What Women Know

On the twenty-fourth evening of waiting, the fire burned low enough that the three women sitting around it became more shadow than face.

Tzipporah had come without explaining why. She did that sometimes — appeared at the fireside of Hur's lane as if she had been walking the camp for private reasons and happened to stop where people would not ask her to be the prophet's wife for a few minutes.

The north-lane widow had been there first, as she often was, because the old rarely need invitations to fire. She sat with a bowl of ground manna on one knee and her silence, for once, unfurnished by commentary.

Mira was mending a sandal strap that had broken three times already this week.

"You are pulling the leather too tight," Tzipporah said.

Mira loosened the loop.

"How long did you wait?" she asked.

"For what?"

"When he went to Egypt the first time. To speak to Pharaoh."

Tzipporah did not answer at once. She turned a stick through the coals until a soft breath of heat answered the motion.

"Long enough to pack twice," she said. "Once to follow him. Once to stay."

"Which pack survived?"

"Neither. I made a third in the morning and let the mule decide."

Mira almost smiled.

"And if the mule had chosen differently?"

Tzipporah set the stick down.

"Then I would have stayed in Midian and raised the boys near my father's well and spent the rest of my life knowing I had married a man who walked into a furnace while I held the water skins outside."

The fire shifted in the silence.

"He does not speak of you," Mira said, and then wished she had not.

"No." Tzipporah's voice carried no wound. Only the long-settled fact. "He does not speak of many things that live inside him. The bush, perhaps. The words at the mountain. Me." She paused. "He is the loneliest man in Israel and he cannot say so because the people need him to be less than human in one direction and more than human in every other."

The widow stirred.

"Less than human?"

"A man who is fully human would have broken under them by now." Tzipporah looked into the coals. "They need him to endure what no person should bear and then answer their ingratitude without bitterness. That requires something beyond patience. And so they unmake him into function and resent him for being distant."

Mira set the sandal down.

She had never heard Tzipporah speak this long about Moshe. The woman who kept a surface of dry competence and short judgments had opened a door Mira did not know existed.

"Do you miss Midian?" she asked.

"I miss the scale of it." Tzipporah picked up the stick again but did not use it. "In Midian the dangers had edges. A well could dry. A goat could stray. A sandstorm could arrive and leave. Here the danger has no edges. It moves through the people like water through cloth, and every morning I wake wondering which direction it has soaked overnight."

The widow set her bowl on the ground with a small click.

"I had a son," she said.

Both women turned.

The old woman did not lift her face from the fire.

"Fourteen years old. In the kilns. A brick stack that should have been shored and was not, because the overseer was counting bodies elsewhere." Her hands settled in her lap. "I carried him to the burial myself because there was no one else and the Egyptians do not halt labour for Hebrew grief."

"I did not know," Mira said.

"No one here does. The camp I came from was not this camp. The people who knew have either died or forgotten, which amounts to the same thing when you are old enough."

Tzipporah looked at the widow with an expression Mira had never seen on her — not pity, which Tzipporah would have despised as readily as the widow would have refused, but recognition. One woman who had carried the unbearable thing looking at another.

"What was his name?" Tzipporah asked.

"Gershon."

"That is a good name."

"It was his father's idea. His father did not survive long enough to hear it used."

The fire had almost gone. Beyond them the camp stretched in rows of tent and shadow, the cloud above them still and bright against the dark. The spies had been gone twenty-four days. No one knew what they were finding. No one could know what the report would cost.

"Men speak of the land," the widow said after a while. "They speak of walls and grapes and giants and proportions. They do not speak of what women already know."

"Which is?" Mira asked.

"That every promised place is also a place where your children must live after you are gone."

Tzipporah nodded once.

"And that matters more than the walls."

"Yes."

"And less than the God behind the promise."

"That too."

Mira looked at the two women and understood that she had spent the wilderness learning from men — Moshe, Aharon, Hur, Dathan — while the women beside her had been carrying knowledge no one had spoken aloud because the camp's idea of teaching was a man standing before a crowd.

These two had taught by staying. By carrying. By keeping silent until the silence held more than any sentence.

"I do not know enough yet," Mira said.

The widow gave her a dry look.

"You are nineteen. Of course you do not."

"That is not kind."

"No. But the strap will hold now."

Mira looked down. The sandal she had been mending had somehow been finished during the conversation, the leather drawn correctly at last, the knot seated where it would bear weight without cutting.

She had no memory of tying it.

Outside the ember-light the camp slept under the cloud and waited for men who were walking where none of them had yet been willing to follow.