Havah (10 page)

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 already?

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!”

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.