He came in without a word or any explanation. He left again the next morning.
When he returned that night, empty-handed again, I said, “What is this that you say about not being apart? How is this not keeping apart?”
His blank expression instantly maddened me. “I come back at night.”
“Yes, but you are gone all day! I thought we were done with that when you found this place for us!” I could feel the hot tears welling in my eyes. I threw myself down on my pallet, confused at my own emotions. I knew in these moments that he saw in me a creature as alien as the minds of the deer and onager and hawk.
“Havah . . .” He came to put his arms around me.
“Go away!”
He went out and left me alone. I lay miserable through the night.
The next day he returned with a young he-goat. We lay together that evening, naked beneath our pelts, speaking not at all.
That season we planted our seeds. Upon sight of the first shoots of our garden, we clasped one another and laughed. The One sustained the world yet.
15
My breasts ripened like heavy fruit in the sun. A dark line grew down the front of my belly. I exclaimed upon it one day as I uncovered myself to lie in the shade. Gone were the days when the stirring breeze or lazy afternoon flight of the dragonfly made me want to run toward the hills and throw open my arms. I wanted only to lie in the cool shade or float, weightless, in the river.
Hearing my exclamation, Adam laid down his hoe—a scavenged shoulder blade hafted upon a long stick, too macabre in my opinion for the tilling of food—and came to sit with me. His hair had grown long down his neck. It dripped sweat as though he had come not from laboring in the sun but from the swim I had craved all afternoon. He drew his forearm across his face.
“The sweat of your brow.” It has come to pass. I was troubled, thinking this. Hadn’t the One also said, “Dust you are. . . . To dust you will return”?
I had begun by now the obsessive habit of needing to know always where Adam was. I knew he chafed at it.
He drew a finger down the line of my belly. “Perhaps this is a reminder,” he said, tilting that beautifully shaggy head. “That we are two halves. As you are two. And we are one, as you and the man inside you are one.”
My philosopher, my love.
“Or else it is only that the child is splitting me in half,” I said.
He laughed and brushed the back of his fingers across my flattened navel. “How ripe you grow, my love.” The look in his eyes smoldered like the sun.
Just then Reut came bounding across the garden, a hare—still squealing—in her jaws.
“Make her let it go, or kill it quickly, at least!” I could not abide the sound of it or even of the mice that Reut sometimes toyed with too near the house.
Adam gazed lazily after the wolf, who had gone off in the direction of her favorite burying ground. “It will be dead by the time I chase her down.”
In disgust at them both, I stalked off, my wrap in hand.
THE DAYS LENGTHENED AND I grew great and cumbersome. I was uncomfortable, relieving myself all day long. It seemed I could not drink a drop before needing to squat in the grass.
One night, as the honeysuckle flowered on the stem beneath the moon and I lay tossing upon my mat, I dreamed of the serpent. I saw him, standing taller and taller before the One, unfurling wing after brilliant wing. The next morning I knew no peace. Had I not dreamed of the serpent the night my son was conceived? What should it mean, then, that I should dream of him now, when that son was ready to burst from the womb? I recoiled at the thought that the serpent should have anything in common with my child!
It plagued me through the morning until, nearly out of my mind by afternoon, I fell into a fit of weeping.
“What’s this, Isha?” Adam asked with a sigh.
I wished, immediately, that I had run to the garden or the river to gather myself alone.
I drew a slow breath and told him, in as measured and reasonable a tone as I could, about my dream the night I conceived. “I dreamed the same dream again last night,” I said when I finished. “What if it should mean—what if it means that the serpent has somehow influenced the conception of this child? What if—”
His brows drew together. “Isha, you know one creature does not conceive the child of another. You trouble yourself senselessly.”
“But—”
He captured my hands. “But nothing. You are Havah, the mother of all living. From you a multitude will spring.”
My son concurred with a swift kick.
I WOKE TO THE gurgling of my bowels. Beside me, Adam was gone away to the land of visions and did not notice when I lumbered from my mat, taking up his spear from where it leaned by the door.
Outside, the dawn had only begun to tinge the thick air gray. Mist had rolled in from the low banks of the river so thick that I could not see the tips of my fingers if I held my arm out in front of me. Sounds might carry very far within it, as though all the earth had been enclosed in a single house. Other times, it seemed to mute the sound of everything.
As I made my way toward the midden, I thought I heard a muffled footfall behind me.
“Adam?” There came no reply. I called again. Nothing.
I went on, the familiar shapes of lavender shrub and poplar solidifying out of the mist as though they were the only real things in all the world. I stopped at one of the poplars and leaned heavily against it, the spadelike leaves brushing against my cheek. My lower back was so stiff this morning—stiffer than it had been any other day. The ache in my legs seemed to emanate heat up through my groin.
A soft footfall sounded again. I straightened, despite pain.
“Adam?” But I knew it wasn’t him.
I turned and faltered a step. There! Just ahead—the form of a man passing by! But it was only his back, as though he walked across my path too far beyond me in the mist for me to see clearly. “Wait!” I hurried forward, suddenly lithe for the first time in weeks.
Then, with a flash, I knew that back, the curve of that shoulder suggested but never fully seen by me. I cried out with a broken sound a word that I had nearly forgotten, hardly known to my lips because it had been voiced always from my heart.
“Adonai!”
I fell to my knees and leaned heavily on the spear. A sound that is grief and relief and pain and love all at once came from my throat like the cry of an animal. I held out my arms. I could have wailed. I could have laughed. I cried instead.
A breeze billowed through the mist, and it began to separate. I cried again, “Adonai! Adonai!” not knowing if I cried it aloud or with every fiber of my spirit. I forgot the valley. I forgot our exile. I forgot the impending child heavy in the womb as an overripe fruit upon a thinning stem. I forgot even the adam.
I knew only the One that Is.
But the mists swirled and cleared, and there I was, on my knees, fluid rushing down my thigh, my bowels demanding release. Terribly mortal, horribly human, in as low a state as a human might be.
Where was he? Where had he gone?
I fumbled to my feet, stumbled several steps to the place he had been.
But there was no one.
In a daze I made my way to the midden as the first light of dawn burned away the mist.
Squatting there, dirtying my nostrils with the stench of my bowels, feeling the ache more pronounced in my back by the moment, I felt as wretched as I ever had. I was near to bursting and emitting all manner of foul matter. No wonder the One had turned away!
I moved with slow resolution back toward the house, the pain in my lower back like fire. And then I understood. I was not abandoned. By the help of the One I had conceived this seed. Now, by the omen of the One, I would deliver him.
I bent through the doorway as Adam, just stirring, glanced at me with sleep-laden eyes.
“I need the mat,” I said. I had made a mat of tightly woven rushes for this purpose. He stared at me for a dull instant before
springing to life. He pulled the mat out from the cache of our things and laid it on the floor. Then he came to help me to my knees.
Was there pain? Of course. There is always pain. I cried out at first in surprise—and later in agony. It was by then terrific, near blinding, searing. My head hung down as the fallow deer when it has run too hard, too far, before it drops.
In the last of those moments, I sagged in the adam’s arms, but I was not there. I had returned to the mists, to hear again my cry after the One, to see again the form of that shoulder, of he who went ahead of me.
I am the mystery of the gate. I am the consort of every living thing. I hear! I live!
It is said that he rent me in two. That he split me apart with a violent birth. That I howled in agony for days, knowing what would come from him. That is not true. I have seen few women in my life deliver so smoothly a firstborn child—without even the songs or sympathy groans of other women to soothe them. Women now have all the comforts of mother and sister in their bed. Of women learned in herbals to ease them.
I had none of these but relied on the midwifery of Adam, whose gentle hands had delivered countless animals.
The truth is this: in the last moments before the birth, I felt a burst of euphoria—like that which comes from running long distances, that dulls pain and makes us think we have grown wings. In the last moment, I lifted my head. I bore him in pain, yes. But I bore him in strength as well, knowing I took part in the mystery of this creation. The plants and the animals, created by God, created in turn after their own kind, in a reflection of the character of the One.
And now, so too, did I.
“It is a male!” There was awe in Adam’s gaze. I was in awe of myself as well.
“I have gotten a man,” I repeated softly, as we did not then have a word for boy.
I inspected him as I first gave him suck of the golden milk coming from my breasts. I was taken with his pudgy thighs and his downy hair, his tiny penis and the faint lines upon his feet, entranced by this miniature of his father. He gazed back at me with eyes that, I was certain, had seen the One face-to-face only moments prior. They were not blue, as Adam’s, but brown, practically black as mine. I searched them for a sign of the Creator. He gazed at me as one astonished, unknowing what he sees.
An appropriate expression for one coming from the bosom of God.
I named him. Adam had named every living creature, but this one was mine. The adam took him in his arms, called him by name, and greeted his son.
I had fretted about my dream of the serpent. But now, as I held my child and stroked the crown of a head already covered with curls a lighter shade than mine, as I held the fingers complete with their tiny nails, I knew that the serpent had infringed not at all, that I had gotten this child with the help of the One, having partnered with God in the making of him.
Kayin, my begotten.
Such hopes, such expectations, we laid across his tiny shoulders.
Too many.
16
The fawn, in the hour of its birth, stands up to walk. But Kayin could not lift his own head, let alone stand upon his legs. The very act of squalling sent a tremor through his entire body. So he came, mewling as a kitten, with his eyes open but just as helpless.
Had we ruined him in our mortal state? Had we caused malaise upon what would have otherwise been a stronger child? But no, he seemed normal after a fashion, and I soon accepted that this must be the way of children.
That night I dreamed that I laid Kayin in a basket of rushes. In my dream, I thought, I have been given such a gift. Let us give a token in return. But as soon as I thought it, I saw again that terrible day that Adah and her mate lay bereft of skin, twitching upon the grass.
But this time I saw something else: blood. I saw the blood of those animals running into the ground, into the earth from which the adam had been taken.
The next morning as we took our breakfast, I said, “I have had a dream.”
At this Adam chuckled. “When do you not dream, Isha?”
“I have had a dream,” I repeated. When had my dreams not carried portents or meaning of some kind?
“And this dream?”
“I dreamed—I dreamed that—” I wondered at the thing about to come from my lips.
“Yes?” he said, calling Reut to him.
“That we should kill an animal,” I said all at once. “That we let blood spill as blood was spilled from Adah and her mate for us.”
He straightened very slowly.
“Two animals were sacrificed so that we might have their skins to cover us as we wear them now. I think we should give back to the One . . . the blood of an animal.”
“You’re raving,” he said.
“Am I?” I asked, half wondering if I was. “My dreams have proven always so false then?”
“This one cannot be true. The One would not wish for the death of an animal.”
“Are you so sure?”
“Even if I agreed, are animals so abundant to us now that we can afford to kill one? Would you kill Gada? The new lamb? The milk ewe? The goat with the hair you like to weave?”
“You could find another, as you found these,” I said. Kayin had begun to fuss. I opened the front of my garment and put him to suck.
“Just to kill it, to give it to the One as you say, as though the One has want of it?”
Suddenly I felt foolish indeed. It had been a strange dream, and I found I no longer had the certainty or the logic to defend it.
“Or so it seemed,” I said lamely.
He went out from the house without a word.
All that day and into the evening, I did not see or speak to him. I wondered if indeed I had seen strangely or false, if perhaps the serpent had never loosed his hold on me but continued to fill my mind with strange logic.
That night Adam acted as though all was forgotten. I waited to dream but saw nothing as I slept.
The next day as I laid Kayin in his basket and prepared to grind grass seeds from their glumes, Adam came into the house. With an odd look on his face, he took up a length of new rope and went back out.
“What is it, husband?” I ran out after him, alarmed at seeing him like this.
“There is a lamb caught in a thicket near the river.”
“And this is amazing?” Sheep were stupid animals, more stupid than the remaining intelligence of any animal, it seemed. They would fall into a hole and never have the sense to get out even if there were a way. “Well, I should like to have a few more animals for their hair, though a milk goat might be better—”
“No,” he said, pulling the rope through his hands. “It is only the lamb. And it is as handsome a creature as I have ever seen.”
He went away like one in a trance and came back a little while later with the animal. When I came out from the house, I stopped short. It was indeed a lovely creature—fleecy and white and without flaw.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “we give it to the One.”
I felt a sudden prickle of alarm. “But as you said, it might have been only my dream. Surely so fine a creature we ought to keep.”
But he shook his head and began to lead the lamb away, saying, “No. It is for the One. I, too, dreamed of it. Last night.”
The next day, as the lamb stood placidly munching on a tuft of herbs, we built a platform out of stone and cut saplings, piling them high so the One might at least have a look at the grisly work we had done before any scavengers could come drag it away.
There was little preamble. Adam drew the animal near as I stood, Kayin in one arm, a wooden bowl in the other. He tied the animal’s legs and laid it atop the altar. It never kicked or bleated even once, and I had to wonder if we were on the cusp of some grave error. But before I could say anything, Adam raised his obsidian knife and slit the throat of the lamb so that I could do nothing but hurry to catch the blood in the bowl. I was so close that crimson droplets speckled Kayin and me both, and I swallowed hard at the sticky metallic scent. Kayin waved
his little arms, and blood spattered one of his hands. I staggered at the sight of the dark crimson of that blood on those tiny fingers and would have dropped the bowl had Adam not taken it from me.
We had agreed that we should remove the skin. It had been so removed for us on that awful day and given to us, so we would keep it now. Adam began the work of separating the skin from the carcass.
I turned away.
When he was finished, he left the bowl of blood alongside the carcass on the altar and came away. He wiped his hands on the grass several times, and still they were bloody. We stood there like that, Adam with his dirty hands and gory knife and me, holding a smattered Kayin, uncertain what to do. We had no ceremony—what should we know of that? We once communed directly with God himself! So I simply thought,
It is done.
But I wondered what exactly had been gained by this.
As we prepared to return to the house, a hot blast burst upon the altar, bringing us back around in shock. The animal burned. I could see and now smell it, engulfed in orange and blue flames.
We stood there for a long time, amazed. How much like the fire on those trees struck by lightning it was! Even Kayin stared, transfixed.
The fire consumed the animal quickly, burning lower and then lower until it seemed to crouch down to the stones amid the crackling bones and embers. Then it burned out as subtly as a small flame dying without tinder.
When we inspected the altar, I gasped; the blood had burned out of the bowl without harming the bowl itself. Upon the rest of the stones were only the charred remains of bones, as though they had burned days ago. In fact, no heat came off the remains at all, though I had felt the blaze from where I stood. The stones themselves, however, still told the tale; they were hot to the touch.