Meryt, her cheeks flushed with the attentions of her family, spoke about me like a merchant in the marketplace selling her wares. “And she is an oracle, too, my dears. Her dreams are powerful, and her anger is to be feared, for I have seen her blast an evil man out of the prime of his life for harming a young mother. She sees clearly into the hearts of men, and none fool her with fine words that conceal a lying heart.
“She comes from the east,” said Meryt, now intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and her children’s attention. “There, women are often as tall as the men of Egypt. And our Den-ner is as clever as she is tall, for she speaks both the language of the east and our tongue. And she gave birth to Re-mose, a scribe, the heir of Nakht-re, who will someday be a power in the land. We are lucky to have his mother among us, and the house of Menna will find itself lucky when she sleeps under his roof.”
I was mortified to have so many eyes upon me. “Thanks,” was all I could say. “Thank you,” I said, bowing to Menna and Shif-re, and then to Hori and his wife, Takharu. “Thank you for your generosity. I am your servant, in gratitude.”
I returned to my corner by the wall, content to observe the family as they ate and joked and enjoyed one another. As the light began to fade, I closed my eyes for a moment and saw Rachel holding Joseph on her lap, her cheek pressed against his.
I had not thought of my brother Joseph for years, and I could not place the memory exactly. But the scene was as vivid as my recollections of Leah’s touch, as clear in my mind’s eye as the tents of Mamre. Even as a child, I knew that Joseph would be the one to carry the family story into the next generation. He would be the one to change into someone more interesting and complicated than simply a beautiful man born of a beautiful mother.
Meryt’s family thought I napped as I sat by the wall, but I was lost in thoughts of Joseph and Rachel, Leah and Jacob, my aunties and Inna and the days before Shechem. I sighed again, the sigh of an orphan, and my breath filled the room with a momentary melancholy that announced the end of the welcoming party.
Night was falling as Menna led Meryt and me through the moonlit streets to his house, which was nearby. Although it was larger and even better appointed than Hori’s, it was hot and airless inside, so we carried our pallets up a ladder to the roof, where the canopy of stars seemed only a handbreadth away.
I woke just before sunrise and stood up to see the entire town dreaming. They lay alone or in pairs, or in clusters with children and dogs. A cat walked down the street below, carrying something in her mouth. She placed it on the ground, and I saw it was a kitten, whom she began to lick clean. As I watched, the sun turned the cliffs pink and then gold. Women stirred and stretched, and then climbed down the ladders. Soon, the smell of food filled the air and the day began.
At first, Shif-re would not permit me or Meryt to do anything in her kitchen or garden, so the two of us sat useless, watching her work. Meryt had a horror of becoming a meddling mother-in-law, but her hands ached to be busy. “Only let me press out the beer,” she asked. “I could sweep the roof,” I proposed. But Shif-re seemed insulted by our offers. After a week of sitting, I could bear it no longer. Picking up a large empty jug, I announced, “I’m going to the fountain,” and walked out the door before my hostess could object, surprising myself as well as Meryt. After years of fearing the street in Thebes, I rushed into this one, not entirely sure of where to go. But since there were always other women on their way to and from the fountain, I quickly discovered my route.
As I walked, I peered into doorways and smiled at naked children playing in the dust. I began to see differences between one house and the next; flowers planted here and there, lintels painted red or green, stools set up by the doorways. I felt like a girl again, my eyes open to new scenes, my day empty of work.
Near the fountain, I overtook a pregnant woman waddling in front of me. “This is not your first, is it?” I asked brightly as I reached her side. When she spun around to look at me, I saw Rachel’s face as it must have appeared in the long years before Joseph was finally born to her. The woman’s face twisted in anger and desperation.
“Oh, my dear,” I said, ashamed. “I spoke before I understood what this means to you. Fear not, little mother. This boy will be fine.”
Her eyes widened with fear and hope, and her mouth dropped wide. “How dare you speak to me so? This one will die like the others before. I am hated by the gods.” Bitterness and anguish colored her words. “I am a luckless woman.”
My answer came out of me with the assurance of the great mother herself, a voice that came through me but not from me. “He will be born whole, and soon. If not tonight, then tomorrow. Call me and I will help you upon the bricks and cut the cord.”
Ahouri was her name, and after we filled our jars, she led me back to the baker’s house. She lived only a few doorways east of Menna, and when her time came the following night, her husband came seeking the foreign-born midwife.
With Meryt, I attended as easy and straightforward a birth as any I ever saw. Ahouri sobbed with relief as she held the third child of her womb, but the only one born breathing. It was a strapping boy she called Den-ouri, the first to be named in my honor. Her husband, a potter, gave me a beautiful jar in thanks and kissed my hands and would have carried me home in his arms had I permitted it.
Meryt spread the story that I had performed some sort of wonder for Ahouri, and soon we were busier than we had been in Thebes. Most of the men who worked the valley were young, with wives of bearing age, and we attended as many as ten births in a month. Shif-re no longer had idle guests to feed, and indeed, quickly gained more dainties and extra linen than she knew what to do with. Menna was proud to have such respected women under his roof and treated me like his own aunt.
Weeks and months passed quickly, and life in the valley took on its own orderly pace. Mornings were the busiest times, before the great heat descended. The men left early and children played in the streets while the women swept out their homes, cooked the day’s meals, and fetched water at the fountains, where news was exchanged and plans laid for the next festival.
While the great river was not visible from the town, it still ruled the ebb and flow of daily life in the arid valley. Its seasons were celebrated in high spirits by the craftsmen, who grew up imbibing the rhythms of farming by the Nile. After so many years in the land of the great river, I finally learned the beautiful names of its seasons. Akhit—the inundation; peril—the going-out; sJiemou—the harvest. Each had its own holiday and lunar rite, its own festive foods and songs.
Just before my first harvest moon in the valley, a scribe came to Menna’s door with a letter from my son. Re-mose wrote to say that he was living in Thebes again, assigned as scribe to a new vizier called Zafenat Paneh-ah, the king’s choice. He sent greetings in the names of Amun-Re and Isis, and a prayer for my good health. It was a formal note, but I was happy that he thought of me enough to send it. And that shard of limestone, written in his own hand, became my most prized possession and regardless of my protests, became proof of my status as a person of importance.
Not long after my son’s letter arrived, another man appeared at the door seeking the woman named Den-ner. Shif-re asked him if it was his wife or his daughter who had need of a midwife’s bricks, but he said, “Neither.” Then she asked if he was a scribe with another letter from Thebes, but he said no. “I am a carpenter.”
Shif-re came to the garden with curious news about a bachelor carpenter who sought a midwife. Meryt looked up from her spinning sharply and with a great show of disinterest said, “Den-ner, go and see what the stranger wants.” I went without thinking.
His eyes were sadder, but in all other ways he was the same. I stood for only a moment before Benia reached out to me with his right hand. Without hesitation, I placed my left hand in it. I extended my right hand and he took it with his left. We stood like that, hand in hand and smiling like fools without speaking, until Meryt could stand the suspense no longer. “Oh, Den
-ner,” she called with false concern. “Are you there, or was that a pirate at the door?”
I led him back through the house to where Meryt hopped like a bird from one foot to the other, wearing the wild grin of the god Bes. Shif-re smiled too, having just learned how Meryt had spent the past months seeking out the artist who had offered me his heart along with the luxurious box that accompanied me from Thebes.
They bade him sit and offered beer and bread. But Benia looked only at me. And I returned his gaze.
“Go ahead then,” Meryt said, giving me a hug and then a push. “Menna will bring your box to you in the morning and I will follow him with bread and salt. Go, in the name of the lady Isis and her consort Osiris. Go and be content.”
Leaving my friend’s house to follow a stranger, I was surprised by my own certainty, but I did not hesitate.
We walked through the streets, side by side, for what seemed like a very long time, saying nothing. His house was near the edge of the settlement, close to the path leading up to the tombs, many streets away from Meryt. As we walked, I recalled my mothers’ stories about hennaed hands and songs for the groom and bride on their way to the bridal tent. I smiled to think of myself as being in a kind of procession at that moment, walking toward my own marriage bed. I smiled too to think of how Meryt would rush from fountain to fountain the next morning, telling everyone about the love affair between Benia the master carpenter and Den-ner the magical midwife. I nearly laughed at the thought. Benia heard the sound that escaped from my mouth as distress. He put his arm around me, placed his lips to my ear, and whispered, “Fear not.”
Magic words. I laid my head on his shoulder and we walked the rest of the way holding hands, like children.
When we arrived at his house, which was nearly as large as Menna’s, he took me through the rooms, and with great pride showed me the furniture he had built—two thronelike chairs, an ornately carved bed, boxes in many shapes. I laughed when I saw the easing stool, which was far too beautiful for its foul purpose. “I thought of you when I made these things,” he said, shrugging in embarrassment. “I thought of you sitting here, sleeping here, putting things to right in your own way. When Meryt found me I made this for you.”
He took an exquisite little box from a niche in the wall. It was unadorned but perfect, made of ebony—wood that was used almost exclusively for the tombs of kings—and it had been burnished until it shone like a black moon. “For your midwife’s kit,” he said, and held it out to me.
I stared at it for a moment, overwhelmed by his generosity and tenderness. “I have nothing to give you by way of a token,” I said. He shrugged with one shoulder, in a gesture I soon came to know as well as I knew my own hands. “You don’t have to give me anything. If you take this from my hands freely, your choice will be your token.”
Thus I became a married woman in Egypt.
Benia laid out a meal of bread and onions and fruit for us, and we sat in the kitchen and ate and drank in nervous silence. I had been a girl the last time I had lain with a man. Benia had been thinking of me since that day in the market, two years earlier. We were shy as two virgins who had been matched by their parents.
After we ate, he took my hand and led me to the main hall, where the fine bed stood, piled with clean linen. It reminded me of Re-nefer’s bed in Nakht-re’s house. It reminded me of Shalem’s bed, in his father’s house. But then Benia turned me toward him and put his hands on my face and I forgot every bed I had ever seen before that moment.
Lying together was a tender surprise. From our very first night, Benia took great care of my pleasure and seemed to discover his own in mine. My shyness vanished in the course of that night, and as the weeks passed, I found wells of desire and passion that I had never suspected in myself. When Benia lay with me, the past vanished and I was a new soul, reborn in the taste of his mouth, the touch of his fingers. His huge hands cupped my body and untied secret knots created by years of loneliness and silence. The sight of his naked legs, thick and ropy with sinew, aroused me so much that Benia would tease me as he left in the morning, lifting his skirt to reveal the top of his thigh, making me blush and laugh.
My husband went to his workshop every morning, but unlike the stonecutters and painters, he did not have to work in the tombs, so he returned to me in the evening, where he and I discovered greater pleasure in each other—and the sorry fact that I did not know how to cook.
During my years in Nakht-re’s house, I rarely strayed into the kitchen, much less prepared a meal. I had never learned how to make bread in an Egyptian oven or to gut fish or pluck fowl. We ate unripe fruit from Benia’s neglected garden and I begged bread from Menna. Shamefaced, I asked Shif-re for a cooking lesson, which Meryt attended only to tease me.
I tried to recreate my mother’s recipes, but I lacked the ingredients and I forgot the proportions. I felt sheepish and ashamed, but Benia only laughed. “We won’t starve,” he said. “I have kept myself alive for years on borrowed bread and fruit and the occasional feast at the house of my fellows and family. I did not marry you to be my cook.”
But while I was a stranger in the kitchen, I found great joy in keeping my own house. There was such sweetness in deciding where to place a chair, and in choosing what to plant in the garden. I relished creating my own order and hummed whenever I swept the floor or folded blankets. I spent hours arranging pots in the kitchen first in order of size, then according to color.
My house was a world of my own possession, a country in which I was ruler and citizen, where I chose and where I served. One night, when I returned home very late, exhausted after attending at the birth of healthy twins, I thought I had lost my way. Standing in the middle of the street in the dead of night, I recognized my home by its smell—a mixture of coriander, clover, and Benia’s cedary scent.
A few months after I moved to my own house, Menna prepared a small banquet for me and Benia. My husband’s workmen sang songs of their workshop. Meryt’s sons sang of bread. And then all the men, together with their wives and children, joined voices for love songs, of which there seemed to be an endless number. I was bashful at the attention showered upon us, the cups raised, the broad smiles and kisses. Even though Benia and I were really too old for such nonsense, we were giddy with delight in each other. When Meryt leaned over and told me to stop grudging people the chance to bask in the light of our shared happiness, I put aside all shyness in gratitude and smiled into the faces of my friends.
I had been right to trust Benia, who was the soul of kindness. One night we lay on our backs staring up at the heavens. There was only a sliver of moon and the stars danced above when he told me his life. His words came slowly, for many of the memories were sad ones.
“I have only one memory of my father,” said Benia. “The sight of his back, which I saw as he walked away from me in a field where I sat behind the plow breaking up clods. I was six years old when he died, leaving Ma with four children. I was the third son.
“She had no brothers, and my father’s people were not generous. She had to find places for us, so my mother took me to the city and showed my hands to the stonecutters. They took me on as an apprentice, and taught me and worked me until my back was strong and my hands callused. But I became a joke in the workshops. Marble would crack if I walked into a room and granite would weep if I raised a chisel to it.
“Wandering in the market one day, I watched as a carpenter repaired an old stool for a poor woman. He saw my belt and bowed low, for even though I was only an apprentice, stonecutters who work in immortal materials are considered far greater than woodworkers, whose greatest achievements decay like a man’s body.
“I told the carpenter that his respect was misplaced and that mere sandstone defeated me. I confessed that I was in danger of being turned into the street.
“The woodworker took my hand in his, turning it this way and that. He handed me a knife and a scrap of wood and asked me to carve a toy for his grandson.
“The wood seemed wa
rm and alive, and a doll took shape in my hands without effort. The very grain of the pine seemed to smile at me.
“The carpenter nodded at the thing I made and took me to the workshop of his teacher, presenting me as a likely apprentice. And there I discovered my life’s work.”
Here my husband sighed. “There, too, I met my wife, who was a servant in the house of my master. We were so young,” he said softly, and in the silence that followed I understood that he had loved the wife of his youth with his whole heart.
After a long pause he said, “We had two sons.” Again he stopped, and in the silence I heard the voices of little boys, Benia’s doting laughter, a woman singing a lullaby.
“They died of river fever,” Benia said. “I had taken them from the city to see my brother, who had married into a farming family. But when we arrived at the house, we found my brother dying and the rest of his family stricken. My wife cared for them all,” he whispered. “We should have left,” he said, with self-reproach still raw after many years.
“After that,” he said, “I lived only in my work and loved only my work. I visited the prostitutes once,” he confessed sheepishly. “But they were too sad.
“Until the day I saw you in the marketplace, I did not bother to hope for anything. When I first recognized you as my beloved, my heart came to life,” he said. “But when you disappeared and seemed to scorn me, I grew angry. For the first time in my life, I raged against heaven for stealing my family and then for dangling you before my eyes and snatching you away. I was furious and frightened of my own loneliness.
“So I took a wife.”
I had been perfectly still until then, but that announcement made me sit up.
“Yes, yes,” he said, embarrassed. “My sister found me a marriageable girl, a servant in the house of a painter, and I brought her here with me. It was a disaster. I was too old for her; she was too silly for me.