MY FATHER WAS A careful man. He was also a self-made millionaire, two things that don’t often seem to go together. My father was the son of a bootlegger and small-time crook in rural Virginia. As a boy he spent his free time taking apart the tractor and building crude radio crystal sets in the woodshed. He was the only one of his eight brothers and sisters to leave the county and go to college. After his B.A. at Virginia Tech, he won a scholarship at Syracuse to continue his engineering studies at the newly formed School for Applied Civic Engineering. It was a radical new system of pedagogy, based on the certainty of scientific and mechanistic innocence, a thing to be developed correctly and brought to the world for its own benefit. The study ranged from Christopher Wren to Frank Lloyd Wright to Tycho Brahe to Oppenheimer to the great dam builders of Mesopotamia. A new class of engineer walked out of the halls into the hazy New York sunshine, pale, stooped, blinking, with great visions of spinning turbines and gleaming spans, new polymer plastics, untested shapes that clung to the briefest hint of theoretical physics, of changing not just the shape but the very fabric of the landscape.
It was only a few years later that he was one of the chief engineers for the Saint Lawrence dam project, overseeing two hundred million dollars worth of federal funds and hundreds of laborers, architects, engineers, hydrodynamics scientists, everybody. He was successful as a civic engineer because he was both visionary and cautious. He took the safety and logistics of his projects very seriously, and I suppose this carried over into his private life. My father carefully chose a wife, my mother, and carefully had a single child, me.
I grew up in the double-wide trailers and prefab on-site office spaces of massive civic-engineering projects. My parents basically left it up to me and I chose to live the first sixteen years of my life in such places as Fishkill, Arkansas, and Sewanee, Tennessee, where my father was building massive dams and soaring bridges. Would any young boy choose differently? Each project seemed to take just about a year, and in between we’d head back to Syracuse, where we had a comfortable upper-middle-class home, and where my mother lived, baking loads of sweet confections and often changing the decorating scheme of the house. Every time we came home we never knew what to expect; she would gut the place as soon as we left and replace everything with some other style of decor. We went through French Country, Willow, Timber and Mahogany, Arts & Crafts, and a long stint with variations on Art Deco. I guess it was the loneliness that did it; she had to fill the time doing something. But when we came home it was all smiles and hugs, she was so proud of us and glad to see us again, and did we like the new furniture? Would we like to see the new flowers in the garden? How about some fresh ginger snaps and herbal tea?
My mother grew up in Buffalo, the single daughter of a wealthy chemical-company executive. She met my father when some of her sorority sisters from Buffalo State College took a trip to Syracuse to attend the annual Cherry Blossom Festival. My father helped her park the enormous Buick she was driving and lit her cigarette. After she had me she started suffering from several clinical emotional disorders that required her to take massive doses of high-grade lithium for the rest of her adult life, focusing her manic energy on pleasant and orderly sorts of tasks. Our backyard garden was legendary in the neighborhood. I never witnessed a single gesture of affection between my father and mother as long as they were alive.
I was in school for only about half of the time I was living at home. As most of the project sites were way out in the sticks, far from any decent school, most of my education was done at home, or I should say, “self-taught.” My father let me order any book I wanted out of whatever catalogs I could scare up, including whole sets of encyclopedias and mini-libraries of classics and world history. I suppose you could say that my education was reading books. My father never really checked up on me, never really tried to direct my reading or help my education along in any real way other than by supplying me with reading material.
So I spent most of my early days lying on a cot in my father’s on-site trailer, reading for hours at a time while just outside the door my father dug, scraped, hammered, and poured vast monuments to the miracles of modern industry. Certainly I did lots of exploring of the various sites, climbing around the structures and squeezing into dangerous spots like any other kid would feel compelled to do. But I was quickly accustomed to the kinds of massive structures my father built; I looked into the cavernous yawn of canyons freshly dammed, watched a million gallons of cement poured into the steel frames, plummeting hundreds of feet into the darkness, watched the curious spiderlike piecemeal work of bridge building, where slabs of steel and concrete were placed like so many toothpicks by bored titans. Enormous machines that crawled, crammed, and hoisted the materials across chasms, vehicles with tracked treads, wheels that weighed thousands of pounds, vehicles that could pass over the trailer where I lay without so much as scraping their bellies, vehicles that thundered with deafening tones, belching smoke and noise, vehicles that created and destroyed with the wrench of a rusted lever. The earth literally exploded beneath my feet; mountains moved, seas were redirected, all the various forces of nature were brought to bear under the power of machinery and science. This feature, the destruction and creation of lands and rivers, is the figurative marker, the determinative of my youth.
I was twelve years old when my father was picked as a consultant for the Aswan High Dam project in August 1962. I spent the next eight months in Aswan, just above the first cataract of the Nile, the traditional southern boundary of Egypt. When the U.S. and other European powers bailed on funding the project, the Soviets jumped at the chance. Egyptian president Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal, and the Soviets saw this as their chance to get in on the ground floor. The Soviets had bit off a bit more than they could chew, though, and they surreptitiously recruited a few select international engineers and designers, mostly from a Boston firm that my father was loosely associated with, to serve as consultants. There was also the matter of the relocation of the local Nubian inhabitants and several large ancient structures like the Great Temple of Abu Simbel to higher ground. It wasn’t seen as a patriotic thing to do necessarily, working with the Russians, but my father could never resist the next great challenge. He was always seeking out larger and larger projects, always wanting his constructions to be greater in size and scale. He only took on jobs that seemed to be a profound expression of man’s ability to exert control over the massive forces of nature, anything that was beyond scope, beyond what had been done before.
My father was technically working with the Egyptian government as an international overseer, but he was doing more than that. He spent most of his hours in the company of Soviet architects and engineers, sweaty men in dungarees and broad hats, talking in his pidgin Russian in an excited manner, waving his hands over topographical maps and stacks of wrinkled blueprints. The Russians chain-smoked cigarettes and did a lot of nodding and smiling whenever my father spoke.
While my father drafted plans in the rows of dusty Quonset huts that the engineers used as offices, or scouted the valley with a team of engineers and architects, I wandered about the streets of Aswan, along the river and on the low bluffs above the city, roaming among the ruined temples and crumbling walls of the ancient quarter, occasionally venturing out into the eastern desert on excursions with my companion Hakor, a local Nubian boy a few years older than me whom my father hired to serve as my guide, and guardian. Hakor also became my first friend.
We were supposed to be there for fourteen months but it didn’t work out that way. My father made a mistake and the Soviets sent us home early. The choice he made had been the right one, something I realized even as a young boy.
When I was sixteen my father announced one day that it was time for me to go to college. At this time we were in Montana, where he was building a series of hydroelectric dams on the Big Hole River that would eventually power half the state. My father had contacts with all the major universities in the Northeast, so his secretaries prepared all the forms and applications, I took a few tests, signed my name, and the next thing I knew I was at Princeton.
When I reached Princeton, that frigid, dark, and precipitous place, I discovered the vast treasure troves of the university library and the powers of interlibrary loan. I was sixteen years old and had never had a proscriptive educational experience of any kind, or much of what you might call a social education either. I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t have the first idea how to go about meeting or knowing anyone. Eventually I was able to meet some people and develop what you might term friendships, though mostly they were academically based, people with whom I shared a common interest. Such relationships only ever happened for me when another person essentially tripped over me in the dark, or when my father hired them to look after me, like Hakor, or when like Alan Henry, just took a liking to me and dragged me out places with him for some unaccountable reason. Helen was the first person I ever met who wasn’t thrust upon me in some way.
Obviously, at first I was quite a mess socially; it took some time getting used to the amount of interaction I was supposed to have with my peers. I was quickly drawn to the Ancient History Department, where I was surprised to learn that many of my fellow students hadn’t read most of the principal historical texts, and if they had they didn’t seem to retain much. My instructors weren’t much better. By my second year I was taking mostly independent-study classes, mostly with the director at that time, a Dr. Nichols, a specialist in ancient civilizations. He directed my further reading, giving me lists of books and documents to study.
My apartment was a nice place, third floor, a narrow studio with western-facing windows and a nice view of a stand of elm trees, a kitchenette I never used, a futon bed, an old dresser my mother shipped to me, a desk, and a few folding chairs. It was a stone’s throw from the largest of the many vast gorges that dotted the craggy hillsides of Princeton, just a few blocks from Carl Sagan’s nest that perched on the edge of such an abyss. I often thought that Sagan would have only to look out his study window, rather than to the skies, down into the windswept chasm that lay under him, the darkly veined basaltic rock pitted and stricken with crevasses, howling, channeling winds that funneled out into the air, the bleakness of it, to see the full extent of the cosmos that he sought.
The rent I paid was a waste of money because I was never there. I spent all my time in the library, huddled in my reserved carrel on the fourth floor, bundled up against the cold, eating apples or takeout, poring over the classical works of Young, Champollion, Belzoni, the great pretenders and misguided translators like Gustavus Seyffarth, Carl Richard Lepsius, Hinck’s work on Assyrian grammar, James Burton, John Wilkinson, De Rouge, the great Samuel Birch’s Dictionary, including the painstaking handwritten copy by Wallis Budge, then the “Berlin School” of Stern, Erman, and Sethe.
Then I moved on to the modern greats, Griffith, Gunn, and Sir Alan Gardiner, whose Egyptian Grammar never left my satchel for the next six years. I taught myself the rudiments of hieratic, demotic, and full-form hieroglyphs, Old and Middle Egyptian cursive and pictograph forms, as well as ancient Akkadian, Assyrian, Nubian, including Meriotic script, the elements of cuneiform, as well as more modern scripts like Coptic, Greek, Latin, and Arabic, practicing late at night on the huge blackboards in the lecture halls of the history department, writing out reams of script, diagramming the translation, working out the ligatures, transcribing the great epics.
I moved from there to the science of cryptography, from the mathematical number-theory magic of Alan Turing and the German Enigma codes, to ancient secrets like meriotic scripts, Mayan, and Linear B. I spent three months trying to come to terms with Roger Bacon’s thirteenth-century cipher, one of the great mysteries of cryptography. I carried with me at all times a copy of the Voynich manuscript with Newbold’s notes. I still don’t accept his theory of the microscopic “shorthand” characters, but it was all thrilling work.
It was disconcerting at first, the quiet of the library, the absence of the struggle of machine and man against the earth, but I got in the habit of wearing ear plugs, which essentially filled my head with the sound of my own beating heart. It was strangely very similar to the pile drivers and pneumatic pumps that my father often used to plant structures deep into the ground. I found that if I brought a large thermos of coffee along I could read and take notes well into the night without much discomfort. I got used to sleeping on the floor under my desk, my leather satchel for a pillow, listening to the echoing groans of the old building settling in the night. It was a comforting sound then and still is; I have always felt most at home in such places: empty libraries at night, the dusty back rooms of ancient buildings, the dark basements of museums. Lying on my back under the desk I intoned the phonetic transliterations to myself into the early hours of the morning, the struggling approximations of sounds that hadn’t been uttered in three thousand years echoing down the empty corridors.
I took to wearing wool sweaters that I could layer shirts under, thick corduroy pants and leather boots two sizes too big to accommodate my extra-thick woolen socks. I had a blue watch cap that kept my ears warm and fit neatly right to the top edge of my glasses. I found insulated shooting gloves in a surplus store, the cropped trigger fingers perfect for turning pages and handling pencils, and I wore them always. Still, my hands and feet were always cold, obviously some sort of circulation problem. In the winter I would boil a pan of water to soak my blue feet in.
Occasionally I would take breaks to stretch, pacing the dusty halls of the stacks, or out onto the front steps to get a breath of fresh air. I remember I would often find it remarkable that so many students would be out there, many rushing back and forth, others talking in groups, living out lives of such furious activity. It inevitably made me long for the calm and placid life of the written records of ancient Egypt. I spent the vast landscape of my late teenage years, that bright, shining time just before adulthood when the world spools out in front of you playful and endless, the way it appears to you on television shows, the way other people remember it and talk about it, I spent that time living in another era, a world not endless but bound by a definite sense of time, place, and history. And I loved it. Did I have any idea what was going on outside, in the present world? A lot of things were happening. I knew about them, but I heard them like you hear faint music rolling down a long hallway in an empty building, the sound of someone else’s home, a private conversation through a motel wall, the crash of dishes in the kitchen at midnight. It wasn’t anything that I was paying attention to or anything that seemed like it needed attention. I had a place to sleep and food when I wanted it and almost unlimited access to all the books I could ever want to read. The world seemed complete for me as it was.
I suppose many people like the idea of walking on the ground that others walked, thousands of years ago, to enter the buildings that once housed the ancients, where men and women lived and died. Almost everyone has a general attraction to these things; that’s why the British Museum is packed with people from all over the world every day. It is a way of assuring ourselves that we are not alone in this moment, this blip of time, that the story of the human race is a long and glorious one. The fascination with history, the artifacts, and particularly the mummies in the Egyptian exhibits, is that here you could gaze on the remains of another man or woman who once walked the earth much like us, so long ago. I suppose it makes us feel like we are not alone; not in the today-and-now sense, but in the long view, the big story, earth, the whole of it.
But that feeling fades the closer you get to it, the more scrupulously and intensely you study. Eventually you come to a plateau where it becomes clear that nobody would ever know the ancients, who they were, the way they lived, what they ate, how they died, what they wanted, even with these little traces they left behind—a scrap of pottery, a cornerstone, the rude inscription on a piece of woven paper, a massive stone monument buried in the desert.
The odd factors of chance, conditions, environment; why this piece and not another? Why this man and not another? Is there any logic to the way history is transferred from the gray areas of past eras to this one? You could work on that problem alone for a lifetime and never get to the end of it. What we really wanted to know was the interior aspect of this history, what they felt inside, how they envisioned their place in the world. Then they would be alive again, and I felt this would be a great gift to receive and to give to others.
This particular sort of life didn’t last of course. I stayed in Princeton for six years. Then I was prodded from the library by Dr. Nichols and a few others and nudged out into the world with a stack of degrees that I didn’t really remember getting. But they didn’t abandon me there. Dr. Nichols had some friends at Berkeley, including the great Egyptologist Miriam Lichtheim, an expert in Middle and New Kingdom translations, and they offered me a lecture position that had almost no teaching load and would leave me free to work on my independent translation projects. I moved out to San Francisco and within a month I found myself in California, a breezy afternoon standing outside a concert hall waiting for Helen, my future wife, to emerge. A small peninsula of the present day emerged into the ocean of history, a place I nosed up against in the foggy hours of the morning; before I knew it I was beached there. The ocean was too big, too blue, and the beach too warm and inviting. Even this rude metaphor I’m wielding is drawn from ancient texts. But inevitably they all are. There’s no way to escape it.
Zenobia was born the next year. I was twenty-two years old.
Penelope shook her head, her thin lips curved into a smirk, a lopsided drinking vessel, the glyph for “mouth.”
You’re a strange bird, you know that, Dr. Rothschild? It’s a miracle you turned out.
Sorry, I said. It’s a boring story.
She laughed.
No, no, Walter, not like that. I didn’t mean it like that.
My jaws throbbed, and suddenly I ached to move.
Dance?
Penelope lifted her head and smiled, her prominent front teeth spanning the fine expanse of her lips and the corners of her mouth spread out and back. It was a beautiful smile.
We bumped and bounced about the room for more songs, many more than I expected to. We danced to Rose Royce, Evelyn Champagne King, the Trammps, and Van McCoy & the Soul City Symphony, disco songs I remembered vaguely from car radios driving through Berkeley or San Francisco.
I spun Penelope around into an awkward dip and she squealed with delight. I don’t know many things about women, that’s for sure. But I do know that all women want to dance, as often as they can, and every woman wants to be dipped.
As I brought her back up I found myself looking directly into an enormous midsection struggling against a belt with a giant buckle the size of a dinner plate and the shape of Texas. I looked up to see the shaggy melon-size head of Gigantica, the wrestler from that riot on Oxford Street, squinting in the smoke and dim light with one eye, the other covered with a gauze bandage, bobbing his head in time with the music. Gigantica rotated slowly, bouncing expertly on his enormous bare feet that looked like twin dancing badgers. His partner was an equally large Swedish lass whipping her blond mane about in a circular pattern. Gigantica looked down at me as he twisted around, nodded slightly and winked with his free eye, as if we were old friends. He couldn’t have recognized me, as I never came into contact with the wrestlers that night, but regardless I felt a cool spike down my neck and I suddenly lost what little coordination I had. My legs went wooden and my back hurt. I shouted in Penelope’s ear that I had to get home, and we threaded our way back to the kitchen to find Magnus so I could thank him and say good-bye. I didn’t get the chance; he had apparently locked himself in the bathroom sometime earlier and refused to come out even when Penelope pounded on the door.
I walked Penelope to her Austin Mini down the block. The sky was lightening to the color of milky tea, and the streets were slick with a short rain that had fallen sometime in the night. The halal meats store was still lit and apparently open, but everything else on the street was dark. A man in a turban on the corner was busy opening up his paper wagon, wrestling the stacks of papers into the small plywood stand and singing softly to himself. I was wearing the wrong shoes, that was for certain. One was a loafer that was somewhat similar to mine, but the other was a positively titanic sandal-type shoe that flopped about as we walked.
Have you ever been to Cambridge, Penelope?
Did my first degree there. Peterhouse.
Familiar at all with the Fitzwilliam Museum?
Sure, she said. Good collection of Constable paintings, some ancient Egyptian materials. Nice museum. I had a roommate who was reading history.
What are you doing tomorrow? I asked. Come with me to Cambridge. I need a guide.
I stood on the sidewalk as she sat in the driver’s seat of the Mini and put her hands on the wheel. She fired up the engine and the radio was tuned to one of the innumerable techno-music stations they have in London, broadcasting a steady thumping beat with a series of shrieking sirens wailing in the background. She sat there and stared through the windshield.
I’ll pay for everything, I said. Have you back right away.
Penelope looked up at me and raised an eyebrow. I was shivering in the cold morning air, my clothes still damp from sweat. My bruised face felt numb.
She smiled and reached in her purse and took out a pen.
Some paper?
I searched my pockets and found Magnus’s card. She wrote her number on the back and handed it to me.
Call me in the morning. I’m not working so I’ll be home. I need to sleep on it. Can’t really make a decision like that now, can we?
In the cab on the way back to my flat I put my head back and gratefully closed my eyes. In the front of my eyelids a warm, reddish glow spread over my mind, carrying the traces of symbols, the slight representational images of language. My bruised face was numb and seemed to hang on my skull like a sack of meal. I opened my eyes as we passed Bond Street and on to the upper reaches of Oxford Street, the low walls of the buildings ablaze with neon signs for stereo equipment, electronics, housewares, the cab sliding down the dark seam of road, unhindered. I wanted to go back down to the office under the British Museum and sit with the Stela for a bit. Forget the rest of it, just feel the cold, smooth limestone, my fingers in the incisions of the symbols and then trailing across to the rough-hewn edges of the slab. The heft, the secure massiveness of the dark stone. I tried to focus on this bit of consistency.
But instead I thought of Helen as I was used to imagining her over the years. I imagined her with her cello, plying her bow with an ardent grace as if she were kneading the shoulders of an unruly child, the half sneer on her lips, eyes puckered with effort, holding the tawny cello between her legs with a tenderness, a loving nestling between her womanly thighs, her creamy, dimpled knees bobbing ever so slightly, a foot padding on the dusty hardwood floor of our old San Francisco town house, the afternoon light coming through the window. The sound of it, the resonant tone of the taut strings, the brutal dragging of hair, the tension, and the ragged sobs it drew from that mysterious instrument. But it wasn’t our house in San Francisco. I never saw her there like that. I mean, I wasn’t looking at her like that then. I only did that now, so many years later. I was making up the image of it, changing around the details, making it seem so much more glorious, beautiful, meaningful than the reality of a practicing professional musician. But what was there to do? It doesn’t make it any less true. In fact that image is what makes it real for me. That is how I choose to remember it, and that is always how it will be.
When I got home I dialed Penelope’s number.
She laughed, that bright musical laugh.
You know what fucking time it is? she said. Are you fucking nutters?
And then she said yes.
From The Instruction of Papyrus Insinger: One does not ever discover the heart of a woman any more than one knows the sky.