The Red Tent

My husband went to his workshop every morning, but unlike the stonecutters and painters, he did not have to work in the tombs, so he returned to me in the evening, where he and I discovered greater pleasure in each other—and the sorry fact that I did not know how to cook.

During my years in Nakht-re’s house, I rarely strayed into the kitchen, much less prepared a meal. I had never learned how to make bread in an Egyptian oven or to gut fish or pluck fowl. We ate unripe fruit from Benia’s neglected garden and I begged bread from Menna. Shamefaced, I asked Shif-re for a cooking lesson, which Meryt attended only to tease me.

I tried to recreate my mother’s recipes, but I lacked the ingredients and I forgot the proportions. I felt sheepish and ashamed, but Benia only laughed. “We won’t starve,” he said. “I have kept myself alive for years on borrowed bread and fruit and the occasional feast at the house of my fellows and family. I did not marry you to be my cook.”

But while I was a stranger in the kitchen, I found great joy in keeping my own house. There was such sweetness in deciding where to place a chair, and in choosing what to plant in the garden. I relished creating my own order and hummed whenever I swept the floor or folded blankets. I spent hours arranging pots in the kitchen first in order of size, then according to color.

My house was a world of my own possession, a country in which I was ruler and citizen, where I chose and where I served. One night, when I returned home very late, exhausted after attending at the birth of healthy twins, I thought I had lost my way. Standing in the middle of the street in the dead of night, I recognized my home by its smell—a mixture of coriander, clover, and Benia’s cedary scent.

A few months after I moved to my own house, Menna prepared a small banquet for me and Benia. My husband’s workmen sang songs of their workshop. Meryt’s sons sang of bread. And then all the men, together with their wives and children, joined voices for love songs, of which there seemed to be an endless number. I was bashful at the attention showered upon us, the cups raised, the broad smiles and kisses. Even though Benia and I were really too old for such nonsense, we were giddy with delight in each other. When Meryt leaned over and told me to stop grudging people the chance to bask in the light of our shared happiness, I put aside all shyness in gratitude and smiled into the faces of my friends.

I had been right to trust Benia, who was the soul of kindness. One night we lay on our backs staring up at the heavens. There was only a sliver of moon and the stars danced above when he told me his life. His words came slowly, for many of the memories were sad ones.

“I have only one memory of my father,” said Benia. “The sight of his back, which I saw as he walked away from me in a field where I sat behind the plow breaking up clods. I was six years old when he died, leaving Ma with four children. I was the third son.

“She had no brothers, and my father’s people were not generous. She had to find places for us, so my mother took me to the city and showed my hands to the stonecutters. They took me on as an apprentice, and taught me and worked me until my back was strong and my hands callused. But I became a joke in the workshops. Marble would crack if I walked into a room and granite would weep if I raised a chisel to it.

“Wandering in the market one day, I watched as a carpenter repaired an old stool for a poor woman. He saw my belt and bowed low, for even though I was only an apprentice, stonecutters who work in immortal materials are considered far greater than woodworkers, whose greatest achievements decay like a man’s body.

“I told the carpenter that his respect was misplaced and that mere sandstone defeated me. I confessed that I was in danger of being turned into the street.

“The woodworker took my hand in his, turning it this way and that. He handed me a knife and a scrap of wood and asked me to carve a toy for his grandson.

“The wood seemed wa

rm and alive, and a doll took shape in my hands without effort. The very grain of the pine seemed to smile at me.

“The carpenter nodded at the thing I made and took me to the workshop of his teacher, presenting me as a likely apprentice. And there I discovered my life’s work.”

Here my husband sighed. “There, too, I met my wife, who was a servant in the house of my master. We were so young,” he said softly, and in the silence that followed I understood that he had loved the wife of his youth with his whole heart.

After a long pause he said, “We had two sons.” Again he stopped, and in the silence I heard the voices of little boys, Benia’s doting laughter, a woman singing a lullaby.

“They died of river fever,” Benia said. “I had taken them from the city to see my brother, who had married into a farming family. But when we arrived at the house, we found my brother dying and the rest of his family stricken. My wife cared for them all,” he whispered. “We should have left,” he said, with self-reproach still raw after many years.

“After that,” he said, “I lived only in my work and loved only my work. I visited the prostitutes once,” he confessed sheepishly. “But they were too sad.

“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.

“So I took a wife.”

I had been perfectly still until then, but that announcement made me sit up.

“Yes, yes,” he said, embarrassed. “My sister found me a marriageable girl, a servant in the house of a painter, and I brought her here with me. It was a disaster. I was too old for her; she was too silly for me.

“Oh Den-ner,” he said, in a misery of apology. “We were so mismatched it could have been funny. We never spoke. We tried sharing my bed, twice, and even that was awful.

“Finally, she was braver than I, poor girl. After two weeks, she left. Walked out of the house while I was at work, down to the ferry and back to the painter’s house, where she remains.

“I was resigned to making strong drink my regular companion until Meryt sought me out. She visited me three times before I would agree to see you. I am lucky that your friend does not understand the meaning of ‘no.’ “

I turned to my husband and said, “And my luck is measured by your kindness, which is boundless.”

We made love very slowly that night, as though for the last time, weeping. One of his tears fell in my mouth, where it became a blue sapphire, source of strength and eternal hope.

Benia did not ask for my story in return. His eyes would fill with questions when I mentioned my mother’s way of making beer, or my aunt’s skill as a midwife, but he stepped back from his need to know. I think he feared that I might vanish if he so much as asked me the meaning of my name or the word for “water” in my native tongue.

On another moonless night, I told him as much of my truth as I could: that Re-mose’s father was the son of Re-nefer, sister of Nakht-re, and that I came to Thebes after the murder of my husband, in our own bed. When he heard that, Benia shuddered, took me into his arms as though I was a child, and stroked my hair, and said nothing but “Poor thing.” Which was everything I had longed to hear.