House of Dreams Read Online Free Page B

up and hurried over to her reluctantly and she handed me a thick linen cloth and told me to hold it beneath Ahmose. “Look,” she said. “The crown of the baby’s head. Push now, Ahmose! It is time!” With a last wail Ahmose did as she was told and the baby slithered into my unwilling hands. It was yellow and red with body fluids. I knelt there stupidly, staring at it as it flailed its little limbs. My mother tapped it smartly and it let out a breathless howl and began to cry. She passed it carefully to Ahmose, who was already smiling weakly and reaching for it. As she settled it against her breast it turned its head, blindly nuzzling for food. “You need not worry,” my mother said. “It cried ‘ni ni,’ not ‘na na.’ It will live. And it is a boy, Ahmose, perfectly formed. Well done!” She swept up a knife, and I saw the pulsing cord in her slimed fingers. I had had enough. With a mumbled word I left the room. The women outside sprang up as I pushed past them. “It’s a boy,” I managed, and they surged towards the stairs with shrieks of joy as I fell into the cool, vast air of dawn.
    I stood leaning against the wall of the house, eagerly sucking up the clean odour of vegetable growth and dusty sand and a faint whiff of the river. “Never!” I whispered to the greying, palm-brushed sky. “Never!” I did not know what I meant by the vehement word, but in a confused way it had something to do with cages and fate and the long traditions of my people. I ran my fingers down my boyish chest, across my concave little stomach under the enveloping sheath, as though to reassure myself that my flesh was still my own. I dug my bare toes into the film of sand that always drifted in from the desert. I gulped at the tiny wind presaging the slow rising of Ra. Behind me I heard the women’s voices, chattering excitedly and incomprehensibly, and the baby’s intermittent thin protests. Soon my mother came out, bag in hand, and in the first light of the day I saw her smile at me.
    “She is worried about the flow of her milk,” she remarked as we set off for home. “All mothers share the same concerns. I left a bottle of ground swordfish bone with her, to be warmed in oil and applied to her spine. But she need not worry. She has always been very healthy. Well, Thu,” she beamed. “What did you think? Is it not a wonderful experience, helping to bring new life into the world? When you have attended more births, I will allow you to minister to my women yourself. And soon I will show you how to combine the medicines I use. You will become as proud of your work as I am.”
    I gazed ahead to the quiet ribbon of the path with its line of trees now swiftly gaining definition as Ra prepared to burst over the horizon. “Mama, why did she say she hated her husband?” I asked hesitantly. “I thought they were happy together.”
    My mother laughed. “All women in labour curse their husbands,” she said matter-of-factly. “It is because their husbands are the cause of the pain that traps them. But as soon as the pain stops they forget how they suffered and they welcome their men back to their beds with as much eagerness as before.”
    Traps them … I thought with a shudder. Other women might forget the pain but I know I never will. And I know I will not make a good midwife though I will try. “I want to learn about the medicines,” I said, and did not need to go on, for my mother stopped walking and bent to hug me. “Then you shall, my blue-eyed darling. Then you shall,” she said triumphantly.
    I did not realize until much later how profoundly the experience of that night served to focus the discontent with which, I am certain, I was born. All I knew at the time was that I was repulsed by the sheer animality of childbirth, did not envy Ahmose the life of constant care the arrival of the baby would mean, and shied away from the deep stirrings of panic the event represented. I felt guilty because my mother seemed