him as moonstruck. He had imagined her former life, how she might have been sitting safely at her breakfast table in New York, with many buildings far below. A few misty skyscrapers rose toward her like stalagmites thrusting up from the floor of a cave. She was reading the
Times,
with bowed head. When her husband came into the kitchen and she lifted her face, how had he regarded that full quiet face? Back then there would have been nothing melancholy in her mien. The scene he imagined must have happened in Iowa City, before Thom Bergmann’s death. In New York, when Lucy resided among the mist and clouds, no one would have interrupted her reading of the newspaper.

What had been her life before her loss? Pierre had liked the sound of Thom Bergmann’s voice the few times they had talked on the telephone. His voice, the way he moved from word to word, had a certain thick-edged carefulness to it. Pierre had pictured him to be large in general, quite tall, and when he studied a photo on the memorial cover of Thom Bergmann standing next to Gabriel Plum, whose height he knew, Pierre saw he had guessed correctly. Bergmann had a large head, with a fleshy nose and lips, lots of salt-and-pepper curly gray hair. He was not a person who would have left his wife in a scruffy desert town while he hobnobbed with his colleagues. Pierre had always liked that English phrase—salt-and-pepper—when applied to hair.
Hobnobbed,
another idiom to embellish his English.
Hoopla
he had liked that expression, too.

What had surprised Pierre was how much older Thom was than his wife.

At his desk beside the rhinoceroses of Chauvet, Pierre sketched a shaggy mammoth from Rouffignac; everyone, including himself, particularly liked the depictions of animals now extinct. The mammoths had died out ten thousand years ago. As he doodled, he wondered if Lucy had been grief-stricken for the entire three years since her husband was crushed by the falling piano. He thought most people could not sustain a sense of loss for such a long period. She moved like a somnambulist; she was a woman in love with a ghost.

Pierre felt his lips curl toward a self-aware, ironic smile. For how long had he sustained his own sense of loss? Of losses too bitter to swallow.

Pierre Saad’s most vivid early memory was of the graffiti on the outer wall of a Coptic church near Cairo. Even his childish eyes could see that the slashes of Magic Marker covered other images. In later years, he would acquire the term
palimpsest.
Beneath the electric blue lines he saw other, older drawings and traces of color. He could detect the flat image of the Virgin Mary. Flakes of her mild blue robe still clung to the wall, but where the gentle blue was worn away—was that the image of a falcon’s head? As he huddled against the wall waiting for his mother to come for him, it had frightened him (he was only six years old) that one image could be placed right on top of another. He knew the Coptic Christians had taken over and defaced many of the abandoned temples of the old gods.

For a moment his six-year-old hand had explored the hard, shaping cartilage just below the surface of his skin and wondered if his own head and neck were a hood for some sharp-beaked falcon. The falcon’s profile incised on the Cairo wall had been painted over by a heart. Anxious and weary of waiting for his mother, he had lifted his gaze, hoping to see some real bird perched at the top of the wall, a bird who could fly and be a bird out there where birds were supposed to be, not imprisoned and immobilized in the flat of a wall.

What he saw again higher on the wall were more pictures, carvings that resembled the falcon masked by Mary’s breast. In one place the entire stone wall had been chipped away. Whatever face or head had been there originally had not been painted over but entirely removed. Nothing was left but a patch of rough stone. He thought of it as a small battle zone. Beyond that height nothing had been mutilated or painted over. High up were the messengers from the pure past. Those sharply incised pictures, he was sure, had been chiseled there in the time of the pharaohs.

Up there was a cow with the moon in her horns—Hathor, the goddess of beauty, worshipped in the days of the pharaohs, before Jesus, before Moses, before Abraham. He had seen her illumined at first dawn, having waited hours in the darkness for his mother’s return.

It had been near midnight when she had left him at the wall. As they hurried through the crooked streets, she had leaned down and explained into his ear that home was no longer safe for them, that she had been forewarned.
Her voice and her breath, explaining and warm so near his cheek, had been a comfort to him. He was an obedient child: often she asked him to do this or that, then later explained why. Always there was an explanation that was reasonable. It had trained him to trust her. When she awakened him, before their hurried passage through the streets, he heard the Christian church bell tolling midnight. Though it was a sound that signaled the outside world was now dark and cold, she had not stopped to pick up his jacket draped on a three-legged stool. Her urgency surprised him—even he knew what midnight meant about outside temperatures.

Positioning him in a dark shadow against the wall, she had taken off her scarf and tied it over his head and under his chin. “Remember,” she had whispered, “do you remember that most of the heat of the body escapes through the top of the head? Keep your head warm.”

Also whispering, he had answered that he remembered.

She had taught him many things about the body that other boys seemed not to know, and about the world as well.

He was six years old, but she had spoken to him of governments, and that his father was French, and that the French were not all bad, despite their domination of Egypt once upon a time. “No worse than the British,” she had instructed. “No worse than our dictator now.” Once his father had loved her well, though his love had not lasted. “There have been benevolent kings and queens,” she had taught. “What counts is not so much the form of government but the generosity and care with which it is administered.”

Before she left him against the wall—if there had been some heat in it at first, that warmth had entirely dissipated well before dawn—she had kissed him on both cheeks in what he recognized as the manner of the French. As she held his face between her hands, his mother’s instruction had taken a new turn: “Think of the kindest person you know. Think about him or her while I’m gone. Then think of the most powerful person you know who is also kind. Call that image to your mind. You may think of the richest person you know, but remember richness and power do not always lie in money but in knowledge of one’s own self, in one’s determination and resilience. Remember: kindness, power, riches.” And she was gone.

He listened and memorized, not so much her words as the gritty sound the soles of her sandals made, moving away so quickly over the sandy street.

Because the night chill was in the air, he had drawn his knees to his chest as he sat huddled against the wall and hugged his knees with his arms to keep in his warmth. After many dark hours, he watched the rays of the rising sun brighten the smooth sandstone surface of the top of the wall. Sunlight illumined the horns of Hathor the cow and the disk of the moon she held between her horns. Next, sunlight washed over her wide-spaced eyes, receptive and open.
Beauty
—his mother had not charged him to remember beauty, but he had thought of his mother and her beauty, how slender she was and how gracefully she moved.

Then he thought of cows as simple animals, their funny four-leggedness, of the fascination of their out-jutting hip bones. Of course, he had seen many cows led by ropes as they ambled through the streets of his village. He had always loved the luminous eyes of cows, their gentleness.

Who would not want to draw them, and the other animals as well? Who would not want to put on something of the power of the animals? Who would not want to unite the limited human body with their various mysterious powers? In memory, he saw again the upright body of the goddess at the top of the wall, still as a mummy in the morning sunlight. A real cow had passed him, raising her tail as she went to deposit her waste onto the street. The bell at her neck made a soft clanking. The man who led her with a worn rope walked with a staff in his other hand.

Pierre knew him or someone like him. He was a Sufi mystic with distinctive bowed legs, deformed but able. His mother had explained the mystic had not had enough vitamin D as a child. Thinking again of his mother, Pierre had raised his eyes yet again to the ancient image of Hathor, the cow goddess of beauty.

I have worshipped her, he thought. As a grown man sitting in his own library, a man of enough reputation that he received an invitation from the president, a man contemplating his own corruptibility and his harsh past, he knew that he had worshipped beauty embodied throughout the centuries in art.
I have worshipped beauty.

In memory, at that moment, his mother dashed into the street. The force of a shot caught her and sent her reeling against the wall, which she hit with her shoulder—her lips opened in a silent O—and then she slid down, her eyes closing, onto the road. Not a second passed till Pierre felt the iron grip of the Sufi cowherd around his wrist, pulling him upward and making him walk slowly along, in step with the cow, beside his own bare, bowed legs. Pierre saw that the tip of the man’s wooden staff poked itself into the sand, swung forward, entered the sand again as though nothing had happened. Before they turned the corner, Pierre-the-boy had managed to twist his body and look back just once. He saw his mother’s unmoving body lying near the wall. Her blood was spattered and smeared red over the bright blue graffiti.