Eve (2 page)

“Your woman is exceptional,” I said.

On this particular occasion, Abel was absent. Frequently, he claimed that sleeping among his flocks gave him solitude and peace. Even after Jacan’s discovery that morning.

Jacan, my youngest son, had been trembling when he returned at dawn from collecting water at the cistern. We could barely make out his words-he was gulping in so much air. “Lion tracks,” he said. “This big.” His little arms stretched wide, and his fingers tried to frame a large circle in the air. “Abel,” he said. “You should stay here today.”

Abel had laughed and ruffled Jacan’s hair. “Who will kill the lion if I sit at home?”

Jacan’s eyes grew as round as onions, and he stared at Abel. “It’s a big one,” he said, doubtful that Abel understood.

Our tools and weapons hung on our courtyard wall—adzes, sickles, scythes, hoes, throwing spears, daggers, and bows and arrows. It was to this wall that Abel went. He reached up for a slingshot and a bag of clay pellets. He turned to Jacan and said solemnly, “My aim will be true the first time.” And towheaded Jacan went to him and hugged the huge trees of Abel’s legs, Jacan’s arms seeming so frail to me, like vines trying to find
purchase. Oh, how I wanted to grab both of my sons and hold them tight!

Now, the long day over, the purple-gray evening skies pressed in from all sides. Inside the waist-high clay walls of the courtyard, moths and flies were drawn to the flames and danced shadows upon our faces. Aya, my crippled middle daughter, ladled meat into wooden bowls and plucked hot and steaming flat bread from the walls of the
tinûru.
I smiled to watch her kiss each piece of bread before she placed it on a platter. It was something she had always done from the time she was small and just learning to cook. I asked her about it once, and she said, “But, Mother, all things must be blessed. You said so yourself that Elohim blessed each thing He made.” It was true. I had told her that, although I was beginning to doubt there was a personal Elohim who enjoyed my company. That had been a truth for the Garden, something sweetly shared between Adam and me.

Dara and Jacan were in their seventh year. As the sun slipped over the plains flat edge, Jacan came running in from the river, knees churning, shouting, “Dara, Dara, Dara!” as though he were mad. He carried a box turtle from the marsh, and although I was convinced he had squashed it in his hand in his eagerness to show Dara, it was still alive and moving when he gave it to her. She squealed, of course, then grew morose when the turtle refused to poke its head out. “Mama,” she cried. “Do something!”

I told her to be patient. “The turtle is probably frightened,” I said. “Wouldn’t you be too, if someone was throwing you about?”

So they hovered, squatted down on their haunches, and waited for the turtle’s glorious head to emerge in the twilight. Such is the life of small children! It never failed to delight me, watching them involved with a task so simple, yet they remained so wonderfully curious and happy.

I do not recall what my family talked about that night as we filled our bellies, but I do remember what it was that made us all
stop
talking. There was a sharp cry in the distance, then a
thud.
To the north, maybe. Cain was the first to scramble up, because Adam, who was deaf in his left ear, hadn’t heard. I’m sure we all looked like baby birds, mouths open, food suspended, for a moment, waiting, waiting, for another noise.
What could it be?

“Father,” Cain cried, as he rushed to the courtyard wall and disappeared into the edges of night.

Adam, accustomed to this disconnection between his inner and outer world, took his cue from Cain. He jumped to his feet, setting down his bowl. He reached for my hand and held it for a moment. “Stay,” he said to us, and then he, too, was through the courtyard gate.

I daresay his command was ignored. Naava had a nose for adventure and for everything else out-there, a desire I could never quite understand. It was a compulsion that neither of my other girls seemed to possess. She rose, and though I called sharply, “Naava, wait,” she dashed out too and vanished.

“What is it, Mama?” said Dara.

“The lion!” said Jacan, yanking on Dara’s arm, then looking at me, fear solid in his eyes. “Abel!”

Aya’s voice was calm and contemptuous. She had no time for silly conjectures. “Abel is in the hills. How could we hear his voice from here?”

Jacan’s face registered confusion for a moment, then he rallied. “Maybe he was on his way home because he was lonely, and the lion attacked him.” He turned to me. “Father will save him, right?”

I waved his worries aside and began collecting the bowls to scour with sand, but Jacan’s words gave me goose skin.
What would happen if I lost my son?

I tended a small collection of burial mounds in the garden that Adam had planted for me—a son whom I had borne before his time, a daughter with a malformed head, and another daughter who had emerged, dead, with knots in her cord—but this was different. Abel was a grown man, with curls of hair on his chest and a gruff voice and somber moods. He did not belong in the ground, away from his family, silent, covered with dirt and thistle and mesquite.

Because I have given life to each of my children, I love each one. Cain— for his ingenuity. Abel—for his sweet ways. Naava—for her feistiness. Aya—for her resourcefulness. Jacan—for his tender heart. Dara—for her compassion. But in times like these, a mother’s mind flashes to—oh, think me not cruel!—whom of her children she would most like to hold fast, if given the choice. Although I strive to treat each equally, my heart cannot be led like Abel’s sheep. It is stubborn and goes where it likes. I do not find any solace in this truth; in fact, it causes me much turmoil.

My love comes in shades of color. There is a bright pulsing red, and there is a weakly washed pink. I do not know why; I only know that it is so.

So, truth be told, it would have been Cain I would have sacrificed, if I had been forced to choose. Cain always grappled for his significance with the universe, his superiority over all of us, even his disgust with us. It was as though he were made in the starry heavens yet housed in a fragile warm shell that was susceptible to injury and ache and decay, and the frustration for him was too much.

As a child, Cain tortured and killed frogs, birds, and lizards. He baited the ducks at the river by hooking a bit of bread and waiting for an unfortunate one to pluck at the morsel and swallow it. He sliced open their throats, then cut them apart, determined to find out what made them breathe or walk or fly.

Everything was a torment when they were boys, even such a small thing as splitting a pomegranate between him and Abel.

“You’ve given him more,” Cain would squeal in fury.

“Here’s a bit more then, from mine,” I would say, and give him another section.

“I want it from
his!”
Cain would say between clenched teeth.

“That’s enough,” I would say.

From Abel, there was nary an unkind word or threatening look.

He was a summer rain.

That night, I quelled a gasp in my throat.
Not Abel, please not Abel,
I prayed. I prayed to the One who had formed us in the Garden, the One whom I had talked with there, and the One whom I did not believe cared for me anymore.

The reason I prayed was simple: I prayed to Him because it was the only thing I could do. True, my energy was irrational and ill-founded, but nonetheless I invoked Elohim my Creator.

Hear my cry, O Elohim, and give heed to my prayer. I shall shout Your praises to the sky. Let me not be ashamed.

And so it came to pass that, as I prayed, the winds of my heart blew no more. It was quiet, and I sat to hear what He would say to me.

His words never came.

Eve closes her eyes and rests. She’s been holding her head up this
whole time, straining to make herself heard. Her hair is white now, splayed out like a sun-bleached starfish upon her pillow.

Naava places a cool cloth on her mother’s forehead. “Shhh,” she says. “Lie back.” She stares at Eve’s face, the bear-clawed scars on her right cheek, the irregular brown spots on her hands and arms, the deep lines in the skin around her eyes and lips, and the frown cracks between her eyebrows. Naava wonders why her mother is so dramatic, so wrong about the past.
Is it possible that two people can experience the same thing and come away with two different stories?

Naava takes Eve’s hand, knobbed like a piece of gingerroot. She traces the swollen rivers of blood in Eve’s veins, shutting them off, then letting them rush forth under the skin. She remembers: sitting with Aya and the younger children by the pond, under the shade of Eve’s beloved Garden of Eden tree, telling Eve’s stories to one another in the heat of the afternoon, while the asps warmed themselves and the bees buzzed above their heads. They played the parts—the serpent, Eve, Adam, even the cherubim and the wavering lights. Once, Aya insisted they all chant to Elohim, asking that they be able to return to the Garden, to see where their mother and father had come from. Elohim answered in a breeze; His words sounded singsongy and soft.
What’s done is done, my children.
His swift reply only
encouraged Aya in her attempts at further conversation; it did the opposite for Naava. Naava was petrified. Voices should come out of people, not out of thin air. Really, she wasn’t even quite sure she’d heard anything at all.

Naava felt this: Eve knew so little of what had happened because she saw only what she wanted to see and loved only what she wanted to love. She herself had said this in so many words, hadn’t she?

On that night in question, Naava hadn’t run out. She remembered it clearly, even if Eve did not. She had stayed with Eve and the children. While her mother and the younger ones argued about whether or not Abel was in serious trouble, Naava went to her loom in the front room off the courtyard, lit another lamp, and began to thread her shuttle and pull colored pieces of wool through the open shed. This was
freedom
for her, to design something spectacular and watch it bloom like a reluctant flower beneath her hands.

The desire to create was strong in her, as it was in her mother. Naava knew Eve was with child again, and Naava also knew by the low melon roundness of Eve that the baby would be born around the fall harvest. Naava smiled to herself. Her two favorite moments in weaving were at the beginning and at the end. In the beginning, wondrous visions danced in her head, and her fingers had only to step nimbly, turn gracefully, to translate the images—flowers and trees and rivers and sunbursts—into tangible beauty. At the end, she held the rough cloth to her face and traced the colors and the designs with her fingers, and the satisfaction was sweet, like honey. Naava had already decided to make a sling for the new baby her mother would bear. She had gleaned wool from Abel’s goats, cleaned and washed it, boiled it with walnut husks to turn it into a rich wheat-brown color, rolled it upon her thigh, and pulled it into strands of yarn. After designing her warp—the latticework support for all those threads—she was ready to weave. She was ready to create.

Naava’s helpfulness came in bursts then, in summer’s early days.

As she concentrated on her weaving, Naava thought of Abel and how handsome he was, certainly more handsome than Cain. She had begun to
notice, with delicious pleasure, his side glances at her when he thought she wasn’t looking.

In fact, morning before last, she had been outside the courtyard, on her hands and knees, picking through her collection of cut plants—yarrow, marigolds, geraniums, madder, and chamomile—and sorting them by the colors they would produce when boiled with wool, when she lifted her face, wet around the temples from the morning heat, and looked toward the corral where Abel was shaking a clay jar full of seeds to get his flocks to follow him through the gates and out into the sandy fields. Except that Abel had been watching her, and when she looked up, he diverted his glance, then caught himself and waved, so she would think nothing of it. Naava grinned and waved back, then realized that the top of her robe was gaping and Abel had been staring into its dark recesses. Shocked, and slightly pleased, she blushed and looked down to put herself in exactly the same position she had been in when Abel—
what had he seen?
She glanced up, but Abel had vanished. She straightened her neckline and tucked the panel firmly under the sash—but not so tightly that he could see nothing.