What I Didn't See (15 page)

A long silence followed. “Excuse me,” Miss Jackson said and left the courtyard.

Miss Jackson seldom made speeches. She never, ever referred to her losses; I'd always admired that about her. I only knew about them because Patwin, who'd worked with her three seasons now, had heard it from Mallick. Patwin had hinted that she was sleeping with Mallick, but I'd seen no signs and hoped it wasn't true. Miss Jackson was not a young woman, nor a pretty one, but she was too young and too pretty for Mallick. I don't mean that Mallick's not a good guy. But honestly, few women wouldn't be.

I thought back on how she'd also told us she'd seen the face of God in the sky and how that speech, too, had been uncharacteristic. I hoped there was a simple explanation; I liked Miss Jackson and didn't want to see her handling things badly—sleeping with Mallick and rushing from a room in tears. Maybe we'd come up on some anniversary of something.

Or maybe Miss Whitfield was to blame. Miss Whitfield might make me edgy and snappish, but maybe Miss Jackson had finally melted in the sympathetic presence of another female.

"Well.” The sympathetic female wrote a few words in her notebook. “I hope it wasn't something
I
said.” She addressed me. “You're very quiet. Are you in love with the dead?"

Since I'd been thinking about Miss Jackson and not about myself, I had nothing prepared to say. I'm not good on the fly. “I'm not sure I do like a dig,” I answered. “I'm still deciding.” My heart was thudding oddly; the question had unnerved me more than it should have. So I kept talking, just to demonstrate a steadier voice. “I wanted to see some things I wouldn't see in Michigan. Mallick gave a lecture at the university and I asked some questions that he liked and he said if I could make my own way here, he could use me."

Miss Whitfield was staring at me through little eyes. From her vantage point, I could see how culpable I'd sounded, how unresponsive to the actual question. So I kept talking, which wasn't like me. “A photograph is simple. It's about the thing in the moment. I can take a picture of a dead baby and not be trying to guess why it's dead, when I'd never know if I was right. A photograph is never wrong."

She was still staring. “Rome wasn't built in a day, but every day we build Rome,” I told her. I meant to use that to explain why a story was different from a photograph, but I stopped, because the longer I talked, the more suspicious she seemed. I felt unjustly accused, but also terribly, visibly guilty. “It's not a ghoulish profession,” I said with as much dignity as I could find. There was a letter opener on a table by the doorway. I pictured myself picking it up and opening Miss Whitfield's throat in one clean swipe.

At that exact moment, I heard Patwin laugh, and the tension I'd been feeling vanished with the sound of it. “What?” Davis asked him. “What's so funny?"

"I was just remembering when you fell off your chair,” Patwin said. He was still laughing. “How your arms flew up!"

I'd begun visiting Tu-api's tomb at night when no one would know. I'd like to say that there was nothing at all odd in this, but how defensive would that sound? I won't persuade you, so let's just skip that part.

In fact, I was disturbed by the murderous images coming over me, and the tomb seemed a quiet place to figure things out. I wasn't the sort to hurt anyone. People rarely upset or angered me. I'd never been a bully at school, didn't fight, didn't really engage much with people at all. Didn't care about anyone but myself, my mother had said once after my father died. She'd never said it again, but she hinted it. Buried it beneath the surface in every letter. Her own grief had been an awful thing to see for a six-year-old boy who'd just lost his father. If that was love, who could blame me for not wanting any part of it?

But I didn't think of myself as unengaged from the world so much as careful in it. Like many other people, I preferred watching to doing, only I preferred to do my watching within the spatial and temporal limits of the camera. A photograph is a moment you can spend your whole life looking at. I like the paradox of that.

A photograph isn't a narrative, so it's harder to impose on it. The only person who sees a photographer in a photograph is another photographer. And that's what I was doing in the privacy of the tomb. I was remembering those brief violent images of mine; I was trying to see the photographer.

They'd started up shortly after Miss Whitfield's arrival, and so they might have come from her. But they'd also begun shortly after Tu-api had shown me her face, a possibility I liked a lot less. If I remembered honestly, at the moment I'd taken Tu-api's first picture the word
murder
had been hanging in the air. The smell of smoke. The white light of the electric torches. “If you were going to murder someone,” Miss Whitfield had been asking, “who would it be?"

No doubt Tu-api was herself a murderess. Patwin was always reminding me of this. The seven women in her antechamber, the groomsmen, the musician, the animals—all killed on her behalf. But I'd no wish to condemn her. In the context of those rows of dead babies, it didn't seem like much. In the history of the world, nothing at all.

What ruler in what land in what era has ever done otherwise? Name me one president, elected by and acting for us, who hasn't promised that we'll have peace just as soon as he's done killing people. Sixteen million soldiers (many of them killers themselves) dead in the Great War. Does anyone know why?

Does anyone believe we are done?

Besides, Tu-api was sorry. I'd been wrong to think that was longing in her face when it was clearly remorse. She'd wanted company in death, but that hadn't worked out. Was it possible she now wanted company in some unending world of guilt?

I found it easier to think Miss Whitfield was to blame than that Tu-api wished me ill. I'd begun to carry the print of her face in my pocket so I could pull it out and look at it whenever I was alone. I would sit on the dirt by her coffin and stare until her beautiful face floated up out of the darkness and we were, for a moment, together.

One night, walking back to my bedroom as silently as possible, I nearly collided with Mallick in the central hallway. He was wearing a nightshirt that left his saggy old knees bare. “Going to the lavatory,” he explained unnecessarily, so that I knew it was true what Patwin had told me, that he'd been in the woman's wing, visiting Miss Jackson. I tried not to judge her for it, but really, what comfort could sleeping with Mallick have been?

"Me, too,” I said with an equal lack of conviction.

We stood a moment, carefully not meeting each other's eyes. “So Miss Whitfield leaves tomorrow,” Mallick offered finally. “She's been a lively addition.” I realized then that he thought I'd been visiting Miss Whitfield. As if that wouldn't be worth your life!

A woman's face appeared in a doorway, white and sudden.

When my heart began beating again, I recognized Miss Whitfield. She didn't speak, merely noted my suspicious, nighttime rambling, my covert meeting with Mallick, and disappeared as quickly as she'd come, no doubt to write it all down before she forgot. “Taking my pictures,” she called it once, as if what she did and what I did were the same, as if her imposed judgments could be compared to my dispassionate records. If I'd wanted to murder her, this would have been my last opportunity. Not that I wanted to murder her. Plus Mallick had seen me; I'd never get away with it. I went to my room and into a night of troubled dreams.

Miss Whitfield left the next morning. At Patwin's insistence, I took a group picture before she went. Patwin was always reminding me to document the work as well as the artifacts. “Take some pictures of live people today,” he would say, fingering his beard with that annoying scratching sound. “Take some pictures of me."

Everyone lined up in the expedition house courtyard, staring into the morning sun. Miss Whitfield was so eager to leave that she couldn't stand still and ruined two exposures before I got one that showed her clearly. It's a formal portrait; no one is touching anyone else in our strained little arrangement of bodies.

"Was there a curse on Tu-api's tomb?” Miss Whitfield had asked us shortly after her arrival. According to the newspapers, Carter had a curse; it was one more way in which we disappointed. Though Mallick, who had his own sources, said no one could find the actual site or text of Carter's curse. Other tombs had them, so, of course, Carter couldn't be expected to do without.

The very day Carter found the entrance to Tut-ankh-Amen's tomb, a cobra ate his pet canary. “Some curse,” Patwin scoffed when we read this, but Davis reminded us how canaries in mines died just to warn you death was coming for you next. And sure enough, last week, we had a telegram from Lord Wallis that Lord Carnarvon, who sponsored Carter's dig, had suddenly died in Cairo. The cause was indeterminate, but might have been a fever carried by an insect bite on his cheek. Back in England his dog had also died—this curse was most unkind to pets.

It was the dog that put Miss Whitfield over the top. She cared little for mountains of copper, gold, and ebony. She was, as Patwin had noted, being nothing but fair, no materialist. But she did love a suspicious death. She left us for Egypt just as quick as an invitation could be wrangled and transport arranged.

I believe we were all a bit disappointed to realize that none of us was to be the murderer or victim in her next book. All those murderous thoughts I'd obligingly had, all the probing we'd withstood, all the petty disputes we'd engaged in, all for nothing. The one to reap the benefit would, of course, be Carter.

We stood at the entry to the expedition house and waved. She was turned around to us, her face in the car window, smaller and smaller until it and then the car that carried her vanished entirely. “A dangerous woman,” Patwin said.

"A terrible eater,” said Ferhid. His tone was venomous. “A picky eater."

"I can't put my finger on exactly what it was about her,” said Miss Jackson. “But there were times when she was watching us, taking notes on everything we said and did, as if she knew what we really meant and we didn't—there were times when I could have happily strangled her."

So we were all glad to see the last of her. It didn't mean she wasn't missed. It was hard to go back to how we'd been before; it was hard to stop being irritated with everyone just because she wasn't there asking us to be. There was a space left that no one else would fit inside. Ferhid kept setting her plate at the table for three days after she'd gone.

I've tried to tell all this as carefully as I could. Davis with the sunlight flashing off his spectacles. Miss Whitfield dipping her hand in the fountain. Mallick in his nightshirt. Ferhid's smile. Miss Jackson kneeling before God's face in the clouds. All that happened. All that was real. I'd rather you looked at that instead of at me. And yet here I am.

Some people are sensitive to exposure and some aren't. Miss Whitfield left her mark on me, but took no mark in return. Miss Whitfield was the sort of person who could touch Tu-api's skull, undisturbed, as it had been for centuries, and even move it and still not be changed by doing so. Me, I've always been the sensitive sort.

The night after Miss Whitfield's departure I went again to Tu-api's tomb. The silhouette of the ruined ziggurat shone in the moonlight. There was the hum of bugs; a dog barked sleepily in the distance; my footsteps thudded in the dust. The wind was cool and carried the smell of cooked chicken. My relief was enormous. The only reason I'd thought of murdering Miss Whitfield was that she was an awful woman who often talked about murder. There was nothing supernatural at work here; it was all perfectly normal, and everyone had felt the same.

The moon had risen, round as an opened rose. I walked away from it into the perfect darkness of the tomb. I owed Tu-api an apology. How could I ever have thought, even for a minute, that she'd curse me into murder? I begged for her forgiveness. It was the first time I'd spoken to her aloud.

She was not the only one listening. Gossipy Mallick had apparently told Patwin his suspicions regarding me and Miss Whitfield, and Patwin, being more discerning and trained to read puzzles far older and more mysterious than I, came upon the truth of it. He'd followed me, and when I spoke, he was the one who responded. “What's this about?” he asked, and what could I possibly say?

"You can't be coming here anymore at night by yourself.” Patwin stepped toward me. “You can't be thinking this way.” He took me by the arm. “Come back to bed."

I let him lead me over the moonlit dust to the expedition house. As we went, he analyzed my errors. I was guilty of romanticism, of individualism. I was guilty of ancestor worship. I had entertained the superstition of an ancient, powerful curse. I wasn't even bourgeois; I had barely made it to primitive.

There was no need to lecture me. I knew all those things. He put me to bed as if he were my mother, sitting beside me for a while, pretending nothing was wrong with me, just the way my mother had pretended. “You need a girlfriend,” he suggested. “It's too bad Miss Whitfield has gone. It's too bad Miss Jackson is already spoken for."

I stopped listening. I'd just realized something about myself, something so unlikely, so unexpected, that no one would ever have guessed it. I myself would never have guessed it. Mother would never have guessed it, and she would be so surprised when she found out. The thing I realized was this: I was the sort of person who would do anything for love.

I'd never felt so joyful, so alive. Who could call that a curse? I'd never felt so serene. Mr. Davis or Mr. Patwin? Mallick or Miss Jackson or Ferhid? All or none of the above, and what if I got it wrong? But it had never been my choice to make. What I would do was whatever she asked.

Poor Patwin. I had only to turn to see his face. He'd believed so firmly in the march of history, it left him blind to the danger in the moment. Poor Miss Whitfield. Served her right, though, choosing Carter over us. How sad she'd be to have missed it all. Poor Miss Jackson. She'd never figured out that the secret is to love someone already dead. Then nothing can happen that doesn't bring the two of you closer together.