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We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust. This is not your fault, or mine.
If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter knows the details of her mother’s life—without flinching or whining—the stronger the daughter.
I can still feel how my mothers loved me. I have cherished their love always. It sustained me. It kept me alive. Even after I left them, and even now, so long after their deaths, I am comforted by their memory.
Rebecca had welcomed him with tenderness and passion when they first were married because as her groom he treated her as though she were the Queen of Heaven and he her consort. Their coupling was the coupling of the sea and the sky, of the rain and the parched earth. Of night and day, wind and water.
“Their nights were filled with stars and sighs as they played the part of goddess and god. Their touches engendered a thousand dreams. They slept in each other’s arms every night,
When her tears were spent, Jacob held her to his chest until it seemed she was asleep, and told her that she was the moon’s own daughter, luminous, radiant, and perfect. That his love for her was worshipful.
The wheel had turned.
She dined upon snake—the animal that gives birth to itself, year after year.
I am not certain whether my earliest memories are truly mine, because when I bring them to mind, I feel my mothers’ breath on every word.
One of my great secrets was knowing I had the power to make her smile.
I was not afraid to hold that small death.
But there’s no use in frightening children with the price of life.”
I would bury my husband and be buried with him. I would find his body and wrap him in linen, take the knife that had stolen his life and open my wrists with it so we could sleep together in the dust. We would pass eternity in the quiet, sad, gray world of the dead, eating dust, looking through eyes made of dust upon the false world of men. I had no other thought. I was alone and empty. I was a grave looking to be filled with the peace of death.
Meryt joined me in singing the words “Fear not,” sensing the power of the sounds without knowing what she was saying. By the third time, all of the women were singing “Fear not,” and Hatnuf was breathing deeply again.
The story it told was unremarkable: a tale of love found and lost—the oldest story in the world. The only story.
Tell me,” she asked, “are you dead, too?” “Perhaps I am,” I answered, shuddering. “Perhaps you are, for the living do not ask such questions, nor could they bear the pain of truth without the consolation of music. The dead understand. “Do you know the face of death?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, remembering the doglike shadows that attend so many births, patient and eager at the same time.
“I am not unhappy,” she said. “Nor am I content. There is nothing in my heart. I care for no one, and for nothing. I dream of dogs with bared teeth. I am dead. It is not so bad to be dead.”
But Benia’s box remained an embarrassment and a reproach to me. It did not belong in a garden shed. It was not made for a foreignborn midwife without status or standing. It was mine only because the carpenter had recognized my loneliness and because I had seen the need in him, too. I filled the box with gifts from my mothers, but covered its gleaming beauty with an old papyrus mat so that it would not remind me of Benia, whom I resigned to the corner of my heart, with other dreams that had died.
How had I come to find so many kind people in my life? What was the purpose of such good fortune?
“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.
“Re-mose, your father was called Shalem, and he was as beautiful as the sunset for which he was named. We chose each other in love. The name I gave you at my breast was Bar-Shalem, son of the sunset, and your father lived in you. “Your grandmother called you Re-mose, making you a child of Egypt and the sun god. In either language and in any country, you are blessed by the great power of the heavens. Your future is written on your face, and I pray that you will have the fullness of years denied to your father. May you find contentment. “I will remember you in the morning and in the evening,
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We knew her days were numbered and kissed each other goodbye at every parting. Nothing between us was left unsaid.
The past had done its worst to me, and I had nothing to fear of the future.
He remained strong and sure, his eye ever clear, his love for his work and his love for me as constant as the sun.
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.
There is no magic to immortality.
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.
Blessings on your eyes and on your children. Blessings on the ground beneath you. Wherever you walk, I go with you.
