Havah

  “They clear,” I said, grateful. Across the fire, Adam turned away. “And I rise and return to the house, to your father, who is ready with the mat.”

  “He knows because he has delivered the animals,” Lila says, having been interested in the process of birth since the twins’ appearance. I knew she watched closely the interaction between her father and me, alert to any signs that the twins would be joined by siblings in the near future.

  I told the rest of the story with more perfunctory haste than I had any year prior.

  Later, as the twins lay sleeping and Lila lay drowsing beside them, Hevel said, “Tell us again the story of your dreams, of the making of the world.”

  “Ask your father,” I said, for the second time that night. I was tired of carrying the weight of my visions and of Adam’s silence.

  “My dreams are not the same as your mother’s,” he said, the sound of his voice dull.

  “He did not need dreams,” I said. “The One told him many things before ever I came to be.”

  “Tell us the story, Mother, of the dreams,” Hevel prompted.

  “Another night.” I felt very tired.

  “Mother?” Kayin said, from where he lay. “Why did the One make you and Father and no one else? Why not many people, as the animals?”

  I once wondered the same thing and concluded that we would never have learned to be together had we not been alone. But I did not care to speak this in front of Adam and said, with uncharacteristic curtness, “I don’t know, Kayin. Who can know the mind of God?”

  “You, Mother,” he said, very softly.

  If only he knew.

  “One day,” I said, lying down upon my side, gazing at them both, but more specifically Kayin, where he lay behind his brother, “You will ask the One for yourself.”

  That night, as I closed my eyes to the soft drone of Adam’s snores, I knew that Kayin lay awake in the dark, gazing at me. I held out my arm to him, and he rose, silently creeping over his brother, who lay sprawled on his mat between us. He lay down against me, and I curled my arm around him as though I were a cocoon, turning my face into his hair. In it I smelled the hills and the earth, the sheep and goats, hearth fire and the garlic we had eaten with our dinner mingled all together with the scent that is uniquely that of a young man—part wild boy, reeking of sweat, and part child, sweet yet.

  “May the One give you vision, my son. May you know his voice. Blessings on your eyes and ears,” I whispered. He laid his arm over mine and drifted almost immediately to sleep.

  I lay there a long time, feeling the rise and fall of his sides against me. Sometime later, as I drowsed, it seemed he stirred—no, not him, but Hevel beyond him.

  “Are you thirsty?” I asked, but he did not seem to hear me. He coughed, and I repeated the question, but he grabbed his middle and doubled over.

  “Hevel!” I said, trying to rise to get to him, but Kayin’s arm over me was like a boulder, and I could not move at all. I cried out again and then for Adam, who lay deaf as the rest of the children—except for Kayin. Kayin lay between Hevel and me, on his back, gazing dispassionately up at his brother. As Hevel fell to the side, choking and contorted, a trickle of blood stained the corner of his mouth. Then, with a great convulsion, he vomited up a stream of crimson.

  Kayin, lying beneath him, did not move as the blood spattered his lovely face, speckling his cheeks and temples and hair. I shouted and tried to push him away, to take Hevel in my arms and staunch the blood from his lips, but I couldn’t move. I watched with horror as Kayin silently opened his mouth, and the blood of Hevel flowed into it—

  “Mother.”

  I jerked at the sound. Kayin leaned over me, smoothing back my hair from my face. I half expected blood to fall from his mouth. I pushed him roughly away. His eyes widened as I fell across him to seize his brother, who lay in the same splayed position as before, his mouth slightly open. I shook him, and then shook him harder, until he sat halfway up, blinking at me.

  “Hevel!” I clasped him, slapping his cheek. By now Adam was awake and frowning. One of the twins woke up and began to wail, at which my milk came in. But I had no care for that, even though I could feel it leaking down the front of my garment.

  “Mother?” Hevel said, drunk with sleep. I pushed open his mouth, examined his lips, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. He came more awake, stared at me as though I were out of my mind.

  “Are you well, my son?” I asked, my heart pounding, feeling sick.

  Adam leaned up on an elbow, “What is this?”

  I was half crushing Kayin, having lurched over him to get to Hevel. I fell back to my mat. I covered my face with my arm and tried to recall and block out at once the vision I had seen.

  “An ill dream. I feared for—I thought Hevel ill.”

  “I’m well, Mother.” His lips trembled, no more a young man in the making but only a boy of ten after all. For all his brashness he was confused and sleepy enough that he looked as though he might cry. Kayin turned toward him, his lean body stretched along its side. Sinuous as a snake, I thought, and was instantly appalled at myself.

  “A dream,” he said to Hevel. “Go back to your snoring.” I heard the grin, forced from Kayin’s lips, saw his halfhearted shove and Hevel’s answering cuff before he dropped almost immediately off again.

  Adam said nothing though I knew he did not sleep. Kayin lay waiting for a word from me, I knew. But I could not bring myself to comfort him or even to touch him. “Mother,” he whispered at last, leaning against me.

  “Stop it, Kayin. You are almost a man,” I said. “Go back to your own mat.”

  The next morning I left Lila with the twins (what did I do before I had a child to take care of my other children?) and went out to Adam where he was clearing a new field so that one might lie fallow for a season.

  I had not liked watching my sons go out that morning. Hevel ran ahead, throwing rocks to the left and right of the flock to keep them from wandering all directions. But Kayin turned once to gaze back at me, and I knew that had I given the least indication, he would have come running back to stay with me and Lila and the children through the day. I had bruised him with my sharp words, but I had not been able to comfort him and even in the bright light of morning could barely look at him.

  I wondered how a mind could conceive of such terrible images. Perhaps it is part of the death that ill images should replace those that were formerly lovely and good.

  I found Adam resting upon a stump and knew, without his saying so, that he had been waiting for me. I meant to relay my dream directly, even to be angry with him—lately every word from him seemed to rankle—but seeing him there, beloved by the sun, his long hair upon his shoulders, I threw myself into his arms, weeping, instead.

  “There, Isha,” he said, into my hair. But even as he said it, I heard the worry in his voice. “All will be well.”

  “How can you know?” I demanded.

  He hesitated and then said, “I can’t.”

  “Then how can you say, ‘All will be well’?”

  “I can’t. But the One knows all, and surely all must be well in the end.”

  “Must it?” I pulled away with a brittle little laugh. “We are living in the wild! The animals would harm us if they could, as they harm one another. The river cares not where we plant our field, nor does the sky; it might strike lightning to the entire field at whim. There is no certainty! God has promised us what—what? That my seed will strike the serpent. Fine then! Where is he?”

  I was in shock at the things coming from my mouth, at the vehemence of them, at every dark thought to have sprung out of the fearful soil of my heart.

  Adam’s expression was mottled with resignation. I regretted my words, but it was as though I was no longer in possession of myself. I felt my frustration welling in the absence of reassurances that I wanted him to speak. Why did he not reassure me? Had he no word—either from himself or from the One?

  “What do you think? What will the
One do?”

  “I don’t know, Isha,” he said faintly. The arm around me seemed devoid of strength.

  “You should know! It was you who walked this earth before me. It was you to whom he spoke the secrets you harbor between you, that you have not shared with me—don’t think I don’t know that you have not spoken everything to me!”

  He looked startled, and I thought with a spiteful triumph, Ah! So it is true! But even as I thought it, I hated the sound of my own accusation. I might as well have slapped him; I knew in my rational mind that he would have never withheld anything from me—even those most secret moments—had I wished them from him.

  “Why—why do you say this to me?”

  “Have you spoken of them all, of everything whispered between you?” I sounded like a jealous lover but justified it in that, if only I knew all that had passed before my existence, I might now know what to do with these horrible portents.

  “No—”

  “You hardly acknowledge that we have changed—that our lives are so different now, that I cannot know even half, or a tenth of the time, what your thoughts are or what direction they might roam!”

  Here at last was the source of my frustration, that I, who constantly contemplated the past and the meaning of it and of our plight and of all that had happened, and who mulled over the words of the One as though they were a fine weave in a fabric by which I might divine the future, did it all alone. Why should I burden myself always in looking for meaning as though I were the only thinking human on earth? When he went off by himself to find land or sheep or goat, what did he do all that time? I saw no evidence of newfound wisdom or tortured seeking—how could he walk blindly into the life before us? Why did he avoid my gaze and my questions, taking to the field when it seemed I might want to lay all bare between us, though we must slave to do it with words unnatural and inadequate?

  “You are upset,” he said at last, as though trying to happen upon the exact thing to say to assuage me.

  I got up, but he grabbed my wrist and drew me back. “Tell me what happened last night.”

  I wanted to rail at him as once again he eluded me, as the One in the grove eluded me.

  “I dreamed that blood flowed from Hevel’s mouth,” I said, wanting to see the resignation replaced by alarm, the silence by action.

  Adam’s brows drew together. “Why, and so it did, the day he fell into your cache of pots, knocking his mouth against one of them. You dream of what has happened.” Relief was in his eyes.

  He thinks he has solved the puzzle! As though it should be so simple!

  “Do you think I would be hysterical over only that? Then I should be frantic every day with the way he knocks about. I tell you: There was blood like a fountain, flowing as it flowed from the veins of the lamb at sacrifice!” I hated even to commit it to words. “It was like that, pouring out of his mouth into the mouth of Kayin, who seemed to devour it. What can it mean?”

  He said, very calmly, so that I wanted to strike him, “You have had a dream of the sacrifice. In your confusion, you have thought of your sons. Perhaps it is only that it is time for another. We have a fine family. Perhaps it is only that. Nothing is as clear as it once was. Should your visions be, also?”

  I shook my head. “It isn’t that. It is something more, I know it! What can it mean?” I waited for a word from him, any word, to give it meaning or give me ease.

  Once he had known how to do that. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

  “Well, that’s an end to it then!” I said, pulling up angrily. “Thank you, husband, very much, for your counsel. Now can I go back to tending our children—”

  I was cut short by a quick jerk of my arm. His hand had tightened on my wrist, and he pulled me hard so that he wrenched my shoulder.

  “Stop this nonsense. You are beside yourself, seeking answers from me as though I have hoarded them from you. I don’t know what it means, but that does not mean that something cannot be done.”

  I fell quiet, ashamed of my outburst, wondering what was wrong with me. I was behaving like a woman half out of her mind with the upset of her body at the first stages of—

  Well then.

  “Then what—what should we do?”

  Adam sighed. How I had come to loathe the abject resignation of that sound. “I am not the one given to dreams. Tell me plainly what you think it means.”

  I said in a small voice, “That Kayin will consume the life in the blood of Hevel. I know I speak madness. I know it is not possible.” It was unfathomable. If the One had eyes, surely they looked like Adam’s. But if all the sorrow and knowing that we had brought into the world had a face, it was Kayin’s.

  “This is what you fear?” he said, frowning deeply.

  No. I could not voice my greatest fear: that Kayin was not the one we thought him. Because to think that would render all the world a rudderless ship and us afloat only on a sea of chaos.

  I nodded.

  He stared at the earth as though waiting for it to sprout some word to inspire him.

  “Then we will keep them apart except when we are near.”

  I laughed and threw my arms up. “How can we do that?”

  “Hevel is capable with the flock. Besides, I think he prefers to be alone. He does not suffer from time apart as Kayin does.”

  “And what of Kayin?”

  “He will help me. The greater our family grows”—and here he gave a meaningful glance toward my belly that fair smoldered and set my thighs to tingling. Ah, so not all is severed between us after all. “We will need to enlarge the garden. There is much to be done there. Kayin understands the selection of grains as he does the breeding of animals. I could use his strong back.”

  I knew, hearing this, that Adam would be a difficult master, as he was a demanding father. I foresaw, with a bit of waking vision, that Kayin might suffer because of it—but better that. Better that than the foreboding of my dream.

  “Yes,” I said. “Let us keep them apart.”

  He pulled me into his arms then, hungrily, my outburst, my anger, and his dull looks that had caused them forgotten between us. We had become furtive in our lovemaking, forgetting it as a man might forget a meal, devouring one another as soon as any emotion sparked realization of our inadvertent fast.

  I saw Lila over Adam’s shoulder when she walked into the clearing. I saw the way she stopped and watched us, eyes upon her father’s back. Just when I would have said something, she quietly stole away. So I said nothing to either of them, though I noted how her gaze searched mine and followed Adam for days.

  The next day Adam called Kayin to the fields, where he worked every day after.

  20

  As Hevel succeeded on the hills, Kayin succeeded in the fields; within two years we had our greatest yield ever. Adam attributed it to the sacrifice of a lamb that we made soon after my dream. Hevel had been particularly attached to the animal. In tears he helped to bind it tight, but he turned his head away when Adam showed Kayin how to slit its throat. At some point Hevel slipped away from the altar, no doubt to take solace in the hills. Even when he brought back the flock that night, he kept away from the house.

  On the second night I found him behind the pen, eyes red rimmed and puffy. He surprised me, though, when he said, “It is good that the One that Is should have Leetom with him.” I don’t know why I was surprised to hear that he had named the creatures individually—had not his father done the same an age, a lifetime, ago?

  “Is it?” I drew him into my arms. He would never have permitted it had I not found him alone.

  “Yes,” he said, sniffling, wiping his nose on his arm. “Because now he will be with the One, and perhaps he will be happy there.”

  My heart swelled and tears filled my eyes. “You are good and noble, my love, my young ram. Surely the One will love you all the days of your life and protect you because you have done so well. Blessed be your eyes and your heart and your hands and the work of them,” I said, kissing him.


  See how my heart swells with pride and deflates again with grief! I am the cyclamen that blooms and then shrivels, the fruit that bursts its skin before withering.

  In those days we had great awareness of the world. I had seen more of it than anyone in my sleeping visions. But even those places we laid our own eyes upon grew more and more vast. We began to devise a map of the area. It was important to Hevel, who had an adventurer’s heart, but important to Adam and me for altogether different reasons. We marked on clay the northern hills and the river that ran south toward the lush steppe and alluvial plain, and the easterly bend where we had made our home. Hevel thought the river must empty into a great bed of water, and I knew he was right. We added the other rivers, most of them discovered by Hevel: one that ran gold as the Pishon and another rich in minerals.

  We did not speak of our valley, Adam and I, but marked the landmarks we knew in silence. We added more as we recalled them, which was sometimes only after dreams; our memories, still fantastic, were not as they had once been. The children, for their part, knew we came from the north and assumed we had followed better soil or water to come here—there was irony!

  We never mentioned the serpent or the fruit.

  When we added something new, we remade the tablet, transcribing it and allowing it to bake in the sun. In this way we kept a record of the land as we knew it. There were, of course, the oceans and the other mountains and the plains and the deserts seen by me in my dreams, but I knew not in what directions they lay—only that they were there and that the world was great yet and yielded mighty things among the fearsome ones.

  Lila became proficient with fibers of any sort, having taken to the solitary and silent practice of twisting animal hair and flax into threads and weaving them before she was even a woman. She was a finer weaver than I by the time of her first blood. Inspired by the working of birds’ nests and spiders’ webs, she wove baskets that never spilled water. When she began to dye her threads, I dismissed her efforts, saying the work of weaving was too time-consuming on its own to add vanity atop it, but as she grew faster and improved her method, and the fabric that came from her pegs flowed with subtle and skillful pattern, I recanted. I threw off the hated pelts and swore I would never again wear them as my only garment—and I never have.