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called a “Frozen Charlotte”—its face crazed with minute cracks in the glaze. I was breaking up. I tried to fight down my grief, but my mind reached forward in my prepared remarks to grasp their closing sentences: “‘Twenty-twenty,’ Thom used to say to me, ‘might be the Year of Clear Vision.’ May you prove him right.” Then I mumbled, mortified by my naked emotion before the scientists, “Thank you for coming to this ancient land to pursue new truths, in Thom’s name.”
    To supportive applause, I left the symposium quickly and entered the hallway. My hand closed convulsively over my talisman, but I considered jerking it off. I have never understood anger directed at a person who has died, but in that moment I felt a flash of hot anger at Thom for deserting me.
    Just behind my shoulder as I hurried down the corridor, I heard the Egyptian host, Pierre Saad, padding along almost noiselessly in his soft sandals behind me. “Mrs. Bergmann,” he called quietly. I hesitated.
    “Mrs. Bergmann, I am so sorry. Please wait.”
    I stopped but, ashamed, I could not bring myself to meet his eyes. Three years after Thom’s death, I should not have made a public display of frozen grief. With bowed head, I stared at the weave of the Egyptian’s white robe, hanging straight down like a choir robe. In a flash, I remembered how I had pulled off my Methodist robe in children’s choir and—to my parents’ horror—refused anymore to sing praises to God, after my grandfather’s death.
    “We should not have asked you to do something so difficult.” His accented English seemed as softly padded as the sound of his footfalls. “It is entirely my fault.” His voice was too sympathetic; I could not look up at him without dissolving in tears.
    Focusing on his sandal straps and on the square-trimmed brown-pink toenail of the big toe on one foot, I whispered, “I need to leave here.”
    “Of course.” His voice modulated into formula: “I completely understand, and I am so very sorry that you are upset.” Suddenly, in a new rush of emotion, he asked urgently, “But where will you go?”
    “Nag Hammadi,” I answered automatically. It was just a name, a place Thom and I had wanted to visit because ancient scrolls pertaining to the gospels had been found close to that Egyptian village. Those pages, as well as the death of my grandfather, had played a role in my rejection of the standard model of Christianity, the ardent faith of my parents.
    “There, then,” the faceless foreign voice continued, apparently satisfied. “Nag Hammadi. We have a museum there now. I hope we will meet again.” He turned away to rejoin the symposium.
    That night in Cairo—after grief had risen up like a floating stone in my throat, then sunk again—Gabriel and I shared a drink in the Marriott, a hotelwith a largely foreign clientele, certainly non-Muslim. The hotel management maintained special permission to set up a bar to sell liquor. The hotel also hosted a gambling casino, which Egyptians were forbidden by Islamic law even to enter. I felt grateful to Gabriel for choosing a liberated hotel. While I was by no means an alcoholic—at least in my own opinion—I had noticed that a private glass of sherry at bedtime did a lot to ameliorate my chronic sadness.
    Over drinks, Gabriel encouraged me to take a cruise-and-camp riverboat tour while he participated in the scientific meeting. Tilting my sociable martini glass toward him, I said, “There
is
a balm in Gilead, thank God.” Wishing that the cone-shaped glass was a cylinder holding three times as much of the potent alcohol, I savored its flavor as I swallowed. I wondered if Gabriel had anticipated I would have a minor meltdown at the opening meeting, that I would need recuperation.
    He had already researched the tour: a flight to Luxor to see the temple ruins, a Nile cruise with stops along the way—another flight to the Aswan dam—the gigantic stone figures of Abu Simbel—and a