The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

20

THE DYING SUN

Trout had stopped complaining, but Flo knew she wasn’t feeling well. At least the toothache hadn’t returned, though neuralgia and eyestrain were obvious the next morning at breakfast, which they took on the terrace at eight-thirty, later than usual. Flo, too, was spent after four parching days in the desert.

Max and Gustave had decamped at dawn for Old Koseir and environs, where Max planned to photograph whatever ruins he found. She took a moment to adjust to the news, surprised that she’d had no warning of it. They might have left a note. Gustave, especially. Of course, if it were up to him, he’d likely have remained at the villa, but Max, or rather his camera, was always in charge. Père Elias didn’t know when they’d return. That evening? The next day?

Père Elias’s French was excellent; he confessed that his job as consular agent in so remote an outpost made few demands on his time and talents. A generous and solicitous host, he fancied himself a Frenchman based on a visit to Paris and Marseilles twenty years earlier. On second inspection, Flo noticed European touches in the house: a diptych of pastel street scenes of the Marais, a modest library of French classics, and a Louis XVI chair with ormolu mounts on the legs.

After breakfast, he offered to show the women his ground-floor quarters at the back of the house, where, he said, something special awaited them. They followed him down a narrow hallway to his bedroom, which faced east, with large windows to funnel the sea breezes. It was furnished simply, with a bed under netting, a nightstand, and an armoire. It could have been a hotel room but for his slippers on the rug. She could hear the surf as they followed him outside to a spacious walled pavilion with no roof. In the center, like an object in a sculpture garden, sat an empty pink porcelain bathtub on a bed of crushed shells.

Flo circled the gleaming fixture. Bronze dolphins cavorted at the front, one for hot and one for cold. The bronze feet were webbed like a pelican’s. It was spotless. If not the only bathtub in Koseir, surely it was the most lavish. Lavish in the Italian mode. Overdone. De trop. It was as impractical as a piece of art, too, as there were no pipes or plumbing of any sort attached to it other than a length of coarse rope tied to a rubber stopper upended in the drain. Another harmless affectation, like the gilt chair. “How do you fill it, then?” she asked. The boy Hakim must tote bucket after bucket from a well, an unreasonable scheme.

“From the sea, of course. A saltwater bath is salutary.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler to bathe in the sea?”

Père Elias seemed eager to answer her questions. “There is a hammam not far from here, a classic, tiled beauty built by the Ottomans half a century ago. That is where I bathe.”

He ran his fingers along the slick surface of the curled edge. “But there is no privacy there. Here, I can eat while I am soaking, or invite the musicians to play. I spend many hours in this tub. My wife, Najmah, may God bless her soul, used to say it was my second wife.”

“Are you not a Christian?”

“Yes. It was a joke, bien sûr.”

Trout asked her, “How does he heat the water, mum?”

In the summer, he explained, it wasn’t necessary. In the spring and autumn, the water was left to warm in the sun, the tub covered between baths. On cold days, water was heated over a fire. He pointed to a cauldron in a sand pit near the outer door.

The women followed his arm, nodding.

He combed his long, white beard with his fingers, pulling it to a point. “I spend whole days in this tub, working, writing letters. I do my best thinking here. I like to sleep in the tub, just so.” Hiking up his robe, he stepped over the rim and lay down, wrapping an arm around each side, his body loosely arranged. “The tub is French. The style of it.”

“Of course,” said Flo.

Frowning, Trout turned to her. “I have a fear of water bringing disease, don’t you, mum? Fevers, the typhoid, boils. Why take a chance?”

“But this is salt water, Trout, not fresh. It will be like bathing in the sea.” Trout had a valid point, though. Water did harbor disease. There was the example, always before her since childhood, of the poisoned stream at Lea, in which she and Parthe were cautioned never to set foot or finger. Yet, people rarely fell ill from bathing in the sea or in springs. There were water cures all over Europe, not to mention the Malvern spa in Worcestershire, where the whole family often took the healing mineral waters. Perhaps the constant motion of springs kept the water safe. Still, she thought the Ottomans had hit upon something with their hammams. In Cairo, she’d felt especially clean and calm after her Turkish baths.

“If you say so, mum,” Trout said.

Flo determined to try the tub.

“You may spend all day in it if you wish,” he said, beaming. “And you, Mademoiselle Trout?”

“Oui,” Trout ventured.

Her first word of French.

“I have good, thick Turkish towels, ladies. And now let me make the preparations.” He led them back through the bedroom. At the hallway, turning, he caused a momentary pileup. “Je suis très content.”

• • •

She and Trout spent the morning as friends might in a mild experiment. They didn’t speak much. Trout didn’t like conversation. Modesty ruled out the food and musicians, but Flo brought a book and Trout her needlework. Flo went first, because she was the lady, and to set an example. While she soaked, Trout crocheted.

The water made her skin sting—the salt, she supposed. She lay back, her neck on a wadded-up towel for a pillow, and took her book in hand. It was pleasant to read and drift off. But now and then her mind wandered to Gustave and Max. What were they actually doing? Murray said next to nothing about Old Koseir. With a jolt, it occurred to her to wonder why they hadn’t invited her to come. Riding a horse to an ancient port was less perilous than crossing the eastern desert. And surely Gustave knew she would have liked to see another antiquity. Probably Max had vetoed the idea. Satisfied, she slid down until she was covered up to her nose, then dropped her book onto the bed of crushed shells. But then, shouldn’t Gustave have insisted on it? No, she was building castles in the air. Stop it. Stop right now.

She relinquished the tub to Trout, convincing her first not simply to wash, but also to loll. While Trout napped for half an hour submerged to her neck, Flo took up her book determinedly.

The towels were the size of bedsheets, which was a godsend, as Flo was so shy she didn’t like to undress even in front of Parthe. She and Trout devised a system to avoid the embarrassment of their nakedness. Looking demurely away, one held the towel high as a curtain while the other got in and out of the tub. For the first time since her toothache, Trout seemed at ease, laughing at her pale toes puckered like small cabbages.

In the afternoon, Trout asked if they might collect shells for friends back home. They could watch the sunset as well. Though Koseir faced east, there was a spot at the cove, Père Elias said, where the shoreline jutted west and a slice of sun was visible at this time of year. The view wasn’t as spectacular as a western sunset, he warned, but it was striking nonetheless. He insisted on accompanying them and brought Hakim to carry the gilt chair. Flo couldn’t convince him she had no need of such a luxury.

“Unless I have a guest, I don’t often bother to go there,” Père Elias said as they set off.

Until the strand narrowed, they walked four abreast on the same path that she and Gustave had taken. Then she paired off with the consul, and Trout with Hakim. The wind picked up, gusting in starts and fits. The tide was coming in fast, flinging longer and longer sheets of glossy jade edged with spume onto the beach.

Behind her, Trout scuffed along, one hand holding her black straw bonnet in place. Hakim matched her pace, gripping the chair in one fist like a strange ceremonial shield.

“Your servant is a lovely boy, so polite. Have you trained him yourself?” she asked the consul.

“Hakim? Yes. He’s an Abadi, you know. His people live in the caves outside Koseir.”

She’d read about the cave dwellers in Murray. “The troglodytes?”

“I’ve never heard that name. But from here to the Nile valley, they are all Ababdeh and all blood relations.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Mais oui. There are many clans and sheiks, but whether they fish the sea or keep goats, drive camels, or live in caves, they are all Ababdeh. And they are all Bedouins.”

It was confusing because she knew that not all Bedouins were Ababdeh. She determined to read up on them back in Kenneh.

As the tide devoured more of the beach, they moved their path inland, shuffling through the flyaway sand of low, lumpy dunes until they reached the cove.

Though the shells was less spectacular than on Flo’s first visit, Trout was delighted at the array. She knelt in the sand and rummaged, refusing the chair. Hakim planted it next to Flo instead. Thinking it rude to refuse, she sat on the cushioned seat, a yellow-and-green petit point of bees and leaves.

The Ababdeh tribesmen she’d seen in the desert were lean and tall, with thick, pomaded hair. The staffs they carried gave them an air of dignity and ferocity. “Hakim doesn’t look like an Ababdeh.”

“He is gentle, but has the cleverness of his people. The sheiks are a hot-blooded bunch hard put to maintain peace.” Père Elias squatted in the sand beside her. “Did you know they are the only people in Egypt who don’t pay tribute to the viceroy?” She could see his freckled scalp where the hair had thinned. “The children are notorious beggars.”

“They were all so thin,” Flo recalled. “They looked hungry.”

“They live on nothing but goats’ milk and durra cakes. Fish if they are near the sea. In a bad year, many of them die. That is their life.”

The children she’d seen had bony baskets for ribs and skin stretched taut over their skulls, which gave even the toddlers a ghoulish look, especially in the light of the campfire. Hakim, by comparison, was fleshy and well fed.

The visible edge of the sun had enlarged in the minutes since they arrived. A bulge of pink, it hovered above the dunes, separated by a narrow band of blue. She focused her attention on the sky and sea. From now until sundown, they would change hue and aspect dozens of times, each phase more flitting than the last, like a vastly speeded-up magic lantern show. At home, in the forced sociability of the parlor, she often retreated to the fireplace, to the flames dipping and fluttering, sparks glittering up the chimney. Anything was preferable to needlework or listening to WEN read the newspaper aloud. Hakim stood watching in that same way, as if sending his mind elsewhere.

The tide continued its assault; they picked up and moved farther up the beach. Behind them, the shore lay beneath a pane of green glass.

“Trout, please sit for a while,” Flo said from her chair. “I am happy to stand.”

“No, mum. In the chair I should be too far from the ground.” She continued to cull from the debris.

Driven by the wind, the sky had lowered and shifted forward, an army on the attack, with clouds elongating into pink and orange troops sweeping shoreward.

“How did he come to live with you? I thought the Ababdeh shunned cities.”

“Vraiment. I found him. He came to town looking for work as a camel driver. He’d run away from his father, who is a sheik. It was his time to marry.”

“He seems so young to take a wife, even for a primitive.” She wondered if Hakim sensed they were speaking about him.

“The Ababdeh men marry when they have their first down.”

Was there anywhere in Egypt that children were not married off in a routine commercial transaction? “Why won’t he take a wife?”

A flock of ibises tilted through the pink air and disappeared to the west. Harried by the wind, the landscape was rushing into its next incarnation, like a theater with its stage sets being hurriedly deployed.

“Hakim is afraid of women,” the consul whispered. “Especially young girls. He doesn’t mind the old ones.”

Flo couldn’t imagine any man afraid of a woman.

“His mother had picked a bride. Hakim says he will never wed. So, you see, he’s a misfit.”

She had sensed his suffering. She stared briefly at him, knowing he wouldn’t flinch. He stood utterly still and straight in his long white tunic. In the rosy light, his eyes glowed a honeyed brown with bright points in the centers like candle flames. Could like souls recognize each other across continents and languages?

“My wife had just died and I felt sorry for him. I tried to help the family reconcile, but he refuses. Now they shun him. His mother has threatened to starve herself to death.”

“So, in a way, you’ve adopted him?”

The consul nodded. “He’s a good boy. Quick. He’ll be an excellent cook when I am finished with him.”

The sky altered again. It seemed impossible, but overhead the clouds had formed a checkered pattern of blue and orange like a giant game board. The sun had dropped behind the dunes, deepening the colors by the second.

“Trout!” she called. “The sky!”

Hakim helped the maid to her feet. She curtsied to him and looked up. “That is something, mum. Quite a show.”

Flo was too thrilled to stay seated. “Come sit down and watch with us.”

“I don’t mind if I do.” Trout eased herself into the chair. “Oh, it’s grand. I shall never see another like it. Nor never could back home.”