Havah (28 page)

How I admired my shrewd daughter, who waited on no man but her youngest brothers and bestowed the favor of her skill where she willed it and when she would. My lovely daughter, so staunch in her unwavering escape of this weft for the one she wove upon her pegs, instilled with mystery known only to her.

“SUFA!” IT WAS ONLY morning, and I could not take any more of her clay flute. Because it had at first put me in mind of Renana and her drums, I had encouraged her. But unlike her sister, the girl had no talent for it, and I could not abide it.

“But Mother, listen.” She pouted her pretty pout, her fingers poised over the holes. How like none of my children she was, my stormy girl, who blazed at her brothers when they trod too near her and tempted them back to kiss her when she held sweet cakes in her hand. She made a syrupy-sweet compote of figs and dates for Zeeva’s bread when there was no honey to be found and shared it with whomever she would as one of her favors. Small wonder she had a special habit of pitting one brother against the other. Already her legs were shapely and strong as a woman’s.

“Enough. I am having a headache from it.”

“Perhaps you’re pregnant again,.” she said, putting the flute in her pocket.

“She’s not pregnant,” Lila said.

Just then Zeeva’s youngest came shouting into the settlement. I was accustomed to alarm on a regular basis—one crisis or another—but there were hysterics in the girl’s voice.

“Matnan! Matnan! He’s gone into the river, and it washed him away!”

We stared at her for an elongated instant and then sprinted to the river. I ran and ran, Sufa at my heels. Lila had gone for help to search downriver, and now I realized how little sense it made for us all to go flying to the place where little Matnan had fallen in if he had washed very far already.

We ran downriver, shouting his name, the sound of my voice and Sufa’s hardly audible over the hammer of my heart. I could not lose another child, whether it be mine or the child of my child. I could not bear one more heartache. I was a vessel, filled full with sorrow, brimming over already.

For hours we searched, joining Lila and Zeeva farther downriver. Lahat and Adam and the children of Ashira waded out into the river calling and shouting for him. All day we searched, wandering farther and farther downriver, past idle eddies and fickle currents. It ran faster here than it had near our old settlement, and more than once Adam and Lahat lost their footing and were carried part of the way down. Each time, seeing that a grown man could barely keep his own in the current, Zeeva moaned and cried out, tearing at her hair and shouting anew.

As the day waned and Besek, in from the hills at last, came with his wolves at his heels, we were all of us worn and hungry and numb.

Finally, as twilight fell down like a veil over the day, a shout issued from the far bank where Besek had crossed some time ago. He cried out again, and I saw him get down in the reeds and slowly lift out a small, lifeless body.

Did I wail? Did I scream? I heard the keens and wild howls of Zeeva, even of Lila.

Besek had to travel upstream before he could find a place to cross, and we ran, searching desperately for a place slow and shallow enough to meet him. But even from here I could see the blue face and splayed limbs, the way they jittered, limp, as Besek shook him. I saw the expression on my son’s face, twisted, as he was finally, on shaking and exhausted legs, met by his father and brother.

We tried to breathe and slap and pinch and shake him to life. But life, once surrendered, cannot be regained. Somehow, during that time that was all one nightmarish mire to me, I stared at his small lifeless body and saw in him the same lifelessness I had seen in Hevel. I thought,
So once the adam must have been and still the One breathed life into his lungs.

In my heart I offered every paltry thing I had within my possession if only the One would fill again the lungs of Zeeva’s child. The child of my boy. The child of my child. But what can one woman offer to God? Only tears and pain and fear and promises. I offered them all.

But his body lay still, his eyes open and turned toward the dark heavens.

ZEEVA TOOK AWAY MATNAN’S body and would not let anyone touch it for days as she washed it and sprinkled it with sweet herbs. Ashira, who had delivered him, was allowed at last to paint the ochre upon his hands. He had not lost his blood, but it was the only ritual we knew for the giving of one back to the soil.

For weeks Zeeva’s oven lay cold. For months afterward it produced only bitter and flat bread. Not until the next year, when her belly quickened, did she bake her sweet cakes again.

In all this time I had no comfort from Adam—nor did he receive any from me. We remained apart, each of us to our own grief, each of us to our own thoughts and questions and railings at God. If ever I needed proof that we could exist, one without the other, I had it now; we might as well have dwelt on two sides of the world.

Zeeva’s child came, wailing to life. She named him Goral for the lucky chance of his conception so soon after Matnan’s death and would not let him, even as a child, out of her sight. Her house was full of the sound of children, for it seemed she bore one nearly every other year after that.

But one day every spring her oven lay cold and her hearth without fire.

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Every time a child slipped from the womb into Ashira’s hands, I looked into its eyes and wondered if just the moment before they had gazed upon God. But if they had any memory of the One, it was gone by the time they could speak. Sufa’s eldest claimed that she had memories of being held in Ashira’s arms after her birth, but that is the closest thing to a memory of the womb I ever heard.

Ashira eventually took young Lahat—not so young anymore—to her home. With his one eye he seemed to see in her all that was lovely, and she had in him a mate who had known the brother she loved.

In those years there seemed to be noise everywhere, of music and industry and bartering by the edge of the settlement. Adam and my eldest expanded the fields and the storehouse. Children quarreled and took ill. Sometimes they injured themselves in falls and fights, breaking limbs and taking fever. Kanit, who had once nearly died this way, became the most practiced medicine woman of our growing family, combining her knowledge of herbs with her mother’s midwifery. All others sought her for remedies for everything from toothache to infertility to bad dreams.

Eventually Adam and I came together—in silence. And this aging body surprised me yet as I continued to bear children. How easy was my burden now. They slipped from the womb with nary a pause. How much I had labored in those early days! And where once I fed and clothed and disciplined each of them, it was the hands and breasts of others—in my house and in the houses of my daughters—that did so now, so that all of their sisters and nieces were like mothers, and all of their brothers and nephews were like fathers.

But life, between such stunning moments, held fewer and fewer revelations. And as the years went on, I began to despair that the One had indeed forgotten us, though we had by then built a high altar upon which we made our sacrifices. Every year Adam drained the blood of the animal and flayed it. Every year I saw in my mind Kayin throwing himself on the pile of his offering. Ashira, who always fell silent for a day after the offering, seemed to retreat a little less each time—especially after Lahat came to live with her. Lila, who spoke less and less through the years, went off on her own in those days, and no one could find her. She always came back, and when the little ones would ask where she had been, she would say only that she was listening to the wind. And perhaps because that was no stunning story, they would not ask any more except what the wind had said. To which she replied that it was a secret meant for her alone.

Most of the time life was a chain of monotony spent contemplating those things that could not be reconciled. So many lengths of woolen thread went into thinking through where the adam and I had begun to lose each other. So many new pots went into remembering everything I had ever said to Kayin to lay the burden of our hopes upon his shoulders. So many meals went into remembering each of Hevel’s gestures and expressions.

In all this time the One was silent.

Within twenty more years our settlement grew so large that something had to be done. Disease had begun to spread too easily among us; already that spring several children had lain ill with fever. Lahat, with his mind for engineering, designed the systems of streets and even sewers, transforming a rough collection of dwellings into a city. But his improvements had no effect on another disease that had broken out among us: strife.

Sufa had created her own troubles years prior, turning two brothers by Zeeva against each other in vying for her. When she announced she was pregnant, the brothers met by the river, and a fight broke out. With visions of Hevel and Kayin before us, we appealed to them to stop, calling enough men to the scene to force them to, if necessary. At last they ended their feud, and the older brother eventually took one of his sisters to wife.

Sufa rejected the other brother after that and never said which of them had fathered her baby. The next spring, Ashira delivered her a daughter, which she named Tzukit. Later that year our settlement divided. Ten families left.

Two years later my son Mazor and one of the eldest sons of Zeeva and Besek came to our house to sit before the adam and me, to say that they were leaving, going south to find lands of their own where they might begin their own settlement. They had traveled there and found fertile land and, farther south, a great marsh where there were many fish.

We watched them go with their wives and somber hearts. Sufa hid her face from Mazor as he left and never spoke his name again. Later she bore a son to Asa, her brother, who came to live in her house the rest of her days.

Eight or nine years after that, word came for the first time of Kayin. A small party of only four people—two men and their women—came to us, having found us by the clay tablet left in the old settlement so long before. Several of Kayin’s offspring, quarreling—was it a universal affliction?—had left the wandering way of life and gone south and settled there, they said, repairing the old house and plowing again the fields that had lain fallow. Kayin himself was well, they said, and his flocks flourished.

I did not ask about the mark on his head, and they did not speak of it.

My children’s children were increased by two more generations before we heard further news of my son. This time a large party of Kayin’s children and their children came to visit us.

“I am Hanokh, the son of Kayin,” the eldest one said. And indeed, I saw both of his parents in his face. He motioned to the others in turn, saying, “This is my sister, Sivan, and my brother, Dedan, and his sister, Atalya.”

They had kept to the same way, I noticed, of calling one’s sister-wife one’s “sister,” when indeed they were all siblings.

“And this is my son, Irad.” He indicated the third man with them. They came with children, too, though what I remember most is my fascination with the variance of their coloring, of their eyes and the shapes of their heads. I had looked at the birds once and remarked at the great diversity of God. But never had I thought to see such variety in my own brood.

When I learned that Hanokh was Kayin’s eldest son—there were sixteen siblings by now and forty-two children of these children—I asked that he tell me everything that he remembered of his early life and of his mother in those days, up to this day. He spoke of the flocks that numbered in the thousands, as Kayin and his sons were capable herdsmen, and of the chants of Renana, which had become the anthem of his entire clan.

Hanokh said that when he returned he would settle in a place along an eastern river and put to use all of the great store of Kayin’s knowledge of cultivating to build a great settlement. He did not seem to carry the curse of his father, and he meant to settle in a place where life might be easier than the wandering life of Nod.

“We lost two children to the fever last summer. Father mourned for months, eating little and crying out in his sleep with the name of his brother.” He rubbed his face. I saw the grizzled look of his father in him and the bowlike lips—and the shape of Renana’s eyes. “I never wish to report the death of a young one to him or any sibling again.”

They stayed with us for several months, making music with their strange instruments around the fire. And in their songs and chants, I heard Renana and the drums she once played. Such a gift she had passed on to them! Within their music I heard the sound of cicadas and frogs and of locusts and the running of water from mountain to river.

That night as we danced by the fire, I danced the dance of the mother pushing forth her children into the world and of the woman who knows the generosity of her hips and nourishment of her breasts. I danced the dance of the orchard and vineyard and of wheat swaying on the stem. I danced the dance of the one who places her hopes in one place, like a bird laying her egg in a high nest, who later finds it crushed. I danced the dance of Kayin, wandering like the sands, and of Hevel, whom I missed that night with such intensity that, when at last I was out of breath, I went away from the fire and the music and the dancers and mothers holding sleeping children and wept against a willow. I wept for my children and, most ashamedly, for myself.

Something had changed; I knew now I would no longer give back my life to have it all as it was, as it had been before. My children were too many, and I knew no other way of life. The valley I craved seemed little more than a dream that I did not even remember most nights.

There Adam found me. He said nothing but caught me up in his arms. He kissed my tears, and there were so many that he kissed me for what seemed forever—on my eyes and face and cheeks and lips and neck. They had run like water from the high abyss to wend around the foothills. And then he lay down and spread out his tunic beneath us.