The thunder rolled away as though it would take itself to the eastern sea, then doubled back, one wave crashing upon the heels of the last, beating at the skies. Before my inner eye I saw again the rising of the land, the heaving of the mountains, and wondered if the One meant to put them back.
I slipped on the wet earth, and my foot slid into a rock. Pain shot up my leg, startling the breath from me. I skittered but ran on. I could barely see, rain and sodden hair in my eyes. I thought I made out the shape of a hare darting through the brush, and, a moment later, the boar, though whether they were truly there or a trick of the rain and lightning, I could not know.
I scrambled toward the natural terraces. Water sluiced past me from above as I climbed upward, trying to get a view of the valley behind me to watch for the adam. The mount and the range to the north hunched like hulking giants. The river was well over its banks in some places. Lightning flashed, and I recognized one of the ewes struggling in the river, flailing as the current carried her away. I cowered on the terrace, wondering if the valley, roused to monstrous life, would devour the adam as well.
Was this my world now? Was this how it would forever be, never to see the sun again or lift our faces to the heavens without rain driving into our eyes?
Let the adam come quickly, I begged the One. But if he heard me, I did not know it.
After a while, the rain abated. Where was the adam? There was an outcrop here, farther up, where I could watch for him in the intermittent lightning. I climbed upward, along the rocky path. My foot slipped again and—ah, now there was pain! But I went on, clutching at grass and stone and shrub. The thunder rolled away, the sky flashed in silence.
I came to the outcrop that lay like a great lintel across the crumbling stone beneath. There was a small opening here like a cave. In here I had taken my meal of grapes and licorice root on hot days, watching the deer and lion upon the valley floor. I dropped, grateful to crawl within its low space where I would wait for the adam or God or death.
A low, grinding growl came from the darkness. I halted, wondering if thunder, that anger in the sky, could issue from the earth itself. In a flash of shock lightning, I made out the form of a wolf crouched as far back as she could go, her narrow bite bared, all gums and long incisors.
“Dvash,” I called, recognizing the she-wolf that had licked honey from my fingers. She relented only a little, her lips still peeled from her teeth. But when I moved toward her, she bit out a sharp snap so that I jerked back, hitting my head and scuttling backward out of the opening.
Had the animals turned traitor to us as well? I thought of Adah and her mate.
Or had we turned traitor to them?
I backed out into the rain. Stones and pebbles broke the skin of my knee, bit my palms. My foot throbbed.
I sidled along the outcrop to a smaller ledge and drew back as far as I could, pulling up my knees, shielding my eyes. Below me, tree and shrub seemed to dance to a frenetic rhythm.
BESIDE ME THE VINES shivered, fruit spilled to the muddy earth. And there—ah! There I had lain, arms outspread. Was it only yesterday that this ground had been holy? That I had been holy before the One that Is and God had lavished joy upon my face as one drops kisses onto the head of a babe?
I lowered my head to my arms and wept, my tears carried away by rivulets of rain.
The sky rumbled and the thunder surged back. This time I felt it beneath my feet. It vibrated up through the earth. Stones somersaulted down the hillside. One of them grazed my shoulder. The black sky beyond the mount was veined with lightning like the back of an unnatural leaf. I could see movement on the side of the mountain: creatures fleeing for the lowland—no, they were not creatures but stones.
I scrambled to the outcrop and peered into the darkness. “Come out!” I shouted to Dvash. She snarled and snapped a ferocious bark that sent me jerking back. Did she understand not at all? Did she not know that I told her come out for her own good, this creature that had once obeyed me without a thought, that had licked honey from my fingers and bared to me her belly? “Come!” I shouted, but she shrank back even farther.
I retreated the way I had come up, the cut in my foot forgotten, struck twice by falling rock. Down. I must get down.
Where was the adam?
A thudding crash sounded above me. I craned to see and cried out; the outcrop had closed like a snapping jaw. There was no sign of the wolf at all. I started back, meaning to go to her, but even in my strength, which was considerable, I knew I could not free her. A large stone tumbled past me. I clung beneath a small precipice, knowing I could not go back.
The earth rumbled, and I lost my footing. Sliding, scrambling, I reached the low hills. And then I sprinted, as fast as the gazelle, for the eastern gate.
When I got there, I spun back. The earth shifted again and the river lurched up in the bed. There was no adam.
I tried to shout the holy name of God, which I had known, but when I opened my mouth, it was like something beyond reach, so that I stuttered the unintelligible.
“It is I!” I cried. “It is I!” I began to tear at the pelt, but it was firmly made. Thunder drowned my cries in a roaring clap, and lightning flashed so brilliantly it blinded me for the moment after.
A figure dashed along the river—a she-goat, hair matted to her body. I called for her over the receding echo of the thunder. She veered toward me, and I grabbed her by the neck, somehow avoiding her horns. But she would not be restrained for long, and I could not hold her. She was out of her mind. I pushed her toward the eastern gate. “Go!” I slapped her rump and sent her at a run. The river had risen so high that she had to pick her way along the edge, but she was adroit and soon disappeared from view.
I stared after her, alone again, beaten by rain and terrorized by the skies and the earth beneath me. Lightning struck midway up the sacred mount, and a flash arced out from it. Sparks seared the dark, and a tree caught fire, impossibly, glowing in the rain. Again, the voracious lightning, and another tree flared and ignited, this one slightly farther up, so that the two flames looked like the eyes of the wolf beneath the outcrop, shaggy head tilted to glare at me.
The blaze did not abate in the rain but seemed to lick at the brush around it, sodden though it was, like a fiery tongue.
THE WIND ROSE WITH a howl and fire spread up the face of the mount like the long iris of a cat.
This time when I called for God, it was with a whisper. I fell down to my knees as the valley shook and flooded and ignited to ruin about me. I waited as the earth shuddered again. Waited—to hear that voice bidding me this time not to wake but to sleep.
But the voice that cut through the rain was not the One. It was the adam.
He ran with a white mantle over his neck—no, it was no mantle but one of the new lambs.
“Go!” he cried, waving me before him. I stumbled to my feet and ran to him, relieved to sobs at the sight of him, unwilling to go alone ahead of him again. But he shouted again, “Go, go! See the waters!” And indeed, the river ran even higher than a moment ago.
Lightning struck the vineyard. Flames engulfed the shrubs. Again and again the lightning came like a lashing tongue, unnatural fire in its wake.
“Run!” the adam shouted again, alongside me now, holding fast the legs of the lamb about his neck. I saw now a bundle at his waist, caught up in the pouch of one of my textiles, beating at his thigh.
We ran for the gate, the hillsides aflame behind us, fires like burning fingers pointing accusation from every direction.
But that was not the end of terror. As we ran, I was suddenly aware of the multitude in the sky—those beings we had always known to be there but had never seen. I could not sense them as acutely as before, but I could feel them. Where before they had been as silent observers to our contentment, I felt them rushing down upon us now as the eagle upon the fox.
At the narrowest pass the adam struggled, the lamb flailing upon his shoulders, bleating pitiably into the storm. Beneath us the riv
er ripped up from the bed, spraying our feet, making wet and slick the path beneath us. When we finally broke from the narrow way, lightning struck the high side of the pass, and it burst with fiery sparks into a column of flame.
We ran, lungs burning, as lightning seared the same spot again and again and again.
Later I would remember strange things in the fire: beings with wings like animals and faces as fearsome as those of the serpent before the light of God, glimmering in the flames, beautiful and terrible, seeming to look in all directions at once—always seeming to stare at me. But at that time, I knew only that there was fire everywhere behind us.
We ran. Out toward the basin beyond the mountains. Where the valley had been deserted, here now were a multitude of animals in flight: the goat and great cat, the bear and the deer. We fled with them, not knowing which direction we went—it didn’t matter as long as it was away from the fiery gates of our valley.
We followed the river formed by the abyss waters where they fall down the southern side of the mount. In the place where the hills roll south toward the low plain, we fell down at last, drinking from the muddied waters in our thirst, unable to cleanse the taste of smoke and fire from our mouths.
The wind quieted, and after a while the clouds stopped churning and spread out like a dingy, gnarled fleece. From here we could see nothing of the great pillar of fire or the smoke of the trees, reaching like burning fingers to claw at the sky. Here in the low hills, that life was a league—a world—away.
10
Dawn had the gall to come—unremarkably and plainly. We straggled on, staggering in exhaustion. The adam’s face was a sweat-streaked mask of grime, though his jaw was set in the most determined and beautiful line. I thought then that I could almost forgive him his betrayal, if only for the comforting sight of the staunchness of that jaw.
Sometime around midmorning we stopped. We found the rocky outcrop of a hill and fell down beneath it. I thought of Dvash and the way the lintel had collapsed upon her. I wondered if she could possibly be alive, whining and pawing in the darkness of that tomb, or if all that remained was a form stamped back into the earth from which it had come.
We curled together, untying our garments with numb fingers to lay them beneath and over us as we shivered, cradling the lamb between us.
THAT NIGHT I DID not dream of the cosmos or the deep. I dreamed of fire and of the faces looking all directions at once from within it. Fire, searing the ground in our wake, immolating our steps so that they might never be known again.
By the time the sun had passed her zenith, my foot burned, my every limb ached. I did not move, even at the adam’s urging, to go to the river to drink or to find food. I rose only once, to pass water, and laid back again upon the stony earth.
Where had Adah and Dvash gone, their bodies mangled, bereft of wholeness? Perhaps the roof of the cave would fall upon me as it had upon the wolf and swallow me back to the earth, and I would know.
But it did not. So I lay, half dreaming a sleep of horrors in the coolness of the shade, knowing something already, perhaps, of the tomb. The adam left intermittently, and I heard on occasion the bleating of the lamb as it followed him about, no doubt bereft of its mother. I hated the noise; it reminded me of the absence of the One, who seemed now very far from me, as my valley seemed far from me.
But most of all, it reminded me that I lay there, alive. Sleep overtook me and then fled in cowardly dance. I dreamed in fits—first, that I lay in the full sun of our garden amid apricots and hyssop. A warbler sang the trilling song of the grasshopper, and a hawk wheeled overhead.
But then I dreamed of a darkness like night without benefit of the moon. The entire earth groaned its death cry. When morning came in my dream, it crawled on feeble limbs, and the valley that replaced the vibrant world of my garden was but a shadow of it. In it the animals spoke the language of the deaf-mute, dumb in their existence, creatures feral and instinctive and base. I saw the adam, running with the lamb over his shoulders, staggering over rocks, his face blackened as though from fire. My lovely adam, who was not meant for this crude earth, having been refined beyond it by the breath of the One.
That night he brought me lettuces to eat, but I turned my head away, disdaining, too, the water he had carried most carefully from the river in a bark cup. Eventually I heard him drink it himself. When he lay down at last with a heavy sigh, he did so like a toppled tree felled by lightning and fire.
I have done this to him, I thought. He will die because of me.
But then I remembered the look in his eye as he accepted the fruit from my hand and knew that I had no sooner acted on his behalf than he had on mine but that we had been one. I recalled, too, the sound of his voice disowning me before God. But when I thought, We both have done this! and could almost bear it so that I might not die after all, I thought again of the man, broken before the One, the lovely face covered in grime as he struggled to keep his footing in the mud. So I was resolved anew that I would die. For his betrayal and his pain—and for my own—I would die. And for the burden of his love as he curled around me in the evening, laying his own garment over me and the lamb beside me to keep me warm. For that, too, I would die.
So I closed my eyes and waited for the earth from which he had sprung to swallow me. I could not return to the adam in the way I had come from him, so I would return to the source of his origin.
The voice that had urged me wake was silent.
THE NEXT MORNING I opened my eyes not on the next world, or on oblivion, but on the ceiling of the shallow cave. The adam had gone—to find food, no doubt. He had built a small fire, but rather than comfort, it brought only distress; it contained the stench of the burning trees amid the storm . . . and the faces, both terrible and lovely, that I had seen amidst the flames.
He returned later, the lamb cavorting about him. I wanted to choke the stupid animal. Did it not remember that it once had a dam with sweet milk and that it had come from paradise to exile?
The adam brought me water, but I threw it away from me. I almost regretted it afterward when he looked at me as though I were a creature he did not recognize. I wanted to laugh. I had become like the animals: alien and strange.
But neither did I recognize in him the lover in the garden, the teacher and loyal sibling—only a creature living for some dogged reason I could not understand. I could not divine his thoughts at all—only those which he wore as plainly as that horrid pelt. The thing had begun to smell now, though I could scent also the river on him and knew at some point he had bathed.
I turned away, hating all these differences in him. Hating them because I knew very well that it was all mirrored in me.
Except that I had not bathed. The next day he went out again.
He was gone a long time. When he returned at last, it was evening, and he had brought back several things with him. I did not care to know what they were. I had seen everything in this life, and all that had been good lay behind me. The One had sent us out, and the adam had decried me.
I faced the wall and pretended to sleep. I imagined I felt his desperate frustration directed at me, settling near the base of my spine, pricking its way up my back like a millipede with stinging feet. Perhaps by the next time he returned, I would be dead and need not suffer his glares. Perhaps in the very next moment the death would come upon me, and I would return to that place that I was before—before light exploded in the heavens, before the voice bid me wake, before the day I first opened my eyes on the adam and gazed into those ceaseless pools of blue.
I could feel my stomach, pulled in taut as though drawn to my spine, my hip bones jutting against the rough inside of the pelt. Surely one could not live without eating for three whole days, or without sun or water or pleasure or laughter. Surely one could not live by lying thus, unmoving. Surely.
And what of the adam? Would he follow me to the earth again, if I, his side, should go? Would it doom him as well as sharing my meal had doomed him? Was he not as doomed as I alre
ady?
Yet he moved in and out of the cave, recovering vigor after our flight as though he had every intention of living. As though we stood not upon the precipice of death but only a new home.
I tried not to think how that irritated me, how pointless it seemed.
That evening, as the fire died down, I felt him untie his thong and lay his skin over us both, over the one already covering me.
I wanted to weep. Why did he sustain me, who had given him death to eat?
I, whom he decried before the One?
I, who forced no action of his hand or working of his mouth to take the fruit and chew and eat it! Yet here I lay, waiting to die for the both of us, as though he had neither eye nor brain nor tongue!
That was the moment I heard it: the softest bit of a snore. Just a hint of a breath risen beyond the purr that I had once associated with the rumble of the lion, except this time it came inelegantly through the throat and out of a slack-jawed mouth.
I lay in torment, dying the death—and he lay snoring on his side?
With a violent start I threw off the pelts and began to beat at him with my fists. He woke with a shout, no doubt amazed by this burst of life from me.
“If I am such a curse to you, why do you feed me? Why not disown me in deed, or will you only in word before the One?” I shouted, my voice raw. I kicked the pelts farther from me. I would die without that trophy of death upon me. I would die as I had come into this world, in my own skin.
And by the One, I would die without the sound of the adam’s snoring in my ear.
I closed my fingers around the alabaster pendant and yanked it so that the cord, drenched in the storm, dried and brittle now, broke. I flung it against the back of the cave. I wanted his tokens, as his love, far from me. They were too painful a reminder of the man I knew before this maddening creature had come to take his place.
“Why do you feed me? ‘She gave me, and I ate!’ Then go on without me if this woman is such a burden. Let me die!”