Fiction
"History"
PHILIP O` CEALLAIGH
A man and a boy, his small son, were walking down a strange
and crowded street, a street in a great foreign city, holding hands. It was
early morning and the boy’s mother was still drowsing in her bed.
They were walking from the hotel to the museum. The boy, a five-year-old who wore glasses, had never before seen so many people. He heard snatches of unintelligible speech as the faces passed swiftly and a chorus of car horns from the traffic in the road. His father noted the maleness of the street – the few women scarved and overdressed in the warm weather – and the alien script of the street placards and shop signs which could not even be resolved into individual letters.
He was aware also of how his son, usually very talkative, was silent now and immersed in the challenge of the chaotic street. The noise, in any case, made it difficult for them to speak. The boy was very good with words, and when he did not understand a word he would ask what it meant.
For example, once he had taken his son to fish from the rocks at home and the boy had soon became bored. “You don’t have patience,” he told him.
“What’s patience?”
He had thought for a moment and then replied: “Patience is giving to each thing the time you need to do it well. So, to fish, you need patience, until the fish comes to you.”
Later that day he asked the boy what patience was, and he replied immediately: “Waiting.”
Or, when they had been collecting bait, using stones to whack limpets off rocks, the boy, who loved animals, asked, “Doesn’t it hurt them?”
“Fish bait. They’re history.”
“What’s history?”
He thought about this. He liked the process of taking a word apart in order to explain an idea simply. It helped him notice the natural connection between ideas. And, like holding the boy’s hand, explaining words gave him a place in the world. He delivered simple blocks of meaning, and watched the boy play with them, turning them around as he would solid objects in his hand. He observed the boy’s world growing, branching out in fresh directions, as he gathered words.
“History is something that has happened, and you tell a story about it.”
“So. It’s a story. That’s real.”
“Yes, but when I say “they’re history,” I just mean, that’s it, the story is over for them, the end.”
The boy, sitting on his hunkers on the wet sand, cogitating history by the tide pool, nodded, his mouth a little open.
Later, when the man was casting out, having baited the hook with a struggling worm, the boy shouted across the waves: “You’re history!” The father laughed, the wind and the sun in his face. In such moments he felt that children were geniuses in a bright new world, one that only later grew dim. He wanted to hold the boy’s hand a little longer, while he still belonged to such a world. Growing older, people found dull ways to make life bearable. Or perhaps did not find any way.
And now they were walking down a strange street, with the traffic screaming, and the traffic cop at the intersection whistling, to the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities.
They reached a “square,” a vast open space where vehicles converged from a number of busy streets, and they stopped and stood there together, looking across, holding hands, as if they had reached the shore of a sea. There was no place to cross. Cars swarmed about each other like ants on an anthill, somehow avoiding collision. It was very loud. The sounds of the horns rose above the sound of the engines. They watched and the boy waited for the next thing his father would do. The father could see people crossing, passing between moving lanes of traffic as if protected by magic charms. But he did not have the nerve for such a trick, and certainly not with a child. Then he saw the sign for the metro station and the people going down into the ground.
They descended into the tunnels beneath the square. The tunnels branched and turned many times. They went up and down stairs. The man saw signs in Arabic that he could not read and signs in Latin script indicating streets he did not know.
“Dad, do you know the way?”
“Approximately.”
“What’s approximately?”
“Kind of.”
When they came up again to the sky and the square they were closer to the museum and there were no more big roads to cross.
“They have a really lot of cars in Cairo, Dad.”
“They do.”
“How many do they have, would you say?”
“A lot, a lot.”
“But how many really, Dad?”
“Oh, millions.”
“That’s a really lot! Why don’t they crash?”
“I don’t know. I think they do. Sometimes.”
The museum was located in a street that was blocked off to general traffic. Only police and military vehicles and tour buses were admitted. There were ordinary police, soldiers and riot police with shields. Soldiers stood guard behind blast shields.
“Why are there soldiers, Dad?”
It was a police state, for one thing. It had made peace with Israel and received American money in return, and had developed a tourist industry, the only real industry there was, and this investment had to be protected against bombers, and their deadly shrapnel.
“To keep an eye on things.”
“What things, like?”
“Crazy runaway crocodiles, from the river Nile.”
The boy smiled. They were away from the traffic now, with the tourists and the soldiers, and it was easier to speak.
“Have their guns got bullets, Dad? Real ones?”
“I’d say so.”
They entered the main gates in front of the museum and he bought tickets and declined the services of several guides. They had a brief rest, sitting outside talking, about crocodiles and hippopotamuses mainly, and then they entered the one of the greatest museums on earth.
The Egyptian Museum of Antiquities fairly represented the country, the man felt. A musty deposit of wonders, a coffin shop, a sarcophagus warehouse. The exhibits were crowded and jumbled. Those in cases were described by small cards in Arabic and English. The cards had been done up on an old typewriter. The English was a mess of stylistic, grammatical and typographical errors. In a museum with a grand name implying respect for the archaeological and historical sciences, the sloppiness was comical. The chaos of the city had pervaded the museum.
They wandered from case to case, stopping when an exhibit held the boy’s attention and gave them something to discuss, and he explained what he could. But the boy was interested in ordinary household objects, things that he could easily recognise. Objects so banal that it seemed strange that they should be exhibited at all, and made the man feel that history, the world of the dead, was a world that was as real as that in which he lived, though glimpsed through the odd distorting glass of a museum display case. The strangeness was due to the objects having been removed from their proper context, the living hands that had held and used them, from rooms where families had lived and children grown up, and placed in cases and made out to be somehow extraordinary. They were not extraordinary. It was just that the people who had used them had been gone a long time.
As he walked the corridors of the dead he could
not shake the mad hum of the city outside. The living city was the latest
layer superimposed upon all the dead layers. He had a sudden vertiginous sensation
that humanity, in its every incarnation, was not around for very long. The
motion, joy, excitement going on outside - the noise of a fly buzzing blind
against a windowpane.
Looking at pots and knives and sandals as simple functional objects made the
tourists seem somehow improbable. What strange species of people needed to
look at such things as if they were hard to understand? There was even a chunk
of ancient bread on display. Preserved in the dry air of a tomb, it now resembled
a rock. But what was bread when it was no longer for eating? And what kind
of a human being needed to look at bread that was no longer bread, but bread
for looking at in a case, and yet needed to be told “This is bread”?
He had had a similar feeling several days before, on the plane, looking at
the ancient desert through gaps in the unreal-looking clouds, thinking what
an improbable thing it was to fly, to sail above the earth in a metal bird,
ignorant of how the trick worked, and yet completely un-amazed. Sustained
by faith in technology, a society of people floated as through a dream.
There was a long room at the back of the museum, and he overheard a tour guide explaining the giant cases. It was a row of coffins. Each was a work of art. They slotted one into the other until the final one was the size of a room. They had been placed in the earth and sealed up. The mysteries of the death cult, now dug up and exposed to tourists in leisurewear. They clicked their cameras, getting their money’s worth, a bit of culture. Then they boarded their air-conditioned buses and were taken to souks that sold junk.
He wandered through the rows of exhumed objects, objects which either from utility or beauty spoke clearly of life, and he could not shake the feeling of being in someone else’s dream. Could they have dreamed forward, as we dreamed back into their lives? Could they have dreamt these people wandering heedless through their treasure?
A boy, five years old, wakes and tries to tell his father about pale ghosts drifting through the aisles of a vast temple, pointing at the Pharaoh’s gold. The boy, rubbing his eyes, sits before a wooden bowl and the woman brings a pot and places it before them. The father scoops mashed beans into the boy’s bowl. And then, Father, says the boy, they were looking at my bowl. The father smiles and passes his hand over the boy’s head. He likes to watch him eat, and grow big. They begin their breakfast, as they do each morning, the sun rising above the fields, the Nile flowing tirelessly through a succession of days.
They stopped before a painted wooden snake, projecting from a black box. A snake temple. The drawers, or doors, opened and the snake slid in or out on a wooden base. For exhibit, the snake poked out of doors.
“It’s a cobra, Dad. Why is it in a box?”
“So it doesn’t bite people.”
“If it escaped it would hide. And bite people. Wouldn’t it?”
“That’s the thing, with cobras.”
“Snakes can cause a really lot of trouble.”
“If a cobra bites you, you’re definitely in trouble.”
“What’s definitely?”
“For sure.”
“Definitely in trouble. The snake told her to eat the apple, didn’t he Dad? Then God took off his legs and said, Eat dust.”
They moved on, holding hands, between the glass cases. He told the boy lots of stories; myths and legends, Bible stories, invented-on-the-spot stories. Spiderman and Batman and Jesus. Curious details caught the boy’s interest. The expression, “eat dust,” a fragment of scripture, like something from an action film. He had read the story to tell it to the boy and had discovered that the snake had originally had legs. God makes the snake limbless in punishment for tempting the people.
He had been struck, when he read, by another detail. In the story, God lies. God tells Adam and Eve that if they eat the fruit, or even touch it, they will die. The implication is that they will die on the spot. The snake explains that this is untrue: God does not want them to eat the fruit because then they will be able, like their Creator, to tell good from evil. Eve wishes to be wise, and eats the fruit. The snake has told the truth. She becomes wise. She understands that she is mortal.
God had lied as you would lie to children who have no way to comprehend what they are being warned against.
They passed a number of jars and cups, and stopped at the next interesting exhibit, a bow and number of arrows. The boy liked these toys. He liked knights and Vikings and now he liked Egyptians too, with their chariots and their bows and arrows. The father read the card and explained to the boy that the red pigment still visible on the tips of some of the arrowheads was poison.
“Snake poison, Dad.”
“Maybe. But there are other ways to get poison.”
“How?”
“Insects maybe, or special plants.”
The boy peered into the case, mouth a little open. He did this when he was thinking, but more often when he was tired. They had been looking around for nearly an hour and it was a sign that soon the boy would be harder to amuse. The man decided they should skip the treasures of Tutenkhamun. He imagined the boy’s mother, breakfasted and relaxed, smiling when they returned from their journey.
“Why is the arrow like that, Dad?”
The arrows were barbed in order to rip the flesh badly if any attempt was made at extraction.
“To hurt more.”
“Oh.”
He mussed the boy’s hair. “Will we go now?”
The boy nodded. They headed for the stairs. They passed the entrance to the Mummy Room. He was not taking the boy to look at corpses. He could do without it himself, in fact. He remembered reading that Sadat had closed the exhibition because Islamists objected to the dead being displayed. Some fundamentalists had killed Sadat. The metro station in the square outside was named in his memory. Much use that was to him.
They stepped out into the light and stood on the steps. They could hear the traffic from the square.
“How about we sit down here on the steps and have a break. Then we’ll go and get some ice-cream.”
The boy did a little jump and landed bend-kneed, still handing his father’s hand. They sat down.
They were just out of reach of the city. Many millions of people were out there. Charging through the streets in cars, kneeling to pray, catching the smell of frying fish. Hustling for money, labouring in a factory or in a taxi, being a lift attendant, a street cleaner, a maker of felafel, an accountant, a shopkeeper, a shopkeeper’s sweeper and mopper. Sprinkling parsley on your dinner. Buying trinkets for your room. Screaming when your team scored. Reading the newspaper, while you had your hair cut, about a war in another country. Watching the sun go down on the concrete skyline from an apartment on the seventh floor. Remembering when your son was born. Remembering when your wife was young. Every generation went about its business, it seemed, as if none of it had ever happened before.
If people really saw that all their passions were infinitely ancient perhaps the traffic in the square would grind to a halt, the engines and horns go silent. The taxi drivers would sit in their cars with no reason to drive any further. Fares would say, here is fine, and would reach for wallets and remove the coloured notes. But the legal tender would be meaningless and would fall to the ground, and it would lie where it fell, and the passengers would get out, dazed, and wander like sleepwalkers through the stilled sea of vehicles. The drivers would fold their arms over the tops of the steering wheels, rest their chins on their arms, and gaze through their windshields.
He looked at his son. He was really alive, the realest thing there was. The other thing was just a story for him, because he was still blessed and immortal. You could tell him to look both ways before he crossed the street, but about the other thing you could say nothing. The soldiers all fall down, then get up and play another game.
He sat there for a moment with the boy, in the sunshine. It was good to enjoy the pleasant light of day.
“Let’s get ice cream, Dad.”
“Let’s go.”
They walked back into the noise of the city, holding hands.
