My Exodus: A Short Story

By Karis Anne

I am an Egyptian.

Egyptians rule with a fist of iron. Their love is conditional. They serve their gods faithfully. They treat their slaves like dogs.

And I am a traitor to Egypt.

As my Israelite servant, Keziah, slaughtered a pure and unblemished lamb, I turned my head away. I was not used to seeing such violence. At least, not until recently.

Recently, I have seen nightmares. Terrible things have happened to my people — things that have crumbled my faith and crushed my heart. I have seen the Nile turned to blood, boils covering a woman from head to toe, locusts eating all of our crops, and beasts rotting in the fields.

I was determined not to see my firstborn son die.

Keziah looked angry as she handed me the goat hair brush that she had dipped in the blood of the slaughtered lamb. Her face had a bitterness that I wished were not there, but could still understand. My son, so far, was still living, while my people had killed two of her sons. I wondered if she felt that my son deserved the tenth plague that would kill him if I – if Yahweh – could not save him.

I can not let him die.

My lip trembled as I turned back to Keziah, “Are you sure that your God will save my son too? Will he pardon my family if I put blood on the door frame?”

Keziah jerked her head in what was surely meant to be a nod, but then smirked, her smile tightening, “That is, if your husband lets you put an Israelite symbol of faith in Yahweh on your house.”

I stared at her. She read the troubled look in my eyes, and I thought that, for a moment, sympathy crossed her face.

“If you obey Him, Yahweh will save you.”

I nodded. I believed that. If He couldn’t, then who could?

Keziah turned her face away, her body rigid with controlled emotion. I couldn’t blame her. It had only been a few weeks since she learned that my husband had been one of the officers that had drowned her 2-year-old son. It was only on behalf of her God that she was even helping me now. I was sure that if it had been her decision, she would not have minded seeing the line of the man who killed her son die out altogether.

I left Keziah’s house without another word and took the back streets to my own, carrying the brush in a pail full of blood. I hoped that my husband wouldn’t be there. If he was, he would surely ask me where I had been all afternoon.

I looked around, cautious of onlookers, when I got to the front steps of my home, but saw no one. Tentatively, I reached up and made contact between the bloody brush and the smooth stone of my home’s door frame.

The deep red color made me shiver. This was the color the Nile had been, the color of the time when I had begun to doubt. The color of the day of realization.

Red, for the blood of the Egyptians.

I continued to paint solemnly, and was about to start on the last doorpost, when I heard the sound of footsteps behind me. I whirled around, and there he was.

I stumbled, falling back against one of the sides of the door frame that I had just painted, and felt sticky blood on the back of my dress.

My husband knew instantly what I was trying to do, and raised a fist. I saw veins pulse in his bald head. He ground his teeth and stepped toward me, grabbing me on the shoulder. Then he shook me.

Hard.

“What are you doing?” It felt more like a threat than a question.

He continued to shake me like he would shake our Hebrew slaves when they did something wrong.

Was I no more than a slave to him now?

I felt tears on my cheeks.

“I have to save our son.”

He stopped shaking me, but I felt his hot breath upon my face.

“Akila, have you no faith in our gods? Would you shame me in this way? Can a couple of weak, Hebrew miracles have this much impact on you? Akila, you are a fool! Isis is the protector of our children, not some invisible, all-powerful God.”

He laughed harshly, and then his anger seemed to evaporate. He released me and I fell back against the doorframe.

“The Hebrew’s God did all those other miracles.” I was pleading now, “I don’t want Gyasi to be killed.”

His laughter was almost more unnerving than his anger, “You are so young, Akila. You know nothing of gods or plagues or miracles.”

I straightened myself up, holding my blood-dripped brush to the sky, trying to keep my voice even, “I know one thing, and that is that Yahweh is more powerful than the gods of our people.”

My husband laughed at me as if I were a child and jerked the brush out of my hand, lamb-blood dripping from the brush-end and down his arm. He didn’t seem to care.

Fitting, I thought, for one who has killed so many.

My husband side-eyed me, “Akila,” he said quietly. His voice was little more than a whisper but husky with anger, “I don’t want to hear the Hebrew name for their God again.”

He spat, and the spittle hit my foot. I winced, and he walked into our home. I knew I would never see the brush again.

At that moment, I determined to leave.

I crept to my room, packed a small bundle, and then took Gyasi away from the nurse who was caring for him as if I wished to coddle him as usual. Instead, I took him and the bundle and left the house.

I arrived at Keziah’s house, out of breath from running. If my husband discovered our absence, he would start hunting us down; he would require me to stay in my home with Gyasi for the night.

I could not let that happen.

Keziah’s greeting felt dry, “You’re back.”

“My husband wouldn’t…”

She waved the rest of my sentence away bitterly, “I don’t want you to talk to me about your husband again.” She sent me an appraising look, “So, you’re coming?”

I glanced down at Gyasi, who was sleeping in my arms, and nodded. I had never counted on going with the Israelites on their journey from Egypt, but I suddenly realized that it was the right thing to do. I had alienated myself from my own people by placing my faith in the Hebrew’s God, so why not cast in my lot with the Hebrews?

“Alright, you can stay here tonight, and then leave with us tomorrow.” Keziah crossed her arms, her face glistening with sweat. I could smell the lamb she had slaughtered roasting over a fire outside.

I looked down at Gyasi again, “I–I only wanted to save him, but…”

“But now you’re coming,” Keziah said matter-of-factly, “and so now we eat.”

As the sun fell through the sky we ate the lamb and unleavened bread that Keziah said had some kind of symbolic significance to the Israelites.

It was dark now, and I felt a heaviness fall on me as the moaning began. At first, it came as a groan upon the wind, rose to a faint wailing, then blood-chilling screams reached my ears and raised the hairs on my head. The tenth plague had begun. I sat motionless and trembling on the floor, my legs unable to hold me up, rocking Gyasi, safe in a Hebrew hovel while my people were slaughtered.

Gyasi, who had been sleeping in my arms, woke up and started to cry. I tried to calm him, making clucking noises with my tongue, but he would not be calmed. I couldn’t blame him. I wanted to cry myself, wanted to voice my doubts, my fears, my anguish. I wanted to block out the terrible wailings I was hearing.

I felt a solid hand on my shoulder, and I turned to see Keziah behind me, looking uncertain but determined. Her eyes shone with tears, her voice trembling, “C-can I hold him?”

The bitter look with which she had always eyed my son had been replaced by a look of longing and love.

I stared at her, unsure, but handed over the fitful Gyasi. Her hands trembled as she took him, but soon she was rocking him back and forth, humming, and he fell back to sleep.

I watched the woman who had lost her son cry silently as she cradled the son of the man who had killed hers.

I stood, turning shakily towards the window and the wailings. Although I did not take joy in the deaths of my people, I wondered if tonight was not just a night of death, but also a night of justice, freedom, forgiveness….and hope.

Egyptians are stubborn.

Their rejection of Yahweh and their hardness of heart will persist, even through this tragedy. They worship their gods without doubts or questions.

This is why I betrayed my people.

Because I am, after all, no Egyptian.