Three Relics

PORCELAIN BABY. OHIO, AD 1975

Although I’ve had the porcelain baby as long as I can remember, its details still surprise me: navel pocking the belly’s swell, throat’s tiny divot, spine furrowing the narrow back. Small as a knuckle, white as sun-bleached bone, the porcelain baby stares calmly from two brush-tick pupils, carmine lips pursed firmly. Daubs of dark lead mark the place where limbs once attached. A raised seam runs the body’s length, remnant of the mold, and just under the left ear I can see where someone scraped away a bit of still-malleable porcelain; this proof of human touch may be the detail I like best.

Many years ago, as my mother tilled her garden, preparing the plot for sowing, the machine’s blade churned something small and white from the soil. She dropped it in her pocket and washed it under a faucet in the old farmhouse where they lived then, built in 1865 on slabs of hewn granite and held together with thick pegs.

One afternoon, the phone in the kitchen rang; the doctor confirmed what she’d suspected: pregnancy. She cried, she admits now, overwhelmed, though they knew they wanted children. Her husband, my father, was up on the roof, nailing a loose shingle. He climbed slowly down the ladder and they began to make their plans. It was mid-May, and the lilac bush by the back door was in bloom.

Not many weeks later, something passed from her, shapeless, clotted. Was she relieved? But the doctor’s ultrasound showed that the baby was unharmed. Twins ran in her family; could she have borne two? She, I, will never know. What of the lost twin, the double self, unmourned and unburied, lost? The bone baby won’t say. Some cannot be saved.

There’s something idolatrous about the porcelain baby; something in the muscled little body demands tribute. It could be Jesus, of course. It’s the right size for a crèche, and something in the eyes calculates, prepares for disappointment. The limbless Christ, dark metal where legs and arms should join; so long without limbs, it seems complete without them. Its pointed pelvis forms something like a stake or a spear.

The earth there yields teeth, arrowheads, pottery shards, and, once, this bit of molded bone, turned and shaped and painted: an inscrutable torso, small and easily missed, bobbing like pumice in the raw soil. When blade cuts turf, long-planted offspring rise. All these clues read, Someone lived here before you, and also, Dust, dust. But this bone-china baby, what does it say? New life is pointed like a spade, and brief; and, Yours is not the only life. Discarded, priceless fragment, saying, Be mindful where you step. Carry your shoes in your hand.

RECIPE. MINNESOTA, AD 2003

One winter afternoon, a month after our wedding, I was paging through one of his cookbooks when a folded piece of paper slipped out. I picked it up off the floor, opened it, and immediately it was as though she stood in my kitchen, our kitchen, his lover before me, in that handwritten recipe. We had been speaking acquaintances once, but when word got around, she would pass me as though I were not there. This pained me, but I would not approach her. When he left she had paid for the right to hold me in contempt. I knew too that I would have done the same.

I held it in my hand, this recipe that her mother must have written—the list of ingredients and the body of directions in a hand I did not recognize, marginal notes in a hand I did. We had moved better than a thousand miles north, far from the kitchen they had once shared, where she had stood over a counter and parsed out spices, where she had seared poultry in a hot skillet. And in that long move we had brought with us this single sheet of paper, this relic from a time they shared.

I threw it away without a thought. That was past. I would not have her words in my place, in the apartment he and I struggled with every paycheck to rent. Finding this thing she had made was like finding a picture of them together, the two of them sitting on a white-painted porch swing, his arm circling her shoulders, her head inclined toward him, their faces lit with happiness. He had loved another, and it had not lasted: here was physical evidence, as if I needed it. Understand, I wished her no ill, but I wanted no ghost in my house.

And yet after I had thrown the recipe away, I regretted it. I knew he loved that dish—chicken with molé sauce—and believed I could make it better than she had. Why hadn’t I kept it? I looked up the recipe in a cookbook, made a list of ingredients, and went to the supermarket. Cocoa powder, dried plums, chiles, plum tomatoes. I minced shallots fine and sautéed them in butter, and on another burner dark sauce bubbled.

But this was a futile exercise. We are not different, we two who have shared one man. How many of her turns of phrase linger in his speech, how many gestures? How many times in a day does some trigger turn his mind back? I cannot begrudge him this, for this is riches, to have lived, as now, before, to have been to another what he is to me.

But hear this, all you who cannot know what I have staked on my love for this man. I will not leave, he who has been to me a cruse of water and a cake of meal in a starving time, he whose body I have fed so often and so well that even if he left me, listen, even if then, part of me would remain; flesh remembers, even if mind forgets, what once made it strong. Love is stronger than death, passion more fierce than the grave. Hear me. If we had nothing left but bone and water, I could feed him on that, make marrow-dark broth rich enough to steady him for this day’s work.

FALSE DOOR. EGYPT, GIZA, 2400 BCE

When the priest fell ill for what the physicians knew would be the last time, one of them sent a temple boy to the stonecutter, who counted off dimensions, held his chisel above the stone, and struck. The limestone split evenly; it was a propitious day for this kind of work. The stonecutter positioned his chisel again.

Early the next day, the scribe arrived, unrolling his set of delicate picks and chisels from a linen wrapper. The dying man wanted what they all wanted: his name repeated many times, to ensure the survival of his ka; pleas to passersby, imploring food offerings, or asking them to say the prayers that would cause food to materialize in the world of the dead.

The priest lay on his deathbed, listening, shivering although the sun—the last he would see—was high overhead. The sharp chipping of limestone, he knew, was the scribe carving the proper glyphs on the false door of his tomb-chapel. Through this portal his ka would pass to partake of offerings left to him.

It would be a duty of the temple boys to fish for him in the river, dropping their nets into the shallow water and jerking them up quick to snare the little silver-skinned fishes. These they pierced with bone knives, sand-sharpened, and let the entrails spill on the ground. One of the temple dogs would lick them up. The boys spread the flayed bodies of the fish on the drying rack, and while one—steady-handed—lifted carefully the spines from flesh, another waved sticks to keep ravens and vultures away. The desert afternoon dried the fish quickly, and the setting sun found the boys packing earthen jars with alternating layers of white, coarse-grained salt and pale fish flesh. They heated a stick of wax over a flame and ran it over the jar’s mouth, pressed the lid down. Beads of wax bubbled around the seal. The boys blew out the flame and made ready to go to the old priest’s tomb. Once he had his meal, they could have theirs. Thinking of these things, knowing that he would be provided for, the old priest died at peace, and was entombed.

Time passed. All of them, farmers and traders alike, brought their tax to the temple. Dates, almonds, olive oil, barley, wine. The boys placed flasks and plates by the door of the old priest’s tomb. His diet was varied even if some days the plates seemed untouched. Was it not his prerogative to go hungry, if he chose so, in the afterlife? Sometimes they lingered, daring each other to trace the images of his name—bird, eye, snake—and sometimes they were silent, thinking of different things. One cursed the bird who had pecked him earlier, by the fish racks, so that his hand bled and he had to wrap a cloth around it. One thought of his mother, whom he barely remembered, but associated in his mind with the kohl dealers who sometimes gathered outside the temple door. She had lined her eyes with kohl, dipping the delicate pencil into the squat cosmetic pot, focusing on her face reflected in a circle of polished bronze. One thought of the water snake he had seen swimming across the current in the river, pointed toward the far shore. He could not look away.

He would expect this, the old priest—had he not done the same himself as a boy?—the priest, long dead, the careful offerings brought by successive generations of temple boys, some thoughtful and some perfunctory, as the upper world swung through year after year until his name was forgotten, year after year until sand obscured his tomb and wore down his temple, year after year until someone hooked chains and pulleys to his chapel door and hove. The limestone broke loose of its ancient footings. Someone wrapped the door in canvas and set it in a frame; someone loaded the huge crate onto a ship. This he could not have foreseen.

Now the door is displayed, in a room filled with other artifacts, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I make it my errand to visit. Iry-en Akhet, Lector-Priest, what would he think if one bright afternoon he passed through this portal, expecting to find dried fish or barley bread, and found me instead, taking notes with a plastic pen, faintly backlit by the case on the opposite wall, a case full of tortoiseshell hair combs, faience pendants, glass cosmetic bottles in which the last remains of lotion and paint still cling? If this can last, why not his temple, why not his god?

INCANTATION

You, stranger, lend me the breath in your throat; say the word and I will be fed. It costs you a passing moment, no more, only time, next to nothing. It does not rob your mouth of meat, does not empty your stomach of cud. Say the word. You, living, cannot know hunger like mine. Like you, I remember feast days: leeks and crackling fat, wine, honey dripping on barley bread. Now, dead, hunger swallows me whole; I burn with it as a candle flame. You, stranger! Speeched, you have power, can speak into existence food such as living tongues have never tasted, stoneless fruit, yielding flesh, satiety without excess, please; say the word. I was once like you. You cannot yet know the sharp hunger of the dead.