Secrets of The Student – Part I: Memory and Story
I wrote The Student during the pandemic, when I had lots of time and nothing better to do. I knew nothing about the craft of writing. Both my spelling and my grammar were atrocious—and according to multiple editors, they still are. But both have improved with age and experience. The Student, literary warts and all, is an anomalous work: It is the beginning of the Petrie and Pettigrew series, because it was the first book to be written, but it is also the last in the series, following all the other books chronologically.
In the forthcoming Riddle of the Sphinx, Pettigrew meets an American student during a Christmas ball at the Mena House. She tells him that she is studying archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania and hopes to go on digs in Egypt. Decades later, The Student has dinner with her at the Garden City House, where she explains to him that she has just come from a six-month dig. At the Mena House and again at the Garden City House, she plasters her nose with the same zinc ointment.
And the circle is complete.
The Student differs from the other works because it was written like a stream-of-consciousness memoir rather than a structured novel. I thought the stream-of-consciousness style appropriate because The Student is a memory—often uncertain, sometimes chaotic recollections of events that occurred decades before.
The opening sequence says it all.
Much older now than when he was at the University, the student and his daughter are taking in the King Tut exhibit at the de Young Museum. They walk along the corridors discussing the exhibits. Then the student hears a faint sound echoing along the museum's corridors: the unmistakable "chink-chink" of a belly dancer's finger cymbals, a sound he last heard thirty years before that still haunts him. He dismisses it as impossible, but the sound grows louder as they walk. He speeds up. They come to a balcony. He looks down and sees a dancer in traditional costume performing before a crowd of children. He stares, and his mind remembers the morning he opened the windows, looked down from his apartment in Zamalek, and watched a transvestite dancer in the street below. The sights and sounds become real, his neck and arms feel the sun's heat, the smell of the Nile surrounds him; his memory opens up to the evening when he and Rosemary looked down at the body of Professor Jones.
And so, the story begins.
I used a similar sequence in Goddess. Pettigrew wakes up from a dream where a statue opens its eyes and smiles at him. He falls out of bed and then goes to the hotel window, opens it, and looks down. Istanbul opens before his eyes: steamers' horns honk in the Bosphorus, vendors’ cries float up, a bear wearing a red hat dances in the narrow street below. The morning mist cools his face, and the smell of food perfumes the air. He takes a deep breath and remembers how he got there. Then Flinders opens the door and tells him that they need to be at the consulate, and the story begins again.
Memory upon memory, flashback upon flashback.
The image of an expanding scene is not mine; writers and filmmakers have used it for years. To use a movie analogy, the screen of memory begins with a close-up and then widens as the camera rolls back. Consider the opening scene of Henry V. It begins with a tight shot of the Globe Theater; the interlocutor then turns to the audience and says, "Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France? Or may we cram within this wooden O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt?" The screen expands as the movie progresses until the viewer sees the mass of French armored knights charging across the horizon.
The Student, like Janus, looks both backward and forward. It is set in old Cairo, where most of the action of the Petrie and Pettigrew series takes place. The student walks the places where they walked: the Egyptian museum, the American University complex, and the Scheherazade nightclub. He sees the pyramids as they saw them; he experiences the same sense of movement and energy in the streets that they did. The character and color of the Arabian Nights come alive for him as they did for Flinders; the squalor and sickness oppresses him as it oppressed Pettigrew. The experience of a half-century before is relived in his mind.
At the end, as he is preparing to return to the US, the student visits the classroom where he spent so much time. He looks at the empty chairs and senses the ghosts of smiles and laughter, and then he asks himself, "Who will remember these?"
It is the same question both Flinders and Pettigrew asked.
"Who will remember?"
