The Book of the Dead (30 page)

Uncle Menny assured me that there wouldn’t be a problem getting onto the plane. “Just smile and act normal and they’ll wave you through,” he said. I don’t think Uncle Menny’s travelled for a long time.

I stood in the queue, shifting my eyes to the reflective steel on the escalators, and I thought I might make it. My djellaba covered most of my body and, as far as I could see, I looked like several other of the men lining up to board. The sight of the guards bristling with bored rage and weaponry dotted along the queue, spot-checking passports and scrutinising faces, was enough to raise a sweat and tingle the nerves of anyone with a beating heart. For my part, I concentrated on not flaking too much.

As they made a show of examining the other passengers, I shifted my weight from foot to foot, easing my muscles gently. It’s not good for me to stand too still in one place without sufficient strapping. I was wearing one of the elasticised cotton body stockings Tadu’s maids had prepared for me; they make travelling a lot easier, but they’re not as supportive as full funereal binding. I took a small sip of honey infusion to keep my vocal cords moist in case I needed to talk, but not enough to get my insides too dank.

You might think I’d be used to waiting. You’d think, since I’m over three thousand years old, that forty-five minutes in a boarding queue would be as the blink of an eye. No. You reach a saturation point. I was speaking to Kiya about this the other day. She said she thinks humans have a finite amount of patience, a certain number of hours that they can put their lives on hold for the whims of others. I agreed. So many of you entirely lose your patience well before your allotted eighty-odd years, so you can imagine what it’s like for us. Or maybe you can’t. Anyhow. It’s of no consequence.

By the time I got to the head of the queue, I had passed two spot checks. I was already looking forward to sitting back and pressing my face to the window, watching the land and the delta reel away from us. There was only the final guard remaining, one with unnaturally pale eyes and a moustache in a style that has never, to my knowledge, been fashionable. His glare was enough to send a tic through my thigh muscle.

I’d gone through this. I’d prepared. I thought I looked fine. I had on a wig of natural hair and had slathered my face with bees’ wax to make it look less… dead.

“Passport,” the man said.

I fished inside the robe and, allowing only my gloved fingertips to protrude from the sleeve, handed the booklet to the guard, praying that the scribes had forged the appropriate document.

The man looked at the picture, then up at me, several times.

I should have held my nerve – well, my sinew – but just as the man was about to hand back my passport and wave me through, Uncle Menny’s words ran through my head:
Smile and act normal.

It was the smile that did it.

I parted my lips and hoped the man wouldn’t hear the crackling, but as I did, the honey infusion chose that moment to equalise itself with a bubble of gas from my interior.

The guard jerked his head away as if struck. He covered his face with his hands and staggered backwards. Eyes watering, he crossed to his colleague, fanning his face and histrionically clutching at his throat, darting me looks of revulsion. I knew I had spoiled my chances of boarding, but I couldn’t just turn and leave, knowing that in this climate I might be shot in the back if I tried. I had to wait through the humiliation of being formally interrogated and rejected before I could simply return to the terminal and call for a lift home.

To cut a long story short, I eventually had to be shipped to Paris in a crate.

I was unloaded at Charles de Gaulle airport’s cargo wing in the middle of the night and, once I heard the porters move away, I uncrated myself, dusted off my djellaba and pulled myself into a truck bound for a gallery in the 4th arrondissement.

There are some critics among my people, especially from the older families, who think that modern society descended into an underworld of teeming incivility. They sit cloistered in the deepest, driest chambers, huddled around their dingy fires, muttering their plaints to Osiris and Anubis, Nephthys and Neith, whomever might assist them to erase the vermin from the face of the land and usher in the next age, but of course it doesn’t happen. In my opinion, the elders would be less disgruntled if, instead of complaining about the awfulness of contemporary society, they had a double scoop at Chercher la Crème on the rue Vieille du Temple.

Now, when your entrails have been removed and placed in jars and your orifices sewn shut, you need to be careful about what you eat, knowing that you will have to clean yourself out later, tamp yourself dry, then pack your innards with dry natural fibres, natron and the right sort of sawdust. You shouldn’t really have anything that will spoil before you are able to perform these ablutions. Nefertiti reminds me of this regularly, but sometimes I can’t resist. I was on an adventure, and would treat myself to ice cream.

Ah, Paris!

I hadn’t visited in a long time, and much had changed. I know Baron Haussmann had his detractors but the broad boulevards he cut through the clutter appealed to me. When I was in charge of commissioning buildings back in the day, I was all for grand-scale monumentalism, even if my erections were somewhat subtler than those of certain families that came before. The citizens of Paris are able to see the sky. They can plant deciduous trees in great rows along the streets. Just marvellous.

But standing there on the pavement, finishing my cherry-rose and orange ice cream under the turning plane trees on the Place Baudoyer, fine spring rain filtering onto my retardant face, I knew I was avoiding the real purpose of my visit. Mother had sent me here for an important reason. Signs up the rue de Rivoli towards the Louvre, the Tuileries and beyond kept drawing my eye, and I forced my gaze away, feeling that familiar melange of guilt and irritation. I didn’t have to see him until tonight. Why shouldn’t I take in the sights, I thought, and have some fun while I’m here?

I shook off the guilt and strolled on. One thing I’d been very keen to do was try the metro. I’d been on the London underground back when it was newly built, and of course the Cairo metro, convenient as it was, hardly compared. Once in your veins, the speed and whoosh of the tunnelling machines becomes addictive. I made my way to the closest stop and looked at the map. While I was tracing the longest of the lines, I was shoved in the back and my face hit the plasticised covering of the map. Happily nothing fell off. I turned to see three youngsters in puffed-up jackets and large trousers skipping down the stairway into the station, chortling mirthlessly.

“Reviens à l’Arabie, vieillard!” one of them shouted out as they descended.

Only the smallest boy, one with pink skin and short-cropped yellow hair, looked back, and his face changed somewhat as he glanced at my visage under my cowl. Was it a look of pity? Despite myself, I thought back to when I had reigned. Children had looked at me in an altogether different way back then. I remembered how the plains would roll endlessly ahead of me, submitting below my pleasantly coloured feet. How industrious the children had been back then; how respectful.

I was starting to sound like the elders, but my job here was to communicate a more tolerant attitude. I regarded the map. At the end of the line was La Defense, which suited me perfectly. I had read about the swathe of modern monoliths Pharaoh Mitterrand had built on the outskirts of the city, and I was interested to see if his Grande Arche and his monumental concourse would live up to the hype it had fleetingly inspired among my family some years ago. “See!” Uncle Menny said at the time, trying to win over the elders. “There is still grandeur in the world.” They wanted none of it, muttered back at him, called it “a playground for plague-bearing rat-babies” or something similar in their degraded archaic vocabulary. But I thought it would be worth a look, and besides, I thought, tapping the terminal yellow dot on the metro map, the further the trip took me from where I had to go, the better. I could mute the call of the ages by immersing myself in a brash and modern place, if only for an hour or two.

I bought a ticket from a woman in the booth. She didn’t look up from her magazine as she pushed my change back at me through the slot. I descended deeper into the tunnel and was caught by an unexpected panic. I have come all this way, I thought, only to be buried again. I had an urge to escape up the stairs, to feel the rain and see the grey sky and smell the trees and the fug of the thick air, but the promise of Pharaoh Mitterrand’s broad concourse kept me where I was, waiting with the throng of citizens for the next train.

A wind rose out of the tunnel to our right and the train, liveried in soothing marine hues and informal hieroglyphs, pulled up at the platform. Hurried as they were, most of the passengers kept a respectful distance from me as I pulled myself into the carriage. The doors were already closing as I found purchase on the steel pole. I felt something crackle as the train jerked off and I splayed to keep upright. A young woman with headphones smiled up at me and stood, gesturing me into the seat. I was about to decline her offer when the carriage swung about a bumpy turn and I ended up sprawling into the space she had just vacated.

I suppose I
am
old, but it still hurts to admit it.

The commuter next to me, talking on his phone, shifted away from me as I straightened myself.

At the next station, three men with accordions and a loudspeaker squeezed on and entertained the citizens with jolly music. It wasn’t much to my taste, but I admired the men’s civic spirit. When we arrived at the La Defense stop, it took some effort to stand and make my way out of the carriage. The passengers jostled past as I hauled myself up the stairs by pulling on the banister. Gradually I started warming up again and the going was easier. Near the top of the final flight, I felt a hand on my arm. I wanted to pull away but the grip was firm and I was wary of disconnecting a joint. I turned to look at my assailant. It was the same woman who had ceded her seat.

“Are you all right, sir?” she said in English. And then, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak much French.”

I speak several languages. “Thank you. I am,” I said, trying to suggest with subtle motions that she let go of my arm.

“Let me help you.”

“That’s not necessary,” I said. But still she held onto me, and she didn’t let go until I was out of the station. When I looked around, I had to gasp. If we’d had pliable steel and glass and copious water, this grand clearing might have sprung from the imaginations of several of the pharaohs. I stared upwards at the gargantuan columns, gleaming blue and silver even in the subdued light.

“Where are you from?” the woman asked.

“Egypt,” I said.

“Have you come on holiday?” she asked.

“Uh, yes. Some sightseeing. I also have a meeting.”

She eyed me. “Well, good luck.”

“Thank you for your help,” I said, rubbing my arm where she had grasped it. “It was gallant.”

“Any time. Enjoy your trip.”

I watched the young woman walk away, considering how things have changed over time, and also how they are much the same as they’ve ever been. I remembered the kindness of my maids when I was small, those who didn’t make it, those who weren’t so well preserved. I strolled on, up the stairs of the Grande Arche, a hollow cube, lopsided but monumental. Towards the top, I thought about sitting on the steps but they were littered with cigarette filters and discs of ground-in chewing gum. I wanted to keep my garments clean for the meeting. I turned and looked along the avenue all the way to Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe, whose splendour Mitterrand’s mimicked and mocked, and beyond, to my real destination. I had to face him today, and time was running out.

I hobbled back down towards the metro entrance but something kept me walking, down the great, light-grey paradeway, hundreds of cubits long, past a phalanx of dancing fountains which mesmerised me for a moment before I was drawn on by the weight of history; that permanently etched avenue, built for armies and invaders, drawing power unhindered into the centre of the city, amplifying it and radiating it outwards again like a great amulet, magnetised me. Before I knew it, I had crossed the river and the périphérique and was stumbling as mortally as possible past boulangeries and florists and banks in the 17th arrondissement. Eventually, past the Arc de Triomphe, the unwavering road became the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and multi-storey franchise fashion outlets and jewelleries and cafés took over the walls of the road.

Some of the citizens in the thick mid-afternoon crowd glanced at me then flinched away, others stared more openly. I felt my face to check that nothing had come off. It felt fine to me, but when I glanced into the reflective shop windows to check, I realised why they were staring. Some time during the walk, perhaps when I had bent to rub my calf muscles warm, my djellaba had ridden up and my leggings were showing. I shuffled the robe down again, embarrassed, and tottered on. But someone called out behind me, “Ce sont les bas chouettes, grampa!”

I turned to see a young couple beaming at me. It appeared that they were genuinely complimenting me on my underwear. The young woman, her hair hennaed and her face chalk-painted in a most becoming style, thrust her thumb up and nodded. “Génial!” I couldn’t help a slight swagger as I moved off. I’d be sure to tell Tadu and her girls when I got home. The encounter had come at a good time, injecting me with bonhomie and confidence before my assignation.

Now I was walking past the broad pavement outside the Grand Palais. I was nearly there; the Petit Palais, the place I had been trying not to think about all day. Now was my last chance to fulfil Mother’s request. My only chance, rather, since the exhibition was closing tonight. I crossed the road to the bleat of car horns and faced the entrance of the modest building. A sizeable poster draped down a column: “Exposition: trésors de l’Egypte ancienne”, it announced, a bold red sticker pasted halfway across the title, advertising “Dernier jour aujourd’hui!” Beside that was a photograph of the head of his sarcophagus. The gold and azure looked too bright. I wasn’t sure whether they had restored the paintwork too fancifully, too gaudily, or whether my memory had faded with time.