“In those days the animals came to me, to see this adam bearing the likeness of the One. I marveled at their diversity. I scrubbed the mane of the lion and stroked the tail of the nimble fox. I caught the frog up in my palm and touched the wings of the serpent. How lovely you are, Adam, made of the One that Is, they said. And how lovely they were to me. I gave them names, and they knew themselves better for my having known and named them. This went on for days.”
He absently traced the curve of my ear. “It did not take long to notice that though they dwelt in multitudes, there was one of me. They were male and female, but what was I? Both? Neither?
“I applied myself to knowing the way of the animals and my place among them. I roamed the hills and the plain beyond the eastern gate. I learned the hierarchy of the wolves, the gestation of the ewe. I surveyed the mountain and swam in the great lake. But I always came back to roam the hills, to gaze down into the valley.”
I pictured my vantage from the orchard, the island shrouded in mist and the fruit shining like gold upon it.
He whispered. “I was aware of it always. I wondered whether I could understand the evil. I pondered the death. I called on the One who whispered to my heart, and he denied me nothing, but in my loneliness I longed for more.
“One day as I wandered through the reeds—the very place where I first lifted my head—I saw it.” His eyes were shining as he said it, dark blue, the color of lapis from the hills of Havilah. “A footprint, a man’s—but not my own.” Tears slipped from his eyes, and the look upon his face was filled with longing.
“I ran along the bank, crying out, wanting nothing more than to touch that foot, to touch that hand. But even as I did it, I heard a voice saying, I Am, Adam. I Am! I fell down on my knees. It was the first pang of loneliness I had ever known, and it was as acute and sharp as any craving for food or sun or sleep or bliss as I have ever experienced. It came again, like a whisper: I Am.”
He wiped his face with the back of his hand. When he spoke again, his voice broke.
“But when I got up, I could not find the footprint again, though I looked for it all day. I only wanted to touch it. To touch it again—” He lowered his head. After some time he sighed and said, “That night as I lay down, I gazed at the stars, at the very ones you love to trace in the sky with your finger when you think I am sleeping, and cried out my plea to God. That night, the fingers of sleep pulled with long and sweet clutch, stroking me into unconsciousness. I heard in my soul: It is not good for you to be alone. It was voiced with the greatest compassion, the most full understanding . . . the most lovely benevolence and love. Such love!
“I slept in the grip of that love, comforted, thinking I should forget my longing within it, knowing that all was somehow well.” He laid a finger against my cheek. “In the morning, when I stirred, I knew.” His fingers fluttered against my cheek as one touches a thing so delicate as a dream, fearing it might break. “I knew I lay here in my own flesh, but not alone.”
How lovely were the tears of the adam! How beautiful his face because of them, how poignant and masculine at once as they dropped to his cheek and fell upon his lips! He kissed me in mimicry of the first exhale of the One against his mouth. And I heard again his words that first morning and felt again his elation, not from the past, but made new in his heart.
At last! Flesh of my flesh!
I knew then he was as much mine as I was his, that he loved me with every fiber, having longed for me before he knew me or that I might ever exist. As the adam buried his head in my hair, my heart cried out at the extravagance of love and the humility and gratitude for which there were not, nor ever have been, words.
3
My first blood came on a warm morning as I waded among the river reeds. Inspired by the nests of birds, I had begun to weave nests of grass and reed cut from the water’s edge with a flake of flint. Within days I perfected my early attempts and began to experiment with new and complex designs.
That day I was so excited about my newest pattern that I sat down on a large rock and began the base of my new basket right there. A little while later, when I got up, it was there: a red smudge. My first thought was that somehow I had sat on the crushed leaves of henna. But that was impossible; I had been nowhere near them all day. Also impossible because we did not stumble. We did not fumble fruit or stone when we gathered. We were never pulled beneath the water so that we could not breathe. The idea of a misstep, of a mistake, of an aberration in the order of the One that Is or our own dominion in this world was an impossible thought.
So how did the red get on the rock?
Only after examining my hands and my cache of reeds and the sticky surface of the rock did I realize it came from within me.
A silvery trill issued from the bank. I glanced up to find the serpent, resplendent in sunlight, studying me.
How lovely you are, daughter of the One and of man.
And how lovely you are. I meant it with my whole heart. Was there any animal in creation more lovely?
He preened a moment. Your blood has come. Do you know what that means?
I thought of Levia in estrus. Of the adam, twined with me through the night.
Yes. I believe I do.
The serpent tilted his head, seemed to sniff at the air.
How fine for you that you might create, after the fashion of the animals, your own kind. It is the mark of God, creation. How fine for you that he gives so generously of this power.
I flushed at the thought; had I not been entranced by the hare with her young, the ewe with her lambs at the teat? I smiled.
You are pleased?
Yes. If the adam was glad for me, how much happier will he be if there are more of us?
The serpent turned away. Indeed.
BY THE TIME I caught up with the adam, the bleeding had stopped. When I told him about it, and how I had washed it away in the water, and about the serpent, he said, “That clever creature, he is right.”
“Think of it—if I conceive, we will be the adam again, in one flesh, on the day our child is born.”
He stared at me and then reached for my hand. Clasping it against him, he cried, “How great is the design of the One!”
Most of our creative acts were less dramatic; with mundane measures we shaped the life around us. We made cuttings of lilac and honeysuckle—that shrub beloved by the cats—and stuck them in the soil of the southern slopes. We bent down the branch of the laurel, nicking it where it touched the ground, covering and securing it there with stones. The adam began to build us a bower of willow, standing long cuttings in the ground and weaving the ends together. Within weeks they all sprouted leaves.
Sometimes we saw light sear the sky, flashing like a jagged branch, leaving bright images on the backs of our eyelids when we closed them. The first time I saw it, I was amazed until the adam explained that there was fire in the sky and in the elements, too. He could send sparks flying from two kinds of stone struck together, and fire might be made in other ways as well. That night he struck from a grooved stone and piece of quartz a tiny spark that we coaxed to life within a hollow bit of wood filled with tinder.
We dried fruit and harvested almonds and pistachios. We took our meals in the orchard, joined by Adah, the fallow deer, or Chalil, the fox, who came when Adam played the flutes he made from hollow stems. The wolf, Dvash, came to lick honey from our fingers. We brought it often from the long hive we had found in the crook of a tree.
Standing upon the hillside, I could smell the pomegranate ripening on the stem, the bitter sap of pine, the dill and chicory growing among the heath, the grapes sweet and heavy on the vines of the far slopes. I could distinguish the scat of every animal, the oil of any feather, the nectar of any blossom, the airborne taste of their stamens. And every night I lay down to the seminal bouquet of wet earth and salt that was the adam beside me.
I roused from sleep when I sensed his waking. I went to him when I sensed his longing. And we knew we were special in all the
earth, so that even the trees and mountains and heavens must watch with wistful sighs.
I RACED ACROSS THE southern hills, leaping rock and shrub and stream. I was a great runner. I lifted my knees high as I hurdled shrub and brush and stream. Laughter bubbled up from my belly as I took to the foothills, past the grazing onager. It brayed after me, and the sound was like laughter. I knew the adam watched me from below and that the exuberance of my legs and quickness of my breath accelerated his heart. I knew, too, when he launched after me, but he was no match for my start or my speed. Only Levia, the lioness, was my equal.
I bounded down the hills toward the valley floor. It was midday, and the sun was hot upon me, and its rays loved me, warming the dark honey of my skin, beading sweat between my breasts and among the hairs at my nape. I was small breasted then, lean as the new colts.
See me! my soul shouted. Watch me run! I ran through the valley like the wind through the meadow in spring. I was tireless, euphoric at my great strength and with the One who had given it to me. I ran faster and faster—faster than I have seen any woman or man run since.
In my soul I heard laughter—first of the adam, from where I left him in the meadow—but more brightly and keenly, of God. Then—oh, great mystery, such a moment! There came a rush of wind and warmth that was not the sun. It was at my shoulder, in my ear and my face: the One that Is, running alongside me, his laughter honey in my ear.
I doubled back beneath the shadow of the great mount and chased the hill to the orchard, pursuing the One through the trees, feeling him everywhere—ahead, near the shrub, no there—beyond that tree! Did I see the curve of a shoulder, of a back just disappearing beyond the willow? I laughed, the music like song, the audible sum of elation, hearing behind and beyond it the laughter of God.
I would have run like that for a day, a week, a lifetime to have only kept it there. To have felt always what I did in that moment.
Eventually I came to the natural terraces of the vineyard. I was breathless, my heart thudding in my ears, the blood in my veins drumming its pulsing song. I plucked my way between the woody, untrained vines, stumped like shrubs—only recently had the adam and I talked of pruning back their shoots—fingering the tooth-edged leaves, plucking idly at grapes the size of plums. I ate hungrily, thirstily, before dropping into a shaded patch of grass, my forearm over my eyes. Sated with the sugar of the grapes, elated from my run, ecstatic from the presence of the One—I drifted to sleep.
When I woke, the sun was in my eyes. No, it was too late in the day for that. I rolled over and found that the brightness nearby was not the sun at all, but its light reflected on gleaming scales.
The serpent watched me with a glittering eye.
How beautiful you are, daughter of God and man. Though the other animals made plain their pleasure or curiosity or intent, none of them ever spoke so elegantly to my inner ear as he. How strange he was, with that aged sense of spirit possessed by none of the others.
And you. In my euphoria and now in my languor, every-thing was beautiful, even more so than normal. I found myself wanting to touch him.
Ah, bliss, he said, standing just outside my reach. How I knew it, once. It came, so faintly: an unspoken exhalation. I knew then that he understood the thing still ebbing like opiate from my veins.
His eye roved over me, watching me as though from a distance and not mere inches away.
How lovely is rapture on you, daughter of man and God.
I sighed. How lovely is the rapture of the One that Is.
You were beautiful even without it. And how intelligent you are! You make yourself over by your search for understanding. By your discoveries, you are daily a new creature. All creation bows down before you. He inclined his head. He would have gone away then, I knew, except that I said aloud after him, “It is because of the One that Is. What am I on my own or you on your own, without the One, after all?”
The serpent’s back stiffened, and it returned its obsidian eye to me.
Indeed, what are you but a part of the adam, and he, a particle of mud? But—he drew closer now. Lying on the ground as I was, he towered over me, as large as a wolf. You became more the moment you demanded to know. When you first lifted your face to the heavens and determined to ascend to understanding. You are more like the One that Is than you realize.
Had I the eyes to see it, I might have noted the moue of distaste. I might have seen the turn of his head as he bowed it. But at the time I was only confounded by his logic, which seemed one moment as opaque as the mists—and in the next as bright as the sun the moment they cleared.
That afternoon when I went down from the terraces, I called the fallow doe, Adah. She pricked her head and came at a gait and together we ran for the river. We plunged full-long into the water and swam so far that we began to drift, Adah, legs churning, I on my back. My hair splayed beneath the glassy surface of the water as I gazed, unflinching, into the sun, thinking of all that the serpent had said.
After a while, Adah picked her way onto the bank. But I drifted until the reeds caught me, until the plop of frogs in the shallows tickled my ears, and I looked up to find the adam crouched at the edge of the water, smiling at me.
He waded in among the reeds and gathered me to him. “How smooth and high your cheek. How strong your legs. How graceful your back. Ask of me anything. Ask of the One that Is anything. Who can deny you?”
That day when he kissed me, I had two loves: one given to hold me and one to woo my soul.
Surely I was the most beautiful creature on earth.
LATE THAT NIGHT, AFTER the insects had come out to take up their chorus by light of the waning moon, I wondered what it must have been to be alone.
I imagined what it was to be without, to see a counterpart for every animal and none for oneself.
Sometime before sleep it occurred to me that the true nature of being without might mean never knowing what one lacked.
I DREAMED OF DARK heavens, of land pulled from the water, and the great energy everywhere, jittering with life.
But there—a great light careened toward a zenith! It was a fiery globe, molten, throwing warmth onto my skin. There were others, too, peering into the darkness like the opening of a thousand eyes, each of them glistening through the heavens, seeming to stare at me. Behind me, a cooler light, so small in comparison, rose in silence. Then I realized it was no light at all but a small mass of land illuminated by that new, great star.
Now with the rise of the sun and of the smaller mass, a long pull bent the walls of my veins in one great, throbbing tug. Release, and then the tug again: the ebb and flow of the tide. The pulse of every heart and vein. The beckon of every womb.
It came as a chorus. It came as a roar. Now when I looked upon the land, the raw earth and craggy mountains in all their chilly finery had sprung a lush wealth of trees, shrub, and grass—green of every kind, twining toward heaven in whatever direction the sun might wheel. The pulse in my ear came not from me but from that land and the stems throbbing with water and sun and sap.
Wake!
THAT MORNING, AS WE made our water in the stream, I announced: “Beyond this land there is a great body of water, filled with strange life miniscule and giant, and beyond it there is another continent. And another.”
I told him about the mountains with their treasures like charms hidden in a fist, and the marshy deltas that drained into great lakes where hatching flies spewed up from the surface like plumes of smoke escaping the abyss below. Of island mountains heaving up fire to sizzle in the sea. Of the frozen waters, creeping so slowly as to seem never to move.
When I had finished, he gave a slow exhale. “You are truly the daughter of God.”
“You told me once you roamed the place beyond this valley.”
“Yes, beyond the mountain gate, before the great mountain to the east, the origin of our river. There is a wide basin before it, covered with waves of rustling grass.”
My dreaming vision had not played me false—th
e world was vast. One day we would come out from this gated cradle and discover the secrets beyond that plain.
I did not realize then how very soon that was to be.
4
Gazing at the glimmering sky by night, I saw the drama of the creation of my dreams inscribed in living code. If only I studied it long enough, I thought I might read within its record the account of all that had gone before. There was meaning, I knew, in the strew of the stars, cryptic symbols drawn by the finger of the One in an age before this.
On a night like this I closed my eyes and found myself gazing down again at the thriving vegetation of the land. The tug and pull of the stars drew me out in all directions—toward the sun, toward the cosmos as they churned with such force that I thought I might split apart.
I was aware of those celestial bodies as I had never been before, each of them measuring the passing of seconds and moments and hours, the fulmination of time where before there had been none.
Now when I looked out over the land, I saw movement within the seas. I rushed as the wind upon the surface of the water and saw beneath it the swarm of fish and, beyond them, a great shadow, gliding through the deep. Was there anything so vast as this ocean, so great as this colossus within it, or so powerful as the One who commanded them all, Wake and Swim?
My heart lifted, and I mounted up toward the sky. I cried aloud the name of the One, spoken in secret to me, but it was with the voice of the eagle. The heavens answered in kind with the throats of a thousand birds.
Wake! I heard, and with every fiber of my being I replied:
I live!
WHEN I CAME TO the river after racing Adah to the far vineyard and back, I found the adam waiting for me, jewels of our garden in hand. He poked the buds of roses into my hair. He laid a wreath of laurel upon my head. But it was the thing he offered upon his palm that caused me to catch my breath: a carved bit of alabaster, a miniature form. I turned it over, touched the lines of legs and curve of hip and buttock and breast. Her arms were straight at her side, her face without detail except for the hint of a nose. But it could only be me. He showed me the burin with which he had carved it. He had with him, too, a short length of cord that he wrapped around the woman before fastening her around my neck. I fingered the smooth figurine, wishing there was a way to tie it without shrouding it in cord; I loved the feel of her form beneath my fingers.