Eve (11 page)

“Why didn’t you make us at the same time?” I asked.

Elohim looked at Adam. “Adam?”

Adam looked up, his mouth red from the juice of the raspberries. “I don’t know,” he said. “Though I could have used her help early on, in the naming of the animals.”

Elohim gazed at Adam, much like a parent trying to get a child to confess something. “Think, Adam, do you not know why I created you first? Can you describe your emotions after you named the animals?”

Adam now had red juice trailing down his chin. He wiped it off with the back of his hand. “Well,” he said. “I don’t remember—”

“You felt lonely,” I said.

Elohim smiled at me. I puffed up like a milkweed pod bursting with seed. “You said you felt sad,” I said.

“Yes, I guess I did. All the other animals had someone like them. I had no one like me … well, except for Elohim”—Adam blushed—“but no one to love.”

“I waited for you to ask for her, your counterpart,” said Elohim, leaning back on His hands, “so you would have need of her and treat her as yourself. In every thing there is an emptiness that must be filled by another. No one is complete by him or herself.”

Adam winked at me, and I leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.

But one thing puzzled me. “Then what are You—male or female—if we are
both
made in Your image?”

A woodpecker
rat-a-tat
ted away at an oak tree nearby. Elohim watched it closely, then turned to me. “You do not yet understand? I do not have one form; I have many. To you I appear as a man, but to others I appear as a cloud or a bush or a flame. I could appear as that woodpecker if I so desired. My appearance is deceiving, for I am everywhere at once—”

“Everywhere?” I exclaimed. “How can that be? Why, Adam and I don’t even know what is happening on the other side of the Garden!”

Elohim pursed His lips. “Do you see the wind?”

“No,” I said. “But I see the leaves and grasses moving.”

“Exactly,” said Elohim. “The wind blows where it pleases. You hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going. If you stay with me here, in the Garden, you will learn all these things, as surely as the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening.” He sighed then, a stream of sadness entering his voice. “I have made
both
of you like me.” His voice became an urgent whisper. “I am the hen who shelters her chicks under her wing; I am the shepherd who watches his sheep; I am the mother who does not forget her child … and I love you, as a mother
and
a father.”

How could He be all these things?

“Where do You go when You leave us?” I asked.

Elohim laughed then. “I am In Time,” He said. “Will your questions never cease?”

I bowed my head, thinking He was upset. “In Time?” I said softly.

“I see the past and the present as though they are the same day,” Elohim said. He reached out and raised my chin so my eyes met His. How can I describe His eyes to you? They were piercing, as though all my thoughts were known to Him, and kind, as though I was everything He needed. “Never stop asking questions, Eve. The moment you do, you will wither and die.”

“But to die is what happens when we eat of the tree,” I exclaimed.

Elohim studied my face, then released my chin. “They are different deaths. One is a disastrous separation from me; the other is a little like … being lost and never found.”

We grew quiet then. The grasshoppers and crickets and cicadas buzzed and hummed, and the afternoon shadows grew long and gloomy. A gazelle and a deer family came to drink at the river, lifting their heads up periodically to check for hyenas and leopards. I had seen one violent affair already, a gazelle killed, its throat snapped quickly between the teeth of a large lion. Truly, this was our newly formed vision of death—how a body, once firm and vigorous, would crumple to the ground, a soft motionless shell of what once was, to be slowly ravaged by the wind, maggots, or other beasts. Elohim had explained this too—the order of things, the culling of populations, the cyclic balance of His creation—but I always hated to see it, the sheer destruction of it. Adam and I would not be touched, Elohim promised, as long as we were in the Garden. This was of some consolation, and we grew accustomed to the ebb and flow of life around us.

Then there was always the lovemaking, so gentle, so freeing, so passionate. As yet our future was unformed, hazy like the dewy morning mist, but we did not bother with the contemplation of it. We were building our own garden, an internal emotional garden, and we were tending it much like the physical one that surrounded us.

Much later, when Cain began grafting branches onto trees and coming up with new, exotic fruits, I thought back to these days with Adam and how, like grafted branches that had “taken,” Adam and I were inseparable, permanently joined together, destined to bear the fruits of both, not one.

But that summer, away from the Garden and pregnant again, surrounded by so many mindless and repetitive chores and too many mouths that needed and needed again, I felt cut off from Adam, shorn from the main stem of our love, and pruned so far back that any further growth was impossible.

I showed the snake to Mother. She clutched her hand to her chest
and grabbed my elbow. “He has hurt you? Where? Show me.”

“I killed it before he could bite,” I said triumphantly.

She studied my face a moment, as if she was trying to read the weather. “Really, Aya,” she said, when she caught her breath. “You need to set limits for yourself.” I think she was afraid for me, thinking I was too bold, too brash, to go after such dangerous animals in my condition. There was some comfort in this, that she must have loved me, a little. But later, as Mother wove baskets out of green river reeds, her fingers flitting like the lapwings living under the eaves, she said abruptly, “That wasn’t him, you know. He was charming and beautiful.”

So, I was to learn my limits.

Soon afterward, Abel came to me in the early morning hours, tired and grumpy. “Aya,” he said, “could you spare a day away from the house? I need your help.”

I consented, mostly to return the favor of Goat, and divided my chores among my sisters and Mother. Naava was to churn the milk into curd—oh, she whined about this to Mother, saying, “Why do I have to do
all
the work around here?” Dara would collect dung and tend the fire. Mother
agreed to skin and pluck the quails and soak them in an onion-celery-anise broth for the evening meal.

I had never gone so far from the house before, and it pleased me immensely. I was a little afraid but I did not let on, because Abel would have teased me and said it was because I was a girl and reminded me about my limits. That has become a silly joke now, thanks to Mother!

Jacan ran up ahead, leaping like the goats from rock to rock, there, then gone. “Hurry, hurry,” he called. Goat chased after him and joined her friends.

Abel’s black goats and brindled sheep stood out against the white sandstone, which had been bleached by the sun and broken into bits by the wind and rain. The air was cooler and windier up here in the flinty hills, where Abel and Jacan brought their flocks. Not as much powdery choking dust as on the plains. The goats found the straggly clumps of wormwood and juniper and sparrow-wort and began grazing them back to rounded cushions.

Abel was kind. I fell behind several times, and he pretended to adjust his pack or tighten his sandals. He was always finished by the time I caught up with him. “It’s beautiful up here,” I said. I experienced an abrupt feeling of gratitude and a sudden keenness for camaraderie, and I smiled at him.

He said nothing but nodded and offered me a mouthful of water from his waterskin. I saw it was leaking, just a little. “Mother will make you a new one, you know.”

“There’s no need,” he said. “Jacan and I are fine.”

“Why don’t you like Mother?” I asked.

He jumped a little and choked on his swallowing. He looked at me. “Not like Mother? What gave you that idea?”

“You’re her favorite, you know.” I put my good leg on a large rock and hoisted myself up to better survey the view of white sand, stretched out like a tired dog behind me. There, a ribbon of water; there, our house and vineyards and fields; and there, to the north, the strangers’ walled complex, growing as steadily as Cain’s amber barley and wheat fields.

Suddenly Abel was distant, aloof. “Aya, I don’t believe Mother has a chosen favorite. And if she does, that is not of my doing.”

I pointed to a cloud of dust approaching. “Someone’s coming,” I said.

Abel’s hand went to his side. “Make haste. I want you up the hill before they get here. If we seize the area first, they will not argue. It is the way of the land.” He held out his hand, and I climbed down off the rock. “You go that way; see that boulder and the cave behind it? Stay there, and they will not bring their animals so far up, where the best vegetation is. I will be between you and them; there’s no need to fear.”

I nodded and scuttled away like a crab, wishing I had the nimbleness of Goat. I climbed up the backside of the boulder with some difficulty and sat on the edge of it, my good leg crossing my bad one. From here I could see a band of men leaning forward into their ascent, leather straps across their foreheads, carrying their provisions in this humble way. They stopped frequently and shaded their eyes to look up at us. Wildly, they gestured to one another, pointed at us, then slapped the backs of their hands against their palms. They looked to be an unruly lot, with beards like tumbleweed and manners like boars. I did not think I should like to meet them.

They came closer to us than I desired, but as Abel had said, they did not venture farther up the hill with us present. They were drunk and loud. A short one with a spotted face said something, and they all laughed. They strutted around like the hoopoes that parade through the grasses with their beaks in the sky; they roared like lions and beat their chests and threw back their heads. They laughed and hurled insults at us, none of which I understood.

Their flock of sheep was not so big, but their animals were sturdy and healthy, and that was all that mattered. I was to prevent them from allowing their herd to go up the mountainside, thus staking out our territory so its boundaries would not be infringed upon. So there I was, guarding the boundary.

As the sun peaked in the sky, the men settled down, and their bodies grew listless in the gathering heat. They flung themselves on all sides of a flattened rock and brought out their food sacks. They unwrapped their noonday feast before them, and my stomach growled at the sight of cold meat, raised bread, dates, figs, and skin after skin of cool beer.

I took stock of Abel and Jacan. Abel must have considered the men no longer a threat, because he and Jacan had wandered a sizable distance
away, herding our goats from the crevices and cajoling them farther up the mountain. I heard the faint strains of his flute, a small instrument he’d cut out of buzzards’ wing bones and banded with reeds. Jacan accompanied him on his horn. I bit my lip in consternation. Soon I wouldn’t be able to see or hear them.

It was a fearful situation to be here without the protection of my older brother, but I soon realized the men were too tired or too bored to challenge my presence, and Abel must have known this. I ignored them finally, and the warmth of the rock and the sound of the heat lulled me to sleep. Ants all around me carried on their missions dutifully, looping me into the story that was their life. I dreamed I was a bird with great wings and no limits. I dove for fish, I wheeled on the wind, I soared high above the earth, I was one with the sun and moon and stars, and I was, at last, whole. The currents ruffled my feathers and lifted me higher and higher, and I sang, loud and clear, so that my joy would be known in every corner of the earth.

Then, a sudden rush. I was falling, falling through the sky, a loud
crack,
and I was wailing because it hurt, my wing hurt, right there, oh, no.

My eyes flew open, and the smell of beer breath was thick around me. The sun was blocked out by heavy black shadows that shifted over me, around me. Confused, I tried to rise, but my arms were pinned down, my legs too. I screamed but could not see Abel or Jacan. The pock-faced man slapped me hard across the mouth and yelled at me. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was drooling in his beard.