Duke of Egypt Read online

  Duke

  of

  Egypt

  Duke

  Egypt

  Margriet de Moor

  TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH BY PAUL VINCENT

  Copyright © 1996 by Margriet de Moore, Em. Querido Uitgeverij, BV Translation copyright © 2000, 2013 by Paul Vincent

  Originally published in Dutch under the title Hertog van Egypte by Em. Queirdo Uitgeverij, BV

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-790-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  In memory of my husband, Heppe

  And how was the voyage?

  And the heart that cracked without breaking?

  Marina Tsvetayeva

  Part One

  1

  There are a goodly number who claim that they realized immediately what was happening that afternoon. They remember him coming into the pub, good-looking, in a homburg hat, and everyone agrees that his nomad’s eyes scanned the drinkers until they picked out Lucie.

  In fact, it had been raining all morning and I was the only one who took any notice of him, the only one, I say, because even Lucie hadn’t looked up when she accepted a cigarette from him and thanked him with her usual smiling, absent gaze. We were in The Tap at the busiest time of day before the new road was built. So when Joseph came in he attracted scarcely any attention, partly because the truck drivers had started discussing some campaign or other and were having to yell louder and louder to make themselves understood. While they ate their sandwiches at the bar, tempers were becoming frayed over some collective wage agreement, or over student militancy, or possibly over nuclear tests. It was the 1960s, and in those days people were getting pretty worked up about such things.

  Joseph completely ignored the noise. He went over to the right-hand corner of the bar, motioned with his hand, ordered a Coke, and turned to the telephone hanging on the wall just behind him. His kind talk loud. Although his face was averted, I could hear his voice above the political discussion, but it was impossible to tell whether he was cursing or begging, since he was speaking their language, making expansive gestures with his arm and somehow creating the impression that he was talking into the wind to someone on the other side of a meadow.

  But when Lucie discovered that she was out of cigarettes, he was leaning against the bar again. Lucie is strange. She stares. Lucie’s one of those people who couldn’t keep up at school, and she’s got the kind of metallic red hair that makes you understand at once why she was made fun of in the street as a child. At the time we’re talking about, she worked in her father’s business, the same job that she now does together with Joseph, but back then, at twenty-one, it was she who was responsible for the stables, reared the horses, and knew what a yearling might fetch at the Delden market. The farm is on the road to Benckelo. If I close my eyes I can picture her easily, in boots beneath a summer dress, lunging a gray foal. With dramatic concentration the animal repeats the circuit of which she is the irresistible focal point.

  She patted the pockets of her jacket. A lighter and an empty cigarette pack. Then she looked down and saw a thin hand with a twenty-carat gold watch on the wrist, offering her her favorite brand. She calmly fished out a cigarette, smiled briefly, and lit up, ignoring the man, who soon afterward paid and left. As I said, it was raining. Joseph had pushed his hat down and crossed the street in front of the pub. It was only then that a few people noticed him through the rain-wet windows.

  “They’ve been camped in the field next to Smeenk’s factory for a week.”

  That was then. That was a minute before they saw Joseph gliding past The Tap in that big fat car for the first time. Afterward everyone got used to the Chevrolets and Mercedeses in which he would invariably appear in the village as soon as the leaves started falling, on his way to his wife. Yes, he came and he went. He arrived from the east between two faded fields of corn and left heading south down a blooming avenue of chestnuts. I always understood that restlessness of his. Houses and streets are beacons that we’ve placed in our own heads, like calendars and clocks and written stories. But in Joseph’s memory there are a few other things, wheels and horses and barking dogs, all clamoring to depart. Is it the call of open space? Woods, church spires, fields; in short, freedom? Joseph’s space doesn’t call out loud, but quietly chafes between his skin and his clothes. What’s so wonderful about being dumped across the border, almost immediately after your birth, as happened to him in 1936? It was December, there was a blizzard raging, but even in such weather children like Joseph were born out in the open. The following morning a team of about ten gendarmes slithered toward the wood on bikes, with dogs, to where a kumpania of three caravans was camped. Freedom, or disruption? If life were fueled only by what instinct had always known, Joseph would never have stayed cooped up in a house for entire winters. But life also consists of omens, and when Lucie gratefully took one of his cigarettes that afternoon in the pub, it was preordained that for the next sixteen or seventeen years he would drive through the village with her in his jalopy, first with just her, and later with two or three kids in the back, and often with a trailer attached in which a couple of nervous horses had to be transported to Delden or Zwolle. In those cases he drove slowly (by his standards), since horses have an unerring sense of speed and hate anything over forty-five miles an hour. And then Lucie would start singing about Tom the piper’s son, and Joseph would be sitting there with a slight grin on his face, he’d be catching the meaning of the song a lot better than Johan, who was two at the time, or Katharina, who was only five months old: Tom, Tom the piper’s son, stole a pig and away did run. That’s the way it is, and who’s to say he’s wrong?

  These days there’s something about them that makes me uneasy.

  They’ve grown silent. And in the left wing of the farm a couple of people sleep in till eight o’clock. Lucie’s father, who lives under the same roof, has been up and about for ages by then. He has invested in chicory, and every morning he checks the barn, where through the use of hydroponic gardening there is an idiotically quick harvest in the making. Today Lucie has just had time to close the door after her children as they go off to school. She has put on coffee and lit a cigarette, when Joseph says to her, “I’m getting rid of the mare.”

  He doesn’t look at her as he says this. He looks at the dogs by their empty bowls. He’s wearing a dark brown suit, a sweater, his feet are still bare. Lucie also is staring straight ahead, and even if she were not, she still wouldn’t see that Joseph is turning into a different person, his face bonier, his hands whiter.

  “What mare?” she asks stupidly.

  He takes his coffee from her and walks across to the windows.

  The kitchen is spacious. There is a dining
table with chairs, a sofa covered in cushions, and a dresser containing a group of statuettes of the Virgin Mary, all of them brought by Joseph. While he sees a thin dividing line of sun above the landscape of barns and hillocks in the far distance, she looks at the statuettes. She is reminded of the past; he had the Virgin of Mostar with him nine years ago, she calculates, when he came home. Bellaheleen had just had her first foal then.

  ... It had been at the end of an exhausting afternoon. Whether it was because Lucie had sold the young stallion the day before or for whatever reason, the mare hadn’t wanted to have her hooves trimmed. They had been working on her for hours when Joseph’s car drove into the yard. After an absence of four months he got out, gaunt, his eyebrows and mustache still raven black, and as he approached the group by the stables, he did not say a word, but with a motion of his head he made it clear that they were to leave the horse to him. He took hold of the mare. Scratching her front leg a little he started first cajoling her and then, without any transition, cursing her, using the pathetic sounds that had dominated his tongue in the past few months. The animal stood listening in a trance, not moving an inch, and quite docilely let him have his way. When he finally raised his eyes, the look in them was guileless. “Let’s agree ...” Searching for Dutch words, he proposed to Lucie, her father, and a casual laborer that the offspring of Bellaheleen no longer be sold, and although they knew that something so absurd was out of the question, the father and the farmhand nodded. As for Lucie, she had looked from his neckerchief to his shoes and her pale gray eyes blinked. . . .

  So all that remains is his superfluous answer to her superfluous question.

  “What mare?”

  “Bellaheleen.”

  He turns away from the window to put on his socks and boots, a jacket, and finally an old hat, before venturing out into the pouring rain. A little while later, by the time he is standing out in the field whistling to one of the horses to come to him, Lucie has finished the kitchen and is on her way to the stables past the beet waste and a rusty piece of agricultural machinery to talk to the farmhand about the work.

  The stable boy is noting down on a blackboard which horses have been fed.

  “They’ve been inside for too long,” he says, pointing to the two bays that have been fighting behind the paneling of the stall. Just then Joseph arrives in front of the stables with Bellaheleen. He puts the thirteen-year-old mare under the sheet iron lean-to in order to give her a quick extra grooming, preparing her for the intended sale. Lucie helps. She uses a metal comb and a brush, she rubs the wet skin with clean straw, and suddenly everything is as it used to be, as it used to be at a time that’s gone for good. She and Joseph move in comradely fashion around the body of the gray- brown animal. But when Joseph flicks his cigarette butt into the rain and coughs convulsively a couple of times, Lucie goes into the stables to get the horse cloth and it’s the stable boy who looks up. Joseph notices.

  With contempt in his voice he says, “Breathing seems to have to hurt these days.”

  The boy grins in embarrassment. “It’s November,” he says.

  Lucie puts the blanket over the horse. She bends down to pull a few wisps of straw out of the tail. Then, as she straightens up again, she is caught unaware by a memory: Joseph telling her about the time they drove through the rolling landscape of Silesia in a group of eight caravans. She stops in bewilderment. She opens her eyes wide and remembers that special way he has of telling a story, theatrical, for effect, which, though it is etched in her memory, now, after months of silence, terrifies her.

  “That’s the Tornowitz plateau,” she hears him say. “After a burning hot day like this you can expect it to rain tonight, pig rain, it turns the whole camp into a swamp, but it doesn’t kill you. I was sleeping like a log one night, when all of a sudden I woke up with the feeling that someone was blowing in my ear in the dark.”

  Lucie, with the wisps of straw still in her hand, looks at her husband in alarm, because she knows how the story continues.

  “Good God, Joseph!” she cries.

  He drops his arm. “What’s wrong?” He and the stable boy are about to trim Bellaheleen’s mane.

  “Nothing,” says Lucie. She buttons up her coat. A moment later, as she crosses the yard by the gate, she hears, less than three feet from her right ear, “Jesus, Lucie, do you know what it turned out to be! There was a rat crawling over my face.”

  What do you make of that? Joseph’s voice of a few years ago, and that encampment on the plain? Lucie often sees shadows, I know, improbable things that dart away at the last moment, but she’s seen them. All morning, from the November countryside of Twente, Lucie looks out over a summery Silesia, at fields full of rapeseed and cowslips that stretch as far as the encampment in the bend of the Prosna. At noon she is still floating in that twilight, but everything is paler now, slightly farther away. She bumps into her father in back of the house.

  “Whoa there!”

  The old man steps back in irritation. They look at each other for a moment.

  “You’re supposed to have ordered some peat moss.”

  “Oh, I did. Yes, I’m sure of it,” she says.

  “Where is it, then?”

  “They’ll bring it this afternoon. You mark my words. They’re delivering a week late again. Do you remember those stacks of firewood?”

  Once you’ve turned seventy most things are fixed.

  Fixed in the past. Gerard is a widower. He lives in the right wing of his ancestral farm. He has sold off their land a little at a time. When his wife gave birth during the war, he was hoping for a son, but instead got the red-haired daughter who was to remain his only child. Meanwhile, this most precious blood relation has given him a son-in-law and three other descendants. Gerard leads the way into the back of the house. Two yellow Labradors leap up to meet him. In the kitchen, filled with blue smoke, he finds his son-in-law involved in one of his noisy telephone conversations. Fuming, the old man sits down.

  “I don’t call that talking,” he says to his daughter. “That’s raving.”

  She picks up the breadboard and the bread knife. He’s a bit different these days, she thinks vaguely. Contemplating her father’s very recent filthy temper, she starts cutting the bread.

  It’s a business conversation with passionate proprietorial interest. Joseph is offering to sell a thirteen-year-old pedigree mare with a very pleasant nature.

  “Yes, sir,” he shouts. “This is the horse you’re looking for. Yes, noble. Yes, fiery. I’ll be right there.”

  He slams down the receiver and goes off to sell off his favorite horse in grand style.

  Lucie and her father see him go down the muddy path, hat pulled down to his eyebrows. Gerard snorts with dislike. Then he mutters something. Lucie, who’s used to the generally good relations between her husband and her father over the years, isn’t quite sure, but she thought she heard “Gypsy!”

  2

  I don’t understand them, and yet I do. In the summer I understand them. In the winter I don’t. Skirts, earrings, hair loose — yes. A woman with her grandchild on her sitting staring at a couple of burning tree trunks — okay There’s nothing to understand about that. When the woman laughs you see a mouth fall of gold. I have no problem with those caravans either. They are places full of furniture and statues of the Virgin and artificial flowers, crammed cubicles, incomprehensible, but marvelous. They mark coordinates across the map of European history. Even those ugly white caravans can beautifully broaden your mind. Don’t forget that the world is an old family domain, where you must be able to sit and chat with your relatives in the farthest outposts. Other things I don’t understand — that shouting, those bare feet, those buttoned-up vests, and all in the rain! Looking back, I have the feeling that it rained the whole of that summer of 1963. They said that they wanted to stay near Smeenk’s factory for the time being. They’d got the outside faucet working again.

  Naturally everyone stared when that sky blue eight-cylinder vehicle
glided past the windows. The truck drivers had left, and the regulars, suddenly more at ease, felt they could talk about, for example, the insurance premiums on those old jalopies, which, for types with droopy mustaches and romantic eyes, were pretty steep. This village is in agricultural eastern Holland. Most pub regulars from before the war remember that the horse dealers always appeared just at the right moment with a cob or a plow horse, and after a lot of arguing would get down to business in a surprisingly flexible way. They were people with a wonderful knack with animals and tools. After the silence following the war, why shouldn’t they gradually return to their old haunts? The atmosphere in the pub mellowed. Louis Armstrong could be heard on the radio and in the back a couple of men were playing billiards. I wondered why somebody started in about the women who’d been fortune-telling in the church square that morning. Why is that regarded as indecent? I happen to know what it’s like when your path is blocked and someone looks you deep in the eyes. She takes your hand. You suddenly become dead serious. When she turns the palm to the light she’s already fully sharing your grief. “You long for passion, but love seems hesitant.” She gives a stimulating inventory of your future, a future that obviously means nothing to her personally.

  He drove out of the village. The light of the sun about to break through hung low over the fields. He looked at the line of treetops and turned off toward Benckelo. Soon this would be a path to the factory. Now it was where his family lived in six wagons and caravans. His family who, as he would soon discover, had had another visit from the police. The driver’s window was open. The dank smell of wet nettles was familiar to him. A lot of water had flowed under the bridge since then. The area, which had experienced the occupation and liberation, the Marshall Plan and various governments with Euro-American leanings, was becoming more prosperous. Farmers’ children bicycled to the high school. In the fields the combine harvester had appeared, so that farmers, if they still kept horses, could let their Gelderland cart horses out to graze while they focused on racehorses crossed with thoroughbreds. A lot of water had flowed under the bridge, but Joseph remembered the area. A gust of wind shook the poplars. He adjusted the windshield wipers, and thought of his father, who until 1942 or 1943 must also have passed by here. In those days a farmer would sometimes have twenty horses in his stable. Those who used ten for the deep plow could bring up a good three feet of soil. It was quite common then for farmers to search far afield for men able to work with such a team of horses. Joseph’s father and his five brothers and fourteen cousins, blacksmiths and traders, were such men.