An Obvious Enchantment Read online

  “In France, we have twilight,” Louis said. “Le lit de lavande. But we are not very sentimental.”

  “That’s because you are a pompous people.”

  “Since we are being honest,” Louis said, “the word I use for Americans is ‘mushy.’ It is not as dignified as sentiment.”

  “American mush is paying for your project, Louis. You should be grateful.”

  “According to your theory of light”—Louis toasted the sky with his wineglass—“I have twilight to thank.”

  Mustafa approached them, his lantern swinging. “Nothing,” he announced.

  Ingrid sat up. “Nothing?”

  “It is late. I’m going to visit my cousin who lives near here. I will sleep there tonight.”

  “Thank you, Mustafa,” Louis said. “For trying.”

  “My pleasure.” He smiled and bowed. “Do not leave on my account.”

  They watched Mustafa’s lantern bob across the field. “That farmer is probably his cousin,” Ingrid said bitterly. “They’re in cahoots.”

  “Before you go after him and start a civil war, finish your wine. I’ve brought dessert.”

  “Okay. Then tell me.”

  “Tell you?”

  “About the project. I don’t want to go back to Giza, so you’ll have to tell me here.”

  “Lie back,” he said. “You’ll need to see the sky.” Louis lay down next to her and turned onto his side to look at her. “You are a pharaoh. In death, you lie like this.” He crossed her arms against her chest. “And this, this is your tomb. A huge chamber. But you cannot see all the stars we see tonight. You see a few stars only; they come into your chamber through long little tunnels, too small for a human. For a long time these tunnels were a mystery. We could not see where they went, what their purpose was. Now we have built a camera that travels like a rabbit down the tunnels and shows us what we could not see with our own eyes. Our little rabbit has found something quite incredible: through the tunnels, stars shine on you like beams. And they are not just any stars that shine into your chamber. Your ancient engineers have worked it out so that the stars of Osiris, the god of the afterlife, shine on your sarcophagus, inviting you to heaven. There, there and there, you see?”

  “Orion’s belt.”

  “And with your tomb, with the pyramids, you have mimicked the same constellation, creating a plan of heaven on earth, for they are placed in the exact position of the stars. A perfect mirror.”

  “I know this part. Tell me the really secret stuff. The stuff you haven’t made public.”

  “Ah, not yet. For that you will have to wait.” Louis touched her cheek with the back of his hand. The air blew softly across the field. They stayed close on the blanket while Orion chased his hunt to the horizon. Above them, the night was pierced with layers and layers of stars.

  “When I was a girl, I used to think they were trying to break through a dome of black velvet. It was a prison and they were prisoners. They hurled the sharpest part of themselves at the fabric and stuck there, bleeding their light down to us. The night was there to tell us how hard they tried to break free.”

  “And you, what are you hurling yourself at?”

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly.

  She moved closer to him, resting her head on his arm. They stayed until the air grew cold. Louis wrapped Ingrid in the blanket and they drove through the darkness back to Cairo.

  “The desert will lose a star when you go,” Louis said when they reached the hotel. He dug into his pocket. “I will miss you. Your lady pharaoh will miss you. Even Mustafa will miss you.” He opened Ingrid’s hand and poured sand into it. “Take this with you. Think about us when you are surrounded by snow.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  Templeton’s Girl

  Ingrid removed the copy of Professor Templeton’s letter from her presentation folder, which was void of presentation notes. It wasn’t what she wanted filling her brain twenty minutes before she was scheduled to stand in front of the senior members of the anthropology department to ask for money for a project she wasn’t sure of. She tipped the spice bottle on her desk and Louis’ sand angled and rested against two planes instead of one. Mimic the sand, she thought. Tilt and re-create yourself. Balance on an edge.

  She chewed on the end of her pen and reviewed the letter. Templeton had trailed off in the middle and, by the looks of the pen marks, had fallen asleep. When he had woken, his mind was somewhere else. What had elapsed in that time—a dream, a drug or an hour—Ingrid didn’t know. Templeton’s mind was hard to track. It was why he was the best and, to a few, the most irritating scholar in his field. He was unapologetically cryptic in his communications from the bush, filing reports months late in longhand on paper stained with mosquito carcasses, wine rings, and God knew what else. It provoked a degree of hostility among the formalists of the department, particularly as his results were as good as his methods were bad. They tolerated him because they had to.

  The rest of the letter was about a theory he had mentioned only once or twice before. She remembered it because of the way his voice changed when he spoke of it. He wrote:

  What if we’ve been wrong about Islam on this coast. What if it didn’t come with Persian traders, didn’t sail on dhows from the East. What if the God that leads these people today was brought to them by the wisest and perhaps the bravest man this continent has ever known? And what if that man lived three hundred years before the date we’ve given for the arrival of Islam and, after being enslaved by Persian traders, he learned the religion of his captors and, filled with the glory of Allah, traveled to Mecca on his own two feet. As the story goes, he wore an amulet with both the languages of his captors and the language of his people. Its inscription read, Every slave is a king with God in his heart. What if there were proof of all of this?

  Ingrid flattened the creased letter with her palm. A separate sealed envelope had been enclosed with the first. Inside were two photographs. One was of Templeton, toasting the camera, lanky and, it seemed, thinner. My sixtieth was written on the back. He had grown a full beard again and was dark from the sun. His sharp brown eyes and aristocratic features pierced her: she had not seen them in months. Another photo had him standing next to a tall blond man. Between them an enormous fish hung upside-down from a suspended hook. Finn Bergmann and marlin at Salama Hotel. Ingrid had placed the photos one above the other and stared absentmindedly at the images. Usually it was words he sent her, stories without punctuation like paintings without line, full of color, shadow and suggestion. It was through these stories that he continued to live in her mind. The detail of the photograph was somehow jarring.

  On her way to the department meeting, Ingrid fell off her shoe and crumpled like a marionette. The hall was empty and her short cry of pain echoed down the corridor. The first body to round the corner was Henry Klingle’s and, while it wasn’t ideal, she smiled at him painfully. “Henry, I think I’ve sprained my ankle.” She held her hand out cautiously. “If you could just help me up, I’m due for a department meeting.”

  “Ingrid! I didn’t know you were back.” He pulled her to her feet, where she stood like a stork. He looked at her ankle and then her legs. “Looks like you got some sun.”

  Ingrid winced and tested her weight on the ankle, taking a step back. Henry was insidious in a subterranean way. He was pleasant enough on the surface, but she sensed the root system of a tenaciously expansive weed underneath. Bending down, she shoved her foot back into her shoe. “Well, I’m off. Thanks for the hand, Henry. Good luck on your dissertation defense.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about that. I may need some help with Blackburn. Would it be all right if I came by your office?”

  “No.” Ingrid put her hand up like a traffic officer. “Call me.”

  On her way to the meeting, Ingrid ducked into an empty classroom and briefly recalled the points in an argument that was weaker for the five minutes she had lost, time she had needed for the inspiration pres
sure often brought her. She had no strategy. She was ill-prepared and now her foot throbbed. She had ten minutes and all she could hear was Templeton’s voice, both mocking and instructing her.

  “I have decided that you are going to make a good scholar because slavery,” he had said, “is in your blood. Look at your father—a first-class slave. First-class slaves can ignore that they’re slaves because they’ve chosen their servitude. Slavery becomes more obvious as you move down the socioeconomic ladder and the choices narrow. Freedom is knowing you are a slave and having the resources to choose your servitude. Not all slaves dream of freedom.” Templeton stopped. He was drawing a picture in the rug with his cane. “You live in a country that is designed to relieve you of certain pressures by stimulating your senses and comforting you with material goodies, but you are smart enough to know that life is about more than that.” The cane was in the air now, punctuating dangerously. “You will have to work against your culture to become free. Ignore the song of the sirens who tell you there is an easy way. There is no easy way. Besides, who would want an easy way? The more you know and understand, the more nooks you can wedge into to hoist yourself to a place of greater perspective.”

  Templeton lowered his cane and coughed into a handkerchief. “You have been born into the youngest, the least wise, the most precocious country on earth. Lucky, unlucky girl. My advice to you is to get out and steep yourself in a place that values the absurdities and fundamental mystery of human beings. A place that isn’t always whistling and tooting to distract you. Start with the beginning. Start with Egypt.”

  “They’ve got scads of people working there.” She’d learned the word from him, and had adopted it immediately. It sounded like masses and scores of healing wounds.

  “Shame on you, Ingrid. There are scads of everything everywhere but no scad is the same. And you are occasionally a very intelligent scad. They would be lucky to have you.”

  “Lucky?”

  “Lucky.”

  Lucky. When she entered the departmental meeting room, she managed to walk evenly to the head of the mahogany table. The pain was intense. “Gentlemen,” she said, noting that the two female members were absent.

  “How was Egypt, Ingrid?”

  “Productive, interesting—hot. The Canadians have made progress on the reconstruction of Akhenaten’s temple to Aten. Patterns are emerging, the symbols are starting to make some sense.”

  “It’s only taken them twenty years,” Dr. Blackburn sniped. Blackburn was a thin asp of a man whose blatant sexism went unchecked in the department. Ingrid dreaded all interactions with him. Like a petty dictator, he took every opportunity to preen and torment.

  Ingrid forced herself to smile. “It’s remarkable how thorough the Egyptians were in eliminating every trace, how terrified they were by the idea of Akhenaten’s one god. I’m surprised the Canadians have been able to reconstruct as much as they have.”

  “Dr. Gregor told me he enjoyed your input,” Dr. Reed said. “I’m looking forward to your report.”

  “You’ll have it by the end of the week.”

  It was a small blessing that Jeb Reed was the chair of the department. He was balanced and relatively harmless. She remembered what Templeton had once said: “He’s a family man, and families are messy. You don’t want mess around you morning, noon and night, so he tries to keep things here as neat as possible. He’s a peacekeeper. A bit soft. Think of him as an armored marshmallow.”

  Ingrid laced her fingers together behind her back. “What I’m here for today is not directly related to my work in Egypt,” she began. “But the project I’m proposing is relevant to the event and evolution of monotheism in Egypt initiated by Akhenaten.” She drew in a breath and looked directly at Dr. Reed. “I think it would be instructive to go to Kenya for a month to observe the particular brand of Islam on the Swahili Coast.” No one spoke. “The question of how monotheism arrived,” Ingrid continued, “and how Templeton’s king, real or imagined, fit into all of this, would make an extremely interesting complement to the material I’ve already gathered in Egypt.”

  Dr. Araji tapped his empty pipe on the arm of his chair. Ingrid unclasped her hands and reached reflexively to open her folder and then stopped when she remembered that the only thing in it was Templeton’s letter. She had nowhere to look. She decided to focus on Dr. Araji’s pipe. Araji was the token foreigner, a man with unfamiliar and untouchable calm, reluctant to participate in departmental battles. He was private, subtle and, unlike his colleagues, not prone to envy. Ingrid liked him. He was not allowed to smoke in the meetings, so his pipe was unlit.

  “Ingrid has been exploring the connection between ancient Egypt’s worship of Aten and its later acceptance of Christianity,” Dr. Reed explained. “Suggesting a trend and/or a predisposition to a monotheistic paradigm.”

  “The worship of Allah, or Islam,” Ingrid continued, “is strong on the East Coast of Africa, also known as the Swahili Coast. What’s interesting to me is why this particular god was adopted by the Africans—not only who brought him, but why he stayed. Why did Islam catch on and why so suddenly?”

  “It’s not your area, Ingrid.”

  “I realize that. If you’ll remember, Professor Templeton has suggested that Islam was not brought by Arab traders in the twelfth century A.D., as has been reported, but by an African king, and not one, not two, but three centuries earlier. As far as we know, the king exists in oral mythology only. There is no solid evidence of his reign, of his pilgrimage to Mecca or of his return to Africa. But if we could find it, if Templeton is on to something, it could significantly change our theory of religious evolution. Imagine, Islam introduced by an African king. An African king’s preparing the way for Allah is not so different from Akhenaten’s preparing the ground for Christ.”

  “A tenuous parallel,” Blackburn mumbled.

  “Ingrid—” Dr. Reed raised his chaotic eyebrows and glanced at his colleagues. “And stop me if any of you disagree. That communiqué was vintage Templeton. He’s an exceptional scholar but he’s also immensely creative. It’s been the bonus and the bane of his career. This last report was not unlike reports we’ve received in years past, when he’s been in the bush for six months or more. He’s susceptible to regionalization. He can let his mind wander too far.”

  “It was intriguing stuff,” Dr. Goodman, a recent addition to the department, offered from across the table. “No question.” Goodman was still playing his tenure politics safely and his input was invariably neutral.

  “Perhaps not the end,” Dr. Blackburn jumped in. “That was decidedly odd.”

  “I think there’s something to his African king.” Ingrid held her ground.

  “There’s often something to what Templeton hypothesizes.” A token smile of acknowledgment passed over Dr. Reed’s face. “Legitimate research is another issue. However unwillingly, Templeton is an academic, as are you. And a promising one, at that.” Ingrid dipped her head in thanks. She slipped her shoe off under the table and rested her swollen foot on the arch of her good foot. “It’s always best to stick to the facts,” Reed concluded. “Especially at the outset of one’s career.”

  Ingrid ignored the warning. “Dr. Templeton may have found substantiation to this African king theory. I think he’s made a breakthrough.”

  “You seem to be granting this king more credibility than he deserves,” Dr. Reed said. “May I remind you that we have no proof that he exists outside Templeton’s imagination?”

  Ingrid paused. Dr. Araji’s head was bent over her dissertation summary. Was he asleep?

  “Forgive me.” Dr. Blackburn’s voice bit into the air. “I’m afraid I’ve lost the thread here.” He took out his handkerchief and wiped his nose. “Would it be out of line for me to suggest that in your desire to travel to Kenya, you may simply be a sheep in search of your shepherd?”

  Ingrid looked at him levelly. “Yes,” she said.

  Blackburn cleared his throat to speak and Ingrid held up her hand.
“If he’s real, Templeton’s African king brought a new god to his people—and, unlike the Egyptians under Akhenaten, the people were ready for it. Do you know why this excites Templeton? It’s a better story, for one thing, but second, because Africa has been invaded and indoctrinated by missionaries for the last century and a half, we tend to think of it as a passive, underplanted terrain, perfectly suited for foreign gods to take root. This story sheds a different light, doesn’t it? At the very least it makes us question what we assume we know. This, to some people’s vexation, is one of Templeton’s specialties. More water, please.”

  Dr. Reed refilled Ingrid’s glass from the communal pitcher. She closed her eyes while she drank, momentarily allowing her current circumstance to lapse from her mind. Those seconds brought her professor to the fore with such vividness she felt he was actually in the room, tapping his foot with nervous excitement.

  “You certainly sound like our man in the bush,” Blackburn said. “Though you’ve developed your own flourish. I might add that it’s six weeks before the term begins.”

  “Because Swahili Islam is based equally in Arab and African traditions, it’s not as rigid as other Islamic societies. It’s an ideal place to observe both the influences of Islam and the roots of African tribal culture as they coexist in a situation that is anthropologically unique. This will fit in well with the course section on African Islam I will be teaching next semester. An opportunity to observe it firsthand can only enliven my understanding—as well as my course work.”

  “How convenient it all turns out to be,” Blackburn said.

  Dr. Reed’s beeper sounded. “My apologies,” he said, punching numbers into a cellular phone. He listened and then hung up. “If it’s all right, I’d like to reconvene in an hour or so. Say, four-thirty?”

  Ingrid drifted down the hall to Templeton’s office, where his secretary was getting ready to leave. “Hi, Maggie.”

  “Hello, dear. Just on my way out. You’ve got the key, just lock up after yourself.”