The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (2 page)

Gustave savored his wine, letting it trickle into the back of his throat. “How many?”

“Hundreds. I don’t know. Thousands. Too many to do. There are hieroglyphs, demotic Egyptian, Greek, and something called Carian, a language no one can read.”

Gustave scratched his whiskers. “In that case, we will have to bring an extra pack donkey.” He served himself a second helping of rice flavored with cinnamon and cumin. The first thing he had noticed about the Orient was its parade of exotic spices, the bazaars smelling of coffee and sandalwood oil; the prostitutes of rosewater, balsam, and musk.

Max thought for a moment. “A litter will do, I think, dragged behind us Indian style.”

Usually, he and Max rode donkeys or horses, but now Gustave imagined himself tugged along on the pallet, reclining like a minor grandee. Save for the dust. And the smell and sight of the animal relieving itself. A veritable shit caravan.

“Joseph, of course, will go with us,” Max planned aloud, “plus two of the crew, Aouadallah and Hadji Ismael, as usual.”

“Yes, Hadji Ismael, for scale.”

Gustave hated being within range of a camera, so Max used Hadji Ismael in his photographs to establish the implausible size of Egypt’s monuments. Perched on a gigantic toe, lounging inside a mammoth doorway, Hadji Ismael was not only reliable but also photogenic—a one-eyed, well-muscled fellow who spoke a strange pidgin in the considerable gaps of which he remained always courteous and sweet. On the ship, he acted the wife to Big Achmet. Bardashes all, the crew. That was something sexual he’d not yet tried. He was just waiting for the right opportunity. At a Turkish hammam, perhaps, where the young attendants were willing and the steam would leave him open-pored and pliant . . .

“Not just for scale—to represent the human enterprise,” Max said for perhaps the fifth time in two weeks. “Even the stars mean nothing without a steaming hovel beneath them.”

Such grandiose talk was the result of the photography apprenticeship in Paris that the ever-industrious, energetic Max had completed
to prepare for the trip. Upon their return, his photographs would likely be the subject of an exhibition, and serve as illustrations for the travelogue he was writing. Gustave disliked this aspect of his friend—the pragmatist who readily lowered his nose to the grindstone to advance himself. In this regard, Gustave was something of a snob, deeming useless knowledge (of beauty, truth, love, etc.) preferable—indeed, superior—to more practical information. If he were ever to publish a book, ideally he wanted it to be about
nothing
.

“You and Aouadallah will work on the squeezes,” Max said, wiping a spot of red sauce from his chin with his napkin, “and I will join you when I can.” He pushed back his chair as a crewman began to collect the dishes.

Gustave scoffed at this idea. “But you will be photographing all day, and then the sun will be down. You can’t help to make squeezes in the dark. Besides, I have my own mission to accomplish. Who knows what commercial secrets I may uncover? I may find a mirage that is
real,
for example.”

Max began packing his bulky and fragile photographic equipment into sheepskin cases he’d had custom-tailored for the trip. “We have a deal,” he reminded Gustave. “Let’s stick to it.”

They did have a deal, struck in the sixth week when Gustave announced he could not bear to make one more squeeze; the process was driving him mad. He no longer felt like a man, but an automaton, a mold machine. Max was sympathetic; nonetheless, he needed Gustave’s labor as well as his supervision over any Egyptian apprentices. And so, in exchange for Gustave’s help, he had promised to make a formal photograph of Gustave’s favorite prostitute. It was a strong enticement: in the damp cold of Normandy, Gustave would have his sun-drenched whore in crisp black and white and silky grays, every eyelash sharp as a pin. Not even Madame Flaubert would object to an artful rendering of an Oriental woman on the wall. The following week he had chosen Kuchuk Hanem, the dancing girl of Esneh, with whom he and Max had spent a satisfying day and night. But the photograph was spoiled by a mistake in the exposure. Max planned to
remake it on their trip back down the Nile. What, though, if Kuchuk Hanem were not at home when they called? What if she had moved or was occupied or had fallen ill? Heraclitus was right—time was a river you couldn’t step into twice. Gustave thought of nothing so much as the return visit to her quarters.

Their deal—exchanging squeezes for photographs—was a polite and simplified version of the complicated alliance between them, about which they never spoke. Max loved literature and had literary aspirations, and it was in the fire of that mutual passion that their friendship had been forged and was continually annealed. But Gustave was deeply indebted to Max on several counts, for without him there would have been no trip. And while Max graciously acted his equal, he was in fact the senior partner in the venture. As the more experienced traveler, he was willing to sort out the tangle of logistics. He was wealthier, which put the burden of keeping within a budget on Gustave. But most important, it was Max who had swayed Madame Flaubert into subscribing to the near-mythic healing powers of the Mediterranean. In service of this, Max had all but sworn to be the guardian of her delicate younger son. In this web of obligation and kindness, only one question sometimes nagged at Gustave: had Max cynically manipulated his dear mother, playing her for a fool, or did he actually care for her (and him)? Perhaps Max himself did not know. That would be like him, Gustave thought. Nevertheless, out of gratitude for Max’s many beneficences, Gustave had agreed to make squeezes, and though he found it insufferable at times, he intended to keep his word.

• • •

Gustave would have napped after lunch, but Max insisted they leave immediately. Gustave donned his heavy boots and pulled up the hood of his burnoose, which framed his face with a fringe of black pompoms that bobbed with the slightest movement, adding a dimension of merriment to his guise. With the help of the crew, they collected their belongings and arranged the donkey packs. Joseph had three horses
waiting on the bank. They set off at once. Neither man had shaved or barbered in weeks, and with their ragged beards and soiled clothes, they looked neither European nor Egyptian but altogether alien.

They rode small mares trained to neck-rein. Compared to the colder-blooded European horses, the Arabians appeared scraggly and weak; in fact, Gustave had discovered, they were fine mounts of excellent endurance and temperament, accustomed to the grueling sun and sand and the merciless onslaughts of the
khamsin
. Hadji Ismael and Aouadallah rode donkeys, hurtling alongside them.

The road from Aswan to Derr was crowded, being the only overland route south of the cataracts on the eastern riverbank. Aside from the monuments, Gustave had observed, little in Egypt stayed still. In the desert’s dry sea, the Bedouin lived as nomads; on the great Nile, commerce from all of Africa moved to market, whether slave girls from Nubia or rice from Luxor. The Bedouin took their houses on their backs; the Nubians lived in mud huts that could be rebuilt in a day elsewhere.

The stream of traffic reminded him of the sugar ants that invaded the house at Croisset in early summer. With no laws or rules of etiquette for the road, people traveled on both sides and in the middle. Every manner of conveyance and beast moved together—camel caravans, flocks of sheep and goats, asses, horses, and the occasional richly draped palanquin with, presumably, a notable personage within. The ubiquitous cudgel flashed out from robes and saddlebags like a lightning bolt. Public beatings were an everyday occurrence. It seemed to Gustave that everyone in clean clothes routinely beat everyone in dirty clothes. Where baksheesh ended, the cudgel began. Between the two, commerce moved at a brisk clip. Arguments were short, ending with much begging and quivering before punishment was meted out and all protest resolved by a quick blow to the back or thighs. He had witnessed an official bastinado in Cairo—fifty strokes delivered unhaltingly to the soles of the feet. The poor fellow was no doubt crippled for life.

They skirted a shallow lake as calm and bright as a sheet of steel. What had appeared from the distance as clumps of snow on the surrounding
trees were revealed at closer range to be rookeries of white ibis, herons, egrets, brown pelicans, and other birds he had not yet identified in his Baedeker and now never would.

“Look up, Du Camp Aga,” he called to Max, pointing at the birds. “Are these edible?” Their horses were walking slowly, unable to get up any speed in the crowd.

“Your highness, O sheik Abu Dimple, it would seem so.”

They’d taken to this kind of chitchat during their hiking tour in 1846, although then they had affected the bourgeois accent of Brittany, and had been, instead of sheiks, two irreverent adolescents. “I feel like shooting something now, effendi,” said Gustave, “don’t you?”

“Well, I am a lower sheik than you, so I would have to say I only want to if you do.”

“Indeed. Let’s get the guns out,” Gustave said.

Hadji Ismael took the rifles from the donkey and passed them to his masters. “Gustave Bey,” he muttered as he handed over the gun, “who shall be the most fortunately blessed one to pick up the birds when they fall?”

There was a shortage of gun dogs in the Orient—none, to be exact. Arabs apparently considered canines too filthy and profane to domesticate, though they didn’t mind sleeping alongside their sheep, goats, and camels. “You and Aouadallah will go out for them,” he said, looking at Max. “Right, Sheik Max?”

“No heroic efforts, though.”

The crewmen looked puzzled as Joseph translated.

“Don’t worry if you don’t find them,” said Max. “We will buy dinner somewhere else.”

Joseph bowed slightly. “Captain is buy fish for dinner, effendi.” It had taken Gustave weeks to adjust to Joseph’s strange French, which had Italian and Arabic elements and a completely mongrelized grammar, made up as needed. Genoa-born, he was a self-effacing, diffident man. Though he had an encyclopedic knowledge of Egypt, he rarely volunteered information, preferring to be asked for it. He had made the voyage up and down the river sixty times.

“Then this will be the
first
course, should we have any luck,” Max said.

The Frenchmen slid down off their mounts and took aim in the distant trees. Gustave fired first at a tall white bird standing on a dead snag, while Max aimed at a brownish clump on a nearby branch. As the shots rang out, every human being on the road dropped to the ground in terror. The two servants trotted off in search of the shot quarry, and the ersatz sheiks stared up at the circling flocks. “Beautiful sight,” Max said. “Makes me long for quail.”

Gustave was not particularly fond of birds. He preferred animals with fur, and was considering bringing back a monkey to France.
A monkey, six meters of Dacca cloth, stones from the Parthenon, maybe a mummy, the photograph of a whore, a red vest . . .
the list was starting to sound like an incantation. He tinkered with the order.
A monkey, six meters . . . a mummy, stones, a photograph, a red vest.
That was better—more musical, more memorable.

The crowd began to right itself, among its members three Europeans traveling in the opposite direction, one of whom now approached, a woman wearing a dark blue dress and pink bonnet. Gustave couldn’t help noticing her neck, which was unusually long, slender, and, despite the unrelenting sunshine, pale. “I say, I think it’s bad form,” she announced in a firm voice, “
very
bad form.”

Gustave knew only a little English.
“Je ne comprends pas l’anglais,”
he said, staring sweetly at her, his eyebrows a question. Her hair was a plain, honest brown, but so clean, despite the dusty air, that tiny rainbows danced along the strands about her face. Her eyes were gray and her gaze direct, without the habit of looking away as she spoke that, to his mind, made so many women look insincere.

She encircled the stock of his gun with one hand.
“Ça, ce n’est pas bon. C’est mal. C’est malheureux.”
The woman appeared to be groping for French words to launch a jeremiad against the discharge of firearms in public places.
“Je suis malhereuse!”
she protested, jabbing at her chest with an index finger as she repeated, “I am
unhappy
!” and awaited a reply.

“Aha!” Gustave said, nodding with dawning comprehension. All women are unhappy, he wanted to reply. He understood women to be powerless and therefore demanding, and had confided to his mother that he would never marry. Besides, how could he give up his darling prostitutes? He could not imagine being loved so thoroughly in a domestic arrangement where he would have to worry about offending a proper dame. His mother concurred in his determined bachelorhood, eager to keep her delicate son with her rather than sanction a union with some
petite bourgeoise
and be reduced to the status of infrequent visitor.

“Allow me to make the introductions,” the ever-unflappable Max said, stepping forward to offer her his hand. “May I present M. Gustave Flaubert? And I am Maxime Du Camp.” He paused and added their official designations.
“Chargés d’une mission en Orient.”

“Florence Nightingale.” The woman curtsied as she took Max’s hand. “From England.” She acknowledged Gustave with a nod.

He would have known her for English anywhere in the world, his friends, the Collier sisters, having been his University of English Womanhood. Miss Nightingale had, for one thing, the typical English prepossession. “Much charming,” he said, continuing his struggle in the language,
“très charmante. Enchanté.”

“How do you do?” She paused, sucked in a little air, then switched back to her tentative French. “I hope you won’t mind if I say you shouldn’t be shooting here.” She gestured toward the stream of humanity once again toiling down the road. “Stray bullets, women and children, livestock, innocents all.”

“We aimed at the birds,” Max replied.

“It is inconsiderate. And very dangerous. Loose bullets kill.”