The Red Tent

Nobody knew! I thought they would all see it in me. I thought that Rachel would guess at my secret and pry the story from me as we walked home. But my aunt wanted only to talk about Re-nefer, who had praised her skills and given her a necklace of onyx beads.

When we returned to camp, my mother hugged me without sensing the new heat in my body and sent me to the olive grove, where the harvest was busy. Zilpah was there overseeing the press and barely answered my greeting. Even Bilhah of the discerning heart was preoccupied with a batch of oil jars that had cracked, and she saw nothing.

Their inattention was a revelation to me. Before my trip to Shechem, I had supposed that my mothers could see my thoughts and look directly into my heart. But now I discovered that I was separate, opaque, and drawn into an orbit of which they had no knowledge.

I delighted in the discovery of my solitude and protected it, keeping myself busy at the far end of the orchard and even sleeping in the makeshift tent near the edge of the harvest with my brothers’ wives. I was happy to be alone, thinking only of my beloved, numbering his qualities, imagining his virtues. I stared at my hands and wondered what it would be like to touch his gleaming shoulders, his beautiful arms. In rriy dreams I saw sunlight sparkling on water and I awoke smiling.

After three days of drunken happiness, my hopes began to sour. Would he come for me? Were these callused hands too rough to delight a prince? I chewed on my fingernails and forgot to eat. At night, I lay sleepless on rny blanket, turning our meeting over and over in my mind. I could think of nothing but him, yet I began to doubt my memories. Perhaps his smile had been one of indulgence rather than of recognition. Perhaps I was a fool.

But just as I began to fear that I would betray myself to my mothers in a flood of tears, I was saved. The king himself sent for me. Hamor would deny his young consort nothing, and when Ashnan asked if Jacob’s kind young daughter could be brought to distract her during her confinement, a messenger was dispatched. The king’s man even brought a slave to take my place in the harvest. My mother found the gesture thoughtful and generous. “Let her go,” she said to my father. Jacob did not object, and sent Levi to accompany me to the door of the women’s quarters in Hamor’s palace.

Waving to my mothers, I could see Bilhah and Rachel peering after me. Either my haste or my pleasure at the king’s bidding alerted them to something, but by then it was too late to ask. They waved back as I descended into the valley, but I could feel their questions at my back. A hawk circled high above us all the way down into the valley. Levi said it was a good sign, but the messenger spit on the ground every time the bird’s shadow crossed our path.

My brother left me at the door of Hamor’s palace, charging me in a loud, pompous voice for the benefit of the messenger “to behave as befits one of the daughters of Jacob.” Since I was Jacob’s only surviving daughter, I smiled. I had been told to behave as myself, and I had every intention of doing that.

In the next three weeks, I met the daughters of Shechem. The wives of all the important men came to visit Ashnan and her little boy, who would not be publicly named until he reached three months, according to the custom of Egypt. “So the demons will not know how to find him,” Ashnan whispered, fearing the presence of evil even within the safety of her comfortable rooms.

Ashnan was rather a silly girl with fine teeth and big breasts, which regained their shape and beauty quickly after the baby was given to a nurse. I had never heard of a healthy woman giving an infant to another woman’s breast; in my world, a wet nurse was used only when the mother was dead or dying. But then, what did I know of the lives of royal women? Indeed, I was amazed by almost everything I saw at first.

I did not much care for being Ashnan’s servant, for that is how she treated me. I brought her food and fed it to her. I bathed her feet and her face. She wanted massage, and so I learned the art from an old woman of the house. She wanted paints as well, and chattered away as she taught me how to apply kohl around my own eyes, and a ground green powder to my lids. “Not only does it make you look beautiful,” said Ashnan, “it keeps the gnats away.”

Ashnan also taught me boredom, which is a dreadful calamity visited upon women in palaces. There was one afternoon I actually shed tears at the monotony of having to sit still as Ashnan slept. All I had to occupy myself with was worry over whether Shalem was aware of my presence under his father’s roof. I began to doubt that he remembered the unkempt assistant to his milk-sister’s midwife. I was trapped without answers, for the walls between the women’s world and men’s quarters were thick, and in the world of the palace there was no work to create a crossing of paths.

After many days, Re-nefer looked in upon Ashnan and I tried to find the courage to speak to her about her son. But all I could do was stammer in her presence and blush. “Do you miss your mother, child?” she kindly asked. I shook my head, but looked so miserable that the queen took my hand and said, “You need some distraction, I think. A girl like you who lives under the sun must feel like a trapped bird within these walls.”

I smiled at Re-nefer and she squeezed my fingers. “You will go out into the marketplace with my maid,” she said. “Help her pick the best of the pomegranates, and see if you can hunt up some fine figs for my son. Shalem likes figs.”

The next morning I walked out of the palace and into the babble of the city, where I stared to my heart’s content. The servant by my side seemed in no hurry and let me wander where I would. I stopped at almost every stall and blanket, wonder-struck at the variety and quantity of lamps, fruits, woven goods, cheeses, dyes, tools, livestock, baskets, jewelry, flutes, herbs, everything.

But there were no figs to be had that day. We searched for them until I was nearly dizzy from heat and thirst, but I hated to return to the palace without satisfying the queen’s request, without bringing fruit to my beloved. Finally, when we had looked in every corner, there was nothing to do but turn back.

At the moment we set our path for the palace, I spied the oldest face I had ever seen—an herb seller whose black skin was lined deep as a dry wadi. I stood by her blanket and listened to her rattle on about some liniment “good for the backache.” But when I leaned down to finger a root I had never seen, she grabbed my wrist and stared up into my face. “Ah, the young lady wants something for her lover! Something magic that will bring her young man to bed, so she may be rid of her tiresome virginity.”

I pulled my arm away, horrified that the conjurer had seen so far into my heart. It was probably only a speech she made to every young girl who approached, but Re-nefer’s maid saw my confusion and laughed. I was mortified, and rushed away from the old one.

I did not see Shalem approach, but he stood before me, the afternoon sunlight filling the sky around his head like a glowing crown. I looked into his face and gasped. “Are you well, my lady?” he asked, in the sweet, reedy voice that I remembered. I was mute.

He looked at me with the same hunger I felt, and put a warm hand on my elbow to squire me back to the palace, the queen’s woman following us, wearing a big grin. Her mistress had been right; there was a light between the prince and the granddaughter of Mamre.

Unlike me, Re-nefer’s son had not been able to hide his heart from his mother. Re-nefer had despised the women of the city since she arrived in Shechem as a young bride. “Stupid and empty,” she branded them all. “They spin badly, weave atrociously, dress like men, and know nothing of herbs. They will bear you stupid children,” Re-nefer had told her son. “We will do better for you.”

Re-nefer had been impressed by the bearing of the midwife from the hills, and she had liked the looks of the girl carrying her bag, too. She approved of my height and the strength of my arms, my coloring and the way I carried my head. The fact that one as young as I was already walking in a midwife’s path told her I was no fool. When Rachel had gone with the queen for refreshment during Ashnan’s labor, Re-nefer had gotten more information about me so discreetly that Rachel did not suspect her purpose as she was quizzed about my age, my mother’s status, my skill at hearth and loom.

When Re-nefer and Rachel surprised me and Shalem in the anteroom, she discerned at once that the seed of her idea had already sprouted on its own. She did what she could to nurture its growth.

Re-nefer told Ashnan to send for me from my father’s house, and she told her son to go out to seek me in the market that morning. “I’m afraid that the little girl from the hills will be lost,” she said to Shalem. “You know that my servant is fool enough to let her out of her sight. But maybe you do not remember the looks of the one called Dinah?” she asked her son. “She was the dark-eyed girl with the curly hair and the fine hands who came with the midwife. You spoke to her in the antechamber when Ashnan was in travail.” Shalem agreed to do his mother’s bidding with such speed that Re-nefer had trouble stifling a laugh.

When the prince and I returned to the palace, we found the courtyard deserted, as Re-nefer had instructed. The servant disappeared. We stood in silence for only a moment and then Shalem drew me into the shadow of a corner and put his hands on my shoulders and covered my mouth with his mouth and pressed his body against mine. And I, who had never been touched or kissed by any man, was unafraid. He did not hurry or push, and I put my hands on his back and pressed into his chest and melted into his hands and his mouth.

When his lips found my throat, I groaned and Shalem stopped. He looked into my face to discover my meaning, and seeing only yes, he took my hand and led me down an unfamiliar corridor into a room with a polished floor and a bed that stood on legs carved like the claws of a hawk. We lay down upon sweet-smelling black fleece and found one another.

I

did not cry out when he took me, because, though he was young, my lover did not rush. Afterward, when Shalem lay still at last and discovered that my cheeks were wet, he said, “Oh, little wife. Do not let me hurt you again.” But I told him that my tears had nothing of pain in them. They were the first tears of happiness in my life. “Taste them,” I said to my beloved, and he found they were sweet. And he wept as well. We clung to each other until Shalem’s desire was renewed, and I did not hold my breath when he entered me, so I began to feel what was happening to my body, and to understand the pleasures of love.

No one disturbed us. Night fell and food was left at the doorway—wonderful fruit and golden wine, fresh bread and olives and cakes dripping in honey. We ate every morsel like famished dogs.

After we ate, he washed me in a large tub of warm water that appeared as mysteriously as the food. He told me of Egypt and of the great river where he would take me to bask and swim.