It is not right, it is not natural, that any parent should survive her children.
THE YEARS PASSED. I relived my every moment with Kayin. Sometimes I thought of Lila, too. Perhaps now, in her old age, she would have her rest—rest in the land of Nod.
I hoped, in the vanity of my heart, that I would see them again. Perhaps next year we will journey to Hanokh and send ahead runners months in advance, so that Kayin might stay near. But the year fled by, filled with rumors of violence.
One day a group came from the north to tell me that Kayin had died. Lila, they said, mourned for him until his body was laid in the earth. After that, she went out from the city and never came back. I think she must have gone looking for the spirit of her brother. Perhaps she found him again.
Or perhaps she walks, as I once walked, with the One, her body the fabric now of the soil and the trees, interwoven with last year’s leaves.
I do not recognize this world. I am the seed, uprooted from another garden. A tree of that place, planted in foreign soil, the bough of heaven that withers in earthly mud.
Peace came for a while after that. For nearly ten years I did not hear of any violence or killing. The fields were rich and the animals fecund.
Perhaps now the One will restore us, I thought one day. Perhaps now the One remembers. I have cast enough seed, at least, for him to choose from, certainly!
I wondered sometimes that we were never lonely before, but we were not. There was the wind through the grass and trees, the call of animals and insects. But in the days of my age there were voices—of children and the aged, raised in anger or gossip or argument. There were songs of women and of the workers in the field and fishermen at the river. Everywhere there was sound.
Surrounded as we were by our multitudes of descendants, we took pains to be alone. The adam held to me as never before, cleaving in ways he had not in his youth. He held my hand and asked that I not leave him, and I did not except to call on my children. But even then I did not leave for long.
I was long past bearing, and I was relieved. I did not recognize the world, overrun with noise and the marks of thousands of feet, and I withdrew often to the comfort of my hearth.
ONE SPRING SHET CALLED the council together to say he’d had a vision. There would be a sacrifice, and, what was more, they would build a house for the giving of them. I was not sure how that would work when the sacred fire came, but who was I to question the One? Nothing had made sense to me yet.
As for Shet, himself, he shunned the work of the artist and wore only simple robes, saying he would put his faith in God and not in the work of his hands. I thought that was all noble and good, though I wondered who would support this holiness. A man had to eat.
He was also determined to record the tales I told him. We spent many days sitting together as I talked about the first days of the world and about the garden. He brought a man to record it all on a clay tablet, an arduous process that went on for months.
“There is a portion of this tale that you do not know, that I must tell you,” I said one day.
He frowned. “How can that be when I have been reared on every tale?”
“Not every tale. But now let me tell you about the night of Kayin’s birth.”
That night I told Naarit to go, that Adam and I would take care of our own meal. I wanted to be alone with my husband. She smiled sidelong at me—little imp!—and slipped out as the stars appeared in the sky. They had not changed, except that a part of my crown dipped below the horizon. The wind rustled the trees, pressed against the door flap, and it was night again.
I lay down next to my husband, nuzzling him. His arms were thin, his back bent from the plow. He murmured in his sleep as my hands roamed all the familiar places. I had nearly died with my last child, more than three hundred years ago. Yet, had I my courses, I would have chanced it again.
“Wake, husband,” I whispered, the years husky on my tongue. “Let us make life.”
We settled for love instead.
FOR MANY NIGHTS NOW in a row, I dreamed I ran through the valley, the gazelle at my side. Everything was in motion: the gazelle, the water running alongside us, the wind rushing over the tops of the grasses and playing through the fruit trees.
“I have had a dream,” the adam said to me one morning. “We were in the garden. How sweet was the wind, and the water, and the grass, and the earth.” His eyes welled; he cried more easily than ever before. I comforted him and drew him to me.
Sometimes in those days our bodies failed us. We could not strive together as well as we once did. But we lay together in contented companionship as Naarit served us breakfast and our children attended us. We had no need to work any longer, only to go to the council sometimes, but even that we had given over to Shet. What a man he had become, with eighteen children of his own.
Well, that was his problem and his blessing.
As for me, I thought the world noisy. I did not know each face as once I did. One day near the river a young boy ran past me.
“Hevel?” I cried. “Hevel!” I stumbled after him, my heart pounding. His mother collected him and brought him to me, calling me “Great Mother.” She asked me for a blessing, telling me his name. I gave it, still stunned by the boy’s resemblance to my lost son.
How we age. I am the oak with many rings, the rock worn away by the wind. I am the leaf that cannot drop, but deadens on the bough.
I WAS OLD ENOUGH, and my children aged enough, that I could pass among them in another settlement or city and not be known. Adam was as wrinkled as the clay baked in the sun. But so was I. I was indignant of this, I told him, because I was not made of the clay but formed of living tissue and so should not bear these creases. I had to say it loudly, and when I did, he laughed and laughed.
Sometimes as Adam sat by the fire, he nodded his head, as though listening to something unheard. When I asked him once what he heard, he just looked at me as though waking from a nap, as a child looking up from singing a song to unseen others.
There came a day when I went walking and passed by a group of children. The older children were teaching the younger ones, and as I neared, I heard in their songs the word game the adam had used to teach me to speak. It was not exactly the same as he taught it to me, but I heard the pattern and the singsong and knew it.
I will tell Adam, I thought, not knowing whether it would bring a smile to his mouth or water to his eyes. But when I got home, the house was quiet, and there was Adam, lying in disarray after a terrible fall.
He declined steadily after that. When he moved upon his pallet, it was as one in pain. Soon he became so ill that he could no longer rise from his bed. I sent Naarit to fetch Shet. When he came, his face was white, and I knew he believed his father already dead.
“He lives, but not for long, I fear. Go, get your men and pack animals. Make a litter. We have to leave.”
“What is this? What can you mean?”
“He will not die here. God has not intended it. Go! Do as I have told you. And when we are going, I will tell you at last the thing you must know.”
When Shet and Naarit had gone, I leaned over the adam. “Fear not, husband. I have sworn to you that you will see the garden again. You will see it. I am taking you there.”
As tears trickled down his cheek, I knew my words were as much in defiance of the One as they were for Adam.
“Rest now, my love. Ish. Tomorrow, we will begin the journey to paradise.”
THAT NIGHT AS WE prepared to go and Adam lay weak upon his mat, the serpent returned.
ADAM
32
I run through the water toward the island. The water is cool against the hot backs of my knees. When I plunge in, I feel it running against the insides of my thighs, which are sticky as overripe fruit. Upon the opposite bank, I step up onto the grass, muscles rippling in my thighs and buttocks. I am strong, and there is no woman stronger because I am the only one.
The serpent waits beneath the tree. The fruit is dark an
d ripe, and I can smell it, sweet on the breeze. How beautiful it is, how delicious it smells!
How lovely you are, daughter of God and of man, the serpent says. But as he does, his wings fold back, creaking like the breaking of bones. When they unfold again, they are so great that they are taller than I. The serpent’s scales, so gold, smooth out until I can no longer detect them or even the iridescence upon them, so that they are like one sleek skin. Where once there were the taloned legs of a reptile, there are now lean legs and arms. Now I see that face, flattening and smoothing, and ah! How lovely it is! But it looks at me not with admiration or warmth but with contempt.
“You have forfeited your birthright. The realm you were meant to rule is mine.”
I realize as he says it that I stand not as one but two; I am Ish and Isha. I am the adam when he had no woman to delineate him male, and I am the woman taken from him.
“For a time. Only for a time. Deceiver!” I cry with a mighty voice.
“Unworthy! Base!” He roars, stretching himself to his full height now so that he towers over me. And now I see at his feet the skin of the serpent, the chrysalis he has shed as readily as a snake molting its skin.
“Accuser!” I cry, even as I feel my body begin to harden as though it were coated with clay and drying in the sun. I am no longer standing as one stands in the spirit but as a human, on shivering legs and unsteady feet. My skin has begun to wither on the bone and I cried aloud: “Adonai!”
Now I see in sharp detail the shrub beneath that tree, the one I ignored that day with its hard little berries, in favor of the more beautiful fruits of its sister. With new clarity I know that to eat from it will give life again to me—and the adam. But now as I mean to run to it, to snatch its fruit from beneath the great legs of that shining being, the serpent-that-is-not-the-serpent, I fall back.
Before my foot is an endless chasm. There, on the other side, comes the smell of flesh, and I scream. Before me is the form of Adah, flayed of her skin, the blood running from a horrible wound and filling the soil—the soil from which came Adam, and ultimately, I.
Now, as I lift my eyes from the soil, Adah is not Adah at all but a man, the adam, made new. As I stare, he plucks from the shrub the small fruit and holds it in his hand.
I WAKE WITH A cry so loud that it rouses the adam. I tell him to hush and rest some more as I make ready to travel.
What does it mean? Surely not that we should lay a man upon the altar in sacrifice!
Or could it be that after so many sacrifices, the adam is ready to be renewed, as he was meant to be?
I do not understand the One! The serpent lied after all; I have not become as God at all.
Shet comes with a sturdy litter and a group of five men ready to accompany us. They have loaded food and provisions and tent upon three donkeys and upon their own backs. Adam smiles as we lay him on the litter, as though we are taking a trip to Hanokh.
“I will go see Kayin,” he says.
I do not have the heart to say otherwise.
I dream every night of the garden—different dreams but always, always, of the garden. Sometimes the trees rustle in the breeze. Other nights I hear the coming of the One and my heart lifts. I say to Adam, “He comes!” Adam smiles, but his face is not turned toward that sound, but to me.
And I know that though we both longed for the One, Adam also longed always for me.
As we travel, I begin my story anew. This time I hold back nothing.
On the day that I tell Shet of the serpent, his eyes well.
“I knew,” he says. “I knew there must have been a time when all was well and all was perfect, as only God could have it.” The look on his face is ecstatic.
“Are you angry, my son? Can you forgive me?”
“I forgive you, Mother.” He smooths my hair back as though I were a girl.
On the seventh day, he asks where we are going.
“To fulfill a promise.” Even as I say it, I do not know which promise I mean: the One’s for us or mine to Adam.
We travel in hope. In faith. At night I lie down and send my pleas to heaven: If there is no time, then take me and give my remaining days to him. Let him not return to the soil without seeing your face one more time.
The One has been silent, but surely he cannot deny Adam, his first child, to whom he gave his strange and holy language before ever it was profaned by human use. Surely he cannot stay silent to him forever.
On the fourteenth day of our journey, Adam is feverish. He drifts in and out of consciousness. We bathe his forehead and put up the tent for him in the noon sun, and travel by night.
During the day I go off by myself. I cry to the One—not for my sake anymore but for the sake of my brother, my lover, my father.
How desperate these days! My heart quickens between hope and despair. We pass the old settlement without stopping; there is no time. I want to go to the grave of Hevel, but it is nothing now but a patch of earth.
“ARE YOU AFRAID, MOTHER?”
I do not know how to tell Shet that I have no fear of the death, for I have been dying it for nearly a millennium. I do not fear it because I return to the place my sons have gone. There, even in the earth, I will wait—surely the One is faithful. Surely the One is good.
I do not tell him that I wait for the birdsong to seem somehow more heavenly and ethereal at once, as though from a throat that never devoured anything so base as a worm. For the air to smell of apricot and peach, for the sound of a river fed by the waters of the abyss. I start at the stir of every breeze, at the whisper through the stunted grass on the plain. It cannot have been a lifetime ago that I heard the sound of the One that Is in the garden, that I waded in the reeds and wandered through the grove.
But there is no birdsong other than the warbler, and the air on this most stifling of days does not stir at all except with the buzzing of flies.
We are farther beyond the settlement than I have ever been since those first days. I search memory as one does a moldering basket in the back of the storehouse. I know this place—it is the one we came to after our flight from the valley. It is the place I first wished to die.
We stop along the river and water the animals, and my eyes have fastened upon a hill overlooking the bend ahead.
“Stay here a while,” I say, hurrying away from the river. There are signs now of refuse. We are not the only ones to have ever come this way. I make my way along the hillside, my eyes scanning every shape, every tree.
It is the narrowest scrape of path, just barely worn from use—another’s, not mine. There now, I see it—the mouth of the cave. My heart springs within my chest, though I would never have thought that I should rejoice to see this place. I run up the path, skittering on rocks, my feet less nimble than they once were, but briefly remembering what it was to be agile.
I enter the cool of the cave. The sound of the air, circling at the entrance, is like an old song. The sun, descending in the west, floods the back of the cave.
With my shadow upon the back wall, I think, It might be a day in that same year, and I might be coming here for the first time, not knowing how to cook food, never having touched meat, repelled by the skins that I wore, lying on the floor. There! That rock was my pillow as I waited to die.
Seized by impulse, I lie down.
No wonder I hoped to die. How had I ever abided any bed such as this? But I lay here three days until the adam’s snore roused me. I chuckle, but the sound catches in my throat. How strong was the man who had clung to me like a child, begging me not die. Now here I am, willing him to live only long enough for me to beg entrance, a miracle, anything, from God.
I sit up, seeing some small signs of use of this place—I think I recognize some of our hearth stones, scattered, burnt on one side. Brushing through the debris, I find some small pieces of flint. They are just splinters now. Suddenly, I wonder—
I crawl upon my hands and knees toward the back, feeling against the wall, beneath every crevice. I search like that fo
r long moments, like a crazed woman, frantic.
I lift a smooth bit of polished stone.
The cord has rotted away, but there, unmistakably, is the figure of a woman—worn, but still perfect.
It is a sign. As we have come out this way, now we retrace our path. As one reentering the womb, we go back the way we have come.
Shet is looking for me by the time I return. I know my face is shining, beaming.
“Mother! Where were you? What is that, a cave there?”
“Come away, Son, and tonight I will show you a wonder.”
That night, as one of the men makes our simple meal, boiling gruel in a skin over the fire for the adam, I draw Shet near me and show him the thing in my hand.
“You cannot know what this is, but it is a miracle.” I tell him the story of the day that his father gave it to me, and Shet weeps upon hearing it.
“Then—then this comes from that place.”
“It does.”
“It is a real place.”
“Of course. It has always been a real place.”
The next day I swear I have found the place where we fell, exhausted, near the river. Here, we sprawled among the onagers and the deer. Where I searched for it painstakingly before, memory floods back as effortlessly as a second twin slipping from the womb.
We journey north. As we go, I point out familiar landmarks—there, that hill where I fell down and thought never to rise again. And here, where his father put down the lamb before hoisting it back onto his shoulders and running as thunder struck from the heavens again and again.
Today my heart hammers in excited staccato. “Very close now!” I shout, like one of my children. And then, “Very, very close—this is the mouth of the opening, the place the river came out! There, let us climb that hill and look down upon it.”