Zipporah, Wife of Moses

by Marek Halter

  “How do you know he isn’t lying?”

  “It’s true, father,” Sefoba pitched in, anxiety written on her brow. “Moses has qualities . . . But so much hesitation! How do we know he doesn’t say one thing and also its opposite in order to cover a lie?” She glanced at Zipporah, whose face was thoughtful but impassive.

  “A man who killed another man can easily lie,” Orma asserted.

  “I’m pleased we’re helping him,” Sefoba said. “But is it necessary for him to pitch his tent so close to us?”

  Jethro smiled and shook his head. “A man who has killed another man can lie to conceal his sin. But a man who confesses his murder without anyone asking him—why would he lie? His confession proves he has a strong sense of justice that won’t allow him to lie.”

  “He lies in his appearance at least,” Orma replied, implacably. “As you say yourself, Father: He pretends to be something he is not.”

  “No, that’s not what our father is saying,” Zipporah intervened, unable to conceal her irritation. “Moses is honest. He simply has the manners of a stranger. And it is not for us to judge what he did in Egypt.”

  “Oh you!” Orma said, indignantly. “Naturally you take his side. Especially if it means saying the opposite of what I’m saying.”

  “Orma, my daughter—”

  “You, too, Father! You, too! You knew he was neither Egyptian nor a prince. And you let me make a fool of myself. Kneeling and . . . and saying all those stupid things in front of everybody!”

  The tears Orma had long been holding in at last gushed from her beautiful eyes. Her mouth quivered, her temples throbbed, and her face was infinitely more animated than usual. Jethro looked at her with a great deal of tenderness. Carried away by her own resentment, the shame of her tears adding to the shame she already felt, Orma began to ape Moses’ severe manner. “Don’t laugh! You mustn’t say such things! I’m not a lord of Egypt, daughter of Jethro.” The imitation was so accurate that Jethro, forgetting his tender feelings, could not help laughing, any more than could Sefoba and Zipporah.

  Orma’s anger exploded. “Go on!” she cried, pointing her finger at her father and Zipporah. “Laugh! Make fun of me! That’s what you like to do, isn’t it? Everything is grist to your mill!”

  She was beside herself with rage, shouting at the top of her voice, as furious as she could be. Handmaids appeared in the doorways. The whole courtyard vibrated with Orma’s words.

  “You don’t love me! I know, Father, you think I’m silly. For you, only Zipporah counts! And it doesn’t surprise me you like the stranger. He’s deceitful; he plays at being a slave. They should understand each other! His skin may be different, but he’ll end up just like this woman you’ve forced us to accept as a sister, but who’s never been my sister!”

  Sefoba gasped. Orma ran to the other end of the courtyard and vanished into the women’s room. There was a stunned silence.

  Jethro sighed with emotion. “Daughter, daughter!”

  Sefoba slipped her hand into Zipporah’s. “She doesn’t really mean what she says.”

  Zipporah nodded, her eyes a little too bright in the twilight.

  “She doesn’t mean it,” Sefoba repeated. “She’s disappointed. She lost a prince today.”

  Jethro shook his head sadly. “Yes, she means it. At least a little. And she may be right about one thing. I don’t love her enough.”

  Sefoba and Zipporah lowered their eyes in embarrassment.

  Jethro touched his eldest daughter’s shoulder. “Go to her. She needs cuddling. It wasn’t only a prince she lost today, but some of her own vanity.”

  AFTER Sefoba had gone, Zipporah and Jethro remained silent for a long time. Orma’s terrible words brought them closer, but also intimidated them. They both realized that there was real pain beneath her rage, and they felt more guilty than offended. They were truly, deeply, father and daughter, with a joy and a strength that went beyond ties of blood or color of skin. Who could possibly understand? Nobody in the land of Midian, not even Sefoba.

  The summit of Horeb’s mountain had turned gray. The evening breeze was blowing in little gusts, carrying with it the scents of the garden and the cries of the children trying to avoid their bedtime. The handmaids lit the lamps. The moths immediately began their persistent dance.

  Zipporah had forgotten Orma’s outburst. She was thinking of the gold bracelets she had discovered in Moses’ cave. She had not yet mentioned them to Jethro, but could not bring herself to do it, even now, united as they were in the heat of the evening. What she had seen in the cave was a secret that belonged only to Moses, a secret she must not reveal.

  “Of course he didn’t tell us everything!” Jethro said in a low voice, as if he had been following her thoughts. “He spoke of Pharaoh’s slaves like a man whose eyes have only just seen the truth, not like someone who was born into that suffering and has known it all his life.”

  “He isn’t lying, though.”

  “No, no, he isn’t lying.”

  “He’s a Hebrew, not an Egyptian.”

  Jethro’s voice became pensive again. “He’s a son of Abraham, I do believe that. But the Hebrews of Egypt apparently know nothing about us, the people of Midian.”

  “Moses doesn’t know,” Zipporah corrected. “Just as he doesn’t know our language.”

  Jethro smiled. “You’re right.”

  “You didn’t ask him who his god is. Usually, Father, it’s the first question you ask strangers.”

  “There was no point. He has no god. Neither the gods of Egypt, nor the God of the Hebrews. That’s why he doesn’t know what he must do with his life.”

  Zipporah did not ask Jethro how he could be so sure of what he was saying. By now, darkness had fallen. Children and handmaids glided past the walls like shadows. Jethro chased away a moth that was about to fly into his beard.

  “When he said he’d killed a man,” Zipporah said, “you didn’t seem surprised.”

  “There was no reason to be. What else would force a man to cross the sea without knowing where he’s going and with no other company than his own fear?”

  So Jethro, too, had sensed Moses’ fear. Zipporah was glad that it did not make him mistrustful. She thought of the expression on Moses’ face as he had got back on his camel. He had said nothing to her, had not bidden her farewell, had not said that he would see her tomorrow. He had simply looked at her with that mixture of determination and awkwardness that was so characteristic of him at all times. A look that said: “Don’t get me wrong. You know the kind of man I am.”

  “Almost a moon ago, I had a dream,” she murmured suddenly, as if the words had come out by themselves, against her will. “A dream that terrified me and attracted me at the same time. I asked Horeb to help me understand it, but he remained silent. I didn’t dare tell you about it. I was like Orma—afraid of being ridiculous and losing my dignity.”

  Zipporah told him her dream, and how she had struggled to make sense of it. Did it mean that she had to take a boat back across the sea and go to live in the land of Cush? Losing everything she had, everything Jethro had given her, especially a father’s love? That was something she could not imagine.

  “But we know what awaits me here. Sefoba has found a husband, as have our elder sisters. Soon, Orma will accept Reba, or someone else. It will all be over. You will have no more daughters to marry off. No man in Midian, not even a shepherd, will come to your domain to ask for my hand. I will give you no grandchild.”

  She had uttered these words as lightly as she could, but they seemed to drop from her mouth like stones.

  Jethro let the silence take away the stench of sadness. “Nobody knows for certain what dreams tell us. They come to us at night and there is something dark about them. But they can also be as blinding as the brightest sunlight. The wise men say, ‘Live your dream in sleep, but do not let your life become a sleep.’”

  Zipporah, too, waited a moment before speaking again. “Do you think he will come and pit
ch his tent here tomorrow?” There was no need to say Moses’ name.

  “I’m sure he will,” Jethro replied. He paused to reflect. “We must be patient. He bears a heavy burden. He cannot relieve himself of it so soon.”

  “May Horeb come to his aid.”

  “What makes Horeb all-powerful is that he doesn’t do what we expect him to do. He surprises us, and, through these surprises, he corrects us, encourages us, and shows us the path to follow. Let him surprise you. Have patience. There are many days before you.”

  The Handmaid

  What Jethro said came true.

  The next day, Moses arrived early, riding on his camel, with the mule and the sheep on a lead behind him, his few possessions in the saddlebag Zipporah had taken him. He pitched his tent beneath the big sycamore that marked the beginning of the road to Epha. It was a good choice, far enough from Jethro’s domain to preserve the solitude that Moses liked, and near enough not to give the impression that he was keeping his distance.

  Moses had quickly learned to ride a camel. With the same ease, he learned to live in a tent and to tend a flock of sheep. In less than a moon, he was able to gather the animals himself, pen them in, and distinguish those that needed to be taken care of. He was shown how to make the tools needed for cutting flints so that they were as sharp as blades of precious metal. He was taught how to cut and sew leather, how to make comfortable saddles, how to dry meat, how to recognize from a distance the cool, shady spots where scorpions and snakes might be lurking.

  Day by day, his presence and his manners became more natural. He even abandoned the habit of walking barefoot on the burning stones and started wearing sandals like everyone else.

  Imperceptibly, Jethro’s household, too, began to change.

  At first, the attraction of a new face and the strangeness of his accent made him congenial company for the young handmaids. Moses did not hesitate to laugh at himself, to mock his own clumsiness, and they could laugh with him. But what, above all, made the days quite different from what they had been before his arrival was everything he told them about Egypt.

  The children of the household, starting with small groups of the older ones, then the younger ones, got into the habit of joining him outside his tent at twilight. They would ask a thousand questions and Moses would answer them, never tiring, his voice increasingly confident. He would tell them, in both words and gestures, how the quarrymen cut the blocks of stone out of the mountain, and how they were transported on the Great River. How, sometimes, the needles of rock were so huge that it took more than a hundred boats and thousands of men to get them from the mountains to the esplanades of the temples, ten days’ journey away.

  In the sand he traced the outlines of the cities and the palaces. He drew gardens, and sometimes flowers that did not even have a name in the language of Midian.

  The children’s eyes grew large at the scale of the marvels they heard about. Their nights were filled with fabulous dreams, their thoughts now no longer of the slaves or Pharaoh’s whip, but only of those incredible cities, those paradise gardens, those stone animals drawn from the heart of the mountains, animals so enormous that a single one of their claws was taller than a man.

  Soon, the children were joined by the young handmaids. Once twilight had come, Jethro’s domain would be filled, as if by magic, with a new kind of silence, until the sky above Horeb’s mountain was swallowed up in the darkness.

  For a whole moon, applying to himself the same counsel of patience he had given Zipporah, Jethro had been careful to avoid sharing his meal too often with Moses. It was just as well, since, whenever he did so, they sat for the most part in gloomy silence, Moses seemingly weighed down with the burden of respect and gratitude, Jethro with the burden of caution.

  It was quite otherwise when Moses sat outside his tent with the children and the handmaids, and it did not take long for the pleasure he dispensed on these occasions to reach Jethro’s ears. One evening, he asked for his meal to be taken to Moses’ tent, along with a great jar of honey wine.

  As soon as he was seated, he drowned Moses’ predictable embarrassment in wine, served in olive-wood goblets. He asked the children to come closer, practically pushing them into Moses’ arms. Although he did not let it show, he was surprised to discover the ease with words that Moses had acquired. His accent was no longer a hindrance to understanding, but gave the language of Midian a new flavor, a new seductiveness. Jethro listened with the same astonishment as the children to Moses’ account of how the priests of Egypt transformed the bodies of the dead kings and princes into sculptures of flesh, emptied of their entrails and ready to face eternity. He laughed as they did when Moses imitated the cries of the monkeys that were kept as pets by the Egyptians and much prized for their playfulness.

  At dawn on the following day, when Zipporah brought him his morning meal of cakes and cold milk, Jethro seized her hand and squeezed it with unusual emotion. “I listened to Moses last night,” he said, “and discovered a new man. He knows more than I do. He has seen more things in heaven and earth with his own eyes than I have. I’m sure now he was never one of Pharaoh’s slaves. I’m even certain that until he fled the land of the River Iterou, he was happy and proud to be Pharaoh’s subject.”

  Zipporah said nothing. Jethro paused for a moment, a wicked gleam in his eyes, and asked if Moses had told her anything about his past since he had pitched his tent here.

  “No, of course not! Why should he? And besides, he’s very busy with the children.” There was a trace of bitterness in her voice. Jethro was still looking at her intently. To evade the questions she feared to hear, she added, with a genuine laugh: “If he continues to please everyone so much, people will start forgetting that Jethro is the master here. The whole household is at his beck and call. He just has to raise an eyebrow and all the handmaids come running!”

  “The whole household, except your sister,” Jethro grumbled, dipping his fingers in the bowl of cold water Zipporah was holding out to him.

  It was true. Orma was the only one to keep her distance. Her anger had not abated since Moses’ first visit. She never went near the tent beneath the sycamore. As soon as Moses’ name was mentioned, her mouth tensed in a scornful grimace. Whenever he entered Jethro’s domain, which rarely happened, she was careful not to look at him. And if ever their paths crossed outside, she immediately turned her head away.

  Watching her, Sefoba and Zipporah laughed just as much as the handmaids, who would nudge each other with their elbows and wink. But, in Zipporah’s case, the laughter was less an expression of gaiety than of her own dismay and sorrow. Now that Moses was here, so close to hand, and pampered by the household, it was she, suddenly, who felt a stranger, forgotten and ignored. In the two moons since Moses had pitched his tent, none of the things she had been hoping for deep in her heart had come to pass. Quite the contrary, in fact.

  At first, fearful of appearing too impatient, perhaps even impudent, she had obeyed Jethro’s words: “Have patience. There are many days before you.” With all the willpower of which she was capable, she had resisted the burning desire to make any move that might have recalled their brief moment of intimacy in the cave. She had deliberately refrained from taking him his morning meal, had left to others the pleasure of initiating him into his new existence and receiving a grateful smile in return. The pleasure of being there, as if by magic, when he needed help.

  She had succeeded so well that her contacts with Moses became rare and superficial. As things followed their course, Moses soon found himself busy with one task or another, and gave most of his attention to the handmaids or the children. The two of them hardly ever met. And whenever they did meet, instead of the joy she had imagined she would feel at seeing him so close and, perhaps, loving him, she felt only emptiness and disappointment. Moses paid her no greater heed than he did, indiscriminately, to everyone in the household.

  She began to doubt that she had ever been overwhelmed by the sight of Moses fishing. To doubt t
hat he had once touched her lips with his fingers. Even to doubt that the stranger was what he said and what he seemed.

  She would go to sleep remembering Moses’ body, naked in the sea, and the gold bracelets in the painted casket covered with writing. Did any of that really exist? Had she forgotten the difference between dreams and reality?

  Her desire for a moment alone with Moses turned to pain: the pain of jealousy. It made her awkward and given to extremes. Never before had a man so occupied her thoughts. She felt frustrated and ashamed. She did not dare show it, let alone talk about it, even to Sefoba.

  One morning, at last, she rose, determined to have done with her torments. It was time she became herself again. She had been patient too long.

  The sun was just starting to touch the sycamore on the road to Epha when she came within sight of the tent. She stopped dead because, at that moment, the flap of the tent was raised and a handmaid appeared. Zipporah recognized her and whispered her name: “Murti!”

  She was a pretty girl, not much younger than Orma, with a slender figure. She looked graceful as she leaned against the trunk of the sycamore.

  It felt to Zipporah as though her blood were turning to sand. How stupid she had been not to think of it! She had seen the way the young handmaids looked at Moses. There was no shortage of attractive women around Jethro. What had happened was inevitable. There was no point in being angry with Moses.

  Murti was on all fours outside the tent now. She seemed on the verge of collapse. But she immediately got up again and began running like a madwoman, her mouth wide open and her cheeks streaked with tears.

  As she came closer, Zipporah stepped out into the middle of the path and caught her arm. Murti had been running so fast that both of them nearly lost their balance. “Murti! Murti! What’s the matter? Where are you running?”

  Murti was sobbing. Zipporah repeated her name softly. The handmaid’s sobs grew more intense, and her chest heaved. Zipporah pulled Murti to her and put her arms around her. Beneath the sycamore, the flap of the tent did not move.