After Abel and Other Stories (8 page)

I watch the girls as carefully as I have ever looked
at anything. I'm wondering what they'll do to my baby brother, when I hear the sound of water moving. The girls have already lifted up the hems of their skirts to wade into the water to get the basket, pushed the reeds aside, and lifted it out. Now I can see the basket again. It looks exactly the same as it did before. I follow the girls' eyes. I see a woman rise out of the river.

The others are beautiful, but this one makes my mind go silent. I didn't know people could look like this. The three holding my baby brother's life in their hands are just copies. It's just obvious, even though this one doesn't even have any clothes on.

As she rises, the water falls away from her. She's like a stalk, long and slender. Her whole body is lit up, like the shiniest bronze. There's no hair on her, except for the long black strands that fall over her shoulders and back. I've seen slave women naked millions of times, and none of them looks like this.

I wonder if all Egyptians are like this, as sleek under their clothes as the statues in their temples. But then I remember the overseers. Some of them have thick, curly hair on their arms and chests. And they all have furry legs. That's what makes me think this woman must be special.

I can't take my eyes off of her. It's like she carries a sun around with her, only this one can be looked at without burning my eyes. My Amma always told me
that the Egyptians are no better than us, even if they tell us they are all the time. Amma knows just about everything. I almost can't believe that she's wrong, but I've never seen a Hebrew like this. It's dangerous to be a pretty slave. That's mostly true for the women, but sometimes for boys, too. We've all known someone who takes a knife to her own face so that she can save herself. Afterward, we tell her the scars are more beautiful than the smooth skin that was there before. I think the grown-ups really mean it, but the Egyptians don't agree, which is what Amma calls a blessing.

I'm so caught up in looking at her that I barely hear what they're all talking about.

“Bring it over,” the woman in the water says as she walks closer to the other girls.

Unlike before, they don't try to stay dry when they approach her. They don't even take off their clothes or jewelry before stepping into the water.

“Open it,” she says when they're finally in front of her. It's the smallest girl who reaches over and pulls the top off the basket. All three girls step back from it, as if it had a poisonous snake inside, but the one they call Mistress reaches in and picks the baby up. She holds him out in front of her and looks at him for a long time. Even her stare must have something special in it, because he stops crying and looks back at her, as if he's curious to see who this person is. Babies can't really do
that, but that's what it looks like.

“We'll take him home with us,” she says at last, and then lays him back down in the basket.

The girls look scared. “But Mistress,” the one with the pink face says, and then stops as if something was shoved into her mouth.

The tall one just stands there looking at everything but her mistress. It's the small one who finally says, “Surely, Mistress, this must be a—” and then she stops.

“A what?” her mistress says. My Amma has done that to me, almost like she's daring and expecting me to answer at the same time. These girls can't just say “nothing” or “forget it” to her, like I do sometimes when Amma's voice gets all gravelly like that and I know I'm about to get punished for something.

The small girl looks down and then up at her mistress. She must think she has to be very brave to do it, because she blurts, “Surely this is a Hebrew child.”

Her mistress just looks at her, waiting to hear more.

The tall girl steps in. I think she must be a good friend, even if she is an Egyptian, because it looks like she's trying to help the other girl. “Won't your father, the blessed Pharaoh, be very angry if you bring this boy home?”

I jump back. It's lucky I'm in the reeds where they can't see or hear me. The daughter of the Pharaoh, I tell myself. The Egyptians say he's the son of a god. Amma
always spits when someone mentions that and says, “Nonsense.” None of the Hebrews believe it, but here's this golden lady standing right in front of me, every bit of her body uncovered for me to see, and I wonder if there's more to the story than I know. It seems to me that only a god could make someone like this.

I don't realize it, but I've stood up. I'll be ashamed to tell Amma this later, because it's not on account of the baby. I don't know how I'll tell her that I just about forgot the baby. It's as if that woman, the Pharaoh's daughter, has told me to rise without even looking at me. I'm pretty sure she doesn't know I'm there, and yet it's like she commanded my body anyway.

They're all walking through the water to the bank now. One of the girls is carrying the basket with my baby brother in it. All three girls struggle to get out of the water. They had to walk in a lot further to get to where their mistress was standing than they did to pick up the basket. They're weighed down by their wet clothes and jewelry, but the Pharaoh's daughter keeps rising, all of her shimmering and gold against the green trees and reeds. The tallest girl rushes as fast as she can to bring a cloth to her mistress and wipes down her arms, legs, back, and stomach. She bends down and lifts each her mistress's feet and rubs it gently, then puts the whitest looking dress over her head. I thought the other girls were clean, but this makes me almost
want to cry it's so perfectly white, like the clouds that sometimes look like they're dancing across the sky.

One of the other girls brings a golden stool and she sits. Then the tall girl begins to comb her hair out, bit by bit. I've always wanted a comb. I imagine how good that would feel, and how nice my hair would be. Amma tries to run her fingers through my hair to untangle it after I spend all day running. The wind pushes it around, and dust gets all the way into it, but no matter what she does it's always a wild tangle, like a dust cloud that I carry around with me all the time.

This comb is white and pink and blue all at once. Amma and Baba always tell me, “Slaves don't have the luxury to believe in miracles,” but they've never seen anything like this comb. I can't believe something can shimmer and change color but stay the same all at once.

The Pharaoh's daughter must have thought about what her girls said, because she says, “He is not a Hebrew,” and I can't tell if she really believes that or just won't hear anyone tell her she's wrong. “He has no mother and no father. He was born of the water. You saw it yourselves.”

The girls are pretty confused about that, but they all nod. It's stupid. I know he's a Hebrew. I saw my Amma's belly get big and heavy with my own eyes and then watched her bring him into life. She's his mother, not this river.

“All things born of the river are sacred,” she says, and again the girls look like they don't understand what she's saying. I don't either. I've heard a lot of crazy Egyptian things, but I never heard anything like this before. I look closely at her, and then I wonder if she's making that up, even though her face looks exactly like it did before.

Well, not exactly. As they're talking, the girls pile gold on her. She's wrapped in it, over her dress and around her waist, her neck, her ankles and wrists, and on every one of her fingers. They paint her eyes black like theirs, and put red onto her lips so that they look like blood. Instead of one of those bands that each of them are wearing, they put a headdress on her. I watch them do it, and it's just about the most complicated thing I've ever seen. First, they take parts of her hair and pin it to the top of her head, crossing the pieces so that it looks like the basket my brother is in, then they weave golden cloth through it and tie that to the headdress, which they lower onto her whole head. It's covered in jewels that ring around her head like a crown. I think that the gem in the middle of her forehead must be the biggest, greenest one in the entire world.

All the while, she keeps talking, “We will take him home. He will be our son, and a member of the royal house. My father respects all divinity. He will understand the miracle of this boy's birth.”

When they're done with her she looks like a goddess for real. I see that my hand has reached out, as if to touch her, to feel all that shining gold and know what it means to hold something precious.

I'm still standing in the reeds. I must look like I grew out of them. There's dirt on my face. My hair is tangled as always. There are tears in my dress that Amma has sewn back up a hundred times. All that usually makes me invisible. I think there must be something wrong with Egyptians' eyes, because they usually can't see me until one of them needs to send me on an errand. But the Pharaoh's daughter must see more than they do, because she looks over at me as if she knew I was there all along. Her blood-red mouth stretches out into a smile. She moves her hand so little that only I see it. I'm not sure how she tells me, but I know she's calling me over to her, just like she called the other girls. I know that she will save us all.

The sun she carries around with her shines brighter than ever. It sparkles hot and perfect. It's mine to lay my hand on. I take my first step toward her.

THE WATERY SEASON

“So Sarai, Abram's wife, took her maid, Hagar the Egyptian
—
after Abram had dwelt in the land of Canaan ten years—and gave her to her husband as concubine. He cohabited with Hagar and she conceived; and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was lowered in her esteem.”

Genesis 16:3-4

T
he signs were all right there in front of her. The wind blew the oak leaves above her head. The white flowers that dotted the hillside had pushed their small heads up. The sun rose higher and higher, reminded her of the purple lilies rising above the water
when the god awoke, sinking back down when it was time to sleep. She hadn't seen those flowers in ten years, and though she didn't remember the way back, she knew she had been brought north and west to get here. She just had to reverse course, head southeast to reach her home.

There were many things Hagar didn't understand. How the water stayed in the well even after a stone had gone through it. What happened to the fire after it had burnt to embers. Why one bird always veered away from the group when the rest flocked across the sky. Her mother told her they could find signs in everything, that each motion of the earth and sun had something to teach, but where she saw portents of a bad batch of bread or a good year, Hagar saw patterns that added up to the world's random wonder.

What she understood least of all was how she had ended up here, so far from a river after a childhood on the flood plain of the Nile. For eleven years she had stayed close to her mother's skirts, had done as she was told to the best of her ability. Which often wasn't good enough.

People called her stupid. Her brothers, the women in the market who tried to confuse her into bringing home more flour than her mother asked for, even her mother, who said her daughter's eyes were not empty but filled with dreams, whispered it into her hair, and
loved her anyway. Her mother, who put her arm around Hagar's shoulders whenever the local children laughed at her, who pushed Hagar behind her big, round bottom when her father came at her, ready with his closed fist, and wouldn't let him approach.

Her mother wasn't always quick enough. Sometimes, Hagar saw the weariness pass across her mother's face when her father started raging. At those moments she thought her mother must be too tired to even raise her arms or offer protection. If she concentrated hard she could still feel his slap across her ear, the one that came after she spilled the mash and ruined the beer, or couldn't figure out how to stitch the rips in the men's clothes back up, or when she forgot her tasks and stared out into the water, waiting to see if she could spot the start of its yearly rise.

Hagar loved the watery season, when the fields flooded and the date palms sagged with fruit. The mud was so thick then that her father was happy. “People always need bricks,” he would say, and head out with her brothers to see who would hire them. The birds liked high water too. They came in flocks so thick the sky sometimes turned white with their wings. If he got lucky, her father would trap one to sell at the temple. Hagar had never tasted bird flesh, but rich people prized it, would pay enough for a live goose to tide the family over during the dry months.