us two little chairs on which to sit. The carver appeared then, beaming, and sent the boy off to fetch coffee. The tray set before us, the mystery of Father’s excitement was revealed: If Father provided the drawings, could the carver make for him a chess set in which the goddesses and gods of the Egyptians and the Romans met face-to-face? Isis and Osiris, Horus and Amon Ra battling Jupiter and Juno and Neptune and Mars? Might sacred bulls confront elephants? He imagined the Egyptian pawns as ibises and the Roman pawns as archers.
This conversation took place in a boil of English, Arabic, and French; already the coffee tray was cluttered with sketches and ivory elephants—examples of sizes and styles. As the ivory carver and my father discussed the set’s price and the time necessary for its completion, I sipped sherbet and explored the shadows. I found a stack of tusks as tall as myself and two pails: one contained ivory bracelets soaking to scarlet in henna and the other ivory animals soaking to the color of wild honey in black tea. As I looked the boy came over and with a flat stick stirred the carvings gently, all the while gazing at me with curiosity.
The shop was very old and smelled unlike any place I had ever been; I suppose it was the ivory dust on the air—all that old bone—the henna, the coffee, and the tea. It was a wonderful smell and soothing, so that for several instants I closed my eyes and slept.
When I awoke the boy had vanished, leaving ajar a little door that opened onto the back alley. The alley led to a quarter entirely devoted to leather slippers stained green, and further down an antiques seller’s where I had seen a figure of hawk-headed Horus, the god of the rising sun, made of Egyptian paste and the size of a thumb. It had come from a tomb near Luxor.
The little figure had spoken to me with such urgency that, for the first time in my young life, I had dared ask my father that he buy it. He did not take my request seriously. How could a ten-year-old possibly fathom the value of such a thing? Not that it was impossibly expensive—for in those days such pieces were still to be found easily enough on the market. But it was three thousand years old and Father imagined a troubling eccentricity of character: my request seemed excessive. Had I inherited an immodest desire for luxury from my mother, who at that moment was having the hair removed from her armpits with hot caramel? (His own delight in luxury he did not question because compared to hers it was so tame: a collection of chess sets, a few articles of elegant clothing.)
Mother’s extravagance and acute blondness were striking anywhere, but above all in Egypt. When in gold lamé she arrived late at a reception at the University Club, a hush descended upon the room. She preferred officers and had befriended a number of the Egyptian brass (including the young Nasser)—handsome men flourishing thick mustaches.
I was learning Arabic. To my delight I discovered if I said egg’ga I got an omelette, and salata, a salad. Father owned a charming little pocket dictionary with words in French, English, and Arabic, and incongruous illustrations of disparate objects. One page showed a Victorian piano, a British bobby, a sarcophagus, two sorts of cannon, a hula dancer, a radio singer, a caged tiger, a man singing in blackface, an airplane, a hand holding a pen, a pearl necklace, a salted ham, a taxicab, a star, a cobra, and a hat.
Each week my father and I returned to the ivory carver’s shop, where the finished pieces accumulated. The Roman castles were Pompeian elephants decked out exactly as in an old print Father had hunted down in the university library; the print was based on a bas-relief uncovered in Pompeii. The little elephants had tusks that ended in spheres the size of small peas. These might be gilded and if they were: should Isis wear a gold necklace and Amon Ra a gold sun? No. Father was after simplicity. The Egyptians should be soaked in tea to darken them and this was all.
As he spoke my father fingered an Osiris four inches tall and completed that morning. He had the lithe body of a young, athletic man and the noble head of a falcon. In guise of a crown he wore the solar disc encircled by a serpent, and in his hand he carried the Key of Life. Father said to me: “When Osiris was torn to pieces and his body tossed to the four winds, Isis, his beloved, searched the world until she found every part but the phallus, because it had been swallowed by a fish. She made him another—of precious wood or alabaster, no one knows. Then she laid his broken body on a perfumed bed and embraced him until he was whole again. And here he is!”
Smiling, Father raised the little figure to the sun that in its passage across the sky had suddenly filled the shop with light. Then, under his breath, he said with a bitterness so unique, so unexpected, that I was profoundly startled: A thing that would not have occurred to your mother.
Alone on my balcony in the afternoon, I would gaze out over the courtyard below, where Bedouins often camped. I could smell baking bread and hear the children singing. I loved to see the women suckle their little ones, and when the girls danced fearlessly I danced too, for in that quiet air the sound of their flutes and drums readily reached me.
They came because of the public water fountain and an ancient sycamore tree that kept the courtyard shady and cool. At its roots the Bedouins had nested their goallah or water pots, and I thought the word wonderful because it contained their word for God. I found a picture of a goallah in the Dracoman, in a series including the sugarloaf-shaped hat of a dervish and a head of lettuce.
I would also gaze at the beautiful balconies across the courtyard, all pierced with patterns of stars. Sometimes a wood panel slid back and the small face of a child might appear, or that of a woman unveiled, her face impossibly pale, her eyes like the eyes of a caged animal, her throat and wrists circled in silver.
I had left all my toys behind but for a small box of glass and porcelain animals, and a green cloth I pretended was a vast meadow. But I was swiftly outgrowing these things. They paled beside the demands of my own slight body, awakening—I did not know to what, except that when each night I found pleasure beneath my small fingers, pleasure detonating like some sudden star, I imagined a blue man beside me, a blue man with the beautiful face of a bird of prey.
Today when we arrive to see the finished Osiris, the ivory carver is full of news. Just this morning in Alley of Old Time, a dervish sliced his belly open and revealed his entrails. A large number of people had gathered beside the carver’s shop to throw coins at the dervish’s feet and cry: Allah is great! Praise Allah! But even more extraordinary, the dervish had spontaneously taken his guts in both his hands and lifted them as though for the carver’s inspection, before asking for a needle and thread to sew himself up again. After, he had limped away to die or to recover—“God,” the carver says, “alone knows.” The blood—and there was very little of it—was not washed away because the spot was considered by some to be holy ground. The ivory carver is eager to show us the blood, but Father at his most imperious says: “L’extase ne m’interesse point.”
The next hour is characterized by silence, Father examining the new piece with extreme attention, the carver bent over his work—Jupiter—with exemplary intensity. Later on, as we are making our way back to Khan el-Kaleel to hail a cab, we turn off too soon and, wandering in an unfamiliar maze of streets, find ourselves among the butchers’ stalls, where Father bumps into a table piled high with several dozen skinned heads of sheep, shining with oil and ready for roasting.
Suddenly I see my father’s fez rolling along the street and then Father bent in two and vomiting, spattering the knees of his white linen suit with filth. He vomits violently, in spasms, as little boys looking solemn gather in droves and one stunning man in a white turban offers my father a handkerchief moistened with orange-blossom water. Panting, Father grabs this to mop his face and I see a wild look in his eyes,
