PIERRE SAAD
WHILE PIERRE SAAD waited, days, weeks, months, he often imagined that he would look out through the window of his library and see her—Lucy—crossing the stony yard on foot, carrying the black French horn case. As she walked toward him, her body would be bowed sideways, but her arm straight as a plumb line with the awkward case as the weight. Perhaps one or two local people would be with her, escorting her. According to the flight plan, she would have parked the plane at the little runway not too far away, and the locals would have offered to show her the way.
Other times he imagined that Lucy Bergmann would fly over his house while he sat at his library table, at his reading table. At the sound of an unmistakable engine, his ears would prick up. His plane had found its way home; she was bringing the codex. Bonne chance, the course passed over his house as she piloted her way to the little airport. He would run to the large glass window, throw up the sash, and lean his whole body out just in time to see her dip the wings, an aeronautical hand wave.
She wouldn’t know whether he saw the greeting or not, but she would make the gesture anyway.
Once when he was a desolate child, he had waved at the moon. He had thought that even if her face was blank, he would wave. By day, he used to watch the passengers on cruise boats steaming in opposite directions on the Nile. When two boats passed, the tourists on each boat waved at the waving people behind a railing much like the one behind which they themselves stood. They would have no time, going in opposite directions, to fasten their attention on individual faces. Their flurry of hands was an acknowledgment in general. We’re here; you’re there. There was a certain touching human recognition in their mutual gestures. No time to stop. No, of course not. Not even expected. We’ll never see each other again. Good-bye. But still that passing moment—Hello!— hands agitating the air, was worthwhile. He had thought so, when he stood as a boy, dressed in white, on the bank of the Nile, and watched the boats passing one another, going in opposite directions.
Yes, he imagined Lucy would dip her wings as she flew over. She wouldn’t even be sure where he lived, but maybe some intuition would prompt her to wave, to acknowledge his possible presence.
Many days passed while he read at his worn table and listened for the sound of the Piper Cub’s engine, more recognizable than his own thumbprint. Weeks passed, and Lucy had not walked across the yard with the precious French horn case. What had appeared, quite unexpectedly, while he sat opening his mail at his reading station, was a letter from the president of France.
Before he opened the important seal, for just a moment, Pierre abstracted the envelope into only its whiteness and then morphed it into a feather dropped from the tail of the Holy Spirit, who, Christians claimed, had appeared in the form of a dove.
So, what message had arrived from on high?
The president broached the idea that there should be a new unified ministry of prehistoric cave art and wondered if he, Pierre Saad, might consent to be its director, were such a ministry to be established. The president wrote that new technology, a device created to look under the surface of distant planets to see if inhabitants had fled underground, had been trained on the Dordogne Valley, the entire Aquitaine in fact, and the device meant to explore the nature of outer space had revealed many as yet undiscovered caves in the interior of the French earth. The caves gave evidence of having been visited by humans. The bones of animals, even of the extinct gigantic elk, megalasaurus, and huge cave bears, had been detected, and these bones had been cracked open and the marrow extracted as prehistoric humans had done.
For a moment Pierre paused in his reading of the president’s letter to try to imagine the kind of device that could detect bones deep in the passages under the earth, identify their species, and note their condition. He thought of Madame Curie and her colleagues, and their surprise that the new X-rays could see through skin and flesh to find the human skeleton.
No doubt many of the caves, showing evidence of having been visited in just the same ways that Font-de-Gaume, Pech Merle, Lascaux, Chauvet, and dozens of others had been visited, once hosted Neolithic humans. People had cooked meat to sustain them while they engraved the images of animals, or outlined their shapes on the rock, or suggestively painted their three-dimensionality in polychrome pigments onto ceilings and walls. Perhaps those caves that had been detected under the skin of France from outer space even predated Chauvet, with its polychrome animals more than thirty-five thousand years old.
Pierre Saad knew that the speculations of the president’s advisers were correct. His own house sat on top of such a cave. Intending only to establish a wine cellar like a good Frenchman, Pierre had accidentally broken into a deeper chamber. It was not that unusual. Rouffignac had also been discovered through a resident’s excavation of his own basement. That man had wanted to lower the floor so the basement could be better used for storage. Pierre’s eyes moved from the crisp, official paper—where did they buy such paper, unique in its importance?—to the expensive rug on his library floor.
Pierre wondered if the space eye had looked through his house as easily as it looked beyond the earth’s surface and if it had already mapped and numbered the corridors and rooms below him at that moment. Apparently the space eye could register geological aberrations and objects but not drawings; it could not detect the spectacular array of paintings he knew he harbored, though the eye would know of the scant animal bones scattered here and there. What the president wanted to know was whether there was art, galleries and galleries of it, in the numerous passages seen from outer space.
Pierre winced when he encountered the word galleries. Cave art had not been transported to galleries for sterile display. It had been created underground. The contours of the rocks sometimes dictated the type of animal or the posture of the animal who emerged from it.
“Knowing of your interest in these sacred texts …” the president had written.
Pierre Saad’s eyes lingered on the phrase “sacred texts.” Yes, that was what they were—all of the cave paintings. Even the hordes of tourists who had crowded into Lascaux II, the mere replica, to the extent that they had had to create Lascaux III and then Lascaux IV, replicas of replicas, knew that somehow they must get in vague touch with their origins as humans. In the beginning, what were people? When people had evolved to the point of knowing themselves as people, how did they think and feel? How did they treat one another? What knowledge did they seek when they turned to making art? What yearning sought satisfaction when they mixed their colors? How had the president known the exact phrase—the recognition that cave paintings were a sacred text—that might seduce Pierre Saad away from scholarship and into administration? The cave paintings were as sacred a text as the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the Nag Hammadi gospels, the Genesis codex of 2020, or the Bible.
In the next paragraph the language betrayed the crassness of what had actually been of official importance. The president wrote that the south of France could become a greater draw for tourists than the pyramids of Egypt. The cave paintings were older. Much older. With global warming, Egypt was fast becoming an oven blasted with sandstorms; underground, under the ground of France, the caves were at a constant temperature cold enough to require a jacket. It had always been that way; it would always be that way. Oh yes, the art in each cave was unique and compelling. If the new caves detected from space also held significant art, the length of time spent by the average tourist in the Dordogne Valley would increase from one or two days to a week. Hotels, restaurants, interpretive centers, transportation …
While the state would bear no expense for the natural air-conditioning characteristic of caves worldwide, of course it would be necessary to control humidity, bacteria, molds….
Perhaps the tourists would need to rent something like space suits, which would increase their sense of adventure. Their defiling exhalations would be piped back into their high-tech outfits and used to inflate and insulate their suits. Earth tones—umber, red, the black of magnesium dioxide found in the palettes of the cave painters. Perhaps the cave clothes would display replicas of the face of a lion, or the profile of a mammoth, the palmate antlers of the megalasaurus. In some instances, people could wear outfits that glittered like cut crystal if there were more caves like Cognac, naturally filled with crystalline stalagmites and stalactites.
Pierre Saad shook his head in disgust. Was it just that easy to betray the quiet spirituality with hoopla? A mere hop, skip, and jump of the greedy imagination.
Yes, Pierre Saad might consent to becoming the national director of parietal art. He would protect cave art from his own imagination and the imaginations of those even more corruptible than himself. Imagination—Einstein had thought it the most valuable of mental powers for the scientist. Imagination and curiosity. But the purity of scientists was becoming as obsolete as honor in the age of chivalry.
Pierre spent hours drafting his reply with the conditions attendant on his acceptance. At the fringes of his thought, disaster rippled: no codex. He assumed Lucy Bergmann was all right. She had grown up flying such a plane. How had she gone astray? Had she betrayed him?
No. Pierre was never wrong about the people he trusted. He had survived as an orphan boy in Cairo because he could tell intuitively whom to trust; he could also tell when his own best interests required of himself a certain chameleon quality. He knew he could not trust the president—Pierre’s own invitation to the appointment as national director was in part a political ploy. The president wanted to signal the Muslim population that some of them could partake in the government, some of them were respected for their learning and integrity, some, such as the Franco-Egyptian Pierre Saad, had entirely assimilated and could be trusted with the irreplaceable past of the French.
In his own past, Pierre had not been able to receive permission to visit the Chauvet cave. He had resented his exclusion from Chauvet, as though he, as an Arab, had secret folds about his person that would allow him to smuggle in the most virulent of microbes, devourers of magnesium dioxide. A visit from him and—who knew?—the black outline drawings of animals might disappear. He wrote the president that before making a firm commitment, of course he (accompanied by colleagues of his choice and his daughter, the artist Arielle Saad) needed a tour of all the caves already known to house prehistoric art, including Chauvet.
He reassured himself that Lucy Bergmann and the Genesis codex would appear in due time. Was he using the American widow as an unpaid and unwitting courier to transport materials for which she might be waylaid and robbed? Of course he was. But no one else had been available. He congratulated himself on being honest with himself. Self-knowledge was another tool in his survivor’s kit.
He reflected briefly on his conversation with Mrs. Bergmann while they sat at the table in Nag Hammadi. He had propped an old-fashioned armpit crutch near at hand. Not knowing the moment of her coming, he still wore a support boot, to continue his ruse.
“Must you trick her?” Arielle had asked her father. Pierre had replied that if he appeared to be vulnerable, impaired in fact, she would be more likely to help him. “I am an Arab,” he had said. “She fears and mistrusts me automatically. She is middle-aged, a widow, and to some extent she fears all men. There is a certain freedom in widowhood, which she fears to lose.”
“She’s drenched with grief,” his daughter pronounced.
“Yes, that too.” He shrugged. “I do have sympathy for her,” he had insisted.
As he sat in his library, drafting a letter to the president of France, those words he had insisted on as truth hovered in the air around him. He remembered Lucy’s pale face, hanging like the disk of the full moon above the podium. Her face had seemed to fracture into a network of fine lines as she looked at the scientists, minus her esteemed husband. While he had been touched by her grief, he also calculated it to be an index to her capacity for devotion.
When she virtually ran from the symposium, he had followed her, out of sympathy. After he had seen her disappear behind the closing doors of the elevator, he had hurried down the stairwell, intending to speak to her again. But he had not slipped on the steps. He had not broken his leg. Instead, he had changed his mind about comforting her.
As he had watched her go out the door of the building into the light, the way she pushed open the door—her power and determination to leave the scene behind, her anger—caused him to hesitate. She was not crushed by grief, he had decided. She needed no sympathy from him. The event at the symposium was going to be a turning point for her. She was about to resume her life. She would not drown in a lake of tears; she had reached the bottom and was now swimming for the surface.
Only later, in a conversation with Gabriel Plum, had he learned that she had indeed gone off with a tour group. And still later, that Plum had been notified she had left the group—her old friend had laughed about it, bragged about her independence, though no one knew where she might have gone. Pierre had been appalled; Plum had no idea of the possible dangers. When Pierre had mentioned that a lone woman, an unveiled Westerner, had no business visiting desert towns alone, Gabriel had said Lucy lived in New York City, where there were certainly more murders and rapes per capita than in Upper Egypt.
Then Pierre remembered that she had mentioned the name of a place: Nag Hammadi. But he did not enunciate that phrase for Gabriel.
Instead Pierre had asked in a soft voice if Mrs. Bergmann were religious.
“A blank, frank, militant atheist,” Gabriel had replied with a rather pleased grin.
“Really?” Pierre had asked. He would have labeled her as one of those secular Americans who dwelt in some sort of perpetual quest for spirituality.
“Her parents are Christian missionaries. She’s still in some sort of eighteen-year-old rebellion.”
“And you?” Pierre had presumed to ask in his least intrusive tone.
“Church of England. I’m a Brit, you know.”
“Wonder where her parents do their work? Africa?”
“Japan. They went off and left her with her old grandmother when she was a child. She’s never forgiven them.”
“I don’t think she’s safe traveling alone in Egypt,” Pierre said.
“I’ll go fetch her when the symposium is over.”
Foolish man, Pierre thought.
At that moment, Lucy’s usefulness had occurred to Pierre. Even before the symposium officially ended, Pierre had left for Nag Hammadi and contacted his daughter to meet him there.
As his conversation with the British scientist evaporated from his thoughts, Pierre’s hand strayed to a blank page on his desk. While he had only seen photographs of the parietal art at Chauvet, he had memorized every curving line drawn on the cave wall. The angle from which the photographs were taken made the curves balloon or shrink; it was difficult to tell which shape had been most intended by the artist. From his memory of a photograph, Pierre began to draw the heads of two rhinoceroses. Their keratinous horns almost interlocked, and they were often interpreted as engaging in a confrontation. But were they? he wondered. Interpretations of any depiction of two animals constituting a single painting often varied diametrically. Some saw the animals as fighting or preparing for conflict; others saw them simply as meeting, perhaps trying to make connection.
The cave drawings often came to him as emblems of his own inner states. They were like dream images, suggestive of inaccessible feelings and ideas. Did he have two conflicting attitudes toward Lucy Bergmann—was his sympathy in conflict with his predatory impulses? Or was he simply acknowledging his own willingness to use her? He had thought in terms of animal imagery since he was a very young child—not of course the cave drawings. Parietal art had come into his life as a college student in France. As a child in Egypt he had found strange kinship in the images of gods that combined human bodies with the heads of animals. Amun with his ram’s head; Bastet the cat, Horus the beaked falcon, Hathor the cow …
In Nag Hammadi, while he masqueraded as a man with a broken leg, Lucy had brought out the politeness in him. For a few moments, in her presence, he had become the person she thought him to be. He remembered himself as having truly felt what she seemed to assume he felt.
In Cairo, standing behind the podium, when she lifted her bowed head and showed her full round face to the group, she had impressed him as moonstruck. He had imagined her former life, how she might have been sitting safely at her breakfast table in New York, with many buildings far below. A few misty skyscrapers rose toward her like stalagmites thrusting up from the floor of a cave. She was reading the Times, with bowed head. When her husband came into the kitchen and she lifted her face, how had he regarded that full quiet face? Back then there would have been nothing melancholy in her mien. The scene he imagined must have happened in Iowa City, before Thom Bergmann’s death. In New York, when Lucy resided among the mist and clouds, no one would have interrupted her reading of the newspaper.
What had been her life before her loss? Pierre had liked the sound of Thom Bergmann’s voice the few times they had talked on the telephone. His voice, the way he moved from word to word, had a certain thick-edged carefulness to it. Pierre had pictured him to be large in general, quite tall, and when he studied a photo on the memorial cover of Thom Bergmann standing next to Gabriel Plum, whose height he knew, Pierre saw he had guessed correctly. Bergmann had a large head, with a fleshy nose and lips, lots of salt-and-pepper curly gray hair. He was not a person who would have left his wife in a scruffy desert town while he hobnobbed with his colleagues. Pierre had always liked that English phrase—salt-and-pepper—when applied to hair. Hobnobbed, another idiom to embellish his English. Hoopla he had liked that expression, too.
What had surprised Pierre was how much older Thom was than his wife.
At his desk beside the rhinoceroses of Chauvet, Pierre sketched a shaggy mammoth from Rouffignac; everyone, including himself, particularly liked the depictions of animals now extinct. The mammoths had died out ten thousand years ago. As he doodled, he wondered if Lucy had been grief-stricken for the entire three years since her husband was crushed by the falling piano. He thought most people could not sustain a sense of loss for such a long period. She moved like a somnambulist; she was a woman in love with a ghost.
Pierre felt his lips curl toward a self-aware, ironic smile. For how long had he sustained his own sense of loss? Of losses too bitter to swallow.
Pierre Saad’s most vivid early memory was of the graffiti on the outer wall of a Coptic church near Cairo. Even his childish eyes could see that the slashes of Magic Marker covered other images. In later years, he would acquire the term palimpsest. Beneath the electric blue lines he saw other, older drawings and traces of color. He could detect the flat image of the Virgin Mary. Flakes of her mild blue robe still clung to the wall, but where the gentle blue was worn away—was that the image of a falcon’s head? As he huddled against the wall waiting for his mother to come for him, it had frightened him (he was only six years old) that one image could be placed right on top of another. He knew the Coptic Christians had taken over and defaced many of the abandoned temples of the old gods.
For a moment his six-year-old hand had explored the hard, shaping cartilage just below the surface of his skin and wondered if his own head and neck were a hood for some sharp-beaked falcon. The falcon’s profile incised on the Cairo wall had been painted over by a heart. Anxious and weary of waiting for his mother, he had lifted his gaze, hoping to see some real bird perched at the top of the wall, a bird who could fly and be a bird out there where birds were supposed to be, not imprisoned and immobilized in the flat of a wall.
What he saw again higher on the wall were more pictures, carvings that resembled the falcon masked by Mary’s breast. In one place the entire stone wall had been chipped away. Whatever face or head had been there originally had not been painted over but entirely removed. Nothing was left but a patch of rough stone. He thought of it as a small battle zone. Beyond that height nothing had been mutilated or painted over. High up were the messengers from the pure past. Those sharply incised pictures, he was sure, had been chiseled there in the time of the pharaohs.
Up there was a cow with the moon in her horns—Hathor, the goddess of beauty, worshipped in the days of the pharaohs, before Jesus, before Moses, before Abraham. He had seen her illumined at first dawn, having waited hours in the darkness for his mother’s return.
It had been near midnight when she had left him at the wall. As they hurried through the crooked streets, she had leaned down and explained into his ear that home was no longer safe for them, that she had been forewarned. Her voice and her breath, explaining and warm so near his cheek, had been a comfort to him. He was an obedient child: often she asked him to do this or that, then later explained why. Always there was an explanation that was reasonable. It had trained him to trust her. When she awakened him, before their hurried passage through the streets, he heard the Christian church bell tolling midnight. Though it was a sound that signaled the outside world was now dark and cold, she had not stopped to pick up his jacket draped on a three-legged stool. Her urgency surprised him—even he knew what midnight meant about outside temperatures.
Positioning him in a dark shadow against the wall, she had taken off her scarf and tied it over his head and under his chin. “Remember,” she had whispered, “do you remember that most of the heat of the body escapes through the top of the head? Keep your head warm.”
Also whispering, he had answered that he remembered.
She had taught him many things about the body that other boys seemed not to know, and about the world as well.
He was six years old, but she had spoken to him of governments, and that his father was French, and that the French were not all bad, despite their domination of Egypt once upon a time. “No worse than the British,” she had instructed. “No worse than our dictator now.” Once his father had loved her well, though his love had not lasted. “There have been benevolent kings and queens,” she had taught. “What counts is not so much the form of government but the generosity and care with which it is administered.”
Before she left him against the wall—if there had been some heat in it at first, that warmth had entirely dissipated well before dawn—she had kissed him on both cheeks in what he recognized as the manner of the French. As she held his face between her hands, his mother’s instruction had taken a new turn: “Think of the kindest person you know. Think about him or her while I’m gone. Then think of the most powerful person you know who is also kind. Call that image to your mind. You may think of the richest person you know, but remember richness and power do not always lie in money but in knowledge of one’s own self, in one’s determination and resilience. Remember: kindness, power, riches.” And she was gone.
He listened and memorized, not so much her words as the gritty sound the soles of her sandals made, moving away so quickly over the sandy street.
Because the night chill was in the air, he had drawn his knees to his chest as he sat huddled against the wall and hugged his knees with his arms to keep in his warmth. After many dark hours, he watched the rays of the rising sun brighten the smooth sandstone surface of the top of the wall. Sunlight illumined the horns of Hathor the cow and the disk of the moon she held between her horns. Next, sunlight washed over her wide-spaced eyes, receptive and open. Beauty—his mother had not charged him to remember beauty, but he had thought of his mother and her beauty, how slender she was and how gracefully she moved.
Then he thought of cows as simple animals, their funny four-leggedness, of the fascination of their out-jutting hip bones. Of course, he had seen many cows led by ropes as they ambled through the streets of his village. He had always loved the luminous eyes of cows, their gentleness.
Who would not want to draw them, and the other animals as well? Who would not want to put on something of the power of the animals? Who would not want to unite the limited human body with their various mysterious powers? In memory, he saw again the upright body of the goddess at the top of the wall, still as a mummy in the morning sunlight. A real cow had passed him, raising her tail as she went to deposit her waste onto the street. The bell at her neck made a soft clanking. The man who led her with a worn rope walked with a staff in his other hand.
Pierre knew him or someone like him. He was a Sufi mystic with distinctive bowed legs, deformed but able. His mother had explained the mystic had not had enough vitamin D as a child. Thinking again of his mother, Pierre had raised his eyes yet again to the ancient image of Hathor, the cow goddess of beauty.
I have worshipped her, he thought. As a grown man sitting in his own library, a man of enough reputation that he received an invitation from the president, a man contemplating his own corruptibility and his harsh past, he knew that he had worshipped beauty embodied throughout the centuries in art. I have worshipped beauty.
In memory, at that moment, his mother dashed into the street. The force of a shot caught her and sent her reeling against the wall, which she hit with her shoulder—her lips opened in a silent O—and then she slid down, her eyes closing, onto the road. Not a second passed till Pierre felt the iron grip of the Sufi cowherd around his wrist, pulling him upward and making him walk slowly along, in step with the cow, beside his own bare, bowed legs. Pierre saw that the tip of the man’s wooden staff poked itself into the sand, swung forward, entered the sand again as though nothing had happened. Before they turned the corner, Pierre-the-boy had managed to twist his body and look back just once. He saw his mother’s unmoving body lying near the wall. Her blood was spattered and smeared red over the bright blue graffiti.