The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (47 page)

They were forced to make camp early, before sunset. Not only was Max not speaking to him, he had also developed a high fever and was no more able to sit astride a camel than levitate on a carpet. This development jarred Rossignol from her funk. She tended to Max as he vacillated between delirium and sleep. Then, after another meager supper, she asked Gustave to accompany her on a walk. Looking sad and determined, she trod to the guides’ area, halted crisply, and called for Mohammed.

Bowing and bestowing blessings of peace, the guide rose from his bed behind the camels, his demeanor calm, his face expressionless. Pantomiming, she begged him for some of the crew’s contaminated water. He shouted something, and one of his underlings promptly handed her a goatskin. Holding her gaze, he shook his head and pinched his nose by way of a warning. She thanked him and curtseyed.

Gustave and Mohammed followed her to Joseph’s tent, where both patients were quarantined. She whisked a linen handkerchief from her bodice and, while the men watched, moistened it with the foul water and dampened Max’s face and chest. “We must lower his fever,” she said to no one in particular, passing to Gustave a palm fan to wave over his friend.

Lying nearby, Joseph roused himself to watch. Rossignol placed
her small palm on his forehead and shook her head. “Both of them have raging fevers, though Max’s is worse. I believe he may be in mortal danger.”

“What else can we do?” Gustave was truly alarmed. He’d never cared for a sick person—only kept vigil, first by his father’s deathbed, then Caroline’s, and lastly, Alfred’s. He’d always left it to others to scurry about with treatments and blandishments.

“We must wet them down, do their sweating for them.”

And so he removed Joseph’s shirt and sponged his chest with it. When Mohammed muttered to them, they didn’t so much as glance in his direction. Soon a second goatskin appeared, as malodorous as the first. Then the crew retired.

• • •

It was only after the two patients were cooled and sleeping that it occurred to Gustave that without water none of them might survive another day, perhaps not another night. “We must drink something,” he told her as she sat in his tent.

“But there is nothing.” She was fanning herself. “Sit closer and I can do us both.”

“We shall have to drink alcohol,” he said wearily. “I wish I had wine or beer, but I have only rakı.”

The fanning slowed. “Oh, for a glass of wine.”

“We must drink as little as possible, though.” With empty stomachs and thickened blood, he explained, liquor would hit them like a hammer. “You’ll become tipsy, you may fall into a sleep from which I won’t be able to wake you.” He wondered if she’d ever been properly drunk.

She fanned his face. When the temperature finally plummeted in the middle of the night, they’d need blankets, but now this moving air was minor bliss.

The veins in her hands were so much smaller than his. Scale, to quote Max—for by now the word all but belonged to him—was an integral part of female fascination. His thumbs were big and meaty next to her small, sharply angled ones. Her fingernails were glossy pink ovals, with
lunular white at the cuticle. His own were twice the size, flat and square as stepping-stones. Her wrist was especially alluring—a second pale throat marked beneath its translucent skin with a faint fretwork of veins.

“Have you ever had rakı?” he asked.

“No.”

“It’s pleasant, made from anise.”

“I’ve seen Charles and Paolo drink it. You mix it with water, don’t you, and then it turns cloudy and white? Quite the magic elixir.”

“The water dilutes it. It’s strong brew, like whiskey or cognac.” He looked questioningly at her. She shook her head. She’d never drunk them either, she said, except medicinally, for a quick jolt of warmth after a frigid outing. “And I rubbed brandy on Trout’s gums for her toothache.”

“La pauvre Truite.”
He patted her hand, briefly, determined not to make any gesture in concert with the rakı that bespoke a seduction. Women were rightly leery of drinking with men.

She hugged her knees. “Do you think we shall see her again?”

“I don’t know.”

“But what do you
feel
?” she importuned. “What do you intuit?”

He closed his eyes to subtract her worried expression from his calculation. What did he think? He hadn’t a clue. “Her disappearance is a complete mystery.”

“Yes.” She was wiping her neck. The notch at the clavicle had always seemed to him fashioned for a human finger to press upon. “I’m ready to try the rakı,” she said, as if resigning herself to a chancy medical procedure. “But shouldn’t we give some first to Max and Joseph?”

“When they wake.” Reaching into a camel bag, he pulled out the first of two unopened bottles and filled two cheap glasses. “Drink it slowly,” he cautioned.

“I shall.”

“And when you’re done, I’ll take you back to your tent. You’ll be safe there, with the guard.”

She didn’t answer.

He sat down Indian-style, facing her on the rug. “Slowly,” he cautioned again.

For the longest time, she sat poised but unmoving, her attention lapsed or wandering. Some epileptics were like that, he knew, carried off by petit mal seizures, physically but not mentally present. His own fits, alas, were of the grand mal sort, and unmistakable. Thank God, the mere fear of having an episode had never triggered one. What a humiliation that would be. Yet another reason not to wed: shame. Shame of a condition equated with madness. Shame at the thought that someone might observe him doing things he himself would never see or remember. Flailing, frothing at the mouth, falling down, convulsing, his hands twitched into claws, face grotesquely contorted. This, too, had driven him into reclusion.

She was staring at him. “I thought perhaps you’d make a toast.”

“Yes. Of course.” He couldn’t say why exactly, but he found this remark so winsome that he wanted to cry. Again! What was it about this English spinster that brought his emotions gushing forth? Or was it simply the trip itself? Every day in Egypt he seemed to have become more sensitive, more easily moved. He lifted his glass. “To Max. To Max and Joseph’s recovery.”

“And to Trout,” Flo added. “May she be unharmed.”

“Unharmed!” They clinked glasses.

“It tastes like licorice,” she exclaimed. “No, wait!” She inserted the tip of her tongue a second time into the clear liquid and savored it. “Horehound.” She didn’t know the French word for this candy.

Gustave’s first swallow only served to spike his thirst to a more unbearable level. He wanted to down the whole glass, but restrained himself, if only to set an example.

“Let’s have another toast,” she said.

“Excellent. Your turn.”

She took this seriously, ruminating like a child who still believes in the omnipotence of her thoughts, as if the toast might take immediate effect in the world. “Let’s drink to Père Elias and Père Issa.”

“To the twins!”

With this second splash of stinging sweetness, his tongue came alive.

“I’ve been wanting to ask you something,” Flo said suddenly. She took a substantial gulp of liqueur.

“Please.”

The wind began to gust against the tent, its walls ballooning slightly in and out.

“Are the hospital matrons in Rouen drunks?”

“What a strange question! Not at
all
. I never saw drunken women at the Hôtel-Dieu. Only the good sisters.”

“That must have been wonderful, to live in a hospital.” She took another sip. “I would have loved that. My mother said hospital women were lower than servants, and loose.”

He was amazed. He’d never seen anything untoward at the Hôtel-Dieu, but then he hadn’t been allowed in the wards themselves. “What do you mean?”

“Fanny said they hang about for immoral purposes. Because, you see, our matrons belong to no religious order.”

“Yes, in France they are all nuns.”

“I’m starting to feel the rakı,” she said. “In my knees. And how ever shall I toddle off to my tent with melted knees?”

He chuckled. “Don’t worry—it will pass. And then you’ll get sleepy.” He decided not to tell her the other possibilities—lewdness, panic, uncontrollable laughter, passing out, throwing up. The less she knew, the better.

“Tell me about your father.” Her glass was half empty.

“Have another sip,” he suggested. Christ, he was thirsty. “He was a great doctor. My brother, naturally, followed in his path. He, too, has an excellent reputation.”

“Bully for him.” She dipped her tongue into the glass, a hummingbird visiting a dangerous flower, then quaffed the rakı.

“But he couldn’t save our father.”

“I’m sorry.” She picked up the book he’d been reading,
The Odes of Horace
, then cocked her head and stared at him, waiting for the next revelation.

He didn’t blame his brother, he told her. “We’re not close, he and
I. We’re nothing alike, for one thing. He’s far more conventional.”

“My sister, too. She belongs in the eighteenth century!” She drank another mouthful. “She lives for needlework and poor-peopling.”

“What?”

Both her mother and sister, she explained, dabbled at charity. “But it’s an event on their social calendar,” she said with a sneer. “That’s all. You know, riding to hounds, hunt balls, the London social season. And
poor
-peopling.” Her voice rose. “They bring a joint or a bird to the cottagers and think they’ve saved the world entire.
Aargh!
” she growled. “My bootlaces are too tight.”

“Allow me.” He loosened them.

Her face brightened, shifting in that way he recognized as the precursor to a change of subject. “May I see Max’s photos? Oh, dear Max! We must look in on him and Joseph.”

He’d forgotten. They struggled gracelessly to their feet, walruses clamoring onto a beach, he thought with amusement. She laughed at her own awkwardness. They linked elbows and wobbled together to the tent. The patients were sleeping, their heads cooler to the touch than before. “Good,” she pronounced. “Perhaps they are past the crisis.”

Returning to his tent felt like balancing on a tightrope instead of treading through sand. They held hands. He steered and she followed, each step a challenge in coordination. At last he opened the flap and they dropped down on the camera cases. “Ah,” she said, smiling, her eyes half closed. “The photos?”

“Of course, my pleasure.”

They were calotypes, he explained, gingerly lifting them from their cases one by one. She wanted to see all of them, dwelling with special interest on the Sphinx and Philae. “Oh, and there is one of your crewman.” She pointed to the sweet, one-eyed model. “He’s everywhere.”

“Hadji Ismael. Yes, to convey the immensity of his surroundings.”

She made a game of finding Hadji. Sometimes he was clad in Turkish trousers, a shirt, and a fez or turban. But more often he wore only a loincloth and white skullcap, his suntanned body dark as the
cleft rock, and dramatic against the lighter stone of the monuments. He was easy to spot, slouched at Abu Simbel against the royal wig of Ramses, or seated on a ledge in the pharaoh’s crown, his dangling feet in sharp focus. “He’s as still as the statues,” she observed.

Gustave laughed. “Yes, well, Max told him the brass tube of the lens was a cannon that would shoot him if he so much as breathed. He’s always terribly relieved when Max finally folds up the tripod.”

“That’s awful,” she protested, giggling. “Would
you
have lied to him?”

“I don’t know. But Max is all business, you see. He regards people as instruments in his various plans.” It was only a matter of time, he decided as he spoke, before Max cashiered him for a more influential friend.

“But, you see, Hadji’s not in all the photos.” He handed her an expansive view of Abu Simbel with the Nile flowing past the temples like molten metal. “Max took this one from high on the opposite shore.”

“Ah!” she exclaimed. “There’s the sand ramp we climbed every day. I had no idea it was so imposing.” She sipped at her drink. “The camera sees so much better than the eye, really.” She studied a panoramic vista of the cataracts. “For instance, in this one it could be the eye of God.”

Perhaps that was why he hated to be photographed. The camera was inhumanly accurate, and, yes, like being seen by God, whose existence he had outgrown, save for the resentment of being spied upon.

“Here’s one of you, is it?”

Max had taken the image of him skulking in the garden behind the Hôtel du Nil against his wishes. He was wearing his long white flannel robe with the signature pom-pommed hood. “I detest being photographed,” he said.

• • •

He topped off their glasses and carried them outside in order to smoke. Following him, she plopped down on the sand without ado. “I’m feeling the rakı more.”

“Oh?”

“Things are spinning.” She pointed skyward. “The moon. The stars. It feels as if I’ve been twirling and got dizzy. Not entirely pleasant, I must say.”

“I’m drunk, too,” he confessed.
“Ivre et heureux, ivre et heureux,”
he sang to the tune of “Frère Jacques.”
“Toi aussi. Toi aussi.”

They were silent for a moment.

“I might need to lie down.” she said. Which was just as well since the pipe smoke was scorching his already dry throat.

They hurried back inside. “Much better,” she said, flat on his carpet bed.

“You should sleep.”

“But it’s not that I’m tired. In fact, I’m soaring like a bird.” Her eyes were fixed on the tent top as if it were a masterpiece. “No wonder the men take brandy after dinner.” She laughed. “I always imagined them solving mankind’s problems. Wait until I tell Parthe! Oh, you should meet my sister.”

He had no interest in meeting the sister. “I’d be honored.” He hated to be polite when he was in his cups.

“She’s such a prune, no curiosity whatsoever, but very dear nonetheless. They’re all very dear, you know? How can I hate people who have been good to me all my life? But how can I love them when they refuse to understand the first thing about me?”

“I love my sweet old
maman
. But when she chatters on I simply close the door.” He drained his glass. “Have you tried flattery on them?”