Havah

  With a sudden motion I flung wide my arms and broke into a run. I dashed down a row of apricots. I chanted my name, as Renana, my lovely, impudent daughter had done once. I never told her I had loved the sound of it on her lips.

  Havah!

  A huff of life, an exhale followed by the vibration of life itself—there, from tooth and lip. I shouted it aloud, knowing my children, if they could see me, would think me mad. I chanted Adam’s name, hard and staccato. “Adam of the earth, ruddy as ochre,” Renana said once. Remembering, I was delighted by her for the first time in what seemed years.

  I stopped then, in the middle of the plum trees, as I realized she had given no name to the One.

  The One. The One that Was and Is and Will Be. His name is a sough, a breath upon my tongue. A whisper spoken to my sleeping soul.

  “How I long for you,” I said, softly, into the dark air. How long had it been since I had seen the curve of that shoulder? How long since I had felt that presence upon me? “Adonai,” I whispered, into the night. “Adonai.” And then again: “Adonai! See me! Watch me run!”

  Like my youngest, running for any adult who would watch, somersaulting for any audience that would laugh, I broke through the orchard toward the open field, feeling the full stretch of my legs with delight. They were stiff as rope wound for a season, but they remembered—they woke at the air in my ears, the lashing of my hair behind me as my plait came loose. I heard a sound, wild and trilling, and recognized my own laughter.

  When I had gone as far as the fields and found myself up to the knee in ripening wheat, I slowed, fingers drifting over the wheat heads, my heart drumming against my chest. Alive! So alive beneath the shining disk of moon. It was so bright here, away from the mists, that it might be twilight.

  “Adonai!” I shouted. It was jubilant.

  Answered only by silence, I cried out, “Adonai! Will you forget your daughter? Where is the serpent that my son should strike him? Bring him to me! Where is the one that I saw rise up before you? Let him come, that my son will defeat him!” The words were a growl, a promise, a plea. I stretched out my arms to the light of the moon and threw back my head.

  I have created with you in the womb and have brought forth life from my lungs to those of my children. I have remembered you. Do you remember me? Do you look upon my face? How long will you turn away? Have you no word, at least, for the seed of her whom you made?

  I fell down among the wheat. Surely here I might hear the step of the One. Surely I might wait until he came. No parent can ignore a wailing child.

  But the night stood still, and the moonlight offered no warmth. After a while, I wound my arms around myself, shivering, wishing for my cloak.

  In the silence I felt dull, bereft of the joy I had thrown about me like mad petals flung into the air. I got up and plodded, my feet like clods of mud, cold and numb. I walked the long way out and around the field toward the orchard, shivering. Tears began to fall from the tip of my nose. They slid to my lips and into the crevice between them.

  Where was the One? How long would this go on? I was so weary of this life, of these seasons, of the harvest and replanting, even of pleasure and birth. I was weary of the hearth and even the sun in the morning and the moon at night. I had thought to be back in the valley by now, that the adam and I might put behind us the ugliness of every terse word—and the silences, too, which were far worse.

  In that place the rift between Adam and Kayin might be mended and Kayin’s heart put to rest. Perhaps there I might appreciate all of Renana’s loveliness without wanting to slap her. Perhaps Lila would smile without the heaviness she wore about her brows. How I longed to raise up my children and children’s children that they might know that place.

  But in my heart I longed most of all to return to the One and to the adam. To be again only Ish and Isha. I covered my face with my hands and wept the tears of the guilty, of the mother who berates herself that she should long for anything other than the pleasure of her children. But I did.

  I was so miserable and cold by then that I did not realize where I went. The mist was more dense than before, and I slid down the side of a small slope, scraping my leg and scratching my fingers.

  Well, this was a fine mess. Here I was, running off in the mist and wandering in the mud like one of my own children! I turned this way and that, thinking how ridiculous this was when I knew every stone and tree and protruding root of this area. I set out in one direction, assuming that I would come to some landmark or another. But I walked on, recognizing nothing, growing more cold by the moment.

  Finally I squatted down on the cold earth. Shivering, I wrapped my arms around myself. There were sounds in the fog, and I recognized them for my own: sobs.

  “Will you forget me so easily?” I did not feel like a matron but a child bereft of father, mother, God.

  I don’t know how long I stayed like that. I was beside myself, unable to stop. All the long years—the births, the days and months in the house, the grinding, the cooking, the making of pots and baskets, the carrying of water and changing of soiled napkins and washing them in the river—had worn me down like water wearing away a rock.

  I had not wanted this life. I did not mean for it. I had found joy in my hope, but my hope was as suspended as the mist.

  Eventually the mists began to clear, and the sliver of moon emerged from the clouds. Shivering, cold, and exhausted, I went home.

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER, ASHIRA, Lila, Zeeva, and I stoked the fire for the oven to bake the new pots we had formed over a pile of melons. When the pots were in the oven, we discussed who would check on the fire through the day. As we did, Lahat came back from the field.

  “Ho, what’s this—firing day?” He bent to peer into the oven. Just then, a shattering sound issued from within it, which was nothing unusual—we lost several pots in every firing—sometimes, on bad days, entire batches. Lahat staggered back from the opening, hands over his face, blood running through his fingers. Zeeva screamed.

  It took all of us to hold him down and clean the socket of the eye that had dribbled out like the insides of an egg and the hot shard that had put it out. Lila packed and covered it with clean linen as Zeeva fetched her strongest wine.

  That night, as Lahat tossed and moaned until dawn, as I changed the bandages when they seeped their foul liquid, I was guilt ridden. Were it not for this life, for this place, for my actions, my son might yet have two eyes. That night Adam held me for the first time in weeks.

  “There are some things that happen of their own,” he said.

  I could not, would not, fully accept that.

  Please, I begged the One, put back his eye. But he was deaf to me yet.

  Not a month later Ashira came running across the field. She had a limp form in her arms, and I wondered if it was one of Hevel’s newest kills. Hevel, Kayin, and Besek were by now proficient hunters. Truth be told, Renana was as well, though the boys rarely included her. At any rate we never wanted for skins or new bladders, sinew or fat. And though the thought of eating flesh was repugnant to us yet, we acknowledged that the pups and the aging Reut thrived upon it. Even the One consumed it upon the altar, Hevel pointed out once, though it had been a long time now since our last sacrifice upon those stones.

  But as Ashira got closer, I saw that she carried no animal and that this was not the proud gait of the hunter’s mate. She hurried too fast and too frantically. Her expression was tight, her breath coming fast from between her lips. Now I saw, dangling from her arms, the dazed figure of Kanit.

  Kayin dropped his scythe and ran to meet her, but I got to her first.

  “She ate the dark berries,” Ashira cried. The girl, panting like a rabbit, stared at me as though at a horror, her pupils bloomed to black orbs.

  “Kayin, fetch water,” I ordered. Adam was there and took the girl in his arms, hurrying toward the house.

  We poured water into her mouth until she vomited, fed her bread and wine. At last, by morning, the color returned to her
face.

  “What would have happened had I not found her?” Ashira whispered, her eyes round.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But she is recovering. That is all that matters.”

  “Would she have stayed like that always? As Lahat, with his eye?”

  I thought of the death and of the unmoving bodies of animals. Could the poison in a plant kill a human? All that grew had been food for us. Already we labored long and hard for every meal we ate. Would the earth now reject us completely?

  I wandered out of the house that night to gaze, silently, at the sky.

  How long? How long will you wait? Haven’t you punished us enough? See how marred now is my love with Adam, clouded as mud in water that once ran clear. See my son, living with one eye! See the child of my child, who lay unmoving through the night! What more punishment would you have—exact it now, I beg you!

  I think back often to those words and wish I’d never prayed them. That my mind had never fathomed them. That any one of my children or the adam had bashed in my skull before ever I formed them.

  23

  We should make a sacrifice when the crops are brought in,” I said to Adam the next day. I had gone to him at the river, where he went to wash at the end of the day. He quirked his brow.

  “Have you had a vision, wife?”

  I hesitated. I had seen my children lie, bold faced—and had beaten them near to senseless for it on several occasions. I had no tolerance for untruth. Still, I had lied by omission more times than I could count. But I could not lie to the face of Adam. Even then, even with so much behind us and with such great stakes before us, it was like lying to my own face, and I was certain he would know.

  I made my voice light. “Is not the abundance in the field and orchard vision enough? It is a living vision of prosperity, and we are as greedy as the vultures if we should pluck it all and eat the best flesh of it for ourselves.”

  I instantly regretted this metaphor, but it was too late. He considered this, looking to the sky. I found myself holding my breath, and for a moment resented that I should stand here like this, as one of my own children awaiting permission to follow Hevel to the pastures or to swim downriver.

  “I’ll think on it.” He untied his tunic and waded into the water. I stared at his naked back.

  “I have just said that it is time,” I repeated.

  “And yet there is no sign, other than your love for that boy, as though he were the first and last man on earth. I said I will think on it.”

  Anger exploded in me. “Am I a child to ask your permission to run to the high hills? When I say that it is time, will you cast aside my counsel?”

  He sloshed back. “Oh, indeed, you say it is time. But I am not certain that it is!” There was fever in his eyes and spittle on his lips. I blinked at his sudden vehemence, not knowing the man who wore this face. I wondered, not for the first time, if in working upon the earth, by so exercising his physical strength more than any aspect of his great intellect, he had become somehow more base because of it, as though more ruled by emotions stored within his muscles as the calendar of time kept within the rings of an oak.

  “Why should you doubt me, husband?” I hated the tremor in my voice.

  He looked away, but I heard him clearly, even from under his breath. “Rest, Havah. Will you let it rest? I will tell you my answer soon.”

  “No, I will not let it rest! If you are not certain, then let us counsel together. What is this, that I come to you for arbitration in my own thoughts? Where is the man who ran with me in the valley?”

  “He ate of his wife’s hands.”

  He might have struck me. He might have flattened me to the ground or held me beneath the water. He might have struck me with the hoe that rested near his tunic or cloven me in two with it.

  It would have left me more alive.

  PERHAPS IN APOLOGY TO me, perhaps in penitence, Adam asked Hevel within earshot of me to mark in his flock a lamb for the altar. I felt my son’s eyes upon his father, and then upon me, as he said only, “Yes, Father. I know the one.”

  I was relieved, if still sore from our exchange by the river. I turned my face away from him when I lay down. I rose before him in the morning.

  Where was God, my arbitrator? Would he allow this to go by without remark? For the children there was always Kayin, wise in mediating his siblings. But who was there for Adam and me?

  I walked alone in the evening, shunning house and hearth. He had consented to the sacrifice, I reminded myself. It was all that mattered. If all went as hoped, I might walk like this beneath the drifting clouds. On that day I would not ponder pain or shame or hurt or rage. I would forget, as one forgets upon waking from a dream, the poison in my heart, the look of his eyes, the sound of his accusation.

  But then I went back again to my every reason to be furious: he knew as well as I the truth of what had befallen us there! He had not stayed my hand. I had not forced him to eat or beguiled him. We were of one will and that one free.

  How dare he hold it before my face now? Thinking that, I was angry all over again.

  The ways we hurt one another. I am the thorn upon the bush. The nettle, unseen, that works its way beneath the skin.

  Hevel came to me that evening. I remember now how surprised I was that he should come to me like that, though I should not have been; it was the shepherd in him that observed so well, that understood better than his siblings the nuance of relationship, that went in search of any missing animal to keep the flock whole and sound.

  I felt chastised and humbled by his presence even as I thought he ought to be speaking with his father instead.

  “I think,” he said quietly, looking off toward the place the sun had set along the horizon, “that a day will come when it will not be like this. When words will be unnecessary, and we will not struggle to find them. Perhaps we will not need them at all.”

  Ah! So wise, my young ram! If only you knew. I turned my face away. I would not let him see me weep. It seemed all I did of late.

  “Do you know, Mother, sometimes when I look at Ashira, I can know what she is thinking? By how she chews at her lip or presses her temple, I can know the set of her mind.”

  “You are a good boy, Hevel,” I said, even though he was a father now and not a boy for many years.

  “I can see the same sometimes with you. By the set of your brow and of your mouth, the direction of your mind.” After a pause he said, “And also with Father.”

  I said nothing.

  “There is a direction of his eyes, askance, at nothing, when I know that he is thinking back. He thinks often of the place from which you came. Every day my entire life I have seen that look cross his face, for as long as I can remember. And I know he thinks of you because sometimes when he does it, he smiles. Just a little bit.”

  I covered my face with my hands.

  I should have known then. I should have known by his nature and assuaging words. His presence was like water soothing a burn. I might have known then, had I only looked. But my eyes were closed.

  He put an arm about me and leaned against my shoulder. He was never as tall as I. “I don’t know what it is Kayin must do. But I know that it pains Father that whatever it is that Kayin is meant to right, he cannot right himself. Perhaps that is the friction between them, that each of them would do anything to see you eased and happy.”

  “I feel very old,” I said, which was nothing at all what I was thinking. I was reeling from his revelation, which I knew to be true.

  “You, Mother? Old?” He smiled. “You are but a girl. Do you think I have not seen you running through the orchard?”

  That night, as we lay within our home, I wound my arm over the form of my husband. A part of me hated myself; I felt I paid dearly out of the store of my dignity. But a part of me longed to be near him at any price.

  He made no movement at first, but as I pressed close against his back, curling myself against him, his hand covered mine.

  BY LA
TE SUMMER I was pregnant again. Only a couple of weeks, but I knew it. The closeness was back between Adam and me, and I determined that when my son was born—and I knew that it would be a boy—I would call him Asa because he was like the salve that heals.

  As soon as it became common knowledge—and of course, Lila knew it nearly as soon as I, as she was uncanny that way—Kayin was more often absent from the house.

  He is preparing for the sacrifice, I thought. Indeed, he had never worked so hard. Everything rested on him. No one said it, and I had never explained it, but if Hevel’s words were any indication, every one of them knew.

  In spite of his labor, Kayin slept only in fits, turning from side to side and starting awake with incoherent exclamations that woke others from their sleep. Adam and I never spoke of it to him but did what we could to keep him well fed so that he might tend solely to the work at hand.

  I half expected to meet the serpent in my dreams. In the dawn, as the light crested the eastern hill, coming in through the roof cracks and crevices between the bricks of the house, I imagined his lustrous scales.

  It was one such morning that Lahat, drawing with a sharp stick on a piece of clay, stopped my blood cold. He had not worked much since the accident and had only recently begun to take an interest in things around him once more—most particularly potting, of all things.

  “Look.”

  “How nice,” I said absently. I was carrying a basket of grain, but when I looked, I nearly spilled it all. There in the clay was a creature like a dragon, with wings and a long tail. The talons were exaggerated, and the scales had been drawn with careful detail. But it was the head that made my heart beat like that of the swallow, so rapid in my chest: it was a human’s.