never see again diminishing like a genie behind us.
Throughout the ride Father’s face remains plunged in the scented handkerchief. When we arrive at our building’s gate, Father raises his eyes and I see that he is still terrified. He needs help counting change. For a moment he opens his mouth as if to apologize but says nothing, as though speaking demands too great an effort. To this day I cannot smell orange-blossom water without thinking of a cobbled street, a spoiled fez, my father’s stained knees.
Father was ill for two months. A fever pinned him down so that he could barely move. When he was delirious he raved that the head of gravity lay upon his heart and that it was made of oiled lead. He imagined that the Colossi of Memni had fallen onto his bed and were crushing him, that his own temple was filling with sand. In the fall we had seen stray dogs worrying the corpse of a camel. Father believed he was that camel.
He said he was being pulverized by Time—he spoke as if Time and Gravity were divine beings who despised him because he was merely mortal and made of frangible clay; those were his words: frangible clay. Finally—and this happened in May—his fever broke, his mind cleared, his mood lightened. Father began to mend. Within days we were able to walk to his chamber’s balcony, which overlooked the street, to stand together cracking melon seeds between our teeth and tossing sweets to the organ grinder’s monkey, who, when the music was over, pulled a tin plate from his pants, and a fork.
The following week Father was back to his desk catching up with his classwork and his correspondence—he was at war with a dozen chess players in other countries. I was “Keeper of the Inkpot.” Father teased: Should I spill any, or fail to fill his precious Mont Blanc correctly, I would be shipped off directly to the crocodile-mummy pits of Gebel Aboofayda! (The crocodile-mummy pits were illustrated on page 38 of the Dracoman, along with a fountain pen and a straitjacket.)
Now that Father was on his way to total recovery, we returned to Alley of Old Time to collect the completed chess set. It was splendid. Each Roman archer had distinct features, with bow lowered or raised, minute quivers (and these would soon be broken) in place. The stances of the ibises were variable and capricious: One was nesting and another about to take flight. Yet another, poised on one leg, was fishing, and one held a fish in its beak. Isis was very lovely—lovelier than Juno, who had a stern expression and a large hooked nose. Isis had two diminutive breasts; her soft belly was visible beneath the folds of her gown.
After we had admired the set at length and been served coffee—and I was given a special treat, a square of pink loukoum Studded with pistachios and rolled in powdered sugar—the set was placed in its box, wrapped in brown paper, and tied with string. Then, as we departed, the ivory carver displayed a prodigious tenderness for my father by suddenly kissing his sleeve. We stepped out onto the street. It had been freshly watered and beneath the tattered awnings we walked in coolness.
“Before returning home,” Father said, “let us pay a visit to the little Horus you once so admired. I imagine it is still vegetating in Hassan Syut’s shop.” This was such an unexpected delight that for an instant I stopped walking and leaned against my father’s side, my arm about his waist.
The Horus was no longer there. It had, in fact, been sold some weeks earlier. However, Hassan Syut had something very unusual to show my father and he went to the back of the shop where he sorted through a multitude of pale green boxes. He returned to the counter with an object wrapped in white linen, and with a flourish revealed a blackened piece of mummy. It was a hand cut off at the wrist, a child’s hand carbonized by a three thousand years’ soak in aromatic gum. It was a horrible thing, and my father let out a little cry of displeasure, perhaps despair: Que c’est sale!
For a reason unfathomable—for still I do not know my father’s intimate history—Father was convinced the hand had been offered with malicous intention. “And you still a child,” he said. “Si fragile!” We were making our way past row after row of green slippers. “Everywhere evil!” I thought I heard him say. “Partout . . . le mal!”
His voice was altered; he had begun to bleat as on occasion when he lost patience with my mother, and I, in the still of the night, would hear her return from the mystery that kept her so often away. On such nights it seemed to me that Mother’s orbit was like that of a comet. Light years away, when she approached us it was always on a collision course.
Father’s words came quickly now; they spilled from his mouth with such urgency I could barely follow: “Evil is a lack, you see,” I thought I heard him say. “A lack, a void in which darkness rushes in, a void caused by . . . by thoughtlessness, by narcissism, by insatiable desire. Yes, desire breeds disaster. De toute façon,” he said now, suddenly embarrassed, “those old bodies should be allowed to rest.” I looked into his face. It seemed the hand had designated the darkest recess of his heart and had torn the delicate fabric of his eyes, for his eyes waxed peculiar, distant and opaque: minerals from the moon. I wondered: If a word was enough to create the world, could one artifact from Hell destroy it? The hand, reduced by time to a dangerous, an irresistible density, seemed, in the thinning air, to hover over us.
Father pulled a handkerchief from his vest pocket and pawed at his face. I believe I heard him mutter: “There is no rest.” What did he mean? He hailed a cab and I was aware that I dreaded going home.
The cab smelled of urine, and the windows—covered with a film of dust and oil—could not be rolled down, so that we traveled in a species of fog. When we arrived I helped Father from the cab and held the gate open. When was it, I wondered, that he had become an old man?
The elevator was paneled with mirrors and the embrace of infinity vertiginous. I shut my eyes. Stepping into the hall, we heard music, and then, behind the door, Mother’s thick voice, her voice of rum and honey, came to us; she was singing: I made wine . . .
Father did not ring but instead, holding the ivory chess set against his heart with one arm, fumbled for his keys.
From the lilac tree . . .
He was breathing with difficulty. I feared he was about to die. But the door was open now, and in a room flooded with the full sun of the late afternoon, Mother, her wet hair rolled up in a towel, was dancing, her naked body pressed to the body of a stranger. Seeing us, she held him to her tightly, and, her face against his chest, began to laugh—a terrible laughter that both extinguished the day and annihilated my father and me, severing us from her and from ourselves.
When my father took my hand, the chess set fell to the floor, seemingly in silence so loudly was the blood pounding in my ears. Father held my hand so tightly that it ached, an ache that was the ache of my heart’s pain, exactly.
for Steve Moore
Gran’père was dying, and p’tit Pierre stood at the door clutching his cap, clawing at the rim in his terror and excitement. P’tit Pierre was not yet nine and in the light of the lantern his face was very small and white—like a lima bean. M’man ran for her shawl and the two of us set off after p’tit Pierre, who was walking very fast, already a good way ahead. M’man and I were wearing our nightgowns and slippers; we had to walk carefully else stub our toes on the cobbles. M’man called out: “Allez! Pierre! Pas si vite!”
It was very dark and foggy. We chased after p’tit Pierre’s lantern, which blinked like the Devil in the distance, and once I stumbled. When we reached the gate where Old Owl Head lived in her tiny room above the street,
