Joseph Week 3: What kind of dream is that?

He has tried, in the long months, to remember the dream itself. He gets the structure – sheaves, bowing, sun and moon – but the structure is not the thing. What stays with him is the moment after. He said the words. He was merely saying what he had seen. The room moved. His father’s face changed in a way Joseph did not have the grammar for, and his brothers’ silence was a different kind of silence than the silence before, and Joseph understood, as he always understood eventually, that he had done something he did not intend. He is still not entirely sure what. In his cell, he turns this around the way a man turns a stone he cannot identify. He had a dream. He reported it. The reporting was apparently not neutral. He does not know what he was supposed to have done differently. He is not sure there was a different thing to do.

– THE DREAMER

He was walking behind the flock when he saw it – a flash of colour between two trees, ochre and rust, the way Joseph’s coat used to catch the light when he ran. It was nothing. A bird. Jacob stood still for longer than was necessary. He has developed this habit of standing still at moments that cost him nothing, as if to make up for the moments he didn’t. He had heard the dream and been troubled. He said: is this what you dream? Do you imagine your father and mother and brothers bowing to you? He said it sharply, because the dream alarmed him – not because he thought it was nothing but because he thought it might be something. And then he sent him to Shechem. Alone. He sent him alone, northward, in the coat. If he had not rebuked him. If the rebuke had made the boy more careful. If he had sent a servant with him. If. The flock has moved on. Jacob is still standing between the same two trees.

– THE FATHER FIGURE

She had been the one to wash the blood from his knee when he was fourteen and ran back from the fields having caught it on a stone. She remembers this because he had not cried, had sat very still while she worked, and had said afterward, formally, thank you, Leah – not mother, never mother, but with a gravity that she had understood was the closest he could come. She had accepted it. She had learned, with Joseph, to accept the closest he could come.

She does not know exactly when she started going out to the road. Sometime in the second month after they brought the coat back. Jacob had stopped eating properly and she had found herself thinking: if Joseph came back – not for Joseph’s sake, not even entirely for Jacob’s sake, but because she has spent thirty years learning the precise shape of Jacob’s grief and she knows she cannot fill this one. She has filled others. The grief of the unloved years, the grief of Laban’s betrayals, the grief of Rachel – that one she could not fill either, but she could sit beside it, she could be present and capable and there. This grief is different. This grief has a hole in it the shape of a boy who said thank you, Leah and meant it as well as he could.

The road south is empty. It is almost always empty. She stays until the light goes and then she walks back to where Jacob is sitting and she puts food in front of him and sometimes he eats it and sometimes he doesn’t, and she does not say anything about the road because there is nothing to say. But she goes back the next evening. And the one after that. This is not hope exactly. She has a long experience of wanting things she is not going to get. It is something more like faithfulness to the wanting – a refusal to stop going out, to stop looking, to let the road become just a road again.

– THE MOTHER FIGURE

He was small when Joseph left. He does not remember the dream – he was not there, or perhaps he was but in the way that very young children are present, on the periphery, watching the adults for signals. What he has is not a memory but a shape: his brother’s voice, which was not like the other brothers’ voices; the particular way Joseph would crouch down to speak to him, as though Benjamin’s height were a thing to accommodate rather than a temporary condition to wait out. After. He had asked where Joseph was and been told he is gone and had understood this to mean the kind of gone that is also coming back, because that was the only kind of gone he had experience of. He understands now that there is another kind. At night, when he cannot sleep, he is aware of a grief that has no edges, the way you are aware of a room being cold without being able to point to where the cold is coming from.

– ATTACHEMENT

What Reuben remembers is not the dream. What Reuben remembers is the pit. He had said: do not shed blood. That had felt, at the time, like the shape of rescue – a temporary custody, a moment to intervene. He was going to go back. He did go back. The pit was empty, and the emptiness hit him in a place lower than his stomach, and he tore his clothes and said the boy is gone, and I, where am I to go? He has never stopped asking this. Where am I to go? He had been jealous of Joseph – he does not deny this to himself, in the dark – jealous of the coat and the father’s open adoration and yes, jealous of the dream, the dreaming itself, the entitlement of a boy who simply dreams and then simply says what he dreamed without calculating the cost. Reuben always calculates the cost. He had calculated wrong. He goes to sleep jealous of Joseph still, and wakes in the cold, afraid of the pit.

– JEALOUSY

He does not think about Joseph every day. Some weeks he does not think about Joseph at all. This is itself a thing he does not examine too closely. When he does think about Joseph, what he thinks is: was that legal? Not in the moral sense – he has made his peace, or he has made something he calls peace – but in the practical sense. They sold him. There was a transaction. Is a transaction a crime? He has begun to notice that he listens more carefully now when merchants arrive at the camp, listening for something in their voices he cannot name. He watches their faces when they talk about the road south. Once, a trader said I came through Egypt and Dan’s hands went very still. He went to sleep that night replaying the dream – not for guilt but for evidence, for the question he cannot stop asking in the arithmetic part of his mind: how much did we miscalculate?

– FEAR

Gad will tell you honestly that he does not remember the dream very well. He remembers Joseph telling it – Joseph in the morning light, that particular energy Joseph had when he was saying a thing he found important – and he remembers the brothers reacting and he remembers thinking, here we go again. He had not hated Joseph. He wants to be clear about this, to himself. He had found him exhausting. The way a person can find another person exhausting without wishing them ill. He does not wish him ill. He wishes him – wherever he is – adequate food and reasonable shelter. This is what Gad wishes for most people. He is aware, in a peripheral way, that he should feel more than this. He is aware that not feeling more might itself be something. He pulls his blanket up and closes his eyes. He is asleep within minutes. This is not a gift. He has only recently begun to understand that.

– INDIFFERENCE