by Marek Halter
She had to take the food to whichever cave he had chosen and leave before he got back with his catch. He would guess. Or, more likely, think it was Orma’s doing. Well, that couldn’t be helped.
CARRYING the jar of beer on her shoulder, she reached a point halfway down the cliff, where the path widened to form a sizable terrace under a rocky overhang, in front of the dark, gaping mouth of a cave. She had found it.
Against one wall of the cave stood a stone oven; against the other, a number of old mats with fringed edges that served as a bed, covered with a big blue-and-white canvas sack and a tunic. The location was perfect, protected both from the sun and from the gusts of wind that brought sand and dust from the mountain.
Zipporah approached the oven. Under a broad flat stone, the white embers smoldered, giving off a peppery odor of terebinth.
Moses not only knew how to fish, but also how to make a fire. And he had settled in a cave where it was quite possible to live for a long period of time.
She imagined him—a prince, a man accustomed to luxury—eating and sleeping on this pallet! He wasn’t a prince here, only a fugitive. If proof were still needed, this pallet was it.
Why, then, was he fleeing? What fault could a lord of Egypt have committed to have to live so roughly?
Zipporah was about to put the jar down on the terrace when she hesitated, and decided that it was better to put it inside the cave, where it was cool. She crossed the threshold, and was surprised not only by the darkness of the cave, but by how long and narrow it was. The bronze-tipped staff with which Moses had fought the shepherds was there, leaning against the wall. His big gourd was there, too. She placed the jar beside it, like a gift.
Down below, Moses was still fishing, with the same slow, measured gestures. Not for a moment did he raise his eyes toward the cliff. She ran back up the path. The sun was burning her brow and mouth.
By the time she began her descent again, bent beneath the weight of the saddlebag, Moses was no longer casting his net. He was opening and cleaning his catch, walking back and forth between the sea and the shingle, washing and gutting the fish.
Breathing hard and sweating with the effort, Zipporah carried the saddlebag down as quickly as she could.
When she reached the cave, she could not help stealing another glance at the beach. It was then that she became aware of a vast shimmer on the sea, much more intense than any of the others, like a wind spreading light as far as the shore.
For a brief moment, Moses seemed suspended there, as if the sky and the earth were uniting beneath his feet. The beach, the water, the air had disappeared, leaving only a dazzle of light in which his calves and arms and hips and torso floated.
Zipporah stood rooted to the spot, both fascinated and terrified, heedless of the heavy burden she still carried, totally overwhelmed by an unknown sensation that spread through every particle of her thoughts and emotions and made her flesh and muscles quiver.
The shimmer stopped.
Once again the sea was a soft, transparent blue, pricked with needles of light. Moses gathered together the fish he had caught, forcing a cane stalk through their cheeks.
At last, Zipporah dropped the saddlebag at her feet. She doubted what she had just seen. Perhaps she had simply been blinded by the effort and the heat.
But she knew it was more than that. The sensation was still there, in the dryness of her mouth and the way her skin quivered.
She could not take her eyes off Moses. He placed the fish in a water-filled hollow in the rocks and covered them with a few stones. Then he walked out again into the water, and dived in. He swam with ease away from the shore, and put his head below the surface.
Looking down on him like a bird, Zipporah watched his body in the transparent sea. Waves sparkling like eyes glided over his back, and over his buttocks and thighs, which were white where the loincloth had protected them from the sun.
She suddenly felt extremely dizzy. There was a tightness in her stomach and chest, a heaviness in her back and shoulders. Her knees started to give way, and she pressed her hands on her thighs to steady herself. She should have turned away. A step or two back would have been enough. Lowering her eyes would have been enough. But she couldn’t. Her dizziness had nothing to do with the void beyond the cliff.
She had never watched a man like this. And it was not only because he was naked.
Moses’ head finally emerged from the water. He shook the water from his hair, passed his hand over his face, turned onto his back, and swam slowly in a wide circle, surrounded by glittering reflections, until he reached the beach.
What she could not see—his eyes, his mouth, the water streaming over his temples—Zipporah tried to imagine. She was suddenly filled with a desire to go into the sea and swim to him, to see the creases around his eyes, to touch his shoulders. There was a painful feeling in her body. Her skin was as sensitive as if she had been rubbed with nettles. She was afraid.
Finally overcoming her fascination, she turned away.
For a few seconds, she bent double, as if she had been flattened by a blow from a stick. She waited with her mouth wide open, her eyes tightly shut, until she had regained her breath. The pounding of her heart made a deafening noise.
She cursed herself, called herself mad, straightened up again with a kind of rage.
Taking the saddlebag in both hands, she pulled it as much as carried it to the mouth of the cave. All she had to do was leave it there, in the shade, then run away quickly.
The thought of finding herself face-to-face with Moses filled her with terror. He would be sure to see the jar and the sack full of food. He would guess. He would understand. He would think: the girls from the well. Or perhaps he would think of her, the black girl. The girl the shepherds had wanted to violate. The girl for whom he had fought.
Perhaps he wouldn’t think any of those things. They would soon see.
Unlike Orma, she would be patient. The prince of Egypt would be hiding here for a long time yet; there was no longer any doubt about that.
Zipporah pulled the sack over the uneven ground to the mouth of the cave. There, she stopped, taken aback by the darkness. The coolness of the cave froze the sweat on her brow and neck. She bumped into the wall with her shoulder, moaned with pain, and almost fell. Her heel hit something hard, which overturned with a dull thud.
She crouched and felt the ground around her with her fingertips. Her heart was again beating fast, and her throat was dry with the sense that she was committing a sin.
“Horeb! Horeb!” she murmured. “Don’t abandon me!”
Her fingers touched something wooden and angular. It was a long, narrow casket. She pulled it to her. In the light coming from the mouth of the cave, she made out the blue and ocher paint on its sides. On the lid, there were columns of small figures, silhouettes of birds and plants, simple lines and strokes, all meticulously drawn.
Egyptian writing!
She knew something of it from Jethro. Once, he had traced a few figures for her in the sand; on another occasion, he had written them in octopus ink on a sheet of crushed cane. Those designs she had found quite clumsy, but these were light and pure and of total simplicity.
She remembered the noise the casket had made after she overturned it. It was not empty. The fear that Moses would return again took hold of her. She listened, ready to run if need be. All she could hear was the surf against the cliff. She still had time to put everything back in its place.
She got down on all fours and groped about her feverishly, grazing her knees on the sharp edges of the rock. She saw something glinting in the darkness, a long, cylindrical object, then another one, identical, beside it. They were heavy. They were . . . Zipporah cried out in surprise. She could not believe her eyes. She stood up and went to the cave mouth to see better.
Gold! Two thick bracelets of polished gold, at least as big as her own forearms! On each of them, carved in relief, a snake. Between the coils of the snake, signs, strange crosses, tiny silhou
ettes, half men, half beasts.
A stone rolled somewhere, and echoed against the cliff.
Moses was coming up.
Zipporah thought of the golden arms of the man who had embraced her at the bottom of the sea.
She quickly put the bracelets back in their place, then rushed out of the cave, her mind racing.
The beach and the sea were empty. Moses was up here, some fifteen paces from her, his catch swinging from the reed he had placed negligently over his shoulder. When he saw her, he stopped in surprise, perhaps even fear.
She hesitated. He was still some distance away; she could run up to the top of the cliff. She told herself again that he would see the food and understand. He raised his hand to protect his eyes from the sun and see her better.
She was ashamed at wanting to flee. Wasn’t she always telling her sisters that you had to learn to confront your own destiny? But, in truth, she did not really have a choice. Her feet refused to move.
He smiled. He took his hand away from his brow in a little gesture of greeting and approached.
IN the days, weeks, and years that followed, Zipporah was often to remember that moment, a moment she was sure was neither as brief nor as supernatural as it had seemed to her at the time.
Moses was here, in front of her, and she was mortified with fear, terrified that once again, as on the previous day, she would be incapable of uttering a single word. She looked at Moses’ lips as if she might be able to find her own words there. Instead, she realized that when she had seen him at the well of Irmna, she had not really noticed the way his mouth stood out from his sparse beard, the lobes of his ears, or the irregularity of his eyelids, one of which was lower than the other. His nose and his high cheekbones, she remembered. And, of course, she still said nothing.
He had overcome his surprise and was looking at her with a candid expression, his eyebrows slightly raised, waiting for her to explain why she was here.
She had forgotten the casket and the gold bracelets, but the thought of the dizziness that had overcome her as she had watched him swimming made her chest tight again, like a threat. It was unthinkable that such emotion would not be visible on her face.
That must be what Moses was seeing. It was an image Zipporah did not like. The image of a woman dazzled by the presence of a man, by the sight of his body. An image he must know well, which probably had no great interest for him. How many women had already displayed the same open-mouthed amazement? Egyptian beauties, queens, handmaids . . . She was furious with herself.
But however much she might want it, she had no other image of herself to show.
Moses seemed to approve her silence. He nodded slightly and went and put his catch down by the stove. He lifted the stone covering the fire, removed the cane from the cheeks of the fish, broke it into several pieces of equal length, which he arranged on the stones of the oven, and placed the fish on them. He bent down to stoke the embers a little, and they began to smoke gently.
Although Zipporah was relieved, she was also offended that he should attend to his fish while she was here. But Moses soon stood up and smiled at her.
“They’ll cook very slowly,” he said. “I’ll be able to keep them for a long time.”
Moses was talking about the fish, but the look he gave Zipporah quivered like a harp whose strings were about to break.
She straightened, trying to hold her head high, and, when she spoke, she spoke slowly, to make sure that he understood. “I was afraid you didn’t have enough food; that’s why I came. You don’t have a flock. Nor anyone to . . . But you know how to fish . . . I didn’t think about your bed. You need a cloth and some new matting . . . I didn’t think of it . . . The truth is, I didn’t only come about the food. I wanted to thank you . . . For yesterday. I owe you . . .”
She stopped, searching for words to describe what she owed him.
Moses was following her gestures and the way her curly hair spread over her shoulders like black feathers. He glanced at the sack and the jar, then quickly looked again at Zipporah’s lips in order to be sure of what she was saying.
He was waiting for her to finish her sentence, but she left it unfinished.
They heard the surf and breathed the scent of the terebinth embers, now mixed with the smell of the fish. With a perfectly natural movement, Moses approached Zipporah. They were on the border between the sun and the shade, two cubits from the void.
She took a deep breath, and, as she did so, she could smell Moses. He smelled of sea salt. She saw him fold his arms, as Jethro sometimes did. This time, she thought of the gold bracelets and her dream.
“I’m pleased,” Moses said, in that accent of his, that slow, hesitant way of speaking, nodding his head along with the words. “I hear your voice. Yesterday, you said nothing. Not a word. I thought: What’s happening? Can’t she speak? Is she a stranger here?”
She laughed. “Did you think that because my skin is black?” she asked, very quickly, as if she had been waiting a long time to ask the question.
“No. Only because you said nothing.”
She believed him.
“You said nothing. But you listened. You understood where I was. There are many caves here. If not . . .”
If not, Zipporah thought, I would have walked the length of the beach until the sun went down to find you. She did not have to say it.
“There is something you should know,” Moses went on. “I am not an Egyptian. I may look like one, but I’m not. I’m a Hebrew.”
“A Hebrew?”
“Yes. A son of Abraham and Joseph.”
Again, she felt a tightness in her chest, remembering the casket and the bracelets. He stole them! she thought. That’s why he’s a fugitive. He’s a thief! Her blood pounded in her temples.
“Like my father,” she replied, mechanically. “My father Jethro, the sage of the kings of Midian, is also a son of Abraham.”
If he was wondering how a son of Abraham could have a daughter with black skin, he did not show it. “In Egypt,” he said, “the Hebrews are not kings, or the sages of kings. They are slaves.”
“You don’t look like a slave.”
He hesitated, turned his eyes from her, and said something curious: “I’m not from Egypt anymore, either.”
Both fell silent again. Moses’ words could mean so many different things, Zipporah found it impossible to make sense of them in her mind. Perhaps he wasn’t a thief? Perhaps he wasn’t a prince, either? Perhaps he was simply the man in her dream?
The thought terrified her. As he watched her, she took a step away from him. “I must go back,” she said.
He nodded, pointed to the interior of the cave, and thanked her.
“You will always be welcome in my father’s house,” she said, still trying to read his face. “He will be very pleased to see you.”
She turned away from him and walked back out into the heat of the cliff. “Wait,” Moses called. “You can’t leave without a drink.”
Without waiting for a reply, he went to the mouth of the cave and picked up his gourd. He came back, took the wooden stopper from the neck of the gourd, and held it out to her. “It’s still cool.”
Zipporah was quite used to drinking from a gourd, but she felt incapable of even lifting it, so Moses lifted it for her. The water squirted out, spattering her chin and her cheek. She laughed. Moses laughed, too, and lowered the gourd.
Zipporah did not know how to seduce a man, even though she had watched Orma. She did not know what love was, even though she had watched Sefoba. But what she felt now, rising within her, was both love and the desire to seduce. She defended herself against both.
“I’m wasting your water,” she said.
Moses raised his right hand, put his fingers on Zipporah’s cheek, and gently wiped away the cool water from her dark skin. Then his fingers slid down to the hollow of her chin, brushing against her lips as they did so. Zipporah gripped his wrist.
How long did they stay like that?
&nb
sp; Probably no longer than it takes for a swallow to pass overhead, but long enough for Zipporah to feel Moses’ caress, for that was what it was, all through her body, as if he were enveloping her, lifting her, as the man in her dream had done. Long enough for her to lose consciousness of what was really happening.
Then she opened her eyes again and saw the same desire on Moses’ face. She saw the gestures he was about to make; she even thought of the bed awaiting them, so close. She still had the strength to smile, let go of Moses’ wrist, and run out into the furnace of the day.
THE sun had long since passed its zenith by the time Zipporah got back to Jethro’s domain. Silence reigned, and not only because of the afternoon heat. Reba’s tents, servants, and she-camels were gone.
She pushed the mule back into the pen. The men took care to look away, while the handmaids threw her worried glances and ran into the shade of the house. Clearly, her absence had not gone unnoticed.
She had been dreaming of her cool room and the jug of water she would pour over her body before she changed her tunic, since the one she was wearing was by now sticky with sweat. But, afraid she would find Orma in her room, she headed for the big room used by all the women. She had almost reached it, and could already hear the cries of the children playing there, when her name rang out. Sefoba was crossing the courtyard to meet her, a distraught expression on her face. She threw herself into her arms, and hugged her tight, her chest heaving.
“Where were you? Where were you?”
Zipporah had no time to reply. Without pausing for breath, Sefoba told her that everyone had feared for her safety, thinking of Houssenek’s sons and all the horrors those savages were capable of as revenge for the punishment inflicted on them the day before by the stranger—may the wrath of Horeb be assuaged!
“Oh, my Zipporah, if only you knew! I imagined you in their hands, I couldn’t help it, I saw them doing to you what they couldn’t do yesterday!”
Zipporah smiled, stroked her sister’s brow and neck, kissed her damp cheeks, and, without telling a lie, assured her that nothing terrible had happened to her and there was no need to get into a state.