The Beatrix Gates

by Pollack, Rachel;

  He considers writing his own story. “The Life of Joseph ben Jacob, Lord Viceroy of Egypt.” But what good would it do? A fire would incinerate the papyrus, or a desert lion would claw it to shreds, or maybe a freak flood would wash away the hieroglyphs. By whatever means, Yah would make sure no one would ever see it. The Beard is the writer, after all. God’s scribe.

  Some things Joseph knows from the ripples and colors of the wine. Others require a dream. He first sees the man he calls “the Beard” in a dream. Joseph is eight, a spindly brat with a squeaky voice. He’s had a bad evening, swatted by Simeon for a trick he’d played on Levi. In despair that no one loves him, he drinks down a whole cup of wine from the flask his mother has given him. The cup falls with a thud on the dirt floor of his tent as he instantly falls down asleep.

  At first, he sees only the flame. It fills his dream like floodwaters hitting a dry riverbed. Finally, Joseph and the fire separate so that he can see it as a blaze on a man’s face. No, not the face, the beard. The man has thick eyebrows and thin hair, and sad eyes, and a beard bushier than Reuben’s, except the beard is on fire! The flames roar all about the face and neck, yet somehow never seem to hurt him. They don’t even seem to consume anything; his beard always stays the same. Later in life, in countless dreams, Joseph will study this man and the inferno on his face. He will wonder if maybe the fire is an illusion—the man’s a master magician, after all—or a trick of the desert light (except it looks the same inside Pharaoh’s palace). And he will wonder why no one ever seems to notice it, not the Pharaoh, not the Beard’s self-serving brother, not the whiny mob that follows him through the desert. In that first time, however, the fiery beard scares him so much he can only hide in the corner of his dream, hardly even aware that the man stands on a dark mountain scorched by lightning, and talks to the clouds.

  ———

  Joseph doesn’t like this man. He doesn’t like his haughty pretension of modesty, the I’m-just-a-poor-shepherd routine. He detests the man’s willingness to slaughter hordes of his own people just for the sake of discipline. He dislikes his speeches that go on for hours and hours, in that thick slurry voice, always with the same message, obey, obey, obey. Joseph distrusts the man’s total lack of humor, his equal lack of respect for women. Can’t he see that his sister controls the waters, so that without her to make the rocks sweat they would all die of thirst? As far as Joseph can tell, the mob would have done a lot better if they had followed the sister and not the Beard. Joseph thinks of her as his proper heir as leader of the Hebrews. But then, he has to admit, he always did like women better.

  Most of all, Joseph detests the Beard’s penchant for self-punishment. The way he lies down in the dirt, cutting his face on the pebbles, the way he’ll swear off sex but won’t give his wife permission to take anyone else. And what about his hunger strikes that go on for days and days, as if Yah can’t stand the smell of food on a man’s breath? It might not bother Joseph so much if the man wasn’t such a role model for his people. Joseph’s people. Doesn’t the man know that Joseph saved his family—the mob’s ancestors, after all—and all of Egypt from starvation just a few generations before? It was Joseph who explained Pharaoh’s dream of the seven fat cows and the seven lean ones, Joseph who took over Egypt’s food storage systems during the seven good years, building up the stocks for the seven years of famine. It was Joseph who took in his family and fed them so the tribes could survive. Doesn’t the Beard know all this? He claims to know everything, doesn’t he? The man who talks to Yah. How dare he denounce food? How dare he?

  Some dreams come so quickly they seem to pounce on him the moment he closes his eyes. Others lie in wait all night until they seize him just before he plans to wake up. The dream of the coat comes that way. Joseph has fidgeted in his sleep for hours, flinging out his arm as if trying to push something away. And then at dawn, just as Reuben and Judah and Issachar and Zebulon are gulping down stony bread on their way to the sheep, their little brother dreams once more of the Burning Beard. He sees the Beard stride into the biggest room Joseph has ever seen. Stone columns thicker than Jacob’s ancient ram hold up a roof higher than the Moon. The Beard comes with his brother, who has slicked down his hair and oiled his beard, and wears a silver plate around his neck, obviously more aware than the Beard of how you dress when you appear before a king. Or maybe the Beard has deliberately crafted his appearance, his torn muddy robe, his matted hair, as either contempt for the Pharaoh or a declaration of his own humility. “Look at me, I’m just a country bumpkin, a simple shepherd on an errand for God.” Later, in other dreams, Joseph will learn just how staged this act is from the man who grew up as Pharaoh’s adopted son. Now, however, the dreaming boy knows only the gleam of the throne room and the scowl of the invader.

  The brothers speak together. Though Joseph cannot follow any of it (he will not learn Egyptian for another twenty years) he understands that the Beard has something wrong with his speech so that silver-plate needs to interpret for him. Whatever they say, it certainly bothers the king, who shouts at them and holds up some gold bauble like a protection against the evil eye. The Beard says something to his brother, who strangely throws his shepherd’s staff on the floor. Have they surrendered? But no, it’s a trick, and a pretty good one, because the stick surrenders its rigidity and becomes a snake!

  Asleep, Joseph still shivers under his sheepskin. The king, however, shouts something at one of his toadies who then rushes away, to return a moment later with a whole squad of magicians in the most amazing coats Joseph has ever seen. For Joseph the rest of the dream slides by in a blur—the king’s magicians turn their sticks into snakes too only to have silver-plate’s snake gobble them up like a basket of honeycakes—because he cannot take his dream eyes off those coats. Panels of linen overlaid with braids of wool, every piece a different color, and hung with charms and talismans of stone and metal. I want that, the dream Joseph thinks to himself, and “I’ve got to have that,” he says out loud the moment he wakes up.

  He begins his campaign that very day, whining and posturing and even refusing to eat (later, he will blame the Beard for this fasting, as if his dreams infected him) until he wins over first his mother and then at last his father. With Jacob on his side, Joseph can ignore the complaints of his brothers, who claim it makes Joseph look like “a Hittite whore.”

  Joseph doesn’t try for the talismans. Jacob probably could afford it, but Joseph knows his limits. Besides, it’s the coat he cares about, all the colors, even more swirls than his cup of dreams. The day he gets it he struts all about the camp, the sides of it held open like the fan of a peacock—or maybe like a foolish baboon who does not know enough to protect his chest from his enemies.

  That same night, Joseph dreams of the coat soaked in blood.

  Joseph’s dream power comes from his mother. “All power comes from mothers,” Rachel tells him, and thereby sets aside the story Jacob likes, that Yah taught dream interpretation to Adam, who taught it to Seth, who taught it to Noah, whose animals dreamed every night on the boat, only to lose the knack when they walked down the ramp back onto the sodden earth. “Listen to me,” Rachel whispers, “you think great men like Adam spent their time with dreams? It was Eve. And she didn’t learn it from God, she learned it from the serpent. She bit into the apple and snipped off the head of a worm. And that’s when people started to dream.”

  Joseph’s worst moment comes in prison. He sits on his tailbone with his legs drawn up and his arms around his knees, trying to let as little of his body as possible touch the mud and slime of the floor. He’s tried so hard, it’s so unfair. No matter what terrible tricks Yah played on him—his brothers’ hatred, his coat taken from him and streaked with blood—he’s done his best, he’s accepted it, really he has. And now this! And all because he tried to do something right. When your master’s wife wants to screw you, you’re supposed to say no, right? Isn’t that what Yah teaches (not that it’s ever stopped Jacob, but that’s not the point)? And ins
tead of a reward he has to sit in garbage and eat worse.

  Something touches Joseph’s sleeve. He screams and jerks back, certain it’s a rat. But when he opens his eyes he sees two men not much older than himself. They wear linen and their hair is curled, signs they’ve fallen from a high place. “Please,” one says, “You’re the Hebrew who interprets dreams, aren’t you? Will you help us? Please?”

  “No,” Joseph says. “Go away, leave me alone.” Yet he feels a certain tug of pleasure that his reputation as Potiphar’s dream speaker has followed him into hell. He tries to ignore them, but they just stand there, looking so desperate, that finally he says, “Oh all right. Tell me your dreams.”

  The one who goes first announces that he was Pharaoh’s chief wine steward before the court gossips slid him into jail. He tells Joseph, “In my dream I saw—I was in a garden. It was nighttime, I think. I looked up high and saw three branches. They began to bud. Blossoms shot forth. There were three ripe grapes. Suddenly, Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand. Or maybe it was there before, I’m not sure. I squeezed the grapes in my hand. I poured the juice into the cup. I gave it to Pharaoh. He was just there and I gave it to him and he drank it.”

  Joseph rolls his eyes. This is not exactly a great mystery, he thinks. He says, “All right, here’s the meaning. In three days Pharaoh will lift up your head. He will examine your case and restore you to your office. You’ll be safe from this filth and back in the palace. Congratulations.”

  The man claps his hands. “Blessed Mother Isis!” he cries. “Thank you!” He bends down to kiss Joseph’s knees but Joseph pulls his legs even closer to his chest.

  “Just promise me something,” Joseph says. “When you’re back pouring wine for Pharaoh, remember me? Tell him I don’t deserve this.”

  “Oh yes,” the man says, and claps his hands again.

  “Now me,” the other one says. He kneels down before Joseph and says, “In my dream I’m walking in the street behind the palace. There are three baskets on top of my head. Two of them are filled with white bread, but the one on top holds all the lovely things I bake for Pharaoh. Cakes shaped like Horus, a spelt bun like the belly of Hathor. Just as I’m thinking about how much the king will like them, birds come and pluck them away.” He laughs, as if he’s told a joke. “Right out of the basket. Now,” he says, “tell me the meaning.”

  Joseph stares at him. He stares and stares at the man’s eager face. Why has Yah done this to me, he thinks, but even that last shred of self-pity drains out of him, washed away in horror at such pathetic innocence.

  “Go on, go on,” the man insists.

  Can he fake it? Joseph wonders. He tries to think of some story but his mind jams. He can’t escape. Yah has set the truth on him like a pack of dogs. In a cracked whisper he says, “In three days Pharaoh shall lift your head from your shoulders. He will hang you from a tree and the birds will eat your body.”

  The baker doesn’t scream, only makes a noise deep in his chest. “Oh Gods,” he says, “help me. Help me, please.”

  Joseph is stunned. No anger, no hate. No demands to change it or make it go away or even to think again. Just that trust. Without thought, Joseph wraps his arms around the man like a mother. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m so sorry.”

  Joseph will stay two years in the prison before Pharaoh will dream a dream not found anywhere in the catalogues, and his wine steward, hearing of lean cows and fat cows, will remember the man he had promised not to forget. In all those months, Joseph will think of that empty promise only three or four times. But he will see the face of the baker every morning, before he opens his eyes.

  People at court sometimes joke about the Viceroy’s clay cup. Childish, they call it. Primitive. Hebrew. Visitors from Kush or Mesopotamia look shocked when they see him raise it in honor of Pharaoh’s health. Their advance men, whose job it is to know all the gossip, whisper to them that Lord Joseph uses this cup to divine the future. Perhaps he sees visions in the wine, they say. Or perhaps—these are the views of the more scientifically minded—some impurity in the clay flakes off into the liquid and induces heightened states of awareness. The visitors shake their heads. That’s all well and good, they say. He saved Egypt from famine, after all. But why does he drink from it in public?

  During long dinners the Viceroy, like other men, will sometimes pause to swirl his barley wine, or else just stare blankly into his cup. At such times, all conversation, all breathing, stops, until Lord Joseph once more lifts up his eyes and makes some bland comment.

  The princes, the courtiers, and the slaves all agree. The God Thoth visits Joseph at night, when together they discuss the secrets of the universe. A bright light leaks under the door of the Viceroy’s bedchamber, and sometimes an alert slave will hear the flutter of Thoth’s wings. And sometimes, they say, Thoth himself becomes the student, silent with wonder as Joseph teaches him secrets beyond the knowledge of Gods.

  ———

  The boy Joseph curls himself up in the pit where his brothers have thrown him. Frozen in the desert night without his coat, he clutches the one treasure they didn’t take from him, the cup his mother gave him, which he keeps always in a pouch on a cord around his waist. What will it be? A lion, a scorpion, a snake? Instead, before Judah and Simeon come back to sell him as a slave, a deep sleep takes him. He does not know it, but Yah has covered him with a foul smell that will drive away the beasts, for now is the time to dream. Joseph sees himself standing before a dark sky, with his arms out and his face lifted. A crown appears on his head. The crown becomes light, pure light that spreads through his body—his forehead, his mouth, his shoulders, all the way to his fingertips, light that streams out of him, through his heart and his lungs, even his entrails, if he shits he shits light, his penis ejaculates light, the muscles and bones of his legs pure light, his toes on fire with light. Joseph tries to cry out, but light rivers from his mouth.

  And then it shatters. Broken light, broken Joseph splashes through the world, becomes darkness, becomes dust, becomes bodies and rock, light encased in darkness and bodies. And letters. Letters that fall from the sky, like drops of black flame.

  Joseph wakes to the hands of the slave traders dragging him up from the dirt.

  Does the Beard dream? Does the fire on his face allow him even to sleep? Or does he spend so much time chatting with Yah, punishing slackers, and writing, writing, writing, that he looks at dreams, and even the future, as a hobby for children and weak minds? After all, what does the Beard care about the future? He has his book. For him, time ends with the final letter.

  When his brothers bully him, when they throw mud on his coat or trip him so he falls on pebbles sharp enough to splash his coat with blood, Joseph just wants to get back at them. In Jacob’s tent one night he decides to make up a prophecy. “Listen, everybody,” he announces. “I had a dream. Last night. A really good one.” They roll their eyes or make faces but no one stops him. They don’t want to believe in him, but they do. “Here it is,” he says gleefully. “All of us were out in the fields binding sheaves. We stepped back from them, but my sheaf stood upright and all yours bowed down to it.” He smiles. “What do you think?”

  Silence. No one wants to look at anyone. At last, Reuben says, “Since when do you ever go out and bind sheaves?” Inside their laughter, Joseph hears the whisper of fear.

  That night, a dream comes to him. The Sun, the Moon, and eleven stars all bow down to him. He wakes up more scared than elated. He should keep it to himself, he knows. He’s already got them mad, who knows what they’ll do if he pushes this one at them. He pours some water into his cup from the gourd his mother’s handmaids fill for him. Before he can drink, however, he sees in the bubbles everything that will follow—how the dream will provoke his brothers, how he will become a slave in Egypt, how he will rise to viceroy so that his family and in fact all Egypt will bow to him. It will not last, he sees. Their descendants will all become slaves, only to get free once more and stumble through the desert f
or forty years, forty years, before they can get back to their homeland. The vision doesn’t last. Startled, he spills the water, and the details spill from his brain. Yet he knows now that everything leads to something else, that all his actions serve some secret purpose known only to Yah. Is it all just tricks, then? Do Yah’s schemes ever come to an end?

  He can stop it, he knows. All he has to do is never tell anyone the dream. Doesn’t Grandpa Isaac claim God gives all of us free will? (He remembers his father whispering, “All except my brother Esau. He’s too stupid.”) If Joseph just keeps silent, the whole routine can never get started.

  That afternoon, Zebulon kicks him and he blurts out, “You think you’re so strong? I dreamed that the Sun and Moon and eleven stars all bowed down to me. That’s right, eleven. What do you think of that?”

  Joseph is old now, facing the blank door of death. He has blessed his children and his grandchildren and their children. Soon, he knows, the embalmers will suck out his brains, squirt the “blood of Thoth” into his body, wrap him in bandages, and encase him in stone. He wonders—if his descendants really do leave Egypt, will they find him and drag him along with them?

  At the foot of his bed lies a wool and linen coat painted in swirls of color. Joseph has no idea how it got there. By the size of it, it looks made for a boy, or maybe a shrunken old man. Next to the bed, on a little stand, sits his cup, as bright as the coat. He has told his slave to fill it with wine, though Joseph knows he lacks the strength to lift it, let alone pour it down his throat.

  When he dies, will he see Rachel and Jacob? Or has he waited so long they’ve grown impatient and wandered off somewhere he will never find them? He is alone now. The doctors and the magicians, his family, his servants, he’s ordered them all away, and to his surprise they have listened. He wants more than anything to stay awake, so he can feel his soul, his ka, as the Egyptians call it, rattle around inside his body until it finds the way out. He tells himself that he’s read all the papyruses, the “books of the dead,” and wants to find out for himself. But he knows the real reason to stay awake. He doesn’t want any more dreams. As always, however, Yah makes His own plans.