Rachel and Leah (Women of Genesis) (2 page)

Then even the sea was gone. She was surrounded by scrub oak and the occasional cypress tree, and the dust of the road clogged her nose and made mud of the tears on her cheeks.

Twice, chariots of the king’s men came clattering along the road, once going up, once going down, raising a fearsome dust and forcing everyone off the road as they passed.

But when she complained, her protector only laughed at her. “It is because of those soldiers that we can travel like this, just you and me and a donkey. If no soldiers came by, then there would be brigands after us—they used to live in these hills thicker than lions—and soon I’d be dead and the donkey and you would both belong to them until they saw fit to sell you.”

Bilhah shuddered at the thought.

Not long afterward, though, she realized that, going to live in a servant’s care, she was entering slavery as surely as if brigands had taken her. The only benefit was that there would probably be less suffering along the way. And, of course, she had her dowry, tied up in a cloth and carried over her friend’s shoulder because, as he explained, what if the donkey runs away or is stolen or falls off a cliff? Should he take your dowry with him when he goes?

They slept at a little inn where once again, apparently, the man had done harness work and there was no mention of paying. They had a good meal of lentils and carrots and old goat in a stew, and her friend slept at her feet with his knife in his hand, lest some rough traveler think that she was unprotected.

It was only two hours farther to Padan-aram, where her cousin’s master camped. They did not pass the town of Haran—it lay on the other side of Padan-aram, said her friend. “But you will have plenty of chances to see it, I’m sure,” he said.

The camp was not as bad as she had feared. Only a few of the dwellings were tents. The rest were houses of stone, along with pens for animals and stone-and-stick sheds for storing this and that. A much more permanent place than she had thought a “camp” would be, though it was nothing at all like the crowded, busy streets of Byblos.

They were seen coming in. A man walked out to greet them—only one man, which her friend said was a good sign. “They’re peaceful people here,” he said. “That bodes well for you.”

Her friend explained why they had come, as Bilhah modestly kept her eyes averted from the stranger.

And within a few minutes, she had met her cousin Noam (who, she quickly learned, did not like being called “Uncle No”), and then met the great man, Noam’s master, called Laban.

“Have you any skills?” asked Laban.

“I can mix the mortar as well as ever my father could,” she said.

Laban smiled. “Nothing here is made with mortar, child. Can you spin? Can you weave?”

“I can learn anything that needs hands to do it,” she said.

“A girl who can’t spin,” said Cousin Noam, shaking his head.

It made her heart sink with despair. They won’t want me, she thought.

“The girl’s a good one,” said her friend. “She learned everything very quickly. She can cook. She can learn.”

Bilhah kept wondering when the man would bring out her dowry. But after a while she realized why he had not yet done so. He wanted them to take her first for her own sake, or at least out of cousinly duty.

It soon became clear that while the master, Laban, was not averse to taking her, Cousin Noam himself was reluctant.

Until at last the cloth was unrolled and the coins exposed on the rug between them.

Cousin Noam shook his head. “This is her dowry. I’m not going to marry her! What good does this money do me?”

Bilhah saw how Laban’s gaze grew dark, his eyes more heavy-lidded. “Why is it,” he asked, “that you measure your cousin by how much of her money is yours, and I measure her by her usefulness to the camp?”

It was her friend the harness maker who answered first. “It’s because both of you are blind, not to see the beauty and goodness of this child.”

Cousin Noam whirled on him with a rebuke on his lips, but he was stopped by Lord Laban’s burst of laughter. “You are a brave man!” he said, still gasping from the laugh. “And a true friend to your friend’s child.” Laban reached down and took five coins from the pile on the cloth and offered them to the harness maker. “Her father would want you to take this, for the days of work you have lost, and for your loyalty to her.”

The harness maker took the coins, but then laid them all back down on the cloth. “I will gladly take a meal from your hospitality, my lord,” he said. “But from her dowry I will not take even the flakes of gold that cling to the cloth.”

Laban nodded again, and smiled. “We have good harness men here,” he said, “or I’d offer you work.”

“And I’d do the work gladly,” said her friend, “because your animals are so well cared-for, and for taking in the daughter of my friend.”

“Oh, I’m not taking her in,” said Laban. “She’s a free girl, though she’s under the care of my servant Noam.
He
will take her in, and
he
will guard her dowry.”

Cousin Noam nodded gravely. “She is now my daughter, and I am now her father.”

Though he was nothing like her father, Bilhah understood that his words were the covenant, and she answered alike. “Like my own father I will obey and serve you, sir,” she said. “I am your dutiful daughter now, and I put my dowry into your safekeeping.”

The cloth was rolled up again, and instead of going into the harness maker’s bag, it was tucked into the belt that cinched the loose robe around Cousin Noam’s waist.

They ate in midafternoon, and after much thanking and honoring and blessing and promising all kinds of future kindnesses, her father’s friend led the donkey away, heading back to the inn to spend a second night.

Cousin Noam introduced her to several people, warning her sternly that each adult had much to teach her as long as she was not ungrateful and served well. To each of them Bilhah bowed the way her father had always bowed to the men he worked for, and because they laughed a little she knew she was not supposed to do that; but the laughter was kind, she knew that it was not seen as a fault in her, and so she persisted. Someday someone would teach her what a free girl was supposed to do, if not to bow like a picture-tile man.

And that night she went to sleep inside a house made snug by tight walls and warmed by the bodies of four other girls, most of them younger than her.

In the morning, when she woke, Cousin Noam was gone. The dowry was too much temptation for him. It meant freedom, because with that money he could go far enough to escape the vengeance of Lord Laban.

But it meant the opposite to Bilhah, for now she, having been recognized as Noam’s “daughter,” was responsible for his debt to Laban.

She prostrated herself before him and wept the most sincere and bitter tears of her life, for now at last she truly was alone, and at the mercy of strangers.

“I know that I owe the value of my cousin’s servitude,” she said. “But I’m small and weak and have no money, either, and I don’t know how to do any of the work of this camp.”

“Your cousin Noam is a thief,” said Laban mildly. “And I don’t hold a child responsible for the debts of the man who robbed her. You are a free girl; I won’t take you as a slave to pay for a slave’s debt.”

“Then where will I go?” she said, weeping and hiccuping because truly her life was without hope now.

“You will go nowhere,” said Laban. “I will be your cousin now.”

Oh, it was a fine moment, as her heart leapt within her to hear such a gracious saying.

But within a few months, it was as if the words had never been said. She did not think that Laban ever decided not to honor his word. She supposed that he meant them at the time, but they had come too easily to his lips to last for long in his memory. Soon she was just one of the servant girls in
Padan-aram, and if she got special treatment now and then, she knew it was more because she was pretty like her mother had been than because Laban remembered that she alone of the girls in her little stone house was free.

The end of my father’s life was the end of my freedom after all, she thought, then and many times afterward.

And as years went by, when the pain of Noam’s betrayal and Laban’s forgetfulness had worn away, the thing that stung her most was her own ungrateful heart. For she remembered Cousin Noam’s name, though he had robbed her and left her to take his place in servitude. But the name of Papa’s friend, the harness maker who had refused to take even the flakes of dust that clung to the cloth,
his
name was lost in the darkness of memory, and though twice she had dreams in which she thought she remembered it, the name always slipped away upon waking.

A
t first Bilhah was trained like any of the other girls. Learning to water the animals, to card wool, to gather dung for drying and burning, to hoe the garden and tell weeds from food, to sew, to cook, to wash whatever needed washing, and above all, to keep the distaff ever spinning in her hand.

It was weary work, and none of it drew upon her mind the way her father’s work had, with the need to learn the fine gradations of color, what was a match and what was not, and how to imagine a shape to continue a line. Nor was she called upon to remember clients’ names and all the things they asked for, or where they lived, or which shops provided the goods that were needed, and which shopkeepers were prone to try to cheat her when she came alone. Her mind was still full of all this information, which made her work here in Laban’s household seem tedious and empty.

But the other girls thought that the things she knew from Byblos were useless. They asked about the city at first, hoping for tales of marvels and wonders from the sea. At first Bilhah was shy to talk about it, because the city brought back memories that made her cry. After a few weeks, though, she ventured a few comments about how things were in Byblos—only now the other girls weren’t interested, and it wasn’t long before one of the older ones said, “You’re not in Byblos any more, so shut up about it.”

The truth was that the things Bilhah knew from Byblos were useless here, and it wasn’t many months before she found that she could remember the streets of the city only in her dreams, and then they never led where they were supposed to, and in her dreams she could never find anything, or if she did, the wrong people were there, or they didn’t have what she needed in the dream, and more than once she woke up in tears, thinking, It’s not my city, this isn’t where I live. In the dream she was thinking it
was
Byblos, only changed; but when she woke, the words she found herself murmuring meant something else: that this sprawling camp in the grassy hills of Padan-aram was not her city, was not a place where she belonged at all.

And it was true. She did not belong. Oh, the tasks that took mere manual dexterity she mastered well enough. Spinning thread might drive her half mad, doing it hour after hour, but her work was as good as anyone’s after a very short time. And she could clean and sew and cook as well as the other girls her age.

But the animals were impossible. She didn’t have the feel for it, even with the small ones. She saw the other girls cuddle with lambs and frolic with kids, and watched the little boys
roll and play with the dogs of the camp. But when she came near even the most docile animal, the stink offended her and made her want to shy away, and when the animal moved she leapt back instinctively.

She heard one of the old women say to another, “It’s because her father was crushed by a donkey,” and maybe there was something to that. She hadn’t been afraid of the donkey she had ridden all the way here, but that was because she was on top of it; when she was down among the animals’ feet, then it was true, their stamping and shuffling in the dirt made her uneasy. And maybe to her the smell of animals was the smell of death, because it had been so strongly in her nostrils as she breathed along with her father’s last labored breaths.

What difference did it make, though,
why
she didn’t like being with the animals? This was a herdkeeper’s household, and everyone had to help with animals all the time.

Everyone, that is, except Laban’s oldest daughter, Leah. But that wasn’t because she was shy of them. She’d hug a lamb like any of the servant girls, and there were a couple of dogs that everyone regarded as hers, because they ate from her hand and when she went out in the camp, they trotted along with her, sometimes running ahead, but always returning, as if she were queen and they were her guards and servants.

Leah didn’t have to help with the animals like everyone else because she was tender-eyed. In bright sunlight she squinted, even though she wore a fine black cloth over her face to fend off the worst of the dazzle. And she couldn’t see anything at all that was far off. Bilhah had noticed it almost at once, because when she first encountered Leah, she walked
right up to Bilhah and peered at her closely, her face only inches away, her head moving up and down as if she could see no more than a palm-size patch of Bilhah at a time.

But Leah was
not
blind. Bilhah had made the mistake of calling her “the blind girl” to one of the older servant women, and to Bilhah’s shock, the woman slapped her, and not lightly, either. “The lady Leah is not blind,” the woman said harshly. “Her eyes are tender, and this causes her great danger, for she cannot see things that might be approaching from far away. But she can see well enough to know who she’s talking to, and to go wherever she wants in the camp, and to tend the garden. And she can
hear
words that are uttered half the camp away, including the words of stupid servant girls who call her blind, which makes her cry. And only the worst sort of person would ever make Leah cry.”