Havah (29 page)

“I can still taste it,” he said, hoarse with emotion. “In you.”

“What is that, my brother, my love?”

“The valley. I taste the earth of it in you, the soil that was once my father and mother, sweet as it was, pungent and rich as it was. I can taste it still, in you.”

We came together, if not truly one, as we had once been, as much one as we had ever been since. When we lay exhausted, I knew that I had conceived. Where my last pregnancies had been realized belatedly and acknowledged by me with a sigh, I covered my belly and gazed up at my crown and wished for the smile of God. Nothing more. I asked not for that return, nor the reconciliation for which I had lived my entire life—as one on a journey thinks always of his destination so that he misses the land around him.

I asked only for blessing. It would be enough.

AS HANOKH PREPARED TO leave, I said to him, “Tell Kayin your father that his mother is bearing him a brother.” Though I did not say it, I knew he would understand that this was the one to stand in the place, after so many years, of Hevel. Hanokh smiled and bowed his head. And then I drew him aside to speak to him privately.

Never once had he mentioned anything of a mountain gate or a valley. I had listened without asking, thinking it a better sign if he might mention it without my asking, but now he was about to leave, and I could wait no longer.

“Have you ever gone west of Nod, my son?”

“Of course, Mother, we have roamed in many directions. Father was most anxious that we should do this very thing. He seemed to search as one does for magical waters.”

If only you knew.

“Did you go through the mountain pass, toward the great mount that yields the waters of the abyss?”

He frowned. “We went through many passes, though I do not know this abyss you speak of. We have passed, however, between the rivers to the place where their source is one. But beyond that we have not gone. Thunder and great lightning roll off the distant mount in ill omens, and we dare not pass.”

My skin prickled. “Was there . . . a pillar of gold light, as though two giants with wings pointing to the heavens stood by the gate?” I lowered my voice, knowing I sounded as fanciful as one of my storyteller daughters entertaining her audience of children.

His brow wrinkled. “On occasion the lightning comes down, and sometimes it is not white but green or even the uncanny color of fire. Is this what you speak of?”

“Yes.” Hope sprang to life in my heart. “But you saw nothing else in that place? Not even the valley through the pass?”

“No, Mother. The storm was great and the lightning too bright. And now that you mention it, I am not sure there is a pass at all but only a river that flows from that place with nowhere to pass on either side of it. Are you sure there is a valley beyond it?”

“No.”
Not anymore.

I bid him farewell that day with troubled heart. But had he said that they had found the valley, had walked in its waters and eaten from the trees, I would have been filled with jealousy and envy of my own grandson and would have begrudged him every joy he might have found there.

No. We must be the ones who find it, if it exists at all. We are the ones who kept and ruined and fled it. We must be the ones who return—if it is not by now just the frayed fancy of an aging woman.

The next year Shet was born. I called him “replacement” because I had been weeping for Hevel when Adam came to me. Where I had given many of my later children to their siblings and nieces to suckle for me, I nursed this one myself, much, I know, to the jealousy of some of his older brothers and sisters. And though he had Hevel’s same gusto for life, he looked nothing like the brother he had never known—though he caused just as much trouble.

Adam held him with a rare light in his eye, with much the same look I had seen on his face at the birth of our first sons. He began to come in earlier from work to see his son and to make him new spears and slings and tell him stories. I felt in those days almost as though we revisited those early years—except for the audience of growing numbers around us.

I had not thought it possible, but I am happy again.

Although we came back together in those days, Adam did not mention the One. Shet heard the stories of our sacrifice and of my dreams of the beginning of the world from Ashira’s songs or his siblings or, sometimes, even from me. But I didn’t really have the heart to speak of it. My faith then was a tender little flame, carefully shielded in the last refuge of my heart, and I would not expose it even to my son, for I had begun to worry that it might go out.

When Shet was four, Zeeva called for a bad omen. She had seen a sign in the entrails of a goat. That spring, the river flooded its banks, seeping into the fields and the settlement, ruining houses and crops and stores. The mosquitoes became unbearable, laying eggs in the still ponds and puddles of water that seemed to be everywhere, and soon many within the settlement fell ill. Three children died that year.

Several years—nearly ten—later, traders came down from the north, and with their goods of copper and cloth brought word that Kayin and Hanokh had indeed founded a settlement, the fields of which were rich.

“Tell me, my son, of your forefather, my son Kayin,” I said when Adam was gone from the house.

“He does not stay long near the settlement when he comes,” the man said, explaining that his flocks were too large and his tents too full not to be a strain. The man himself was young, perhaps only forty, and his hair was lovely, falling in ripples to his shoulders. He traveled with a brother that I could not guess for older or younger. Both of them had dark eyes and full lips and reminded me so very much of Kayin that I wanted to hold them to my breast and tell them stories of those first days.

They were careful when they spoke of him, and I sensed that there was something else, a strange unease. I knew then that they must all know the mark of Hevel upon him. And indeed, when they presented me with gifts, there were among them metal objects that bore the mark of the circle and the line. I wept when I saw it, and though the men saw, they said nothing.

Traders brought goods from the city of Hanokh almost by the year. Strange metal knives and tools, and news. Irad was a great-father by then of more than twenty children, and his city flourished.

That night I gazed at the stars and tried to picture so many people at once. I could not. I grieved that I had not laid eyes on each of them and told Adam that one day we must go to this settlement that was by then a city.

A strange phenomenon happened in those years, so gradually that it was a long time and several generations before I noticed it. Even then, Adam had to point it out to me.

“Do you see the bird symbol on each of their pots?” he said one day as we perused the wares of a new party of traders from Hanokh. “Does it put you in mind of the hawk you once drew for Asa as a symbol of God?”

Indeed, now that I saw it, the resemblance was clear. When I asked one of the men about it, he smiled and said that indeed, this was the hawk spirit that is the messenger of God. But by the next time, many years later, when I heard it being explained to a young girl, it was no longer the messenger but the god itself. At that I had raged, calling it falsehood and the teller a liar and an idiot and several more things, breaking every pot and other image of it I could find.

They would not stop me, the Lady of the Rib, the Great Mother, as I was called, but several merchants never returned.

The greatest shock of all came the first time I saw the insignia of an all-too-familiar creature on a finely made pot. It was winged like a bird but had four talons and a tail. And then I realized that the rendering of its feathers were not feathers at all but scales.

“Where have you come by this image?” I pointed with a trembling finger.

“It is the symbol with which our master marks his pots.”

I remembered for the first time in more than a century the image that Lahat had drawn into the dirt. He had been the master of the potters’ trade for decades now, spawning new masters in turn in other settlements. I turned away from it, repulsed, feeling that it mocked me, feeling, too, betrayed by my son.

I should tell him. We should tell him. We should tell them all. They do not know the thing they celebrate.
But even now we had not spoken of it, letting them know only that we came from another place and that we had erred in myriad ways all the journey of our lives along the river, trying to please the One with our offerings and deeds, waiting for the day that all would be made right.

Between the two of us, Adam and me, I no longer knew if we could bear to tell them the truth.

29

Generations passed. Young fingers that were once meddling, curious, and questing, chastised and slapped for their mischief, became the hands upon the plow and the loom and the grindstone, holding back new and younger hands from trouble. Eventually, those hands became the hands that rested on knees and upon chests in repose near the fire, corded and sunspeckled and traced with veins.

I became increasingly enamored of art, and it began to spring up with great abundance. There had been little luxury for it in the beginning, when Adam had carved his pendants and we had made our marks in the clay and upon the dirt, when Lila had woven her patterns into her textiles, and Renana had recited her poetry and chants and Ashira her songs. But now there came a great swell of creativity in music, and great innovation in its instruments: drums of rawhide, lyres, and flutes and rattles. Every time traders came in with their musicians, especially from the northern city of Hanokh, the music was more brilliant than before, bringing to mind more vivid images of the land from which it came and of the sky and even the insects.

How I loved these nights, for though I might still run as swiftly as any young person, nearly, I found my legs better suited in these years to dancing. After food and enough sweet wine, I inevitably found myself on my feet. Sometimes I saw Adam, watching me from across the fire, and knew he found me—despite everything—lovely yet.

But not as much as before. One of those years I paused to consider myself in a bronze mirror—a gift from the city of Hanokh. I touched my face, searching the image of the crone for the girl that had once peered from the water at me.
How lovely you are, daughter of God and man,
the serpent of half-truths had said. He had told truly, as he had told truly that we would not die—not that very day, at least.

I did not like the way girls preened of late. They wore ornaments of bone and leather and metal, putting beads in their hair and stringing them sometimes through their ears and around their ankles. They painted their hands and mouths and necks as one adorns a jar. They put tattoos on their foreheads and feet and breasts.

I owned by now many ornaments, and my storehouse of adornments grew by the season from every visitor to come to our settlement. I wore them when it suited me, but it was not for them that people gazed at me with admiration yet. My hair was still black, not having sprouted the gray that Lila’s had. My skin was firm, for I healed better and faster still than many of my children. My legs were strong, my hips were fine. Other parts of me . . . well.

ONE SPRINT, WHEN I was nearly six hundred years—there had been a time when I had not even known to count so high—there came word of killings. A feuding clan had invaded another and wiped them out nearly to the man and child.

Adam declared that we would not eat, that we would fast as one mourning, for three days.

He did not need to declare it for me; I had no appetite. Soon after, he gathered to him Lahat and Asa and Besek, saying he was going to talk to these southern clans.

“Do not go!” I clung to him. “They are not in their right minds.”

“They will not harm me. They wouldn’t dare, lest every hand remaining on the earth turn upon them in return.”

“Is that the only thing that would stay them, this fear of death visited upon them?”

“It is the only language they understand.”

“Let me go with you then.”

But he shook his head. “You are needed here.”

Again, he would leave me as he had in those early days! But I heard the unspoken half of that statement:
In case anything happens to me.
And I knew there was real danger.

“Give them this message,” I said. “Wisdom does not seek to shape the future with frail, human hands.”

How we should know.

He was gone for almost a year. But I knew he was well and hale. I would have known it if he were not.

SOMETIME AFTER ADAM’S RETURN—after the clan had committed themselves to fasting and ascetic life in atonement, strange news came from the north. Irad’s great-grandson had taken two wives. And while I had seen it done that one woman gave another to her husband, or that a man—or woman, in Sufa’s case—should leave one love and go to another, these were the days where ceremony and social rite had begun to surround the forming of these unions.

More and more couples sought the advice and blessing of the patriarch and matriarch of the city. More and more couples—and their parents and grandparents and siblings, sometimes—came to my house to talk of union. I tried my best to talk about it as though I were an expert. But what had I ever known of this kind of thing? There had been no ceremony for us. We had done all that we could to destroy our union!

But these children knew none of that. What was there to bind them but flimsy declarations and the idea of obligation as one family portioned off a piece of the harvest or the flock? What did these ninnies know of anything, sitting here with their wide eyes, beaming at me as though the sun shone through the tops of their heads and out their rear ends? Forty and sometimes thirty years old—barely out of puberty—I thought their families were probably just glad to get them gone from the house, or for another set of hands to help.

But I blessed them, thinking all the while of my own children—they were all my own children—hoping that they might seek more happiness in this life than a full belly and children underfoot. What a great surprise it would be to them when the day of redemption came.