Egypt

43

We crossed the Great River in sunlight for Khety’s funeral rites; Khety’s wife, Kiya, and her daughter, and his younger brother Intef, and my own family. We were all dressed in white linens. Kiya’s belly was swollen now; the baby was growing. The girls sat together, Khety’s daughter folded into the generous company of my girls, her face alert to the strange seriousness of the ritual. Tanefert tried to comfort Kiya; but to her the river traffic all around us was simply unreal.

I found myself gazing into the dazzle of the light on the waters, mesmerized and apart. Since my return home, and from the dead, three weeks ago, I had kept myself apart. The grim agony of separating myself from the addiction was finally over; but I felt empty and detached. The darkness was still inside me. I had told Tanefert everything on my first night home. And her silence had taken possession of the house as surely as Horemheb’s soldiers had taken possession of the city. We slept like strangers, and her eyes avoided me during the day. As I sat on the boat, my son insisted on sitting with me, his hand in mine, as if he were afraid he would lose me again. He gazed up at my face, perhaps searching for the father he remembered and could no longer recognize.

At the embalmer’s shop on the west bank, we met Khety’s coffin, and the cortege of priests and mourners who would accompany it. The coffin was placed on its covered bier, decorated with bouquets, and pulled by the embalmer’s men to the cemetery. I insisted on joining them in their labour. I wanted to feel the true burden of Khety’s death as I dragged my friend’s coffin to his tomb. The professional mourners went ahead of us in their blue robes, tearing their hair and beating their breasts. I hated their high wails and cries, so rehearsed and inauthentic. The chest containing the canopic jars was dragged on a bier by more of the embalmer’s men. The priest, wearing a panther skin thrown over his shoulder, went before the coffin, sprinkling milk on the ground, and wafting incense in the bright air of the morning. Behind came the funeral servants, carrying the trays, foods and flowers, jars of wine and jugs of beer, and the other necessities of the funeral feast. And behind that, others carried the few objects from Khety’s life that would be left in the tomb with him.

We came to the cemetery, and the tomb. The lector priest was waiting for us, chanting prayers and spells from the papyrus roll he held out before him. Khety’s mummy was propped upright, and the priest set about preparing the instruments he would need for the Opening of the Mouth ceremony. The lector priest began to recite the Instructions, and the priest approached the tomb statue of Khety. I tried and failed to find his face in the generalized features the embalmers had given him. He was one with the innumerable dead, now. Following the prescribed gestures, the spells and libations, the priest took his instruments from their alabaster tablet, one by one, and touched the face of the statue with the forked pesesh knife, the chisel, the adze and the rod ending in the snake’s head-restoring the senses to the dead man so that he might live again in the Otherworld, and eat, and speak his name. He made offerings of incense and natron, of food and wine, and the traditional cuts of meat-the foreleg and the heart. All this was intended to reunite the parts of the body and the spirit; and I could only hope the magic would work powerfully, restoring the butchered parts of Khety’s body to his new, whole self, in the beautiful light of the Otherworld.

It was hot. The children, who had been awed and fascinated, began to look around, slightly confused and bored. Tanefert gave them each a drink of water. Intef looked dazed. Kiya stared straight ahead, holding her daughter’s hand. The child must have been puzzled by the elaborate rituals, and by the disappearance of her father into this anonymous wooden shape.

Finally, the rites were concluded; Khety’s coffin was carried down the small steps into the tomb chamber. The canopic chest was settled in its niche. I descended into the small space of the tomb; there, around the mummy, I placed his senet game board, over which we had spent many hours of play, and his staff of office, and his knife, which, according to ritual, I broke so that it could not be used against him in the afterlife. And then I laid in front of Khety the papyrus scroll of the Book of the Dead which I had commissioned especially for him, with his name written throughout, and whispered my earnest prayer for his afterlife, that he should pass the trials of death, and arrive at the Field of Reeds, and that it should bring him all the pleasures and the peace he dreamed of, but never quite achieved in this life; and that, if he could, he might one day forgive me my failure of friendship.

Kiya and Intef kissed his headrest, and then passed it to me to place gently beside the coffin. But when her daughter gave me his favourite old sandals, Kiya suddenly began to weep in terrible and uncontrollable jolts. Her daughter embraced her, and Tanefert went to her support. Then all the girls began to cry together. Quickly, the funeral feast was prepared; back up the stairs, in the light of day, they stood at the chapel door together, eating and weeping, weeping and eating. I could do neither.

The priests and embalmers whispered their condolences and excuses, and made their way back to the river, with all the tools and paraphernalia of the rites. The professional mourners had already gone to another engagement, another burial. Death was everywhere, of course.

There was nothing more to do. There was nothing else to be achieved. Tanefert came to my side. We didn’t speak. Very carefully I took her hand in mine, and this time she allowed me to do so. We remained like that for a few, vital moments. Then, with a brief squeeze, she withdrew hers, gathered the children together, and led them away.

Kiya remained behind, unwilling to leave. We stood together in the heat. She looked at me.

‘I loved him,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘He knew that.’

She touched her belly. Her words, and the sorrow on her face, and the sadness of the unborn child inside her who would never know its father, suddenly passed into me, into my dead, black heart. And then bitter tears poured out of me, despite myself; my cries of grief were wordless and helpless as a child. I wept for what I had risked, and what I had lost, and for who I had become. She held me, as I buckled, as best she could.

As we walked back to the Great River, arm in arm, we were silent. But just before we came to the boat, she turned to me.

‘When the child is born, if it’s a boy, I will name him after his father.’

‘It is a fine name to carry through life,’ I said.

‘He will live for his father. He will be a good man, too. You will take care of him. You will stand in for his father,’ she said simply.