Wyatt once told me that at these festivals, the Ancient Egyptians would purposely drink to the point of vomiting, so that they imitated the Nile flood. Those Egyptians, he said, knew how to live.
I look up at the sky again, searching for Sothis. Just like the Ancient Egyptians, I see it as a sign.
* * *
—
DEIR EL-BERSHA IS located smack in the middle of Egypt, opposite the town of Mallawi on the east bank of the Nile. Only people authorized by the government are allowed entry because of damage from ancient earthquakes and recent lootings.
I stare at the scenery until I see the familiar rock-cut tombs. Dozens of tiny metal doors are lined up in a striated row of limestone, like a hotel carved into the walls of the wadi, the valley. A death hotel. I can pick out exactly where I spent three seasons in the tomb of Djehutyhotep II, the overlord of the Hare nome. Below it, covered with staging, is the newest tomb. I squint, but I can’t see any activity there.
That’s not the only thing that’s new in Bersha. There are sprawling modern cemeteries that didn’t exist in 2003, just a little south of the tombs. Beside a mosque, there is now a brightly painted church for Coptic Christians. Along the banks of the Nile, Egyptian farmers walk on narrow raised paths between their fields, or heap the flat fans of date palms into a donkey cart. And then suddenly, we are at the Dig House. I pay the driver and step out of the taxi, sand flying up around me.
The house has changed, too.
It was built out of mud brick in 1908 by a British architect, Gerald Hay-Smythe, to match medieval Coptic monasteries. The porch had collapsed before I arrived as a grad student, and no one ever got around to fixing it. But now, I see, the porch has been rebuilt.
There are no vehicles parked outside, and there’s a stillness to the house that speaks of emptiness. I walk past a patch of wild onions and a rusting bicycle into the outer courtyard. Sheets and shirts and galabeyas, the long caftan garments worn by locals, hang on crossed clotheslines. Fifteen years ago, the Egyptian family who looked after the Dig House and the Egyptologists inside it would string our laundry up like this. All our bedding smelled like sunlight.
“Hello?” I call out. There isn’t a door to knock on, just an open archway. Hesitantly, I step forward, and startle a cat. It yowls and leaps onto a crumbling sill, where it judges me with narrow eyes before disappearing inside the open window.
I walk down the long corridor that separates the quarters of the local caretakers from those of the archaeological team. A fine layer of grit covers the floor, the walls, everything. “Is anyone home?” I say, but the only sound is swing music crackling from a speaker in the throat of the house. I peek my head into a room without a door, which has a stack of old twin mattresses printed with the Disneyfied faces of Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty. Further down the hall is the entrance to the magazine—the storage facility where we would put any finds that we might want to look at during a future season. I can’t help myself from stepping through the doorframe, where in the dim light I scan neatly labeled cardboard boxes, stacked on shelves. Suddenly I whip around, certain I’m being watched. On a folding table is a mummy that was in this room long before I ever was, and will likely be here long after I leave. “George,” I murmur, calling him by the name everyone else had, fifteen years ago. “Good to see you again.”
Further down the hallway is the bathroom, an individual shower and a toilet. I use the facilities, fingering the frayed sign still taped to the back of the stall door: THINGS YOU SHOULDN’T FLUSH: ANYTHING YELLOW, TOILET PAPER, YOUR HOPES & DREAMS.
“Min hunak,” I hear, a voice getting closer. Who’s there?
I have literally been caught with my pants down. I spring up, wash my hands, and hurry out of the bathroom to try to explain myself, only to come face-to-face with a memory.
As if it were yesterday, I see this man with his weathered brown skin and gentle hands setting a platter of fresh salad in front of me at a table. He’s ageless, frozen in time, the same caretaker who looked after the house when I was a graduate student. “Hasib?” I ask.
His eyes widen, and hearing my accent, he switches to English. “Hasib was my father.”
I blink. “You’re…Harbi?”
Harbi had been a boy back then, though one of our best workers. He’d done whatever Professor Dumphries asked—from rigging staging so that we could scrutinize hieroglyphs at the top of the chamber wall to standing for hours in the hot sun with a mirror canted to capture the light so that we could accurately copy rock art.
His gaze narrows. “Dawn?”
“You remember me?” I say. If Harbi does, maybe he will not be the only one.
“Of course I do. You brought me Superman.”
Every time I flew through Heathrow, I’d pick up a comic book for Harbi and a Cadbury bar for Hasib. “I came empty-handed this time,” I confess. “Is your father still here?”
He shakes his head. “He died.”
Muslim clients of mine have always been better with death language than my Christian clients, who tend to be terrified of that transition. “I am so sorry to hear that,” I tell him. “I have many great memories of him.”
Harbi smiles. “As do I,” he says. “My son and I now see to the Dig House.” He frowns. “Mudir did not tell me you were coming.”
When I hear him say Mudir, the director, I immediately think of Dumphries, who had held that title as the head of the Yale Egyptology program. But of course, there is a new director now. Wyatt.
“It was sort of a last-minute decision,” I hedge. “Where is everyone?”
“It’s Friday,” Harbi says, shrugging. Fridays had been our days off, when we would often take trips to other dig sites. “They were visiting Sohag overnight.”
Sohag is another Yale archaeological mission, about three and a half hours south. “When will they be back?”
“Lunchtime, inshallah.”
“Would it be all right if I wait?” I ask.
“Yes, yes,” Harbi answers. “But you must be hungry, doctora.”
I feel my face color. “Oh,” I correct, “actually, I’m not. A doctora.” It makes sense for Harbi to assume that a visitor would be another Ph.D., like the ones from Yale, and that the girl who worked here for three seasons as a grad student would have completed her dissertation.
Harbi looks at me for a long moment expectantly. When I don’t say more, he starts walking down the hallway. “But you are still hungry,” he says.
I notice his limp and wonder what happened: if he fell on-site, if his injury pains him. But I can’t ask personal questions, not when I am unwilling to answer any myself.