The Twelve Rooms of the Nile Part 27

The fanning slowed. "Oh, for a gla.s.s 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 rak?" 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 rak 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 rak," 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 gla.s.ses. "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 pet.i.t mal seizures, physically but not mentally present. His own fits, alas, were of the grand mal sort, and unmistakable. Thank G.o.d, 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 gla.s.s. "To Max. To Max and Joseph's recovery."

"And to Trout," Flo added. "May she be unharmed."

"Unharmed!" They clinked gla.s.ses.

"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. "h.o.r.ehound." 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 gla.s.s, 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 Pere Elias and Pere 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 Hotel-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 Hotel-Dieu, but then he hadn't been allowed in the wards themselves. "What do you mean?"

"f.a.n.n.y 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 rak," 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 pa.s.s. And then you'll get sleepy." He decided not to tell her the other possibilities-lewdness, panic, uncontrollable laughter, pa.s.sing out, throwing up. The less she knew, the better.

"Tell me about your father." Her gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s, a hummingbird visiting a dangerous flower, then quaffed the rak.

"But he couldn't save our father."

"I'm sorry." She picked up the book he'd been reading, The Odes of Horace, then c.o.c.ked 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt. 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 p.r.o.nounced. "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 bra.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e."

"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 G.o.d."

Perhaps that was why he hated to be photographed. The camera was inhumanly accurate, and, yes, like being seen by G.o.d, 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 Hotel 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 gla.s.ses and carried them outside in order to smoke. Following him, she plopped down on the sand without ado. "I'm feeling the rak 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 "Frere 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 gla.s.s. "Have you tried flattery on them?"

"I don't expect flattery from a woman carries much weight."

He pondered it. No doubt she was right. Though he was naturally suspicious of flattery from either s.e.x.

"I'm so worried." She sobbed suddenly. "Trout, the poor old battle-ax. She never harmed a fly, really, and never would."

As he reached to comfort her, she snuggled her face and fists into his shoulder without protest, rather like a squirrel with a nut. Patting her in a way he hoped was supportive, he couldn't think of anything clever or comforting to say. Drinking could leave him stupid and boorish, inclined to recitations of Corneille, the theorems of Pythagoras, s.m.u.tty ballads, or the conjugation of irregular verbs. And so he said nothing. Eventually they dozed off, each of them a lump of incoherence.

He awoke to find her beside him, sound asleep. What luxury, what privilege to observe her at his leisure! It felt almost illicit. But since he suspected that a sleeping person could sense another's gaze-the heat of it-instead of staring, he stole long, furtive glances at the individual hairs of her brows, the whorls of her ear, which were less fleshy than his, her smaller earlobes. Her eyelids were shiny and translucent, with faint pink squiggles that were invisible when her eyes were open. A brown smudge in the shape of a pickle covered part of one cheek. Her hands were ravishing, as if a sculptor had idealized them, the fingers slender and tapering, the skin creamy as vellum.

Moving quietly as a breeze, he gathered half a ream of paper and some flour, then crept outside the tent so as not to disturb her. He tore the paper into tiny shreds, added the flour, and reentered the tent to moisten the mixture. It was an act of faith to use so much of the rak.

Sitting beside her p.r.o.ne figure, he applied the mixture to her hand, molding it to the bones. He worked deliberately, with focus and delight. His head was buzzing. The gluey stuff smelled like a cabinetmaker's shop. Plaster of Paris would have been better, but this would suffice.

"Oh, my." She opened her eyes. "What are you doing?" She sounded drunk, her words slurred.

"Making a model of your wrist. Then I'll have it cast into an objet d'art for my study at home." A sculpture of her wrist arranged on his desk alongside his dictionary and inkstand, his travel treasures-a mummy, stones from the Parthenon, egret feathers, Rossignol's note to G.o.d. . .

"Mmm," she hummed, closing her eyes again.

He remembered the process exactly, as if no time had pa.s.sed since he and Caroline fashioned heads for their puppets. The papier-mache squeezes he'd made with Aouadallah at Abu Simbel had been something of a refresher course, though they'd cracked and had to be redone in the usual way. Max had been displeased. Yes, displeased was the word he used, as if Gustave were his employee.

"It feels very nice. Cool." She rearranged her feet and sighed. "Have you noticed that the worst loneliness is to be in the wrong company?"

"True." He could not divide his attention, not when he was on the verge of achieving a perfectly smooth surface. Was this not what Bernini experienced, releasing the figures yearning to be set free from the carrera? Though that was sculpture, of course. So, not freeing a figure, then, but catching one-a living, breathing subject-and fixing it in time.

"You went away," she said vaguely. "People I wish to leave me never do. But I didn't want you to."

He was ecstatic, the strands adhered to the pads of his fingers all of a sudden imbued with the spark of life. "I never left you, Rossignol. And never would. We are in Egypt, after all. Where would I go?" Indeed, in this moment, she was Egypt. And in Egypt their friendship would likely remain. Any future they had was dim, inscrutable. Letters arriving in the post with talk of Shakespeare.

"You did." Her eyes were still closed. "You went to Old Koseir. And then I lacked the nerve. Though I was planning to, thank you very much." She opened her eyes and, with her other hand, moved the lamp closer. "That is so kind!" she marveled, her voice high and incredulous. "You are making a squeeze of my hand?"

"Of your wrist, actually. But not a squeeze-a cast." He explained again that he would have it fashioned in bronze, for his desk.

"What a lovely thought." She stifled a yawn. "So full of sentiment. I quite like the idea of my hand being a guardian angel on your desk."

He'd commission Pradier to cast it. No, not bronze. Alabaster or marble-like the bust of Caroline-the veins in the stone suggesting the delicate tracery within her flesh.