House of Dreams (5 page)

I did not lose that enthusiasm. As day followed day, Epophi giving way to Mesore and then the New Year and the blessed rising of the flood water, and I realized that I was not going to fall ill, the gods were not going to punish me for my presumption, Pa-ari was not going to abandon me, I ceased to gulp frenetically at my lessons. Pa-ari was a patient teacher. The jumble of beautiful, closely packed signs on his pottery pieces began to make sense and I was soon able to chant to him the ancient maxims and nuggets of wisdom of which they were composed. “A man’s ruin lies in his tongue.” “Learn from the ignorant as well as from the wise man, for there are no limits that have been decreed for art. There is no artist who attains entire excellence.” “Spend no day in idleness or you will be flogged.”

Writing them was a different matter. I had no paint and no pottery. Pa-ari’s teacher dispensed such things at the temple school and collected what was not used after class and Pa-ari refused to try and steal the tools I needed. “I would be disgraced and expelled if I was caught,” he objected when I suggested stuffing a few extra bits of clay into his bag. “I will not do it, even for you. Why can’t you use a stick and some smooth wet sand?” I could, of course, and I did, but with bad grace. Nor could I draw the characters with my right hand. I reached for everything with my left including the stick, and after seeing the results when I tried to use my other hand, Pa-ari gave up trying to force me to change. I was a clumsy, laborious writer but I persevered, covering the banks of the Nile with hieroglyphs, practising with my finger on walls and floors, even drawing in the air as I lay on my pallet at sunset. Nothing else mattered. My mother exclaimed over my new docility. My father teased me because I fell so often into silent reveries. I had indeed become biddable and quiet. I was no longer so restless and dissatisfied, for the realities of my outward life were completely subordinate to my inward existence.

I no longer cared that the village girls shunned me. I felt superior to them, hugging my precious literacy to myself like some magic talisman that could protect me from every threat. The small ceremonies that made up our daily life— the marriages and deaths, gods’ feast and fast days, births and illnesses and scandals—were no longer manifestations of my prison. When I accompanied my mother to visit her friends, to drink palm wine and listen to the women’s chatter and laughter, I did not feel trapped. I had only to withdraw a little in my mind, to go on smiling and nodding at them while I silently spelled out the names of the herbs I had crushed and steeped for my mother’s salve that morning, and I would watch her berry-brown, animated face while she told some story, watch her broad smile come and go, watch the lines around her eyes crinkle, and think, I know more than you do. I do not need to be sent to the herb-gatherer to say the name of the plant you barter for. If I wanted I could write the name, and the number of leaves, and the price I expected to pay, and then I could go and dangle my feet in the Nile while I waited for a reply. Yes, I was arrogant, but it was not the cold arrogance of spite or assumed importance. I did not imagine myself to be better than the family I loved or the women who passed in and out of our house with their jokes and their troubles, their courage and their uncomplaining stoicism. I was different, that was all. I had always been different, as Pa-ari knew himself to be different, and that awareness made me all too eager to secretly flaunt the thing that hid my insecurity.

So the time went by. When he was thirteen and I was twelve Pa-ari graduated from pottery and paint to papyrus and ink, and on that day my father gave him a man’s kilt of snowy white linen of the sixth grade that had come all the way from the flax weavers’ market in holy Thebes. The linen was so fine that it clung to my admiring fingers as I handled it. “You may wear it to school,” father told him with, I thought, a tinge of sadness. “Beautiful things should be used, not laid away for special occasions. But learn to clean it properly, Pa-ari, and it will last a long time.” Pa-ari embraced our father, then stood back awkwardly.

“I am sorry that I love words more than the soil,” he said, and I saw that his fists were clenched behind his back. Father shrugged.

“There is no need to be,” he replied gently. “Blood will out, my son, or so they say. Your grandmother was a word-woman, and wrote and told stories. If the Good God calls me to war again I will bring back a slave to work the land.”

“Who did she tell the stories to?” I broke in, enthralled with this unexpected revelation, but I might as well have saved my breath. Father smiled that slow, enigmatic smile of his and ruffled my hair.

“Why, to the members of her family of course,” he said, “but do not imagine that we need to hear any stories, my Thu. Midwifery and healing are more useful skills for a woman than the ability to entertain.”

I did not agree but dared not say so. I took Pa-ari’s kilt and held it to my face, marvelling at the tightness of its warp and woof. “It is worthy of a prince’s body,” I whispered, and my father heard me.

“It is indeed,” he agreed, pleased, “but know, Thu, that there are five grades above this and the linen worn in the King’s house is so light that one can see the outline of limbs through it.” My mother sniffed loudly, my father laughed and kissed her, and Pa-ari snatched his prize and retired to wrap it on.

Later, when we had swum and eaten and then wandered out behind the village to watch Ra set over the desert, he unrolled his first lesson on papyrus from its thick linen covering and spread it out on the sand for me. “It is a prayer to Wepwawet,” he told me proudly. “I think I have done it very neatly. The scribe’s pen is much easier to use than the thicker paint brushes. My teacher has promised me that soon I may be allowed to sit at his feet outside the classroom and take dictation for him. He will pay me! Think of that!”

“Oh, Pa-ari!” I exclaimed, running my fingers over the smooth, dry surface of the paper. “How wonderful!” The letters, graceful and symmetrical, were as black as night but the light of the westering sun that flooded the surrounding desert was dyeing the papyrus the colour of blood. I rolled up his work carefully and handed it back. “You will be a great scribe,” I told him, “honest and clever. Wepwawet will have a jewel of a servant in you.”

He grinned back at me and then lifted his face to the hot evening breeze that had sprung up. “I might be able to get you some papyrus of your own,” he said. “Once I begin to work for my teacher I will be supplied with enough to carry out my duties, and if I write very small there will be an occasional sheet left over. If not, I can perhaps buy you some. Or you can buy your own.” He lifted a handful of sand and dribbled it over his bare shins. “Doesn’t Mother sometimes share her payments with you, now that you have become so proficient at your job?”

His question was completely innocent, yet all at once the old familiar feeling of despair rose up in me with such speed that I began to tremble, and with it came a sudden sensuous awareness of everything around me. The splendour of Ra’s glorious colour, red-orange against the churned hillocks of the endless sand; the unscented, dry wind that teased my hair away from my face and blew tiny grains from Pa-ari’s idle fingers to cling to my crumpled sheath; the sound of my brother’s quiet breathing and the rise and fall of his chest—all these things combined with a panic that made me want to jump up and begin to run, run away across the desert, run into the greedy, flushed arms of Ra and so perish. “Gods,” I blurted, and Pa-ari glanced at me sharply.

“Thu, what is it?”

I could not answer. My heart was thudding painfully, my hands jerking, half-buried in sand. Grimly I fought to regain my composure, and when the emotion began to ebb I put my forehead against my knees.

“I’m twelve years old,” I said, my voice muffled against my own warm skin. “Nearly thirteen, Pa-ari. What stupid dream have I been wandering in? I became a woman several months ago and Mother and I went to the temple with the sacrifice and I was so proud. So was she. Before long you’ll be having your own babies, she said to me, and still I thought nothing of it.” I lifted my head and met his eyes. “What use has it been to me, all this learning? I was so caught up in the wonder of it, the joy of mastering. The prison doors are opening, I told myself, but not once did I pause to ask what lay beyond.” I laughed harshly. “We both know what lies beyond, don’t we, Pa-ari? Another prison. Payment, yes. Mother often rewards me. I mix the medicines, I keep her bag filled and in order, I soothe the women and wash the babies and bind the umbilical cords and all the time I am studying with you, I am learning so much …” I gripped his arm. “One day some young man from the village will come to our door with gifts in his hands and Father will say to me, so-and-so has sued for you, he has this many arouras or so many sheep, it will be a good match. What can I say?”

Pa-ari pulled himself out of my grip. “I don’t understand what is happening,” he protested. “You frighten me, Thu. When such a thing occurs, you say no, if it is not what you want.”

“Do I?” I breathed. “I say no. And time goes by, and then another man appears, perhaps not quite so young as the first, and I say no again. How many times can I say no before the men stop coming to our door and I become the kind of woman the other women make fun of and scorn? The dried-up old crones who are a burden to their families and a disgrace to themselves?”

“Then at some moment you say yes, and resign yourself,” Pa-ari said. “You have always known that your fate was to be the village midwife and, if you are lucky, to marry and enjoy the fruits of your labour with a good husband.”

“Yes,” I said slowly. “I have always known this, and yet not known it. Does that make sense to you, dear one? Not known it until now, this moment, here on the sand with you. I cannot bear it!”

He continued to regard me. “Then what do you want, Thu?” he enquired softly. “What else are you fitted for? It is too late to apply to the temple as one of Wepwawet’s singers or dancers. You must start to dance at six years old and besides, the girls who dance do it because their mothers danced. This self-pity does you no credit. Life in the village is good.” I ran a distracted hand through my hair and sighed. The terrible weight of despair was leaving me.

“Yes it is,” I agreed, “but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life here. I want to see Thebes, I want to wear fine linen, I want a husband who does more than come home covered in sweat and soil at the end of the day to eat lentils and fish. It is not a matter of riches!” I cried out passionately, seeing his expression. “I am not sure what it is, except that I must get away from here or I will die!”

A tiny smile came and went on his face and I knew that for once he did not understand, could not share in the storm of apprehension that had whirled me about. His ambitions were small, comfortable and realistic. They suited his quiet temperament. Pa-ari was not given to idle dreaming. “Surely you exaggerate,” he rebuked me mildly. “It will take more than the disappointment of a life lived here to kill you, Thu. You are an obdurate young woman.” He scrambled to his feet and reached down to pull me up beside him. “Ra has descended into the mouth of Nut,” he commented, “and we must go home before full darkness catches us. Do you have any plan that will deliver you from the so-smothering womb of Aswat?” His tone was bantering, so that I did not want to discuss the matter with him any more.

“No I don’t,” I replied shortly, and strode ahead of him, back towards the fields and down the dusky path that led into the evening quietness of the village.

But my cry of agony in the desert, genuine and unfeigned, did not go unnoticed by the invisible powers that govern our fates. Sometimes in life a moment of pure anguish rising from long turmoil can arrow with great force into the realm of the gods who pause in their mighty deliberations and turn towards the source of the disturbance. So it is Thu, they say. What ails the child? This is no ordinary grumble. Is she not happy with the fate decreed for her? Then let us weave for her another destiny. We will put before her the map of an alternative future so that she may choose it if she wishes. Thus unperceived do the slow-wheeling fates reverse and begin to grind along another path, and we do not realize until the years behind us have lengthened that we have chosen to be carried with them into a new direction.

Of course I did not reason thus at the time. It was only later that I saw, I felt, the mysterious shifting that had been set in motion in my life by my desperate outburst that day. I resumed my studies with Pa-ari. What else could I do? Pointless or not, they were my drug, the balm with which I tried to soothe my indignation. Yet I believe that from that moment on my old destiny began to wither like a seedling pushed aside by the stronger, more ruthless thrusting of a tall weed, and my new one began to take shape.

Three months went by, and then one scorching afternoon I heard a piece of intriguing news. My mother and her closest friend were sitting outside our house in the shade cast by the wall, the beer jug between them next to a bowl of water into which they dipped squares of linen to cool themselves. I was stretched out some way from my mother, lying on a flaxen mat, my head propped on one elbow as I lazily watched them wring out the linen over their brown thighs, their sheaths rolled up around their hips and their arms glistening with water. Beyond us, across the baking expanse of the village square, the dusty river growth stood bowed and without a stir and I could not glimpse the river itself. I was in a dreaming, not unpleasant stupor induced by the heat and this precious, unaccustomed moment of sheer idleness. I had turned thirteen and my body had begun to acquire the first tentative curves of full womanhood to come. I was contemplating these changes, aware of the small valley damp with sweat between my breasts, the modest hill of my hip against which my other hand rested. The women’s voices rose and fell, a pleasant litany of meaningless gossip in which I had little interest. Occasionally my mother passed the sopping linen to me and I drew it over my face but neither of them addressed me directly and I was glad. I sipped my own beer, my thoughts moving from the delights of my body to Pa-ari, kept late at school to take private dictation from his teacher, and then to my father who had gone to a meeting of the village elders. His crops had been harvested and the land lay dead in the summer fire. He was often bored during these months. He had never yet been summoned to work on one of Pharaoh’s building projects for his bread and onions as so many were, but then the word from outside was that Egypt was still too impoverished to erect any great monuments. My mother and her friend were discussing the terrible famine that had cursed us during the time of the Syrian usurper Irsu, before the Good God Setnakht and his son Ramses, our present Incarnation and the third to hold that illustrious name, began to put the country back into the way of true Ma’at. The subject of the famine often came up in the summers, spoken of with worried speculation before the village women moved on to lighter topics.