House of Dreams (3 page)

“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.

“She is worried about the flow of her milk,” she remarked as we set off for home. “All mothers share the same concerns. I left a bottle of ground swordfish bone with her, to be warmed in oil and applied to her spine. But she need not worry. She has always been very healthy. Well, Thu,” she beamed. “What did you think? Is it not a wonderful experience, helping to bring new life into the world? When you have attended more births, I will allow you to minister to my women yourself. And soon I will show you how to combine the medicines I use. You will become as proud of your work as I am.”

I gazed ahead to the quiet ribbon of the path with its line of trees now swiftly gaining definition as Ra prepared to burst over the horizon. “Mama, why did she say she hated her husband?” I asked hesitantly. “I thought they were happy together.”

My mother laughed. “All women in labour curse their husbands,” she said matter-of-factly. “It is because their husbands are the cause of the pain that traps them. But as soon as the pain stops they forget how they suffered and they welcome their men back to their beds with as much eagerness as before.”

Traps them … I thought with a shudder. Other women might forget the pain but I know I never will. And I know I will not make a good midwife though I will try. “I want to learn about the medicines,” I said, and did not need to go on, for my mother stopped walking and bent to hug me. “Then you shall, my blue-eyed darling. Then you shall,” she said triumphantly.

I did not realize until much later how profoundly the experience of that night served to focus the discontent with which, I am certain, I was born. All I knew at the time was that I was repulsed by the sheer animality of childbirth, did not envy Ahmose the life of constant care the arrival of the baby would mean, and shied away from the deep stirrings of panic the event represented. I felt guilty because my mother seemed delighted at my interest in the whole process, an interest that did not extend beyond a fascination for the potions, salves and elixirs she mixed and brewed as part of her profession. Of course I felt proud when she ushered me into the tiny room my father had built onto our house where she measured out her herbs and prepared her concoctions, but the pride was a part of my whole urgent need to learn, to acquire knowledge, for knowledge, as Pa-ari had said, was power. That little room was always redolent with the aroma of fragrant oils, of honey and incense and the bitter tang of crushed plants.

My mother could neither read nor write. She worked by eye and hand, a pinch of this, a spoonful of that, as she had learned from her mother. I would sit on a stool and watch and listen, filing everything away. I continued to attend village births with her, carrying her bag and soon passing her the medicines required before she even asked for them, but my distaste for the process of parturition never left me, and, unlike her, I remained unmoved at a child’s first cry. I have often wondered if there was some serious lack in my make-up, some gentle component of femininity that did not take root when I was myself in the womb. I struggled with my guilt and tried very hard to please my mother because of it.

I soon became aware that my mother’s work entailed more than just the task of midwife. Women slipped into our home for other reasons, some of them whispered furtively into my mother’s understanding ears. She did not discuss specific secrets with me but spoke about them in general ways.

“An abortion may be procured by a crushed mixture of dates, onions and acanthus fruit steeped in honey and applied to the vulva,” she told me, “but I think that this treatment must be supported by a potion of harsh beer, castor oil and salt drunk at the same time as the outward salve is used. Be very careful if you are asked to prescribe for this, Thu. Many wives come to me for such a purpose without the knowledge and consent of their husbands. As my first duty is to the wives I do my best to satisfy them, but you must always be able to keep their requests to yourself. It is better to prevent conception than deal with it after the damage is done.”