Moses

by Howard Fast

  He realized that it might have been different, had not the men of Kush, their hearts filled with hatred and grief, destroyed the entity of the white house on the escarpment. If he had wed Merit-Aton, he would have wed Egypt—the old, proud Egypt of the Upper Nile, and then too he would no longer have been Moses of the half-name.

  Yet the sorrow that remained was for the lovely woman, not for the circumstances lost. He had no resentment against the path the boat was taking towards the Land of Goshen, for the pathways had already been defined, and neither the oarsman nor the boat—as Moses thought—did anything but follow the current.

  “So be it,” he said to himself, almost with relief, almost with peace. “I am tired of pretending, tired of aping, tired of being a stranger in a strange land. Let it come as it may.”

  Yet he knew well enough that he would also be a stranger in the Land of Goshen.

  [17]

  HE STEPPED INTO the water to help Nun, and together they drew the light papyrus boat up on to the grassy bank. When the ebb of the river flood began, Goshen and the other lands that rimmed the Delta were as green and lovely as anything in Egypt. But these places had no canals or irrigation works to store the water and retain it, and as the ebb continued, the face of the land hardened and parched; the grass yellowed and died, and the dust gathered and rose in puffs and clouds with every breath of wind. The land was hot and the stink of the marsh blew over it. Only the waterbanks remained green and lush.

  They walked; an Egyptian in a loincloth, with hunting weapons, and beside him, a bear of a bearded man whose long hair was braided in a heavy plait. They walked in a silent land, a sorrowful and hot land, and the dust eddied around their feet.

  “Is it far, the city of the Levites?” Moses asked.

  And Nun snorted mockingly, “Cities? Are we a people for cities? Are the mud hovels we live in houses? We lay our heads away from the weather as an animal does.” He had changed; the fetid air of the place worked in him like poison; he was full of apprehension and anger, not at Moses, but at nameless things and at himself too.

  “There is a city of the slave people,” he laughed, pointing to a heap of rubble and mud brick, abandoned, with only a few lizards running in and out of the debris. “Is that what we seek?” Moses wanted to know, and Nun shook his head and laughed bitterly again. “There are more slaves than the Levites in Goshen.” They went on. They saw a few goats chewing at the yellow grass. The goats were scrawny and sick-looking, and Nun explained that when the goats were sleek and healthy, the Egyptians took them. Moses himself was not defined; whether he came here as Egyptian or Levite, he did not know, yet he murmured, “So Egypt steals from slaves.” “Their lives—so why not their goats?” “And if you ruled a land, Nun, would there be no slaves?” The Bedouin was silent, with no answer to a question he never posed for himself.

  They came to an old well with a few palm trees growing around it, and there they paused to rest and shelter for a moment from the heat of the sun. Three naked children, very small and thin, perhaps six or seven years of age, played in the shade, and they looked up and saw Nun before they saw the man behind him. He spoke to them in the tongue of the Levites and their eyes widened, fixed upon the silver bracelets that circled each arm above the elbow. They did not reply, but stared at him wide-eyed and immobile, as children do when curiosity struggles against timidity. Then they saw behind him the tall figure of Moses, the clean-shaven face and the neck-length cropped hair; and their curiosity turned into panic and they fled, whimpering and running as fast as their skinny little legs could carry them.

  “The Children of Israel,” Nun shrugged, gloom fastening upon him like a weight on his shoulders. “Why did we come here, O master?” he asked Moses. Not unkindly, but pointedly, Moses again asked his slave, “Where is the city of the Levites?” And Nun pointed beyond the palms to a cluster of mud-brick hovels. There, the children ran, and he and Nun followed. If Nun walked slowly and uncertainly, Moses had the added uncertainly that those he approached would fear him, and in his mind begged them, “Look on me with a little kindness, for I have a particular grief.” But he was too Egyptian, and Egypt was in the upright pridefulness of his walk, in the clean-shaven brown skin of his face, in the shock of black, banged hair, in the grace and health of his smooth muscles. They would be afraid of him as the children had been afraid, and he lagged behind Nun, dragging his feet. He suddenly regretted the long hunting knife that hung from his belt, his quiver of sharp arrows and the great, ominous laminated Hittite war bow. So did Egypt come, weighed down with the weapons of death, and now they were heavy as his own thoughts, which pleaded, “But look only on my Kushite stave, where the notches beyond counting are the exile Egypt imposed on me, and that is not all that Egypt did to me as well as you.”

  They had a well there, outside the mud hovels, with a thatch of papyrus to keep the sun off the water. A woman drew water at the well, and to her the three children ran, burying their frightened faces in the ragged, shapeless woollen dress she wore. Another woman, sitting crosslegged beside the well, climbed to her feet, and still more women and children emerged from the hovels and from the alleys between them as the two strange men approached.

  The Woman at the well looked up in fear, for her face had been cast and shaped by fear, not by joy or anticipation—a thin, weatherbeaten face, dark-eyed and hollow-cheeked—and she fixed her eyes on Nun, who spread his arms in a gesture of peace and called out in the speech of the Levites,

  “I am not to be afraid of, Sarah, daughter of Jabed. I am Nun, the son of Ephala, the son of Zilpah, and you are kin to me by my mother and my cousin, Ephrel, so where is the need to look at me thus, as if I were strange to everything here?”

  “You are not Nun, the son of Ephala, who was taken away and whipped to death because his back was proud and unbending,” the woman replied with a kind of certain knowledge and haughty defiance.

  “Then look at me again, woman, and call the others to look at me.”

  “Nun is dead. The dead do not walk with silver bangles and fat on their flesh. And who is that tall Egyptian behind you?”

  “He is my master, and he allows me to come back to look at the place where I was born.”

  “Oh ho—such sights for an Egyptian lord to see! And what do you want of us? We have not a bit of gold or bronze or food for you to take. Leave us in peace, whoever you are.”

  Now the other women were coming forward, slapping their children back, squinting through the sunlight at Nun. A handful of skinny old men pushed through and past them, cackling authoritatively. Moses halted twenty paces away, watching Nun go up to them. He had been able to follow the drift of the conversation between Nun and the woman called Sarah, until it became a quick give-and-take, and then it lost him. Now, no longer speculating or wondering, but face to face with his blood and birth, he had a feeling of relief, of the breaking of a tension as old as his consciousness. He leaned upon his stave, listened and watched, but made no movement and said nothing. “Let Nun handle it,” was in his mind. Nun would know what to do, and he would do what was best; and as for himself, Moses—it seemed to him that he cared very little. He had ceased to be one thing or another; he was not a prince of Egypt and neither was he a Levite. In that time when nations were still a network of clan and tribe and family, when a man who stepped from among his people stepped into chaos, Moses was alone and, as he now argued to himself, indifferent to his aloneness.

  One of the old men hobbled forward and peered into Nun’s face. His rheumy, red-rimmed eyes blinked painfully in the bright sunlight, but he studied Nun conscientiously and then sneered at the women with contempt. “What do you know, you clucking fools? Old hens! This is Nun, son of Ephala. His mother, Zilpah, was the daughter of Pashur, who was sister by marriage to my own mother. Her father was the Midianite Hushur, who was circumcised by the Egyptians when they took him from the Bedouin traders. He always claimed that his great-grandfather was the Sheik Jacob, holy be his name, who held great power in the
Land of Canaan, but a Midianite is a liar—who can believe them? The truth is that Sheik Jacob had more sons than you can count, for he was potent the way this dog on the throne of Egypt is potent, and every miserable Bedouin tribe calls itself the Children of Israel. It is not enough that the Midianites claim Midian was born from Abraham and Keturah and begot Epher and Hanoch and all the rest of their swarm, but they must weave into their swarm Reuben and Gad, so that they too are the Children of Israel, and even the Amelekites, those dogs who join with Midian and deny Nehushtan, will have it that Abraham was kin by Zefra, who had one eye but could see around objects with that one eye, which was—”

  Moses, who had, with great difficulty, caught the thread of the words, realized that the old man had forgotten what he had set out to prove, and also saw that his amazing genealogical monologue could continue until his rasping voice gave out. He was surprised that Nun made no effort to interrupt, for Nun was always impatient and easily annoyed by too much talk and nonsense; but in this case, his patience was more than that of the women. One of them, who might have been younger than she appeared and even lovely once, interrupted harshly and said,

  “Enough of that, old fool! It’s Nun, the son of Ephala. We see that. He has come to good fortune and good times. What do you want of us, Nun?”

  “Call, me old fool!” the old man cried, his voice rising in a shrill whine. “I’m old enough to be your grandfather. I held you on my knee and you wet all over me. I slapped your bare behind, rotten brat without respect! A curse from Nehushtan! May his slime gather over you and rot your flesh!”

  “Leave it alone, Miriam,” another woman said tiredly. “The old fool is crazy. You’ll start him on his curses. He’ll curse us all day long.”

  “Time was when there was respect,” the old man whined. “Respect for the old, honour from the young. Before we were slaves in Egypt. What is a slave? A slave is dirt. A slave is filth. A slave is an animal, like an ass in the field. What does a slave know of honour or respect? Before we were slaves in Egypt, it, was different. Oh, yes, I tell you it was different. A woman didn’t open her mouth then—”

  “Oh shut your own mouth already, old man,” another woman put in.

  “Go back to your hole, old man,” the woman called Miriam said tartly. “There is too much sun on your head. It will make you even more foolish than you are.”

  Moses realized that they had forgotten him entirely, all except the children, who were losing their fear and edging towards him, their eyes fixed on his great war bow and the shining silver handle of his hunting knife. He also realized that, in some curious way, they were using this interruption in the bleak and hopeless monotony of their lives to gain a little excitement, a little variation of their unchanging daily routine. The imprecations, abuse and curses flung back and forth were without body and evoked neither fear nor anger, and Nehushtan was referred to without respect or awe—and sometimes with contempt. He realized that Nun had attempted to justify himself in terms of religion, but here was no religion in the sense that Moses knew religion, but rather a sort of magic such as Doogana practised, degraded by the pervading degradation of slavery.

  Another old man now pushed his way among the women and faced Nun, and placed his approval upon him with an embrace of his skinny arms. He was, as he explained, Nephi, brother to Ephala, the father of Nun. Ephala had died two years ago, he informed Nun; he had slipped or fallen out of sheer weariness from a scaffolding, where he was carrying bricks. His baby brother, Ephala was, the child of his mother’s age—even as he, Nephi, had been the child of his mother’s youth. Thus he embraced Nun, who was alone, his mother dead of worms a month later, his sister dead in childbirth, his brother dead of the fever that had swept through them the year before. “Life is burden and misery,” the old man intoned with sorrow, and the women began to weep. They wept because Nun was an orphan, because his own eyes remained dry and thoughtful, and their weeping rose in a passion of grief at their own lot. They all kissed Nun and they took him back to the shade of their hovels, leaving Moses as forgotten as if he had never existed.

  But the children remained with him, and since his slave had been welcomed and embraced at last, they accepted the master. They crowded around him as he walked towards the village, and when he sat down in the shade of one of the houses, his back against the mud wall and facing him a stretch of gardens where the Levites attempted to grow some crops with almost no irrigation, the children stilled the last of their fear. Skinny and scabious they were, but also beautiful, with their long brown eyes and their silken black hair. The oldest among them could have been no more than ten or eleven years old, perhaps some of the girls a little older, and Moses realized that their childhood was brief; older children were taken to work with the labour gangs. Where were the men of the tribe now, Moses asked them? But they were vague as to work and direction; the men would return at sunset; they were more interested in his shining hunting knife, and when he demonstrated that the polished iron of its blade was sharp enough to slice a hair he plucked from his head, they looked upon him as a magician. They had never seen iron before.

  Among themselves, they chattered in their own language, but with Moses they used the same sharply accented Egyptian that Nun spoke; and to Moses it was fascinating and enjoyable to talk with them. The truth of the matter was that never before had he put himself in such a relationship with a group of children. He was annoyed with himself, that he had allowed Nun to persuade him to put away all his trappings and jewels—they would have made gifts for the children; and he told one little girl that he would bring her a necklace of pearls to put around her neck. She did not know what the word pearl meant, and when he explained, they all took it as a great joke. He strung his great war bow, and they took turns trying to bend it, and then murmured with awe when he drew the string to his check. The little girl he had promised the pearls to crawled into his lap and asked him what his name was.

  “Moses,” he answered.

  They all giggled. “Oh, Egyptian,” the little girl said. One of the boys was bolder and said, “No one has a name like that.”

  Another put in, “Moses is half a name. What is the rest?”

  “That’s all there is,” Moses laughed.

  “Then what should we call you?”

  “Are you my friends now?”

  They all nodded seriously but one, who wanted to know whether they could be friends with an Egyptian. Moses said he thought they could be because he was a different kind of Egyptian. “Is that why you have half a name?” He nodded, and then they asked him what kind of Egyptian he was, and he told them that he was a prince of the Great House. It was the greatest joke of all, and the children shook with laughter and delight, for they had never met another man who said such things, even to make them laugh. But they still demanded to know what they should call him, and he answered them,

  “Call me Moses of the half-name, for that is what people without fear call me—”

  So he was hardly aware of Nun’s absence, and the time passed and the shadows of the afternoon grew longer. When he heard Nun’s voice he stood up, and then when Nun appeared with some of the women, the children scattered as if they had done something wrong. Nun announced with assumed obsequiousness,

  “I was too long, O my master. Forgive your slave.”

  Moses nodded, and together they departed. As they walked back the way they had come, Moses asked Nun,

  “What did you tell them about me?”

  “I told them that you were a captain of chariots who was now resting and hunting in the marshes for amusement. I told them you were an easygoing master, and because I had fought well in the wars, you had promised that I could see my people.”

  “Are these all the Levites?”

  “There is another village not far from here, but here I was born. We were a great tribe once and we still boast a proud heritage, but now how many of us are left? Eleven or twelve hundred at the most, and we die quickly, even as slaves die.” His voice was full o
f resentment, and Moses asked him, almost apologetically,

  “What did you tell them my name was?”

  “I gave you the name of that old priest you talk about so much, Amon-Teph.”

  “I told the children my name was Moses.”

  “Oh?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean that even a wise man can be a fool,” Nun blurted out, and Moses suddenly turned on him and cried,

  “You forget you’re a slave, Bedouin!”

  “I forget,” Nun whispered. “Forgive me.”

  They did not speak to each other again until their boat approached Neph’s landing at Tanis. Then Nun offered, half-hesitantly, the information that the woman named Miriam was the sister of Moses. Moses shrugged. It meant nothing, and he could not connect the acid-tongued, bitter and hostile woman he had seen and heard, to himself.

  [18]

  HE TOLD NEPH of his trip to Goshen, and he said, “I am coming to the end of something. I hope it isn’t my life.” To which Neph answered,

  “How old are you now, Moses?”

  “Not far from twenty-three years.”

  “The oldest time of youth, isn’t it?” Neph smiled. “Now you are at the moment when you have lived for eternity, and you must cherish that, because it will never return. From here on, the days and the years move faster and faster, and soon you will ask where is yesterday, while today slips unheeded through your fingers, and you will understand what is always so difficult for us Egyptians to understand, that there is always an end of something and a beginning of something. Don’t clutch too hard, boy, and don’t pity yourself.”