The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

30

THE RITUAL OF TREADING

Fortunately for Gustave, he could avoid staying at the Hôtel D’Orient, where Miss Nightingale would be, without explaining himself to Max. He and Max had lodged there when they first arrived in Cairo and quickly denounced it as a citadel of porcelain and plate. With heavy drapes and furniture completely unsuited to the desert, it seemed designed for travelers who had no wish to leave the comfort of their homes—merely to change the view through their windows.

They took rooms instead at the Hôtel du Nil, a boardinghouse for Europeans of moderate means. It was simple, verging on shabby. The proprietor, M. Bouvaret, a retired actor from the provinces by way of Constantinople, was obliging enough and could be bought with small tips as necessary. Joseph supposed him a Turk whose family had assumed a French name during the brief Napoleonic era.

Avoiding any mention of their argument, he and Max conversed easily. It was the manly thing to do. Women, in his experience, often harped on painful subjects, threshing them like grain until only hulls remained, and then only dust, and still they prodded, poked, hypothesized. Instead of incessant wounding, he and Max posited theories of art, history, and the future of the world.

He began another long letter to Bouilhet by describing the brownish-red rash that had appeared in irate blotches on the backs of both legs. My bodily doom is sealed, he wrote. I suppose it was just a matter of time until the disease caught me out. But his mind, he told Bouilhet, was brimming with ideas, and he had begun furiously jotting them down, along with character sketches. Spurred in part by Rossignol’s aspirations and Trout’s secret love affair, he’d been thinking again about a female protagonist. It rankled to admit it, but Max—damn him for a perspicacious critic!—was right: there was much to explore and even exploit in an ordinary female. He sent one scenario to Bouilhet:

A Young Unhappy Woman

A provincial who has read too many romances, she expects her life to resemble them, full of galas and velvet gowns, champagne toasts and steamy love affairs. In short, she is bored. She must select her lovers from among the locals (the druggist, doctor, blacksmith, grocer, etc.) or from travelers (a merchant, soldier, veterinarian, notary). The best she can hope for is an illicit liaison with the son of the richest landowner in the county. Once a year he throws a ball at the manor for his poorer neighbors, a scattering of crumbs that she mistakes for jewels. . .

In a real bed for the first time in months, he closed his eyes and drifted toward somnolence, oars dipping in water just beyond the walls, his mattress steadily rocking as the blue cange sailed on in his landlocked body.

When he wasn’t sleeping or writing letters or postulating the future of humanity, he contemplated Miss Nightingale, though he delayed writing to her. It struck him as odd that in her absence, she was Miss Nightingale, but in person, she was Rossignol. Though she, too, had renounced marriage, Miss Nightingale embodied all that he despised about convention. But Rossignol! She was a rare creature—an Oryx, a black leopard, a vibrantly plumed parrot from the Amazon who spoke multiple languages while retaining the ability to sing like a bird. And like an exotic animal, no one knew her mind. That was what he had come to desire as much as her body—to know her mind. For it was the mind of a man in the body of a woman. Wrong, he corrected himself. It was not the mind of a man; he would have recognized that. It was the mind of a rebel, a revolutionary.

He tried to imagine her as a wife (not his), and immediately sensed it would ruin her. The institution would chafe at her until she either surrendered—not likely—or was eroded to a bitter nub of a woman. Her sharp intelligence must be kept occupied, or like a surgeon’s scalpel, it would grow dull and dangerous with disuse. Even friendship would be beyond the capacity of Rossignol the bored and bitter wife. No. They had no future together except as Egyptian adventurers, and that chapter, sadly, was nearing its end.

• • •

Cautioning him to be less noticeable than a shadow, he sent Joseph to inquire at the Hôtel d’Orient. She was indeed registered there, scheduled to depart within the week. He vowed to write to her. But not yet. He could not approach her yet.

His legs, his poor legs! He hid them from Max, could barely tolerate seeing them himself. The scourge had spread to the soles of his feet, a leprous bloom of white and red patches. Otherwise he felt fine, his mind supple and clear after weeks of lassitude.

Tanned by the desert sun and dressed as natives, he and Max passed for Mahometans to visit Mamaluke sites where they made more squeezes and photographs. The city seethed with feral cats. Early summer was their breeding season, and their near-human cries in the alleys and gardens at night sounded like torture.

At the end of the week, Max got bad news. The graphic letter he’d sent to a lover in Paris had been intercepted by her husband, who had thrashed her and banished her from the house. Max moped through the rooms.

“Will they divorce?” Gustave asked.

“God, I hope not!” Max paused his pacing. “Married women make the best lovers. They are more experienced and less demanding.”

Gustave nodded, agreeably, to this platitude, though his history with Louise contradicted it.

Of course, Max said, he loved her.

Gustave discovered his sympathies lay not with Max but with the ruined wife. What would become of her if the husband refused to reconcile? Max would not step in. For a woman to have a love affair was far more dangerous than Gustave had realized. Yet, to his mind, it seemed the only way a sensitive woman other than a crusader like Miss Nightingale could assert her independence.

After a day, Max dropped the subject. Rogue. Bastard. Yet who could blame him? Why was sex such a boon to men, and for women, such a disgrace? Surely, mankind had erred, configuring sex as a commodity, a matter of ownership and property instead of simple delight. The premium on virginity sentenced every woman to just one lover. He couldn’t imagine living with this restriction.

Joseph’s wife, whose desperate pleas for money had filled her “love letters” for months, met him at Bulak in a new dress and hat, though the cupboard was empty and she had not prepared dinner. Joseph appeared at the hotel the next day in a fog of jasmine and sandalwood. He had bathed. “She is ruin me!” he told Gustave proudly.

• • •

On May 29, Gustave and Max decided to extend their stay in Cairo to attend the Ritual of Treading before heading north to Alexandria, where they’d catch a packet for Beirut the second week of June. Joseph was glad to have a few more days of work.

That night, Gustave wrote her a lengthy letter. He’d settled on “her” and “she” rather than Miss Nightingale or Rossignol until she was replaced by the next fascination, should there be one.

He decided to tell her everything, to make a clean breast of it. Indeed, it was an autobiography of sorts, tracing his life back to age nineteen. Surely if anyone could understand his obsessions, she could. It was a loving letter, without a return address. When he finished it, he sent Joseph to deliver it by hand.

• • •

At dawn on the third of June, he perched atop a wall on the Street of the Faithful alongside Max and Joseph. By eight an enormous crowd had gathered, milling about like angry bees.

Doseh, or the Ritual of the Treading, was performed in Cairo several times a year to commemorate a miracle. A Mahometan saint had once ridden his horse through a street filled with clay jars of food without breaking a single one. Strangely, over the years, the ritual had modulated into a menacing key. It was no longer a celebration but a test of faith, with lives instead of jars at stake.

With every minute that passed, the crowd enlarged. After two more hours, a sheik clad in dazzling white robes appeared on a black mount with a lavish saddle and bridle embellished with gold tassels, bells, and embroidery. At his signal, the crowd arranged itself in the street to form a thoroughfare of flesh—men prone on their bellies in ranks so close together they looked like herrings packed in a tin. Not a brick of the street was visible. Locusts and mummies, Gustave thought. Now living men.

Wild music commenced, played on flutes and drums. It drove the spectators to a frenzy. Eunuchs beat the crowd back in a storm of cudgeling unlike any he’d seen for speed and vigor. When they were done, the river of bodies was immured by a wall of spectators, both eerily silent. Gustave trembled with expectation and dread.

It was trial by happenstance. An injury in the treading was a reflection of sin. “Why not throw them in the river to see if they float?” he asked Max.

Max lit his pipe, puffing until the tobacco glowed. “I don’t think injury is the idea but the power of faith.” He exhaled a long plume of smoke. “Of the mind.”

“Or of the heart,” Gustave added, genuinely glad for Max’s company just then. He could not have attended so strange a spectacle alone. For a change, he found Max’s detachment, his coolly dispassionate powers of observation, calming. Since a benevolent crowd was a rarity anywhere, he felt safer with Max, too, though his fear was nothing compared to the excess tenderness and empathy. He suspected that the almost paralyzing vulnerability he felt was not the result of his own pain and sadness, but of Rossignol’s, at his hands. How she must have suffered when she received the letter! He dreaded the coming days for her. He felt sad, he felt guilty, he felt sorry. He felt altogether too much.

At noon the sheik entered the street. His mount was so spirited, prancing sideways and backward, skittering with high, dressagelike kicks, that the rider had to restrain him. Either the beast simply wished to have his head, or the sight and smell of the helpless men had spooked him.

It was not the first spectacle Gustave had seen in Cairo. Eight months earlier, he and Max had watched magicians and mountebanks perform tricks and snake charmers tempt vipers from baskets. Fortune-tellers in varied guises had promised him a hodgepodge of fates: wealth, health, many women, and an early death by water. Most impressive were the spinning dervishes. They had plunged spikes through their chests and mouths, then affixed oranges on the sharp end and continued to whirl, their long, tan skirts floating up in perfect disks. Surely that had been a clever illusion. A man would perish on the spot from such an insult to the body. And he did not believe in miracles.

The sheik began his passage through the street. A deafening cacophony of cheers and songs erupted from the spectators as the steed picked his way on skulls, smalls of backs, tender napes, the thin-skinned backs of knees. From the flattened men a cataract of anguished excitement issued in the form of prayers and ululations.

He couldn’t bear it, even with Max beside him, meditatively puffing on a short-stemmed meerschaum. “I am leaving,” he cried out, hardly audible over the throng. He leaped to the ground on the other side of the wall.

“Wait!” Max called to him. “Wait for me.” He and Joseph dropped down and caught up with him.

“Surely some of them will die,” said Gustave, walking rapidly away from the scene. He began to cry.

Max put his arm around Gustave’s shoulder as they entered a quiet lane shaded by plane trees with their trunks painted white. “If that is true, they knew the risks.”

“Still.”

Max felt his neck for heat. “Has the fever returned?”

“No. I’m just feeling sensitive.”

“Could you be coming down with something else? Perhaps it’s a simple case of exhaustion.” He patted Gustave’s back.

“No, I am well.” He was. He was more himself than ever, a sensitive fellow with a big bluff. Max, he knew, grasped this, but it was not in his nature to speak of it. Instead, they continued back to the hotel arm in arm.

The next morning, Joseph reported that there had been no injuries from the Doseh. Gustave hoped he was telling the truth. He was dead tired, having spent much of the night imagining himself flat on his belly while a hoof hovered above, threatening to smash his neck. He wished to be like a plant, existing without awareness of the past or future, simply breathing in and out, feeling nothing.

• • •

The next day, still hollowed out, he rambled with Joseph through the bazaars one last time, without desire: perfume sellers, chandlers, goldsmiths, olive and date vendors, spice merchants, booksellers, bakers, tailors. He engraved the scenes in his mind against the likelihood he would not return. When tradesmen approached, he held up a weary hand and they retreated to their covered booths like a sea to its depths.

The next morning, the last before they left for Alexandria, he indulged his nostalgia once more—for women drawing water and fellahin from the countryside selling grain in their distinctive long blue tunics and white turbans.

On the day of departure, he gave a big gratuity to M. Bouvaret, who had helped twice with the luggage and generously drawn maps to sites in and around the city. His most painful farewell would be to Joseph, loyal, love-besotted Joseph. He would hold off until the last moment, when he and Max boarded the ship for Alexandria.

“Wait,” said the innkeeper, pocketing his baksheesh. “You must not depart yet.” He followed them out the door, helping again with their possessions.

Moments later, he returned, lugging a large tin pot. “Y’allah,” he said, urging them toward the street. “Now, messieurs, this is how friends say good-bye in the Orient.” Beaming, he pitched the potful of water at their feet.

“What?” exclaimed Gustave. He checked his valises. Not a drop had touched them or him despite the big splash.

Bouvaret clapped the pot. “Revenez avant que cette eau ne sèche!” he shouted. Come back before this water dries.

Once again, the dam broke and tears rolled over Gustave’s cheeks. He had to stifle himself. To be so easily moved was unnerving. First, the men at the treading and now a little water. A rainbow on a strand of hair. Or the memory of Trout holding her hat atop the dune while Max gathered moonlight into his lens. The whole evanescent display of life in all its depravity, all its glory. Because the water had been, above all, glorious as the sunlight sparked it. It had hung in the air like a liquid marquee announcing, anointing the moment with a homespun grandeur. Water from the Nile, no doubt. He wanted to embrace the innkeeper for the aptness and sweetness of the gesture, but the man had already turned toward the door.