Stars

Part one. Fair to look upon

My name is Abram and I'm credited with founding three religions. And if you find that hard to believe, I can tell you that I find it harder. It felt to me like I was spending all my time here on earth just trying to feed my family. We were doing this trek down to Egypt, for instance, because a drought had descended on Canaan where we were living. I left the Negev with three asses, and eight goats. Two months later, when the Nile delta finally came into view, I was down to two asses and no goats. My family only consisted, at this stage, of me and my wife Serai. Plus two serving-women, and a serving-man who was so old that I had to serve him.

I could have used young men to help protect us in this foreign land -- sons -- but Sarai had never given me any. Or daughters for that matter. That was a bizarre state of affairs in my mind, given how often we still made love. Here at the gates of Egypt, in the twenty-second year of our marriage, my heart could still skip a beat when it came home to me yet again what a beautiful woman she was. Even more beautiful, now, in her forty-first year, than she had been at nineteen when I married her. And I hadn't given up, by the way, on making sons with her. Call me a nutcase if you want, but a nameless and formless but all-powerful being had started speaking to me by this time, and had promised me that my descendants would, some day, be as numerous as stars in the sky.

I feared, when I first heard that voice, that I might be going crazy, and confided my delusions to Sarai, hoping that she could help me put them to rest. She told me, however, that my intuitions had served us well in the past, and that she could see no reason to stop trusting them. As time went by she came to believe, in fact, even more firmly than I did, that the messages I was receiving had to be taken seriously.

* * *

Happy and proud as I was of my wife's beauty, I was also becoming acutely aware, as we entered Egypt, that those looks were a source of both danger and opportunity. The situation was, I realized, going to require some very careful management.

I put my plan to her this way: "Behold now," I told her, getting straight to the point, "I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon."

"What," she asked, "are you getting at?"

"It shall come to pass," I explained, "that when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife: and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive. Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and my soul shall live because of thee."

She didn't look receptive.

"If we play this right Serai, it could give us a chance of having a comfortable life."

That was meant to be my clincher, but it sent her, instead, from non-receptive to pissed off. She turned on her heel and walked away.

I could understand why she wasn't crazy about my plan. I wasn't either, reader, but what other options did we have? And please don't imagine, by the way, that I made a business of cashing in on my wife's beauty, because I didn't.

I know that Genesis 20 has me pulling the same "she's my sister" trick on a Philistine king up in Canaan, and there's even a story in Genesis 26 of my son Isaak doing it with his wife Rebekah, but those are just separate images of the the eposide that was about to unfold in Egypt. The image of a bright object at the far edge of the Universe can get separated, your astronomers tell us, into two or more copies by a thing called gravitational lensing. That, reader, is what happened with the "she's my sister" story I'm about to tell you: it survived because it turned out, in the end, to be a bright light in the life of my people, but it got split into three separate stories, because it took place on the distant edge of recorded history.

Back, anyway, to the story. "Sure enough," the New Living Translation of Genesis 12:14--16 puts it, "when Abram arrived in Egypt, everyone noticed Sarai's beauty. When the palace officials saw her, they sang her praises to Pharaoh, their king, and Sarai was taken into his palace. Then Pharaoh gave Abram many gifts because of her -- sheep, goats, cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female servants, and camels."

I had still been hoping, at the start of this arrangement, that Serai would be playing a mainly ornamental role in Pharoah's harem, that he wouldn't be bothering her too much. Now, however, I felt a stab of anguish every time a new camel, or another polite and respectful young slave showed up at the riverside property Pharaoh had given me. No way, I realized, would he be sending me all this stuff if he wasn't happy -- very happy -- with Sarai.

As you can imagine, that realization made me painfully jealous. I hesitate to tell you good people this, but it also made me perversely and disturbingly excited. Thoughts of her taking off her clothes for him, and of all the things that would follow from that were in my head all the time. Having sex with the slave girls that Pharaoah had sent me provided an ersatz kind of relief for my overheated condition, but the release I was really aching for was, of course, to sexually reclaim Serai herself.

And yes, readers, she had become important to Pharaoh. That was confirmed when I was invited to a banquet at the palace: she was sitting beside him at the head of the table, while I was eight or ten people away, next to a boring aristocrat who was talking to me about fowling. Did I want to join him after the new moon, he asked, to see how they set their nets? No I did not. I wanted my wife back, and I was finding it hard to stay focused on what he was saying, because my eyes kept returning to the head of the table where Serai was being the gracious Chaldean lady. Her performance was entirely proper, except that she seemed to be giving Pharoah more private smiles, more eye contact, than social convention demanded. I found that unsettling, but there was, of course, nothing I could do but call for another cup of wine.

* * *

Two months later Pharaoh sent for me again. This visit was meant, his messenger explained, to be a surprise for Serai. I couldn't see her right away when she came walking into the hall where Pharaoah and I were standing, because a statue of the jackal-headed god Anubis was in the way, but I could hear her laughing and talking. This was obviously a relaxed and happy woman, but her face registered shock when she saw me. And, even though I was expecting to see her, I was shocked too: she looked so completely different. The new Sarai was wearing a snow-white linen sheath fastened just under her breasts, ochre makeup on her lips and her nipples, and black eyeliner. All perfectly respectable here in Egypt, but outrageous to my Mesopotamian eyes.

"What's the matter with you two?" Pharoah asked. "I thought you'd be delighted to see each other."

"I am, Divinity. I'm just not used to seeing her in Egyptian dress."

"Lighten up Abram," he said, placing a hand on my shoulder. "You two live here now. I'm happy about that, and I hope you are too."

"Of course we are, Divine Lord," Sarai put in, beaming her old, warm smile at both of us.

"Well there you go then," said Pharoah. "Why don't you go for a walk with your brother? Show him the ponds."

* * *

Jealousy is an unlovely emotion. I hadn't spoken to her alone for six months, and I wanted to know everything. Everything, in particular, about sex between them. She answered my questions as patiently as she could.

"Yes," she was saying, "it's true that I've become his favorite. I'm sure that must be quite obvious."

Did he still, I wanted to know, make love to his other wives?

"Yes, quite often. He's not an inconsiderate guy."

"Does he make love to you in their presence?"

"No. Only in front of Ufina. My Nubian maidservant." She paused when she saw the look on my face. "Abram," she asked, "are you sure you want to hear this?"

"I won't try to kid you Sarai, it hurts. But it would hurt way worse if you didn't tell me." The effect of the perverse sexual excitement I was starting to feel along with this hurt was hidden, fortunately, by a loose robe.

"Well OK then. Ufina's usually on hand in the bedroom to get us stuff and, you know, clean up."

"Clean up?"

"Clean us up. And when he feels like spending the whole night with me, he has her first. Says it takes the urgency away, so he can last longer with me. Devote more time to my pleasure."

Now I was in a state, people. Shaking. Heart hammering. Hands icy. Penis so painfully erect that it was uncomfortable to walk. Sexual obsession, horribly mixed up with jealousy and regret. What fool I'd been! Telling myself that she'd been submitting to him out of a sense of duty to me -- going through the motions of this Pharoah gig in a detached way to keep our brother-sister con going.

"So what you're telling me, Sarai, is that you have orgasms with him, right? Are they as big as the ones you have with me? How many times a night do you have them?"

No reply. I should have had the sense to hold my tongue at this point, but I blundered on.

"Do you get them in batches like you did with me or just one at a time?"

More silence.

"Well? Are you going to tell me or not?"

She turned to me in a fury, cheeks blotchy with rage: "Shut up! Shut up!"

That shocked me, finally, into silence.

"May I remind you," she said at length, in a choked voice, "that this whole thing was your idea?"

"You're right," I admit. "It was."

"Damn right it was. And now you're upset because I'm enjoying sex with him! What did you want? That I should be a flesh and blood woman with you, but a wooden doll with him?"

"No Sarai, no!"

"Yes Abram! You wanted me to be a real woman with you, and a hooker with him! You wanted acting, right? You wanted cynical. That's why you thought you could pimp me out in the first place, isn't it?

All the things in this fabulous garden we were walking through -- the ponds with the big Nile fishes stirring in their depths, the tall palms, the flat-topped mimosa trees, the gazelles with their flicking tails -- all these things were dissolving into a blur, now, behind the the tears that were filling my eyes. My judgement, my morals, my whole life, stood revealed as shit. I felt that I had lost Serai forever, and her next words seemed to confirm that:

"If I were you, Abram," she said, "I would pray to that formless, nameless, all-powerful being of yours for acceptance."

Her tone -- sarcastic rather than reassuring -- seemed to imply that my idea of a connection with an all-powerful being had been a grandiose delusion. Wishful thinking to cover up a life-long struggle against poverty and inadequacy.

Sarai was also crying now. Probably, I assumed, because she had ended up with such a failure, such a jerk, for a husband.

A good fifteen minutes went by in silence. Our walk was nearly over, the palace coming back into view, when she turned to me again:

"And if you want me back Abram, you had better ask the formless being to show us a way to make it happen."

Dear god! Could there still be hope?

Part 2: Nebba gedzhis adahl

I, Ramses IX, eighth king of Egypt's Twentieth Dynasty, builder of the Sun Temple at Heliopolis, commissioner of the monumental artworks at Karnak, and doer, besides, of a whole bunch of other cool stuff, was nervous about taking physical possession of my newest consort. Her beauty was somehow too... ethereal.

Would an angel like Sarai even have the dark bush of hair, the untidy pink folds you see between the thighs of flesh-and-blood women? Believe me trusted readers, she had those things. Sliding my hand down the curve of that lovely belly to verify this fact, two contradictory things happened: her sex flooded, firstly, like the Nile when the rains fall beyond the upper cataracts, but -- good luck figuring this one out! -- she also started crying. Softly at at first, then with bitter, wracking sobs.

This happened not once, but half a dozen times. She was prepared to take me anyway, tears or no tears -- "Forgive me Divine Lord! I must do my duty to you!" -- but that wasn't the way I wanted her.

I consulted my soothsayer, who told me she might be a widow. "Probably recently widowed, Divinity. There could be many reasons why she doesn't want to speak of it."

"Have you talked to her about this?"

"No, Divine One, only about day-to-day matters. I felt I would learn more, that way, than through direct questioning."

"So did you figure anything else out?"

"That she is a woman of great passion, Divinity, and that her body yearns to be united with yours."

"Why the tears then?"

"I would guess, my Lord," the soothsayer answered, "that she probably experienced strong pleasures with her late husband. Perhaps those feelings return when you caress her, and re-ignite her grief."

"Do you have a potion to help me win her over?"

"Only patience, Eternal One. But I am confident that it will work."

* * *

You may not have the power of life and death over people that I have, reader, but be thankful that you have more privacy than me. The courtiers, slaves, concubines and eunuchs that surround me started chattering like a tree full of finches when I decided to take Serai along on my winter hunt, "when he's not even fucking her!"

I was doing the patience thing with Serai. She made it plain, on our barge trip up the river, and again on our overland trek toward the Sudan, that she was prepared to try the physical connection again, but I told her that, for now, her company and conversation were all I wanted.

When we arrived, finally, at my hunting camp, it was already dark. There was no moon out, so we picked our way carefully into the blackness of a nearby wadi, while my people were unpacking and preparing the place for our stay. Out there away from the fires, the stars crowded against each other in such numbers, and blazed down with such intensity, that it was on the edge of being scary.

"I had no idea at all," Sarai said, gazing up at the clouds of stars strung out along the Milky Way, "that there were so many." She shivered, and then suddenly clung to me.

In the blessed absence of ministers, ambassadors, priests, merchants, and lobbiests, we ate oryx liver grilled on Sahara mesquite, peasant bread, goat's milk cheese, olives, ostrich egg and chunks of wild honeycomb. Beyond the popping of the embers, the dreamland whimper of a hunting-dog, and the occasional growl of one of our camels, there was nothing but silence around us.

An unspoken understanding had arisen that we would spend that night together, but when we got to my tent she made none of the seductive moves that I've come to expect from women. She just sat there on my bed, holding my eyes with hers. I didn't know what to make of the soft and serious look on her face. For a moment I thought she was going to start crying again, but she reached for my hand instead, and held it in both of hers.

Much later that night, after I had made love to her more times than I had been capable of any any time since my early twenties, I was lying behind her, a hand cradling one of her breasts, my now-soft penis comfortingly pressed against the crack of her bum, trying to figure what this was all about. I'd enjoyed ivory-white Hittite courtesans, coal-black Nubian princesses, the slutty wives of foreign potentates, virgin teenage captives, canny businesswomen, charming hostesses, Syrian necromancers, Sumerian aristocrats and Midianite serving-women, but few of them, reader -- OK I'll say it: none of them -- had taken me to the places Sarai and I had reached in the past hours.

Thinking back on those hours, I felt yet another wave of desire starting to build. As if she were telepathically linked to me, Sarai's bum starting to make small movements against my penis. Incredibly, I felt the beginnings of yet another erection.

"Careful," she said, "I'm really sore."

"Well then let's not..." I began, but Serai was already pulling me on top of her.

How come the most powerful monarch in the world has to stand in line, wait half a lifetime, to get a share of this transcendant kind of passion?

"Lots of people," she said with her mouth glued to mine, "nebba gedzhis adahl." Sensing that I hadn't understood, she broke off the kiss. "Lots of people," she repeated, "never get this at all."

The realization that neither my supposedly unlimited royal power, nor my allegedly divine status could secure me a dependable supply of this bliss, brought on a sudden fear.

"Please tell me, Sarai, that you'll always be here for me."

She responded by holding me very tight. But, because the sun god Ra was poking the first of his yellow fingers into the tent, I could also see that my outburst/plea had, for some reason, made her cheeks shiny with tears.

* * *

A magical spring and a summer followed, with times of great joy. But somehow, something was still missing. Nothing I could put my finger on -- just today's hesitation, yesterday's evasion, or the shadow that fell across last month's togetherness. It finally came home to me, in any event, that she was not yet fully mine.

"It sounds like she's still hung up on her husband," the soothsayer said. "Maybe he's still alive. A captive, say, or a slave... In some situation, anyway, which could leave her hoping that they might be re-united."

"She talks of having had a husband," I replied, "but never of the details."

"Looks like it might be time, Divine Lord, to get some clear answers from her."

"I fear you're right."

"Fear, Lord?"

"Because I might not like the ones I get."

"All the more reason to get them sooner, Eternal One, rather than later."

I got those answers on the same day. When I walked into Serai's apartment that afternoon, I found her crushing silphium buds with a mortar and pestle. Silphium was a Libyan herb that worked as effectively as a contraceptive as your pill does. I had been wondering all year why Sarai wasn't getting pregnant. Telling myself it was because she was past forty.

The time for truth-telling had clearly arrived.

* * *

That, faithful reader, is how I learned the truth about her situation. Far worse than the brother-sister con she had run on me with Abram, was the fact that she was still expecting to get back with him -- still wanting to get back with him! She had an unshakeable conviction that a nameless, invisible but all-powerful god had imposed a duty on her to have children with him... (Which was, of course, why she had been using the silphium to stop me from impregnating her.)

My first impulse was to have Abram killed. Sarai could maybe be kept on as a concubine, but the way I felt now, it would be better to get her away from here. Pass her on to one of my frontier commanders, or send her up to the Syrian slave dealer.

"That was quite the act you put on Serai. The love stuff. Had me totally fooled for a while"

"Great Lord, you have every reason to have me killed, and part of me thinks you should. But the love between you and me was in no sense an act."

"Glad to hear it Serai. Sorry it wasn't as good with us as it was with your husband."

"Sex with my husband was good, Divine Lord, but nothing like what you and I had. I don't have to tell you how far beyond the ordinary it was. You were there. Didn't you say that you had never had that kind of loving with any other woman?"

I hope the person who is channeling this to you twenty-first century people out there can manage to convey to you how crazy-making I found those last words. "So exactly why the fuck," I shouted at her, "can't you forget about going back to him? Am I missing something here?"

"He and I were joined in a covenant, Great Lord, with the nameless god to produce descendants who will be a light to the nations, and bring justice to the world."