Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 29

Egyptians

He dozed for a while, and when he awoke, he said: “Do you know that I’m Egyptian?”

“I thought you were from Nîmes.”

“I was born in Nîmes. The town was settled originally by the Roman legions that had taken Egypt from Antony and Cleopatra. When we go there, we will walk through the ancient part of the town, see the city’s coat of arms, which shows a crocodile leashed to a palm tree, representing the founders’ capture of Egypt.”

When we go there, when we go there.

“Caesar Augustus…” Jacques said, and then interrupted himself while he lit a cigarette. She reached up and took it from between his lips, took a drag, returned it to him.

“Caesar Augustus, no fool he, knew that having overthrown one great empire, those legions might take it into their heads to overthrow another—to wit, his own. But of course he did not want it said that he didn’t treat his loyal soldiers well—so he granted them tracts of land, but in the far-off south of Gaul. These demobilized soldiers of Augustus brought with them a colony of Egyptian slaves, whose descendants intermarried with the local population, with the sons and daughters of the Romans. The researches of Friar Mendel have let us know that ancestry does not mix smoothly, a pureed soup, but rather in discrete clumps. Even now, nearly two millennia later, a child will sometimes be born with half-almond eyes and olive skin. I was such a child. I warn you—I have an ancient nature, cold and pitiless—exacting.”

“I’ve been warned.” She smiled. (Years later, he would say, “I told you, very early on, about my Egyptian nature. You mustn’t wail: you knew what you were getting into.”)

The train dropped them off in mid-afternoon. A few porters and taxi-drivers managed to rouse themselves to implore their business. Jacques shook them off, and they set out, their hands clasped, walking along the narrow streets, the flat planes of ancient houses and churches looming above them. The houses were shuttered, the occasional muffled cry of a cooped-up child issuing forth from behind the stone walls. Their footsteps sounded against the cobblestones: the echoes of their footsteps. The heavy mid-day meal had been eaten. The pots and pans and plates and saucers had been washed and were now set on racks to dry in the still afternoon air. Tubs of mucky water festered, waiting to be dumped in the back garden, while the inhabitants of these houses drowsed on divans and daybeds.

As their elongated shadows walked ahead of them, she rocketed out of time, saw this walled city as a ruin, when humanity itself would have ceased to exist, when these stone walls, these cobblestoned streets, might be observed by the eye of a rook, perched atop the wreckage of one of the turrets above them.