Adam & Eve (5 page)

“Life is a closed circle,” he told his friend Romi that night at dinner. His friend said nothing, but nodded. Romi provided many sweet foods for his friend to enjoy—sugared almonds, honeyed dates, candied oranges—but he could not sweeten his friend’s bitter mood, and Romi remained ignorant of its cause. For his part, all that evening Eyad felt his eyes shifting from the upturned corners of Romi’s smile to the satisfyingly smooth cheek of Romi’s pleasant wife.

qAfter Eyad went home, full of bitter satisfaction, a knock came on his door. A holy man, an imam, stood there and said he was aware of Eyad’s devotion to the faith. “You are a man of action,” he said. “There is an American woman who wears an amulet. She is coming to Egypt; her husband was an astrophysicist. The amulet is a piece for a computer; it contains blasphemous information about life beyond the stars.”

“The Quran speaks of no such evidence,” Eyad answered.

“People are easily misled. It is never for us to know the mind of God, blessed be his holy name. The truth is everlasting. There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.”

To these statements, Eyad nodded assent.

“Our resources are immense,” the imam went on. “We watch many people who interest us. You are one of them. We have a mission for you.”

“In whose name do you speak?”

“Perpetuity.”

“Give me a sign,” Eyad asked, but joy coursed through his body like a river that knows its origin and its destination.

With the tip of his finger, the visitor traced a smile on his own cheek, but he did not smile.

Eyad could not resist telling his old friend Romi, the master of English, that he had been chosen as a protector of the faith, in perpetuity.

“I have no quarrel with the other religions,” Romi said.

“You don’t understand. It is in concert with the Jews and even the Christians that we will act.”

“Almost I wish that you had not told me,” Romi said, but he put his arm affectionately around the shoulder of his second-best friend.

I
N THE THREE
years following my husband’s death, I never slid Thom’s memory stick into my computer, but I kept the memento as a tangible object, a pendant hanging on the black silk cord between my breasts. Although I promptly turned over Thom’s briefcase and printouts to the scientists, their work using spectroscopy to locate extraterrestrial life scarcely progressed after his death. As Thom and I had agreed in those last moments we spent together, I kept to myself not only his words to me, writ large on the face of the universe, but also the existence of the small red dot—that collapsed valentine, that drop of Thom’s blood.

In those years while the nations warred in the Middle East and parts of Asia, I lived in a depression, a deep crevice. Certainly I received no sign from within my own gloom or from the state of the nations that I should reveal the secret of extraterrestrial life. The idea of that distant life seemed unreal, the emblem of a trauma I needed to bury. Yet I always wore the memory stick.

After Thom’s death, I moved from Iowa City to New York City to a new position as an art therapist. When I was with my clients, my attention was absorbed to a great extent by the patients’ paintings and sculptures—their work as a whole and all its parts. I rejoiced in their achievements. That they
could create—begin, develop, and finish something! Wasn’t that the very template of sanity? At least of continuity, which was one of the hallmarks of sanity.

Only once in the presence of a patient did I have a mental lapse: of a patient’s white-and-gray rendering of the hospital cafeteria, I had involuntarily thought, “The Garden of Grief,” and I said, “It’s a wonderful garden,” when I had intended to say it was a wonderful
painting.
Rendered in neutral tones of ash and char, the painting had been the opposite of a wonderful, colorful garden, but I found consoling beauty in its vision. Another time—not with the patients—at a bookstore near Lincoln Center, I had looked at the array of appealing book covers and said, “What beautiful flowers.” Was
displacement
what I was after? A displacement from extended grief? Moving my work from Iowa City to New York had helped me leave some portion of sorrow behind. Not enough.

A new international symposium—in Egypt—had been organized to honor Thom, and I agreed to travel to Cairo to greet the group. I was glad to go, glad to have a mission, a new direction, a small but new duty to perform. I wore the memory stick like a shield over my heart.

After traveling alone from New York to Paris, I joined one of the scientists whom I’ve already mentioned in passing, our old friend Gabriel Plum the Sherlockian Brit, for the second half of the journey from Paris to Cairo. From the moment I hugged him at Charles de Gaulle, I found his tweedy aroma to be unexpectedly comforting. I’d always liked Gabriel, how a certain warmth and wit shone through his dry manner. Once aloft, we chatted brightly, then settled into moments of pleasant silence, as only old friends can do. From the window of the huge jet, I was admiring the ruggedness below of the mountains forming the spine of northern Italy when Gabriel leaned over and said quietly but with a certain British briskness, “I say, Lucy, suppose we get married one day?”

I burst into laughter, thinking he was making an old-friend joke.

Unperturbed, he went on. “Why not? We’ve known each other forever.”

A tremor of grief wobbled my chin, and I bit my lower lip.

With smooth aplomb, Gabriel transitioned into a question. “Could you fly a plane this size? What’s the biggest airplane you ever flew?”

“Corporate jet,” I answered. “And you?” It pleased me to remember that Gabriel was also fascinated with flying. “What are you flying these days?” Since I’d moved from Iowa to New York, I hadn’t flown much.

“Yes,” Gabriel answered; he sighed. “Nothing hot, the new Cessna.” He reached over and squeezed my knee. “For all your playing of Penelope,” he said kindly, “Thom is a Ulysses who will never come home.”

What I liked about Gabriel—he seemed as articulate and debonair as Tony Blair, the British prime minister who sent his troops to Iraq. Gabriel was more cynical, though.

Yet he had made me laugh. That spontaneous burst had let some daylight into my dark world.

On the difficult first day in Cairo, though I was exhausted from travel, I was scheduled to speak a few words of welcome to the symposium convened to continue Thom’s work. Arriving a bit late, I walked straight to the podium. From just the corner of my eye, I caught the peripheral movement of the Egyptian host—a drapery of white robes—rising in a gesture of respect. The other scientists remained seated; they knew me well: an ordinary wife of a revered man. Determinedly, I grasped the edges of the speaker’s stand. As I looked at the ELF team, I realized again that Thom was not only absent but dead; I pressed his memory stick—my talisman—against my breastbone to give me courage to speak into that void. Should I give the memory stick to them? Make a grand splash? There had been no sign. No revelation had occurred on the road to Now.

“Because this is the year 2020,” I said to them. Then stopped. My voice brought to mind an antique china doll, plain and white—the type called a “Frozen Charlotte”—its face crazed with minute cracks in the glaze. I was breaking up. I tried to fight down my grief, but my mind reached forward in my prepared remarks to grasp their closing sentences: “‘Twenty-twenty,’ Thom used to say to me, ‘might be the Year of Clear Vision.’ May you prove him right.” Then I mumbled, mortified by my naked emotion before the scientists, “Thank you for coming to this ancient land to pursue new truths, in Thom’s name.”

To supportive applause, I left the symposium quickly and entered the hallway. My hand closed convulsively over my talisman, but I considered jerking it off. I have never understood anger directed at a person who has died, but in that moment I felt a flash of hot anger at Thom for deserting me.

Just behind my shoulder as I hurried down the corridor, I heard the Egyptian host, Pierre Saad, padding along almost noiselessly in his soft sandals behind me. “Mrs. Bergmann,” he called quietly. I hesitated.

“Mrs. Bergmann, I am so sorry. Please wait.”

I stopped but, ashamed, I could not bring myself to meet his eyes. Three years after Thom’s death, I should not have made a public display of frozen grief. With bowed head, I stared at the weave of the Egyptian’s white robe, hanging straight down like a choir robe. In a flash, I remembered how I had pulled off my Methodist robe in children’s choir and—to my parents’ horror—refused anymore to sing praises to God, after my grandfather’s death.

“We should not have asked you to do something so difficult.” His accented English seemed as softly padded as the sound of his footfalls. “It is entirely my fault.” His voice was too sympathetic; I could not look up at him without dissolving in tears.

Focusing on his sandal straps and on the square-trimmed brown-pink toenail of the big toe on one foot, I whispered, “I need to leave here.”

“Of course.” His voice modulated into formula: “I completely understand, and I am so very sorry that you are upset.” Suddenly, in a new rush of emotion, he asked urgently, “But where will you go?”

“Nag Hammadi,” I answered automatically. It was just a name, a place Thom and I had wanted to visit because ancient scrolls pertaining to the gospels had been found close to that Egyptian village. Those pages, as well as the death of my grandfather, had played a role in my rejection of the standard model of Christianity, the ardent faith of my parents.

“There, then,” the faceless foreign voice continued, apparently satisfied. “Nag Hammadi. We have a museum there now. I hope we will meet again.” He turned away to rejoin the symposium.

That night in Cairo—after grief had risen up like a floating stone in my throat, then sunk again—Gabriel and I shared a drink in the Marriott, a hotel
with a largely foreign clientele, certainly non-Muslim. The hotel management maintained special permission to set up a bar to sell liquor. The hotel also hosted a gambling casino, which Egyptians were forbidden by Islamic law even to enter. I felt grateful to Gabriel for choosing a liberated hotel. While I was by no means an alcoholic—at least in my own opinion—I had noticed that a private glass of sherry at bedtime did a lot to ameliorate my chronic sadness.

Over drinks, Gabriel encouraged me to take a cruise-and-camp riverboat tour while he participated in the scientific meeting. Tilting my sociable martini glass toward him, I said, “There
is
a balm in Gilead, thank God.” Wishing that the cone-shaped glass was a cylinder holding three times as much of the potent alcohol, I savored its flavor as I swallowed. I wondered if Gabriel had anticipated I would have a minor meltdown at the opening meeting, that I would need recuperation.

He had already researched the tour: a flight to Luxor to see the temple ruins, a Nile cruise with stops along the way—another flight to the Aswan dam—the gigantic stone figures of Abu Simbel—and a return to Luxor, where he would join me.

“Time in Egypt,” he said, swirling his Manhattan, “casts a very long shadow. When I’m in this country, I always think how short our human lives are. It’s depressing. Think how many of us it would require to lie end-to-end to take us back to the time of Moses.”

The mixture of fatigue and gin allowed me to blurt out, “Moses. You believe in the biblical Moses, and I’m not religious.” Had he actually proposed that we marry? I remembered glancing down at the bony mountains of northern Italy. “What makes you think we could get over our differences about religion?”

“I’m a gentleman,” he answered, wryly smiling. “And an Anglican. We don’t ever need to talk about our religious beliefs.” He glanced up and down my body in a way too intentionally obvious to be offensive. “You might even enjoy High Church ceremony once every few years. At Christmas, perhaps.” He tilted his head, his expression both shrewd and puckish.

For a moment I remembered that Thom had worried that Gabriel’s faith might be threatened by the discovery of extraterrestrial life. I recalled the pro-found
repercussions of Copernicus’s astounding notion that Earth was not the center of the universe. Yet the church had survived.

I laughed. “I hate to admit it, but I do like the ceremony sometimes.” On the heels of laughter, I fought down hysteria, my engulfing grief for Thom, who happily celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah. “Religion is always a quest,” Thom had said, though he was not religious. “Stop questing and know you’ve become a fossil.”

“I’m not as dedicated to endless research as Thom was, bless him,” Gabriel went on in his casual, friendly way. “But if we were married, we could travel constantly. Where would you like to go with me?”

“Russia. I loved Tolstoy’s novels.
Anna Karenina.”

“The Russian Madame Bovary.”

“Their authors murdered them, don’t you think?” I asked.

He ignored the question. “What about
War and Peace?
What about Dostoyevsky?”

“Anna K.
is a better novel than
War and Peace.
The characters are more complex. But Dostoyevsky—he’s too extreme for my taste, a fanatic.”