Ismail Kadare - The Pyramid

But others objected: “How can we be responsible? We were just carrying out orders. If there has been a mistake, others are to blame.”

“But we are all guilty,” the former maintained. “In one way or another we are all involved in this nasty business.”

Having said that, they raised their eyes mechanically toward the sky. It was not just the pyramid, but also their own bodies and their very fates that were being siphoned upward by the celestial void.

THE SKY was overcast, Cheops paced back and forth on the upper floor of his palace, feeling tense. Though he was trying not to look anywhere at all, he could not prevent his head from turning toward the west, toward the spiraling tornadoes of dust, blacker than any seen before. It looked as if a sandstorm were brewing for the afternoon. But the pyramid’s dust cloud could be seen from everywhere, running ahead of the hurricane. Cheops felt as if his own tomb were galloping across the sky like a bolting horse. The vision had not left him for years. He consoled himself with the thought that it was his fate as a monarch, that there was no one to whom he could complain, but it made him melancholic just the same.

Two sets of scrolls were laid out on a marble shelf. One was thick and weighty and contained the biography of his father Seneferu, recently completed by a team of historians. Cheops had asked to look at it before choosing the layout of his own biography, which would soon be started. The other set of scrolls contained the current affairs of state.

He would wait for another day before unrolling his father’s life: today his soul was too much like a sea of bitterness, And he almost had to do violence to himself to pause in front of the shelf. The manuscript was in two parts: the first, dealing with life on earth, was encased in red leather; the second, colored sky blue, dealt with the afterlife.

He thought that he knew more or less what the first scroll would consist of. The king’s youth, his coronation as Pharaoh, first military campaigns, reforms, then alliances with neighboring states, major decrees, conspiracies unraveled, wars, hymns written by poets. But the second whetted his curiosity. He went through it slowly, and his eyes rested on one of the papyri: “The day of Seneferu, After the day, the night of Seneferu, Then again the day of Seneferu, Then the night again. After which the day. After the day, the night of Seneferu, Then after the night, another day of Seneferu, After this day, the night,,”

Good god! he groaned. He imagined himself inside his sarcophagus, alone in the mortuary chamber. He put his own name in the place of his father’s: Day of Cheops; night of Cheops., His dismay was so great that it stopped his anger short. That was what his posthumous biography would be like., The first papyrus was entitled The First Three Hundred Years. But if the first three hundred were as monotonous as that, there was no reason to expect any change in the following centuries.

He unrolled the scroll further. He found the same words, and, again, replaced his father’s name with his own: Day of Cheops. Night of Cheops. Day of Cheops after the night of Cheops, Another night of Cheops…

The idiots! he growled. They had apparently counted out the days and nights of the first three hundred years, thinking they could get away with such fiddlesome listings.

He seized the manuscript as if he were grabbing a woman by the hair before throwing her to the ground, maybe even before trampling on her, when all of a sudden, at a place where he had made a tear, a different wording caught his eye.

He tore out the passage and was so surprised that his anger subsided at once. An event! he almost shouted out loud. In this uninhabited void an event., rarer than an oasis in the desert, had sprung forth. He drank in the hieroglyphs with ardor: “In the morning the highest dignitaries of the state arrived in turn. Then the High Priest of Egypt, all the ministers, and last of all the Queen presented their congratulations to the Pharaoh, At the end of the ceremony, the dignitaries having retired, he lay down in his sarcophagus, Afternoon of Seneferu, Then the afternoon of Seneferu was followed by a night of Seneferu, Then day of Seneferu.” Day of Cheops…

He ran through the document feverishly until his eye alighted once more on an event. Significant facts were extremely rare, as if lost among a myriad of stars. Commemorations of the Pharaoh’s coronation. Celebrations of his own birthdays. Some religious ceremony. So that was what his life would be in the afterworld, compared to which his present life constituted only an infinitesimal fragment. Heavens! he groaned again. These happenings were like distant posts in a desert, like the domes of temples seen on the horizon. He thought he had had a vision of this kind once before. Ah yes, it was two years previously, in a report from the security service about the philosophers of Memphis, giving a detailed reconstruction of their judgments about time. Some of them thought that time now was not what it should be, that it had lost its original quality. It had lost all restraint, it had, so to speak, gone flabby, got dilated — in a word, it had run down. According to them, real time should be very dense. For instance, the time of a human life in this world should be measured as the sum of its orgasms. All the rest was emptiness and vanity.

Cheops had only a vague memory of the arguments of the opposing faction. All he recalled was that they stood firmly by the contrary view, in other words, they defended time’s need to relax. According to them, if humanity persisted in living so intensely, then it would end up losing its reason.

Gobbledygook! Cheops thought. It had been an inspired idea to send half of them off to the Abusir quarries. If people would stop bothering themselves with such nonsense then the affairs of state would run all the more smoothly. But they were incorrigible. After wracking their brains with all sorts of visions, the Egyptians were now doing their best to unhinge the rest of the world. That’s what his ambassador in Crete had reported. The Foreign Minister had brought the dispatch to him, puffing with pride. The other viziers were also glowing: the Egyptians’ worldwide impact was steadily increasing. Crete, and, beyond that island, the Pelasgians and the peoples who had settled there just recently, had been struck by a great confusion. They had learned from the Egyptians that another life existed, and it had quite turned their heads. We were ignoramuses, they said, we were blind, thinking life was so short and simple, whereas it is infinite!

The ambassador had reported just how excited the Cretans were. They were grateful to Egypt for a miracle that they held to be the most important discovery ever made by mankind. From now on everything would change — ideas, mentalities, even the earth’s dimensions. It was no trifle, no, it was not a mere appendage or outbuilding tacked on to life. No, what had at last been brought to light was life a hundredfold, a thousandfold, not to say everlasting.

Cheops listened to his ministers in silence. To begin with, even he had not understood whence came the chill that he felt. Then when they had left he went out on the balcony of his palace and gazed for a time at the dust rising from the building site. The thought came to’ him, more clearly than before, that if Egypt had not made the discovery that so bedazzled the rest of the world, then there would be no pyramid either. There would be no pyramids, he thought again and again. And that horrible dust cloud would not darken his days.

Two decades previously an inner voice had advised him not to have this kind of tomb built. But his ministers had ended up convincing him of the opposite. Now, even if he had wanted, he could no longer detach himself from his pyramid.