House of Dreams Read Free

what was in his mind when he took Pa-ari’s hand and led him along the sun-baked track to Wepwawet’s precincts. Perhaps he thought of nothing more than ensuring that his heir would not be cheated when it became his turn to plough the few fields supporting us. I remember standing in the doorway of our house and watching the two of them disappear into the white freshness of the early morning light. “Where is Father taking Pa-ari?” I asked my mother who was emerging behind me, a flax basket laden with washing in her arms. She paused, hefting the load onto her hip.
    “To school,” she replied. “Run back and fetch the natron, Thu, there’s a good girl. We must get this done and then take the dough to the oven.” But I did not stir.
    “I want to go too,” I said. She laughed.
    “No, you do not,” she said. “For one thing, you are too young. For another, girls do not go to school. They learn at home. Now hurry with the natron. I will start for the river.”
    By the time my mother had finished slapping the wash on the rocks beside the water, rubbing the coarse linen with natron while she gossiped with the other women who had gathered, my father had returned and gone back to the fields. I saw him bending, hoe in hand, green spears of wheat brushing his naked calves, as I trailed after my mother up the path from the river to the house. I helped her drape the washing over the line strung in our reception hall, open to the sky like all the others in the village, and then watched her fold and pound the dough for our evening meal. I was quiet, thinking, missing Pa-ari who had filled my days with games and small adventures among the papyrus fronds and weeds of the riverbank.
    When my mother set off for the communal oven I ran in the opposite direction, left the track that meandered beside the river and followed the narrow irrigation canal that watered father’s few acres. As I drew near he straightened and smiled, shading his eyes with one broad, calloused hand. I came up to him, panting.
    “Is something wrong?” he asked. I flung my arms around his solid thigh and hugged him. For some reason that memory has survived in me, bright and vivid after all these years. Often it is not the momentous occasions that cling, the times when we say to ourselves—I will remember this for as long as I live—but tiny, inconsequential happenings that flick past unremarked, only to surface time and again, becoming infused with greater reality as time draws us further from the original event. So it was for me then. I can still feel the soft mat of hair on his sun-blackened skin against my face, see the faintly stirring carpet of young crops so green against the further beige of a desert shimmering in the sun, smell his sweat, reassuring, safe. I stepped back and gazed up at him.
    “I want to go to school with Pa-ari,” I said. He bent, and taking a corner of his short, soil-powdered kilt, wiped his forehead.
    “No,” he replied.
    “Next year, Father, when I am four?”
    His slow smile widened. “No, Thu. Girls do not go to school.”
    I studied his face. “Why not?”
    “Because girls stay at home and learn from their mothers how to be good wives and tend babies. When you are older your mother will teach you how to help babies come into the world. That will be your work, here in the village.” I frowned, trying to understand. An idea occurred to me.
    “Father, if I ask Pa-ari, could he stay home and learn to help babies come and I can go to school instead of him?”
    My father seldom laughed, but on that day he threw back his head and his mirth echoed against the row of wilting palm trees that grew between his land and the village track. He squatted and enfolded my chin in his large fingers. “Already I pity the lad who sues for you in marriage!” he said. “You must learn your place, my little sweetheart. Patience, docility, humility, these are the virtues of a good woman. Now be a good girl and run home. Keep your mother