New Decameron Eighteen: Anna Tambour (Patreon)

Curse of the Mummy Paper

by Anna Tambour

We wouldn’t be meeting like this--you and I--if we didn’t love books, so before I introduce myself, I’ll lay these before you as presents. Truly, you needn’t jump on a chair or grab a broom.

A princess, from the late Mr. Pettingrew’s collection, was swathed in forty thicknesses, producing 42 yards of the finest texture. The supply of linen rags would not be limited to the mummies of the human species alone; independent of that obtainable from this source, a more than equal amount of cloth could be depended on from the mummies of sacred bulls, crocodiles, ibides, and cats.

--Dr. Isaiah Deck, 1855 manuscript proposing the solution to the great rag (thus, paper) shortage then plaguing the USA’s 800 paper mills

An Onondaga county man, worshipful of the golden Eagle and not of the Egyptian Ibis, has put upon the market, ‘paper made from the wrappings of mummies.’

--[Syracuse, NY] Standard, August 19, 1856

Does that reassure? 

For though I’ve been known to utter kitten cries and toy with balls of string, this is no more a ‘cat story’ than the princess mentioned would have been a cat-story lady, or a cat-story lady brought back to life as some world-conquering villain whose only gentle stroke is to a cat.

Both make you creep away from them, warned perhaps by some instinct against sentiment. We flee from love that smothers, from forgetfulness. Not for us, all that petting, nor dishes set down just for us, always decorated with the glued-on bits and bones of unfinished fish, never quite washed because they’re ‘for the cat’. 

We would rather starve than touch that seaminess. 

But seaminess doesn’t kill, and no cat ever really died--last-flick-of-the-paw death-- from that so-common pain, starvation.

And as anyone who knows cats knows: we love good books--from the light embrace of a papyrus scroll to the luxurious bed of an open vellum tome, to a pile of paperbacks. A good bookshop is of course, a palace, but a loving home can be a good abode.

* * *

At one time I lived in a beautiful place, not here where it snows every winter, floorboards creak and drawers stick, people rush ungracefully about on hard, unmusical footwear, and the air is a nose-offending reek of ‘99 percent germ killer’ and name-brand perfume that no long-time-ago old dung-carrier would have worn. You who know this isn’t sentimentalism can call me Keti, for that is what the baker did. Keti, by the way, is fleabane in your unmellifluous modern tongue.

As to the baker, Niankhum, deserving of a book of psalms to him . . . 

Whenever I dropped a rat at his feet, he was properly appreciative. He never asked where the gift came from. And if it needed a bit more chasing, he kept out of my way, even when the rat jumped into the dough trough or fell into the oven’s fiery mouth.

He was also quite a reader. There were no booksellers in Niankhum’s town but he had a collection that he treasured. It was quite musical when I settled on it, my purrs setting forth a vibration in the scrolls. He’d pull one from under me and read to us, which always turned up my music. 

His wife, who liked to think she was my mistress, was the dream of many cats. 

A lap that could hold 7 at a time. A face as round and beautiful as the moon.

The baker’s wife took care to keep herself beautiful. She rubbed her skin with ground cinnabar, salt, almond oil and honey till it took on the sheen of the baker’s finest egg-washed bread. She wore wigs on special occasions but didn’t need to, her own hair being so thick that she’d only have to lay on a pallet on the floor and all us cats would comb her thick mane till it stretched out to the door. She made special foods to gain weight, her favourite being milk reduced to cream that she shared thick slices of with ‘all my little family’. The other 6 of us grew so fat, they couldn’t roam outdoors at night nor leap atop a wall. 

Of all women I’ve ever known--and what cat doesn’t know countless hordes--she was the only one who knew how to wear perfume. And such perfume. Her secret was to mix balanos oil, myrrh, and resin (what’s so secret about that, you say. That’s just what the city of Mendes exported for gold and rubies, nothing special to us.) But this baker’s wife added an incomparable something extra. This was her secret recipe: 

On a hot still summer day, when the sun was looking down upon everything at once, , she carried all 6 cats up the ladder to the hot clay of the flat roof where a black-glazed platter lay in waiting. Then she carried up and built a mound of cream slices in the middle of the platter. The 6 didn’t wait to be invited. They never noticed her lower a lid upon platter, cream and cats. The dome she had constructed of finest fish bladder looked like a cloudy sky, and the air around them, as the cats ate, grew hotter and hotter till they, if they hadn’t been so greedy, would have been panting and scratching frantically to get out and into some cooling shade. But what did those silly sisters and brothers of mine do? They sweated. When finally they had all finished their cream, their coats were matted with sweat. She reached in and took them out one by one, rubbing each down with linen cloths that she packed into a stoppered jar. And in that jar, she macerated her perfume. Like a cat, she knew how to apply it to herself, and as you could expect, knew how to drive her husband wild. Which she did with much more enjoyment, I must say, than any female of my set. 

The baker’s wife (I don’t remember her name, but the other 6 called her with no sense of shameless flattery, Isis) was not only a loving, but a conscientious wife. She would even make up the medicaments for her husband’s frequent attacks of constipation: zizyphus bread, honey, sweet beer, etc., mixed to a paste and smeared on linen that she bandaged around his stomach. That doesn’t sound bad, does it? But even though I love the baker--(I don’t deny that feeling that I first recognised in that melancholy time when the fire roared in the oven and shot sparks into the inky night, in that time before the dung beetle rolled the sun up into the sky, that thoughtful, sentimental, nostalgic time--the baker used to sit on his stool then, humming faintly. Sometimes he would drop his hand and I would rub against it. Otherwise, I curled myself up between his sandaled feet which were always soft and smelt fragrantly of dough from his stamping.)--even though I did love the baker, do!--there are limits to self-sacrifice. And no way would I pick up the etc. in the medicament that his wife made regularly for his constipation. Cat’s dung!

Her cries carried to every house in our town and far over the sands to stir the rooftops in the next town, so loud were they that early morning when he choked on a hard crumb in his cup of sweet bouza, an unattractive soup of broken hard loaf soaked in water and honey that I used to turn my tail up at, little did he learn. 

His death was so unexpected that the next thing the town knew was the smell of his bread burning. 

The baker’s wife wanted only the best for her beloved husband, and was quite an organiser. Priests were summoned and scurried to the bakery, where they picked him up from where he had fallen, at the foot of his oven.

They took him away to the music of the baker’s wife’s lamentations. Around her feet milled the 6 accompanists. Their high voices would have been far more plaintive if they had known what was to befall them. 

The embalming of the baker took the requisite 70 days, and in all that while, the widow hardly touched a crumb, and lived otherwise, on date vinegar flavoured with water. Mice exported grain both day and night while the 6 lay torpid upon the floor, more useless than ever now that the mice had to climb over them and sometimes had to dig new holes in the walls that were thoughtlessly blocked by a paw or tail or tragic whiskered face.

Indeed, it occurs to me that the 6 reluctantly slimming cats looked like your modern filmmakers documenting a trade route as they lay dilatorily watching fat rats wash their whiskers, themselves watching busy mice lugging the remaining stores of grain, chunks of bread and cakes along the inside walls and out of sight.

Meanwhile, the beautiful widow was in danger of losing her looks, she starved herself so. Still, she cared for nothing other than providing an Afterlife of comfort and joy to her beloved husband. So along with this most unprecedented embalming of the baker and all its costliness (the neighbours did not approve), the widow hired a bevy of builders and painters, and also spent much worry and coin on everything his heart and body would desire in the Afterlife. 

Day after day, the widow acted sometimes frantically but oftentimes as if she were sleepwalking. She worked and worried so hard that her smooth brow wrinkled and her hair grew wild as a bush. One morning, she shoved a wig over it and made for the tomb. For today was the 71st Day. The baker’s body was ready and the tomb had been built, decorated, muralled, provisioned; and nothing was missing except her presence to farewell her beloved husband on his Journey into the Afterworld. The ritual required her to arrive on foot from their home, the bakery. The priests would arrive from the direction of their temple.

The spectacle of the priests’ arrival holding her husband high was part of the scene that she would store in her heart, ready to tell him when they met in the Afterworld, if she had provisioned him well enough that he would meet her. 

As she approached the tomb, however, all she could see was a milling of men. Builders, painters, decorators, the owner of the emporium where she bought all the items he would need on his journey, even to the clay donkey.

‘Where is our money?’ they asked as one.

The widow was shocked. She thought she had paid them, every one, all she owed. They insisted she had not. Her husband had always hated owing anyone money, and would rather go without than buy something on credit. And she had felt the same. I do believe these men were plotting to destroy her, but don’t know finance well enough to be sure.

‘Come back to the bakery after this and I will find whatever I can to pay you,’ she had just said, when four priests approached.

They bore upon their shoulders a board laden with what I had to assume was the baker, now wrapped and smelling so highly of spice and oils that I wanted to run, but I didn’t. I stayed in the shadow of the tomb, watching. (And where, you might ask, were the 6 other members of the household who the baker had provided, through his missus, with such luxurious lives of feast and leisure? Still at home, those layabouts.)

The chief priest stepped forward, leaving the other three to balance what had once been a man plump as a grape. 

‘Woman,’ he said to the widow, ‘Your good husband, Niankhum, arrives impatient for his journey.’ And the woman the greedy 6 called Isis when they were fat, and Useless in her mourning state of forgetfulness, answered with a stumbling bow and an idiotic ‘Is that my beloved?’

From the shadows in her cheeks and the bags under her eyes, I wouldn’t have liked to estimate how long it must have been since she last ate or slept, though she must have cried her fill. 

‘Beloved or not,’ said the chief builder, shoving her out of the way. ‘I’ll not seal this tomb till you seal my hand with coin.’

‘What’s this?’ said the chief priest, striking his staff against the builder’s head. ‘May Uytsteth give you piles for your attempt to cheat a suffering widow!’

‘Where’s our offerings?’ said one of the priests.

The chief priest turned to the widow

The baker’s wife rent her hair. She didn’t know how she had forgotten to go to the next town to buy those funerary cakes. Her husband had always made them for the people of his town, but now that he was gone, the ovens were cold. Baking was of course, not woman’s work. ‘How could I forget?’ she cried. 

It was obvious to me. Every thought of food she’d had since her husband’s death had been to provide for him in his Afterlife. Like when she prepared his beer, she thought only of him. She lost all interest in her own needs, and the rest of her ‘little family’ was just an extension of her, in her forgetfulness.

So call me a mouse if I’m wrong. I am sure that she had paid to the smallest coin, everything she owed the tomb-makers and provisioners, and had paid the priests for the embalming.

But whether she had enough coin left to pay for the ceremony that the priests had arrived for with her husband held high between them, is still a mystery to me.

Whatever, as you say now.

The priests dropped the baker in the sand and stomped off, the heels of their sandals spurting up sand.

The builders trashed the tomb, drank all the liquid and took everything they could carry, even to the last unground grain of barley--all the provisions that is, except, probably superstitiously, the pile of inked papyrus, the Book of the Dead. 

They left while the baker’s wife scrabbled in the sand with a beautiful broken bowl.

She buried him beside the rubble, her tears rolling off the oiled linen before she tipped him into the hole. I wasn’t sorry. The likeness was terrible. His eyes had been warm, lively, and crinkled at the corners. And he stank of resins, rather like your germ killers. 

I didn’t want to leave, yet was too shocked to make plans yet. I followed the widow back to the sad ex-bakery and those 6 useless cats who were so annoyingly self-centred that they didn’t do a thing about comforting her, who needed them so much. They complained mightily however, of the loss of their slices of cream. That night, the wailing was terrible to hear. 

The bakery was soon surrounded by old toms, and I don’t blame them. She sounded indecent.

Before the pigeons woke the next morning, the front door was shaken by a tremendous banging. 

It was old Muhet. I don’t know her real name, but everyone called her Muhet behind her back, for she was wrinkled as the plum that loosens your bowels.

‘Good morning, Auntie,’ said the baker’s wife respectfully, though this ‘auntie’ was but a neighbour, and famous for her nosiness. 

‘What a sight,’ declared Muhet, who rushed past and swept into the bakery, suddenly getting into everything like teeth-grinding grit from a sandstorm.

My siblings scattered. I hid behind a water jar.

‘Enough of this mourning,’ said Muhet, not even pausing for a polite ‘I am unworthy to cross your doorway. A thousand praises on your fragrant . . .’ and she came bearing not a single gift.

She came weighed down, she said, with the demand of the whole town. That the baker’s wife marry, and she knew just the man. A baker from ______ (some place I can’t remember or she never said, but where misfortune had fallen) was, thank the Gods, free to take over this bakery, and thus, this wife. 

And to my surprise, the marriage took place the next day, as if there was no mourning period needed. Where were the gossips, you might ask? Stuffing their faces with bread, now that the oven burst into life again.

This baker wasn’t like that last one. His new wife dutifully served him, though her sighs when not in his presence would have made any sensitive cat rub against her leg. Now that she bustled back to work, however, she noticed how thin my 6 siblings had become (they looked now like healthy cats, not filled wine sacks). They took up their places around the room where she gave them milk. When the baker came in for his midday meal and sleep, he saw them eating their cuts of cream and let out a bellow that could be heard on roofs across the town. 

He tore open the front door, and raised a foot to kick the nearest cat out, but his new wife rushed between them. 

‘Remember Efuban?’ she said. Seeing his face, she quietly shut the door. Everyone knew of Efuban, who had been stoned by a mob the day he killed a cat, though everyone knew it had been an accident. 

‘Remember where your food comes from, your dress,’ said the new baker. He stormed off and before the door shut behind him, my siblings mobbed the dish again to polish off the cuts of cream. I might have stopped to say, ‘Your beloved Isis is crying,’ but it wouldn’t have done her good. Instead, I followed the monster. 

He went to the temple, met the priests, and soon sauntered back, happy as a full belly. 

While his new wife was busy with his dinner, plucking pigeons on the roof, he plucked my siblings off the floor till the floor was clean of all 6--all now in a bag, providing a moral about exercise after eating that they have never, unfortunately, lived to enjoy, no matter how many years pass.

Oh, he never noticed me, never knew there was a seventh. Out he went with the bag slung on his back. The noise in the street was too great for anything new to be noticed, though the bag was loud with cries and hisses, 6 cream-filled cats bumping on his back, tumbling against each other, nose to undertail, upside down and everywhichway. He carried the bag to the temple and handed it to the chief priest, who lowered it into what looked like a secret place under the floor. It certainly sealed their cries.

I stayed at the temple and watched. At nightfall, two priests prepared milk together, fussing over the preparation for some reason, but I’d never watched priests before and didn’t know their ways. When they were satisfied, they poured it into a pot that one took hold of. The other priest opened the secret place under the floor and pulled up the bag of my siblings. Their cries were so weak and dispirited, they almost caused me a pang of pity. Like mice they were, lacking all dignity. The two priests nodded to the chief priest. Then one priest carrying the pot, the other the bag, and the chief priest carrying nothing but all looking nondescript as they usually did, they all walked out of town, out to a sandy flat place that was so featureless that it looked sacred.

And in this place sure enough, there was a sort of column, with decorations such as I’d never seen, and when I say that, I mean that it was truly strange, for what haven’t I seen?

And the priest with the bag of my siblings handed it to the chief priest. Then the two priests took hold of the pot, raised themselves up as high as they could and poured the milk into the top of the column. Then the chief priest opened the bag and tumbled my 6 brothers and sisters, the cream-lovers, onto the sand.

Instead of running, as any lean cat let out of a bag should, one sniffed, then another, and in a moment’s breath, they had surrounded the base of the column, which was crying milk. They lapped and lapped, and lapped in a kind of frenzy. This milk was driving them mad with desire. They couldn’t lap fast enough, it seemed. The priests looked on, smiling.

Now I know that I should have pushed them aside to take my place. After all, I am the oldest and wisest. And I should have known that, cats being sacred, these priests would be better providers than any ignorant but well-meaning wife.

I never lived for my stomach, but nothing can slake my curiosity. So I watched from a low point, and no one noticed me. Indeed, out there lit only by stars, I wouldn’t have been distinguished from a pile of sand.

‘These six won’t do much to help our count,’ said one priest to another.

‘But it’s something. We need to do more to satisfy them.’

‘And if it works--’

‘Yes, there’s no shortage of scoundrels we can pay to bring us fresh supplies.’

‘But what if we get caught?’

‘Who would tell? What’s to catch. Look at them. They have chosen to live again as Bastet’s aides.’

I’d been so absorbed listening that I hadn’t looked at my siblings, but now I did. I had to look fast, because in a few moments, one of the priests had picked up all their still silent bodies and thrown them back in the bag.

The chief priest raised his hands to the heavens, and then rubbed them.

‘I do so love,’ he chuckled, ‘the smell of embalming.’

‘I do too,’ said one of the milk preparers, seriously enough that he ended up walking a bit alone on the way back.

The next day, in mourning for the missing cats, the baker’s wife shaved her eyebrows, earning a beating from her new husband. I know because I dropped in to see how she fared, and could only rub against her legs for a moment once his back was turned. But I had to leave. She had never been anything to me, but I don’t like to see a creature that I’m not playing with, suffer.

Back I went to the temple where I almost choked from the fumes while watching the 6 go through the process of permanent preservation. It was hard in a way not to turn madcap somersaults at the ludicrous idea of cats dying and then being preserved permanently by being dunked in goo and wrapped in something that holds them so tight, they cannot even flex their paws to kneed.

But the providing of thousands of mummified sacred cats was serious business to this small third-rate temple in a town so lacking in allure that no one had ever tried to raze it.

My siblings were bundled together with a quirth of others into a job-lot, loaded onto a donkey cart and trundled to out to some other featureless place in which now sat, supposedly forever, a stone image of Bastet. Quite a beautiful image, I should say. You could almost hear her disdainfully purr. She would never have been able to be caught by a bribe of milk. Not that I didn’t think (and still don’t) the idea of a cat being a God any less ludicrous than the idea that a dungbeetle moves the sun around. Which dungbeetle? I have eaten many. One crunch and they’re gone. They don’t strike me as any more capable than a donkey, and actually, they are much less able to do anything. I narrowly missed a donkey’s hoof one day, and I can tell you: if that hoof had connected, my history would be different. 

So back to the statue of Bastet. The thousands of mummified cats were meant, it must have been, as companions to her. Into a tomb went my siblings at the bakery, the Greedy 6, on top of and surrounded by so many other mummified cats that I could almost hear the cheers of rats across the land. Whatever the priests really thought about cats and Bastet, rats would certainly worship any cat that could be the cause of such a cat-plague of religious contribution.

When night fell, so were the stones lowered upon the tomb. So now I knew, as your mysteries say, where the bodies were buried. The Greedy 6, in that tomb that was buried soon enough, by history and sand. And the baker, Niankhum, in a place unmarked, except by my memory. Do I regret that he was left to starve there in the wilderness of between-lives? To be truthful, I am glad. Once the head priest stuck a skewer up his nose and twiddled it in his brain, he was no more the baker I knew than I am a pickled turnip. 

* * *

Centuries passed. My curiosity got me in many scrapes and more than a few deaths, but that unwraps another myth you might believe in. Why 9 lives? Why not 5, or a baker’s dozen, or 8977? I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m immortal, but I’m still me.

You’ve possibly read of me or seen pictures, though I keep out of the limelight, leaving it to those who bask in it. I’ve sat on poets’ papers, posed for painters’ portraits, chased balls of scrap-paper tossed by a lonesome limerickist. I’ve roamed the backrooms of museums where they prepare bodies for a modern Afterlife. I’ve watched watchmen. I’ve loved a thousand thousand books, inspired as many tales, but never, if you must know, walked on only two legs (what a waste to use a mere 2 when we have taken or been given 4!). Furthermore, I’ve never tarried in any place, no matter how young a miewling, if someone called me Fluffy.

As for the Greedy 6? Why shouldn’t they be romping free as I am, only caged by the turns of history? 

They have one problem that I never knew, that none of them has solved. 

Embalming, you see, does change a cat forever.

All that sticky stuff against your fur. It does the same thing as honey to the face. Just try to pull it off, and out comes all your hair. The only way that these cats can come out from their bonds is if they come out--yes, you know already. Hairless. They must wriggle free of their resin-coated winding cloth, and in this act, depilate themselves.

So in addition to greed, they possessed vanity. Such a curse, but they bestowed it upon themselves.

I tried to tell them, but as with their fatal attraction to cream, they would not believe me.

I thought that I’d be telling them for eternity, or as long as we live. Little did I know that there is a way to kill a cat.

Mummy paper. No one makes mummy paper now. Almost no one ever did. But in the 1850s in the busy United States of America, there was a huge hunger for rags to make paper. And likewise, there was at the same time, a huge digging up of mummies in Egypt. Many of those mummies were tossed into the hungry maws of steam trains, but others were sent by the shipload to the New World. And so my 6 siblings became for the last time, sea cats. They took their first and last steam trip and were then treated to the incomparable indignities that ended with them becoming--paper. 

Not being, like that princess, liable to clog up the machine as a big-boned body so therefore undressed of what the mill desired--40 yards of linen--being instead, neat little bundles tight as loaves, they were tossed whole into the jaws of the giant crushing machine. In that shadowy wet cavernous place, teeth the size of men thundered, smashing, grinding, ripping the linen to shreds. I saw all 6 of my silly siblings for one fleeting moment, tumbled from a basket into the maw. The machine crunched down upon them like jaws upon a rat. I heard not a single miew, though who could have heard it any more than anyone could have heard their bones breaking? By nightfall the soup that they were crushed into was: paper.

All the cats, not just the Greedy 6. All of them who I saw tumbled into that frightful broth that day--all of them could have done something through the centuries. Would they have--if they knew their future--torn themselves loose, freed themselves in the shiphold or on the train, or in the carts awaiting to be emptied into the terrible maw of that fateful (if you choose to believe that) mill? Freed themselves of their bonds. I ask, but that is my interfering self. I wouldn’t choose as they did, but it can’t be Fate. They were turned into paper and died as cats, became no more themselves than the breadcrumbs in the baker’s soup could again be bread.

And though they can never be recycled, there is a scrap of the paper still extant, I must believe, somewhere. Somewhere?

For as science says: you can’t destroy matter. 

Such a waste. That a cat can be destroyed is too incredible. I can’t believe it, as you would say when something happens that you know just did.

Such a tragedy. So they were vain. So they were greedy. That’s only human, you might say. And so do I!

But:

There’s a cat down the street here, living like Bastet herself.

A cat so beloved that I would find life cloying.

She’s a bookshop cat. She spends her days catching warm rays in the window. And her nights? I wouldn’t know. But she has rolls of fat, and is as active as a book. 

People point at her, exclaim about her ugliness. But then they enter the shop and try to tempt her to come and let them pet her. They buy books they never thought they’d want, but they do, taking them home, maybe as substitutes for this cat. They become silly in their admiration. They are not themselves. 

I would say that she is Bastet herself, if I were a believer. But one thing I do know. She is free. 

Her skin is pink as a tongue. She is hairless as a mouse’s heart.

**********************************************************************

"That was fun," Maya says. The cat, on the librarian's table, is looking at them steadily. Maya nods to him, and he looks away and becomes very involved in licking his back leg.

"It's a real cat," he says. "The hairless cat at the end there. It's the cat in Borderlands, the science fiction bookstore in San Francisco."

"Oh neat! Have you been there?"

"Well, sort of. My writer has been there, so I've been there in her head. It's a great store, and sort of community owned. It was going to close, and all the customers rallied round to help." He indicates the library cat. "He ws listening, did you notice. First time he's deigned to pay any attention. Just because it was a cat story."

Maya smiles. "Did they really mummify cats?"

"Sure did. Lots and lots of them, just like it says."

"I thought mummies were just kings and queens, not people like bakers. Not cats. That's cool."

"Good story. No food though. Well, there was some bread, but I didn't fancy it when rats had been in the dough. Let's read something that has some lunch in it!"

"What have we got?" Maya looks at the pile.

He picks up a book from the top."Up for another first chapter? We've got the first chapter of a YA book by Amber Lough called Open Fire."

"Is that open fire like shoot, or open fire like an open fire on the hearth?"

"Let's find out!" 

And they read.