Havah

  “We have done well,” Adam declared, and I silently concurred—and hoped that we need never do it again.

  OUR GARDEN PROSPERED. WE worked diligently through the day, tilling, harvesting, sowing, drying, and storing. The trees and vines we planted were still young, so we spent days ranging through the nearby hills, gathering fruit and grapes in such abundance that now our problem became one of storage.

  During this time we realized the one new skin from the sacrifice would not be enough. We had need for more items supplied by animals: bladders and stomachs for water containers, skins not only for wearing but with which I might cook grains over a fire. So one day Adam took his spear and went to hunt the deer and the hare. He brought back sinew and bone and fat, and brains to tan the hide, which I refused to touch.

  Kayin lay between us as we slept at night. I kept him near and suckled him whenever he began to whimper. By day I worked in the shade so that he would not be scorched by the sun. Adam offered to wear him in a sling around his shoulder, but I was jealous for the child.

  As the months passed, Kayin began to cut his first teeth and, as curious as ever, insisted on putting anything he could find into his mouth: sticks, his father’s tools, clods of dirt, insects.

  A curious thing occurred during this time: my bleeding did not return. At first I did not recognize it, but after several months, I mentioned it to Adam.

  “Perhaps it will not until you have weaned the child,” he said. I was content with this idea. It hardly seemed possible that I should need the cycles anyway—the seed had been born. When Adam and I did come together, we did so for our own pleasure, however we could have it and however easily. The days of our sleepless nights, of our hours awake spent striving, seemed a thing of the past.

  But during the ninth month after Kayin’s birth, my milk dried and though he tried to suckle, I could no longer satisfy him. One day, as Kayin tried to nurse, I pulled him away. “Enough!” I said, very loudly. He stared at me in astonishment, his fat cheeks framing the circle of his mouth. His lips were an elegant bow even at that age. Shocked at my outburst—he hadn’t even been biting—I put him back, guilt pouring tears down my cheek. But I had no more milk for him and began to feed him gruel. During those days the vomit came back to me again. The most bland meals sent me out of the house to retch.

  That was how I knew I was with child again.

  17

  That spring, when the flowers were on the almond tree, I went into labor. It was two weeks early by my count, but already I had begun to seep pink fluid. Through the day I worked in the vineyard, stopping only to take a little food. By nightfall I will hold my new son.

  But night came without him. I lay down, expecting to wake to painful contractions but was woken only by Adam’s snoring.

  Remembering the night of Kayin’s birth, I went to the back of the house, but my bowels had not churned, and they did not release. When I came to lie down again, I saw Kayin gazing at me from his place between us with his somber, too-knowing eyes.

  “Sleep, my love,” I said, smoothing back his curling hair, leaning awkwardly to kiss him.

  “Baby?”

  “Soon, my son.”

  But he studied me with such a look of concern that I tilted my head. “What is it, Kayin? Why can’t you sleep?”

  “See the baby,” he said, on his side, gazing at me. How I loved him like that, his little naked shoulders so soft against the woven mat, his hair like a dark halo.

  “Perhaps in the morning.” I paused and then said, “You know you will need to help care for your brother. And you must love him because he is younger than you.” I had recently begun to worry for Kayin, so much the center of our attention until now. We had spared nothing for him, giving him the best of everything we had. And though he had my best love—surely it could not be possible for me to love any other as much as he—there would be another now to need me. At least Kayin had spared me the two of them nursing at once, for which I was grateful.

  “Love him,” he said sleepily. I kissed his brow and lay back, sighing heavily.

  The next morning Adam instructed Kayin in the use of his spear. The boy tried to placate him, but Adam walked back and repositioned it in his little hand again—and then again, impatiently. I knew he feared for him if he should ever need to defend himself. Finally I called out, “Peace, Adam! He looks fearsome to me.” The moment I said it, Adam turned a baleful look on me. Yanking his larger spear up from the earth where he had stuck it, he stalked away.

  Kayin just stood there, his small spear in hand, waiting to see if his father would return, holding it steady over his head until at last I went to him and lowered his arm.

  His chubby face seemed too solemn, too seeing. Too very adult. He stood there for a long time, spear in hand. It would be some time—many years, in fact—before I realized that he had meant to protect me in his father’s absence.

  Late that afternoon my back cramped and my bowels began to gurgle, and I knew that the hard back-labor with which I had borne Kayin was imminent.

  I went out to relieve myself, commanding Kayin to stay in the house and away from the fire. I was near the midden when my first great pain came and I doubled over. This child had been active all the last part of my pregnancy—did he mean to kick his way out as well?

  Upon the ground a slow, sinuous creature slid between my heels as though through the gate of a mountain pass. At first I thought I had started to lose consciousness and that the glowworms at the edge of my sight had turned dark and snaked their way through the middle of my vision. But that was not the case; I was very conscious when I recognized the chrysalis.

  It wound its way out from beneath my shadow toward the sun and the field beyond. I watched it, willing my attention away from the tight contraction only now releasing me, and as I did, a ray of light caught its scales: gilded, so sleek they seemed to be one great smooth surface rather than a collection of individual plates. The world around me seemed to fall away. His scales were so brilliant now that I could see now my own form reflected in them. They refracted queer light—not the sun—so bright that I raised my arm before my eyes, my shadow thrown behind me where it had been beneath me only a moment ago. It was as though the creature emitted a light of its own, casting every shadow in reverse. But there, what was that in my hand before me as I shielded my eyes? Something mangled and glistening. . . .

  The core of a fruit.

  I screamed and threw it away from me. The serpent darted out, lightning quick. It coiled around it, unhinged its jaw, and began to devour the object whole. From somewhere now came the words of that creature: How was he to know that you loved him unless you had a choice?

  In those words was the pain of my every disappointment, of my ache at every misplaced word between Adam and me, of the betrayal of his disowning me before the One.

  I lashed out with a foot, stomping on the chrysalis with my bare foot, digging it into the ground, grinding it into the dust so that it should die the death, surely, that I now died.

  Rending pain. Pain, like the smoke of a fire, choking out any sweet and clear air. A boy’s scream—Kayin? Kayin! Where was my son? My Adam? I was awash in pain and floating amid visions of the valley, of that tree, of that winged animal that had, in the last moment, grown as large as a man and much greater—and then of the vile thing at my feet, taunting me even as it died.

  If not a perfect God, if not a serpent who could no more control my actions than he could control my own arm, then there is only one wrongdoer here. In my delirium my heel fell not upon the snake but broke through the smooth surface of a pool that reflected the sky and the one who peered into it: me.

  There I did not see the dark-skinned beauty hand-fashioned by the One, whispered to life by God, nor the athlete, the seeker, the sleek-limbed child of bone and breath, but something that eclipsed that beauty, covering my image like a pox, staring out from the dark holes of my eyes.

  It is the death. I die. Oh, Adonai, I die.

  I L
AY IN THE house. A squalling, red-faced creature lay bundled against me. There, leaning over me on the other side, was my dark cub.

  “Mana?”

  The fire. I hated the smell of it. I needed fresh air. “Open the door flap.” My voice cracked. “Can you?”

  Kayin moved and squatted, pushing aside the hide a little bit. It was just enough. A faint breeze came in, and it seemed I could smell the night mist gathering near the river. I closed my eyes. I drew the bundle closer to me, turning toward my side. I opened the soft pelt around him and, after first inspecting him in the firelight, held him against my breast. He found the nipple with appetite.

  He was a petite child—due to his early entry to the world, no doubt. He seemed as impatient to eat as he had been to come forth. His head was covered in black down, and his face was red and scratched. But he seemed well and hale, shaking his fist intermittently before falling into a fit of sleep.

  Footsteps outside, heavy. A larger form moved aside the hide and nearly collided with Kayin’s smaller body. It was a vision I would recall in years to come. But at the time Adam said only, “There, Son, where were you off to?”

  “I needed air,” I said.

  Adam knelt near me, and Kayin’s smaller version of Adam’s face peered around his arm, his hand resting on my leg.

  “It is my error that I left. I should not have gone.”

  “The child came early,” I said, still in a fog, my every limb as though made of oak.

  “By the time I crested the first hill, I could hear Kayin half out of his wits even from there. He found you near the tree. You stepped on a snake.”

  “The serpent.”

  He shushed me, glancing at Kayin, but I insisted. “It was the serpent.”

  “Hush. It bit you, and you fell into a delirium from the shock. Your foot is swollen twice its size but it will heal. Meanwhile, this one came faster than the first.”

  Indeed, my leg felt sore to the knee and my foot throbbed as though with a heart of its own. Kayin came and lay down next to me.

  “Come, hold your brother.” I tried not to think of the pain, showing him how to hold the baby’s head. My own head hurt, and my throat seemed swollen and dry.

  Kayin took him carefully, and my heart swelled to see it. What a good man he would become, my Kayin, and what a good helper he would have in his new brother.

  I thought of the mists outside and the fog into which I had fallen in delivering him. I knew Kayin’s place in this world well, though the destiny of this new one seemed obscured to me as something shrouded by the mists of the river at night.

  “Hevel,” I said.

  “Will I ever name one of these fellows?” Adam said, quirking a smile at me. How much I had missed that. How lovely he was.

  “The next one will not be a fellow,” I said, before falling into an exhausted sleep.

  BEFORE YEAR’S END I was pregnant again. I named the girl Lila. She bore the likeness of the babe I never was. Finally, I had representation among my offspring. I sang the night she was born and swear to this day I felt no pain in birthing her. At the moment of her arrival, Kayin held her and called her beautiful and said he would marry her.

  “But not for a long time,” I said. For a while, at least, she would belong to no one but me.

  HOW SHOULD LOVERS GET away to know one another, to remember the terrain of each other’s bodies, to discover new scars and scratches and sunspots on one another, with children underfoot? I despaired that I would ever be with Adam as a woman again. Adam, who occupied his days with furrow and seedling, and in building the new oven that we had engineered together. In it, I could cook cakes of flour ground from grains and acorns mixed with the oil of seeds and olives.

  I was devoted to keeping food ready at hand and in the mouths of my children, a task that seemed to grow daily with the boys’ appetites and then in great leaps as Lila began to wean, though she still came occasionally to the breast even well into her second year, especially when I held her on my lap and sang songs. Hevel, jealous of his sister, would come to nurse at the other one though he was too old to truly want it, and Kayin had no qualms in telling him so.

  Sometimes, as I worked by the river forming pinch pots, I gave Kayin some of the heavy river clay to mold into shapes and dry in the sun. In showing him how to do it, I formed several small figures—“little adams,” I called them. The boys loved them and spent hours playing together in the yard. Lila had no interest in the clay people, preferring bundles of hide tied together to look like women and smaller, egg-shaped ones that she called her babies.

  I enjoyed making the little men for my sons, which I did with no small bit of mysticism, for in shaping these miniature men, I enacted the part of the One. I have made men with the help of the One, I thought, thinking of my sons; since the moment Kayin had come into the world, I believed I labored in service to the legacy of the One within us.

  One night when Kayin shushed his brother for shouting, Hevel got angry and threw one of Kayin’s clay men into the hearth fire. Hevel was always the young ram, having barged his way out of the womb and into his brash existence, he was temperamental and rash. I gasped at this—the toy was the image of Adam himself. It was my first experience of sacrilege, of blasphemy, and I tried to pluck it out, but the fire was too hot.

  “Hevel!” Kayin said, and it was the first time I saw him truly upset.

  Hevel hated being chastised and turned away, mussed his own hair in frustration, and began to howl. But when Kayin tried to console him, Hevel turned on him, pelting him with his little fists. Kayin pinned them without a word, but I saw color in his cheeks.

  The next morning I drew the clay figurine from the ashes. I dusted it off with my fingers, and noticed a strange thing: the clay had hardened. Beyond the way it might harden in the sun, it had baked into a solid form. Adam and I had both known and understood the properties of fire—on food and water and wood. Now as I held the figure in my hand, I remembered another occasion when I had lined a temporary hearth with clay and found, after several fires, that it had hardened. Turning the clay man over in my hand, I considered the skins and baskets that we kept for water that seemed to be forever leaking, the pots that dried and crumbled.

  I began to fire my pots after that.

  THIS IS THE TIME of our exile that I remember with the most fondness—when my first children ate of an earth where God once walked, reared on sheep’s milk and goat cheese and honey.

  True, the stench of soiled baby napkins was everywhere so that even Reut was no longer curious about these things. And when I wasn’t in the midst of cleaning up some sodden or stinking mess, it seemed one child or another was always demanding something to eat from breast or hearth. But at night as I lay surrounded by the soft breathing of tiny chests, by the smells of baby curls stuck to warm foreheads, and the familiar form of the exhausted Adam smelling of sweat and wild wheat beside me, I was content.

  Our fledgling flock multiplied to five sheep and eight goats. Each birth was attended with excitement, the boys the first to announce the fullness of the ewes’ bellies, with many excited false alarms. Adam was no longer there for each of them as he had been with the animals of our valley, so Kayin, gentle with his hands, took over the birthing by the time he was nearly ten years old.

  For every action like this, Kayin confirmed my conviction of his destiny. He was good. And though a mother would like to believe that all her children are good and that they are brilliant and kind and gifted, I knew Kayin was good. I loved him for all of these reasons and because he was my firstborn. I loved him in a way that I kept in my heart and spoke nothing about, that a mother might feel guilty about for loving one child more than another.

  And though we said nothing to him of the words of the One and spoke not at all about the place from which we had come, there was always something in his eyes that seemed to accept and shoulder without asking our one need of him: that he bear the burden of hope.

  KAYIN

  18

&n
bsp; Mother, come quick!”

  Hevel ran on legs as graceful as a doe’s. He was nearly ten and at that age where the beauty of a boy might surpass that of a girl even though he wore his hair tied back in the way of his father and brother, which made him feel more the young man. He already rivaled Kayin in height and seemed to fly when he ran, putting me in mind of the lion and the gazelle—and of myself—at every turn. In his strong body I could recall my adolescence, which had also been my childhood and infancy and the time of my marriage bed in the bower of Adam. How coltish and lean my legs had been—much as his were now—though mine had grown more shapely in the years since. Even Kayin, in his burgeoning pubescence, had begun to mark the differences between his young sisters and me with silent eyes.

  That summer I bore twin girls that I named Zeeva and Ashira. They were as different as the wolf and the songbird, the one howling at every moment, hungry and needful, the other content and pretty, winsome even in her infancy, flirtatious nearly from birth. Lila attended their births with fascination, wanting to pull Ashira out even as she began to crown.

  Though he made her stand back for Ashira’s birth, it was into Lila’s hands, supported by Adam’s, that I delivered Zeeva. Lila appointed herself mother to the twins after that in all but the most practical ways, bringing them to me to feed in turns.

  Kayin had long ago been relegated to following the flocks, which was a great burden off of us; there were so many now that they must be taken to graze upon the far hills. He did it in good humor, knowing in that way he always seemed to know, that he must do as he was asked and do it well. So he took Reut with him and went to the pastures, often with his brother tagging along behind.

  Hevel escaped my jurisdiction—and that of his matronly and bossy younger sister—as quickly as he could. Unlike Kayin, he made no graces about it, calling Lila a goat and telling her to make him something to eat until she threw her shuttle at him. He wanted to be with his brother in the hills, throwing stones and practicing with his spear. He had less talent for the weapon than Kayin, who had fashioned by now a full-sized one for himself, improving even upon the design of his father—much to the surprise of Adam. But it didn’t matter to Hevel as long as he was out of the house and, in the very least, tussling with his older brother.