The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

marvelled at the gigantic columns, failing altogether to understand my mother’s emotion when with tear-filled eyes she led me home. At home, she took off my baby shoes and gave me new sandals that were uncomfortable and chafed my feet until I grew used to them.

When I complained, my father laughed benevolently and said that a boy from a good family could no more walk barefoot, so much had times changed. He told me that still during his grandfather’s time even the noble ones could hang their sandals around their necks and go about barefoot. Manners were simpler back then and healthier. It was enough for a woman to wear a sleeveless, narrow cloth whereas today every woman who was careful about her reputation required broad garments and multicoloured collars. Before, men wearing hardened and crinkled aprons and wide sleeves would have been laughed at. Verily, had the grandfather risen from his grave to see the city, he would not have been able to recognise Thebes any more or even understand what people were saying, so much had Syrian names of things and words mixed with the language. The more one used foreign words, the finer the person he thought he was, said my father.

After the meal, my father, with a grave look upon his face, laid his big, clever hand on my head and stroked with shy tenderness the soft locks at my temple. “Now you are seven years old, Sinuhe, and must decide what you want to be.”

“A warrior,” I said at once and was puzzled by the disappointed look on his good face. For the best games the street boys played were war games, and I had watched soldiers wrestle and perfect themselves in the use of arms in front of the barracks and had seen plumed war chariots race forth on thundering wheels to manoeuvres outside the city. There could be nothing nobler or grander than a warrior’s career. Moreover, a soldier need not be able to write, and this was what weighed most with me, for older boys told terrible tales of how difficult the art of writing was and of how mercilessly the teachers pulled their pupils’ hair if they chanced to smash a clay tablet or break a reed pen between their unskilled fingers.

It may be that my father was never a notably gifted youth, or he would surely have become something more than a poor man’s doctor. But he was conscientious in his work and never harmed his patients and in the course of years had become wise through experience. He knew already how touchy and self-willed I was and made no comment on my resolve.

After a while, he asked my mother for a bowl, went to his workroom and filled the vessel with cheap wine from a jar. ”Come, Sinuhe,” he said to me and started leading me down to the river bank. I followed him in wonder. By the quay, we stopped to look at a barge from which stunted porters were unloading wares sewn up in matting. The sun was setting amongst the western hills beyond the City of the Dead, and we had our stomachs full, but the porters toiled on, panting and dripping with sweat. The overseer stung them with his stick while the clerk sat placidly beneath his awning, checking off each bale on his list with a reed pen.

“Would you like to be one of those?” asked my father.

I thought this a stupid question and gave no answer but only looked at my father, finding this strange, for no one wanted to be like the porters.

“They labour from early morning till late at night,” said my father Senmut. “Their skins have coarsened rough as crocodile’s skin, their hands are rough as crocodile’s paws. Only when darkness falls can they crawl to their wretched mud huts, and their food is a scrap of bread, an onion and a mouthful of sour beer. Such is the porter’s life. Such is the ploughman’s life. Such is the life of all who labour with their hands. You surely don’t envy them?”

I shook my head, still looking at my father in wonder. It was a soldier I desired to be, not a porter nor a dung digger nor a field waterer nor a filthy shepherd.

“They can never change their destiny,” said my father gravely. “When they die, their bodies will be salted and covered with sand, at best. Immortality and joyous life in the Western Land do not wait for them unlike those who can build themselves permanent tombs and can afford to have their bodies prepared for everlasting death. Why do you think that is so, Sinuhe?”

My chin quivering, I looked to the direction of the City of the Death, where the setting sun coloured the white temples of the Pharaohs blood-red, for I already knew what my father tried to say.