The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

3

DANCING THE BEE

“There are even more Ramses than there are kings named Louis,” Gustave observed, “though this Ramses is in a select group—he has a speaking role in the Bible.”

Max did not reply. He lifted his binoculars and scanned the horizon, where vultures floated on the updrafts in slow circles.

“It’s thought he’s the hard-hearted pharaoh of Exodus.”

Max passed him the binoculars. “It’s there, in the distance, I think. You can just make out the top of the mountain.”

It had taken a week to sail the sixty kilometers south from Derr, but now the sandstone cliff of Abu Simbel lay in the distance, a hazy golden-white prominence that pushed against the sky.

They rounded two more bends and came upon an impressive sight: a pair of temples separated by a steep ramp of sand. As the crew moored the boat at a ramshackle wooden pier, the larger temple disappeared into the perspective and the smaller one into the distance behind them. The magnificent view could only be appreciated from the far shore of the river, midway between the two. Max pointed out that he’d have to scale the opposite mountain to get both monuments in the same frame.

Followed by Joseph and two crewmen, Gustave and Max jumped ashore and slogged up the enormous ramp, which resembled nothing so much as an artificial ski jump. As they approached the huge monument, the vista became more difficult to assimilate. Everything was so outsized.

The great rock temple at Abu Simbel, built by Ramses II, was in the middle of a mountain set back from the river. Unlike the pyramids at Giza, assembled brick by massive brick, it had been hewn from the native stone in a magnificent feat of subtraction. Inside it, Gustave had read, soared a hypostyle that dwarfed any European concert hall. There, the ancient Egyptians celebrated their rituals.

Having seen an exhibition of drawings by Napoleon’s savants, he expected to be stunned by four colossi of Ramses seated on thrones—two on either side of the temple entrance. The pharaohs would be in full regalia, brandishing the imperial flail and crook, wearing the beard of divinity and the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt.

What greeted him instead was an accumulation of silt that had nearly buried the statues. Sand reached to the nose of the highest one. Farther down the slope, the figures were more exposed, until entirely visible. But the first was a toy buried in a giant’s sandbox. Gustave began to howl with laughter. The servants cowered behind him.

“Mon Dieu, mon Dieu,” Max bellowed, raising his arms to the heavens. “Do these people care nothing for their own magnificent history? Can you imagine Notre Dame in such disrepair? Even the humblest village church?”

Still chuckling, Gustave said, “Perhaps we’ve come at the wrong season of the year.”

“No, effendi,” Hadji Ismael offered, “it has been this way since I am a boy.” Joseph nodded in agreement.

“My God,” Max repeated. Sighing, he regarded his boots for a time, then straightened up and planted his hands on his waist. “We shall have to dig them out.”

Gustave did not believe his ears. “What?”

“At least to their necks. They look so . . . unregal. The first photograph of Abu Simbel cannot present them to the world in this condition.”

The world? At moments like this, Max taxed Gustave’s patience. For an orphan with a fortune at his disposal and no relatives to please, he was grindingly diligent. What Gustave wouldn’t give for such freedom! Madame Flaubert doled out his portion of his father’s estate in spoonfuls. “That, my dear friend, will take forever,” he complained. “Do we even have the implements? The manpower?”

But Max was already instructing Hadji Ismael to unpack the shovels from the cange. “We’ll excavate the first head completely—at least that. I don’t care if it takes a week.” He ordered Joseph to engage laborers in the nearest village and buy the necessary provisions; also to inform the captain that they would be staying put for several days.

Prone to acrophobia, Gustave peered gingerly down. He couldn’t see the river directly beneath the temple, but in the distance, two boats glided, hugging the opposite shore. The cange was hidden by the declivity.

He sat on a flat outcrop. He could not engage in such work. Though he hadn’t had a nervous episode in seven months, heavy exertion could trigger one. Surely Max grasped this possibility; it was he, after all, who had persuaded Madame Flaubert, with the help of Gustave’s brother, Achille, that the balmy climate of the Orient would be salutary. But excavating? No doctor would sanction that. “I’d better start on the squeezes then,” he told Max. “I shall work in the smaller temple with Aouadallah.” The farther away from Max just now, the better.

He and Aouadallah set off on foot down the steep sand ramp, carrying their equipment with them. They passed a party of tourists camped below the temple façade. English, he guessed, from their clothing and the clipped intonations of speech ricocheting off the rocks in the dry air. The gentlemen poked with walking sticks or stood soberly gesturing under parasols, while a quartet of women sat on folding chairs at easels, busily reducing antiquity to squares of paper. He pulled up his pom-pommed hood to discourage conversation.

The small temple appeared to be a variation on the large one, with four shorter, flatter likenesses of Ramses standing rather than seated at the entrance. He imagined the Virgin and Child raised up in multiples at the nave of a cathedral: unthinkable. It would cheapen the effect, the very sanctity of the figures. Yet four Ramses, or eight, or sixteen, perfectly suited the pharaoh’s majesty.

Aouadallah brought the water jug, brushes, and paper. Gustave had decided to try a new technique, shredding a ream of paper into bite-size pieces in a trough while Aouadallah trickled water over the tatters. For glue, he added the flour he’d nicked the night before from the galley. Together they kneaded the mixture until it was as smooth as the papier-mâché from which he and Caroline had fashioned the heads of marionettes for their childhood plays.

They began inside, at the base of an interior wall. There, clad in breastplates, pleated kilts, and intricate wigs, the ancient Egyptians waged war, issued proclamations, hunted lions and stags, and worshipped their animal gods. Royalty and slaves, animals and furnishings alike were depicted in profile, never frontally. Those at a distance were portrayed as doll-size figures floating in the ether. The art historians of the Academy had already sunk their teeth into the ancient Egyptians, pronouncing them ignorant of perspective. Arrogant cads! Shitheads! Pressing the paper mash into the crevices, he was certain of it: the inscriptions resulted not from a limited but a deliberate aesthetic. The Egyptians preferred profiles not because they were easier but because they considered them more beautiful.

He and Aouadallah worked until late in the afternoon, then packed their equipment and sat down to enjoy the sunset. As the shadows lengthened, a breeze blew down from the heights. He watched the orb of the sun hover in the western sky above the temple, a molten disk turning from yellow to copper and finally a luminous red etched by the silhouetted palms and ragged brush of the hillside. Then, like a giant eye blinking shut, it sank below the world. In the pearly dusk, they returned to the cange.

• • •

The Frenchmen decided to camp onshore the first night, Gustave in the open air and Max in a tent. After a supper of flat bread, tomatoes, garlic, and a salty white cheese, Gustave smoked two pipes as he sat on his blanket and stared at the sky, while Max recorded the day’s events and updated the concordance of photos in his tent. Max had high hopes for his pictorial travelogue. With photography all the rage, he said, even people who didn’t like to read would buy his book. And what, Gustave wondered, might his dear friend be writing about him? Nothing, probably; he doubted that Max would wish to share credit or glory with anyone. Since Max was not one to read his work aloud to friends, the book would remain a mystery until it was published.

Max gave the impression that he had already lived his life and had returned merely to perfect a few flawed performances. Nothing caught him off guard or disturbed his calm authority. Not that he was without passion. His lechery was more expansive than Gustave’s. He had had sex with women, men, adolescents, and animals. A week before at Derr, while Gustave limited himself to flirting with the whores lounging about in flimsy blue and white gowns, Max partook. He always partook. He simply f*cked more. It wasn’t a question of stamina. Gustave was more discriminating.

Nevertheless, Max was an excellent—no, the best—brothel companion. A tall, slender fellow, all angles and little flesh, the whores had dubbed him Abu Muknaf, “the Father of Thinness.” He moved like a wolf—stealthily and quickly, with no wasted motion. A wolfishly cunning rationality ruled his writing, too. His philosophy was not Art for Art’s sake, but art with a lowercase a, for audience. Everything he wrote was undertaken with particular readers in mind. And like any good pragmatist, he was supremely organized, the instrument of his control being the list. He made reading lists, shopping lists, packing lists; lists of literary critics, of dramatists, of whores. Upon Max’s advice, they had brought seventy trunks to the Orient and most likely would return home with a dozen more brimming with trophies and treasures purchased from a list. It was hard to argue with this strategy. Gustave himself sometimes made lists, though rarely wrote them down. Dates from Derr, a monkey, a mummy . . .

They had packed up nearly all their possessions, as well as a great number of items bought for the trip. As government chargés, Max had explained, they required the finest suits and cravats, linen and silk shirts, waistcoats, the best fur felt hats and cloaks as well as four pairs of boots, two saddles, journal books, botanicals, and medicinals, all kinds of tapes, gauzes, and bandages, essence of orange to make flavored water, fifty kilos of confectioners’ sugar for same, rifles and ammunition, lye and lemon soap, drawing and painting supplies, surgical tools, sheets, coverlets, two featherbeds, grooming and smoking paraphernalia, traveling desks and drafting boards, books, enough whiskey to last two years, laudanum and opium balls in case of injury or illness, whistles, dictionaries, daggers, ceremonial swords, tricolor bunting, woolen underwear, and, of course, the photographic equipment. Max knew precisely where in the seventy trunks each item lay, though at the moment, sixty-five trunks were sweating in storage at the consul’s warehouse in Alexandria. Max was a stranger to self-doubt. He was as sure of himself as a bird is of flight.

But was he always right? Was he right, for instance, about The Temptation of Saint Anthony? Could both Max and Bouilhet be wrong? Gustave winced at the memory of that sickening night. He had read it to them over the course of four days. Afterward, they had rested and dined, then sauntered down the terrace with lanterns to the tenebrous banks of the Seine, its liquid fringe unraveling at their feet. “Consign it to the flames!” Max had shouted skyward, as if the stars would quake at the news. Bouilhet had been gentler. He had taken Gustave’s arm, his voice motherly. “If you do publish, only the most devoted readers will cut past the first pages. Better to wait and revise.” Though both men had sworn, like a jury, not to confer, he thought that they had, for they both offered the same objection. Nothing happens. Neither mentioned the strengths of the book: historical verisimilitude; the palpable depiction of the saint’s torments—he had cried out in pain while writing; the precise, lyrical language; its driving rhythms. Had they at least appreciated the hellish amount of research the book entailed? No! That he’d read more than two hundred volumes and taken copious notes did not impress them. And if that were not enough to vouch for the novel’s authenticity, like his protagonist, he’d become a recluse. It was he, not Saint Anthony, who had written, “I have come to the desert in order to avoid the troubles of existence.” He had lived so exclusively indoors that his neighbors had nicknamed him “the bear of Croisset.”

He hadn’t intended to be a hermit. Biology and destiny had set in motion a dire sequence of events that changed the climate of his life, reducing the seasons to a perpetual winter. He had to hibernate to survive the tragedies that befell him. The writing, he thought, had saved his sanity.

The run of bad luck began at Christmas of 1846, with what Dr. Flaubert dubbed “the fall from Grace”—Gustave’s first nervous attack. He was twenty-five, home from law school on vacation at the reins of a wagon beside his brother. All he remembered before passing out was a blaze of lights and a sudden draining of strength and sensation from his body, as if he had been painlessly incinerated. Achille had barely managed to retrieve the reins in time to avoid a spill.

The family had feared for his life. The word “epilepsy” being more a curse than a diagnosis, the doctors concluded that he suffered from an unknown neurological malady. Over the next few months, despite rest, bloodletting, and the insertion of a seton in the fatty folds of his neck to drain bad vapors from his body, he suffered more seizures. Dr. Flaubert decided Gustave should not risk the stresses of law school for at least a year.

Secretly, he was elated. He could write, which was all he wished to do in the first place and the only thing he’d ever done well. Although “the fall from Grace” was a joke, Gustave knew that his father was disappointed. He had ambitions for his sons: Achille had already risen to eminence in medicine and worked alongside him at the county hospital; he expected Gustave to excel in another profession, preferably the law. Flaubert père had no use for scribblers and had paid scant attention to the plays Gustave wrote and performed as a boy. Nor had he shown interest later in the novel he completed at nineteen.

The following December, his father discovered a red lump on his own thigh. Achille recruited an expert and together they operated, but the site became infected, and in March, the great surgeon died.

Gustave’s life was beginning to read like the Book of Job.

Two months after his father’s death, tragedy befell Caroline, his only sister, his little tomboy. It had been difficult to watch her fall in love and marry a feckless old schoolmate of his. Madame Flaubert, ever the worrier, had insisted that the whole family accompany the newlyweds on their honeymoon to Italy, as if a hovering crowd could prevent her catching a sore throat or chest cold. If only Mother’s concern had extended to advice about birth control! For despite the appalling lack of privacy (ten of them traveling together by post chaise through the Midi and on to Genoa by boat), Caroline managed to become pregnant. Two weeks after Flaubert père passed to his Maker, she gave birth to baby Caroline. Within a week, mother Caroline was ailing and, two agonizing months later, died of childbed fever. Her husband fell to pieces; Madame Flaubert took the baby home to be raised by the Flauberts, reduced now to two in residence and Achille, four miles away at the hospital in Rouen.

His dear mother teetered on the verge of collapse. There were tears at every meal and wailing from her rooms when the lamps were extinguished at bedtime. Gustave feared she’d die of grief, even with the infant to love. He offered succor; she accepted. The irony of it! The son who had been a disaster in the making without prospects, who had failed his law school examinations twice, became indispensable. He was flattered to be so desperately needed and proud to save his sweet mother.

Law school was never again mentioned. To keep his sanity while he played the part of loyal son, doting uncle, and aspiring writer, he adopted an eccentric regimen that he stuck to for the next two years. He arose at noon and conducted himself like a family man; but at night, when everyone was sleeping, he labored over his pages, shouting out words as he composed them, crying or laughing as the text dictated.

He was all the more aggrieved by the fourth and final loss, one that felt like a betrayal but was in fact another wedding. His closest friend—his hero—Alfred Le Poittivin, font of all he knew about cynicism, sex, and art, the man who had taken him to his first brothel and suggested Saint Anthony as the subject for the novel, had caved in to family pressures. He took a wife and cut off his former friends. Gustave never saw him again until he lay on his deathbed, the victim of tuberculosis, a scant two years later. Alfred’s absence had left a gaping hole in Gustave’s life only partially filled by Max and Bouilhet. Gustave often thought that if Alfred had lived, he would have known for sure if the novel were worthy, for Alfred had been peerless in matters of substance and taste. Gustave didn’t have the same confidence in Max and Bouilhet.

• • •

The odor of Turkish tobacco, stronger than its European counterpart, wafted toward him. Max had emerged from his tent to smoke. “You should write a travel book on Greece to launch your literary career,” he said. “You’ve read the ancient Greeks, you could insert literary landmarks. Or we could collaborate again.” Tubes of smoke issued from both nostrils.

Max’s timing could not be worse, given Gustave’s growing doubts about his literary insight. They had written an essay together following their walking tour of Brittany. Precisely four copies existed. He had never thought of it as anything but an exercise in friendship and literary description. To call it a book was preposterous.

“I want to launch my career with a bang,” he replied, “with a novel, possibly a play.” For the last year and a half, he and Bouilhet had been studying dramatic structure by reading the greatest playwright of all, Shakespeare. How he missed their Sundays together, smoking, eating, sharing manuscripts. “Travel writing is a lesser genre,” he added. Would Max take offense? Surely he sensed his sincerity. “I speak for myself, of course, but I must follow my own lights.”

Max smiled knowingly. “A lesser genre, perhaps, but a travel book is less risky. If it succeeds, fine. If it doesn’t, the critics ignore it.” He took a last drag on his cigarette. “And it wouldn’t take much work to add to the journal you’re already keeping. Just promise you’ll consider it.” He squashed the cigarette under his boot.

“I shall, Abu Dabu. Not to change the subject, mon ami, but I have solved the mystery of why these monuments are so neglected: the ancient Egyptians are as foreign to these Arabs as they are to you and me.”

Max nodded. “True. But any fool can see the monuments are extraordinary. Why treat them like rubble when the whole world reveres them? Think of the tourists and money they would attract if they were restored.”

Joseph appeared and stood next to Gustave’s blanket, glancing diffidently at the ground as he waited for a break in the conversation.

“It’s a marvel anything gets accomplished with the confusion of so many nations living cheek by jowl.”

“Speaking of confusion . . .” Max nipped into his tent and returned, holding an Ottoman calendar, its squares full of dizzying languages and symbols. Gustave had given up trying to decipher it. All he knew was that the Ottoman day began at sunset, making it nearly impossible to get times straight when meeting with officials of the empire outside major cities. “We will wake at sunrise,” Max announced. He consulted the calendar again. “Which is at six thirty-eight.” He went back inside.

“What is it, Joseph?” Gustave asked.

“A favor, effendi? A small favor?”

“Certainly. What can I do for you?

They’d hired Joseph based on a letter commending him as a reasonably reliable and honest man—high praise, the writer said, in a profession rife with scoundrels and swindlers. To date he had been a fine dragoman, never truculent, though often reserved. As he approached, Gustave inhaled the stink of aged sweat, sour ass, dirty hair, and other less identifiable bodily odors. He realized he had never seen Joseph bathe or change clothes. In the morning, he passed a rag across his brow, sloshed water in his mouth, and spit. His complete toilette apparently.

“My new esposa is write,” he said, shyly pulling a packet of letters from his foul jacket. “She is young and bellissima, has not twenty years. She is been with French nuns.”

“It’s wonderful to receive a letter, isn’t it?”

“Ah, when she is write me.” Joseph raised his eyes to the sky.

The man reeked so bad that Gustave had to breathe through his mouth. Did he bathe at home with his young and beautiful wife? Surely the nuns had taught her good hygiene.

“Effendi,” Joseph began again, “you read them to me? She is write in français.”

“Oh, yes, of course. I didn’t realize.”

He opened the first letter and skimmed it. A demand for money. (“Send it immediately, I tell you.”) No salutation or valediction. Complete lack of courtesy and affection. The handwriting was faint, done in pencil. “She says she loves you very much.”

“And the other?” He handed it to him.

“Have you shown these to anyone else?”

“No, effendi. These sailors no read. And no privacy.”

“Here she is saying she misses you.” He touched the page with his finger. “And, again, she loves you.”

“You read fast, effendi. There is more?”

Telling the truth, he said, “She wants to buy a new frock.”

“I know this.” Joseph looked down at his hands.

The other six letters contained more shrill demands for money. She had run up bills with tradesmen. The dressmaker was insisting that she return a garment. The grocer was going to refuse her credit. (He threatens to cut off my balls, she’d written, parroting Joseph’s crudeness, or crude herself?) “She sounds lovely,” he said. He couldn’t wait to tell Max.

“She read,” Joseph said, smiling. “I love for that.” He frowned. “I no read, effendi. If I read, I no do this work, I join French Legion.”

• • •

Stretched on his blanket, Gustave marked time until everyone had bedded down. He enjoyed such perfect privacy in his study at Croisset that he could no longer so much as daydream if he thought someone were observing him.

Beyond the outline of his toes, the campfire crackled and glowed, while overhead, the stars inched through their celestial arcs. He located the Big Dipper, then connected the studs of Orion’s belt, which reminded him of Kuchuk Hanem’s extravagant jewelry. He liked the rhythm of her name—the little click like a snap of the fingers in the middle of it. KU-chuk HA-nem. Golden creature, instrument of pleasure.

Like other Arabs, she called him Abu Chanab—Father Mustache. Why, she asked, did he cover such a fine mouth? Twice she offered to shave it off, taking his face between her warm, oily hands to appraise it. Peering back at her, he had glimpsed her most alluring feature: a small rotten incisor amid an otherwise dazzling smile.

The day they met, she had declared her importance by sending an emissary named Bambeh to the cange when they docked in Esneh. Did they wish to see dancing girls? Though she also was an alma, Bambeh looked not like a trollop, but a pretty sprig of a girl. She had brought her mistress’s pet lamb with her. Hennaed with polka dots and muzzled in black velvet, the animal followed her like a dog. The sight of the two of them had brought tears to his eyes. They did wish to see dancing girls, Max told her, but they had plans for the morning. She’d waited two hours while he and Max visited a shop above a school to buy ink and scouted two more monuments. When they returned at noon, they found her perched demurely at Rais Ibrahim’s elbow, the crew at her feet, a trail of sheep pellets on the deck.

Attracting stares and cries for baksheesh from Arabs squatting outside mud huts, they followed Bambeh to a courtyard as different from the town that surrounded it as a dream is from waking life. Instead of the dust and mud of Esneh, the courtyard was tinted with confectioners’ hues—the pink of desert roses and the brilliant scarlet of two flowering pomegranate trees. Walls painted pale aqua set off the vibrant green of plants in colorful glazed pots.

The first moment he saw Kuchuk Hanem something inside him had melted and not solidified since. The sensation was identical to looking at certain paintings. The plasm of his being streamed invisibly toward the canvas, completing it, as though the painting had been waiting for him since the artist finished it.

Clad in pink silk trousers, she was perfuming her hands. She had just completed her bath, Joseph explained. He caught the odor of rosewater and something like turpentine as she bent to replace a water jug, her bronze arms rippling in the sunlight. Through the filmy purple gauze wrapping her torso, he saw the clear outline of her breasts and felt himself stir.

A statuesque, coffee-colored Syrian, she embodied his fantasy of the East. Her eyes were dark, painted with antimony, her eyebrows black, her nostrils wide and flaring. Her costume was straight from the seraglio. On her head sat a tarboosh ornamented with a gold disk and fake emerald; a blue tassel fanned out over her shoulders like a cockade; and a spray of artificial white flowers was fastened to her hair from ear to ear. And what hair!—as elaborate as the wigs of the ancient Egyptians. Thick, black, and wavy, it was parted in the center into two long, bushy pigtails that were braided together at the nape.

She stepped toward him, accompanied by the faint tinkling of her gold jewelry. Bangles collided on her wrists, while her necklace, a triple rope of beads, whispered like brushed cymbals. Above this sea of sound, her hoop earrings swayed silently. A golden aura enveloped her, as if she had been dipped in that metal or fashioned directly from it, embellished with a goldsmith’s granules, globes, and darts to complement the iridescent undulations of her skin.

She greeted them in French. He took her hand and kissed it, noting a fine line of blue writing tattooed on her arm, which he later learned was a verse from the Koran, though not what it said. After perfuming his and Max’s hands with attar of roses, she asked if they would like some entertainment. Before he could answer, Max took her arm, and the two vanished down a staircase.

Minutes later, Max shouted, and Gustave followed his voice to the lower level, where Kuchuk lay on a kilim-covered divan. After Max left the room, Gustave entered her for a rapid coup more like a greeting than lovemaking.

The niceties followed the sex. She brought out her best glasses and a bottle of rakı. Lion’s Milk, she called it in Arabic, for its potency and the swirl of white when water was added. He had already experienced its highs and its hangovers, first in Alexandria and again in Cairo.

She and her girls did not resemble the whores or grisettes in Paris, nor the seedy wenches in Kenneh and Cairo. Hers was a prelapsarian paradise, a lecherous Eden devoid of morals and contrition. Toothsome without being tawdry, he thought. Tremulously louche. She had raised ribaldry and lubricity to high art. Unlike most whores, she was not naughty or coy, but frankly available. Pleasure was the only commandment she obeyed and dancing was sexier than sex itself. A few years earlier, public dancing, like brothels, had been outlawed, forcing the courtesans south from Cairo to lesser cities. The only concession to this were the blindfolds the musicians wore as they sawed on sour violins, beat drums, and rattled tambourines.

Her dance movements were relatively crude: she squeezed her bare breasts together with her jacket and jerked her pelvis back and forth. When the music slowed, she rose up on one foot, then the other, pressing the lifted leg across her shin.

“Sheik Abu Dabu!” Gustave shouted above the music. “I have seen this dance before, on old Greek vases.”

Max shook his head. “The male dancers at Cairo were better.” They had seen the famous Hasan el-Belbeissi, who was faster, more agile and acrobatic, walking on his hands, tumbling through the air at breakneck speed.

“But not as beautiful,” replied Gustave.

Joseph smiled. “We say this on Nile.” He pointed to Bambeh, who had replaced Kuchuk Hanem as the soloist. “The beautiful women, they have the ugly feet.”

Gustave beheld her misshapen toes and calloused knuckles. His mind raced back to Louise’s milk-white, perfectly shaped feet and hands. His hot marble Venus. Satin slipper, bloody hanky. At home, one of his prized possessions was the pink satin shoe he had pocketed the second time he bedded her, along with a handkerchief soaked with her menstrual blood. The break with her was still fresh and painful.

Kuchuk’s ribaldry surpassed his own. She snatched his tarboosh and put it on. To discourage lice, he and Max had shaved their heads except for occipital knots of hair by which, according to Mahometan belief, they would be whisked to heaven when they died. She polished his pate with her jacket, then shooed everyone upstairs, indicating she wished to copulate with him again.

“Come, my dear,” said Gustave, “let me give you a ride.” To everyone’s amazement, he bent over and she jumped on his back. Then he hobbled off to a small cubicle and took his second turn with her, a brief but intense orgasm.

When they returned to the upstairs courtyard, Kuchuk mounted his back again. “And I have seen this before,” Max joked, “in a medieval tapestry. So often the Christian tarts ride their customers home when a unicorn is not available.”

“We are going to get a cup of coffee,” Gustave called back.

With the others following, he stumbled along the alleyway to the café next door, a wooden shack with a roof of sugarcane stalks thrown down helter-skelter. Demitasses of Turkish coffee soon arrived on a copper tray. A few moments later, the muezzin sang out the call to afternoon prayer over the rooftops of the city: “Allahu Akbar.” Kuchuk glanced through the open window, suddenly aware of the time.

“Beautiful melody,” said Max, besotted with rakı. “Allah il Allah,” he tweedled, mimicking the muezzin until the whores howled with laughter. It was then that Kuchuk took Gustave’s face between her palms and pantomimed shaving off his mustache. “Abu Chanab,” she whispered, Father Mustache, planting a kiss on his cheek.

“She say not to cover your pretty mouth,” Joseph translated.

He and Max decided they would visit her brothel again that night.

• • •

The musicians from the afternoon were already assembled in the courtyard when they returned in full regalia, wearing swords and bearing a bottle of rakı. Oil lamps shedding pools of creamy yellow light burned on tin sconces. The women sat singing together on the divan. A new and older alma with a savage expression and deep-set eyes took him downstairs and made quick work of him. His timing was so derailed by her voluptuous writhing that he stained the divan. When he set to work on her with his mouth, she seemed surprised, but tolerated it silently. Perhaps her magic button had been excised. He loved giving pleasure to a woman as much as he loved receiving it. Because he’d twice fallen in love with women eleven years older than he—Elisa Schlesinger, his first crush, when he was fourteen, and then, of course, Louise—he preferred older prostitutes and was beloved by them in turn. In Egypt, the old whores said they found him more enchanting than Max because of his impressive height and large, cowlike eyes. But he knew they were lying: they were grateful to him for the business.

He downed a glass of rakı, took Kuchuk aside, and, grasping her necklace with his teeth, had sex with her. Her cunt, he wrote later, felt “like rolls of velvet as she made me come.” Afterward, showing off her muscularity and grace, she offered him licorice straws from her second mouth.

But Kuchuk Hanem’s most remarkable talent was for the Bee, the dance forbidden in all of Egypt. She began by vibrating her torso as quickly as its namesake, shedding her clothing until she was naked. Her body was sinuous, fluid, assuming forms that seemed impossible. Backbends, simple flips, and rapid turns led to undulations that traveled through her flesh like water through a sluice, from her neck to her breasts, belly, and hips, down through her legs until only her feet were shivering to the music. She wore castanets on her fingers and bells on her ankles, accompanying herself vocally with trills and shouts. The chirring, clapping, and tinkling built to a crescendo until she seemed half animal, half angel, moving according to some essential rhythm borrowed from nature in harmony with the whorls of turban shells, the branching lacework of leaves, the khamsin’s whirlwind. She was magnetic, paralyzing, her face altering from grave to frantically wanton and grave again.

For an encore, she performed a duet with a cup of coffee placed on the floor. Castanets clacking, she made love to the cup with a series of lascivious movements and ended by clenching it with her teeth and gulping it down. In that one stroke, he felt she had taken him whole into her mouth—or could.

In the past, Gustave had loved all his prostitutes, but never a particular one. His feeling was more for the institution itself, “prostitution” being an old and venerable word, like “university,” “Sorbonne,” and “Mother Church.” But by the time the dancing was over, he was convinced that he was in love with Kuchuk Hanem, and begged to spend the night with her. Though she worried that his presence would attract thieves, in the end she relented. They slept together in a small downstairs room, guarded by her pimps and by Joseph, who had paired up with an Abyssinian whore, forgetting for an evening his young wife. After another coup, Kuchuk drifted off, her little hand resting in his, her mound of Venus heating him like a hot water bottle. Delectable snoring issued from her elegant nose and slackened mouth. With her scruffy Papillion dog asleep nearby on his red jacket, they made as happy a family of three as might have lived anywhere on the earth. He gave himself over to reveries of domestic normalcy and oriental perversity.

At 3:00 A.M. he awakened for a final coup, rather like the affectionate screwing of an old married couple before breakfast. At dawn she fetched charcoal for the brazier, then returned to bed, warming herself in the heat of his body. The bedclothes that all night had passed for Venetian silk revealed in the daylight the most telling touch: bedbugs, which he amused himself by squashing on the wall. Their nauseating smell combined with Kuchuk’s attar of roses created an odor as memorable as her rotten tooth. In his work, he decided, as in life, there must always be a touch of bitterness in the sweet, a hint of calumny in the romance, a jeer in the midst of triumph!

Early the next morning, as agreed, Kuchuk Hanem appeared with her lamb in tow at the cange to pose for a portrait. No longer was she clad in diaphanous silks and cottons, much to his disappointment. She wore instead a bizarre combination of European and Ottoman clothes that denoted a prim matronliness—a black cloak, a fichu and cheap cameo at her throat, an embroidered vest and hat in the Armenian style, and European boots. Max took three exposures, all with the spotted lamb: one of her seated under a white umbrella, one standing, and one leaning over the side of the cange, so that the waters of the Nile might flow forever above the mantel at Croisset.

In accord with her attire, they had parted decorously. No fervid kisses or tender hugs, no desperate clutching of her ass. He promised to return in a month or two. She stepped gracefully off the boat followed by her sheep like a figure in a nursery rhyme. When she reached the street above the docks, she looked back and wagged her small perfumed hand.

He had detected true longing in that wave, with a soupçon of love and dolor, too. Ever since, he had allowed himself the fantasy that she had found him unusually appealing, and was counting the days until his return—that she was thinking and dreaming of him, reviewing every detail of their lovemaking.

When the photographic papers were developed, Kuchuk had disappeared, leaving only a gray smudge where she and the Nile had briefly intersected in the frame.