Eve (10 page)

“Water lilies,” said Adam slowly, letting Aya take over again.

“Yes, those. We need those in the pond, as shade for the tadpoles and the tiny fish.”

“There are no fish,” said Adam. The pond was too stagnant and still for that.

“Well, yes, I know, but there should be,” said Eve. She hefted herself off the ground, then braced herself against the house until she got her bearings. She continued massaging her back. “The way Elohim had it, it was perfect.”

Adam exhaled sharply. “Unless you want me to spend my time building more aqueducts instead of tending the orchards and weeding the fields,” said Adam, “then you will have to wait on this waterfall.” Then, after a pause, he said, “I’m not Elohim.” Naava thought she could see his frown from where she sat watching. She knew to be wary when Adam’s wrath was kindled; blue skies could become cloudy in an instant.

Eve groaned and held her belly.

Adam started up as if to come to her aid, but Aya held on to his bandaged wrist and wouldn’t let go. “Why don’t you lie down, woman? The girls will make sure things get done,” he said.

In that one word,
woman,
Naava heard dismissal and contempt, all rolled into one. She knew her father preferred a feigned cheeriness, not this sadness that leaked like an old flask. She guessed that was why he spent so much time in the orchards, where he could be alone, to think, to meditate. He wanted quiet. He wanted some sort of resolve, peace, contentment.

Eve stared at him, her bottom lip quivering with emotion. She approached Adam and sat down next to him, cautiously, as if she might break the fragile web that connected them.

Adam worked his jaw muscle, clenching and unclenching it. When he spoke, his voice came out even and stilted. “We are
here
now. The
past
is gone. We have children who need us.”

Eve sat, unmoving.

Adam turned to Aya. “Are you finished?”

Aya nodded, snugging in the last seed burr to hold the splint in place.

Adam stood. “I’ll be in the orchards if you need me.” And with that, he was gone. There was a faint lingering smell of sweat born of injury and high emotions, but that was all.

Eve bent over like an injured animal, and Aya went back to her grinding.

Naava felt disgust. It was a darkness that rippled out from the center of her being and swallowed her whole. Her longtime irritation with Eve was suddenly overwhelming. She could feel it as distinctly as she could feel a morsel of food entering her mouth and traveling downward. All her last illusions about her mother were swept away as easily as a cobweb, and she knew she was forever changed. It was Naava’s turning point, her irrevocable jump from the cliff. She knew what it meant, and in the time it took for her to blink, she had already made peace with whatever disaster would result when she reached the bottom.

Eve drove Adam away, time and time again, all because she wanted to quarry Eden, holding out the one futile hope that they might find home once more.

Naava knew this would not be how she would live her own life. When the time came, Naava would take care of her husband. She would right all wrongs between them and bolster up all erosions between them, swiftly and stalwartly She would be a dutiful wife, providing him with healthy babies and hot satisfying meals. She would not become as Eve, as washed-up seaweed, once alive and green and shooting up from the floor of the river, now shorn from its roots, stinking and rotting in the sun.

Is it wrong that I saw my family’s, impending doom and did
nothing to stop it? That is to say, I did not know
which
black cloud would scuttle across the sky toward us, only that one would, in due time.

There was the acrid tension between Cain and Abel, like sour pith between the teeth, which escalated at opposite ends of every day when they were in each other’s presence for Aya’s meals. There was Naava, who saw me only as archaic and discarded. There was Aya, my little bird—what would we have done without her constant care?—but that summer it seemed that she drugged us all with her food and her potions, keeping us loyal and panting for her ministrations. There were the sudden strangers who diverted Adam and Cain’s irrigation channels in the middle of the night and threatened Abel out of his pastures during the day. This combination of things could only end badly.

And Adam. What can I say about my dear husband, who no longer regarded me as he did in the Garden? He now looked past me and through me to my children, who adored his gruff humor and rough manner, or to his work, which required only brawn and tirelessness.

It was not always so.

Indeed, that wonderful afternoon in the Garden, after our lovemaking and Elohim’s visit, we slept like nesting birds, cradled by the roots of the Tree of Life. I woke to the sound of water pattering down all around us, the
incessant sound of plunking and plopping. The shrubbery and flowers jumped like frogs around us, taking in the weight of the water, then releasing it gently to the forest floor.

“It’s raining,” whispered Adam.

We turned our bright faces up to the sky, up to the pink-flowered Tree of Life and the cucumber green of the canopy, and caught the drips on our tongues. Later, we ran, as the light flashed around us, and the toad-colored sky rumbled above us, and the river was swept into peaked claws. The air quivered and shook our bones, and we leapt, for the joy of it, for the wild abandon of it. Limbs from vine-covered trees cracked and fell; shredded flowers whipped away on the wind; yet still we were there, standing in our Garden, together.

The destruction was considerable, and we wept for the downed trees and trampled bushes and broken flowers. As the sun made its shy appearance, we gathered large leaves and long twigs for a three-sided bower, shaking off the water drops and planting the twigs firmly in the soft earth. The structure took form, piece by piece, and eventually we sat, pressed up against the heat of each other, in our tiny warm enclosure, admiring our handiwork. The air smelled of damp earth and wet wood. A lone spider began to spin a web in the open corner, its silver threads glistening in the sunlight. Before she was done, a fly lit upon it, and in a flash she was upon him.

Adam and I talked. Surely we talked about a great many things. But at times like this we could sit, not saying a word, then later marvel at how it felt as if we’d had the longest conversation. That was what it was like. To be known. To be loved.

Often in the afternoons, after we were finished weeding and pruning—for Elohim had exhorted us to work in the Garden—we discussed the ramifications of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Adam pounded on a coconut with a sharp-edged stone. “If Elohim didn’t want us to have it, why did He make it?”

My sentiments exactly.

“I mean,” Adam continued, “why did He specifically point it out to us and say no?”

I shrugged. “He doesn’t want us to know what good and evil are.”

“But don’t we
know
what good and evil are?”

“
We
are good.” I paused. “What is evil?”

Adam’s hand grew still. His forehead knit together. “The storm was evil,” he said. He scratched at the red welts on his skin. “Mosquitoes are evil.”

“They aren’t evil. The storm caused some damage, but it wasn’t bad,” I said. I pointed to the new seedlings around us. “See? Everything is growing back. And, as for your mosquitoes, have you seen? The bats eat them.”

“I don’t like the bats,” said Adam.

Was Elohim hiding something from us? Something that we might enjoy as much as we had enjoyed each other?
For days on end we were immobilized with indecision. Elohim had, wittingly or unwittingly, tapped the seeds of doubt into our fertile minds. Given that our environment was hot and tropical and wet, the seeds took off of their own accord and soon became mammoth specimens.
Was this what Elohim had intended? To trick us?

After we had relished fruits of all flavors and sizes in the Garden—and named them boysenberries and loquats and mangoes and papayas—we sat and studied the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil for hours and saw that it was beautiful and had all the signs of being delicious. The reddish-brown fruits, glossy and round, dangled up high on the tree, and although we could see that they were ripe, not one fell to the ground. For a while this was a satisfactory arrangement, because the trunk was too thorny for climbing and elsewhere there was an ample supply of nuts and berries and fruits and vegetables to choose from. Our palates were sated, and our stomachs were full.

Over time, though, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil loomed larger than life, and it began to seep into both of our dreams.
What did its fruit taste like? What was so bad about the tree? What didn’t Elohim want us to know? Didn’t He trust us? Didn’t He love us?

Days ran into nights. We created new ways of showing our love for each
other. Adam brought me daily gifts—a flower chain, a smooth pebble, a green-shiny beetle, a maple leaf, a palmful of honey. At night, when the sky was a limpid black, I was a weaver of words. I concocted outlandish stories about the hard white stars and the low yellow moon and how Elohim had made us for each other. Elohim visited us frequently and spun tales of His creation, but He always left us with more questions than answers, which translated into the broken story strands that I felt I must stitch together somehow. “Imagine,” we murmured to each other, “He said,
Let there be,
and everything came into being.” Such strength in words! Such power in a breath! Elohim, the poet; Elohim, the potter. Adam always delighted in hearing my stories of our births, our creation. Later, my own children would grow quiet and still while I told them the details of their own births.

Elohim took frequent walks in the Garden, during the slow time of day when the air and sun and heat dragged to a tired crawl. He would join us by the river afterward and we would sit and talk for hours, interrupted only by flies that buzzed about our heads and the occasional mysterious splash of a fish or a turtle along the shoreline.

On one such occasion, a short while after I had arrived, Adam begged Elohim to tell His story of how we were made—
again.
Adam was eating raspberries and using his tongue to dislodge the tiny seeds that had wedged between his two front teeth.

Elohim smiled. “You ask for this every time,” He said. His voice was low and steady, but, strangely enough, it growled in the grassy ground beneath us and roared from the shoulders of the hills around us. “I called you Adam because you came from
adamah,
the blood-red earth; Eve, Adam named you
mother of all living
because you came from muscle and bone and sinew. I breathed life into you, like this—” Elohim cupped His hand in front of His mouth and blew a warm gentle air onto His palm. “Your flesh came from the earth, your blood from the dew, and your breath from the wind. Your passion from the mountains, your bones from stone, and your intellect from me. I made you male and female, in my image, clothed in splendor and majesty and wrapped in light as the angels.”
His words trailed off, like the retreating hoofbeats of a herd that has been called to their master.