Eve (14 page)

Then it would be time.

I would spread myrrh and balsam on our bed. I’d light the lamps and wash my body. I drew back the unruly hair of my head with bits of cloth
and dabbed a little sheep fat from Aya’s larder on my lips. I waited for Adam. He would be pleased with my efforts and come to me gently and lovingly thinking that this was an unexpected return to the Garden.

He did not suspect the truth—that I simply wanted him to plant his seed—and I did not tell him. The cycle began again, without Adam, and soon my baby and I supped on each other’s love until our hearts were content. This I did without thought or consideration for how such conniving would end, and that was my mistake.

There is no justice in love.

Just because you give love does not mean you will receive it in the end, even though you feel it is your right, your privilege, because of all your labor. I was chagrined when I first realized this, thinking that maybe Elohim felt this same way when He pointed our way out of the Garden. Maybe He felt rejected and abused and violated because the trust between Him and us had been broken. Maybe He wept, as I have done many nights, over the lost innocence of His children. Of course, Adam and I did not intend to injure Elohim. We did not think that a small decision such as ours would have large consequences, and that is the heartache, knowing that it could have ended differently.

I have always judged Elohim harshly, as my children have done to me. I remind myself of this, always, though it is difficult.
Where was Elohim that summer, when I needed Him most? Why did He turn His ear from me?
For then, during those summer months, I was an empty well and my bones were scorched. I cried all the day long, and my throat was parched.

Now, as I rehash these events all over again, I can see the stars through my crude window, like shining blossoms floating on a darkened pool. I hear Naava’s steady breathing as she sleeps next to me—bless her heart, I have troubled her with all my recountings!—and remember Elohim’s promise of children.

The Garden was warm at night, almost stifling hot. The wind was oftentimes absent; the only sounds were of bats’ wings and cicada chirps. We
were as droopy as the surrounding vegetation until we discovered that if we climbed up the mountains on the eastern side of the Garden, we would come out onto a plateau, where the air was dry, the winds were gentle, and the sky was as black as a crow’s wing above us. Here, we could greet the moon and the stars.

We would sit, hour after hour, talking about Elohim, about us, about our plans for the Garden—for we
did
have plans, to create more walking paths and the like. Adam had even begun to twist vines together to form a rope we could tie to the Tree of Life, as a laughing, soaring way to enter the river.

Elohim would join us on occasion.

“
Why
did You create us?” I asked Him on one particularly hot evening. “We can’t be of much interest to You, because You know so much more than we do.”

“I longed for company,” He said.

Imagine,
I thought in amazement.
He needs us.

He was quiet for a moment. “Have you not exclaimed at the wonder of a hummingbird or the deep scarlet throat of a lily, only to realize that Adam is nowhere near to share in your delight? You race to find him or tuck the sight away in your mind to tell him later. That is how it was before I made you. Who would appreciate what I had made? Who could enjoy the fruits of my labor?”

I did not think to ask Him then, but later I wondered why He did not create a spouse for Himself—a counterpart—rather than children. Was it because He would have had to share His omniscience, His glory, His superiority? Most certainly He would have endowed Her with powers like His own, wouldn’t He? But with children, He would always be ranked
above
them. Possibly this is what the city people had figured out—that there are gods
and
goddesses, to uphold male
and
female sensibilities.
Had Elohim not considered this?

And then, even later, I found myself imagining that
if
Elohim had created a partner for Himself, She would have been lovely, creative, and every bit as imaginative and powerful as He. Instead, though, He embodied Her
and
Him—the epitome of
male
and
female—
in Himself. Hadn’t He said that He could appear as anything? And weren’t we
both
created in
His image, and how could that be if He were not male
and
female at the same time?

With Elohim’s validation that a new sight or sound is so much better shared with someone, Adam was already wondering about other things. “Is there anything else to be created?” asked Adam. “I have thought of a few things, such as a plant that gives off heat in the early-morning chill, or—”

“Watch,” said Elohim. He grabbed two flinty stones and struck them against each other. A spark leapt from between them, sputtered, then died.

“Oh,” I said, astonished.

Again Elohim struck one stone against the other, and again sparks flew. He held up a handful of dry grass, and the spark was transformed to a small bluish light. It quickly consumed the grass. “Fire,” said Elohim. He laid the light down on the ground and piled sticks onto it, to feed its growing hunger. The flames, now a red-orange, licked higher and higher, and the heat poured into our bodies.

Adam reached for it but yelped and drew back, shaking his hand. He grimaced.

Elohim laughed. “I cannot teach you everything. Some things you must learn on your own. That is the way of the world. With age comes experience, and with experience, wisdom. That is how it should be.” He turned to me, warming His hands over the fire. “Eve, you have seen the animals birthing, have you not?”

I nodded.

“You will have children too. That is an ability I have given you and Adam—there it is, Adam, the answer to your question. It is then, and only then, that I think you will understand my longing, my need. But, of course, you understood the need for each other, did you not?”

It was a rhetorical question, I knew.
So,
I thought,
Adam and I will have little ones who look like us.
We would join Elohim as creators. The wonder of it all!

We let the warmth of the fire seep into our limbs while Elohim pointed out the planets and the stars and wove the stories of the sun and moon into the fabrics of our being.

Now Naava has turned in her sleep and is snoring gently. I shall have a little laugh with her in the morning about that. She hated it when her sisters snored, and she claimed it was why she never got enough sleep. Aya always said, “You sound like a nest of bees. No wonder you wake up!”

During that summer, I had one hope: that we were hibernating, Adam and I, like bears in their dens. One day we would emerge into the warm sun, drowsy from a long nap, and nuzzle each other and say, “Where have you been, my love?” We would smell deep into each other’s steamed fur, straddle each other’s bellies, and lick each other’s honey sweetness. And we would Be One again—for all time.

The morning heat creeps in on all fours and spreads its haunches
on the cool dirt floor at the foot of Eve’s bed. Wasps hover under a nest right outside the window. A dove coos mournfully. Eve blinks at the grainy, dusty light and teases Naava about her snoring, and still, to this day, Naava denies it.

She asks Eve if she might stretch her legs a bit. She has not been home in so long, and she badly wants to feel the rough stone of the cistern again, where she and Cain found each other. She wants to see what is left of Eve’s garden, now baked and fallow in the desert sand. She wants to sit at her loom and dream of the robe she once wove for her trip to the city.

She finds Eve’s hand and squeezes it. Eve closes her eyes to doze again, and Naava goes out, into the dazzling sunlight and underneath the bone-white sky, to reacquaint herself with her history.

The robe was as intricate and as astonishing as an eclipse. Naava had gone to great pains to get the colors just right, using herbs from Aya’s patch and flowers from Eve’s garden. Eve’s baby sling long forgotten, Naava had created spectacular new colors, dazzling to the eye. Fresh goldenrod for yellow. Madder for red and purple. Broom sedge for brown. Chamomile for green. She boiled the wool in large pots, sweating and stirring and lifting, until the
fibers glowed with a true intensity. She dried them, threaded them, and wound them tightly on wooden spools. With a stick she drew her design into the dirt floor of her weaving room and covered it with clay bricks, left over from house repairs, so that her plans would be protected from critters’ tracks or prying eyes.

Then she began. The work was tedious. Her fingers wept with blisters, then crusted with calluses. When the weaving wasn’t to her liking, she cried out in frustration and unraveled as far back as she needed to go, the design dissolving into nothingness.

She wove her version of Eve’s Garden, the way she saw it in her mind. There was a blue-green river that transected the back of the robe from top to bottom. The sky above was to be split into two swaths—one as black as bitumen, sprinkled with pearly stars that she would stitch in later; the other a sunshiny yellow with gray luminous clouds. Below would be the green expanse of grasses and mosses, the reds and oranges of flowering trees and bushes, and the silvery light of bird wing. It was Naava’s retelling—a heartfelt, gorgeous rendition of her mother’s memory—although Naava had noted, with disappointment, that the evolving product was nothing like she had imagined in her mind. It seemed an impossibility to link vision with reality.