Eden (5 page)

Yet like the beasts of the field and the beasts of burden in the street, and even like the women of the village, Eden was not allowed inside the temple but huddled out in the street during prayers and teachings. Yet here too, the young master refused to part with her, shunning the room of scholars.

Instead, he sat with her by the open door, listening as the old, dry voice recited the laws and ancient tales. For the young master did not wish to learn alone without his hand upon her head and her head upon his lap, and feared nothing of what the others said when he sat among the women. As ever the dog and man shared his mat, and to anyone who cast a suspicious eye, he told them he could listen just as well in the shadow of the temple wall as inside a bare, dark room.

On more than one occasion, another teacher joined them. This new teacher came from a settlement deep in the wilderness, an outsider, a man of the desert cliffs that overlooked the Dead Sea. On his garments Eden saw the dust of limestone and smelled the scent of caves where men and women lived, staring out over blue saltwater.

The stranger brought his wife and was unlike the people of the village. For though he came out of a harsh place by the lifeless water, his words were softer than those of the rabbi of the town's. And he seemed to smile a little as he left his woman outside with Eden, her master and the others.

Then in the dark, bare temple the Outsider told of his life in the empty desert. “Where we live one cannot separate one grain of sand from the other, and in time we have come to see that any rock can be a temple. Would you sit and not ask your wife to sit beside you? Has she not come as far as you, has she not toiled as you have toiled? Has she not tended you when you were sick, as you tended her with child? Would you not wish her to pray with you as we pray now? Does not God hear those who whisper as well as those who shout? Does he not see those outside the room as those within?”

And then as the students began to murmur in confusion and objection, the teacher from the Dead Sea raised his hand to quiet them—and told the same tale as the old rabbi told, but in a different way:

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”

The teacher from the Dead Sea paused as he left the bare room of the temple and looked down at Eden's master and his dog. The young man rose and bid the man of the desert come under the shop roof for the night before returning with his wife to the settlement of sky and bare rocks. In the house of the carpenter the two spoke long into the night. Eden lay at her master's feet in her soft pile of shavings. She raised her head only once when the man of the desert showed the younger man two small stones he took from his purse. The stones were each of equal weight and size. One stone white, the other black. And the man of the desert asked, “Can you really tell the difference between the two?”

And thereupon he struck one stone against the other and behold, the dark stone was white within and the pale stone black.

“Judge not in haste,” the man of the Dead Sea told her master, letting the broken stones fall from his fingers, “unless you know the hidden center of every stone.” And he took from his small pouch two more stones, one white, one black, and put them in her master's hands. “The trick is how to find out without breaking them.”

Eden sniffed the broken stones that lay on the floor.

Just stones, nothing more.

“Something to think on,” the man of the desert told her master.

“Until we meet again.”

The River

Fleeting years and many lambs later, the youth had grown a beard and Eden had grown old. Whiter around the muzzle, and along her paws, her silvery fur all had turned to white.

One day she watched Maryam carefully as the woman of the house packed many things in a traveling sack. Often Maryam would pack her son's midday meal along with his carpenter tools, as he walked to nearby villages to repair a door or a bed. But on that day the woman packed no tools, only the supplies he'd need on the road: flint and tinder, water skin, bread and olives and cheese. And his rolled mat of woven reeds wrapped in his cloak which he carried over his shoulder.

Eden felt the unspoken words of parting between mother and her master. Maryam would miss her son for every day hereon. From the shadow of the carpenter's shop the dog saw Maryam's husband Yosef pause at his workbench and stare silently at the open door. The men had said their good-byes in private and nothing was left to say.

Maryam simply pressed her son's hand to her forehead, then let his hand fall, neither bringing it to her lips nor kissing him farewell. “Come back when you can,” was all she said.

But Eden had no intention of watching her master wander off. That day the dog and her young man walked farther into the green hills than Eden had ever been before. And they did not turn back as night fell, but slept upon the young man's mat of reeds, curled up in their shared cloak till daybreak.

All that next day they marched. The food in the young man's sack vanished bit by bit. By nightfall they were tired and hungry. The man and the dog found shelter in a cluster of rocks by a running rivulet of water that gathered in a small pool no bigger than a few hands wide. Eden lapped gratefully at the stone bowl. And as the sun set Eden stood guard as her master found twisted sticks for a fire.

At first Eden didn't see or smell the stranger's approach. Unannounced, one of the desert people had come out of the wilderness with hardly a sound and no wafting scent on the wind. Once more, the stranger smelled of nothing but sand and stone, his body so thin and gaunt, leaving only the barest essence of a holy man on his threadbare robes. Yet as he sat, she recognized him as the very same who had spoken at the temple, the very same who had spent the night talking in their house and told the story of the stones. The Outsider. The man of the Dead Sea.

So it was not necessary for her master to say,
it's all right. He's one of us
.

Instead he welcomed the man of the desert into their shelter of rocks and bade him sit.

“Indeed, well met.”

They lit a fire and shared the last handful of the food from the master's sack. For a long time the three sat in silence, but at length the man of the desert spoke. “Have you been thinking since last we talked? How to discover what lives inside the stone without breaking it?”

Eden looked up at her master, but he did not reply. Instead he loosened his purse strings and removed the two stones, the white and black given that night in their house those fleeting years ago. Her master's fingers turned each over in the light of the fire. Over time each stone had rubbed against the other and in so doing had worn away its outer layer—the dark stone showing its white center and the white stone its dark one.

“Time is the answer,” her master said. “Time and familiarity, like friendship. Time and close proximity, like family. Time and close affinity, like marriage. The stones sit in the purse, they rub each other's sides, and
over time
their surface fades and the stones' insides are revealed without breaking.”

The Outsider looked in astonishment at his old friend. Then he laughed like a man with twice the belly—the sound rose from their rock shelter into the night.

“I never would have thought of that,” he said with a glint in his eye. “After all, it's just a question we ask,
how to see inside without breaking?
No one ever expects an answer!”

And then the two men chuckled, the sound echoing in their shelter, so even the rocks themselves seemed to smile. Their laughter died and quiet returned.

Eden laid down her head and slept her master's hand upon her soft ears. Deep in the night she opened her eyes once more; master's hand was gone. The two men sat by the embers of the fire and spoke in whispers. To Eden they seemed to be speaking only to the stone walls of the shelter, and to the emptiness beyond, but if either the rocks or emptiness heard them Eden did not know. The words themselves she did not fully understand, but she listened carefully just as when she had listened to the man of the desert outside the temple with her master and the women who were not allowed inside.

“A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.”

The man of the desert held a handful of sand in his palm and throughout the rest of the night the two men stared into the cup of his hand as if to count each grain, as they would the souls of men. Eden touched her nose to the man of the desert's palm and snuffed, blowing the grains away.

But neither man seemed upset, her master saying, “So it will be with us.”

Eden lay down and closed her eyes, nothing to do but wait out the night. The last thing she heard before falling asleep once more was her master's voice asking:

“Is he still at the river?”

Who might
he
be?
Eden wondered. Who knew?

“More gather every day,” the man of the desert replied. Then fell silent.

Ah, Eden understood, someone important.

When the sun rose that morning, the dog peeked from the warmth of her master's cloak to find the man of the desert nowhere at hand. The man of no scent had returned to the wilderness leaving behind only the grains of sand once held in his palm, now scattered about the fire pit, back on the ground from whence they came, each grain indistinguishable from the next.

That day's march began in hunger; the stony hills on either side giving neither shelter nor food. The twisted stumps of trees reached for the sky with bare branches, too early in the season for any fruit. As the day lengthened a few pilgrims appeared out of nowhere and many ways seemed to join as one. Their march became a ragged troop, faithful travelers treading a path into the valley of a river. The newcomers gave master and Eden what little food they had brought: a crust of dry bread, a slip of meat, a swallow of water. Another hour passed and the number of pilgrims increased by scores, sending up waves of dust from their tramping feet.

When they reached the river a chill wind blew in from the north under a gray sky. Handfuls of men and women lined the steep, rocky slope along the bank, while those closest to the water's edge gathered together in shivering knots, tugging at their cloaks. Some squatted on boulders while others clung to twisted bushes and the trunks of thin trees whose roots snaked into the water's edge—anything to keep from slipping into the cold current.

The thread of pilgrims, once noisy and talkative on the road, became hushed as they approached the dark, curling water. Even the children among the crowd, always happy to see a dog, were strangely quiet and subdued and refrained from petting Eden. Indeed the whole crowd retreated to frowning silence as newcomers shuffled through breaks in the thickets and closer to the unwelcoming water beyond.

Eden noticed many beggars, the sick, and the hungry. Some wore thin homespun, while the wealthier pilgrims wore thick cloaks. But no matter whether clad in rags or fine wool, heavy care weighed down each pilgrim, unspoken burdens sapping their strength and draining their hope as they shivered in the cold.

Eden sensed deep regret and pain on every leg she passed. Some of those along the riverbank smelled of remorse, others of desperation—a scent that overpowered all others. As the pilgrims milled about, the dog could smell their troubles with each leg she saw. And with each breath, another sin. This one beat his wife. That one gave herself to strangers. One failed to mourn a dead father. Another cursed his mother. The sins went on and on …