Havah

  I was not prepared for what he did next. With a great wail he pulled me against him and bore me to the cave floor. He buried his head against my breast like a child and said, “You cannot die! Do not leave me! Do not die!”

  I hissed, “We are both dying, or did you miss it? So never fear, my love, you are dying too!”

  He moaned more loudly, shuddering against me. I felt his tears, hot against my throat, slipping into my hair.

  “Not yet,” he wailed, as raw as the earth. “But you lie as though already dead, and I cannot go on without you. Do not leave me. Do not die!”

  I felt a grief from him to melt the mountain ice. Grief to drown in. Grief to both rend my heart and mend it at once.

  He held me harder against him and stroked me desperately, as one rubs a body to life, cradling my cheek and clasping desperately at my back and then my thighs.

  Needfully, he came to me; roughly, he took me. And in grief and in love, I opened my arms, drawing him into them until he strove with me, desperately chasing the unity we once shared. It seemed he would bury himself in me, as though I were a haven of all that was familiar, the lush place we had known together.

  When we lay exhausted—for all this while I had not eaten or drunk—his head rested upon my shoulder, and his arm draped over me as though fearful I might run away or in fact die.

  “The One said that your seed will strike the head of the serpent.”

  I stared into the darkness of the shallow cave and recalled the words of the One with the tendril of perfect recollection. I had not pondered them since the terror of hearing them spoken, through all our flight from the valley.

  But the adam had.

  “You are necessary to that end, and to me.” His voice broke. “You are all I have of the garden. You are the image of me and of the One. And if you have wronged, then I have surely repaid your wrong twice over.”

  He lifted himself, and I knew without seeing that tears streamed down his face. They slid down either side of mine as well, past my temples, over my ears.

  “I will protect you all the days of my life. You will be the mother of all who live and the giver of life to the seed spoken by the One—the seed that will strike the offspring of the serpent. The One has said it, Isha.” He kissed me softly on the mouth. “Today I name you Havah because you will live, and all who live will come from you, and you will give birth to hope.”

  Even as he said it, I knew there were things from which he could not protect me. Though I knew I would rise up and eat and drink—and I had forgotten until now that the One had said I would bear children—we were surely to die. If not today or tomorrow, then eventually.

  He could not protect me from that.

  But he had done what he could, naming me after life even in the face of our doom as one whispers a wish into the squall of disappointment.

  “Havah.” The name is a breath before speaking and a fiery exhale.

  I am vitality borne into the lung; I am existence whispered on the tongue. Like the breath with which the One sparked life into the adam . . .

  I live.

  EXILE

  11

  If the One had a name for the adam, it was known only to him or shared between them in secret. If that was the case, neither of them ever told me. So he was always the adam to me, which meant only “human”—this man, my mate without a name.

  The night Adam named me, I dreamed of the serpent, regal as he had been, lovely to the eye. I recalled the daylight upon his wings, the iridescence of the scales upon his feet, the golden talons. I dreamed, too, of the way he had magnified into something more, growing wings greater than his wings, unfurling his length to stand impossibly erect, his brilliance putting the sun to shame. Truly he was the most majestic creature under God! I wondered, waking later in the night, what had become of the being that had risen from that wormlike shell. He, who turned a face to every direction. He, for whom I had a hundred questions and a hundred more accusations.

  Thoughts of the serpent fled with the morning light; when I rose from my rocky bed, I knew I did it not as one but two.

  I had conceived.

  WE FOLLOWED THE RIVER south, sustaining ourselves on cresses, radish, garlic, and lentil shoots. We ate sweet plums as we walked on feet sore from stumbling upon stones and strange thorns. We never wanted for food, though I was convinced that the fruits were punier and the leaves thinner and the sweet peas less fragrant than those that grew in the valley. Even the grapes tasted nothing like those in our valley, lacking the brilliance of the One as it had shone upon my face that day. What was the sun to that?

  But as I savored the secret of my conception—it was the first time I had something truly to myself—it seemed that I saw in the sun a hint of the amber that once bathed the slope of the mount by late afternoon. That I heard in the river some fragment, if broken, of the song our river had sung.

  I clasped the marvelous knowledge of my pregnancy around me like a mantle. In my heart I whispered to the One.

  One day, I knew, I would hear his voice again.

  “MY FEET ARE TIRED.” In fact, they were not so sore, and the cut upon the one had long since covered itself with a crust that had dried and begun to flake away. The skin beneath it was smooth and pink and new. But I was weary of this unending journey. I had lost track of the days as the foothills of the mount gave way to forest filled with oak and pistachio and hawthorn, almond, pear, and wild cherry, and then to meadow and forest again. By now the last forest had retreated into the distance, and I was worn by the undulating monotony of the hills—and the eternal walking.

  I was also tired of watching Adam struggle to make the fire at night. Where once the spark had leapt to the tinder nearly upon his command, now it must be coaxed with what seemed an increasing amount of effort so that many nights I bid him let it be. I had no word of encouragement for him; I could not stand to watch such enervated efforts where before he would never have struggled. So we huddled together beneath the hated hides, the lamb, which I named Gada for the riverbank that we followed all those days, and our frustration between us.

  “We will rest awhile,” Adam agreed. “There is a good tree for shade—”

  “No. I want to stop. Not just for an hour, or even for a day. I am tired.”

  He frowned.

  “Why should we keep going anyway? Where are we trying to go? My back is sore from lying on this hard ground. I want to make mats to sleep on.”

  We stayed there for three days, weaving mats that we might roll up and tie and sling over our shoulders. I had fashioned already a handle for the smaller basket in which we kept our fire kit. Soon, I thought, I would need a basket strong enough to cradle my baby.

  I was converting the rest of our belongings to a new carrier—I had decided to replace the old one while I was making the mats—when I realized my pendant was not among our things. Frantic, I dumped out the basket and searched again. Upon not finding it, I sat back on my heels and began to weep uncontrollably. Adam, who had spent the morning scouring the river’s shallows for flint nodules, obsidian, and quartz, stared at me as though bats had flown from my ears.

  “My pendant. The one you carved for me—” Then I remembered: I had thrown it away from me. I dropped my head to my hands and wept afresh.

  Adam wrapped his arms around me. “It was a trifle. I will make you another. See here, Isha, a bit of quartz I found today. I will make it from this.”

  “No,” I said, tears streaming down my face. “No! I don’t want it!”

  I couldn’t explain that I wanted nothing carved from this outside world, no matter how beautiful. I wanted—no, needed—the old pendant expressly because it came from our valley and from a time before this silence we lived in now. But there was more: It was something precious that I might give to my son—something beyond a flint or obsidian flake—brought out from that place, by which I might say, “See and know the place from which we came.”

  Because here was the truth: Though I had retraced,
over and over, our journey in my mind, I could not be certain of the way we had come from the fiery pillars at the gate of that valley to the cave in which I’d lain waiting to die. I could recall no landmark; we had fled the thunder in darkness and followed first one and then another group of animals in aimless exhaustion.

  I did not know the way back.

  “Adam? I must know. Do you think you could find the way back?”

  “To what?” Adam looked thoroughly perplexed.

  “To the valley. Our garden. Could you?”

  He was silent and I knew his answer.

  He said, very softly, “The days that I left you in the cave, I ranged as far back as I dared, as far as I remembered. But always I came to a place where I knew neither north nor south, where I recognized neither tree nor shrub nor stream . . . where I could recognize nothing but the way I had just come. And as we have traveled all these days since, I have tried to recall our steps the night the thunder was at our backs. . . .” He shook his head.

  And so there it was. We were exiled and did not even know the way to return if we could.

  “Let us go back,” I said, hurriedly collecting our things. “Let us go back the way we have come.”

  Adam shook his head. “It’s no use, Isha. I have tried. How I tried!”

  “We followed the river. We will follow it back. Between the two of us, we will find it. But we must go now, right away.”

  “But that is the thing!” he cried. “I am not certain we will come back to the same river.”

  I sat back, hard, upon the dirt.

  I wanted to tell myself that it did not matter. With our perfect memories—we retained that much, at least, even if we had lost the natural union between us—we could surely remember. We would wander the area for as many days as it took us to find it. But even as I thought it, I knew no amount of wandering could help. Despair opened before me like a yawning pit.

  Adam laid his hand over his eyes. His face crumpled. This time I felt no impatience or weariness or indifference. For the first time in days, I understood pain that was not only my own. It jarred me from myself even as I clung to the one thing I had clasped about my heart more closely than the pendant that had once hung before it.

  “My love,” I said, taking his hand gently away from his eyes. Ah, how I loved him, even as his face was twisted in despair! “Adam . . . Ish. I, too, have something I have not told you.” I lifted his hand and kissed it. “I bear the seed.”

  He blinked, dark lashes long in shadow against his cheek.

  “I am pregnant with that child. You yourself spoke of it the night it took root in me.”

  “And I did not even know it.” Wonder filled his face, his words.

  “And yet I do, and I am not afraid of the pain because what a child this shall be!” I went into his arms. “He will strike the head of the serpent, as you have said. Because I know now that the serpent was no common animal—”

  “I thought my eyes played a trick. It seemed to me he stood before the One almost as a man—no, as something greater.” We had never spoken of it. Now I felt a rush of relief and gratitude that it was laid plain between us at last. All of it.

  “I have pondered this many days, that this is the very thing the serpent wished for us, exactly as it has happened. I am certain it knew, as now we know, evil. But now I bear the seed. Because of him, the day will come when we need no landmark to know the way again.”

  I had to believe it. I must. Just as I must believe that as the earth remained intact, the waters would one day recede in our valley garden. Surely the fire must go out. We had seen the areas burnt by our fires, the way the grass had grown in more lushly than before. Surely the garden would heal as we healed from the cuts of thorns and stone.

  And then one day we would find our way back.

  12

  We could not live as we had before. The world was different, and now we had to think of more than ourselves. We wandered the nearby hills, looking for caves. Most of them were filled with the scat of rodents. I wrinkled my nose, but Adam would not be swayed. He spoke little and frowned often in those days. He was frequently alone in his thoughts, speaking only when I questioned him directly. Even then he did not hear me sometimes so that I had to repeat my questions a second or third time. By then my tone was as abrasive as the coarse hair of the boar. How he annoyed me!

  Meanwhile we stayed in a series of ill-suited niches—they could not properly be called caves—in the hills for a number of days until he returned one morning to say he had found a cave that we could comfortably live in for a time. At that I threw up my arms and said that the world had been made anew, that the sun and moon had shone in the same day, and surely I was the most blessed of all women.

  We cleared away the dirt and debris and laid fresh rushes and grass and even flowers upon the floor. We stacked the baskets with our things, which at the time seemed many, against the wall. When it was done, the tension around Adam’s mouth and shoulders softened, and he laughed a little bit as he had a lifetime ago. I thought, This is where I will birth my baby. Here, in the cool shade, on the strew. The One had talked of pain, but I was not afraid of it. I would welcome it. This was the seed of whom the One had spoken, who would visit upon the serpent a greater blow than the serpent had done to me.

  I understood now that the serpent, once my wise advisor, was—and always had been—my enemy. I did not know why. I had known nothing of guile then. But I knew something of requital now.

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER I wandered west of the cave to the place where the hills, covered in herbs and wild flowers, flattened toward a wide meadow. There were several large, flat stones in the area, and the day before, as I had picked my way between them, I had come upon a snake. Its jaw was unhinged and the tail of a fat mouse protruded, limp, from the gullet stretched around it. I ran away, unmindful of the stones beneath my feet, seeing visions of Adah stripped of her skin, the waning light of the One, and the chrysalis of the serpent upon the ground slithering away like a worm. When I had gotten away, I retched up every bit of my breakfast.

  This time when I went back I saw an altogether different sight: The snake—could it be the very one? But there was its belly, still distended—lay dead, its head flattened as though struck by the hoof of an animal.

  This I took as my sign.

  I sang the rest of the day and welcomed Adam to my arms that night.

  “HAVE YOU NOTICED,” ADAM said one day, “how strange the animals have grown?”

  I wanted to say of course I had noticed—this was no news. Since before we left the valley, when Dvash had bared her teeth to me, I had known it. But it was not just her. They had been skittish and strange everywhere outside the valley. The jackal ran away, the hare skittered along the ground as though it were a shadow, the deer kept to themselves, and I had not seen a bear in days—and then only from a distance.

  “But it isn’t just the animals,” I said. “The ground must be different as well. Everything that grows from it seems not quite as right as it was.”

  He was quiet for some time before he said, “The antlers that I brought back in those first days—a buck did not drop them. That day I was near the wood, and I found them.” He did not look at me.

  “But you just now said the buck did not drop them.”

  He was carving, which had been his habit in the evening as it required no more light than that which the fire gave off—or the moon, when it was full enough.

  “The buck was dead, the belly ripped open, eaten to the bone. So much of it was gone that I couldn’t even save the hide.”

  I lurched toward the opening of the cave. After I had emptied my stomach on the path outside and taken some water from the basket—it was leaking, I could tell, and tomorrow I must treat it with pitch—I settled back onto my mat and said vehemently, “Good. I want no more of hides.” Couldn’t he see that I hated them? I would throw them away were the wind not occasionally unkind and the nights cooler than we were accustomed to.

&n
bsp; He shook his head. “We must have clothes. Haven’t you noticed that the nights are cooler?”

  “Of course I have,” I snapped. Had I not come to just the same conclusion? Did he think I had no brain—made of the same stuff as his?

  “We need more clothes and coverings for our feet,” he said. “I’ve lost track of the times I’ve cut mine on stones, and there are the insects and creatures.” I thought of the snake. I had not mentioned it to him.

  He laid down his carving with a sigh and stretched out on the sleeping mat, his arms behind his head. He was leaner now, the angles of his face sleek, his limbs sinewy as those of the great cat. I, too, had grown thinner, the child in my belly not even making the smallest bump yet.

  I moved to lay next to him, to smooth back his hair and peer into his face, searching there for traces of the boy who had given birth to this man. I could not see the blue of his eyes in the dimness of the cave, even with the fire. I wished, fiercely, in that moment that I could.

  “Isha,” he said softly. “Is it too terrible? To live here as we do, I mean. I will do anything to bring you comfort, only never lay as you did those first days, as one dying—”

  I shushed him softly, stroked back the hair from his face. “No. It is not too terrible.” In that moment I told the truth.

  WE RIGOROUSLY STUDIED THE changing vegetation around us. Every day the soil seemed to thrust up strange new life. Some of it was vile to touch, as the nettle, or to eat, as the bitter melon. We found other uses for them eventually. Where once we had eaten anything that came from the earth, we had to use caution now. Where once we had never worried about the supply of food, we began to mark the progression of seasons, the bloom and wane of fruit trees and shrubs and vine.