The Red Tent
Page 32
Gera said nothing more about Leah’s daughter, and prattled on about feuds and love affairs among her cousins. She chatted until late in the afternoon before thinking to ask about me, and by then I could excuse myself, for it was time for the evening meal.
Jacob died that night. I heard one woman sobbing and wondered who among his daughters-in-law wept for the old man. Benia folded me in his arms, but I felt neither grief nor anger.
Gera had given me peace. The story of Dinah was too terrible to be forgotten. As long as the memory of Jacob lived, my name would be remembered. The past had done its worst to me, and I had nothing to fear of the future. I left the house of Jacob better comforted than Joseph.
In the morning, Judah prepared to take Jacob’s body to lie with his fathers in Canaan. Joseph watched as they lifted his bones onto his gold-covered litter, which he gave for the funeral voyage.
Before Judah left to put his father into the ground, he and Joseph embraced for the last time. I turned away from the sight, but before I reached my tent I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to face Judah, whose expression was a map of uncertainty and shame.
He held out a fist to me. “It was our mother’s,” he said, struggling to speak. “When she died, she called me to her and said to give this to her daughter. I thought she was out of her mind,” said Judah. “But she foresaw our meeting. Our mother never forgot you, and although Jacob forbade it, she spoke of you every day until she died.
“Take this from our mother, Leah. And may you know peace,” he said, pressing something in my hand before walking away, his head hung low.
I looked down to see Rachel’s lapis ring, Jacob’s first gift to her. At first I thought to call Judah back and ask him why my mother had sent me the token of Jacob’s love for her sister. But of course, he would have no way of knowing.
It was good to see the river again. After the heat of the hills, the embrace of the Nile was sweet and cool. And at night in Benia’s arms, I told him all that I had heard from Gera and showed him the ring. I puzzled over its meaning and prayed for a dream to explain the mystery, but it was Benia who gave me the answer. Holding my hand to the light and peering at it with eyes practiced at seeing beauty, he said, “Perhaps your mother meant it as a token that she had forgiven her sister. Maybe it was a sign that she died with an undivided heart, and wished the same for you.”
My husband’s words found their mark, and I recalled something that Zilpah had told me when I was a child in the red tent, and far too young to understand her meaning. “We are all born of the same mother,” she said. After a lifetime, I knew that to be true.
Although the journey was uneventful and my hands were idle, I was exhausted by the trip home. I longed to return to my own house, to see Shif-re and Kiya’s baby, who had been bom during my absence. I was terribly restless during the three days’ stop in Memphis, but kept my impatience to myself because of Benia. He returned from the marketplace every evening, overflowing with the beauty he had seen. He exclaimed at the silkiness of the olive wood, the pure black of the ebony, the aromatic cedars. He brought back scraps of pine and taught Joseph’s sons to carve. He bought me a gift too, a pitcher in the shape of a grinning Taweret that made me smile every time I looked at her.
The vizier’s barque trailed a barge laden with fine timbers when we sailed out of Memphis for the last part of the journey to Thebes. Joseph and I said goodbye in the darkness of the last night. There was no need for sorrow at our parting, he said lightly. “This is only a farewell. If As-naat bears again, we will call for you.”
But I knew we would not meet again. “Joseph,” I said, “it is out of our hands.
“Be well,” I whispered, touching his cheek with a hand that bore his mother’s ring. “I will think of you.”
“I will think of you, too,” he replied softly.
In the morning Benia and I eagerly turned to the west. Once home, we resumed the order of our days. Kiya’s new son was good-natured, and he learned to crow happily when his mother handed him to me on nights she went to attend at a birth. I rarely accompanied her past sunset, though, for I was growing old.
My feet ached in the morning and my hands were stiff, but still I counted myself lucky that I was neither feeble nor dull. I had strength enough for my house and to care for Benia. He remained strong and sure, his eye ever clear, his love for his work and his love for me as constant as the sun.
My last years were good ones. Kiya had two more babies, another boy and a girl, who took over my house and my husband’s heart. We received countless sweet-breathed kisses every day. “You are the elixir of youth,” I said, as I tickled them and laughed with them. “You sustain these old bones. You keep me alive.”
But not even the devotion of little children can stave off death forever, and my time arrived. I did not suffer long. I woke in the night to feel a crushing weight on my chest, but after the first shock there was no pain.
Benia held my face between his great, warm hands. Kiya arrived and cradled my feet between her long fingers. They wept, and I could not form the words to comfort them. Then they changed before my eyes, and I had no words to describe what I saw.
My beloved turned into a beacon as bright as the sun, and his light warmed me through and through. Kiya glowed like the moon and sang with the green and solemn voice of the Queen of the Night.
In the darkness surrounding the shining lights of my life, I began to discern the faces of my mothers, each one burning with her own fire. Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah. Inna, Re-nefer, and Meryt. Even poor Ruti and arrogant Rebecca were arrayed to meet me. Although I had never seen them, I recognized Adah and Sarai as well. Strong, brave, wonderstruck, kind, gifted, broken, loyal, foolish, talented, weak: each one welcoming me in her way.
“Oh,” I cried, in wonder. Benia held me even tighter and sobbed. He thought that I suffered, but I felt nothing but excitement at the lessons that death held out to me. In the moment before I crossed over, I knew that the priests and magicians of Egypt were fools and charlatans for promising to prolong the beauties of life beyond the world we are given. Death is no enemy, but the foundation of gratitude, sympathy, and art. Of all life’s pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.
“Thank you, beloved,” I said to Benia, but he did not hear me.
“Thank you, daughter,” I said to Kiya, who had put her ear to my chest, and hearing nothing, started to keen.
I died but I did not leave them. Benia sat beside me, and I stayed in his eye and in his heart. For weeks and months and years, my face lived in the garden, my scent clung to the sheets. For as long as he lived, I walked with him by day and lay down with him at night.
When his eyes closed for the last time, I thought perhaps I would finally leave the world. But even then, I lingered. Shif-re sang the song I taught her and Kiya moved with my motions. Joseph thought of me when his daughter was born. Gera named her baby Dinah. Re-mose married and told his wife about the mother who had sent him away so that he would not die but live. Re-mose’s children bore children unto the hundredth generation. Some of them live in the land of my birth and some in the cold and windy places that Werenro described by the light of my mothers’ fire.
There is no magic to immortality.
In Egypt, I loved the perfume of the lotus. A flower would bloom in the pool at dawn, filling the entire garden with a blue musk so powerful it seemed that even the fish and ducks would swoon. By night, the flower might wither but the perfume lasted. Fainter and fainter, but never quite gone. Even many days later, the lotus remained in the garden. Months would pass and a bee would alight near the spot where the lotus had blossomed, and its essence was released again, momentary but undeniable.
Egypt loved the lotus because it never dies. It is the same for people who are loved. Thus can something as insignificant as a name—two syllables, one high, one sweet—summon up the innumerable smiles and tears, sighs and dreams of a human life.
If you sit on the bank of a river, you see only a small part of its
surface. And yet, the water before your eyes is proof of unknowable depths. My heart brims with thanks for the kindness you have shown me by sitting on the bank of this river, by visiting the echoes of my name.
Blessings on your eyes and on your children. Blessings on the ground beneath you. Wherever you walk, I go with you. Selah.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
PART THREE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE