After Abel and Other Stories (9 page)

But the rains didn't always come, and the river didn't always rise enough. Then, her mother told her Lord Hapi was angry, and the frogs stopped their singing, the flies sat stunned on the dry banks. When the rains didn't come, and the river didn't rise, the papyrus dried out, and her father went out each day to work, and came home at midday with an empty purse. During those times, her parents fought. She could hear their voices, loud and full of anger, from where she sat outside. Her father would accuse his wife of treachery, of having a diseased womb that gave him a baby who looked normal. He had already planned her wedding and the dowry it would bring in, but then she turned out to be an imbecile and useless. “If I had known,” he said, “I would have left her out for the crocodiles.” He would rail against the rich men whose whims determined the course of his life, how stingy they became when things didn't go as they'd hoped. “The wrong men get all the fortune,” he'd say. “They bribe the gods, but it's all wasted on them. Look at me! Strong and healthy, but stuck here with only one deceptive wife and a drooling girl-child hanging on her apron.”

Hagar didn't understand why he would say that. She lifted her hand to her mouth, but she knew even before doing so that he was wrong. There was no drool on her chin. Her mother had taught her to keep it inside her mouth, to swallow it down. She remembered her mother
saying, “Men like your father cannot see the world before them. He lives in dreams, like you, only his blind him to the world as it is.”

Her father was still ranting, “I deserved better than this. I deserved the palaces. It should have been me surrounded by beautiful wives and dozens of children making my name for me.”

“You?” her mother would scoff, “who digs in the mud and makes bricks? Who cuts the papyrus, only to hand it off to others with the skill to make use of it?” Her own father had been a merchant once. She had hoped to marry a scholar, but a daughter's fate depends on her father's continued success, which is how she ended up here, in a mud hut filled with dust and stale sweat. “The gods have already given you everything and more than you deserve.”

At times like that, when her parents spat in each other's faces, and her mother told her to look for signs of prosperity in the feathers that fell from the birds as they passed overhead, or the patterns of mud and dried-out silt at the edge of the reeds, her brothers would cuff Hagar's face anytime they happened to pass by, and then they, too, would laugh at her, even though they'd always chase off the other boys who tried to look up her dress or confuse her with their tricks.

During the dry years, Hagar had to stay very quiet. She had to keep out of everyone's way. But the year she
turned twelve, her body stopped wanting to be hidden. Her skirts got shorter, her tunics tighter, and no one noticed for all the fighting, until the day the boy next door, who had suckled with her, their mothers sitting side by side in the afternoon sun, promised her a jewel he'd pulled from the bottom of the mud if she came with him into the high reeds, until he'd tried to put his hand under her dress and made a funny face. That's where her brothers found them, and she smiled at them, as she always did, wondering at the new game the neighbor boy would play.

She cried all the way home, telling them she wanted her jewel, but they dragged her home to their mother, then turned back around and left. When they came back, their knuckles were bruised, and she saw she'd have to mend their clothes again. She hoped she'd sew them well.

Her mother began crying over her, asking, “What will happen to you, my stupid, dreamy girl?” Each night, she would hear whispers from her parents' bed at night. Hagar couldn't hear what they were saying, but she knew they were talking about her. They were always talking about her.

After that, her mother would try to teach her something new each day, each week. How to build a fire, which made Hagar swell like a frog with pride, because no one had ever let her come near a flame before.
How to cook a full meal. Her father shouted that it was taking too long, that she was too slow to learn anything, that she made too many mistakes. Her brothers threw the food she cooked on the floor in disgust, but her mother stroked her hair, said, “Don't worry, you're getting better every day. It takes everyone time to learn,” and then tears would leak out of her eyes, which she'd hide from Hagar's father. Hagar would watch her wipe them quickly and say, all business again, “Let's try that again.”

Then she was here. With these old people who needed help with everything. She had her own knife now, and hardly ever nicked herself anymore. She cooked for them, and slept on the floor next to her mistress, who had bad dreams and needed water brought to her in the middle of the night. In the morning, Hagar would help unfold the old lady into the day, rubbing each creaking joint until it could swing on its own. “You are as slow as the heat of the day,” her mistress would say, “but your touch is full of magic.” Then she'd rise and walk back and forth in the tent, ankles cracking, knees seizing, hips bent over, until she could stand and walk, though she had nowhere to go.

Hagar didn't understand how there could be so much life in a place with no river, or how they could all eat so well without the thick papyrus to cook and fish to catch. The trees that grew dark green and broad shaded
their tents. From there, she could see where the locals had cut away the trees to make room for the neat rows of grain that grew on small farms, and the sheep grazing in empty pastures. Even without flowing water, the beetles had shiny backs. She would watch them crawl across the hard ground, looking for small seams in the crumbly dirt. There were no crocodiles here, but her mistress told her to beware the snakes and scorpions, so she watched for them, stayed back when they raised their fearsome heads, or else tried to hit them with the sharp edge of her knife to see if she could cut them cleanly in two.

She wondered if her mother thought of her. Or her father, who looked at her hips and thighs, said he could finally find a use for her, and handed her over to the traders. By the time they gave up on the river that year, her father accused her mother of stretching things out, of trying to cheat him out of a decent profit. He declared Hagar ready. Hagar didn't know what he meant, but she followed her parents out of the house, where she saw a group of men, their heads draped in long cloths, each like a minor pharaoh. She watched one of the men, a long knife tucked into the rope tied around his waist, put a bag of coins into her father's hand. Her mother stood very still while the men talked, then turned to Hagar, took her now plump shoulders in her hands, told her to be a good girl, and then turned and called her brothers in for dinner.

One of the men took Hagar by the arm, told her to get into a cart that was hitched to an ugly ass and stay quiet. At first, she was happy to feel the bump of the wheels underneath her. She looked around with wonder at these places beyond walking distance from her small house and so beyond the far reaches of her imagination. She wondered how long this trip would be, grew sad when the hours stretched into sunset, then afraid when they didn't head back for home. She cried for her mother, thinking the men would understand and turn around, but they just shouted at her to keep her voice down. That her noise was bad for business.

The caravan traveled for days, picking up other women. They were tied together at the waist by a thick rope, walked in a shuffling line most of the day, but the traders let them sleep in the cart at night. Hagar was smaller and younger than the others. None of the other women seemed to notice her, but they made sure she was never pulled into the cart by one or more of the traders at dusk. Each time, Hagar listened as the wheels squeaked, the cart rocked back and forth, and then followed the others into it when the men called for them, felt their hands squeeze her skin, rub up next to her, and then let her be.

Hagar was lonely on the road. Only the traders spoke her language, and they didn't talk to the women, except to order them in and out of the cart. The other
women didn't try to talk to her. Each kept to herself, absorbed in her own history of misery as if to guard against the pain of another separation that would come when they were sold off the caravan one by one.

Hagar still cried for home at night, but she was afraid of the man with the long knife and hid her sobs. She remembered that her mother had told her to be good, and so she choked back her tears, thought if she was good enough, she would be sent home again. She repeated it over and over to herself, “Be a good girl, and you'll go home,” until, after two days, she went from hoping it would be true to believing it would happen. She believed in it the way her father had believed in his gods, had stepped out of the road when a cow, eyes shining like the goddess's, sacred udders swinging beneath its belly, was led through the town by its owner.

By the time they reached this new land, Hagar had lost count of how long they'd been walking. They stayed close to the sluggish Nile, then went through vast, desert caverns, stopped whenever they passed a town or well, and finally reached a city that seemed to fill the entire valley, its ends reaching from mountain to mountain in every direction.

Hagar had never seen so many people in one place before. She had run back and forth to the local market for her mother many times. When the traders told the girls they'd arrive at the market soon, Hagar thought
she would recognize it, but this was nothing like the collection of threadbare men and women, each with a single basket, selling and buying what they could to survive. Here, a person could buy and sell everything. Textiles, cattle, people. She wanted to wander around, touch the colorful spices, look at the strange faces. Some of the men had long braids winding down their backs. She saw others with black markings across their cheeks and, most wondrous of all, boys and girls with eyes the color of the sky. But the traders kept the women tied together in the cart from the moment they entered the town, so Hagar had to settle for watching as the swirl of activity passed around her.

The traders had sold most of the other women by the time a couple came out to inspect their wares. Hagar's first impression of the woman who would become her mistress was that she seemed impossibly old. The hair at her forehead where it stuck out from beneath her hood looked like wispy clouds above skin veined with blue. But Hagar had been taught that people who lived to be that old must be wise and protected by the gods, so she didn't cry out when the woman pinched her cheeks or pulled down her lips to inspect her teeth or her dress to examine her body.

“That one's father said she's a simpleton,” one of the traders said. “But we haven't had any trouble with her.” When both the man and woman spoke to her in
Egyptian, Hagar was happy to be picked. They spoke their own language with each other, though, and Hagar never could form her mouth around the strange round sounds they used. So she waited until they spoke to her, and got used to listening to their gibberish. Sometimes, she could pretend they were the frogs of her home, talking to her like they used to.

There was much to see here, more things than she thought possible in the world. Without a river, the slave girls had to walk back and forth to the well, and everyone prayed for rain during the fall, then shivered as it fell in winter. No monkeys chattered in the trees, but hawks flew and swooped overhead, and crows called back and forth to one another from the tops of the cypress trees.

Hagar still tried to be good, even though she spilled the food and dropped the firewood sometimes, but her mistress was patient, more patient than Hagar's parents had been. No one told her to stay away from the fire here, and in time she became strong enough to balance the heavy water jug on her head like the other girls did.

Soon, her mistress told her she'd be sleeping in her master's tent. Hagar asked if she would be kneading his joints into motion every morning, too, but her mistress only laughed. “Oh, you are a child,” she said. “Just do as he says.” So she entered his tent, and every night he lay his old body on top of hers. She could feel the bones of his pelvis, see his ribs and collarbone through the
thin skin that lay over them. She still didn't really understand. But every night, he would climb on top again. And every night, she would wonder at how so old a man could still retain so much strength, to hold her down, to catch his breath and let it go.

She had been called stupid since the moment she could understand words, but some things she knew. When her belly grew and she became tired and her head hurt, she knew. She rejoiced at how good her body was. She turned from the old man, looked into her mistress's face, and asked, “Is this what you wanted?” Her mistress smiled, told her that she had done just right, then propped Hagar between her old legs, the skin sagging in folds around her knees and pressed against the sides of her belly to help push the boy out, cradled him to her old breast before Hagar could even hold him tight.

“Give me my son,” she said, because though she didn't know much, she had seen babies search for their mothers' bodies before they even opened their eyes. “He's hungry,” she said, when he began to wail, “and you can't feed him.”

Her mistress didn't like that. Hagar saw her stiffen, clutch the baby tighter in her thin fingers before handing him over. “Put him up,” she said, “but remember whose child this is. You are the vessel. You have your job to do. But you are no one's wife and no one's mother.” Hagar wished for her own mother then, for the skirts to hide
behind and her mother's sharp breath on her hair.

So this is how it would be. They would love her boy, these old people. They would love her hands on their joints and her young body doing what theirs no longer could. But they would never love her. She was just a bewildered young woman far from home. Even the old man, who had come to her night after night, had taken her like a sign of his own forgotten youth, sent her back to her mistress's tent, where she lay on the floor with their boy, ready to feed and quiet his cries. He called her mistress, “Mama,” then came and demanded Hagar's breast.