by Peter Pitzele

      At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his officials and all the Egyptians; and there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead.

 

 This is not actually a story about me; but it is a story I know from the inside. Much of it I learned from others who were caught up in this drama before I came on stage to play my part.  

Playing parts is actually the right way to put it. There was something about what we did, all of us, that belonged to theater. Though this, of course, was a theater of cruelty and of the absurd that makes all staged plays seem like parodies. Our show, our feignings and duplicities, our wearing of masks began in the time even before the edict, when a new king arose in Egypt who “did not know Joseph.” Until his ascendancy, the Hebrews had enjoyed a favored place in the land. Since the time of Joseph, we had been able to keep some property when the rest of the landholders had been turned into serfs, so there was a long-standing resentment of Hebrew privilege.

 Moreover, in the four hundred years of our citizenship in Egypt, we had become a useful class of economic administrators, skilled artisans, scribes, and civil functionaries. We had a sense—in retrospect I see it was misplaced but at the time it was surely understandable—that we were indispensable members of the governing, if not the ruling class. We kept many of our old ways of worship, but in every other respect we were model citizens. Yet this new king was able to stir up old grievances and play on old fears. Among the soldiers especially, where paranoia and ideas of heroic supremacy often take root, this oppression of the Hebrews was met with enthusiastic support. What was taken away from us  enriched the takers.

 Overnight things changed. Not only were our lands confiscated; many lost posts and positions. Under the guise of national mobilization—the threat of an armed invasion from the north—we were herded into workcamps. Our men were impressed into the labor force and sent out to build fortifications. Yet even there and in those conditions, our people found ways to persevere, even to flourish. Oppression made us more of a “we” than we had been before. Even when the king ordered the midwives to report the births of any male children to the local police, ways were found to foil this plan.

 But then came the general, fatal edict and its enforcement. It has come down through time in exactly the terse and terrible terms in which it was spoken by the criers and written in red ink on the doorposts in the squares: “Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile.” Just who the “you” was in that death sentence was never spelled out, but in the end it was the soldiers. Armed guards began to enter the slave quarters in surprise visits, and it seemed the walls listened for the sound of an infant’s cry. The patrols took to carrying about drums and horns which they would beat and blow in our make-shift villages in the hopes of startling an infant from sleep to scream. We keened to cover the noise. Families were rousted from their meals and their hovels  searched. More than once, some mother who had tried to keep her baby with her was heard shrieking in rage and terror as the soldiers carried her infant to the river and threw him in, as you might throw back a fish too small to cook. Mothers had to be restrained from hurling themselves into the river. After the first drownings, no one could doubt the ruthlessness of the soldiers. Pharaoh  had moved beyond oppression: he sought to exterminate us. 

 Many credit Shiphrah and Puah with beginning our theater of resistance, but ultimately it was the work of the queen. In that period, there were two courts which, in the day to day running of the state, were separate. In the North Pavillion was the king’s court, over which Pharaoh ruled, an entrenched, inherited monarchy utterly fused with the rituals of a state religion.

 The queen’s court in the South Pavaillion mimicked the king’s, except that it was a place without political power of any sort. It was the center of fashion and modish enthusiasms, a place for successful poets,  dancers, storytellers, musicians. The queen ruled in borrowed splendor. Her sovereignty rested on the king’s favor and that was fickle in the extreme. The queen was attended by the wives of the chief ministers and nobles, and further attended by an educated elite of women—many of whom were, even in this time, Hebrews who brought their domestic skills to the court and were often put in charge of the education of the royal children. The beaurocracy that surrounded the queen pre-existed and outlasted her, though she had some power of appointment during her reign.

 Only on state occasions, or at ceremonies when ambassadors were received or visiting rulers feted, or only on holidays did the two courts mingle into one brilliant extravaganza of pomp and profligacy.

 So, as I was saying, it all started with, or certainly started around, the queen. Some said that even the mid-wives took their cue from her, but that gives them too little credit for their own holy guile. But this particular queen, however one might account for her daring and righteousness, was an altogether extraordinary woman. She was at the very center of power, yet chosen, it seemed to us, as the mother of mercy and subterfuge. There were some who said that she had Hebrew blood in her. How else to explain her risks and sacrifices? Who knows? When you live in a country for 400 years there is bound to be a mixing of the bloodlines. More to the point, she was a gifted woman who found herself married to a monster. I believe some innate moral sense was quickened into life in response to the horrors she began to hear of, and she did not lack the courage nor the means to take action. Other women, of far less status and endowment, did likewise.

 I know that women’s worlds are thought by men to be ludicrous, trivial places, and certainly in other times, the queen’s court was a place of ultimate vanity and frivolity; but not so this queen and not so this time. In the course of several years, she was able by tactful appointment to draw to her women whom she knew she could trust and by tactful patronage to send elsewhere women whom she knew would not be loyal to her. It was not something that happened overnight, but in the end, she had formed around her a network of women, among them Hebrew women in the guise of serving women as well as Egyptian women of good families, who felt as she did about what was happening in the land and who could not sit by and watch a whole people enslaved and babies thrown screaming into the sacred Nile. Indeed there was sympathy among certain priests on account of this pollution.

 I know that none of the histories mention her, but nothing of what occurred in that country in those days could have happened without someone in a very high place giving it their sanction and support. My brother, Moses, was adopted by the queen’s own daughter. You don’t suppose she was able to keep such a thing from her mother, do you? Nor was she, a girl hardly older than myself and recently married to a pompous high-ranking officer in the charioteers, able to figure out and organize resistance on the scale it operated. My brother was certainly not the only baby who was adopted into an Egyptian family and raised there under the eyes of sometimes ignorant, sometimes conspiring men? On the Passover night, when we were bidden to ask our neighbors for “objects of silver and gold,” you don’t suppose we went after trinkets, do you? On that night? Of what possible use could they be in our exodus? No, these objects of silver and gold were nothing less than the children who had, until that moment, lived in adopted homes. They were our treasures, lent out, claimed back. “Gold” and “silver” were merely codes. On this night, under the pretext of this borrowing—more theater yet—we entered the homes where our children had been housed and fed and cared for; we were able to smear the doorposts with blood, and take our children home for that special, terrible, final meal.

 But I am ahead of myself.

 In the early days, this is the way it worked. When a woman was pregnant, the network of women who planned the adoptions would send out word, seeking a family to take in the child if it should be a boy. When the time came, if it was a boy, the infant would be placed into the river in a basket (fulfilling the letter of the law, which said only that children were to be “cast into the Nile”) and sent downstream—this usually happened in the very early morning when women went to the river to bathe or wash and men were doing whatever it is men do at that hour. I will not say that babies did not die. This scheme was hardly fool-proof; the baskets were known to leak or overturn, especially when the current was swift. But many were saved by a plan that persisted for many years and  through many births.

 The story you have of my brother’s adoption is largely true as you have heard it told. The princess was not in fact the intended mother. And Jocheved kept the child longer than anyone expected until my father and I prevailed on her, finally, to trust the system that had been established. The child had been swaddled in silence for three months, his every cry stopped by our hush, by a rag nipple, by a hand laid forcibly over his mouth. “Shhhhh,” was the word he heard in these earliest months of his life, poor thing. (I always believed it was this that accounted for his impediment of speech, the stammer of which he was so ashamed.) My mother wept over the little basket she wove for him; she agonized over the time and the river tides. Finally, impulsively at dawn on the third new moon, she cast her little baby into the Nile and sent me after it to watch.

 You can imagine my reaction when I saw it catch in the bulrushes just at the royal jetty. It wasn’t until I recognized two of the serving women who accompanied the queen’s daughter that I realized we might be able to count on her. Batya, as we Hebrews came to call her, saw the basket and pulled out of it the bundle it contained. I held my breath; I heard the baby’s cry. When I saw, from my place of concealment, that she drew the infant to her and rocked it gently in her arms, I came up to her, curtsied low, and, playing a part I had often played for other mothers and their river-born sons, asked her in formal terms if she wished a wet-nurse for the child. This was the pre-arranged phrase by which we signaled our confederacy. “Yes,” she said, and I brought my mother to her.

 Each day, four times a day, my mother came to the queen’s court, to Batya’s chamber, and nursed her child. How much my baby brother was able to understand about who she was, I never knew. The general agreement was that the child should be raised as an Egyptian and only told his real identity when he had the maturity to manage it. In other words, when he could play the part, keep up the ruse, maintain this theater of survival in which we all dissimulated.

 For my mother, the time came all too soon when her baby was to be weaned. Then Batya adopted him for her own and gave him the name he kept all his life. My mother’s grief was softened by knowing he was loved and knowing, too, that he had as comfortable a place to grow up in as any mother could wish for her darling boy.

 I saw my brother often. Batya recommended me to her mother, the queen,  who found me a position as a courier. Moses did not know who I was, though I developed a relationship with him in those days that was sisterly in all but name. I brought him little curios from the world beyond the walls of the palace, and as he grew a little in maturity, I answered his questions, though always with caution. It was not my place to strip away the disguise that he, unknowingly, wore; it hid him from himself, but it protected him from harm. I was also in a position to see how he fared in his adopted family.

 The truth is that he was a very happy child. When she took him in as a baby, Batya was newly married, and for several years Moses was her only child. She invented some cover story about him—a friend of hers had died in childbirth, and she had agreed to raise the child as her own; husbands, in those days and in those circles, did not care; they hardly knew what went on in the home. Their appetites were limited, sharp, quickly appeased, variously satisfied. In time, however, Batya had a child of her own, a boy who became a baby brother to Moses. I often saw them together in the palace gardens among the peacocks, by the great pool with the gilded flamingoes, and in the palm courts where the horses were trained.  In time, Batya had other children and then one day, when he was thirteen, she took Moses aside and told him the true story of who he was.

 The next time I saw him, he was changed. He was off by himself and wanted to be left alone. Once I even saw him push away his little brother who, bewildered and in tears, had to be led back to her mother by the serving woman. When I tried to approach him he turned on me with a snarl. “You kn…kn…knew,” he said, his stammer always acute when he was excited. “What is my n…n…name? What is my r…real n…name?” I had no answer, for we did not name him when he was born, for fear of loving him too much. We had called him only “Tovah,” meaning our good little one. No amount of explanation, at least at that point, could appease him. He was still young, perhaps too young to have been told. By the next time I saw him, he had pulled away from his family completely. He brooded about the palace, churlish, sullen, stared over the parapets down into the terraced city below, or from the eastern wall he gazed for hours at the smoky hovels of the Hebrews in the infested lowlands near the river.

 I don’t think he spoke to Batya unless he had to and then only with the coldest courtesy. She was bereft. “I’ve lost him,” she would say to me. “He won’t answer to his name when I call him by it. Doesn’t he know how much I loved him?” And though I told her that he would, in time, come to realize what had been done for him, my reassurances never seemed to get through to her. I was unable to say anything to him. He couldn’t see the goodness, the care, the resourcefulness, the emergency; all he could see was that he had been lied to. His protected spoiled little heart was full of its own hurt. Many is the time I felt like boxing his ears, but he was already big for his age and I did not want to risk his rage.

 Two years later, he disappeared. I heard for a fact that he had killed an Egyptian overseer in cold blood, had stolen a horse, and ridden east. Some effort of pursuit was made, but nothing came of it. Not long afterwards, the king died, and at least the slaughter of children ceased, though by this time the Hebrews were so broken and enslaved that no one thought it necessary to slaughter their children. People were dying of mal-nutrition, disease, and the savagery of the work. The new king, Batya’s half brother by a former queen, continued his father’s policies, and, if it was possible, he seemed to drive us even harder. During that time, our father, Amram, died.

Many years passed in this way.

 And then Aaron left, telling us he had been summoned in a dream to seek his brother out in Midian, Midian of all places. Then, one day in the autumn, the two brothers, miraculously it seemed to me, returned. Moses moved in with us, but there was no familiarity with him, though I think he tried to find a place in the family. His mind was on other things. He told us to call him by the name he had been given, Moses. It was right, he said; it was his; it was a name one of his mothers had given to him. By this I knew that much had changed in him.

 But there were far more obvious changes. He and Aaron came out of the wilderness like two wild men, bearded, their eyes on fire. After a brief time of preparation and planning, they moved among us like fire over dry grass. The readiness to revolt was in the blood of the oppressed, and all that was needed was the spark of leadership. Moses, knowing this, went to the North Pavillion with Aaron and bargained with the king, warning that unless there was a relief from the tyranny, there would be a bloody revolution.

 In these matters, the inexplicable played its part. The winter of his return witnessed disasters, plagues, amazing visitations. It was as if the elements themselves conspired with my brothers to lend them their authority. Talk about theater! Anyway, you know the story, how it has all been neatly set down, though it was not so neat in the living of it. 

 During this time, my brother was everywhere: among the people, keeping alive their hope and the credibility of their revolt; in the court, negotiating for their release; with the elders, helping them to imagine an exodus and the need for some kind of order in it; with the court magi, in lengthy theological argument, explaining to them about a God they knew nothing about; visiting the sick in the make-shift infirmaries; then conferring with the elders again, whose fear of reprisal warred with a mounting, irrational hope. It was an irrational time, a mad, irrational time. And so it went, through a pestilential winter.

 We come now to the night of nights.  

 It was late in the evening when, at last, Moses and Aaron came home. The sun was set, a red, full moon rising. We were still living in the house of his birth; the empty chair for his father stood mutely at the table.

 He was exhausted. For weeks he had been instructing elders, and anyone who would listen for that matter, about the right conduct of the night and the meal, warning cajoling, insisting. In particular, of course, he had to see to the slaughter of the lamb. Most families had no such luxury; so he had to devise ways for people to share, determine how the blood was to be carried, the meat parceled out for food: it was an immensely complicated task. And even though by this time Moses was seen as God’s own prophet, the inheritor of Abraham, still there only so much men could do or would do without hearing from him directly.

 On that night, he came in grey with weariness, slumped into a chair, and pushed the leg of roast lamb away from him. None of us had the stomach to eat. He seemed utterly mortal in his fatigue, utterly haunted in his eyes, as if he had already seen what we were all too soon to see. Our mother sat by him, and then shyly she reached out and laid her hand on his arm. I remember this gesture for what it began, but even at the time, it touched me, that withered hand resting on the strong forearm of her son. Then he, reaching over wearily, covering her hand with his. “Mother,” he said with a sigh.

 “Will this thing you have told us about happen?”

 “I b-believe it will.”

 “It will be a terrible thing.”

 “It will be.”

 “And it will happen to everyone?”

 “Everyone whose doorpost is not smeared with b-blood.”

 “That it should come to this.” And she bowed her head, the white hair falling over her eyes.

 There was a silence then. In truth, the two of them had seen very little of one another, and this affection between them, this gentleness between them, seemed precious.

 “My son, have you forgiven me?”

 “Yes, m…mother. You gave me life, you protected my life.”

 “Have you forgiven me,” I asked, remembering the rage in his eyes years ago when I saw him in the palace. I was never sure he had forgiven me for the part I had had to play. And I knew that once you feel deceived as he had felt deceived, it is hard ever to trust again.

 “Yes, M…Miriam, a thousand times over. I was confused and in pain, lashing out.”

 “And Batya…have you forgiven her?” I asked.

 “Everyday when I have gone to the palace, I have tried to look in on her, but I am guarded and watched always, and I am afraid to jeopardize her. I owe her m…my life even as I owe you and my m..mother my life. She…” and he stopped, for at that moment the candles on the table flickered as if a wind had blown through the chinks of the door, and indeed, there was a sound in the air, like a wind.

 We looked at one another, the jigging candlelight making the shadows jump on our still faces, making distorted shapes. I saw my mother’s fingers clutch at Moses’ arm. Her lips began to move in some wordless prayer.

 Then in a flash, Moses eyes swept to mine. “Batya!” he said. “O my God, Batya.” He started from the table overturning his chair. “M…M…M…” then he quit trying to say my name, his face red with the effort. “Is she warned? Is she protected?”

 “No, no,” I said, realizing in a flash the immense, hideous, impossible oversight. “But how can it be?” for what was dawning on him was now dawning on me. “I thought the whole palace is to feel the wrath of God on this night. I thought…”

 “But we have m…m…marked our n…neighbors doors. We m…marked the doors of all those who took our children in.”

 “Yes, yes. But I never…I never thought. O my God.”

 He was already turning and out the door, screaming “Batya!” into the night. I followed him. His “Batya” filled the streets along which all doors were shut. He ran before me, the wind billowing out his cloak, and overhead the moon, full when it rose, had begun to darken. I looked up and saw that darkness was eating away at its side, and with the growing darkness, all night sounds were ceasing, the peepers, the crickets. Only the wind was sounding while ahead of me, farther ahead all the time for I could not match his speed, his “Batya!” cut the air.

 The palace was a great way off. We ran through the slave quarters, then through the artisan shops, closed down and hunched in the graying moon, then past the burgher’s houses on the lower tiers of the terraced hill, and then farther up the slope our feet found the pavement where the royal road began. Here the army of the royal guard was billeted. When he came near these, my brother ran on in silence while overhead the moon, like a great silver wafer, was being eaten up by darkness. The wind assumed a tearing velocity, overturning baskets, shaking the heads of the palms, bringing down the thatch from cottages, rattling the spears in their copper brackets. As I ran, I saw him as a boy playing with his little brother by the golden pools, in the shadows of the stately palms. His brother…a first-born.

 It was a miracle that no one stopped this fleeing man or the woman who pursued him. And he arrived at last at the palace door, its outer gate locked against the night. Against this he hurled himself, pounding upon it. “Batya!” he cried out, a cry like a piercing wail, “Batya!” like a child crying for its mother in the terror of the night. And he beat his fists against the iron door while I, panting, breathless, stood aside, helpless, watching as he beat his fists against the door until his knuckles bled. And now the moon,  closing like a heavy eye, gleamed a ghastly wink under its lid. It seemed to me a thing of utter evil, that glinting, snakelike sliver of an eye. Total darkness was almost upon us, and in the last cold light of that dying moon I saw my brother tear his knuckles with his teeth and smear his own blood on the palace door. Then, the moon was snuffed, the wind rose in a roar and it seemed to me the air was filled with a sound of wailing as if every creature found its ultimate beastly cry of grief and terror and hurled its voice out into the hurling wind. Then from the palace, I heard the high-pitched ululation of a woman and sensed by the faint starlight my brother’s body slump to earth.

 In the end, she came with us, Batya did, widowed and worn. Like so many others from that country who choose to leave with us she wandered between worlds, for our God was not her god and our people were not her people. Yet to speak truly, we were not a people yet and we knew nothing of God. But she came, empty and grey, like so many of the wraiths who straggled out of the cities and towns and heaved in silent, stunned bands towards the Sea of Reeds, our appointed place of rendezvous. My brother walked beside her; I never saw them speak, but when we came to the great crossing, Moses had his mother on one arm, Batya on the other, and so they crossed—and with them a multitude beyond counting—into the wilderness beyond.