Ismail Kadare - The Pyramid

Festivities had been expected for the evening of the inauguration, then on the following day, and thereafter until the end of the week. However, in place of invitations to the celebration dinner, the families of the reprieved received their relatives’ excised tongues.

The capital shuddered. What horrified people was not so much the excision of tongues — a quite frequent practice, and a requirement for various high-ranking posts, notably in the police archives and in the palace service — as the delivery of the excised tongues by messenger, and, even more, the fact that the organs came wrapped in a papyrus bearing the pharaonic emblem.

Nobody failed to appreciate that what had been sent out was another warning.

As you might expect, Memphis was plunged into even denser silence.

The habit of keeping quiet reached such proportions that, according to a further report from A. K., Jaqub Har, the linguist, forecast that if the present trend continued, then half of the Egyptian language would have disappeared within three years, and within a decade there would be barely three hundred words extant, which could be learned even by dogs.

In fact the general buttoning up of lips was not based solely on fear. For a long while now things had become much more discreet, and even the bureaus whose job it was to spread rumors and induce panic seemed to have become tongue-tied. The royal herald’s drum, even the creaking of a door or the clank of chains, now seemed not to make the sound expected of them. People complained of illnesses going back greater or lesser lengths of time. Some tossed in their sleep, unable to bear the thought that the pyramid’s funeral chamber was still empty. Others groaned as they thought of the eternal imprisonment that the stones were suffering. They bewailed the stones’ agony uninterruptedly, as if the tails of their tunics had been caught under one of them and were stopping them from ever moving away.

The sickness even affected what seemed to be the best protected from it — the investigations themselves! Sand began to cover the files; some prosecution witnesses were aging so fast that they had become unrecognizable by the time of their second confrontation with their victims.

Unlike the situation in the first few months after the pyramid’s completion, the number of individual visitors was now increasing. In silence, each would seek out the row where he had been denounced, or conversely the row where he had denounced someone else. People would wander up and down, muttering, “No, it’s not here, it must be farther on”; then, unable to locate the scene of the deed, they would be tempted to go back to the police station, to hammer on the iron doors with their bare hands, screaming: “Open up, open up, issue a summons, interrogate us, or we’ll go mad!” But the offices of inquisition were also growing ever quieter. The interrogators now only hobbled about; they felt worn out; their eyesight had grown significantly weaker.

The sharpest minds tried to clarify the causes of this all-pervading decline. The exhaustion and the misleading glow in which everything was now suffused was obviously not easy to explain. Everything was unwinding and drawing back as if before a ghost. But the hardest task was to track down the lever or cog responsible for the sluggishness of a machine that was supposed to know no rest, that is to say the intelligence service. And it was even harder to pierce the reasons for this dense and alien silence that had enveloped both camps, persecutors and persecuted alike.

Some nodded skeptically. Don’t go looking for explanations when there aren’t any, they objected. It’s the silence of the tomb, and nothing more. Every grave has its silence underground. The pyramid has its silence right up there.

PEOPLE spoke that way because they did not know what was going on in the Pharaoh’s mind. Cheops was despondent. In the past, and on more than one occasion, he had had his black moods. Sometimes it only takes a single misfortune, such as the wrong turning taken by his daughter to bring a man to his knees, but the Pharaoh’s present torment was of a different kind. It was not just a bout of dejection, but a sadness as vast as the Sahara — and every single grain of its sand made him groan.

For a long time he pretended not to have any idea of what had thrown him into this state, and even denied its existence. Then one fine day he stopped hiding it from himself. His atrocious unhappiness was caused by the pyramid.

Now the thing was finished, it attracted him. He felt that he had no option but to be drawn toward it. At night, especially, he would wake up in a sweat, shouting repeatedly: “To depart, O, to depart!” But where would he go? The pyramid was so tall that it could be seen from everywhere, From the distance it seemed to be on the point of calling out and saying: “Hey, Cheops! Where do you think you’re going? Come back!”

He had had people punished on charges of delaying the building work. Then he had had others sentenced for the opposite reason, because they had speeded the work up. Then again for the first reason. And thereafter for no reason at all The day when they finally came to announce that it had been completed, he was completely dumbfounded for a moment, and the messengers did not know what to think. They had expected a gracious word, if not an expression of enthusiasm, or at the very least some conventional formula of congratulation. But Cheops did not move his lips. His eyes seemed to go quite blank, then his silence infected the messengers too, and they all stood there together as if they had been plunged into desolation, into the void.

No one dared ask him if he would go and see it. Little by little the palace went into mournings as if there had been a bereavement. For several days no one ventured to speak of the pyramid in front of Cheops again.

The Pharaoh had contradictory feelings about the pyramid: he could feel its attraction while at the same time hating the thing. Because of the pyramid he had begun to detest his own palace. But he was not keen on moving into the pyramid either. He considered himself too young to go over to the other side, but not young enough to go on belonging to this one.

On some days, however, he had a muddled and insidious feeling that it was calling him. He changed his sleeping quarters several times, but wherever he went he could not escape its rays.

During the full moon he shut himself up for nights on end with the magician Djedi. In muffled tones, as if he was trying to lull him to sleep, Djedi told him all about a man’s double, his kâ. And about his bâ, another kind of double that appears to a dead person in the shape of a bird. Then, in an even more trailing voice, he spoke of shadows and of names. A man’s shadow was the first thing to leave its master, and his name was the last: in fact, the latter was the most faithful of all his possessions.

Cheops tried not to miss a word of what the magician was saying, but his attention wandered. At one point he muttered: “With my own hands I have prepared my own annihilation.” But the magician did not seem at all impressed by this statement. “That’s what we all do, my son,” he remarked. “ We think we spend our time living, whereas in fact we are dying. And indeed, the more intensely we live, the faster we die. If you have built the hugest tomb in the world, it’s because your life promises to be the longest ever known on earth. No other place of burial would have been big enough for you.”

“I am in distress,” Cheops said. The magician’s breathing grew heavy, as if before a storm. Djedi began to confess his own torments to the Pharaoh. “I am unable ever to forget anything,” he said. “I even remember things that it is forbidden to recall. I can still see the darkness inside my mother’s womb. And the claws I had when I was a wild beast. Instead of growing outward, as it does on all animals, my fur grew inward, into my flesh. I hear the call of the caves. I am alone in knowing what I suffer, my son,1 confide in no one. Your pain belongs to a different universe. Your torment is henceforth the torment of a star. You don’t know what earthbound torment is. May you never know it!”