PASSAGE TO EGYPT
IN THE THREE years following my husband’s death, I never slid Thom’s memory stick into my computer, but I kept the memento as a tangible object, a pendant hanging on the black silk cord between my breasts. Although I promptly turned over Thom’s briefcase and printouts to the scientists, their work using spectroscopy to locate extraterrestrial life scarcely progressed after his death. As Thom and I had agreed in those last moments we spent together, I kept to myself not only his words to me, writ large on the face of the universe, but also the existence of the small red dot—that collapsed valentine, that drop of Thom’s blood.
In those years while the nations warred in the Middle East and parts of Asia, I lived in a depression, a deep crevice. Certainly I received no sign from within my own gloom or from the state of the nations that I should reveal the secret of extraterrestrial life. The idea of that distant life seemed unreal, the emblem of a trauma I needed to bury. Yet I always wore the memory stick.
After Thom’s death, I moved from Iowa City to New York City to a new position as an art therapist. When I was with my clients, my attention was absorbed to a great extent by the patients’ paintings and sculptures—their work as a whole and all its parts. I rejoiced in their achievements. That they could create—begin, develop, and finish something! Wasn’t that the very template of sanity? At least of continuity, which was one of the hallmarks of sanity.
Only once in the presence of a patient did I have a mental lapse: of a patient’s white-and-gray rendering of the hospital cafeteria, I had involuntarily thought, “The Garden of Grief,” and I said, “It’s a wonderful garden,” when I had intended to say it was a wonderful painting. Rendered in neutral tones of ash and char, the painting had been the opposite of a wonderful, colorful garden, but I found consoling beauty in its vision. Another time—not with the patients—at a bookstore near Lincoln Center, I had looked at the array of appealing book covers and said, “What beautiful flowers.” Was displacement what I was after? A displacement from extended grief? Moving my work from Iowa City to New York had helped me leave some portion of sorrow behind. Not enough.
A new international symposium—in Egypt—had been organized to honor Thom, and I agreed to travel to Cairo to greet the group. I was glad to go, glad to have a mission, a new direction, a small but new duty to perform. I wore the memory stick like a shield over my heart.
After traveling alone from New York to Paris, I joined one of the scientists whom I’ve already mentioned in passing, our old friend Gabriel Plum the Sherlockian Brit, for the second half of the journey from Paris to Cairo. From the moment I hugged him at Charles de Gaulle, I found his tweedy aroma to be unexpectedly comforting. I’d always liked Gabriel, how a certain warmth and wit shone through his dry manner. Once aloft, we chatted brightly, then settled into moments of pleasant silence, as only old friends can do. From the window of the huge jet, I was admiring the ruggedness below of the mountains forming the spine of northern Italy when Gabriel leaned over and said quietly but with a certain British briskness, “I say, Lucy, suppose we get married one day?”
I burst into laughter, thinking he was making an old-friend joke.
Unperturbed, he went on. “Why not? We’ve known each other forever.”
A tremor of grief wobbled my chin, and I bit my lower lip.
With smooth aplomb, Gabriel transitioned into a question. “Could you fly a plane this size? What’s the biggest airplane you ever flew?”
“Corporate jet,” I answered. “And you?” It pleased me to remember that Gabriel was also fascinated with flying. “What are you flying these days?” Since I’d moved from Iowa to New York, I hadn’t flown much.
“Yes,” Gabriel answered; he sighed. “Nothing hot, the new Cessna.” He reached over and squeezed my knee. “For all your playing of Penelope,” he said kindly, “Thom is a Ulysses who will never come home.”
What I liked about Gabriel—he seemed as articulate and debonair as Tony Blair, the British prime minister who sent his troops to Iraq. Gabriel was more cynical, though.
Yet he had made me laugh. That spontaneous burst had let some daylight into my dark world.
On the difficult first day in Cairo, though I was exhausted from travel, I was scheduled to speak a few words of welcome to the symposium convened to continue Thom’s work. Arriving a bit late, I walked straight to the podium. From just the corner of my eye, I caught the peripheral movement of the Egyptian host—a drapery of white robes—rising in a gesture of respect. The other scientists remained seated; they knew me well: an ordinary wife of a revered man. Determinedly, I grasped the edges of the speaker’s stand. As I looked at the ELF team, I realized again that Thom was not only absent but dead; I pressed his memory stick—my talisman—against my breastbone to give me courage to speak into that void. Should I give the memory stick to them? Make a grand splash? There had been no sign. No revelation had occurred on the road to Now.
“Because this is the year 2020,” I said to them. Then stopped. My voice brought to mind an antique china doll, plain and white—the type called a “Frozen Charlotte”—its face crazed with minute cracks in the glaze. I was breaking up. I tried to fight down my grief, but my mind reached forward in my prepared remarks to grasp their closing sentences: “‘Twenty-twenty,’ Thom used to say to me, ‘might be the Year of Clear Vision.’ May you prove him right.” Then I mumbled, mortified by my naked emotion before the scientists, “Thank you for coming to this ancient land to pursue new truths, in Thom’s name.”
To supportive applause, I left the symposium quickly and entered the hallway. My hand closed convulsively over my talisman, but I considered jerking it off. I have never understood anger directed at a person who has died, but in that moment I felt a flash of hot anger at Thom for deserting me.
Just behind my shoulder as I hurried down the corridor, I heard the Egyptian host, Pierre Saad, padding along almost noiselessly in his soft sandals behind me. “Mrs. Bergmann,” he called quietly. I hesitated.
“Mrs. Bergmann, I am so sorry. Please wait.”
I stopped but, ashamed, I could not bring myself to meet his eyes. Three years after Thom’s death, I should not have made a public display of frozen grief. With bowed head, I stared at the weave of the Egyptian’s white robe, hanging straight down like a choir robe. In a flash, I remembered how I had pulled off my Methodist robe in children’s choir and—to my parents’ horror—refused anymore to sing praises to God, after my grandfather’s death.
“We should not have asked you to do something so difficult.” His accented English seemed as softly padded as the sound of his footfalls. “It is entirely my fault.” His voice was too sympathetic; I could not look up at him without dissolving in tears.
Focusing on his sandal straps and on the square-trimmed brown-pink toenail of the big toe on one foot, I whispered, “I need to leave here.”
“Of course.” His voice modulated into formula: “I completely understand, and I am so very sorry that you are upset.” Suddenly, in a new rush of emotion, he asked urgently, “But where will you go?”
“Nag Hammadi,” I answered automatically. It was just a name, a place Thom and I had wanted to visit because ancient scrolls pertaining to the gospels had been found close to that Egyptian village. Those pages, as well as the death of my grandfather, had played a role in my rejection of the standard model of Christianity, the ardent faith of my parents.
“There, then,” the faceless foreign voice continued, apparently satisfied. “Nag Hammadi. We have a museum there now. I hope we will meet again.” He turned away to rejoin the symposium.
That night in Cairo—after grief had risen up like a floating stone in my throat, then sunk again—Gabriel and I shared a drink in the Marriott, a hotel with a largely foreign clientele, certainly non-Muslim. The hotel management maintained special permission to set up a bar to sell liquor. The hotel also hosted a gambling casino, which Egyptians were forbidden by Islamic law even to enter. I felt grateful to Gabriel for choosing a liberated hotel. While I was by no means an alcoholic—at least in my own opinion—I had noticed that a private glass of sherry at bedtime did a lot to ameliorate my chronic sadness.
Over drinks, Gabriel encouraged me to take a cruise-and-camp riverboat tour while he participated in the scientific meeting. Tilting my sociable martini glass toward him, I said, “There is a balm in Gilead, thank God.” Wishing that the cone-shaped glass was a cylinder holding three times as much of the potent alcohol, I savored its flavor as I swallowed. I wondered if Gabriel had anticipated I would have a minor meltdown at the opening meeting, that I would need recuperation.
He had already researched the tour: a flight to Luxor to see the temple ruins, a Nile cruise with stops along the way—another flight to the Aswan dam—the gigantic stone figures of Abu Simbel—and a return to Luxor, where he would join me.
“Time in Egypt,” he said, swirling his Manhattan, “casts a very long shadow. When I’m in this country, I always think how short our human lives are. It’s depressing. Think how many of us it would require to lie end-to-end to take us back to the time of Moses.”
The mixture of fatigue and gin allowed me to blurt out, “Moses. You believe in the biblical Moses, and I’m not religious.” Had he actually proposed that we marry? I remembered glancing down at the bony mountains of northern Italy. “What makes you think we could get over our differences about religion?”
“I’m a gentleman,” he answered, wryly smiling. “And an Anglican. We don’t ever need to talk about our religious beliefs.” He glanced up and down my body in a way too intentionally obvious to be offensive. “You might even enjoy High Church ceremony once every few years. At Christmas, perhaps.” He tilted his head, his expression both shrewd and puckish.
For a moment I remembered that Thom had worried that Gabriel’s faith might be threatened by the discovery of extraterrestrial life. I recalled the pro-found repercussions of Copernicus’s astounding notion that Earth was not the center of the universe. Yet the church had survived.
I laughed. “I hate to admit it, but I do like the ceremony sometimes.” On the heels of laughter, I fought down hysteria, my engulfing grief for Thom, who happily celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah. “Religion is always a quest,” Thom had said, though he was not religious. “Stop questing and know you’ve become a fossil.”
“I’m not as dedicated to endless research as Thom was, bless him,” Gabriel went on in his casual, friendly way. “But if we were married, we could travel constantly. Where would you like to go with me?”
“Russia. I loved Tolstoy’s novels. Anna Karenina.”
“The Russian Madame Bovary.”
“Their authors murdered them, don’t you think?” I asked.
He ignored the question. “What about War and Peace? What about Dostoyevsky?”
“Anna K. is a better novel than War and Peace. The characters are more complex. But Dostoyevsky—he’s too extreme for my taste, a fanatic.”
“Quite right,” Gabriel answered pleasantly. “At least our literary tastes are compatible. Another day we’ll check off art. Matisse but not Picasso, I presume. Whatever made you become an art therapist?”
“Another night,” I said.
“I look forward to it,” he answered, taking the hint, but he hesitated. He bowed his head, then leaned toward me and touched just with the tip of his finger the cord around my neck. “What’s this?” Carefully he pulled on the silk cord till the memory stick emerged from under my blouse. “Thom’s flash drive? I wondered what became of it.”
“It’s comforting,” I replied, feeling invaded.
“It could be useful, scientifically,” he speculated. “Thom always used his flash drive at the end of a presentation. It was where he kept his latest thoughts, his grand summary. He always had a grand summary at the end of these big meetings. Did you know that? A moment when he drew all the data together, gave it his own brilliant spin, and made his next new insight seem inevitable.”
He stopped and looked at me too hopefully.
“I gave you his briefcase. All his notes,” I said. “The memory stick is for me.” I began to feel irritated, a little vulnerable.
“But you’ve removed your wedding ring.”
I said nothing.
When Gabriel bowed his head and seemed chagrined, I remarked, “Did you say there was camping on this tour?”
He lifted his face, and his eyes twinkled in their wry and engaging way. “On the edge of the Sahara. The tents each have a small solar-powered air conditioner.”
Then, because I had not heard the terms of math uttered for three years, I asked impulsively, “Tell me again, the equation for elliptical orbits.”
“X squared over a squared plus y squared over b squared equals one,” he said, as I watched his lips speak the notation describing the orbit. Then he leaned forward, kissed me lightly on the mouth, and named a tour agency I could contact.
In the morning I made arrangements to travel and felt glad to escape the scientists. I told Gabriel good-bye in the lobby of the Marriott, though he offered to accompany me to the Cairo airport. When I saw that he wanted to kiss me farewell, I averted my eyes. I’d had enough of kissing. When I looked at him again, he had resumed an expression of friendly amusement. That afternoon I flew to Luxor, as Gabriel suggested, to take a cruise on the Upper Nile. I was glad to be traveling into the mythic past.
When I settled into the gray, wooden-slat lounging chair on the top deck of the cruise boat, I felt my entire body relax. Beyond the banks of the Nile, the landscape blazed like a mirror. I found it more comfortable to gaze down into the flowing river.
In my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, the Lower Mississippi lay to the south, while the Upper Mississippi had its headwaters in Minnesota, but in Egypt the Lower Nile fanned out in a delta to the north before emptying its waters into the Mediterranean, and the Upper Nile had its roots deep in the heart of Africa. My gaze followed a north-flowing bubble on the river. “Where are you going, and where have you been?” I muttered to the waters of the Nile surrounding the boat. Hadn’t I learned to ask those questions from a nursery rhyme while sitting in my grandmother’s lap? Unlike the muddy Mississippi, the Nile was a ribbon of glorious blue.
The water seemed to reply to me with a question I both wanted and needed to hear: Where are you going? it asked. And my answer: Nag Hammadi, though I knew it was not a stop on the tour itinerary.
It was at Nag Hammadi that the outcast books of the New Testament had been found in 1945. Learning of the existence of those rejected gospels had broken the spine of my belief in the Bible as a canon of sacred texts. Sylvia, an elderly neighbor who was also a professor of comparative religions, had enlightened me. “Robbed you!” my mother had said. “Buddha! Enlightenment! You’re nine years old! What can you possibly know of enlightenment? ‘I am the Light of the World.’ Who said that? Do you know who said that?” My skepticism about a God defined as both good and all-powerful began with my grandfather’s cancer and death and my grandmother’s heartrending grief, though it did not break her faith.
“The name Lucy derives from the word for light,” neighbor Sylvia had said. She kissed me on the forehead. “Even a child can pursue enlightenment.”
To ensure the safety of tourists from fundamentalist Muslim terrorist attacks on busloads of Western foreigners, heavily armed military guards stood at the perimeter of every attraction: at the Great Pyramids of Giza, at the Sphinx, at the Valley of the Kings, at the High Dam. At one of the attractions, I looked up, saw the ubiquitous soldier with a machine gun at the highest point, and remarked to a fellow traveler that his presence was reassuring. “Not entirely,” the man replied. “The government obviously considers us to be at risk.”
I rather liked the idea of being at risk. It made me feel more alert.
The first night we camped, I stretched my body so that it completely filled the cot. That night I enjoyed something like a sense of largesse—maybe it was just my body’s response to the smooth clean sheet below and the pleasant soft whiteness above. I smoothed the sheets with open palms. Egyptian long-staple cotton, I thought happily, and a space that was all mine. In Memphis, beside the Mississippi, farmers had grown huge fields of cotton.
And when was the last time I had felt exceptionally brave and strong? Independent? In my friendship with other girls, especially Janet Stimson when we were about eleven and rode the city bus to the public library. The crown of childhood had come the year before college, when I had studied psychology on my own as a high school senior and then scored well on the psychology test for college graduates. Before Iowa.
It was not the remembrance of things past that I wanted, but their recovery. And not of things but of the natural self I once embodied. Suddenly I was glad to be alone, and I felt like a smart, young girl again, full of power, back before Thom entered my life.
I fingered the memory stick and took it off, for the night. Restless, I got up and went outside to view the Egyptian night sky. From the dazzle of stars in the dark, I picked out constellations. Had Thom really found out there a planet or planets that hosted life? Not among any of those tiny lights visible to me. Beyond that. Did those beings have eyes, and did they look this way and imagine us, bare forked creatures?
In the morning, I lifted the tent window flap and squinted at the world outside. Mercilessly the morning sun had filled the world with painful brightness. Other small tents were spaced around me. How to take life by the hand and sally forth?
Another night when the setting sun, swollen like the belly of a pregnant woman, slid down behind the peak of the obelisk at Luxor, I wished someone were there to see it with me—a man to whom I would say, with some satisfaction, that the Arabic word for sun was feminine. I pronounced the word for sun and thought of how I might spell it in the Roman alphabet: sham su?
If that imagined man were Gabriel, he would laugh and call me “smarty pants” for my effort with Arabic. Likely, he would also pinch my cheek in a paternal way. Gabriel was ten years older than I was, but then Thom had been twenty-three years older. I was glad that Thom had gotten to live as long as he had, though he had not made it to sixty. Unthinkable really, that I myself should ever arrive at age sixty.
Marry Gabriel Plum? Why not? I had known him since graduate school days in Iowa City. He had come there to study the Van Allen radiation belts. He had known Thom. Perhaps Thom had saved Gabriel’s life by pushing him out of harm’s way as the piano hurtled downward. I thought bitterly of the unbearable, premature relief I had felt seeing Gabriel lying on the pavement, clear of the shattered piano.
Did I want to move on with my life? Or did I want to move backward, to childhood, to a time before loss and grief? Both, of course.
When I looked at the broken columns and damaged images of temple ruins, I only felt how broken and damaged I was. It was only as I stared at the waters of the Nile that I felt any peace. A river can be like a great life-supporting artery flowing through the body of a country. The Mississippi, the Nile, the Thames, the Seine, the Danube, the Rhine, the Amazon, the Ganges, and the Yangtze. Such a river is an artery with its own pulse. Such a river is its own heart as well as that of the land it parts and nourishes. I wished for such a conduit of life to flow through me and enliven all my parts. Or some ocean to rock and lave me. A tour of ruins, however noble or ambitious, was not enough.
After a week with the tour group, I decided to strike out on my own. When the guide said, “I am forbidden to allow you to leave the group,” I replied, “I state in this letter that I have left without obtaining your permission.” Then I turned and walked away, carrying only my small suitcase with me. If they wanted to transport my other baggage for me, let them. I could not say what possessed me to do such a thing—to follow a mere name: Nag Hammadi. It was a whim, an impulse. No, it was part of a desire to be free. I wanted to test myself as an independent woman.