in the roof above my bed. My father took his best copper bowl to the Temple and had me registered in the book of births as his own son born of Kipa. But the circumcision he did himself, for he was a doctor and feared the priests’ knives, because they left infected wounds. Therefore he did not let the priests touch me. Also he may have wanted to save money, for a poor people’s doctor is not a wealthy man.
I cannot recall seeing or living all this, but my parents have told me these things so often and in such unvarying phrases that I must believe them and have no reason to suppose they lied. But throughout my childhood I never doubted that they were my parents, and no sadness darkened my childhood. They did not tell me the truth until my boy’s locks were shorn and I became a youth. They told me then because they feared and honoured the gods, and my father did not want me to live a lie my whole life through.
But who I was and where I came from and who my parents were, I never learned. However, for reasons I shall speak of later, I believe I know, but that is just my own suspicion.
The one thing I know for sure is that I was not the only one to be carried down the river in a pitched reed boat. Thebes with its palaces and its temples was a big city, and the mud hovels of the poor clustered endlessly about the temples and palaces. In the time of the great Pharaohs, Egypt had brought many nations under its sway, and with power and wealth came altered customs, and foreigners came to Thebes as merchants and craftsmen to build temples there to their own gods. Great was the splendour and wealth of the temples and the palaces, great also the poverty outside the walls. Many poor people put their children out, but also many a rich wife, whose husband was away on his travels, sent the proof of her adultery down the river in a reed boat. Perhaps I was abandoned by a sailor’s wife who had been unfaithful to her husband with some Syrian merchant. Perhaps I was some foreigner’s child, since I had not been circumcised. When my hair was cut and my mother had put it away in a little wooden box next to my first sandal, I looked long at the reed boat she showed me. The reeds were yellowed and broken and sooty with smoke from the brazier. It was tied with fowler’s knots, but that was all it could tell me of my parentage. It was then that my heart felt its first wound.
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3
With the approach of age, the soul flies like a bird back to the days of childhood. Now those days shine bright and clear in my memory until it seems as if everything then must have been better, lovelier than in the world of today. In this, rich and poor do not differ, for there is surely none so destitute but his childhood shows some glint of happiness when he remembers it in age.
My father Senmut lived upstream from the Temple walls, in a squalid, noisy quarter. Near his house lay the big stone wharves where the Nile boats discharged their cargoes, and in the narrow alley ways were the sailors’ and merchants’ taverns and the pleasure houses to which the wealthy also came, borne on chairs from the inner city. Our neighbours were tax gatherers, barge masters, non-commissioned officers and a few priests of the fifth order. Like my father, they belonged to the more respected part of the population, rising above it as a wall rises above the surface of the water.
Our house, therefore, was spacious in comparison with the mud huts of the very poor that huddled sadly along the narrow alleys. We had even a garden a few paces long with a sycamore in it that my father had planted. The garden was fenced from the street by acacia bushes, and for a pool we had a stone trough that contained water only at flood time. There were four rooms to the house, and in one of them my mother prepared our food, which we ate on a veranda opening out of my father’s surgery. Twice a week a woman came to help my mother clean the house — for Kipa was very cleanly — and once a week a washerwoman fetched our linen to her wash place on the river bank.
In this rowdy quarter, where there were many foreigners — a quarter whose degradation was revealed to me only as I grew out of childhood — my father and his neighbours upheld tradition and all venerable customs. At a time when these customs lapsed even amongst the aristocrats of the city, he and his class continued rigidly to represent the Egypt of the past in their reverence for the gods, their purity of heart and selflessness. It seemed as if they desired to dissociate themselves by their behaviour from those with whom they were obliged to live and work.
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