Joseph and His Brothers, page 146
"Do you know how to conduct yourself?" he asked as they left the hall, turning to the right and entering a courtyard of flowers with four basins set in its ornamented pavement.
"In a pinch, perhaps," Joseph responded with a smile.
"Well, the pinch is probably here," the man replied. "Do you know at least how to greet the god first off?"
"I wish I did not," Joseph riposted, "for how delightful it must be to learn that from you."
The official maintained his seriousness for a moment, then burst into laughter—one would never have expected it of him; but then his wide-beaming face immediately turned dour and earnest again.
"You would appear to be a kind of jester and buffoon," he said, "a rascal and cattle thief, whose antics can only provoke laughter. I assume therefore that your prophecy and interpretations are mere roguery as well, the market cries of a quack peddling nostrums."
"Oh, I haven't much to say about prophecy and interpretation," Joseph replied. "For it is not up to me and not my doing, it just hap-
pens to come to me at times. But I've never made much of it until now. But since Pharaoh has called me to him in such haste, Fve begun to think of it more highly myself."
"In saying which you intend to teach me a lesson, I suppose?" the steward asked. "Pharaoh is gentle and young and full of kindness. That the sun shines upon a man is no proof that he's not a rogue."
"It not only shines upon us, but allows us to shine as well," Joseph answered as they walked on, "some in one way, some in another. May you be pleased with yourself in its light."
The man cast him a sidelong glance, several in fact—in between he would stare straight ahead—but then with a certain haste, as if he had forgotten to look to something or had to make a quick double check as to what he had seen, he turned his head to the man he was escorting, until finally Joseph had no choice but to repay his sidelong glances. He did it with a smile and a nod that seemed to say "Yes, yes, that's how it is, you needn't be so amazed, you've seen rightly." As if taking fright, the man quickly turned his head to look forward again.
Leaving the court of flowers they entered a corridor lighted from above, one wall of which was painted with scenes of harvest and sacrifice, while the other was a series of pillared doorways that looked into various chambers, including the Hall of Counsel and Interrogation with its baldachin, whose purpose the steward explained to Joseph as they passed. He had grown more talkative. He even told his companion where Pharaoh was to be found at the moment.
"After lunch they proceeded to the Cretan garden room," he said. "Cretan, because a foreign artist from those shores ornamented it. The chief royal sculptors Bek and Auta are in attendance as well, receiving instructions. The Great Mother is there too. I will hand you over to the chamberlain on duty in the antechamber, who will announce your arrival."
"Yes, let's do it that way," Joseph said, and there was nothing more than that to what he said. But as they walked along the man at his side, after giving another shake of his head, suddenly broke into soundless, unstoppable giggles, a laughing fit that shook his belly with quick, short, visible spasms and that he had not yet quite mastered when they entered the antechamber at the end of the corridor,
where a short, stooped courtier, whose apron had a marvelous waistband fold and who carried a fan under his arm, stepped out from the flap in a bee-embroidered portiere, where he had apparently been listening. The steward's voice was still quivering with the peculiar distress of his suppressed giggles as he explained to the chamberlain, who came flouncing and mincing toward them, who it was he had brought.
"Ah our long-awaited, much-sought-after know-it-all," the little man said in a lisping high voice, "who knows more than the experts of the House of Books. Fine, fine, ex-qui-site!" All the while he remained as stooped as before, perhaps because he was born that way and could not stand up straight, perhaps merely because elegant service at court had accustomed him to this posture. "I shall announce you, announce you at once, and why shouldn't I? The entire court awaits you. Pharaoh is, to be sure, busy at the moment, but I shall announce you posthaste all the same. I shall interrupt Pharaoh, cut him short on your account, right in the middle of his instructions to his artists and report your arrival to him. One would hope that surprises you somewhat. But let us also hope your surprise does not lead to confusion, so that you then utter something foolish—for which perhaps no confusion is required. I call to your attention beforehand that Pharaoh is exceptionally short-tempered when it comes to saying anything foolish about his dreams. My congratulations. And your name would be?"
"My name was Osarsiph," came the answer.
"It is your name, you mean, it is what you are called. Strange enough, I grant, always to have to answer to that name. I shall now go in to announce you by it. Merci, my friend," he said with a shrug to the steward, who now withdrew, and slipped with a stooping gait through the curtain flap.
One could hear muted voices inside, especially a soft, youthful, prim voice that then fell silent again. Evidently the hunchback had flounced his way forward to lisp into Pharaoh's ear.
He returned now, his eyebrows drawn high, and whispered, "Pharaoh summons you!"
Joseph stepped inside.
He found himself in a loggia, not large enough to actually deserve the name "garden room" that had been applied to it, but of rare beauty all the same. With a floor whose squares depicted octopuses
and children riding dolphins, and a ceiling supported by two columns inlaid with colored glass and sparkling gemstones and entwined with grapevines painted so naturally they appeared real, the room looked out onto gardens through three large windows that drew the fullness of the gardens' charm inside. One could see lustrous tulip beds, the marvelous blossoms of exotic shrubs, and paths strewn with gold dust and leading to lotus ponds. The eye ranged far out into a vista of islands, bridges, and gazebos and caught the flash of enameled tiles with which the distant summerhouse was decorated. The hall of the verandah itself gleamed with color. Its walls were covered with frescoes that departed from any style known to Egypt. Strange peoples and customs were portrayed there, evidently those of the Islands of the Sea. Women sat and walked in stiff, colorful formal skirts, their breasts bared above tight-fitting midriffs, their hair piled in curls above headbands, then falling in long braids to their shoulders. Pages, in a dainty livery no one had ever seen before, waited upon them with tapered pitchers in their hands. Crowned with bright feathers atop his curly head, a little prince with a wasp-waist jacket, two-colored trousers, and lambskin boots strolled smugly between fantastically blossoming grasses and shot arrows at fleeing game, painted so that they flew freely over ground their hooves never touched. In another place acrobats did somersaults across the backs of raging bulls—a diversion for ladies and gentlemen gazing down on them from pillared windows and balconies.
The same exotic taste defined the objets d'art and handcrafted utensils that adorned the chamber: earthenware vases glazed in shimmering hues and inlaid with ivory reliefs set in gold, splendid embossed goblets, a black onyx bull's head with golden horns and rock-crystal eyes. As he entered the room with hands raised, Joseph took in the scene, casting an earnest but modest glance around the group of people to whom his presence had been announced.
Amenhotep-Neb-maat-Re's widow sat on her throne, a tall chair with a high footstool, directly opposite him, framed against the light coming through the arch of the middle deep-set window, so that her bronzed complexion, already contrasted against her attire, was darkened even more by shadows. All the same Joseph recognized the unusual facial features he had seen on various occasions when the royal family drove forth: the daintily arched nose, the
pouted lips set between furrows left by bitter knowledge of this world, the eyebrows traced by a brush above small, black, sparkling eyes that gazed with a cool attentiveness. The god's mother was not wearing the golden vulture helmet that Jacob's son had seen her wear in public. Her hair—surely gray by now, since she had to be in her late fifties—was wrapped in a silver cloth bag that left room for the golden band of a clasp running from temple to temple across her brow, while slithering down onto her forehead were two equally golden, sinuously erect royal serpents—two of them: as if she had appropriated the one that belonged to her spouse who had now merged with the god. Her ears were adorned with round disks of the same bright gemstones from which her necklace was made. Her small, vigorous body sat very straight, very upright and poised, in the old, hieratic style, as it were—forearms on the arms of the chair, feet placed tightly together on the high footstool. Her shrewd eyes met those of the reverential new arrival, but then, out of an inborn, perfectly understandable indifference, she let them swiftly glide down over his form and immediately turned back to her son—but those bitter furrows at her pouting lips formed a mocking smile in response to the excited, boyish curiosity with which this long-expected and highly recommended newcomer greeted her.
To the left and backed by a muraled wall, Egypt's king sat on a lion-pawed armchair with an ample supply of soft cushions and a slanted back—which he was not resting against, but was bent energetically forward, his feet thrust back under the chair, his slender hands adorned with scarab rings grasping the chair's arms. One must also add that the pouncelike pose of eager attentiveness from which Amenhotep—turning to his right and opening his gray, veiled eyes as wide as possible—viewed his newly arrived interpreter of dreams did not take shape all at once, but formed by starts and stages over the course of a minute—it took that long—until it finally reached a point where Pharaoh had actually risen from his chair somewhat and shifted his weight entirely to his clasping hands, the strain clearly visible in the working of his knuckles. As he did so, an object that had been lying in his lap, a kind of lyre, fell to the floor with a gentle, reverberating tinkle—and was quickly picked up and presented to him by one of the men who stood before him, one of the sculptors he was instructing. The man had to hold it out to him for a while before he accepted it, closing his eyes, sinking back into the cushions of
his chair, and returning to the same pose he had evidently assumed while conversing with his master craftsmen—an extraordinarily relaxed, soft, and all too comfortable pose, for the seat of the chair was hollowed out for a cushion that yielded until Pharaoh could not help sinking into it and thus sat not only at a long angle but also very low, while dangling one hand down over the arm of his chair, strumming the thumb of his other hand softly against the strings of the improbably small harp lying in his lap, and pulling up his legs to cross one knee over the other beneath his linen skirt, which left one foot jiggling rather high in the air. The golden shaft of his sandal emerged from between his big and second toe.
The Child of the Cave
At the time Nefer-khe-peru-Re-Amenhotep was as old as Joseph— who now stood before him as a thirty-year-old man—had been when he tended the flock together with his brothers and coaxed his colorful garment from his father; that is, Pharaoh was seventeen. Yet he looked older, not only because in this clime people age more quickly, and not solely due to his precarious health either, but also because early on he had committed himself to the world as a whole—with a multiplicity of impressions storming his soul from all the quarters of heaven—and had labored with zealous enthusiasm in the cause of the divine. In describing his face—beneath the round blue wig with its royal serpent that he wore today over a linen cap— we should not be discouraged by intervening millennia from making the apt comparison that he looked like a young, aristocratic Englishman of rather faded stock: tall, arrogant, and weary, with a large drooping chin that one could not call receding but that was nevertheless weak; a nose whose narrow, somewhat indented bridge made his broad, sensitive nostrils all the more striking; and deep-set, dreamily veiled eyes from which he was never able to raise the lids entirely and whose dull luster stood in bewildering contrast to the unhealthy, flushed red of very full lips, a hue that came not from rouge but from nature. The face was thus a mixture of sensuality and painfully convoluted spirituality—but still at a boyish stage and presumably even with something of a boy's playful recklessness. It was anything but handsome and beautiful, and yet it held a disquieting
attraction—it was not surprising that Egypt's people felt a tenderness for him and gave him flowery names.
Nor was there anything beautiful about Pharaoh's body—which was of scarcely medium height and to some extent rather oddly misshapen, as was clearly evident beneath his light, though to be sure exquisitely luxurious attire and from the way he draped it over the cushions with a casualness indicative not of bad manners but of an oppositional style of life: a long neck, a narrow and weak chest half covered now with a marvelous collar garland of gemstones, thin arms with embossed golden bracelets, and a slightly protruding stomach that he had had since birth and that was now exposed by a skirt hanging from well below the navel but rising high in the back, its elegant front fold adorned with fringed ribbons and images of the uraeus. Moreover the legs were not only too short, but also lacking all proportion, since the thighs were decidedly too full, while the calves were almost as skinny as chicken legs. Not only did Amen-hotep urge his sculptors not to disguise this peculiarity, but he also even directed them to exaggerate it for the sake of precious truth. In contrast his hands and feet were of a very beautiful and noble shape, especially his long-fingered and elegantly sensitive hands, in the beds of whose nails still lay traces of scented oils. How odd that the ruling passion of this coddled lad—who obviously accepted the luxury of his birth as a matter of course—was said to be a longing to know the Most High; and as he stood there off to one side, Abraham's great-grandson was amazed at how this concern for God could appear on earth among members of the human race so terribly different, so remote and so strange each to the other.
Amenhotep had now turned back to bid farewell to his two master sculptors—simple, robust men, one of whom busied himself wrapping a damp cloth around a still-unfinished clay statuette set atop a pedestal, which he had just been showing to his patron.
"Do that, my good Auta," Joseph heard the soft, prim voice say—the same voice he had heard from outside, which though rather too high also had a certain solemn cadence that at times alternated with a more hurried rhythm—"do it as Pharaoh has instructed you, make it charming, lively, and beautiful, the way my father in the heavens desires it. There are still errors in your work—not errors of craftsmanship, for you are very competent, but errors of the spirit.
My Majesty has demonstrated that to you, and you will correct it. You have depicted my sister, Sweet Princess Baketaton, all too much in the old, dead style that is repugnant to my father, whose will I know. Make her charming and light, make her according to the truth that is the light and that lives in Pharaoh, for he has placed it deep inside himself. Let her one hand be putting a garden fruit, a pomegranate, to her lips, and let the other hang free, not with the rigid palm facing her body, but with the palm curved toward the back—that is the will of the god who is in my heart and whom I know as no one else knows, because I have come from him."
"Your servant," Auta replied, wrapping the clay figure with one hand and raising the other to his king, "will do it exactly as, much to my good fortune, it has been commanded and taught me by Pharaoh, the sole son of Re, the beautiful child of the Aton."
"Thank you, Auta, my warm and cordial thanks to you. It is important, you do understand, don't you? For as the father is in me and I in him, so shall all be one in us, that is the goal. Your work, however, if executed in the right spirit, can perhaps contribute a little toward all becoming one in him and me. And now as for you, my good Bek—"
"Remember Auta," the almost manly deep voice of the Goddess-Widow could be heard to remark from her high throne, "always remember that it is not easy for Pharaoh to make himself understood, and that therefore he probably says more than he means so that our understanding can follow his intention. What he means is not that Sweet Princess Baketaton should be depicted eating, biting directly into the fruit; rather you should merely place the pomegranate in her hand and let her lift her arm slightly so that one may presume she might perhaps put the fruit to her lips—that will be sufficiently new and is the meaning to which Pharaoh wishes to bring you when he says you should let her eat of it. You must also subtract something from what His Majesty has said about the hanging hand, so that the rounded palm should not be turned completely toward the back. Just turn it away from her body slightly, only halfway, that is the meaning intended and will bring both praise and censure enough. This by way of improving your understanding."
Her son was silent for a moment.
"Have you understood?" he then asked.
"I have," Auta replied.
"And so you will also have understood," Amenhotep said, staring down at the lyrelike instrument in his lap, "that in attempting to soften my words, the Great Mother says, of course, something rather less than she intends. You can place the hand with the fruit fairly close to the mouth, and as for the free hand, it is to be sure only half a turn from the body when you rotate the palm toward the back, for no one turns the palm completely to the outside, and you would be violating the shining truth were you to do it that way. And thus you can see how prudently my mother has softened my words."
With a mischievous smile he looked up from the instrument, revealing small, but too pale and transparent teeth between his full lips, and then glanced across to Joseph, who returned his smile. The queen was smiling as well, by the way, as were the two master craftsmen.
