“I want to go to school with Pa-ari,” I said. He bent, and taking a corner of his short, soil-powdered kilt, wiped his forehead.
“No,” he replied.
“Next year, Father, when I am four?”
His slow smile widened. “No, Thu. Girls do not go to school.”
I studied his face. “Why not?”
“Because girls stay at home and learn from their mothers how to be good wives and tend babies. When you are older your mother will teach you how to help babies come into the world. That will be your work, here in the village.” I frowned, trying to understand. An idea occurred to me.
“Father, if I ask Pa-ari, could he stay home and learn to help babies come and I can go to school instead of him?”
My father seldom laughed, but on that day he threw back his head and his mirth echoed against the row of wilting palm trees that grew between his land and the village track. He squatted and enfolded my chin in his large fingers. “Already I pity the lad who sues for you in marriage!” he said. “You must learn your place, my little sweetheart. Patience, docility, humility, these are the virtues of a good woman. Now be a good girl and run home. Keep your mother company when she goes to fetch Pa-ari.” He planted a kiss on the top of my hot head and turned away. I did as I was told, scuffing the dirt as I went, obscurely insulted at his laughter, though I was too young to know why.
I found my mother peering anxiously down the path, a basket on her arm. She gestured to me impatiently as I came up to her. “Leave your father alone when he’s working!” she said sharply. “Gods, Thu, you are filthy and there is no time to wash you. Whatever will the priests think? Come.” She did not reach for my hand, but together we walked past our acres, past other fields, all thick with crops, the wandering line of palms on our left, the tangled river growth on our right, cool and inviting, with the wide reaches of the silver river glimpsed intermittently through it.
After some minutes the fields stopped abruptly, the shrubs to our right straggled into nothing, and Wepwawet’s temple was there, its sandstone pillars soaring to the unrelieved blue of the sky, the sun beating impotently on its walls. From the time of my birth I had come here on the God’s feast days, watching my father present our offerings, prostrating myself beside Pa-ari as the incense rose in shimmering columns above the closed inner court. I had watched the priests moving in solemn procession, their chants falling deep and awesome in the still air. I had seen the dancers swirl and dip, the systra in their delicate fingers tinkling to draw the God’s attention to our prayers. I had sat on the temple water-steps, my toes in the gently sucking Nile, my back to the paved forecourt while my parents were inside with their petitions. To me it was both a place of exotic mystery, forbidding in its secrecy, and the focus of Ma’at in our lives, the spiritual loom to which the various threads of our life were firmly attached. The rhythm of the God’s days was our rhythm, an invisible pulse that regulated the ebb and flow of village and family affairs.
During the time of the troubles a band of foreigners had come. They had camped in the outer court, set huge fires in the inner court. They drank and caroused in the temple, torturing and killing one of the priests who tried to protest, but they had not dared to violate the sanctuary, the place none of us had even seen, the place where the God lived, for Wepwawet was the Lord of War and they feared his displeasure. The village headman and all the adult men had armed themselves in righteous anger and had descended upon the brigands one night as they slept beneath Wepwawet’s beautiful pillars. The women spent the following morning washing the stones free of their blood and no man would ever tell where the bodies were buried. Our males were proud and brave, fit followers of the Lord of War. The High Priest had made a sacrifice of apology and restoration, reconsecrating the holy building. This was before my father and his troop camped beyond the village and went in search of beer.
I loved the temple. I loved the harmony of the pillars that led the eye up to Egypt’s vast heaven. I loved the formality of the rituals; the odour of flowers, dust and incense; the sheer luxury of space; the fine, floating linens of the priests. I did not realize it then, but my appreciation was not for the God himself but for the richness that surrounded him. Of course I was his loyal daughter, I have always been that, yet I cared less for him than for a glimpse of a different existence that set me to dreaming.
We turned onto the paving and made our way across it, my mother and I, passing between the pillars and into the outer court. Several other mothers waited there, some standing, some squatting on the stone, talking quietly. The outer perimeter of the court was honeycombed with small rooms, and from the dimness of one of them came the sound of boys’ voices raised in a sonorous chant that broke into an excited babble as my mother and I came to a halt. She greeted the women cheerfully and they nodded to her. Presently a tumble of children disgorged from the chamber. Each carried a drawstringed bag. Pa-ari came up to us panting, his eyes alight. Something clinked in the bag. “Mother, Thu!” he shouted. “It was fun! I liked it!” He collapsed onto the floor, folding his legs under him, and Mother and I settled beside him. Mother opened her basket, producing black bread and barley beer. Pa-ari accepted his meal gravely and we began to eat. Other mothers, sons and smaller children were doing the same. The court was alive with chatter.
As we were finishing, a lector priest approached, his shaven skull gleaming in the noon sun, the gold of his armband sparkling. His feet were impossibly clean in his white sandals. I stared at him, bemused. I had never been so close to one of the God’s servants before. It was some time before I recognized the scribe who farmed land on the eastern side of the village. I had seen him topped with curly brown hair, streaked with the mud of the Inundation, I had seen him weaving his way down the village street, drunk and singing. I knew later that the God’s men were also farmers like my father, giving three months out of every year to temple service, wearing fine linen, washing four times a day, shaving all body hair regularly, performing the rites and duties appointed by the High Priest. My mother scrambled to her feet and bowed to him, signalling to us to do the same. I managed to describe a clumsy little obeisance. I could not take my eyes off the black kohl around his eyes, the bony surface of his skull. He smelled very good. He greeted us kindly, and put a hand on Pa-ari’s shoulder.
“You have an intelligent son there,” he said to my mother. “He will be a good student. I am happy to be teaching him.”
My mother smiled. “Thank you,” she answered. “My husband will come tomorrow with the payment.”
The priest shrugged lightly. “There is no hurry,” he said. “None of us is going anywhere.”
For some reason his words touched me with cold. I reached up and tentatively drew a finger down the wide blue lector’s sash that enfolded his chest.
“I want to come to school,” I said timidly. He gave me a brief glance but ignored my words.
“I will see you tomorrow, Pa-ari,” he said and turned away. My mother gave me a little shake.
“You must learn not to put yourself forward, Thu,” she snapped. “Pick up the scraps now and put them in the basket. We must be getting home. Don’t forget your bag, Pa-ari.” We began to straggle out of the court, joining the thin stream of other families wending their way back to the village. I sidled close to my brother.
“What’s in the bag, Pa-ari?” I asked. He held it up and shook it.
“My lessons,” he said importantly. “We paint them on pieces of broken pottery. I have to study them tonight before I go to bed so I can repeat them in class tomorrow.”
“Can I see them?”
My mother, doubtless hot and irritable, answered for him. “No you cannot! Pa-ari, run ahead and tell your father to come in for his food. When we get home you are both taking a nap.”
So it began. Pa-ari would leave for school at dawn every day, and at noon my mother and I would meet him with his bread and beer. On God’s days and holidays he did not study. He and I would slip away to the river or
back onto the desert, playing the games that children devise. He was good humoured, my brother, seldom disappointing me when I made him pretend to be Pharaoh so that I could be his queen, trailing about in a tattered, discarded length of linen with leaves twined in my hair and a vine tendril into which I would tuck stray birds’ feathers around my neck. He sat on a rock for a throne and made pronouncements. I issued commands to imaginary servants. Sometimes we tried to draw the other children into our fantasies but they quickly became bored, leaving us in order to swim or beg rides on the patient village donkeys. If they did join in, they complained bitterly that I was always the queen, and they did not get a turn to order me about. So Pa-ari and I amused each other, and the months slipped by.
When I became four, I once again begged my father to let me go to school and was again met with a firm denial. He could ill afford to let Pa-ari attend, he said. The fee for me was out of the question and besides, what girl ever learned anything useful outside her own home? I sulked for a while, sitting sullenly in a corner of our reception room, watching my brother’s head bent over his bits of pottery, his shadow moving on the wall behind him as the lamp’s flame guttered and swayed. He did not want to play Pharaoh and his queen any more. He was forming a bond with some of the village boys with whom he shared the schoolroom and often he would get up from the afternoon sleep and vanish, joining them as they fished or hunted rats in the granaries. I was lonely, and envious, but I was eight years old before it occurred to me that if I could not go to school the school might come to me.
By then my mother had me firmly in hand. I was learning to prepare the bread that was our staple, to make soups with lentils and beans, to broil fish and prepare vegetables. I did our laundry with her, stamping on my father’s kilts and our thick sheath dresses, slapping the linen briskly on the glistening rocks, enjoying the showers of water that flicked against my hot skin, the feel of the Nile silt between my toes. I rendered tallow for the lamps. I mastered her fine bone needles, mending my father’s kilts with meticulous care. I went with her when she visited her friends, sitting cross-legged on the dirt floors of their tiny reception rooms and sipping the one cup of palm wine she would allow me while she gossiped and laughed, discussing who was pregnant again, whose daughter was being courted by whose son, how the local tax assessor’s wife had sat too close to the headman’s son, the hussy! The voices would flow over and around me, encasing me in a kind of stupor so that I often felt I had been there for ever, that the quiver of dark liquid in my cup, the grit under my thighs, the slow rivulet of sweat coursing down my neck, were all parts of a spell holding me prisoner. Several of the women were heavily pregnant and I stared furtively at their misshapen bodies. They were part of the spell also, magic that would keep me one of them always.
Sometimes my mother was summoned to deliver a baby during the hours of darkness. I paid little heed to those infrequent disturbances. I would vaguely hear her exchange a hurried word with my father and leave our house before I settled deeper into a contented sleep. But just after my eighth Naming Day my apprenticeship with her began. One night I opened my eyes to find her bending over my pallet, a candle in her hand. Pa-ari was curled asleep on his side of the room, oblivious. There were whispered voices out in the reception room. “Get up, Thu,” she told me kindly. “I am bidden to Ahmose’s confinement. This is my task and one day it will be yours also. You are old enough now to help me and thus begin to learn the duties of a midwife. You need not be afraid,” she added as I struggled up, fumbling for my sheath. “The birth will be straightforward. Ahmose is young and healthy. Come now.”
I staggered after her, still in my dreams. Ahmose’s husband squatted in a corner of the reception room looking uneasy and my father, bleary eyed, squatted with him. My mother paused to retrieve the bag that always sat in readiness by the door and went out. I followed. The air was cool, the moon riding high in a cloudless sky, the palms spiking tall against the dimness. “We should get a live goose and a bolt of linen out of this,” my mother commented. I did not reply.
Ahmose’s house, like all the rest, was little more than an open-roofed reception room with steps at the rear leading to sleeping quarters. As we padded in our bare feet through the door, we were greeted distractedly by the woman’s mother and sisters who lined the walls, squatting on their heels, a jug of wine between them. My mother shared a joke with them as she led me up the steps and into the couple’s bedchamber. The small mud brick room was cosy with a woven rug on the floor and hangings on the walls. A large stone lamp burned by the pallet on which Ahmose crouched, a loose linen shift folded about her. She looked different from the young, smiling woman I knew. There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead and her eyes were huge. She reached out a hand as my mother set her bag on the floor and approached her.
“There is no need to panic, Ahmose,” my mother said to her soothingly, taking the clutching fingers in her own. “Lie down now. Thu, come here.”
I obeyed most unwillingly. My mother took my hand and placed it on Ahmose’s distended abdomen. “There is the baby’s head. Can you feel it? Very low. That is good. And here his little buttock. This is as it should be. Can you discern the shape?” I nodded, both fascinated and repelled by the feel of the shiny, taut skin stretched over the mysterious hill beneath. As I withdrew I saw a slow ripple pass over it and Ahmose gasped and groaned, drawing up her knees. “Breathe deeply,” my mother commanded, and when the contraction was over she asked Ahmose how long she had been in labour.
“Since dawn,” came the reply. Mother opened her bag and withdrew a clay pot. The refreshing odour of peppermint filled the little room as she removed the stopper, and briskly but gently pushing Ahmose onto her side she massaged the contents into the woman’s firm buttocks. “This will hasten the birth,” she said to me as I stood beside her. “Now you may squat, Ahmose. Try to remain calm. Talk to me. What is the news from your sister upriver? Is all well with her?”
Ahmose struggled into a squatting position on the pallet, her back resting against the mud wall. She spoke haltingly, pausing when the contractions gripped her. My mother prompted her, watching all the time for signs of any change, and I watched her too, the huge, frightened eyes, the bulge of veins in her neck, the straining, swollen body.
This is part of the spell also, I thought with a surge of fear as the feeble light from the lamp played on the figure crouched in the corner, trembling and occasionally crying out. This is another room in the prison. At eight years old I was probably too young to have actually expressed in those words the emotion that flooded me, but I remember sharply and clearly the way it tasted, the way my heart lurched for a moment. This was to be my lot in life, to coax terrified women in dim village hovels in the middle of the night, to rub their buttocks, to insert medicaments into their vaginas as my mother was now doing. “That was a mixture of fennel, incense, garlic, sert-juice, fresh salt and wasp’s dung,” she was instructing me over her shoulder. “It is one remedy for causing delivery. There are others but they are less efficacious. I will teach you to blend them all, Thu. Come now, Ahmose, you are doing very well. Think how proud your husband will be when he returns home to see his new son cradled in your arms!”
“I hate him,” Ahmose said venomously. “I never want to see him again.”
I thought my mother would be shocked but she ignored the words. My legs were shaking. I slid to sit cross-legged on the warm mud floor. Two or three times Ahmose’s mother or one of her sisters would peer in at us, exchange a few words with my mother, and go away again. I lost track of the passage of time. It began to seem to me that I had been drifting in this ante-room to the Underworld for ever, with the sweet and pleasant Ahmose now transformed into a demented spirit and my mother’s shadow looming distorted over her like some malevolent demon. My mother’s voice broke the illusion. “Come here!” she ordered me. I scrambled up and hurried over to her reluctantly and she handed me a thick linen cloth and told me to hold it beneath Ahmose. “Look,” she said. “The
crown of the baby’s head. Push now, Ahmose! It is time!” With a last wail Ahmose did as she was told and the baby slithered into my unwilling hands. It was yellow and red with body fluids. I knelt there stupidly, staring at it as it flailed its little limbs. My mother tapped it smartly and it let out a breathless howl and began to cry. She passed it carefully to Ahmose, who was already smiling weakly and reaching for it. As she settled it against her breast it turned its head, blindly nuzzling for food. “You need not worry,” my mother said. “It cried ‘ni ni,’ not ‘na na.’ It will live. And it is a boy, Ahmose, perfectly formed. Well done!” She swept up a knife, and I saw the pulsing cord in her slimed fingers. I had had enough. With a mumbled word I left the room. The women outside sprang up as I pushed past them. “It’s a boy,” I managed, and they surged towards the stairs with shrieks of joy as I fell into the cool, vast air of dawn.
I stood leaning against the wall of the house, eagerly sucking up the clean odour of vegetable growth and dusty sand and a faint whiff of the river. “Never!” I whispered to the greying, palm-brushed sky. “Never!” I did not know what I meant by the vehement word, but in a confused way it had something to do with cages and fate and the long traditions of my people. I ran my fingers down my boyish chest, across my concave little stomach under the enveloping sheath, as though to reassure myself that my flesh was still my own. I dug my bare toes into the film of sand that always drifted in from the desert. I gulped at the tiny wind presaging the slow rising of Ra. Behind me I heard the women’s voices, chattering excitedly and incomprehensibly, and the baby’s intermittent thin protests. Soon my mother came out, bag in hand, and in the first light of the day I saw her smile at me.
House of Dreams Page 2