TWENTY-NINE

Eberhardt Woolfe sat on his verandah facing out over the river to the village on the east bank. In his hands, pressed to his eyes, was a pair of binoculars. He watched as a flock of swifts darkened the sky around a large tree on the far side of the Nile, the birds settling then rising, moving in concert as if magnetized by an invisible force, writing on the sky.

His eye was caught by a flash of color behind the darkening cloud and he found himself looking at a woman leaning out from a first-floor window at the hotel. She had red hair and a pink shawl over her shoulders. A pale face rested on a pale pair of hands. The woman was perfectly still. He adjusted the focus, wanting to see her with greater clarity, but the binoculars could offer no more.

Eberhardt wondered who she was. He tried to focus again on the darting birds; the light was too low, he couldn’t make them out. Putting down the glasses, he looked across at the far bank. The birds were reduced to specks, the woman to a fiery punctuation mark against the dark stone façade of the Luxor Hotel.

Rubbing his eyes, Eberhardt reminded himself that he wasn’t here to look at women, at tourists, to wonder idly about making their acquaintance. He was here to excavate the tomb of the queen and record his findings. His purpose was to honor the dead, to place himself in their service. The living were not his concern and he sought no place among them.

He rose from his chair and went inside to the large room in which he worked and spent his leisure hours, there being for him now no distinction between the two. Banging the screen door behind him, lighting the lamp on the desk, he lowered himself into the chair, feeling the ache in his shoulders. He was stiff from the day’s endeavor, from scraping at the dense wall of rubble and debris that still blocked the entrance to the tomb.

Picking up his scalpel, he began with its sharp, silver point to scrape dried bat droppings from a scarab he had found a few days earlier. The scarab was green, made of malachite, and smaller than his thumbnail. The humble beetle had been for the ancient Egyptians the symbol of resurrection, for the way it rolled its ball of muck, mimicking the sun rising to roll across the sky each day. This one had survived some two and a half thousand years. It was crudely carved, the workmanship unremarkable. There had been shoddy workers among the scribes and craftsmen of ancient Egypt, as well as fine ones. It touched him, to realize it. He had a tenderness toward the imperfect. He reached for a brush and dusted away the specks of dirt and dust he’d dislodged from the carved lines of the beetle’s back.

As he did so, Eberhardt saw again the white, oval face, the sideways tilt of it as it rested on the long, linked fingers. The woman had been so very still as she looked out over the river. As if, he could not help thinking, she too inhabited that space between the lands of the living and the dead.

“Ach,” he said aloud. “Such nonsense. Be quiet now.”

He’d gotten into the regrettable habit of talking to himself. He spoke Arabic fluently, had exchanges all day long with the workers at the site and the foreman who managed the hiring and firing, distributed the wages. He could speak with them but he couldn’t talk to them. They understood each other to a serviceable degree and no further. If he had anything important to discuss, he conversed with himself. Or sometimes with Kati.

He put down the scarab and went to the far side of the room, to where the Bösendorfer stood, opened the lid. Pulling up his shirtsleeves, inclining his sore back over the ivories, he lowered his fingers to the keys and heard the first notes enter the room like party guests, dancing over the air, reaching the mud ceiling and the rounded corners, drifting out through the netted door to the verandah. He closed his eyes and played on, Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved filling his head and heart and mind.

“Kati,” he said, his voice drowned out by the music. “Where are you? Where are you now?”