‘It’s rude to stare,’ she said. The voice matched the body, not the face.
‘Forgive me.’
‘I appreciate your
‘Good evening. We’re with the city Medjay. We need to interview the women of the Harem.’
‘At this hour?’
‘It doesn’t matter what time it is.’
She looked annoyed. ‘Which women do you mean? We have all kinds of women here: seamstresses, dressers, women of the right hand, dancers, musicians, right through to the foreign parties. I don’t think any of them would want to see you at this hour.’
‘Oh? Let’s see. I know one of them is missing. Vanished. A very special girl. A kind of mirror. Her sisters will know what I mean. They must be worried. Frightened, probably. It’s worse not to know what’s happened, don’t you think?’
She looked at me intently, her big face furrowing. And then she let us in.
‘She’s a eunuch!’ whispered Khety.
‘I know,’ I whispered back. I’ve seen everything Theban nightlife has to offer, all the lower depths of the clubs and dens, and the other places men go to realize and enact their most secret desires. Boys as women, women as men, men with men, women with women.
She walked ahead of Khety and me and the girls followed, giggling and whispering, their lanterns jiggling and bouncing as they skipped along. What with the strangeness of the surroundings and the constantly dancing lights and shadows, I soon lost my sense of direction as the passage turned left, right, right, left…We walked ever deeper into this dark labyrinth, passing empty reception rooms full of unoccupied couches and heaped cushions, low workrooms where little figures sat hunched, stitching by close lamplight and ruining their eyesight, silent laundry courts where washing bowls were stacked and white linen dried on endless racks, shut offices, and dark sleeping quarters where tired women came and went in different states of dress, their hair down. The eunuch stepped lightly, elegantly, ahead of us, occasionally glancing back slyly to make sure we were still following.
At last we came to another door. The girls gathered around us, their lanterns and chatter finally resolving into stillness and quiet.
‘We can go no further. We are not permitted.’
The eunuch knocked at the door, whispered urgently, then ushered me in. Khety was not allowed to follow. The last I saw of him he was standing in a pool of light with a sad entourage of pretty girls smiling up at him. Then a thick curtain was drawn across the portal, and he was gone.
‘Good evening.’ Her voice was light, amused, intelligent. ‘Forgive the girls, they’re silly and over-excited. We don’t usually see visitors at this hour, but I’ve been expecting someone.’
She was dressed in a pleated outfit, the whole garment seeming to shape itself to her body, giving prominence to her naked right breast, which was beautifully displayed. Golden sandals on her immaculate feet, her shining and perfumed hair hanging loose. She looked not unlike the woman I had seen carved and painted everywhere in the city.
Her name was Anath. We were in a comfortable entertaining room, with elaborately wrought high-backed wooden chairs inlaid and gilded, and finished with lions’ feet. On a stand between us lay a board set out for a game of
‘Do you play?’ she asked.
‘At home. With my wife and my daughters. My oldest is smarter than me. She beats me often now. She remembers all the moves, she thinks through every permutation, and she almost always throws exactly what she needs.’
‘Girls are more intelligent than boys. They have to think for themselves from the day they are born.’
We sat down, and I told her everything. As I spoke, a few other women gradually drifted out of the shadows and into the room, one by one taking up positions in chairs and on heaped cushions to listen to me. I tried to focus, to attend to the face of the woman before me. She was listening intently.
There was a shocked silence, then a murmur of sorrow, and little gasps of grief from around the room. I looked up now at the other women, six in all. Suddenly I too felt as if the world had lost its balance. As I looked from face to face, gathered now in the flickering light of the lamps, it seemed I had wandered by mistake into a room of living mirrors. For these women, though different from each other in slight details, looked more or less identical. In their poise and their profiles, they could all pass for the same person. The Queen.
Eventually Anath spoke. ‘We are raised here, sometimes from girlhood, in this harem within the Harem, because we were all born with one gift. There are other offices in the Harem Palace serving different purposes, but here, the spirit of the Queen’s perfection is reflected, however dimly, in each one of us, and we labour and struggle to bring those elements of ourselves-our eyes or our noses, the length of our legs or the sound of our laughter-that are not quite like her into a closer harmony. This is a great purpose, wouldn’t you agree?’
I did not know what to say. ‘But why?’
‘To protect her. To pass for her when she needs us.’
I looked at them all, unbelieving. ‘Is she here among you now? Is the Queen one of you? If she is hiding here, please come forward. I will bring you safely home. I swear.’
I looked around the silent faces in the still light of the candles. I was desperate, in truth, to recognize her, for her to step forward and say, ‘You have found the Queen. Your search is over.’ But no-one moved. I realized they were all terrified. They looked anxiously at Anath, who looked confused.
‘Why would she be among us?’ she said.
‘Because she has vanished. I have been sent for to find her and return her to safety.’
The silence in the room became more concentrated.
‘Please, tell me: what happened the night Seshat disappeared?’
‘Three nights ago,’ Anath began, ‘a sealed message came from the Queen. There were detailed instructions. It was imperative that no-one, including ourselves, should know of their contents.’
A second woman spoke: ‘We thought nothing of it. It was not unusual to receive such a command from the Queen.’
‘The instructions were particularly for Seshat,’ Anath continued.
‘And who brought the message?’
They looked at each other, and Anath shrugged. ‘We do not know. From the moment we walk through the door, all is secret. Of course we can describe everything to each other afterwards, when we return. But not this time. For Seshat never returned.’
When I described the scarab amulet, they knew nothing of it. It did not seem to have belonged to Seshat. I was still glad I had given it to her grieving family.
‘What sort of men would destroy our sister with such terrible brutality?’ asked one of the women.
Another voice spoke up angrily from the back: ‘What sort of men would want our Queen herself murdered?’
‘That is what I am trying to discover.’
‘Some sort of monster,’ said one.
‘No,’ said another, ‘there are no monsters. Only men.’
I bade farewell to the hall of strange women. Anath took me by the arm and led me out along a dark avenue of sycamore figs to the furthest edge of a garden lit by the moon, and by many lamps. At the head of a pool was a statue of Nefertiti. She stared, all-seeing, all-knowing, across the dark water at her feet. We sat down for a moment on a bench, listening to a solitary night bird.
‘Where I live, within the Harem, we have little contact with the outside world,’ Anath said after a short while. ‘I know people think the Harem is a place of desire and mystery, and perhaps for some it is. Perhaps they imagine the things they would like to find in the secret world of women. But it is not like that for those of us who live here. We have our dedications, our daily rituals, our tasks. Sometimes I have felt like a bowl of silence, untouched, undisturbed by the outside world. But your news has destroyed my tranquillity. That bowl is cracked now. What an illusion it all was, that this world is kind and good.’
What could I say to her? There was no purpose in telling her that in my experience violence was buried deep within each one of us, a potential written into our very bones, something we shared even with the gods.
