The Deceit (15 page)

Helen nodded her encouragement.

But Ryan was getting used to this anyway, talking to camera. He actively enjoyed it: he was using his knowledge. Teaching things to an unseen audience was better than talking to bored kids from New Jersey. It was maybe better than mixing concrete in the Abydos sun. He continued.

‘Religiously, Akhmim has played a role out of all proportion to its size. The family of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, the first monotheist in history, came from Akhmim. Likewise, alchemy was born in Akhmim: the greatest alchemist in history, Zosimos of Panopolis, of the fourth century, lived here. Indeed the very word alchemy, and the word chemistry, might mean “that which is from Akhmim”, since the city was also known as Khemmis or Chemmis, hence “chemistry”.’

He paused, and leaned an inch nearer the camera. ‘Then there is magic: Pharaonic and Egyptian magic all came from Akhmim. The wizards who duelled with Moses in the Bible were traditionally Akhmimic. Moreover, Hermes Trismegistus, the founder of Hermetic philosophy, of Western occultism, was likewise said to have lived here. And Sufism – the great cult of Islamic mysticism – was formed here, in the ninth century, with Dhul-Nun al-Misri.’ He sat back a fraction. ‘The associations are therefore endless and outstanding. Arguably, this tiny desert town is the religious navel of the world, more Jerusalem than Jerusalem. And of course, our documents, the Sokar documents, are written in sub-Akhmimic, the local dialect of Coptic, the oldest and most impenetrable form of that Gnostic language.’ He stopped, abruptly, thinking hard.

‘Why have you stopped? That was OK.’ Helen sounded aggrieved.

He put his hand up for quiet, then called across the living room to Hanna, who had been idly leafing through a book. ‘Is there a monastery around here with an intact library? Dating back to the fourth or fifth century?’

‘There are dozens of monasteries! This region is one of the cradles of Coptic faith. The White Monastery had the finest library in Egypt after Alexandria was burned. That is where Sassoon found the Sokar documents, as we know.’

‘Yes, but the White Monastery was ransacked, pillaged. I just need a library with an intact run of codices – it doesn’t have to be huge, just intact, unbroken.’

Hanna stood up. His face was delicately flushed. ‘Because, if you can compare one text with the one before, and the one before that, going back through the decades, you will be able to see how the language evolved. You will be able to decipher the papyrus!
Très audacieux!
I know exactly the place. The Monastery of St Apollo. The Holy Family were meant to have sheltered there, in the Flight out of Egypt. But then they sheltered everywhere: they had a strange need for constant shelter. We require a taxi. We must be discreet.’

The drive took twenty anxious minutes, into the desert to a tiny, humble monastery tucked under a large cliff, pitted with Pharaonic tombs, like the sockets of eyes in skulls; all of it next to a shallow, artificial and very ancient-looking lake-pool.

Hanna did the preliminary and ancillary work, subtly smoothing their entrance into the monastic precincts, making generous offers to the preserved body of St John the Dwarf, taking tea with the bearded abbot, and telling diverting stories. He made sure water and fruit was brought to Ryan, as Ryan toiled in the little library among the musty parchments and fragile codices and doddering manuscripts and cracked
ostraka
– writing preserved on potsherds.

On the first day, he worked back through the codices and parchments, comparing, annotating and decoding. The mental work was hard but rewardingly exhausting. He felt the kindly face of Sassoon smiling over his shoulder. ‘Not bad, not bad for an amateur philologist. Not bad at all.’ He deciphered the name of the author; he cooled himself by taking a swim in the salty lake next to the monastery.

Helen joined him in the lake, Albert paddled. Ryan couldn’t help noticing her lissom, suntanned body, in her swimsuit; he wrenched his gaze away. It was a physical effort to do so.

Albert and Helen retired to the town in the afternoon; Ryan kept working. Then at last he commuted back to Akhmim in the dark, safe from sight, and slept in the quiet clean house. That night there were no bad dreams.

On the second day, he returned to the monastery at first light, when the old mud bricks were cold to the touch and the desert cliffs tinted a pale tangerine. This day, he began to examine their papyrus in particular, but it was desperately difficult: so much was illegible, erased and defaced, the peculiar sub-Akhmimic alphabet so intractably old and unusual. At moments he felt he was close to a breakthrough, but it didn’t come.

The starlit drive back to Akhmim that night was melancholy. He sat alone in the kitchen and ate
fuul
and flatbread for supper, staring at a Coptic calendar on the walls, thinking about the boy and trying not to think about what he had said; remembering his wife and trying not to remember her death.
Rhiannon.

His lonely meal was interrupted by Helen. She sat down opposite, over a beaker of water. And spoke.

‘Tell me your story, Ryan. What happened to you? Why did you disappear?’

This was Helen’s manner, of course: abrupt, but not necessarily rude. Just dispensing with preliminaries and seizing the information. He was getting used to it.

Ryan exhaled, and gazed in her almost flawless blue eyes. ‘It ain’t pretty.’

‘Tell me.’

He told her. How he had met and fallen in love with a young woman when he was studying under Sassoon in London, at the beginning of his glittering career, after leaving Harvard. This was when Ryan Harper was the coming man – Sassoon’s successor, the brilliant new Egyptologist.

He said the word ‘brilliant’ with an ironic grimace. Helen nodded. ‘And so? Then?’

A deep long pause. ‘We moved to Egypt. Working in Saqqara. We were very happy, the happiest I had ever been. What does Freud say is the key to happiness? Work and love? Well, I had both. Then Rhiannon got pregnant, and we were both overjoyed, literally, beyond joyous.’ He swallowed some
fuul
and flatbread, swallowed the choke of grief. ‘She died in childbirth. A local infection, perinatal malaria, from the Delta. And the baby … My daughter went first, she died too. And that’s when … well …’

The silence in the kitchen was morbid. Ryan picked up his plate and took it to the sink and washed it, noisily.

Helen spoke behind him. ‘That is terrible.’

Ryan scrubbed the plate clean, and stacked it. ‘My parents were Baptists, but I was never ever religious. And yet, what happened to Rhiannon and the baby – that killed something in me, killed the hope. I hated everyone, resented everyone. Then I stopped hating the world and began hating myself. Blaming myself. Should I have brought Rhiannon to Egypt? Unsanitary Egypt? Maybe I made a mistake?’ He shrugged. ‘Then I stopped caring. And started drinking. I got into fights, messy arguments, insulting important people. In Egypt, as you know, you have to play the politics. Kiss the babies of bureaucracy. I didn’t. I was sacked. They were right to sack me. I drifted for a bit, a succession of demotions. By the time I was twenty-nine I’d had enough: I gave up the academic work and got a simple job as a charity worker in Abydos, trying to save the temple there, the Oseirion, from drowning. They have terrible problems with the water table, because of Aswan.’

‘You raised some money for this cause?’

‘Sometimes. Mostly I just got stuck in – physical labour, digging ditches. Hard yakka, as the Australians say. I enjoyed not having to think.’

Helen gazed at the table, then at his face. Then she said, ‘I did notice your hands. They are tough, bruised, not the hands of a scholar.’

‘Well I’m not, not any more.’

‘And also you
look
like a …’ A brief, embarrassed smile. ‘When we were swimming, you are …
stammig
as we say in Germany. More like a worker on a farm.’

Ryan looked at Helen. This was different. ‘I also did a bit of teaching, to keep my income vaguely bearable. Bored American kids get to know their Anubis from their Horus. It’s a Study Abroad programme. But the kids have stopped coming, there’s hardly any work anyway. Because of the troubles.’

He stared at his glass of water. A few years ago it would have been whisky. But in the end he’d realized that hard physical work killed the pain better than any alcohol. Ryan sipped the water and looked at the German woman with her severe and high-cheekboned beauty. She had a hint of Nefertiti about her, the famous bust in the Berlin Museum. A slightly sad and Nordic Nefertiti. He decided to copy her curtness. ‘So. You? What’s your story?’

She was unfazed. ‘Not as sad as yours, but it has pathos. My father is an academic, quite well known, he still teaches politics at Heidelberg. Mother:
hausfrau
. We come from rural Catholic Bavaria – it is a little like your Deep South, very religious. My sister is – was …’ She blinked, the blue eyes blinked, twice. ‘She was the favourite, the star, the bright one, not me. She was the beautiful daughter and so clever, musical, a brilliant concert pianist, she had the great career … the Germans worship music.’

Helen poured herself a glass of mineral water. ‘She had a stroke, aged twenty-five. Ischemic. We do not know why. It can happen in teens and young adults, as well as old people. It can happen any time.’

‘She died?’

‘Yes and no.’

Ryan shook his head. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘She lies in hospital in Heidelberg today, in a coma. Persistent vegetative state is the precise medical term. Is she alive or dead? Maybe God knows, I do not know. I know she will never recover, not now.’

‘You believe in God?’

‘No. But the reflex is there, I suppose. This is why I work now, work so hard. My parents were broken by Anna’s stroke, so now I try to be her, the successful daughter. I am not, I fail, but I try. I do not have a husband, I rarely have boyfriends, I just work. I work to be someone else, to replace someone who has gone. There. My story. The End.’

Ryan sighed profoundly. ‘I am very sorry.’

‘Yes,’ Helen said, lifting her glass. ‘But at least we both understand. This is good. You know something, Ryan? Sometimes I do not quite trust people who have no tragedy in their lives. Now I can trust you.’

He lifted his water, they chinked.

The faintest sad smile on her lips.

‘
Prost
.’

‘Cheers.’

Ryan drank the last of his whiskyless water. And said, ‘But do you trust Albert Hanna?’

Helen shook her head. ‘Ah. Of course not, he is a serpent. But an amusing serpent. And we have no choice, we need him. And now I say good night. I hope it goes well for you tomorrow.’

Tomorrow came very early. He got up at dawn and crept outside, and got in the waiting old taxi, and drove through the surreal shadows of the dawnlit desert. Then he worked for six hours without a break, eyes straining in the darkened old library with the flickering lamplight.

Then at last he sat back, massaging his aching neck. He had a bulging notebook, literally full of notes. He picked it up and stepped out of the creaking library, emerging into the stark desert sun of the monastery courtyard. He was almost content: he hadn’t cracked the code, but he had definitely made a start. A very good start.

Helen and Hanna were sitting on a stone bench. Helen gazed at him – tense and waiting. Ryan regarded them both, and declared, ‘The guy who wrote it is called Macarius. He’s a sixth-century Copt. It’s all about religion.’ He paused. ‘And we have to get going.’

Hanna shook his head. ‘Why? Why can’t you stay here and translate it all?’

Ryan had his answer. ‘Because many times Macarius says I went to
this place
and I saw
this here.
But he doesn’t
describe
it; therefore, we have no idea what he’s talking about. How it fits in. We cannot solve the puzzle without following his logic – and his route.’

Helen was half-smiling. ‘This is good. We will make a better film!’

‘Or get arrested,’ Hanna said.

A silence settled on them all. The sunlight glittered on the lake-pool beyond the open monastery gates.

Hanna broke the silence. ‘Very well. The die is cast. Where then, Mr Harper, where are we going first?’

‘To Bubastis.’

Hanna nodded. ‘But of course. Bubastis. The city of cats.’

The winter weather up here was significantly worse than the drizzliness of the Cornish coast: the fierce wind carried flurries of snow and Dozmary Pool was showing shoulders of ice. The great granite outcrops that made Bodmin Moor visible from thirty miles away – Rough Tor, the Minions – sheltered the huddled, grey little sheep from the worst of the piercing gales.

Karen braked, slowed, and took a right turn off the A30, making her careful way down a narrow and sombre lane lined with high blackthorn hedges. The road was muddy, but the mud was frozen.

It was a suitably bleak landscape, a suitable place for a lunatic asylum. Except of course it wasn’t called the Cornwall County Lunatic Asylum any more – it was now the Bodmin PCT Psychiatric Hospital and Mental Health Unit. But the Cornish still referred to it as they had always done: anyone who went mad, anyone who was sectioned and sent here, was said to have ‘gone up Bodmin’.

The car park was empty. The car indicators blinked, obediently, as she locked her Toyota and walked towards the main asylum buildings. The architecture was a mix of ambitious Victorian Gothic and some 1980s wards and offices. The new bits were not ageing as well as the gloomy, redbrick grandeur of the old stuff. The Victorians built to last: they liked to incarcerate their lunatics in style.

The wind was biting. Karen was relieved to get inside the warm, brightly lit reception, where a sweet, plump nurse took her credentials and led her down maybe seventeen corridors to a large reinforced glass door with an elaborate system of locks.

The sign beside it read,
SECURE UNIT
and
WARNING
.

The nurse keyed a code, and they waited for something to happen. With nothing to do, the nurse made small talk, glancing at Karen.