The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (7 page)

The niceties followed the sex. She brought out her best glasses and a bottle of rakı.
Lion’s Milk,
she called it in Arabic, for its potency and the swirl of white when water was added. He had already experienced its highs and its hangovers, first in Alexandria and again in Cairo.

She and her girls did not resemble the whores or grisettes in Paris, nor the seedy wenches in Kenneh and Cairo. Hers was a prelapsarian paradise, a lecherous Eden devoid of morals and contrition.
Toothsome without being tawdry,
he thought.
Tremulously louche
. She had raised ribaldry and lubricity to high art. Unlike most whores, she was not naughty or coy, but frankly available. Pleasure was the only commandment she obeyed and dancing was sexier than sex itself. A few years earlier, public dancing, like brothels, had been outlawed, forcing the courtesans south from Cairo to lesser cities. The only concession to this were the blindfolds the musicians wore as they sawed on sour violins, beat drums, and rattled tambourines.

Her dance movements were relatively crude: she squeezed her bare breasts together with her jacket and jerked her pelvis back and forth. When the music slowed, she rose up on one foot, then the other, pressing the lifted leg across her shin.

“Sheik Abu Dabu!” Gustave shouted above the music. “I have seen this dance before, on old Greek vases.”

Max shook his head. “The male dancers at Cairo were better.” They had seen the famous Hasan el-Belbeissi, who was faster, more agile and acrobatic, walking on his hands, tumbling through the air at breakneck speed.

“But not as beautiful,” replied Gustave.

Joseph smiled. “We say this on Nile.” He pointed to Bambeh, who had replaced Kuchuk Hanem as the soloist. “The beautiful women, they have the ugly feet.”

Gustave beheld her misshapen toes and calloused knuckles. His mind raced back to Louise’s milk-white, perfectly shaped feet and hands. His hot marble Venus.
Satin slipper, bloody hanky.
At home, one of his prized possessions was the pink satin shoe he had pocketed the second time he bedded her, along with a handkerchief soaked with her menstrual blood. The break with her was still fresh and painful.

Kuchuk’s ribaldry surpassed his own. She snatched his tarboosh and put it on. To discourage lice, he and Max had shaved their heads except for occipital knots of hair by which, according to Mahometan belief, they would be whisked to heaven when they died. She polished his pate with her jacket, then shooed everyone upstairs, indicating she wished to copulate with him again.

“Come, my dear,” said Gustave, “let me give you a ride.” To everyone’s amazement, he bent over and she jumped on his back. Then he hobbled off to a small cubicle and took his second turn with her, a brief but intense orgasm.

When they returned to the upstairs courtyard, Kuchuk mounted his back again. “And
I
have seen this before,” Max joked, “in a medieval tapestry. So often the Christian tarts ride their customers home when a unicorn is not available.”

“We are going to get a cup of coffee,” Gustave called back.

With the others following, he stumbled along the alleyway to the café next door, a wooden shack with a roof of sugarcane stalks thrown down helter-skelter. Demitasses of Turkish coffee soon arrived on a copper tray. A few moments later, the muezzin sang out the call to afternoon prayer over the rooftops of the city:
“Allahu Akbar.”
Kuchuk glanced through the open window, suddenly aware of the time.

“Beautiful melody,” said Max, besotted with rakı.
“Allah il Allah,”
he tweedled, mimicking the muezzin until the whores howled with
laughter. It was then that Kuchuk took Gustave’s face between her palms and pantomimed shaving off his mustache.
“Abu Chanab,”
she whispered, Father Mustache, planting a kiss on his cheek.

“She say not to cover your pretty mouth,” Joseph translated.

He and Max decided they would visit her brothel again that night.

• • •

The musicians from the afternoon were already assembled in the courtyard when they returned in full regalia, wearing swords and bearing a bottle of rakı. Oil lamps shedding pools of creamy yellow light burned on tin sconces. The women sat singing together on the divan. A new and older alma with a savage expression and deep-set eyes took him downstairs and made quick work of him. His timing was so derailed by her voluptuous writhing that he stained the divan. When he set to work on her with his mouth, she seemed surprised, but tolerated it silently. Perhaps her magic button had been excised. He loved giving pleasure to a woman as much as he loved receiving it. Because he’d twice fallen in love with women eleven years older than he—Elisa Schlesinger, his first crush, when he was fourteen, and then, of course, Louise—he preferred older prostitutes and was beloved by them in turn. In Egypt, the old whores said they found him more enchanting than Max because of his impressive height and large, cowlike eyes. But he knew they were lying: they were grateful to him for the business.

He downed a glass of rakı, took Kuchuk aside, and, grasping her necklace with his teeth, had sex with her. Her cunt, he wrote later, felt “like rolls of velvet as she made me come.” Afterward, showing off her muscularity and grace, she offered him licorice straws from her second mouth.

But Kuchuk Hanem’s most remarkable talent was for the Bee, the dance forbidden in all of Egypt. She began by vibrating her torso as quickly as its namesake, shedding her clothing until she was naked. Her body was sinuous, fluid, assuming forms that seemed impossible. Backbends, simple flips, and rapid turns led to undulations that
traveled through her flesh like water through a sluice, from her neck to her breasts, belly, and hips, down through her legs until only her feet were shivering to the music. She wore castanets on her fingers and bells on her ankles, accompanying herself vocally with trills and shouts. The chirring, clapping, and tinkling built to a crescendo until she seemed half animal, half angel, moving according to some essential rhythm borrowed from nature in harmony with the whorls of turban shells, the branching lacework of leaves, the khamsin’s whirlwind. She was magnetic, paralyzing, her face altering from grave to frantically wanton and grave again.

For an encore, she performed a duet with a cup of coffee placed on the floor. Castanets clacking, she made love to the cup with a series of lascivious movements and ended by clenching it with her teeth and gulping it down. In that one stroke, he felt she had taken him whole into her mouth—or could.

In the past, Gustave had loved all his prostitutes, but never a particular one. His feeling was more for the institution itself, “prostitution” being an old and venerable word, like “university,” “Sorbonne,” and “Mother Church.” But by the time the dancing was over, he was convinced that he was in love with Kuchuk Hanem, and begged to spend the night with her. Though she worried that his presence would attract thieves, in the end she relented. They slept together in a small downstairs room, guarded by her pimps and by Joseph, who had paired up with an Abyssinian whore, forgetting for an evening his young wife. After another
coup,
Kuchuk drifted off, her little hand resting in his, her mound of Venus heating him like a hot water bottle. Delectable snoring issued from her elegant nose and slackened mouth. With her scruffy Papillion dog asleep nearby on his red jacket, they made as happy a family of three as might have lived anywhere on the earth. He gave himself over to reveries of domestic normalcy and oriental perversity.

At 3:00
A.M
. he awakened for a final
coup,
rather like the affectionate screwing of an old married couple before breakfast. At dawn she fetched charcoal for the brazier, then returned to bed, warming herself in the heat of his body. The bedclothes that all night had
passed for Venetian silk revealed in the daylight the most telling touch: bedbugs, which he amused himself by squashing on the wall. Their nauseating smell combined with Kuchuk’s attar of roses created an odor as memorable as her rotten tooth. In his work, he decided, as in life, there must always be a touch of bitterness in the sweet, a hint of calumny in the romance, a jeer in the midst of triumph!

Early the next morning, as agreed, Kuchuk Hanem appeared with her lamb in tow at the
cange
to pose for a portrait. No longer was she clad in diaphanous silks and cottons, much to his disappointment. She wore instead a bizarre combination of European and Ottoman clothes that denoted a prim matronliness—a black cloak, a fichu and cheap cameo at her throat, an embroidered vest and hat in the Armenian style, and European boots. Max took three exposures, all with the spotted lamb: one of her seated under a white umbrella, one standing, and one leaning over the side of the
cange,
so that the waters of the Nile might flow forever above the mantel at Croisset.

In accord with her attire, they had parted decorously. No fervid kisses or tender hugs, no desperate clutching of her ass. He promised to return in a month or two. She stepped gracefully off the boat followed by her sheep like a figure in a nursery rhyme. When she reached the street above the docks, she looked back and wagged her small perfumed hand.

He had detected true longing in that wave, with a soupçon of love and dolor, too. Ever since, he had allowed himself the fantasy that she had found him unusually appealing, and was counting the days until his return—that she was thinking and dreaming of him, reviewing every detail of their lovemaking.

When the photographic papers were developed, Kuchuk had disappeared, leaving only a gray smudge where she and the Nile had briefly intersected in the frame.

4

LA VIE DE FLORENCE ROSSIGNOL

O
n a clear Monday in February 1850, what Flo saw from her houseboat was nothing less, she thought, than divinely inspired, powered into existence by the love of God.

She’d awakened to the unmistakable jolt of the boat setting sail at dawn. As she watched through the window, the river turned pewter, then silver, like a hand mirror tilting up to catch the ever more brilliant light. After breakfasting with the others, she’d remained on deck, anticipating Abu Simbel.

They had been on the Nile for six weeks and more than nine hundred miles. Going south, the river had been a wide expanse, lined on either side with the fertile croplands that had filled the empire’s belly for millennia. Then, at Aswan, the green borders had narrowed and the river with it, fracturing into rapids that boiled over the crags. After the cataracts came the three D’s—Dendur, Dakkeh, and Derr, where Charles bought two barrels of dates. Flo had planned to spend the afternoon at a temple, but Derr was the capital of Nubia, and the clamor and poverty of its inhabitants were so dispiriting, she had spent only an hour in town.

Now, as the boat sped upriver, its great crossed sails unfurled in the breeze, sandstone cliffs encroached on both sides, rising up in sheer ocher walls to form a canyon through which the low, twisting river appeared to be fleeing for its life. The river was more tortuous here than in the north, with hairpin turns so sharp that each vista coming into view was an astonishment. Which is how it was that, rounding yet another bend, Flo was staggered by the breathtaking sight on the western bank: cut from the cliff, the faces of enormous stone pharaohs glowed in the morning light. They were the biggest likenesses she had ever seen. If the height of the cliff were three hundred feet, these colossi, she estimated, were easily seventy feet high. Her gaze shifted to the second temple, also carved from the rock and equally imposing, if smaller—the monument to Ramses’s queen, Nefertari. Elation buzzed through her body.

Everyone, including the dragoman, Paolo, gathered eagerly as the boat moored alongside a patch of palms. Selina carried her hemp tote, packed with drawing supplies, on her shoulder. She squeezed Flo’s hand and stepped onto the gangplank. Flo and Trout followed. Behind them, four brawny Nubians would, if necessary, haul the travelers over the slope of windblown sand that rose, it seemed, a thousand feet up the mountain.

The climb was slow and arduous.
Never look down,
her father had told her when she was a child and they hiked the hills of Kent, near Embley. She focused on the colossi when they were visible, their blank eyes staring impassively into the sun, urging her on. The heat was building, and she was glad she’d worn only her brown Hollands. Unbleached linen was perfect for the climate of Egypt.

Trout struggled alongside, aided by a crewman who pushed her from time to time, his hands hovering just behind the broadest part of her back. Flo hoped to finish the ascent unassisted, but she wouldn‘t be shy about asking for help. Once she reached the great temple, she could rest. She planned to sit alone in the inner rooms and ponder the Egyptian religion. Unlike most Christians, she hadn’t dismissed the Egyptian gods and goddesses as false deities, viewing them, rather,
as alternate conceptions of holiness. Surely, the theology of a people who had ruled for four thousand years was worth contemplating.

Trout grunted, and the crewman clamped onto her elbow to steady her. She was dressed for a visit to London, not the Nubian Desert, her cotton twill bodice and skirts already damp with sweat. In front of Flo, following in Paolo’s footsteps, Charles and Selina made steady progress. Selina stopped to speak, pointing at something, but the wind tossed aside her words.

At seventeen, Flo had climbed the stairs at Notre Dame—more than four hundred steps, her travel guide had crowed—to the parapeted rooftop and Paris below, dainty as a Persian miniature. Though not as high, this was considerably more difficult. At last she moved from the acutely angled ramp to a patch of level ground. It felt good to stand up straight after so much bending and trudging.

One Ramses was broken, the disjointed head and torso lying on the ground. Higher up, the first colossus was covered to his nostrils in sand. Arabs with shovels appeared to be digging out his visage. But despite neglect and damage, the temple seemed pristine, as if whatever had blasted the figure apart had happened centuries before, and it had been untouched ever since. Certainly no European had disturbed it, since Europe hadn’t known of Abu Simbel until the French conquered Egypt. Sailing up the Nile in 1817, Giovanni Belzoni must have gasped as she had when he rounded the bend in the river.