Dead Men's Hearts

Egyptians; a population derived from various Mediterranean and sub-Saharan roots.”

“Oh, terrific. Now how about telling us what that’s supposed to mean?”

Kermit Feiffer, Forrest’s assistant director, was supervising the shooting while Forrest was editing earlier tapes. Kermit’s directorial technique included frequent interruptions. The interviewee was supposed to respond, but take care not to make it sound as if he were answering questions. No yeses and no nos. And, needless to say, no we Us. Later on he and Forrest would cut and edit as necessary, and record any needed voice-overs.

By now Gideon had gotten the hang of it and liked the informal tone it created—preferred it, in fact, to Forrest’s heavy-handed fluttering—but every now and then Kermit got on his nerves. A golden-bearded, self-admiring man in his early thirties, Kermit seemed to take himself every bit as seriously as Forrest did, but with less apparent justification. Most of the time he seemed to find Reclaiming History tedious in the extreme, so that during the shooting he yawned and fidgeted, and closed his eyes despairingly, and wandered away in despondent circles, and even groaned in torment, which took some getting used to on the part of the interviewee. He had also taken it upon himself to inject controversy and tension into things wherever he could—not an easy task on a talking-heads documentary about ancient history, but Kermit appeared to consider it a personal challenge.

He was amply succeeding with Gideon.

“I mean,”“ the assistant director went on, ”for you to say that the Egyptians were Egyptians sort of begs the question, wouldn’t you say? What race were they? White or black?“ He placed his hands on his narrow hips. ”What’s the problem, afraid to take a position?“

Not afraid, disinclined. Gideon hated the whole subject, first because race, biologically speaking, was a very different and vastly more complex phenomenon than color, a point that anthropologists had done a lousy job of getting across to the public at large. Second, because he found this white-black question tiresome and anthropologically pointless. But mostly because what ought to have been studied in the spirit of scientific inquiry was being twisted into something where the answers came first and the questions came afterward, and when that happened, facts—data—got distorted and stretched, ignored or overemphasized.

Not that it was anything new. The first extensive anatomical study of mummies, made near the beginning of the century, had concluded unconditionally that they were Caucasian. That result had stood unchallenged for all of three years or so. Since then, subsequent investigators, generally reputable, had “proven” the ancient Egyptians to be descended from East Indians, American Indians, Blacks, Mongols, Bushmen, Libyans, Australian aborigines, and Pelasgians, to name only a few. Naturally, each new determination had provoked a fresh furor. And now they were at it again, hotter than ever.

“Asking if the ancient Egyptians were white or black isn’t much different from asking if modern Egyptians are white or black,” he said. “Some are white, some are black, and most are neither. Is Mubarak black? Was Sadat? Are they white? They’re Egyptians; North Africans.”

Kermit was circling back from one of his eye-rolling rambles, humming through his nose now. That meant he was pleased. Probably because Gideon sounded irritated.

“Were some of the rulers black?” Gideon continued. “Sure, the Hyksos rulers were Nubians, and there’s no arguing that they were black. But most, in my opinion, were a type of their own, unique to their time and place.”

“I don’t know,” Kermit said, “my sister’s kid is taking anthropology in high school, and according to her teacher scientific studies now prove that Cleopatra was black, and the same goes for most of the pharaohs. Are you saying she’s wrong!”

Gideon sighed. Maybe he preferred Forrest after all. He gritted his teeth. “I’m saying—”

But he was saved by the appearance of a dark, wiry Egyptian who had come up behind the camera and distracted his attention with a waggle of his fingers.

“Cut, damn it!” Kermit turned furiously on the man. “Who the hell are you? Can’t you see we’re shooting?”

The man tapped his chest. “Ragheb.” He looked thoroughly pleased with himself, the bearer of important tidings.

“And what’s so goddamn important, Ragheb?”

But Ragheb wasn’t there to talk to a mere assistant director. He motioned to Gideon. “Come, please?”

“Come where?” Gideon said. “Is something wrong?”

The man’s eyes gleamed. “Moomy,” he announced proudly.

This time it had been found in the most isolated part of the Horizon compound, a sandy area in the extreme northeast corner that had the lumpy, pitted look of an old garbage dump over which sand and soil had settled with time, and a few scrubby plants had taken tenuous hold. It was in fact an old garbage dump; it was where Cordell Lambert and his coworkers had buried their waste early in the century, when the only things to do with garbage in Luxor had been to bury it or to burn it.

It was also the area in which Haddon had more recently directed that the rubbish from the outdoor storage enclosure, along with the bulldozed wreckage of the enclosure itself, be plowed under. To that end, under Jerry’s supervision, a sizable crater had been gouged in which most of the junk had already been buried. The original pit had not been large enough, however, and now a second, smaller hole had been scooped out by the backhoe. In so doing, it had unearthed trash no different from what might have been in an American landfill of the 1920s: bits of lumber and corrugated cardboard, deteriorating clothing, shoes (some with buttons), rusted tin cans and metal corset bones, and patent medicine containers—including six that were plainly recognizable as Milk of Magnesia bottles. Apparently American stomachs had not rested easily in foreign countries even then.

These had all been brushed off and placed in fiberboard boxes ready for stowing away, presumably for future graduate students desperate for thesis topics to sift through and theorize from.

But the newly found object that had caused Gideon to be summoned was set by itself on the ground at the feet of Jerry Baroff, who regarded it contemplatively, puffing on a pipe. “TJ’s at the dig this morning so they called me. I thought I better call you.”

It was a plain brown paper sack the size of a large grocery bag, crumpled and soil-stained, but not old. Protruding from it was the proximal end of a broken femur, unmistakably human. Inside was a jumble of other bones, no less certainly Homo sapiens.