“Perhaps he chooses to remain below, reading the paintings.”
Although Pierre opened the case so we could see the codex, he did not remove it from its safe place. I thought its inscribed signs looked like rivets, as though they were shaped to hold elusive meanings on to the dry, frail sheets. “I place these pages here, for you to see. We will not touch them, though. I read from my draft of the English translation. But I want the codex to be present,” he said, “to represent the person whose own hand so long ago hovered above them, writing.”
Each of us acknowledged the presence of the codex by inclining our heads in the direction of the case.
“I translated first into modern standard Arabic, the language of Cairo, then into French, the language of the country where I have chosen to live, and finally into English because it is the language we come closest to having in common, among the five of us. Of course my English is not so skillfully deployed or idiomatic as one might wish.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry my father is not here, but I will read the Arabic translation to him later.”
He glanced around at all of us and at the little fire. I thought he wanted to remember the moment accurately—the color and size of the flame, how his daughter was dressed—in a cotton shirt and neat khaki pants, the sort with a zipper concealed in a seam encircling each leg just above the knee so the pants might be shortened if they proved too warm. Her cotton shirt was dyed burnt orange. She had not bothered to change from her comfortable lace-up walking shoes into something more fashionable. Adam and I were both stylishly dressed in the neutral linen clothes we had worn when we arrived. My shoes were fashionable but low-heeled, a tasteful compromise between style and comfort.
“It is a jeweled moment,” Adam said. Though he spoke to us all, he turned his head and looked only at Arielle, beside him on the sofa. How lovely it was to hear Adam’s voice—calm, warm, assured. It was the voice of a man of cultivation, a man of the world. “Like John Keats, I would ask of this moment ‘Do I wake or sleep?’ It seems too lovely to be true: to be here, with you all, in the south of France.” Despite his warm words, Adam rubbed his hands together briskly as though they were cold. He nodded at the sprightly flame dancing in the fireplace, and I thought of the comfort we had drawn from our fire on cold damp nights under the rocky overhang.
“‘O for a beaker full of the warm South,’” Adam quoted from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”
He hesitated and extended his hand as though he held an imaginary wineglass and were toasting the flames:
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim.
I knew that he did not quote for me.
Keats’s words seemed new-minted when Adam pronounced them. Pierre blushed for the young man, this handsome American, so obviously smitten with his daughter. “Well then, from poetic words to sacred ones.” Pierre cleared his throat. “Perhaps they are the same. Let me begin,” he said. But feeling the need for explanation, he hesitated again.
“These notes are thoughts written about two and a half thousand years before the time we now live in, before the beginning of the common era. While these words do not compare, in antiquity, to the paintings that exist in the system of caves below our feet—or they to the age of the star-writ dark studied so devotedly by Lucy’s husband—this writer’s mind, like the minds and needs of artists of parietal paintings and drawings, was like ours. You must not think of him as foreign, or remote. He was like us, a quester.”
Pierre shifted his body to look at me, saw with approval my excitement and interest. “We are full of curiosity?” he said, in a friendly tone.
“Of course,” I murmured. But I also felt a special calm. The moment, the culmination of all our effort, was too important to be defined only with the froth of excitement. I closed my hand around the titanium case of the flash drive.
“The Neanderthals had bigger brains than ours; those later ones, the cave artists, Homo sapiens, and those who lived and wrote in Egypt and Mesopotamia were more like us