Collected Stories, page 62
Stiffly he stretched and rolled his stiff neck. His left arm was sore from yesterday’s reinoculation; the memory of his night’s watch was like a memory of delirium. He felt pleased that it had passed, and looked at his watch. Five-thirty. His mind groped. And then the pretense of awakening to sane reality fell away, and he stood in the pale, overtaken electric light sick with shame at the trick he had played upon his own anxiety and responsibility. What if he had missed a time for the pills?
His flesh lay like putty on his bones. In the membranes of his mouth he tasted all the night’s odors—the smell of sickness that was like no human or animal odor but virulent, deadly, and obscene; the smells of the things one relied on to stay alive, the disinfectant smell and the DDT spray. His arm was a swollen, throbbing ache. He belched and tasted bile, and bent to hold cool water in cupped handfuls against his eyes. When he took a drink from the carafe the chlorine bite of the halazone tablets gagged him. The effort, the steady, unrelieved, incessant effort that it took in this place to stay alive! He looked at his haggard, smudged face in the mirror and he hated Egypt with a kind of ecstasy. Finally, unwillingly, he went through the bedroom door.
Daybreak had not come here. The room was the vaguest gloom, yet when he turned on the light it had somehow the look that closed rooms have in daylight, a dissipated air like that of a room where a drunkard sleeps through the day. Shaking down the thermometer as he stepped across the rug, holding his breath to hear anything from the bed, the father approached and bent across the net. He bent his head lower, listening. “Dan?” he said. Then in a convulsive panic he tore away the net, knowing his son was dead.
The boy slept peacefully, lightly, his breathing even and soft. His forehead was cool to his father’s shaking hand. There was no need for the thermometer: the fever was not merely down but gone. In his jubilation the father picked up the little vulture-headed image he had bought for the boy the first day and tossed it to the ceiling and caught it. He moved around the room, retrieved a horsehair fly whisk from the floor and hung it on the dresser post, eased the shutter up a little way for air. The boy slept on.
Outside in the hall he heard soft sounds, and going quickly to the door, he surprised the hall boy depositing his shined shoes. The white eyes flashed upward in the face of the crouching figure, the bare feet moved respectfully backwards a step, the long, belted robe swung like a dancer’s.
“Saeeda,” the soft voice whispered.
“Saeeda. Can I have tea?”
“Only tea?”
“Fruit, maybe. Oranges or plantains.”
“Yes. How is your son?”
“Better,” the father said, and knew that this was why he had opened the door, just for the chance of telling someone. “Much better. The fever is gone.”
The floor boy seemed genuinely pleased. After all, Chapman thought, he probably hadn’t liked the business of being quarantined and inoculated any better than anybody else. To an Egyptian typhoid normally meant, if not death, several weeks in a fever hospital and a long, feeble convalescence. This one now was smiling and delighted as he went away on his sliding black feet. He should have a good tip when they left—a pound note at least.
The muezzin was still calling. It seemed an hour since he had begun. Returning to the bathroom, Chapman stood in the French doors looking out at the town. In the gray light the palm tops lay as quiet as something under glass. The yellow paths of the back garden were quiet geometry below him, and he smelled the authentic, wet-mud smell of Egypt. Across wall and roofs was a yellow reach of river, with a narrow mud island lying against the far shore, then a strip of taffy-colored water, then the shore itself and the far lines of palms indicating villages or canals, and clear beyond, binding the edge of the pure sky, the long desert rim that divided habitable Egypt from the wastes.
Over there was the City of the Dead, where the light had been last night and where he had half imagined ghouls and vampires, jackal-headed men with square shoulders, obscene prowling things. It was innocent and clean now, and the river that when they first came had seemed to him a dirty, mud-banked sewer looked different too. It came down grandly, one of the really mighty rivers, pouring not so much out of the heart of the continent as out of all backward time, and in its yellow water it carried the rich silt for delta cotton fields, the bilharzia worms to infect the sweating fellahin at the ditch heads, the sewage and the waste, the fecundity, the feculence. The river was literally Egypt. Lotus and papyrus, ibis and crocodile, there it came. Incomprehensibly, tears jumped to his eyes. He went into the bedroom and got the binoculars and returned to watch.
The blurry yellow haze sharpened into precise lines as he turned the knob. Beyond the mud margins he saw a line of people coming, leading donkeys and camels loaded with something, perhaps produce for the market. He saw them carry burdens from beast to boat. Farther down, a family was bathing in the river, a woman and four children, who ran and splashed each other and launched themselves like sleds on the water. The thought of swimming in that open drain appalled him—and yet why not? Probably it never occurred to them that the river was polluted. And it was a touching and private thing, somehow, to see the brown-skinned family playing and see them so close and unaware and yet not hear their shouting and laughter.
The far bank was fully alive now. Two feluccas were slanting out across the current of the river, and the river seemed not so much to divide as to unite its two shores. Birds flew over it, camels and donkeys and people clustered at the landing places, the feluccas moved, leaning farther in a riffle of wind. All the Nile’s creatures, as inexhaustible as the creatures of the sea, began to creep and crawl and fly. Safe, relieved of anxiety, reassured, rescued, Chapman watched them from his little cell of sanitary plumbing, and on his hands as he held the binoculars to his eyes he smelled the persistent odor of antiseptic.
It was ridiculous, but they made him feel alone and timid. He wished his son would awake so they could talk. He could read aloud to him during the time he was getting stronger; the thought occurred to him as an opportunity he must not miss.
“What a damned country!” he said.
Watching the river, he had not noticed the movement at the far corner of the garden below him, but now as he swung the glasses down he saw there one of the ragged, black-robed boys who raked and sprinkled the paths every day. He had taken off his turban and was kneeling, folding it back and forth until it made a little mat beside one of the garden water taps. On this he knelt, and with a reaching haul pulled the robe over his head. He wore nothing else. His ribs were like the ribs of a basket, his shoulder blades moved as he turned on the tap.
Steadying the glasses against the jamb, Chapman watched the brown boy’s face, very serious and composed, and as it turned momentarily he thought he saw one milky blind eye. Face, neck, shoulders, arms, chest and belly, and carefully the loins and rectum, the boy washed himself with cupped handfuls of water. He washed his feet one after the other; he bent and let the tap run a moment over his head. On the yellow ground a dark spot of wet grew.
He stood up, and Chapman stepped back, not to be caught watching, but the boy only pulled on his robe again. Then he knelt once more on the rug of his turban and bowed himself in prayer towards the east.
Chapman kept the glasses steadily on him. The intense concentration and stillness of the bent figure bothered him obscurely. He remembered himself staring at the tiled wall and did not like the memory. Moreover, the shame of that evasion was mixed with an irritated, unwilling perception that the boy kneeling in the garden was humble, touching, even dignified.
Dignified? A skinny, one-eyed boy with a horizon no wider than the garden he worked in, with one dirty robe to his back, and for home a mud hut where the pigeons nested in the living-room and the buffalo owned the inner, safest, most desirable room? The image of Egyptian workmen he had seen picking up the dirt-caked hems of their robes and holding them in their teeth for greater freedom of action stood in his mind like stiff sculpture.
And yet the praying boy was not pathetic or repulsive or ridiculous. His every move was assured, completely natural. His ouching of the earth with his forehead made Chapman want somehow to lay a hand on his bent back.
They have more death than we do, Chapman thought. Whatever he is praying to has more death in it than anything we know.
Maybe it had more life too. Suppose he had sent up a prayer of thanksgiving a little while ago when he found his son out of danger? He had been doing something like praying all night, praying to modern medicine, propitiating science, purifying himself with germicides, placating the germ theory of disease. But suppose he had prayed in thanks-giving, where would he have directed his prayer? Not to God, not to Allah, not to the Nile or any of its creature-gods or the deities of light. To some laboratory technician in a white coat. To the Antibiotic God. For the first time it occurred to him what the word “antibiotic” really meant.
The distant rim was light-struck now. The first of the morning buzzards came from somewhere and planed across the motionless palm tops. It teetered and banked close so that Chapman saw the curve of its head like the vulture-headed image on the boy’s bed table: the vulture head of Mut, the Lady of Thebes, the Mother of the World. They eyed each other with a kind of recognition as it passed. It had a look like patience, and its shadow, passing and returning over the garden, brushing the ragged boy and the palms and the balcony where Chapman stood, might have seemed a threat but might also have been a kind of patrolling, almost a reassurance.
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
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First published in the United States of America by Random House, Inc., 1990
Published in the United States of America by Penguin Books 1991
This edition published in Great Britain by Penguin Classics 2013
Copyright © Wallace Stegner, 1938, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1950, 1951, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1959, 1990
Copyright renewed © Wallace Stegner, 1965, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1986, 1987
All rights reserved
All stories in this work originally appeared in the following publications: The Atlantic Monthly, Contact Magazine, Cosmpolitan, Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, Mademoiselle, Rocky Mountain Review, Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly and Woman’s Day
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-71-819749-0
Wallace Stegner, Collected Stories
