Havah (25 page)

I stopped walking and pulled him round to face me. “Kayin, where is Hevel?” When he stared at me, wild eyed, I screamed, “Where is Hevel?! Where is Hevel? What have you done to him?”

He started to wail, and I hit him then, hard across the face. I was sobbing and did not know why.

He spoke at last, dully, as though I had not struck him at all, “He always loved to be apart. Perhaps all this while he was communing with the One.” He pulled away and walked as one in a daze.

As we came to the edge of the field, I could no longer help myself but ran ahead of him on weakened legs. “Hevel!
Hevel!
”

Kayin stopped and would go no farther.

“What? What?” I looked wildly about me. He raised a shaking hand and pointed to a nearby ditch. He had been in the process of moving stones there for a low wall. At first I saw nothing but the field beyond it through the scrim of the mists, but then . . .

I saw a dark form in the earth.

I seemed to run forever, my feet not my feet, having no feeling in them, heavy as logs. I did not hear the breath, ragged from my lungs. I heard none of my own cries as I dropped down upon the dark form splayed upon the earth. Grotesque shapes took flight all around me.

Hevel.

I gathered him in my arms. “Hevel, Hevel! My son! Wake!” He was a dirty mess, smelling of earth and blood. Blood—

In the morning light I saw blood everywhere.
Like the lamb before the altar.
He was slippery, the back of his head too soft. I slapped his grimy cheeks. “Hevel! Hevel!” I shook and shook him.

Kayin was beside me and tried to put his arms around me, but I shook him off as savagely as though he were a carrion bird.

My hands roamed my son’s body. I saw his injuries and recognized, too, the work of vultures: his lips, so beautiful always, had been stabbed at so they were ragged and crusted, registering a toothy grimace on one side.

Like the wolf, scowling beneath the outcrop.
I screamed and screamed, shaking him.

He did not stir.

I did not understand this great error, this terrible misunderstanding. “What—what is this that has happened? What have you done?”

Kayin wailed, letting loose a cry to chill my blood. He fell over his brother’s body and moaned and then began to vomit. Red. He vomited up red. The stench was wine, but it was the color of blood.

The mists were lifting, burned off by the morning sun. How could the morning come at all? How could the sun show its face?

Now by the light I saw red everywhere: upon my arms, upon Hevel’s tunic, upon Kayin’s tunic and arms and thighs. Red like the earth the adam came from.

I fell over Hevel and pummeled Kayin with my fists. “You came from the same womb! You sucked the same breasts!”

Kayin moaned, not raising a hand to ward me off.

I gathered Hevel again in my arms, cradling him and rocking him as though I could bring life to those limbs a second time.

“He offered me a lamb for my own sacrifice. As a gift. And I told him to keep it! That I had the work of my own hands. Would that I had taken it!”

There came now other sounds, though I did not hear them until they were nearly upon us. And though my heart had dried to dust within me, I said, “Run. Run! Before Adam finds you here. Go, lest I lose you both!”

He stumbled to his feet, and for a moment I thought he would not go, that Adam would be upon him. But then with a furtive glance he staggered several steps and then broke into a wild run.

I clasped Hevel to me even as Adam came and fell down on his knees, crying out a sound as awful as the lifeless body in my arms.

25

I am told that even as they lifted me up and took me to the house, I would not let go of him. That I held my dead son against the one growing in my belly and cried to heaven, cursing the One that Is, demanding that he give my son back.

Lila gave Ashira a cache of red ochre, saying that it would take the place of the blood gone from Hevel’s body. Ashira said nothing, silent, her eyes swollen, but painted the ochre upon Hevel’s clean palms, saying that he would have back the blood on Kayin’s hands, saying also that she coated him with the red earth of his father from whence he came. At this my heart cried,
He came from me!
But I could not speak. We laid on him the fleece of the lamb he had given in the sacrifice and returned him to an earth not yet ready to accept him.

Adam spoke hardly at all. He did not ask after Kayin or why he had run off at his coming.

When I slept, I dreamed such dreams as no heart has the strength to endure—dreams of siblings raising arms against one another and of words hurled like stones and spears that kill and draw blood until the earth runs with it.

I remembered Dvash, crouched beneath the outcrop that would become her tomb.
I am as unhinged as that wolf.

They say I woke and cried out Hevel’s name.

Even waking and knowing he was dead, I half expected to open my eyes and see him kneeling near my bed. Memories of him in life came back to me in acute, painful detail in his death: Hevel as a baby toddling into Lila’s pegs. As the child who dragged Kayin’s toy spear around whenever his brother wasn’t looking. As the man with the laugh lines crinkling around his eyes. As the one who stood before the altar, his face raised to heaven.

When I could bear it no more—the sleep, the visions, the face of Lila, drawn and pale, and of Ashira, who had come to the house with her children, leaving them with Zeeva so that she might go sit by the grave of her mate—I got up and went out to the field and sat down with my daughter.

It was five days now since Hevel stared, unseeing, at the sky.

Ashira lay her head in my lap, and I crooned to her as I had when she was a child, as unable to comfort her as I had been unable to comfort Hevel in his death or Kayin in surviving . . . unable to do anything but pour out grief for which there is no word.

I grieved for my dead son. I grieved for my living son, undone. I grieved, too, for the ruin of my hope, as void as the sweet face of my Hevel, his head smashed in like an overripe fruit.

That afternoon, when Ashira had gone, I lay down in the grass near the fresh earth. How simple the sky was in its blue. How impervious the clouds, understanding nothing of the sorrow beneath them. How oblivious the breeze, which caressed my cheek as it did on that day in the valley when I had first opened my eyes. The sounds of this world had been laden with mystery once. Now I lay by the grave of my son.

Sometime before sunset, Kayin came to me. He was grizzled and gaunt and carried a spear. His clothes were stained but seemed to have been washed, and he, himself, looked washed. His hair was unbound and pulled down over his forehead. He sat down near me, collected, silent. Eventually, he spoke.

“I must tell you, so you know, what the One said to me.”

My heart constricted, but I nodded.

He bowed his head. “When I left the altar, I wandered through the fields. I shouted at the heavens. I sobbed. When Hevel found me, I told him to come to the field. I wanted to show him the area I had consecrated to this work so that he might know my heartache, my bitter defeat in all of it. I wanted him to see.

“He came and we drank together, and he laid his arm across my shoulders and said, ‘Brother, I do not know the burden you carry, but now I am sickened that you might not have needed carry it, for the One has taken my sacrifice. And how you have suffered all of these years.’”

He drew a ragged breath. “I could not stand it! To hear it from his mouth, to hear and know it was true!”

I looked away and covered my face. I had worn a linen cloth over my head to keep it from the sun, and I drew it down over my eyes so that they might look on nothing. At least that much of the world I would block away.

“I could have borne it. I thought I was even relieved. But then Hevel said that he was going to leave, that he could take his flocks anywhere and graze them . . . that he would leave so that he did not hurt me. . . . I could not bear the thought of him going away from me or for being the cause of his going from you. Most of all I could not bear the thought of him being followed by the One that I had pursued so ardently, if only to win the love of you and of Father.”

His voice caught. When he had collected himself, he continued. “I flew against him, railing, shouting at him that he would not deprive our parents of the thing they had waited for, that he must stay no matter the pressures of it. I was so angry I wanted to hurt him—his nose was bleeding, but he did not fight back. Hevel, who was always stronger. He did not fight! Why did he not fight? But he would not.”

He was weeping now, as was I.

“Surely he would be alive if he had, for he was the stronger of us. He was more true with his sling than I ever was with my spear. He would have taken that jackal that day bare-handed to protect me, I know—” He sobbed quietly.

I, who wanted to comfort and to shun him, to hold and to beat him, sat unmoving, unable to do either.

After a little while he drew a trembling breath. “I walked through the night—I don’t know where. Sometime before dawn I heard the very thing for which I know you have petitioned all these years. ‘Where is Hevel your brother?’ It was like a voice known to me from a dream that I have never dreamed before. I said, ‘I do not know.’ Part of it was insolence because in that moment I hated that voice and the One it belonged to. I had sought it all my life, and now it had all come to this! But the rest was simply that I did not know where Hevel had gone, only that he stared at the dark sky—”

He shook, covered his face with his hands. “Ah, have I sent him beyond the reach even of the One, that he asks me where is my brother? Do you know, Mother? Have I?”

“I don’t know,” I said woodenly because if I thought on it too much, I might go mad. Perhaps to soothe only myself, I said, “I do not think there is any reach beyond God.”

“But then, most terrible, he asked the very thing you asked: ‘What have you done? Your brother’s blood cries out from the soil.’ Ah! It is too great, too terrible! And now I am cursed! Cursed for the soil that took my brother’s blood! It will no longer yield to me its strength. And so I cannot stay. I have tried and cannot grow even a mustard seed! It lies in the soil as though dead, even on the third day.”

Now I raised my face and uncovered it. Already Adam had been cursed to toil with the earth. Now Kayin was to be cursed from even that, exiled from the land of our exile? What could there ever be for him? Adam had toiled for every abundance from the earth, and now Kayin would toil and receive nothing—he who had raised up in pride the best fruits of his efforts, only hoping that they would be good enough!
I
had had the dream of this event and had kept him to the fields! How great then was my guilt in this?

I drew him into my arms, and he burrowed against me. He clung to me, and I clasped him as hard as I could, knowing, perhaps in the way of my dreams, that I was soon to lose him.

He could not remain here.

After what seemed a long time, when my back was sore and my legs numb and my face bloated from weeping—when did I not weep?—he raised his head. For the first time I saw a strange thing there, on his forehead.

“What is this?” I brushed his hair aside.

He caught at my hand. “Don’t.”

“But what is it? It almost looks like—” And there, indeed, was the circle and the line—the mark Hevel had used with his flocks!

He covered it again. “I know I am going away. I know I cannot stay here. The One has said that I will wander now, ceaselessly. And so I will go to the Land of Wandering.”

“What land is that? And what will you do?” Was I to lose everything?

“It means only that everywhere I go, that shall be my land.”

At his bitter smile I remembered how lovely he had been only days before. Now I barely recognized this haggard stranger before me.

“As for what I will do, I was a shepherd before I tilled the earth. Do you remember, I once roamed these hills with Hevel and our little flock?”

“Then take the best sheep and of the—”

“No,” he said, gently, “no, Mother. There are sheep in the hills, and the land to the east of here is fertile. Hevel and I have seen the beginning of it on the long treks we once took together. I will go there.”

“Alone?”

He lowered his head. “I do not think Lila will want to go with me. I came to her at the river when she was bathing, and she looked past me as though I were a shape in the mist and would not see me.”

I mourned for them both.

“But Mother, there is more.”

“What more can there be? It is already too much!”

Bitterness crossed his face. “I said so to the One. ‘I can’t bear it,’ I said. To be gone from this place and from the presence of the One—it is with you, I see that now—and to be gone from you, it is too much. And what is more, what is to stop any one of my siblings—and some day there will be a great many, spread out from this plain to mountain—from visiting upon me the same fate I handed to Hevel?”

“No! None would dare!”

“None will. Because the One set the mark upon me that you have seen and—” his voice wavered—“I have looked within a still pond and know what it is. Ah, Mother, it is too terrible!”

He did not stop me this time when I moved his hair aside. Indeed, it was Hevel’s mark, the one all of his flock bore. A mark known, as Hevel himself had said, to everyone, though there were so few of us then. But now as I gazed at it, something strange happened—it seemed to waver before me on his forehead, like a ripple of water passing over skin.

Suddenly I saw not the face of my son but a hand I recognized as my own, reaching toward a fruit. How lovely, how beautiful were both! But in the next instant I was filled with shame and drew back as one burnt.

His mournful words pierced me. “I do not know what you see, but when I looked in the pond at the reflection of it, I saw my hand raised to my brother, and I turned away from my own image as you have now. This is my bitter mercy. This is my bitter protection: the shame of others. I wish, I hope that someday I might lose it. Perhaps then another hand will put an end to it all, as I so deserve.”