Havah (19 page)

I knew, hearing this, that Adam would be a difficult master, as he was a demanding father. I foresaw, with a bit of waking vision, that Kayin might suffer because of it—but better that. Better that than the foreboding of my dream.

“Yes,” I said. “Let us keep them apart.”

He pulled me into his arms then, hungrily, my outburst, my anger, and his dull looks that had caused them forgotten between us. We had become furtive in our lovemaking, forgetting it as a man might forget a meal, devouring one another as soon as any emotion sparked realization of our inadvertent fast.

I saw Lila over Adam’s shoulder when she walked into the clearing. I saw the way she stopped and watched us, eyes upon her father’s back. Just when I would have said something, she quietly stole away. So I said nothing to either of them, though I noted how her gaze searched mine and followed Adam for days.

The next day Adam called Kayin to the fields, where he worked every day after.

20

As Hevel succeeded on the hills, Kayin succeeded in the fields; within two years we had our greatest yield ever. Adam attributed it to the sacrifice of a lamb that we made soon after my dream. Hevel had been particularly attached to the animal. In tears he helped to bind it tight, but he turned his head away when Adam showed Kayin how to slit its throat. At some point Hevel slipped away from the altar, no doubt to take solace in the hills. Even when he brought back the flock that night, he kept away from the house.

On the second night I found him behind the pen, eyes red rimmed and puffy. He surprised me, though, when he said, “It is good that the One that Is should have Leetom with him.” I don’t know why I was surprised to hear that he had named the creatures individually—had not his father done the same an age, a lifetime, ago?

“Is it?” I drew him into my arms. He would never have permitted it had I not found him alone.

“Yes,” he said, sniffling, wiping his nose on his arm. “Because now he will be with the One, and perhaps he will be happy there.”

My heart swelled and tears filled my eyes. “You are good and noble, my love, my young ram. Surely the One will love you all the days of your life and protect you because you have done so well. Blessed be your eyes and your heart and your hands and the work of them,” I said, kissing him.

See how my heart swells with pride and deflates again with grief! I am the cyclamen that blooms and then shrivels, the fruit that bursts its skin before withering.

In those days we had great awareness of the world. I had seen more of it than anyone in my sleeping visions. But even those places we laid our own eyes upon grew more and more vast. We began to devise a map of the area. It was important to Hevel, who had an adventurer’s heart, but important to Adam and me for altogether different reasons. We marked on clay the northern hills and the river that ran south toward the lush steppe and alluvial plain, and the easterly bend where we had made our home. Hevel thought the river must empty into a great bed of water, and I knew he was right. We added the other rivers, most of them discovered by Hevel: one that ran gold as the Pishon and another rich in minerals.

We did not speak of our valley, Adam and I, but marked the landmarks we knew in silence. We added more as we recalled them, which was sometimes only after dreams; our memories, still fantastic, were not as they had once been. The children, for their part, knew we came from the north and assumed we had followed better soil or water to come here—there was irony!

We never mentioned the serpent or the fruit.

When we added something new, we remade the tablet, transcribing it and allowing it to bake in the sun. In this way we kept a record of the land as we knew it. There were, of course, the oceans and the other mountains and the plains and the deserts seen by me in my dreams, but I knew not in what directions they lay—only that they were there and that the world was great yet and yielded mighty things among the fearsome ones.

Lila became proficient with fibers of any sort, having taken to the solitary and silent practice of twisting animal hair and flax into threads and weaving them before she was even a woman. She was a finer weaver than I by the time of her first blood. Inspired by the working of birds’ nests and spiders’ webs, she wove baskets that never spilled water. When she began to dye her threads, I dismissed her efforts, saying the work of weaving was too time-consuming on its own to add vanity atop it, but as she grew faster and improved her method, and the fabric that came from her pegs flowed with subtle and skillful pattern, I recanted. I threw off the hated pelts and swore I would never again wear them as my only garment—and I never have.

Zeeva, my hungry girl-twin, took special interest in the preparation of food. Through her mistakes and my observations, we began to throw dough against the sides of the oven to bake it. She was as brashly featured as Hevel, so that as she grew older she looked more Hevel’s twin than Ashira’s. When Hevel was at her cook fire—as he often was, since he was voracious as she—I thought they looked like two halves of the same person even more than the adam and I. They were so alike, so headstrong, sampling every simple pleasure without worry for the mysteries that seemed to pique me and Lila and plague the thoughtful Kayin.

Zeeva’s twin, Ashira, grew more pretty by the year, with her wide hips and long, straight hair, outpacing her sisters in loveliness. She seemed to be always singing. She was unique in her coloring, her skin more golden than any of ours, whereas Zeeva’s was as dark as Kayin’s when he had been in the fields all day. Ashira took even more interest than Lila in each of my pregnancies and came to sing to me with her lovely voice and stroke my hands as I labored. How she loved to hold and sing to each baby from the moment of birth. She sang a new song for each of them the moment they were in her arms, and it was the same song she would sing to comfort them when they fell down or, much later, when they were in their own pregnancies, or—for some—when they died. Because of her eagerness and growing skill, Adam became less and less present at the births of his youngest children. I think those young ones nearly thought of her as their mother, having opened their eyes upon her first.

My next child after the twins was also a girl, and I grieved for that; secretly I wished for another boy, a companion for my sons. Though I loved my daughters and yearned for the company of other females, I felt an affinity for men. I had known a man before any other human. My first children had been boys. Their needs were simple though their fears were myriad and complex. How fragile in their own way they were, too. I have always contended that girls are the sturdier of the genders and wondered in secret if the One that Is might not best be identified with the strength and creativity of the female heart.

Renana, who came after the twins, was a keeper of wisdom and a storyteller. By the time she was eight, my youngest children were always to be found in her lap. She made up stories for each of them, different ones for different children, which she continued in segments when they pleased her, like little bits of cake pinched off a bite at a time.

My children were all innovative and clever and, compared to their descendants, I daresay they were geniuses. But none was as clever, in my mind, as Kayin.

It was to him that Lila ran with shining eyes to display her handiwork once she had dutifully shown it to me. He saw with a fine and appreciative eye the innovation and skill with which she created her fabrics. It was he who inspired Hevel’s first attempts at hunting with his unconventional sling. It was to him that Zeeva went with her finest flour cakes, which rivaled and surpassed mine, to smile at him through her lashes.

It was a wonder to me, the way the girls looked at him. How strange! Had I ever looked at Adam the same way? I watched their silliness, the way they took pains over small gifts for him in ways different from what they did for their other siblings or their father or me. The first time I saw Lila, who was not given to flirtation, touch his arm and lean in toward him, I was stunned, as though I had seen a three-legged heron draw a lion from the river. Zeeva was less adept at flirting, nor did she need to be; plenty of men through the years followed their stomachs to her hearth. Ashira, however, was most gifted in this particular skill never learned by me. The first time I saw her cast down her lashes before Kayin and then Hevel in the same day, I was amazed—and more so at the expression on Kayin’s face, and later, the color high in Hevel’s cheeks. Kayin went to Ashira when he wanted to lie down to the sound of singing—until Hevel began to give him baleful looks and Lila fell silent.

One day when they were both young, a quarrel broke out between Ashira and Renana over who should have the new cloth Lila had woven on her pegs—as though Lila herself would not make the final decision. “Go!” I said, ordering them from the house, tired of their wearisome competition.

“Take it to Kayin, and let him arbitrate you harridans.” Besek was at the breast, and my nipples were sore and my back as well. My legs ached to stretch, to remember that they were made to run—far from the noise and smells of this place.

“I should have it because Lila made her last one for Hevel, and I am the next eldest,” Ashira said.

“No!” Renana shouted, already impervious. “Me! Lila promised.”

“Lila never promises but makes everyone wait, you stupid donkey!” Zeeva burst out.

“Out!” I shouted, waving them out.

Besek raised his hand in imitation of me, laughing. Zeeva made a face after the two of them as they stormed out together, calling for Kayin, heels flashing.

When they returned a scant half hour later, the scowls were gone, and they came into the house together.

“What is this?” I said, still cross. “You come back now with peace?”

Renana swooped down next to me and retrieved Besek from my lap. “We gave it to Kayin.”

I raised my brows.

“He said, ‘What, have you brought me a gift, sisters?’” Ashira said, smiling prettily. “And we started to tell him about our argument. Well, he looked so downcast—”

“He loved it so much,” Renana said. “Hevel already has one, he said, even though he was only second oldest. So we let him have it.”

I felt the wry smile on my lips. So clever, my son.

That night, when Kayin came in wearing the piece over his shoulders, I saw the way his sisters beamed at him, bouncing to sit near him and tell him that yes, indeed, it was handsome on him—no doubt to remind him of their generosity. I knew, though he had not told me, that he would keep it until the next one flew from Lila’s pegs, and then give it to whichever of them did not receive the new one.

At times I was frankly amazed that such a creature might have come from me. He was a dark-skinned beauty, my Kayin. His eyes deepened as he matured so that one might never know where the black of his pupil ended and his iris began. He was beautiful as obsidian is beautiful, sharp as it is sharp . . .

And like the edge that, struck too fine, crumbles in the end.

IN THE TWENTIETH YEAR after our exile, I was a great matron. I had by now eight children. Noise was everywhere: gossip and arguments, instruction or storytelling. Voices raised in song, complaint, or laughter. I was by then both delighted and alarmed by the spectrum of emotion in my brood—delighted at the way laughter could spark the same in anyone else nearby, alarmed at the wrath in even tiny children. Too many times I had seen a child strike out at another in anger.

In all this time we told the tale of the One’s creation of the world. We told it accurately and diligently as remembered from my dreams. We spoke of truth and untruth, of right and wrong.

But we did not speak of the fruit. That tale we did not tell.

For all that our children knew, we were created free-thinking and fallible, to forge our life here amid struggle. For all they knew, this was the way it had always been. We taught them to keep the teachings that we gave them: Honor the One. Never tell untruth. Never raise a hand in anger. Never assign blame for one’s own actions. This one, most particularly, I emphasized.

Perhaps I had not forgiven Adam completely, after all.

I feared for the day one of my children or children’s children would ask why the One should create creatures that might do harm or say unholy words—this seemed an obvious question to me. But it was long years before that happened.

Meanwhile, our children grew in stature and intellect, maturing over the years in a way much slower than today. Yet, despite our contentment, life had become one long drone for me: the days filled with the same tasks, surrounded by the same voices and cries and tantrums.

By the time Lahat was weaned, I had begun to feel a bone-weariness that no food or rest could satisfy. It was as though each of my pregnancies had leached vitality from my very bones. Kayin often came to me after evening or morning meals, saying he wasn’t hungry, pressing the best portions of his food upon me. I ate them to appease him; he thought me thin, though I think it was only because he was so accustomed to seeing me full of child.

Well, I could change that.

I announced to Adam that, as the field, I would lie fallow for a season. Though I did not shun him completely—he understood these cycles as well as I, and those fertile days within them—opportunity was rarely at our disposal when we wished it. So the pleasure of our lovemaking, furtive and impulsive as it was, was replaced by the pleasure of feeling nothing but my own weight within my body, a flat belly and breasts that were solely mine once more. Now, I thought, perhaps we might talk as we once had. We might take our pleasure in the afternoon or swim in the river beneath the moon.

But that did not happen.

For as much as he sought me out before—which was to say, not often, as we hardly ever had time to ourselves—he sought me less often now.

Fine, then. I would not suffer for it.

I worked outside the house. I went with Hevel to the high pasture. I waded in the river with Lahat.