Читать книгу Joseph in Egypt (Vol. 2) - Thomas Mann - Страница 7

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We know that Mut’s well-intentioned parents had betrothed and married her to the son of Huia and Tuia when she was still a child. We need to remember this; for it followed that she had got accustomed to the formal nature of her married life, while the moment when she might have realized its actual character still lay in fluid darkness. Thus she had nominally lost her maiden state at too early an age—but there it stopped. Hardly yet even a maiden, rather a half-grown girl, she found herself a spoilt darling, head of an aristocratic “house of women,” in command of every luxury, every flattery, surrounded by the half-savage servility of naked Moorish women and kneeling eunuchs; first and titular wife and chief over fifteen other idle, passive, and voluptuous females chosen for their beauty, of very varied origins, and themselves the empty and honorary apanage of a courtier who could not enjoy them. Of these dreamy-eyed, chattering females she was the queen; they hung on her words, were plunged in melancholy when she was sad, and burst into delighted cackles when she was merry. They quarrelled addle-patedly over Petepre’s favours when he came to the women’s house to play a game at draughts with Mut-em-enet, while amber brandy and sweets were handed round. So then she was the star of the harem, and at the same time the female head of the whole establishment, Potiphar’s wife in a higher and more special sense than the concubines; the real mistress and—under other circumstances—the mother of his children. She occupied when she chose quarters of her own, separated from her husband’s by the northern columned hall where Joseph performed his reading service. And she was hostess and housewife at those exclusive entertainments and musicales given by Petepre, the friend of Pharaoh, to the high society of Thebes—in return for which they were entertained at similar functions in aristocratic houses in the city.

It was a nervous life, full of elegant obligations—superfluous ones if you like, but no less consuming to the energies for all that. We know that in every civilization that ever existed the demands of social life, of culture itself, tend to choke with luxuriant detail the overburdened forces of the upper-class woman; so that the life of her soul and her senses is submerged in conventional circumstance and she never actually gets round to it at all. A cool, unoccupied heart, not troubled because unaware of a lack, and thus not even pathetic, becomes a habitual state of existence. In all times and regions these worldly women, possessing no temperament, have existed in high society. One may go so far as to say that it matters little whether the husband of such a one is a captain of troops in an actual or only in an honorary sense. The ritual of the toilette is equally important whether its aim is to preserve desire in the breast of a husband or is practised as an end in itself and as a social duty. Mut, like other ladies of her station, devoted hours to it daily. There was the painfully elaborated care of her finger- and toe-nails, until they shone like enamel; the perfumed baths, the depilatories, the massage to which she subjected her beautiful body. There was the critical business of applying drops and paint to her eyes—beautiful enough already, with their irises of metallic blue and their practised and sparkling glances, they became veritable jewels through the artful application of rouge, pencil, and other sweet enhancements. There was the care of her hair; her own was a half-length mass of shining black locks, which she liked to dust with gold or blue powder—and besides that the wigs, in various colours, braided, plaited, in tresses, and with pearl fringes. There was the fastidious adjustment of the snowy garments to the embroidered sashes pressed by the iron into lyre-shape and the little shoulder-capes moulded into tiny pleats; the choice of ornaments for head, neck, and arms, presented by kneeling slaves. And throughout all this nobody must so much as smile: the nude Moorish girls, the sewing-women, the barber eunuchs preserved their solemnity nor did Mut herself smile, for the slightest carelessness or neglect in these high matters would have called down the reproach of the great world and made a scandal at court.

Then there were the visits in her carrying-chair to friends of like station; and the receiving of them at home. And Mut was lady-in-waiting to Tiy, the wife of the god; she must attend at the palace Merimat and like her husband carry the fan. Also she was summoned to the evening water-parties which the consort of Amun held on the artificial lake called into being by Pharaoh’s command in the royal gardens, where torches of the recently invented coloured fire steeped the water in sparkling hues. And then—as we are reminded by our mention of the mother of the god—there were the famous honorary religious duties, functions combining the social with the priestly, and responsible more than anything else for the stern and haughty expression of Mut’s eyes. These duties arose out of her membership of the order of Hathor and her capacity of wife to Amun; they fell to her as wearer of the cow’s horns with the sun’s disk between; in short, as “goddess in her time.” It is strange how much this side of Eni’s life contributed to heighten her cool worldliness as a great lady and to keep her heart empty of softer dreams. It did so in connection with the titular character of her marriage—though there was no necessary connection between them. Amun’s house of women was in no sense a place of the intactæ. Restraint of the flesh was far from being an attribute of the great mother as whose representatives Mut and her fellow-members performed their feasts. The queen, the god’s bedfellow and mother of the coming sun, was the protectress of the order. Its head, as I have already more than once mentioned, was a married woman, wife of Amun’s prepotent high priest; and married women preponderated among its members—such as Renenutet, wife of the overseer of bulls (we pass over further comment on the state of her morals). In fact, Mut’s temple office had to do with her marriage only in so far as she owed, socially speaking, the one to the other. But in her own mind, privately, she did what Huia the hoarse had done in his conversation with his old bed-sister: she connected her priestly office with the singularity of her marriage and, without putting the thing into words, found it suitable, indeed quite the proper thing, for a wife of the god to have an earthly husband made like Petepre. And she knew how to convey this conception to her social circle, so that they sustained her in it and thought of her membership in the order of Hathor as that of a being set apart and religiously chaste. And all this contributed even more than Mut’s lovely voice and the elegance of her dancing to the pre-eminence of her position in the order—almost equal indeed to the lofty station of its head. In this way did Mut’s will-power mould outward conditions and create for her those super-compensations of which the mute depths of her being so painfully stood in need.

Was she a nymphomaniac? A loose woman? The idea is absurd. Mut-em-enet was a saint, a chaste moon-nun of high social position, whose strength was consumed partly in the demands of her highly cultured life, but partly, so to speak, was temple property and transmuted into spiritual pride. Thus had she lived: as Potiphar’s first and titular wife, petted and indulged, carried in the arms of subordinates, knelt to and bowed to from all sides. Her compensations were so superior that not even in dreams was she confronted by images from that sphere so well represented by her sinuous mouth. By goose-wishes, to put it arrestingly! For it is false to regard the dream as a free and savage domain where all that is forbidden to the waking thought may come out and revel unashamed. What the waking state definitely does not know, what is simply shut off from it, the dream does not know either. The border between the two is fluid, it permits of interpenetration; there is but one space, through which the soul hesitantly moves, and that it is one, indivisible for the conscience and the pride, is proved by Mut’s bewilderment, the panic shame she suffered not only in her waking hours but when she for the first time dreamed of Joseph.

When did that happen? In her world, the world of our narration, they were careless about counting the years; and we are somewhat conditioned by their habit. We must estimate as best we can. Eni was certainly several years younger than her husband, whom we have seen as a man at the end of the thirties when Joseph was sold to him. In the meantime he had added seven years to his age. She, then, was not like him in the middle of her forties, but several years less; certainly, however, a mature woman, much older than Joseph. Just how much older I am reluctant to ask; my reluctance is justifiable, springing as it does from a profound respect for the feminine cult of the toilette-table, which can go far to annihilate the years, and in its results upon the senses surely possesses a higher veracity than mere reckoning with a pencil can have. Since the day when Joseph first saw his mistress, as she swayed past him in her golden chair, he had increased his charms for the feminine eye. But she had not increased hers—at least not for one who saw her uninterruptedly. Woe to the preparers of creams and the massage-eunuchs if those years had been able to show any change to her disadvantage! But her face, with its saddle-nose and strange shadowy hollows in the cheeks, though it had never been actually beautiful, still preserved its mixture of conformity and caprice, of fashionable convention and anomalous charm, which it had always had; though the disturbing contradiction between the eyes and the sinuous mouth had probably been accentuated. To one inclined to be attracted by the disturbing—and there are such people—she had probably only grown more lovely.

The beauty of Joseph, on the other hand, had probably outgrown the stage of youthful charm for which it had always been so bepraised. At four-and-twenty he was still—perhaps only then entirely—a figure to marvel at. But his beauty had ripened beyond that equivocalness of his youth while preserving its general effectiveness; and specifically in that it made a much more direct appeal to the feminine emotions. It had been ennobled, because it had become more manly. His face was no longer that of the Bedouin boy, insidiously seductive—though still reminiscent of it at times, as when—though not at all short-sighted—he narrowed his eyes and veiled them in the way that Rachel had done. But it was fuller and more serious, and darkened by Egypt’s sun; its features too had grown more regular and refined. I have referred already to the changes in his figure, his movements, and the sound of his voice—due, these last, to the tasks he had performed. We must add, in order to get a true picture of him as he now was, that his whole appearance had become more refined, being worked upon by the cultural influences of the land. We must think of him arrayed in the white linen of the Egyptian upper classes; transparent, so that the under-garments showed through; with short sleeves, revealing the forearms adorned with enamel rings. His head was bare, dressed in its own smooth hair, save on formal occasions, when he wore a light wig of the best sheep’s-wool, something between a head-cloth and a peruke, fitting the top of his head with thick, fine, even strands like ribbed silk. Along a diagonal line it changed into small overlapping curls, like tiles on a roof, which came down on neck and shoulders. Round his neck besides the gaily coloured collar he wore a flat chain made of reed and gold beads, with a scarab amulet. His face had slightly changed its expression; it had a hieratic cast, due to his make-up; for he accentuated the line of the brows and lengthened the eyes evenly toward the temples. Thus he looked as he went about, setting his long staff before him, among the work-people, the steward’s first “mouth.” Thus he went to market, or stood behind Petepre’s chair and beckoned to the waiters. Thus the mistress saw him, in the dining-room or the house of women, when he came before her, submissive in posture and speech, to deal with some household matter. And thus it was she actually first saw him; for previously her eyes never dwelt on the purchased slave, not even at the time when first he had known how to warm the heart of Potiphar. Even while he lived and waxed as by a spring, it had needed Dudu’s complainings to open her eyes to the slave’s appearance.

And even after her eyes had been opened, Dudu’s tongue playing the part of calf’s foot, she was far from properly seeing him. When after hearing of his offensive advancement in the house she had had to look at him, it was solely with stern-eyed curiosity that she gazed. The element of danger (we must put it like that, if we are concerned for her pride or her peace of mind) consisted in that it was Joseph on whom her eyes fell, Joseph whose eyes met hers at seconds of time. It was a circumstance big with fate; and big enough too that little Bes, in his dwarfish wisdom, had perceived in it a hidden and fearful danger. He saw that Dudu’s malice was bringing about a situation more destructive than anything he had dreamed of or could dream of, and that the opening of the eyes might be even all too wide. Inborn fear and dread of powers which he saw in the image of the fire-breathing bull made him prone to such intuitions. But Joseph, with culpable lightness—in this point I am not inclined to spare him—had affected not to understand, and assumed that Bes was dreaming, though probably in his heart he was of the same mind. For he too laid stress on the moments in the dining-room—less for what they meant than for the fact that they actually happened; in his folly he was glad that he was no longer empty air for the mistress, but that her look rested on him as on a human being, no matter how angry her gaze. And our Eni?

Well, Eni was no wiser than Joseph. She too had affected to misunderstand the dwarf. That she looked angrily at Joseph excused her in her own mind for looking at him at all. And this was a mistake from the very beginning; pardonable before she realized whom she saw when she looked, but after that less excusable and more culpable every time. The unhappy creature refused to see that the stern-eyed curiosity with which she regarded her husband’s body-servant was losing its sternness, leaving the curiosity deserving of another and less orthodox name. She supposed herself to share in Dudu’s indignation; she felt bound, indeed, to share in it on religious grounds, or—which was the same thing—on political and partisan ones: on the grounds of her relation with Amun, who could not fail to see in the preponderance of a Shabirite slave in Petepre’s house an insult to himself and a surrender to the Asiatic tendencies of Atum-Re. She had to make the anger last in order to justify the pleasure she felt in entertaining it; so she called it righteous anger and zeal for her cause. Our capacity for self-deception is amazing. When Mut had an hour free from her social duties—a short summer hour or a longer winter one—she would lie stretched out on her couch at the edge of the square basin let into the pavement of the open columned hall in the house of women. And lying there, watching the bright fish, seeing the floating lotus blossoms, she would muse to the accompaniment of soft stringed music played by an oily-locked little Nubian girl crouching at the back of the hall. And she was quite convinced of the tenor of her musings: she was considering the problem how, despite the obstinacy of her husband and Beknechons’s statesmanlike vagueness, she could prevent this evil thing, that a slave from Zahi-land, one of the Ibrim, waxed great in the house. And so considering she omitted to notice how much pleasure it gave her to think about it. Though surely she knew that her pleasure had no other source than the intent to think about Joseph. Had we no pity for her we might be angered at such blindness. She even did not notice that she had begun to look forward to the meal-hour in the dining-room, when she might see him. She fancied that her pleasure sprang from her purpose to dart angry looks at him; it is pathetic, but she never dreamed that her sinuous lips curved in a self-forgotten smile, remembering how at her stern fixed gaze his startled, humble one would be swiftly hidden beneath his lowered lids. It was enough, she thought, if at such times she frowned her indignation at the affront to her house. Had the dwarf’s little wisdom sought to warn her too, if it had spoken of the fire-breathing bull or hinted that the artificial fabric of her life was already shaken and threatened to totter to its fall, perhaps her face, too, might have got red. But she would have said that she blushed for anger at such nonsensical babble; she would have outdone herself in extravagant, hypocritical merriment and in deliberate misunderstanding of such misgivings. Who would be deceived by these exaggerated disclaimers? Certainly not he who sought to dissuade her. For they were but meant to dissemble the path of adventure which the deluded soul is bent on treading. To delude oneself, up to the point where it is too late to turn back—that one must do at all costs. To be awaked, warned, called back to oneself before it is too late: there lies the danger which is at all costs to be avoided. Then let the kind-hearted observer beware of making himself absurd with unwarranted sympathy. Let him not benevolently assume that the human being’s deepest concern is for peace, tranquillity, the preservation of the carefully erected structure of his life from shattering and collapse. For, to put it mildly, the assumption is unwarranted. Too much evidence goes to show that he is headed straight for ecstasy and ruin—and thanks nobody in the very least who would hold him back. In that case—what use?

As for Enti, the kind-hearted observer must—not without some bitterness—take it for granted that she was brilliantly successful in gliding over the moment when it was not yet too late and she was not yet quite lost. A moment of terrifying rapture and realization came to her with the dream I spoke of, which she dreamed about Joseph. Then truly she was aghast and shook in all her limbs. She remembered that she was a being endowed with reason, and she behaved accordingly. That is to say, she imitated the conduct of a reasonable being; mechanically she behaved like one, but not actually as one. She took steps, for the success of which she could no longer sincerely wish—confused, unworthy steps, before which the well-wishing friend must simply hide his head and take care lest he feel an unseasonable pity.

It is almost impossible to put a dream into words and relate it. For in a dream little importance attaches to the actual matter and everything to the aura and atmosphere, the incommunicable sense of horror or of blessedness, or both, which wraps it and which often till long afterwards engrosses the soul of the dreamer. In this tale of ours dreams play a decisive rôle; its hero dreams greatly and childishly; and there will be others in it who will dream. But how hard would all of them find it even to approach the inwardness of what they dream, how unsatisfactory would they find every effort to do so! We have only to recall Joseph’s dream of the sun, moon, and stars, and the helpless insufficiency with which he told it. I may then be forgiven if in relating Mut’s dream I fail quite to convey the impression it made upon the dreamer, both when she dreamed it and afterwards. But having said so much, I may not withhold an accounting of it.

She dreamed, then, that she sat at table in the hall with the blue columns; in her chair on the dais, beside old Huia, and ate her dinner in the tactful silence which always prevailed. But this time the silence was particularly forbearing and profound; the four companions not only refrained from speech but were even noiseless in all their motions, so that in the stillness one could hear the breathing of the servants as they passed to and fro—so distinctly indeed that they seemed not to be breathing so much as panting and would have been audible even were the silence less profound. The quick, soft sounds were disquieting; perhaps because Mut was listening, perhaps for some other reason, she lost sight of what she was doing and gave herself a wound. She was cutting a pomegranate with a sharp little bronze knife, when it slipped and went into her hand, making rather a deep gash in the soft flesh between the thumb and the four fingers, so that it bled. There was a good deal of blood, ruby red like the juice of the pomegranate; she saw it flowing with distress and shame. Yes, she felt ashamed, despite the beautiful ruby colour; partly of course because it stained the pure white of her garment, but also aside from and beyond this she felt disproportionately ashamed and sought to hide the blood from those about her. Successfully as it seemed, or as they wanted it to seem, for they assiduously behaved—with more or less ease and convincingness—as though they saw nothing at all. None of them troubled themselves over her distress, which distressed her the more. She did not want to betray that she was bleeding, she was ashamed; at the same time she was indignant that nobody cared to see it, nobody lifted a finger, but by common consent left her to herself. Her waitress, the affected damsel in the spider-web garment, bent over the little one-legged table absorbed in putting things on it to rights; old Huia at her side, his head waggling, chewed away toothlessly at a gilt thighbone whereon were stuck pieces of cake soaked in wine. He held it by one end in his hand and acted as though he were entirely consumed in chewing. Petepre, the master, raised his cup behind him over his shoulder, for his Syrian cup-bearer to fill it. And his mother, old Tuia, was cheerfully nodding her great pale face with the blind slits of eyes in the direction of the distracted Mut; though it was hard to say whether she even saw her daughter-in-law’s predicament. And Mut, in her dream, went on bleeding, staining her white frock and feeling silent bitterness at the general indifference to her plight; also a distress which had nothing to do with that, but with the bright crimson blood itself. She rued indescribably the seeping and spouting flow; it was such a pity, such a pity! She felt so sorry for it, so sorry—she felt a deep, unspeakable anguish in her soul, not about herself and her plight, but about the sweet blood that was flowing away. She gave a short dry sob. Then she realized that in her trouble she had forgotten her duty to Amun, the obligation to look angrily at that offence to her house, the Canaanite slave, and do her part in discountenancing his advancement. So she darkened her brows and looked fiercely across at him where he stood behind Petepre’s chair: young Osarsiph. Then he, as though summoned by her look, left his place and office and came toward her. And was near to her, so that she felt his nearness. But he had come near to her to quench the flowing of her blood. For he took her injured hand and carried it to his mouth, so that the fingers lay on his one cheek and the thumb on the other, the wound on the lips between. Then her blood stood still with ecstasy and was stanched. But in the hall, while she was being healed, there was unpleasant and disquieting bustle. All the servants there ran about distraught; light-footed, indeed, but panting in confused chorus. Petepre, the master, had veiled his face, his mother was touching the bowed and covered head with her outspread hands, desperately groping for him with her blind, upturned gaze. But Huia—Eni saw him get up and threaten her with his gold thighbone, from which all the cake had been munched. He scolded her soundlessly and his sorry little beard wagged up and down. The gods knew what abuse he was shaping with his toothless mouth and busy tongue! Perhaps its tenor was the same as what the servants were saying as they panted. For loud whispers formed themselves out of the panting and came to her ears: “To the fire, to the flood, to the dogs, to the crocodile!” They said it over and over. She had that awful whispering chant still in her ear when she emerged from her dream; cold with horror, then hot with ecstasy of her healing; and aware that life’s rod had been laid about her shoulders.