have slapped her.
We spent a few days both trying to lead in the abandonment dance—that hardened two-step I eventually had grown so adept at. She watched television with the children after dinner, went to do her part-time teaching in themorning, and came home in the afternoons to attend to their so-called emotional needs. She cooked some meals, I cooked others. We went to bed. She read. I pretended to fall asleep immediately.
A couple of weeks like this and usually one of us would tire, needing to change up the moves. Anna returned one day from teaching and came to me in the kitchen.
“Egypt.”
I looked up from the pot of beef stew I was preparing.
“I’d like to go to Egypt—see the Nile. The children have all done projects on it at one time or another. I know all about it, but I can’t really imagine it.”
I went back to my stirring and did not speak. But she stood beside me, waiting.
“I thought this wasn’t a good time,” I said, finally, taking the stew off the burner. I have never quite managed seamless humility.
“It’s the perfect time. March, like you said. I’m sorry.”
I was hers again, much too easily.
Her presence in Egypt seemed as natural as Nefertiti’s.
Upon entering the first gate of the temple of Karnak, where the silt had been excavated to reveal graffiti from the kind of travellers I would like to have been—the Indiana Jones-type man who would have carved “Michael” into a pharaoh’s obelisk—I began to feel that everything in my life had led me to this spot. The hieroglyphics—these beautifully carved translations of power—made me feel dizzily small. The temperature was a dry 32 degrees;the sun bore down on my stubborn head, while Anna had wisely worn a wide-brimmed hat that shaded the burgeoning lines on her neck.
The Nile could have flooded and drowned us then, the pharaoh might have proclaimed higher taxes, the gods might have asked for greater human sacrifices, and I, gratefully, might have been spared the humiliation of my modernity
.
“I am Mustafa,” said our guide, and I felt something between him and Anna instantly. He was an average-looking man: glasses, black moustache, a soft, not muscular build. He shook our hands, and I noticed he held Anna’s longer than mine. “Where are you from?” he asked her.
“Canada,” she said, then realized from his look that this was not enough. “I was born in Istanbul.”
He stared at her harder. “Of course, of course, I see. But I thought you were one of us!”
I needed to fuck my wife then more than I had in several years.
As the sun roasted my neck pink, Mustafa told us about the king who had died having left no sons to rule. His daughter, Hatshepsut, took the throne despite her sex and ruled Egypt with imagination and determination. Mustafa showed us where she was depicted in carvings and paintings as a male figure, and where her stepson later defiled her image. I felt Mustafa was talking only to Anna, so I retreated into the shadows to listen, while my wife politely nodded her head, again and again. She lookedfascinated, and occasionally brushed her hands along the stone to touch what seemed like the manifestation of Mustafa’s words.
He taught us how to read hieroglyphics, which I had once, long ago, studied. But there, in front of the Obelisk of Ramses II, I felt as though I was finally learning the craft I had been practising for more than twenty years. I knew the symbols for “make” and “life,” and could just about make out the subtle prayers of the scribes for their king and queen or deity. But I had believed that a hieroglyph existed more independently than Mustafa was suggesting. He taught us how to read ideograms and cartouches, to decipher the depictions of battles in the carvings by reading them like a story. I saw the interdependence, noticed how “make” and “life” were only part of a refined, intricate narrative, and the signs became truly meaningful for the first
We spent a few days both trying to lead in the abandonment dance—that hardened two-step I eventually had grown so adept at. She watched television with the children after dinner, went to do her part-time teaching in themorning, and came home in the afternoons to attend to their so-called emotional needs. She cooked some meals, I cooked others. We went to bed. She read. I pretended to fall asleep immediately.
A couple of weeks like this and usually one of us would tire, needing to change up the moves. Anna returned one day from teaching and came to me in the kitchen.
“Egypt.”
I looked up from the pot of beef stew I was preparing.
“I’d like to go to Egypt—see the Nile. The children have all done projects on it at one time or another. I know all about it, but I can’t really imagine it.”
I went back to my stirring and did not speak. But she stood beside me, waiting.
“I thought this wasn’t a good time,” I said, finally, taking the stew off the burner. I have never quite managed seamless humility.
“It’s the perfect time. March, like you said. I’m sorry.”
I was hers again, much too easily.
Her presence in Egypt seemed as natural as Nefertiti’s.
Upon entering the first gate of the temple of Karnak, where the silt had been excavated to reveal graffiti from the kind of travellers I would like to have been—the Indiana Jones-type man who would have carved “Michael” into a pharaoh’s obelisk—I began to feel that everything in my life had led me to this spot. The hieroglyphics—these beautifully carved translations of power—made me feel dizzily small. The temperature was a dry 32 degrees;the sun bore down on my stubborn head, while Anna had wisely worn a wide-brimmed hat that shaded the burgeoning lines on her neck.
The Nile could have flooded and drowned us then, the pharaoh might have proclaimed higher taxes, the gods might have asked for greater human sacrifices, and I, gratefully, might have been spared the humiliation of my modernity
.
“I am Mustafa,” said our guide, and I felt something between him and Anna instantly. He was an average-looking man: glasses, black moustache, a soft, not muscular build. He shook our hands, and I noticed he held Anna’s longer than mine. “Where are you from?” he asked her.
“Canada,” she said, then realized from his look that this was not enough. “I was born in Istanbul.”
He stared at her harder. “Of course, of course, I see. But I thought you were one of us!”
I needed to fuck my wife then more than I had in several years.
As the sun roasted my neck pink, Mustafa told us about the king who had died having left no sons to rule. His daughter, Hatshepsut, took the throne despite her sex and ruled Egypt with imagination and determination. Mustafa showed us where she was depicted in carvings and paintings as a male figure, and where her stepson later defiled her image. I felt Mustafa was talking only to Anna, so I retreated into the shadows to listen, while my wife politely nodded her head, again and again. She lookedfascinated, and occasionally brushed her hands along the stone to touch what seemed like the manifestation of Mustafa’s words.
He taught us how to read hieroglyphics, which I had once, long ago, studied. But there, in front of the Obelisk of Ramses II, I felt as though I was finally learning the craft I had been practising for more than twenty years. I knew the symbols for “make” and “life,” and could just about make out the subtle prayers of the scribes for their king and queen or deity. But I had believed that a hieroglyph existed more independently than Mustafa was suggesting. He taught us how to read ideograms and cartouches, to decipher the depictions of battles in the carvings by reading them like a story. I saw the interdependence, noticed how “make” and “life” were only part of a refined, intricate narrative, and the signs became truly meaningful for the first
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