The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

24

LEMON ICES AND RAKI

After Trout vanished, everything went to hell. Joseph came down with a fever. Fearing contagion, the camel guides kept their distance, polite but guarded behind their kaffiyehs. Mohammed assured Gustave that, barring further trouble, they’d arrive in Kenneh just one day late. He promised they’d have water by midday on the morrow. However, the next day they found a decomposing camel carcass in the well at Bir es Sidd. Only the caravan crew deigned to fill up their skins. Gustave watched with revulsion as a camel guide lifted a goatskin pissing from many holes and gulped down the foul liquid.

That evening, the Ababdeh, also strapped for water, sold them the dregs of a skin of sheeps’ milk, a mouthful for each of the Franks, but nothing for the crew, who vowed to continue drinking the polluted water. They could drink their own urine, if necessary, Mohammed bragged. After a poor supper of apricot paste and gamey partridge, Gustave and company went to bed thirsty, exhausted, and demoralized for the second night in a row.

The morning of the third day, Gustave’s mouth was so dry it was difficult to form words; his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. Max proposed a remedy. He claimed to have read that a piece of flint held in the mouth slaked thirst. “Water from a stone?” asked Miss Nightingale, lifting an eyebrow as Max handed the flint to her. “That sounds familiar.” But she too proceeded to suck on the mineral. It neither dissolved nor lost its sour taste. Gustave found the rough texture and metallic tang particularly unpleasant. The constant urge to swallow involved removing the flint or lodging it in the pocket of the cheek. “Don’t spit!” Max cautioned “Swallow.”

Miss Nightingale became so quiet and docile that Gustave began to worry for her. Was she despairing again, or merely disheartened from fatigue? He still had her note to God, which seemed somehow vital, like a chit in a game that could redeem her from any peril. Nevertheless, he determined to cheer up his pucker-faced friends and hit upon a brilliant scheme later that afternoon. “Max,” he called as they were picking their way through a rocky gorge, “do you recall the lemon ices at Tortoni’s?”

Max sagged on his saddle, his eyes dulled with fever. “Yes.”

“If only we had a lemon ice now. Wouldn’t you like one?”

Max made no reply.

“Lemon ice, anyone? Gustave called out. “Cold, sweet, delicious—able to quench any thirst.”

“You are torturing me,” Max grumbled without looking up.

“Torture? Lemon ices? Au contraire, I salivate just thinking about it. Surely, if you could—”

“All right, yes, I’d like one.” Max pulled his kaffiyeh up to the bridge of his nose.

“Do you remember the halo of white frost? It melts faster than the rest. When it touches the tongue, it turns to cold sugar.”

“Will you please stop?” Max begged. “You’re making me thirstier.”

“Wait. Imagine just one teaspoonful in your mouth. Let it melt slowly, from your own heat. It glides over the tonsils. By the time it reaches your stomach, you feel like swooning—”

“Mademoiselle, aidez-moi!” Max cried. “Please, shut him up!”

Rossignol, he thought, had been listening with pleasure. Now she looked pained. “Gustave, perhaps—”

But he continued, swept up in his own obsession. “I love to crush the ice with my teeth. That soft crunching, the coolness against the palate—”

“I am going to kill you.” Max withdrew a pistol from his belt. “One more word and I shall shoot you.”

What a humorless prick. Max had the imagination of a gnat. Was the gun even loaded? He didn’t think so. “Lemon ices! Lemon ices! Lemon ices!” he taunted.

“You provincial shit! Goddamned spoiled brat. Ride ahead. Joseph and I will follow so I don’t have to listen to your unending crap.”

“All right! I have stopped.” He’d never seen Max so furious.

He apologized and pleaded for forgiveness, but it was too late. Max seemed to have erased him. Miss Nightingale, too, was silent.

They were forced to make camp early, before sunset. Not only was Max not speaking to him, he had also developed a high fever and was no more able to sit astride a camel than levitate on a carpet. This development jarred Rossignol from her funk. She tended to Max as he vacillated between delirium and sleep. Then, after another meager supper, she asked Gustave to accompany her on a walk. Looking sad and determined, she trod to the guides’ area, halted crisply, and called for Mohammed.

Bowing and bestowing blessings of peace, the guide rose from his bed behind the camels, his demeanor calm, his face expressionless. Pantomiming, she begged him for some of the crew’s contaminated water. He shouted something, and one of his underlings promptly handed her a goatskin. Holding her gaze, he shook his head and pinched his nose by way of a warning. She thanked him and curtseyed.

Gustave and Mohammed followed her to Joseph’s tent, where both patients were quarantined. She whisked a linen handkerchief from her bodice and, while the men watched, moistened it with the foul water and dampened Max’s face and chest. “We must lower his fever,” she said to no one in particular, passing to Gustave a palm fan to wave over his friend.

Lying nearby, Joseph roused himself to watch. Rossignol placed her small palm on his forehead and shook her head. “Both of them have raging fevers, though Max’s is worse. I believe he may be in mortal danger.”

“What else can we do?” Gustave was truly alarmed. He’d never cared for a sick person—only kept vigil, first by his father’s deathbed, then Caroline’s, and lastly, Alfred’s. He’d always left it to others to scurry about with treatments and blandishments.

“We must wet them down, do their sweating for them.”

And so he removed Joseph’s shirt and sponged his chest with it. When Mohammed muttered to them, they didn’t so much as glance in his direction. Soon a second goatskin appeared, as malodorous as the first. Then the crew retired.

• • •

It was only after the two patients were cooled and sleeping that it occurred to Gustave that without water none of them might survive another day, perhaps not another night. “We must drink something,” he told her as she sat in his tent.

“But there is nothing.” She was fanning herself. “Sit closer and I can do us both.”

“We shall have to drink alcohol,” he said wearily. “I wish I had wine or beer, but I have only rakı.”

The fanning slowed. “Oh, for a glass 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 rakı?” 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 rakı 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 rakı,” 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 glasses. “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 petit mal seizures, physically but not mentally present. His own fits, alas, were of the grand mal sort, and unmistakable. Thank God, 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 glass. “To Max. To Max and Joseph’s recovery.”

“And to Trout,” Flo added. “May she be unharmed.”

“Unharmed!” They clinked glasses.

“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. “Horehound.” 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 glass, 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 Père Elias and Père 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 Hôtel-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 Hôtel-Dieu, but then he hadn’t been allowed in the wards themselves. “What do you mean?”

“Fanny 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 rakı,” 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 pass. And then you’ll get sleepy.” He decided not to tell her the other possibilities—lewdness, panic, uncontrollable laughter, passing out, throwing up. The less she knew, the better.

“Tell me about your father.” Her glass 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 glass, a hummingbird visiting a dangerous flower, then quaffed the rakı.

“But he couldn’t save our father.”

“I’m sorry.” She picked up the book he’d been reading, The Odes of Horace, then cocked 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 balls, 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 amusement. 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 pronounced. “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 brass 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 shore.”

“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 God.”

Perhaps that was why he hated to be photographed. The camera was inhumanly accurate, and, yes, like being seen by God, 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 Hôtel 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 glasses and carried them outside in order to smoke. Following him, she plopped down on the sand without ado. “I’m feeling the rakı 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 “Frère 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 glass. “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 sex.

“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, smutty 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 rakı.

Sitting beside her prone 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 God. . .

“Mmm,” she hummed, closing her eyes again.

He remembered the process exactly, as if no time had passed since he and Caroline fashioned heads for their puppets. The papier-mâché 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.

“I think you’ve forgotten about it.” She pretended to pout. Whatever her complaint was, it didn’t seem serious. She was giving a comical performance of herself. Starring, directed, and adapted for the tent by that master storyteller, rakı.

“I most definitely have not,” he insisted, playing along.

“I think you have.” At this she wagged her finger at him playfully. What a mild inebriate she was.

“Well, then, I apologize if I’ve offended you,” he said, propping her arm on a shallow box to dry.

“Merci beaucoup. I accept.”

It would be so easy to take advantage of her while she was sauced. He pictured what lay beneath her skirt, another entry in the encyclopedia, a cunt to match her adorable chin and lips. The size of a mouse, he thought, warm and pink and furry—

But no, he knew her too well. Whenever he felt a deep bond, it was impossible to violate it, to inflict harm. For alongside his cynical pronouncements, he was hopelessly loyal, extravagantly forgiving to the point of weakness. He couldn’t hold a grudge. Though Alfred had ended their friendship without explanation, he had sat holding the man’s hand at his deathbed, and guarded the body all night. He’d never felt a moment’s anger either—just grief. To seduce her now would be betrayal. He’d always known that friendship carried a high price. He was glad she had no inkling of her power over him.

“Trout has a lover,” said Flo abruptly. She tapped on her glass.

“Good Lord! What makes you say that?”

“Promise me you won’t tell anyone, though—especially Max.”

“I promise, on my dear mother’s life.” Suddenly he ached for his mother. She must miss him terribly. He’d nearly canceled the journey at the outset, weeping prodigiously on the train from Rouen to Paris, the anguished indecision continuing for hours at Max’s apartment. Then he’d written her to tell of his upheaval, and somehow that had helped.

“I read her journal. She seems to have written him love letters she never mailed. I suppose she didn’t want to provoke my suspicion.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know.” It was clear from her tone that she hadn’t yet posed this question of herself.

He blew on her wrist and fanned it. “Je suis desolé. La pauvre Truite. Et la pauvre Rossignol.”

• • •

Again, he woke first. She lay sprawled on the carpet. The cast had dried. He leaned down, preparing to cut it off, when she opened her eyes and fastened on him. She studied him unself-consciously, indeed boldly scrutinizing his face. It was like being admired, he thought. “Don’t move,” he said, sawing carefully through the cast with his pocketknife. He lifted the cast off. “Thank you.”

Again, that series of shifting expressions that denoted she was about to change the subject flickered across her face. She would have made a terrible liar, a worse card player.

She rose up on one elbow and leaned toward him so close he could see the aura of fine hairs on her cheek in the lamplight. He smelled liquor. Her breath? His? They were besotted with rakı, pickled in it.

“Would you pass me the bowl, please?” she said.

He handed it to her. She picked up the spoon still stuck in the pa-pier-mâché and stirred it halfheartedly. “Do you think it needs more rakı? That is what you used, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And yes.” He scrambled on his knees to retrieve the bottle and gave it to her. She tipped a few more drops into the bowl.

“I should like to make a mold of your face, Gustave. Would you mind?” Her lips, he noticed, were chapped and starting to peel.

He liked the idea, just as he liked it when she stared at him. “Please do.”

Neither of them moved.

Grinning, she said, “I think you should lie down, don’t you?”

If she were any other woman, he’d have thought she was seducing him. Which she wasn’t, but the thought set him tingling anyway as he reclined on the kilim rug.

Kneeling above him, she covered his face quickly, spreading the mixture in globs cold and slick as Maman’s cold cream. Did skin absorb liquid through the pores? The mere possibility soothed him; he was parched again.

“I think I shall die of boredom.” She smoothed his laden forehead. “Or of idleness.”

“Nonsense. You shall live to be a hundred.”

“What’s the use if I spend it ordering mutton chops and listening to empty chatter?” She tilted his chin up. “Hold still, I’m going to do your nose.”

He had no desire to move. Her touch was exquisite, hypnotic. Delicate as baby Caroline’s, the sort that relaxed every fiber and nerve. He felt all of a piece, one calm texture, like a bowl of pudding, or the sea.

“But if I don’t marry, I have a chance of a better future.”

The masque was tightening, making his skin tingle. It occurred to him there might not be a future. They might not live to reach Kenneh. Max and Joseph might already be dead in their tent while he himself was nothing but hardening dust, a man lying on his back while an attentive and lovely woman rimmed his nostrils with glop. Was it a mere accident that they were alone and completely soused? Though he didn’t believe in God, he’d always allowed himself a secret, halfhearted faith in destiny, in the dexterity, pointedness, and utter appropriateness of fate. If it was good enough for the Greeks . . .

Perhaps he could allow himself to bed her after all. Orgasm was the only thing that silenced his mind, the closest thing to godliness he knew—each coup, Creation repeated anew.

Now there was some gorgeous garbage! Je mérite le premier prix de la merde.

She turned and scrutinized him. “One more bit.” She reached for something with her hand.

In the next moment, she smeared the mixture over his mouth, blending it into his cheeks and chin with quick, feathery strokes. It felt pleasantly sticky, like jam. Twice, in a gesture he found arousing, she inserted the tip of the spoon to fashion a slit so he could breathe and talk. “There, it’s done,” she said softly. “Now we wait until you are dry.”

“I’ll just lie here,” he muttered through the mask.

“I’m afraid I shan’t be able to capture your eyes or mouth. You’ll have holes there instead.”

This hardly sounded appealing. Weren’t the eyes the portal to the soul?

She wiped her hands on her skirt. “And now I am going to give you my profile.”

Did she mean a drawing of herself? Perhaps by Selina? He’d hang it above his desk, near the mummy, egret feathers—

“Look at me,” she commanded.

He obliged. Turned to the side, she sat stiffly erect, her neck regal, only one eye visible, like the jack in a deck of cards.

“I’m looking.” Was he to draw her silhouette?

“If you wish to talk to me, you must address my profile. This is how Sultan Abdulmecid conducts audiences.”

Gustave did not know how to respond.

“I wish I could speak with my family like this,” she went on. “You see, a face in profile is powerful because it’s inscrutable.”

True enough, he thought. It was a wonder the European monarchs hadn’t hit upon this trick. Nothing of her affect was revealed. He might as well be talking to a postage stamp.

“Also, the sultan is frequently seated behind a carved screen, making it even more difficult. I know you are going to Constantinople, so—”

“Mmm.” He had to mutter like a ventriloquist or risk breaking the mold. “I don’t expect to be granted an interview”—he took a breath through his nose—“with the Sublime Porte.”

She leaned over him and dabbed more plaster on the rims of his nostrils. “I want to know how it feels to be so superior that one doesn’t have to look another in the face.”

“That tickles.” His eyes watered from the effort of suppressing the itch.

“I’m sorry. Try not to sneeze.” She resumed her imperial posture. “You may address me now,” she said, with the hard perfection of a struck coin.

“I cannot think what to say.” A wave of desire passed through him.

“Imagine that I am your ruler, your Solomon,” she said to the side of the tent. “What dispute shall I settle for you then?”

He did have a problem. Suddenly he wanted her. But how to plead his case, how to ask her? I come to you with a rising cock that all day has wanted to crow. “I can’t think of a thing,” he mumbled, taking care not to open his mouth.

“Then I shall question you. But do try not to move your face.” She asked his age and height, the names of his parents, how many cousins he had. (He was astonished to learn she had twenty-seven first cousins.) She wanted to know if he’d ever been engaged. She told him she wished he were her brother.

Her mouth was neither full nor meager, with a well-shaped upper lip. He wanted to kiss her, a desire perversely strengthened by his inability to do so from behind his mask. She chattered on without emotional force about her relatives and pets.

He dozed off and woke to feel her working the mask free from his mouth. “I would like to kiss you,” he said drowsily.

“My father kisses me on the cheek.”

As she popped the mask free, his face felt suddenly refreshed. “Then I shall kiss you on the mouth, Sultan Abdulmecid.”

Behind her closed lips, her teeth were a fortification. Obviously she didn’t know she was supposed to open her mouth. Drawing back, he lifted her hand and placed her fingers in his mouth. She shivered. Then he reached forward and placed his own finger in her mouth. When he kissed her again, her lips were pliant, her mouth open. She held her breath.

• • •

He was refilling their glasses. “I should take you to your tent.”

“Mmm. But let me lie here just a little longer.” She opened her eyes and closed them again.

“Would you allow me to make another cast of you?”

“I might. Yes.”

She turned toward him and drifted off in his arms.

• • •

Twelve hours of night felt like a day, a week, a life. Again, they stumbled to Joseph’s tent, where they found the patients no worse. They woke and slept, woke and slept, talked and murmured nonsense. He had never felt so comfortable with another person in his bed.

At some point he began quite naturally to caress her, his hand on her waist, then sliding up her ribs, a tidy but exotic landscape of concavities and rises. He kept his eyes closed, seeing only with his hand. She touched his face, tentatively, then with more vigor, stroking his cheeks, feeling his ears, nose, and lips.

But he must not, he reminded himself, could not, for many reasons, the first of which was that at Koseir he’d found a single chancre on his penis. In a matter of weeks, he’d know if it was the pox. He’d bring himself off outside the tent later on, but now he gave himself to the slow pleasure of touch. Alcohol was a beautiful thing. If he had children, God forbid, he would name the first one Rakı. Slowly, so that she would perceive what was happening to her in her fog, he unbuttoned the top of her bodice. And then, in order not to frighten her, he hit upon a clever scheme, placing her own hand on her breast and then covering it with his.

“Oh,” she said, gasping. She touched his face again with her free hand and slid her other hand out from under his.

He had felt a staggering number of breasts over the years, all reduced now to zero. This was the first, the only one that mattered. When her nipple hardened in his palm he became light-headed, his cock so hard it was bobbing up of its own accord, practically straining against his shorts. Knowing she’d be frightened if she felt it, he moved his hips back, even now feeling the pressure of his swollen testicles. He put it out of his mind. Her breast, her breast, her breast . . . Her arm. Her neck. He was fading into and out of his body on waves of rapture.

He must distract himself or explode. He reached for the bowl of papier-mâché. “Wait, don’t move,” he said. He added some rakı and mixed it up. “This is going to feel cool.”

She opened her eyes to see what he was up to.

He folded her bodice out of the way to reveal her breast. “I am going to make a mold of your heart.”

• • •

When he next awoke, he wondered if he’d suffered a nervous attack. So complete was the oblivion from which he emerged that at first he couldn’t be sure whose consciousness was peering out through his eyes. Was this what animals felt—sensation without identity?

Alone, he sat up and lifted the tent flap, clasping it under his neck. It was light out, the Orient’s bellyful of colors faded to a dun expanse. The camels were bunched on the ground, grotesque swans. And there was Miss Nightingale’s white tent, medieval-looking with its decorative fringe and flag. Was it morning? Afternoon? No one was about. He closed the flaps and lay back down.

His head felt heavy and swollen, as if wrapped in a ream of sopping squeeze paper, while his mouth was dry as a broom. Thirst. That was how the previous day had begun and ended, with a thirst beyond words, beyond enduring. He recalled a stream of pilgrims on the road, calabashes hanging from the pommels of their saddles, their bad-tempered wives screaming out an unending chorus of disapproval.

Trout. Privately, he had wept for her, though not in front of Miss Nightingale, thinking it would alarm her even more. And Max, seriously ill. Joseph, too. He prayed Max was better, though he didn’t love him and never would, he realized hazily—not the way he loved Bouilhet and Alfred. Still, Max was the best of companions for an adventure—fussy and ambitious, perhaps, but never too cautious.

Abruptly, a memory of Miss Nightingale surfaced, her mouth moving quickly, her neck rigid. The word Abdulmecid. . . . Abdulmecid, repeated in his mind like the tolling of a distant bell.

Inside a bandbox, he found the two casts he’d made.

Something had been said, not in profile, but looking straight at each other. What the devil was it? It had been, well, poetic. Poignant. He had promised himself to remember.