Eve (3 page)

Lately when Abel took to the pastures at night, she thought it was due to his fear of her—or fear of himself around her. He smelled of rain and earth and wet wool and starlight. How could he not? And how Naava loved that smell and wanted to smother herself in it.

She thought what a tragedy it would be if something should mar that beautiful face of his, for it would be sad to look upon a ruined countenance day after day. She wanted him whole, intact, and lovely. She did not want to give up her dream of having him to herself. For she
would
have him someday, at the right moment, and she would brush up against him, or place her hand in his, softly, tenderly, and whisper the words into his exquisite whorled ear, “I love you.”

The shout had not been Abel’s.

By the time Cain’s slurred singing reached their ears, the oil lamps were sputtering out, and Naava’s weft—her burgeoning piece of fabric—was the width of her smallest fingernail. Naava dropped her threads and ducked
quickly out of her room. Eve and the children glanced up at the sudden movement, rising from their places at the sight of Naava’s eager face.

“They’re back,” Naava said.

Eve tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and smoothed her robes. She grabbed the little ones’ shoulders and pulled them back to her.

Naava opened the gate and disappeared into the night beyond the courtyard walls. Even in the darkness, she could see that Cain floundered like one of Abel’s newborn lambs. Adam had one arm around Cain’s waist and the other firmly locked on his forearm.

“Hold the gate,” said Adam. His voice was stretched tight, like the knots he used to tie up his unruly grapevines.

Adam supported Cain through the entrance, and together they stepped into the yellow circle of lamps where Cain, with an ill-timed belch, held out a new wineskin to Eve. It was shiny and ready to burst. Eve half-laughed at the ridiculous sight before her, knowing Cain could not be so happy if there was trouble with Abel, and Naava saw the furrows in her mother’s face grow smooth again.

“What is it, brother?” Naava called. “Surely you didn’t go out to raid our storehouses.”

Cain turned to her and gave a delighted snort. “We have guests! To the north of us. Real live people, just like us. They have tents, sheep, dogs, timber—you should
see
the building materials they’ve brought!—blue stones, and boats: these hollowed-out contraptions you put in the water, like floating logs, but better, more efficient!”

Naava paused. She wondered how she felt—thrilled or alarmed? The family, the whole lot of them, looked astonished, of course. Eve had her hand over her mouth, while Dara and Jacan examined the new wineskin with eager hands. They thought they were the only ones that Elohim had created. Maybe there was a mistake. Naava’s first guess was that her family was no longer special. Elohim had made others, just like them, to work the land and be His laborers. He had no particular affinity toward them, exactly; He simply loved to create, and create He did, because, look, there were more of them. Her second guess was maybe He
did
love them after all and had seen fit to send them companions, or better yet, friends. More like themselves, more faces who could take away the infernal repetition of
life in the desert, for it was outrageously dissatisfying to Naava, day after day, seeing and doing the same things over and over again.

“There will be problems,” said Adam gravely. “They are very different from us. They look different, act different. Speak differently.”

“Father’s irritated,” said Cain, his face unfolding like a newly lit star, fire and light at the same time. He pointed to his ear and said, “They wanted to know what happened to his ear.”

Adam frowned.

Eve sidled up to Adam and slid her hand into his. Startled, Adam glared at her, shook his hand free, and said, “You too? Do you laugh with them, at my expense?”

Eve brought her fingers to her lips, then held them out, denying any misdeed, but Adam had already spit out what he wanted to say, what Cain had goaded him into saying, what he always said when the discussion circled and landed upon Adam’s ear. “My ear would be whole if it weren’t for you.”

And then Cain, like a wildcat grown bored with a limp hare between its paws, said, “Mother, they’ve given me a gift for you.” He reached into his leather bag and pulled out something white that looked like the figure of a woman—firm breasts, taut pregnant belly, and legs that were smoothed into a cylinder, nice for holding.

Adam sighed, shook his head, and sat down on the courtyard bench with his head buried in his hands.

Eve reached for the figure, puzzlement on her face, and traced her finger across its head, its neck, its belly. “It’s stone,” she said.

Cain shrugged his shoulders and gestured to Eve’s swollen belly. “Alabaster. For the baby.” He looked to Adam for help. “We’re not entirely sure what it is, but when we tried to explain with our hands”—here he stretched his fingers over his belly—“that you were with child, a woman pushed this into my hands, rubbed her stomach, and folded her hands in front of it, mumbling a mess of words I couldn’t understand.”

“I think it’s something they pray to, for help,” said Adam, still not looking up.

Eve looked startled, and that’s when Naava said, “There are men
and
women gods?”

“Elohim has a wife?” Eve said.

“It’s
not
Elohim,” Adam said. He lifted his face defiantly. He jabbed his hand at the statue. “Look at it. It’s made of stone. Worthless, really. How could anyone expect something like that to help them?” He actually glowered at Eve’s obvious interest in the stone woman, Naava thought. “I could eat a mule! Aya, where’s my bowl?”

Aya brought Adam some olives and barley bread and sat next to him. “Father, do they have someone who knows herbs?”

Naava saw Adam’s nostrils flare, which he did whenever he was on the verge of losing control. After all, this sudden intrusion of people had startled everyone, including him, and this fact seemed to only irritate him. “You’re not going anywhere, do you understand? You’re staying right here, with your mother.” And to Eve, he said, “It’s not safe. We don’t know who they are or what they want yet.”

Eve nodded but didn’t answer. She was caressing the little stone woman with her fingers.

Naava let her mind concoct fabulous images of these strange people. She imagined they were beautiful. She imagined they were fascinating creatures, not a dull bone in their bodies. She imagined what they would think of her, upon first glance.

Right then, Naava resolved that Eve’s baby sling would become a new robe for herself. For one could not visit such marvelous people in the rags Naava wore every day.

Hello, morning. Hello, sun, sliding up out of the blackness. I’m up
here—invisible! This is partly because I’m up so high, like a bird in the sky, and partly because my family’s just beginning to wake. Cain doesn’t know I climb his date palms, and I don’t intend to tell him. Besides, who would guess I could shinny up here?

If I had wings, I would swoop down from this tree and fly to the north. I would follow the green riverbanks of the great muddy Euphrates to the rugged mountains and shaggy pines where Mother and Father came from. There I would search for the flaming light that blazes the way back to the Garden. I would ask Elohim to let my parents come back, and I would beg Him for a good-as-new foot.

Father likes to joke that if anyone wants a view here in the Land between Two Rivers, just stand on a log. There are two giant rivers that wind down from the mountains in the north. When the snow on the mountains melts, the water tears through the countryside like a horde of locusts. Sometimes it overtops the riverbanks and drowns our crops and floods our house. Other times, it rushes on past and deposits silt and sand, which we have to dig out. There’s no way to prepare for this. During the summer months, when the water trickles through, we cut trenches in between the willows and tamarisks and poplars so the river can water our crops.

And if the water doesn’t destroy our crops, the mice, moths, snails,
or fungi will. Believe it or not, it’s the smallest vermin that do the most damage.

This is where I sit in the gray morning light, in one of Cain’s date palms on top of a levee created by the melting snows. I am surrounded by forty palm trees, twenty-one fruit trees, a crop of baby emmer wheat and barley, and too many rows of vegetables to count—beets, turnips, leeks, onions, garlic, watercress, cabbage, and cucumbers.

Look. There go five gazelles, rumps flashing in the distance, their white flanks giving them away. And there. A flamingo stands on one leg, balancing its precious pink life.

Our house is set back a bit from the river. There are six rooms—Mother and Father’s room, a pantry for dried herbs and preserved things, a storeroom for wines and vinegars of all sorts, Naava’s weaving room, a sleeping room for the girls, and a sleeping room for the boys. They are attached like arms and legs to the courtyard, which is where we eat and cook and labor when it’s not raining. The cistern is on this side of the house, as is Mother’s garden—a perfect haven of lush green vegetation and flowers abloom with brilliant color. Father planted it for her, to replace the Garden they left… or were banished from, however you look at it. Abel’s pens for his sheep and goats are on the far side, away from the river.

Cain has come up with a plan, after the other night. I heard Father and him talking, in low voices, while I slapped dough onto the sides of the
tinûru
for the morning meal. Cain called the strange people “visitors,” for that’s what we thought they were—sojourners who would be moving on— because why would they want to share land with us when there was plenty for the taking? Cain tried to convince Father of the “learning possibilities” and “sharing capabilities” that we could have with them. He even suggested that he could teach these new people about flower dust. The way Cain described it to us the night they returned drunk to the courtyard was: “I couldn’t believe my eyes, my tongue. Father and I were eating these things they were passing off as dates, but they were as scrawny and crisp as ants. I knew why. They don’t know about flower dust!”

Father argued that we couldn’t be sharing all our secrets, since that would mean we’d have no power and no leverage.

“Leverage for what?” Cain said, insisting they were nice people in an odd sort of way, but Father exclaimed, “Did you see the heavy yellow jewelry they were wearing? The shiny pots? The colored stones? They have more to offer than we do, my son.”

Cain grew quiet then, but I could tell he was simmering like the broth in my cook pot.

“We’ll keep to ourselves,” said Father. “We don’t know if they are friend or foe.”

“But—” said Cain.

Father beetled his brow and glared at Cain. “You will do as I say. Is that so much? We don’t know what they are capable of.”

Cain stomped off like an angry boar and yelled back over his shoulder, “They’ll think us simple!”

Father looked at me then, his fist halfway to his mouth and full of the barley bread I had made. I was the only one left in the courtyard with him. I scared him, I think, for he cast his eyes about him, like he was lost and a little embarrassed at our aloneness. Mother said that when she had presented me to him, his eighth child, after three others had been buried in Mother’s garden, he made a face at me and said, “She will be of no use to us, her foot that way.” But Mother said, “You’ll see. She’ll pull her weight.”