Eve (36 page)

Cain thought a moment. “We will ask your Inanna, then. How is that?”

The men whispered between themselves. They shot quick looks at
Cain, who had his hands across his chest. “You have yourself a deal,” said the fat man. “What is our reward?”

“Name it,” said Cain.

The fat man looked at the painted man and sneered. “Your sister.” He spit in his hand and held it out to Cain.

Cain’s hand flew to the knife in his belt. He pulled it out and held it out in front of him.
Flash flash flash,
it went in the sun.

I sucked in air. Did they mean
me? Be careful, Dara, they will try to kill you,
Aya had said.

Cain could not beat these two bullies—once, I saw them kick a poor dog until it lay down and didn’t move.

“What is it, what is it?” Puabi asked.

I pointed to Cain.

“What?” demanded Puabi. She stood up on the bench and tippy-toed to see over the crowd.

I stood and cupped my hand over her mouth, so the bad men wouldn’t see us and come get me. “Shhh,” I hissed.

Puabi pulled away, and her tea spilled. She began to shriek like a hyena, and Zenobia came running.

“What’s wrong, baby?” she said, brushing Puabi’s hair from her face. “What is it?”

I stood as still as a rock and watched Cain waving his knife at the two men.
Go, Cain, go go go,
I thought.
Do not let them take me like they tried to take Aya.

I heard Puabi say, “My tea.”

The fat man and the painted man guffawed. “We jest with you. We will take the dates, all of them. If you win, you shall have our dates. Fair enough?”

Cain stood very still, sweat dripping off his face. He put the knife back in his pocket. “Your dates are rubbish,” he said, frowning. “What kind of reward is that? If I win, I want two oxen and some of that flaxseed you have.”

The fat man waved to a worker nearby who molded clay into shapes on a wheel. “Wet clay,” he demanded.

The potter bunched up some clay and flattened it into a square and took it to the fat man. He bowed to the fat man. “At your service,” he said.

The fat man grabbed the clay from the potter’s hand. “Here,” said the fat man to Cain. “Your mark.”

Cain nodded and took the hem of his robe and pressed it into the clay. The fat man did the same. The fat man grinned at the potter and at Cain. “Inanna sees it is good.”

I turned to Zenobia, who was pulling on the ends of my hair.

“Is this true?” Zenobia said. “That you spilled her tea?”

I shook my head.

Zenobia struck me anyway, hard across the cheek. “You will not hurt her,” she said in a loud voice. “Do you understand me?”

I didn’t do anything,
I thought, but I dropped to my knees and kissed the back of Zenobia’s hand. This is what I had been taught to do, if I was ever punished. Zenobia did not want excuses. Ever.

Puabi hid behind her mama’s skirts.

I glared at Puabi and thought,
You are not very nice.

I followed her and her mama back to their house, and I decided right then that her precious Mongoose might need a little trip outside the walls of the city. He’d have to be careful, though, because the lion might eat him.

I believe it was during this interim, with Dara working in the city
and me dreaming of dying, that I began to contemplate my life and what about it made it significant—if it were at all. Is this what Elohim would call a
life—
the bearing and raising of children, the wearisome arguments with Adam, the hostilities of my sons? Or did I wish for a personal act of heroism, some seed of thrilling divinity within me to rear up and claim the life it deserved, for Elohim
had
reminded Adam and me, over and over again, that we were created in His image.

In essence:
Was there more to this futile cycle, or was I simply oblivious to it?

There I was. A simple vessel that Elohim had created. But for what purpose? It was my work or my life that molded me into who I was, who I had become, that informed my stance toward my husband and children. It was what made me either hostile and strange or happy and compliant, and I was afraid my attitude had been more the former than the latter.

But why?

I think it was because I did not see where I was going. I did not see, on this meandering path I was on, a great veering or diversion ahead to lead me back to the Garden. I saw thunderous clouds ahead. I saw evil overcoming good. I saw hope swallowed by despair.

I did
not
see Elohim. Or hear Him, as I had in the Garden.

This was troublesome to me.

I say these things because I wish to make clear my inner dilemma and how it seeped like groundwater into my outer demeanor. Certainly I desired to be a good wife and a good mother, a person who loved others as herself, but this not knowing my future affected me to the very core. I wished for Elohim to explain. I wished for Him to manifest Himself again so we could converse as we used to.

Now I have doubled back again to my origin, for the Garden is at the heart of all my thoughts.

In my meditations, I have concluded that there is one thing I desired, and that was something I will call
redemption—a
rescue from the mundane, a salvation to something greater, a deliverance from this curse that had been placed on Adam and me, a rectification of my ignorance. I wished to look back on my mistakes—alas, there have been many—and see clearly, despite my missteps, that I was forging my way toward something grander than myself.

Take, for instance, Naava’s robe. Thread by thread, stitch by stitch, she related a story,
my
story, in the Garden. At first I was aware only of the disparate materials she used, unremarkable in themselves, but then, as she integrated them like the notes of a harmonious melody, another delightful entity emerged, that of my beautiful Eden. The story, or song,
became
remarkable in the mixing of the good and the bad.

I imagined Dara’s praying people with folded hands. She created, as Elohim did, from the clay of the earth, but her statues were simply that-inert statues, although I would vouch that Cain felt differently, as even I did that summer.

We—women and men, girls and boys—are alive with Elohim’s breath, with Elohim’s creativity, which makes us different, more spectacular, than any other aspect of Elohim’s creation. We are drawn to Elohim, by Elohim, in a way that no other creature seems to be.

Which is why I was continually perplexed. I felt this heart-tug, but I could not hear Him. He called me, I am sure of it now, but He refused to answer my cries.

I will tell you why I pursued these questions. In truth, I have given
them much thought. Let’s say I am a mole. If I stay in my hole, pressed in on all sides by dirt, I will not be distressed by the weight of it. It would simply be the way things are. But if I am a mole, and I am brought into the breath of day, into the drafty weightless air, I should feel that something was wrong, and I would attempt to set things right—meaning I would crawl back into my tunnel. All this is to say that I
was
a mole, set in a foreign world that I knew to be different, knew to be wrong, and I resisted it with all my being.

I have a theory, a faint notion, why this is so. I look at my children. Some are easier to love than others. Their spirits are soft, their outlook cheery. Therefore, it is easier to reciprocate their feelings. Maybe it was
my
stubborn heart,
my
blinded eyes,
my
deaf ears that refused to perceive Elohim. Maybe it was I who had created my own turmoil.

I speak for myself, of course. Adam and I used to discuss these things in the Garden, and later as he lay dying, but with the busyness of life then on the plains, that, too, was taken from us. And my prayers, like rocks I flung at the sky, only arced back down to earth.

One thing we had abandoned since the Garden was the day of rest that Elohim had talked about. He had called it the Sabbath. I wonder if our abandonment of this practice had something to do with our increasing feelings of disorder and distress.

It was a day like any other, humid and warm, thrumming with bird and monkey chatter. It was a day at the beginning of my life with Adam. We were absorbed in the many tasks of the Garden, one of which was yanking large-leafed vines down by the handful, those pesky epiphytes that clung to the larger trees and threatened to choke the green life out of them. Elohim appeared and said simply, “Stop.”

We had no idea what He was talking about, so we ignored Him, for He
had
encouraged us to work in His Garden.

Again, He told us to stop.

We did, the vines hanging limp in our callused and blistered hands, curious now as to what He had in mind.

He told us to sit, to rest. He wanted to tell us a story.

We sat across from Him.

He told us again of how He created the world—how He rolled the lamps of the sky in His hands, how He flung those luminous balls into the firmament and said, “It is good.” He told us of the green mountains, the vast seas, the fish, the fowl, the flowers, the forests, how all that He made was good, very good, and He was pleased.

“And then I sat and looked all around me,” He said. “And I was lonely.”

Imagine that. Elohim—lonely.

“I longed for someone I could talk to and share things with, so I thought,
I’ll make a man, in my image, who will delight in what I have made, who will enjoy the fruits of my hands.
So I formed Adam, blew my breath into him, and he took the wind and sky into his chest and became a living, breathing soul.”

Absentmindedly, Adam reached up to pull down another vine.

“Rest, Adam,” said Elohim. “I ask you to rest.”

“You’ve asked us to work the Garden,” Adam insisted.

Elohim nodded. “Labor is good, but rest is even better. For it is the juxtaposition of the two that lends credence to each. Only when you have experienced both can you appreciate either.”

“What about
me
?” I said. I was forever harping for my inclusion.

“You too,” Elohim said. “I made you from Adam’s side so that he would have a companion, someone to share things with. He was nothing before you. You completed him. You complemented him. I breathed life into you too, and then, only then, was Adam complete.”

I looked at Adam, unsure of what to say. We had talked about this matter quite frequently and argued about what it had meant—me being created
after
Adam. I argued that I was the culmination of Elohim’s creation, since I was created last. Adam argued that he was made first; therefore, he was the most important of Elohim’s creation. Of course, we were half joking then, but once we were cast out of the Garden, it became a wound that would not repair itself. Maybe this is what Elohim had meant by His
curse upon me—that man and woman would never behave as He had originally desired.

Now I think that we never quite understood the significance of what Elohim was telling us. After all, when He told us to rest, we could only know that our limbs were not tired, neither were we exhausted in spirit. So, although I am trying to recall His exact words, I am aware that I had no idea of what He was suggesting at the time. I had no need for it; therefore, it escaped me. I could tell that Adam felt the same way. His limbs grew listless; his eyes hazed over. He had not the slightest idea what to do with himself. Neither did I. It was as I said before: Our work defined us, our work gave us purpose. At least that is how we understood it.