HOMER SAYS THAT A MAN LOSES half his soul on the day he becomes a slave. But Joseph’s soul remained intact. What he had lost—his home and family, his dignity, his arrogance—was actually a gain. He had died to his old self and been reborn as someone more self-aware, more skeptical of his assumptions, a lover of the truth. He saw the world with curious eyes now. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for him to be a slave, he realized. He had become the lowest of the low, an element, like water, content with the low places that people disdain. Life had accordingly become very simple. His job was to follow directions. Whatever someone in authority told him to do, he did. He was free of decisions, and he would soon be free of idleness as well. There was no feeling of humiliation in any of this. On the contrary, he was grateful to know exactly what his duty was at every moment.
The first day of the journey was uncomfortable, but once his bonds were untied, the Ishmaelites treated him decently. They fed him well; some of them even took a liking to him, particularly a young man named Tema. Tema talked to Kedar, the leader of the caravan, and Joseph was given a camel of his own to ride on.
They entered the Sinai, the Land of Turquoise. Nothing on all sides but red granite and blue sky. On the first day, the flies sent their hospitality committee; they hovered around Joseph’s legs, arms, and face and would not be shooed away. “This is the flavor of the desert,” Tema said. “You get used to them.”
Falcons circled overhead. On both sides of the trail the caravan passed huge red granite boulders that looked like Henry Moore sculptures. Some of the boulders had names: “the Overturned Boat,” “the House of the Lions,” “the Two Rocks Talking.” Tema, with a laugh: “They’re talking because they like each other very much.”
Tema told him that in this heat it was important not to get dehydrated. So they stopped every few hours to drink water and rest in the shade.
One day they found a boulder house beside a spring. Tema said that hunters would sit here and wait for ibexes, who have to drink at least once a day, unlike gazelles, who can go for days without water. The canyon was covered with wild mint, which had tiny purple flowers and was wonderfully fragrant. They gathered some for tea.
Quails everywhere, whistling from wadi to wadi. Tema pointed out the occasional quail trap: three sticks propping up a rock.
As the wadis became narrower, the landscape changed: willows, reeds. The caravan stopped for an hour, and Joseph, along with Tema and several other young men and boys, climbed down to twin pools, an upper and a lower one, next to a cliff shaded by willows. In this desert, water seemed like a miracle. It moved him beyond words. He dived into the upper pool. Freezing! When he climbed out and sat on the rocks to dry, he could see how deeply the dirt had caked into his skin.
He thought of his father every day. He knew how devastated he must be. There was nothing Joseph could do about that.
Thinking of Jacob was a curious process. His image would appear in Joseph’s mind arbitrarily, as he was on the camel or lying under his blanket at night. He saw the old man weeping or tearing his clothes in grief, and he would immediately react to that image with sorrow, pity, and a helpless sinking feeling in his stomach. But as soon as he became aware of this reaction—usually just a few moments had passed, though sometimes he got lost in his pity—he would remember that God’s will was always done, that both he and his father were in the care of that vast intelligence. And then, for a while, the image of Jacob no longer made his heart ache.
Sitting around the campfire one night, they talked about women. Tema to Joseph: “Everyone knows that women are smarter than men. The female ibex leads the herd and warns others of danger. If one of our young men is too wild, he usually settles down after he gets married. His wife says, ‘You must provide for us.’ She shows him the right way, and the young man stops his foolishness.”
“On the other hand,” Kedar said with a wry smile, “all trouble comes from women. Life is difficult with them and difficult without them. Look at the rocks: they’re silent, unmoving. If there were no women, we’d be like these rocks. As it is, we go about from land to land so that we can provide for our wives.”
Joseph looked at him with interest. Kedar was in his forties or fifties, his face baked by the sun, deep wrinkles in his forehead and around his eyes.
“With that attitude,” Joseph asked, “how can you trust your wives?”
“Ah,” Kedar said, “never trust a woman. Never even trust your own wives.”
Joseph, puzzled: “Don’t you love your wives?”
“Of course I do.”
“But how can you love someone and not trust her?”
Kedar: “I love my three-year-old boy, but I wouldn’t trust him with a camel.”
The conversation moved to children. Kedar: “You must keep your children close to you. Children are your own flesh. What happens to flesh, to meat, if you leave it somewhere and don’t keep your eyes on it?”
Tema, like a good student: “It rots.”
Kedar nodded. “So with children.”
The young men and boys around the campfire listened attentively. This was how they learned the wisdom and the foolishness of their elders.
After placing his blanket under a lone pomegranate tree, Joseph lay watching the shadow of the moon on the cliffs. A bat swooped down, feasting on insects attracted by the oil lamp. After an hour the moon rose. Then the first small trumpets of the mosquitoes.
He slapped at one on his right cheek. How annoying to have all this beauty interrupted! But then he considered his reaction. On the sixth day of the Creation, in the story that Jacob had delighted to tell him from as far back as he could remember, God had looked at the world and had said, “Behold, it is very good.” Hadn’t that sixth-day awareness continued until now, and wouldn’t it continue until the end of time? Didn’t God, even now, look at everything He had created and see that it was very good? What if even flies too, and ants and mosquitoes, had their purpose to fulfill and Joseph’s annoyance was a missed opportunity to appreciate that? The mosquito, bless its little black heart—didn’t it have its own peculiar beauty, when you stood apart from yourself as a human being? Wasn’t its whine an essential note in the harmony of creation? Maybe there was nothing unnecessary or mistaken or evil in all the universe. Could that really be true?
Another night. Wild donkeys—five, with two colts—were watching them from the hill above. Tema told Joseph that he had more than once lost food to wild donkeys. So he took the bread, dates, winter pears, dried meat, and other staples and placed them close to his blanket. “Their leader is planning to wait till we go to sleep,” he said. “She thinks we’ll leave the food unprotected. The gods tell us to be kind to animals, but enough is enough.” Then he collected stones and arranged them in a pile beside him. Every now and then, when the donkeys got too close, he threw a stone at them.
All night, in and out of Joseph’s dreams, the clomp clomp of donkey hooves.