Читать книгу Joseph in Egypt (Vol. 1) - Thomas Mann - Страница 8

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Three days they had gone on by the margin of the sea and it was evening once more and time of rest in the tents, and as they rested, it looked just as it had three days before; it might have been the same place. As the old man sat on his mat at the door of his tent, Joseph appeared before him, with pancakes and a written scroll in his hands.

“The least of his slaves,” he said, “bringeth to the master according to his commands.”

The Midianite put the bake-stuff to one side; the list he unrolled, and studied the script with his head on one side. He did so well pleased.

“No blots,” said he, “and that is well. But one can tell likewise that the signs are drawn with pleasure and a sense of beauty and are an adornment. It is to be hoped that the content agrees, so that it is not only decorative but also practical. It is a pleasure to see one’s own so cleanly set down and the various items listed in order. The goods themselves are greasy or they are sticky with gum; the merchant does not willingly soil his hands, he deals with them as they are written. They are there, but they are also here; clean, not stinking, easy to see. A list like this is like the Ka or the spiritual body of things, alongside the real. Good, then, Come-hither, thou knowest how to write and canst also reckon somewhat, as I saw. And in thy station it lacketh thee not for readiness of speech, for it hath pleased me, the way thou gavest thy lord good-night three days past. What were thy words again?”

“I know them no more,” replied Joseph. “But it may be that I wished peace to thy slumbers.”

“No, it was pleasanter than that. But no matter; likely there will come more occasion for such a phrase. But what I could say is this: when I have naught more important to think of, then at the third and fourth remove I think of thee. Thy lot may be hard, since in any case thou hast seen better days and now thou servest the travelling merchant as baker and clerk. Since, then, I purpose to dispose of thee, and innocent of the knowledge of thy origins to enrich myself further as much as I can, I will see to it that I look out for thee.”

“That is most gracious.”

“I will bring thee to a house that I know, where I have sometimes done a service to mine own and its advantage; a well-kept house, a house of honour and distinction. It is a blessing, I say to thee, to belong to such a house, be it only as the least of servants, and if there be one wherein a servant may display the finer gifts it is this. If thou hast fortune and I bring thee to this house, then is thy lot as favoured as in view of thy guilt and culpableness it could possibly fall.”

“And to whom belongeth the house?”

“Yea, to whom? To a man—and a man he is, or rather a lord. A great among the great, gilded with gold of favour, a man good, stern, and holy, for whom his grave waits in the West, a shepherd of men, the living image of a god. Fan-bearer on the right hand of the king is his title, but dost thou think he beareth the fan? No, the man leaves that to others, he himself is too exalted for it, he only beareth the title. Thinkest thou I know the man, the gift of the sun? No, for I am a worm before him, he seeth me not at all, and also I saw him but once from afar in his garden on a lofty seat, as he stretched forth his hand to command, and I made myself small that he take not offence at me and be distracted from his commanding, for how could I answer for it? But the upper high steward of his house I know from face to face and word to word, who is over the stores and domestics and tradesmen and governeth all. He loveth me and greeteth me in blithe words when he seeth me and sayeth: ‘Well, old man, so we see thee again and thou comest with thy pack before our house to over-reach us?’ That he sayeth in sheer jest, thou perceivest, thinking to flatter the merchant by calling him a cheat and we chuckle together. To him will I show thee and propose thee and if he be in good mood and can use a young slave for the house, so art thou provided for.”

“What king is that,” asked Joseph, “whose golden rewards the master beareth?”

He wanted to learn whither he was being taken, and where the house lay for which the old man destined him; but it was not this alone made him ask. He did not know it; but his thinking and asking were controlled by traditions which worked hither from the beginnings and the times of the forefathers. Abraham spoke out of him; he who in his arrogance toward man held the view that he could serve the Highest and Him alone, and whose thinking and doing had excluded with contempt all lower and lesser gods to address itself to the Most High. The grandson’s voice was pitched in a lower, more worldly key; yet the question was Abraham’s question. Joseph heard with indifference of the house steward, on whom after all, according to the old man, his immediate fate depended. For the Midianite he felt contempt because he knew only the steward and not even the nobleman to whom the house belonged. But even about the latter he troubled himself little. Above him was a higher, a highest, of whom the old man spoke; and he was a king. Toward him alone and urgently went Joseph’s thoughts and the speech of his tongue, unaware that it was guided not by chance or choice but by inheritance and tradition.

“What king?” repeated the old man. “Neb-mat-Re-Amun-hotpe-Nimmuria,” he said in liturgical accents as though repeating a prayer.

Joseph was startled. He had stood there, his arms folded across his back, but now he quickly released them and seized his cheeks in both palms.

“That is Pharaoh!” he cried. How could he not have understood? The name which the old man chanted was known to the ends of the earth and to the stranger people of whom Eliezer had taught him, to Tarshish and Kittim, to Ophir and Elam closing in the east. How could it have been meaningless to the instructed Joseph? Some names of the title pronounced by the Midianite: “Lord of truth is Re,” “Amun is satisfied,” were incomprehensible; but the Syrian addition “Nimmuria” (“He goes to his fate”) must have enlightened him. There were many kings and shepherds, every town had one, and Joseph had stood quietly as he put his question expecting to hear the name of some ruler of a fortified city by the sea, some Zurat, Ribaddi, Abdasherat, or Aziru. He had not been prepared to interpret the title in its most splendid and regal sense, in the most godlike and glorious significance which the word commands. Written inside a longish, upstanding annulet, guarded by falcon wings spread over it by the sun itself, it stood last of a glorious row of such names, losing themselves in the mist of the past, each similarly ringed and each illustrious. With each was associated the history of victorious campaigns, of far-extended boundary-stones and buildings world-famous for their magnificence; so that this last name itself connoted such a heritage of awe, such enhancement of the single life, as justified any homage and made quite comprehensible the involuntary start which Joseph gave.

“Certainly,” said the old man. “That is the great house that hath made great the house to which I will bring thee and will offer thee to my friend the overseer to try thy fortune.”

“Then wilt thou lead me down to Mizraim into the land of mud?” asked Joseph and felt his heart beat.

The old man, his head bent on one shoulder, gave it a shake.

“The question is like thee again. I know already from Kedema, my son, that out of childish conceit thou imaginest we lead thee hither or thither, though in truth we are taking our way where we take it, even without thee, and thou only comest thither where our way leadeth us. I do not travel to Egypt that I may bring thee thither, but because I have business there which will enrich me: I will buy things there which they are skilful in producing and are much sought after, such as glazed collars, camp-stools with pretty little legs, head-rests, draught-boards, chess-boards, and pleated linen aprons. These I will buy in the workshops and in the bazaars as cheap as the gods of the land will let me and take them back over the mountains of Canaan, the Retenu and Amor, into Mitanniland on the Euphrates and to the country of King Hattusil, where they have an eye for them and will spend money recklessly. Thou speakest of the ‘land of mud’ as though it were a land of filth, baked out of excrement like a bird’s nest and like an uncleaned stall. And yet it is the land whither to travel again I am resolved and where I shall perhaps be able to leave thee; the finest land in all the round of earth, with such exquisite customs that thou wilt seem to thyself like an ox before whom one plays the lute. Thou, wretched Amu, wilt make great eyes when thou seest the country beside the river of God, which is called there ‘the lands’ because it is two lands, and double-crowned, but Mempi, the house of Ptah, holds the balance between them. There range unthinkably vast spaces that antechamber the desert; there crouches the lion in the head-cloth, Hor-im-akhet, created before time, the mystery of the ages, at whose breast the king fell asleep, the child of Thoth, and in dreams had his head lifted up with most exalted promise. Thine eyes will stand out of thy head when thou seest the marvels and all the splendour and choiceness of the land that is called Kemt, because it is black with fruitfulness, not red like the poverty-stricken desert. But from what is it fruitful? Because of the river of God and from that alone. For it hath its rain and its fructifying semen not in heaven but on earth and it is the god, Hapi, the Strong Bull, who spreads himself out above it and stands over it full of blessing the space of a year, leaving behind the blackness of his power, wherein one may sow and harvest a hundredfold fruit. But thou speakest as though it were a dunghill.”

Joseph hung his head. He had learned that he was on his way to the kingdom of the dead; for the habit of regarding Egypt as the underworld, and its inhabitants as a people of Sheol, was born with him, and never had he heard otherwise, especially from Jacob. So then he was to be sold into the melancholy nether world, the brothers had sold him down thither, the well had been its appropriate entrance. It was very sad, he could have wept. Yet joy in the appropriateness balanced the sadness, his view that he was dead and the blood of the beast had been in truth his blood being so neatly confirmed by the old man’s disclosures. He had to smile—however near to tears on his own and Jacob’s account. Precisely down thither should he go, into the land which was the object of his father’s pronounced aversion, Hagar’s home, the monkey-land of Egypt! He recalled the prejudiced description with which Jacob had sought to make this land intolerable to his son, regarding it, without any actual knowledge, in the light of his own hostile and horrified principles, as the seat of worship of the past, of dalliance with death, of insensibility to sin. Joseph had always been inclined to a blithe mistrust of the justice of the picture, to that sympathetic curiosity which is regularly the consequence of parental moralizing and warning. If the good, worthy, and didactic man had known that his lamb was travelling Egyptwards, to the land of Ham, the bare, as he called it, because it was black on account of the black fruitful soil, which its god gave it! The confusion of thought was right indicative of the pious prejudice of his judgment, Joseph said to himself with a smile.

But the bond between son and father was not one of opposites alone. True, it was a diabolic joke that he should be travelling toward the utterly taboo; it was a youthful triumph thus to coquet with the moral terrors of the underworld. Yet with it, in his blood, was a mute resolve which must have gladdened the father’s heart: the resolve of the child of Abram not to let his eyes run over at sight of the elegance and the marvels so praised by the Ishmaelite; quite definitely not to admire too warmly the splendid civilization which awaited him. A deep and native spirit of mockery drew down the corners of his mouth at the mere thought of that elegance; and his contempt was to be a shield and buckler against the timidity which results from too great reverence.

He asked, looking up: “Is the house to which thou wilt bring me at Mempi, the dwelling of Ptah?”

“Oh, no,” the old man replied, “we must go farther up, that is down, I mean up the river, out of the land of the serpent into the land of the vulture. Thou askest in thy simplicity; for when I said to thee that the master of the house is fan-bearer on the king’s right hand, of course that means he must be where His Majesty the good god is, and whose house is at Wese, the city of Amun.”

Joseph learned much that evening by the sea, hosts of information thronged upon him. So he was going to No, No-Amun, the city of cities and talk of the world, a subject of conversation amongst the remotest populations, where rumour said that it had a hundred gates and more than a hundred thousand inhabitants. Would Joseph’s eyes then not run over, after all, when they caught sight of the metropolis? He saw that he must firmly resolve beforehand not to fall prey to vacant admiration. He stuck out his lips disdainfully. But despite his efforts to compose his features, to the honour of his own God, he could not quite escape a certain embarrassment. For he felt somewhat afraid of No, more particularly the name of Amun alarmed him: that mighty name, intimidating to everybody and having a domineering ring even in regions strange to the god. Trepidation seized him at the thought of entering the throne of the god’s cult and seat of his power. The sovereign of Egypt, ruler of the two lands, king of the gods, that was Amun. Joseph knew it well, and confusion dwelt in the thought of that unique power. Amun was the Highest—if indeed only in the eyes of the children of Egypt. It seemed it would be useful to speak of Amun and practise himself in talk of him. He said:

“Wese’s lord in his chapel and in his bark, that is one of the more exalted gods hereabouts?”

“The more exalted?” answered the old man. “Truly thou speakest not better than thy understanding. What thinkest thou that Pharaoh hath set before him of bread and cake, beer, wine, and geese, for his consuming? That is a god without compare, I tell thee; what treasures he calleth his own, movable and immovable, my breath would give out would I tell the tale of them, and the number of his scribes who administer all is like to the stars.”

“Wonderful,” said Joseph. “A very important god indeed according to all thou relatest. Only I asked, to be precise, not about his importance but about his nobility.”

“Bow down before him,” advised the old man, “since thou wilt live in Egypt, and make not too many distinctions between important and noble, as though one could not stand for the other and both were not all the same. For Amun’s are all the ships of the seas and rivers, and the rivers and seas are his. He is the sea and the land. He is also Tor-Neter, the cedar mountain, whose trunks grow for a barge called Amun’s-Front-is-Mighty. In Pharaoh’s shape he goeth in unto his first and true wife and begets Hor in the palace. He is Baal in all his members, doth that impress thee? He is the sun, Amun-Re is his name—doth that satisfy thy demands as to nobility, or not quite?”

“But I heard,” Joseph said, “he is a ram in the darkness of the innermost chamber.”

“I heard, I heard.... As thou hast understood, so speakest thou and not a doit better. Amun is a ram, just as Bastet in the land of the Delta is a cat, and the great writer of Schmun an ibis and an ape. For they are sacred in their animals and the animals sacred in them. Thou must learn much if thou wilt live in the land and wilt live before him, be it only as the lowest of his youthful slaves. How wilt thou see the god if not in the beast? The three are one: god, man, and beast. For if the divine wed with the beast, then it is the man, as Pharaoh when he is at the feast puts on a beast’s tail, according to ancient custom. And if on the other hand the beast wed with the man, then it is a god, and the divine is not otherwise to be regarded and understood than in such a marriage; thus you see Heqet, the great midwife, like a toad on the wall, to judge from her head, and Anpu, the Opener of the Way, dog-headed. Lo, in the beast man and god find themselves, and the beast is the sacred place of their meeting and their union, sacred and honourable in its nature as such. And very worthy of honour among feasts is that one in which the ram cohabits with the pure virgin in the city of Djedet.”

“I have heard of it,” Joseph said. “Doth my lord approve of the practice?”

“I?” asked the Ma’onite. “Leave an old man in peace! We are travelling merchants, middlemen, at home everywhere and nowhere, and for us the word holdeth good: ‘Nourish thou my belly, I honour thy customs.’ Heed it in the world, for it will behove thee too.”

“Never,” answered Joseph, “will I in Egypt in the house of the fan-bearer say a word against the honour of the feast of the covering. But between thee and me, let me point out that in this word ‘honourable’ lieth a snare for the unwary. For easily doth man hold the old for honourable, simply because it is old, and imagineth they are the same. But the catch is that sometimes we do reverence to the old when it is simply worn out and rotted with age. Then its honourableness is but seeming, and is in fact an abomination and indecency before the Lord. Just between you and me, the presentation of the human virgin at Djedet seems more like an indecency.”

“How wilt thou distinguish? And where should we be if every booby were to set himself up as the navel of the world and as a judge of what is sacred and what merely old, what still worthy of reverence and what an abomination? Soon there would be nothing sacred! I do not believe that thou wilt hold thy tongue and hide thy impious thoughts. For it is peculiar to such thoughts as thou hast that they must be uttered—I know that.”

“In thy presence, my lord, it is easy to learn to hold age and honour as the same.”

“Flatter me not with sweet words, for I am but a travelling merchant. Heed rather my warning, that thou run not up against the children of Egypt and speak to thy undoing. For certainly thou canst not keep thy thoughts; therefore must thou take care that thy thoughts are just, and not only thy words. Certainly nothing is more holy than the union of god, man, and beast in the sacrifice. Reckon to and fro between these three with reference to the sacrifice and they are resolved therein. For in the sacrifice are all three and each represents the other. And therefore Amun moves as sacrificial ram in the darkness of the furthermost chamber.”

“I know not rightly how I feel, my lord and purchaser, reverend merchant. It is so dark, while thou instructest me, and scattered sparkles of light trickle down like dust of precious stones from the stars. I must rub my eyes, pardon me for doing it, for I am dazed, and as thou sittest before me on thy mat, it is to me as though it were the head of a green frog that thou wearest, and as though thou squattest there wise and wide and comfortable, like a toad.”

“Seest thou that thou canst not hold thy thoughts, however offensive they may be? Why wilt thou and wouldst thou see a toad in me?”

“My eyes ask not if it is my will. Just like a squatting toad thou seemest to me under the stars. For thou wast Heqet, the great midwife, when the well bore me, and thou didst lift me from my mother.”

“Ah, chatterer! That was no great nurse that helped thee to the light. Heqet, the she-frog, is called great because she was by at the second birth and resurrection of the mangled one, when the lower world fell to him, but to Hor the upper, according to the belief of the children of Egypt, and Osiris became the First of the West, king and judge of the dead.”

“I like that. So then if one is going toward the west, one must at least become the first of those there. But instruct me, my lord: Is then Osiris, the sacrifice, so great in the eyes of the children of Kemt that Heqet became a great frog because she was midwife at his rebirth?”

“He is great entirely.”

“Great above the greatness of Amun?”

“Amun is great by reason of his kingdom, his renown affrights stranger peoples so that they cut their cedars for him. But Osiris, the mangled one, is great in the love of the people, all the people from Djanet in the Delta up to Heb, the elephant island. There is not one among all, from the coughing pack-slave of the quarry, who liveth millionfold, to Pharaoh, who liveth once and singly and worshippeth himself in his temple—I say to thee there is not one who did not know and love him and wish to find his grave in Abdu his city, at the grave of the mangled one, were it possible. And since it is not possible, yet they all hang fervently on him, trusting in the hope of becoming like him at their hour and to live for ever.”

“To be like God?”

“To be as the god and to be like him; that is, one with him, so that the dead man is Osiris and so is called.”

“What all thou sayest! But spare me, my lord, in thy teaching and help my poor understanding as thou helpedst me out of the womb of the well. For it is not for everyone’s understanding, that which thou wilt teach me here in the night by the slumbering sea, of the beliefs of the children of Mizraim. Shall I then understand that it would be in the power of death to change nature and for the dead to be a god with the beard of a god?”

“Yes, that is the confident belief of all the folk of the land and they all as one love it so fervently from Zoan to Elephantine for that they have had to wrest it for themselves in prolonged struggle.”

“They have wrested the belief for themselves in prolonged struggle and held out for it until the dawn?”

“They have won it. For in the beginning and originally it was only Pharaoh, he alone, Hor in the Palace, who when he died came to Osiris and became one with him so that he was like a god and lived for ever. But all those who cough, as they drag the heavy statues, all the brick-makers, the pot-drillers, those behind the plough and those in the mines, they have not rested and have struggled till they achieved it and made it good, so that they too now at their hour become Osiris and are called Osiris-Khnumhotpe, Osiris Rekh-mi-re after their death, and live for ever.”

“Again it pleaseth me, that which thou sayest. Thou hast chidden me for the view that every child of earth hath his own universe about him for himself alone and is the centre thereof. But in one way or the other it seemeth to me the children of Egypt shared the view, since each would be Osiris after his death, as in the beginning only Pharaoh, and have brought it to pass.”

“That is and remaineth foolishly spoken. For not the child of earth is the centre point, Khnumhotpe or Rekh-mi-re, but rather their faith and confident belief; they are all one in that, up the water and down, from the Delta to the sixth rapid: the belief in Osiris and his resurrection. For thou must know: not only one single time hath this very great god died and risen; rather he doth it ever anew in even ebb and flow before the eyes of the children of Kemt—he goeth down and cometh forth again mightily to stand as blessing over the land, Hapi, the Strong Bull, the river of God. Countest thou the days of the winter time, when the river is small, there are seven-and-twenty of them and they are the seven-and-twenty who were forsworn with Set, the wicked ass, and brought the king to his coffin. But at his hour he goeth forth, the growing, swelling, flooding, the increasing, the lord of bread, who begetteth all good things and maketh all life, by name Nourisher of the Land. They slaughter the oxen before him; but seest thou then that god and sacrifice are one, for he himself is a bull and an ox before them on earth and in his house: Hapi, the black, with the sign of the moon on his flank. But when he dieth he is preserved with balsam and swaddled and put away and is called Osiris-Hapi.”

“Lo then!” exclaimed Joseph, “hath he also brought it about, like Khnumhotpe and Rekh-mi-re, that he becometh Osiris when he dieth?”

“I think that thou mockest?” queried the old man. “I see thee little in the glimmering night, but I hear thee and it seemeth to me very much as though thou mockest. I tell thee, mock not in the land whither I am taking thee because simply I am travelling that way, and presume not in thy folly against the beliefs of its children, thinking that thou knowest better with thy Adon, rather adapt thyself piously to its customs; otherwise thou wilt be grievously disappointed. I have taught thee somewhat and initiated thee, and turned a few phrases with thee this evening to my amusement and to pass the time; for I am already old, and sometimes sleep faileth me. I had no other ground to speak with thee. Thou mayest say good-night now, that I may try to sleep. But pay heed to thy phrases.”

“Commanded is as good as done,” replied Joseph. “But how should I mock, since my lord hath so graciously instructed me this evening that I may hold out and not come to grief in the land of Egypt, and hath taught the culprit things of which I, a child of the masses, dreamed not, so new are they to me and not to be understanded of all. Might I know how I could thank thee I would. But since I know not, I will do something yet this evening for my benefactor, do that which I would not do, and answer a question before I leave thee, which thou askedst me. I will tell thee my name.”

“Wilt thou do that?” asked the old man. “Do so or rather do not so; I have not urged thee to it, for I am old and cautious and would rather not know what are thy connections, because I must take care not to involve myself therein and be guilty of wrong-doing through the knowledge.”

“Not at all,” Joseph replied. “Thou runnest no such danger. But at least thou must know how to call the slave, if thou wilt pass him on into this house of blessing in the city of Amun.”

“Then what is thy name?”

“Usarsiph,” answered Joseph.

The old man was silent. Though only a distance of respect was between them, they were aware of each other but as shadows.

“It is well, Usarsiph,” spoke the old man after a while. “Thou hast named me thy name. Take thy leave now, for with the sunrise we shall set forth.”

“Farewell,” Joseph saluted him in the dark. “May night cradle thee in softest arms and thy head slumber on her breast as thy childish head on thy mother’s heart.”