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symbols, all golden and glittering as they swept across my vision, and I summoned and dismissed them at will as though they were my servants.
    I did not lose that enthusiasm. As day followed day, Epophi giving way to Mesore and then the New Year and the blessed rising of the flood water, and I realized that I was not going to fall ill, the gods were not going to punish me for my presumption, Pa-ari was not going to abandon me, I ceased to gulp frenetically at my lessons. Pa-ari was a patient teacher. The jumble of beautiful, closely packed signs on his pottery pieces began to make sense and I was soon able to chant to him the ancient maxims and nuggets of wisdom of which they were composed. “A man’s ruin lies in his tongue.” “Learn from the ignorant as well as from the wise man, for there are no limits that have been decreed for art. There is no artist who attains entire excellence.” “Spend no day in idleness or you will be flogged.”
    Writing them was a different matter. I had no paint and no pottery. Pa-ari’s teacher dispensed such things at the temple school and collected what was not used after class and Pa-ari refused to try and steal the tools I needed. “I would be disgraced and expelled if I was caught,” he objected when I suggested stuffing a few extra bits of clay into his bag. “I will not do it, even for you. Why can’t you use a stick and some smooth wet sand?” I could, of course, and I did, but with bad grace. Nor could I draw the characters with my right hand. I reached for everything with my left including the stick, and after seeing the results when I tried to use my other hand, Pa-ari gave up trying to force me to change. I was a clumsy, laborious writer but I persevered, covering the banks of the Nile with hieroglyphs, practising with my finger on walls and floors, even drawing in the air as I lay on my pallet at sunset. Nothing else mattered. My mother exclaimed over my new docility. My father teased me because I fell so often into silent reveries. I had indeed become biddable and quiet. I was no longer so restless and dissatisfied, for the realities of my outward life were completely subordinate to my inward existence.
    I no longer cared that the village girls shunned me. I felt superior to them, hugging my precious literacy to myself like some magic talisman that could protect me from every threat. The small ceremonies that made up our daily life— the marriages and deaths, gods’ feast and fast days, births and illnesses and scandals—were no longer manifestations of my prison. When I accompanied my mother to visit her friends, to drink palm wine and listen to the women’s chatter and laughter, I did not feel trapped. I had only to withdraw a little in my mind, to go on smiling and nodding at them while I silently spelled out the names of the herbs I had crushed and steeped for my mother’s salve that morning, and I would watch her berry-brown, animated face while she told some story, watch her broad smile come and go, watch the lines around her eyes crinkle, and think, I know more than you do. I do not need to be sent to the herb-gatherer to say the name of the plant you barter for. If I wanted I could write the name, and the number of leaves, and the price I expected to pay, and then I could go and dangle my feet in the Nile while I waited for a reply. Yes, I was arrogant, but it was not the cold arrogance of spite or assumed importance. I did not imagine myself to be better than the family I loved or the women who passed in and out of our house with their jokes and their troubles, their courage and their uncomplaining stoicism. I was different, that was all. I had always been different, as Pa-ari knew himself to be different, and that awareness made me all too eager to secretly flaunt the thing that hid my insecurity.
    So the time went by. When he was thirteen and I was twelve Pa-ari graduated from pottery and paint to papyrus and ink, and on that day my father gave him a