When the docents announced that the museum was closing, I abruptly turned and hurried away without a backward glance, feeling less embarrassment than shame, as if I’d been caught staring at something I shouldn’t have been staring at. My feet ached, my back was stiff; I had been walking around and around the case for hours, it seemed. It was as if seeing them had set off slow music in me, which was gathering force. I went home and looked up images of them. I found a short film consisting of lingering close-ups edited together, fading in and out of each other, set to Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.”

What a perverse choice of music! Delicate, infused with a sense of discovery, it was meant to invoke images of familiar things all aglow in moonlight, under your gaze as you rest in a state of tranquil contemplation. You gaze in delight on a transformed world, enjoying an immortal calm that never entirely overcomes the memory of mortal transience. But what are you being shown? Two starving human beings, emaciated, squatting naked on the ground, half-buried in clay. There are still some traces of pigment left on them, mainly streaks of green on one of the faces... The bodies were carved from limestone, and in their extreme whiteness they still seemed to be exposed to the glare of a pitiless Egyptian sun. Two bound captives, with ropes around their necks. The back of one figure was gouged with unintelligible writing that no one had ever been able to identify. Their eyes still squinted; their mouths hung open as if they were panting for breath or crying out in misery. Was “Clair de Lune” selected because, as the camera inched over the surfaces of the huge, elongated heads of these figures, someone had been struck by a resemblance between their powdery, curved whiteness, and the surface of the moon?

I read that they were only two feet tall. To me, they had seemed life-sized. One was supposed to be male, the other female, but I couldn’t distinguish that between them. Two ashen figures half-melted into a clay base—hairless, almost foetal figures with sticklike arms and legs, bulbous heads, noses broken away, knees pulled up to their chins, elbows flush to wizened torsos. They sit face to face, a little entangled in each other. One of them keeps its right fist lightly clutched to its breast, while the left hand holds the other by the arm, as though the one figure were trying to comfort the other. So, the statue was showing me a human being reduced to little more than a skeleton, a dying human being, who nevertheless was able to find in themselves a fleeting surplus, just enough to offer consolation to another dying human being.