Havah (14 page)

WE DESIGNATED A MIDDEN, dug into the earth. We had not had one near the cave until the day I realized that the pervasive stench outside it was not the earth or any strange fissure in it but the evidence of our bellies turned foul. Now we dug a pit well away from the house.

Gada and the goats were mindless—nothing at all like the animals we had known so long before—and I finally stopped expecting them to have a brain in their heads. We tied them to a bit of shrub by day, or else Adam or I took them grazing in the hills. We brought the animals in with us those first nights, but soon after, Adam began to build them a pen of stone and mud. It need not be wind-fast, he said, but only enough to keep out the hyena and the fox, the jackal and the lion. Soon after it was finished, Adam captured a pregnant ewe, and so our little flock continued to grow.

About that time the babe began to move inside me. The first time I felt it, it was a gentle flutter against my abdomen—then against my bladder—as though to say,
I am here.

I had put my hope and expectations upon this child. Now, with a great, irrevocable rush, I gave it my love. Was it possible that I could love anyone more than the adam? That I could love a thing that was a part of me but not a part of me, eventually to be two where there had been only one?

Adam had.

Now for the first time I understood.

Flesh of my flesh.

Over the next weeks and months my belly grew: first as a hard bump, then long under my ribs, and then larger, rounder, and crossways from side to side. I was fascinated with the changes in my body. My breasts darkened around the nipples and swelled larger than I had thought possible. The adam was fascinated too, though I couldn’t bear at times for him to touch me. At night as I curled against him, I felt the growing presence between us and thought, for the first time since our expulsion, that all was well in the world.

Of course, it wasn’t. Rodents ate much of our seed stores. Strange rot ate the rest. Reut dragged half-eaten remains of hares and birds and other animals home on occasion or buried them near a tall poplar by the house. Occasionally, the food we ate loosened our bowels. Mosquitoes plagued us near the river.

The days of the valley seemed like another life. Not forgotten—I could conjure in dreams the smell of apricots and hyssop, the taste of licorice, and even the crispness of the waters of the abyss drunk straight from the narrow falls and streams. But it seemed harder now in waking hours; there was ever before us the work of gathering, retting, cooking, tool-making, weaving, grazing, and milking. Sweat ran in rivulets down the neck and back of Adam as he cleared a small area for our garden. Here we would plant vegetables, cresses, herbs, garlic, chickpeas, lentils, and flax. He cleared another for an orchard and a vineyard.

We gathered pitch for glue and burned out the middle of wood pieces that we would later carve into bowls. We took apart and reinforced the house with new bricks baked in the sun. We spent our evenings eating and working by the light of the fire. Those were long and weary days for me; I was ungainly and uncomfortable and ravenous. I criticized and then snapped at and then clung to Adam, never wanting to be alone but unable to abide his company. I was irritated when he spoke and then by his silence—by his inattention during the day and his arm over me at night.

One morning he announced that he was going to look for more animals.

“Then I will go with you,” I said, but he shook his head.

“You have to stay with the animals here, and you are too heavy now to move quickly enough to be any help.”

My irritation flared, but for the first time in days, I said nothing. I worked, sullen, through the day after he left, entertaining a hundred complaints—and only fifty apologies—and napped in the afternoon as I was more and more wont to do. By the time I heard his step outside that evening, I knew he had found no animals.

He came in without a word or any explanation. He left again the next morning.

When he returned that night, empty-handed again, I said, “What is this that you say about not being apart? How is this not keeping apart?”

His blank expression instantly maddened me. “I come back at night.”

“Yes, but you are gone all day! I thought we were done with that when you found this place for us!” I could feel the hot tears welling in my eyes. I threw myself down on my pallet, confused at my own emotions. I knew in these moments that he saw in me a creature as alien as the minds of the deer and onager and hawk.

“Havah . . .” He came to put his arms around me.

“Go away!”

He went out and left me alone. I lay miserable through the night.

The next day he returned with a young he-goat. We lay together that evening, naked beneath our pelts, speaking not at all.

That season we planted our seeds. Upon sight of the first shoots of our garden, we clasped one another and laughed. The One sustained the world yet.

15

My breasts ripened like heavy fruit in the sun. A dark line grew down the front of my belly. I exclaimed upon it one day as I uncovered myself to lie in the shade. Gone were the days when the stirring breeze or lazy afternoon flight of the dragonfly made me want to run toward the hills and throw open my arms. I wanted only to lie in the cool shade or float, weightless, in the river.

Hearing my exclamation, Adam laid down his hoe—a scavenged shoulder blade hafted upon a long stick, too macabre in my opinion for the tilling of food—and came to sit with me. His hair had grown long down his neck. It dripped sweat as though he had come not from laboring in the sun but from the swim I had craved all afternoon. He drew his forearm across his face.

“The sweat of your brow.” It has come to pass.
I was troubled, thinking this. Hadn’t the One also said,
“Dust you are. . . . To dust you will return”?

I had begun by now the obsessive habit of needing to know always where Adam was. I knew he chafed at it.

He drew a finger down the line of my belly. “Perhaps this is a reminder,” he said, tilting that beautifully shaggy head. “That we are two halves. As you are two. And we are one, as you and the man inside you are one.”

My philosopher, my love.

“Or else it is only that the child is splitting me in half,” I said.

He laughed and brushed the back of his fingers across my flattened navel. “How ripe you grow, my love.” The look in his eyes smoldered like the sun.

Just then Reut came bounding across the garden, a hare—still squealing—in her jaws.

“Make her let it go, or kill it quickly, at least!” I could not abide the sound of it or even of the mice that Reut sometimes toyed with too near the house.

Adam gazed lazily after the wolf, who had gone off in the direction of her favorite burying ground. “It will be dead by the time I chase her down.”

In disgust at them both, I stalked off, my wrap in hand.

THE DAYS LENGTHENED AND I grew great and cumbersome. I was uncomfortable, relieving myself all day long. It seemed I could not drink a drop before needing to squat in the grass.

One night, as the honeysuckle flowered on the stem beneath the moon and I lay tossing upon my mat, I dreamed of the serpent. I saw him, standing taller and taller before the One, unfurling wing after brilliant wing. The next morning I knew no peace. Had I not dreamed of the serpent the night my son was conceived? What should it mean, then, that I should dream of him now, when that son was ready to burst from the womb? I recoiled at the thought that the serpent should have anything in common with my child!

It plagued me through the morning until, nearly out of my mind by afternoon, I fell into a fit of weeping.

“What’s this, Isha?” Adam asked with a sigh.

I wished, immediately, that I had run to the garden or the river to gather myself alone.

I drew a slow breath and told him, in as measured and reasonable a tone as I could, about my dream the night I conceived. “I dreamed the same dream again last night,” I said when I finished. “What if it should mean—what if it means that the serpent has somehow influenced the conception of this child? What if—”

His brows drew together. “Isha, you know one creature does not conceive the child of another. You trouble yourself senselessly.”

“But—”

He captured my hands. “But nothing. You are Havah, the mother of all living. From you a multitude will spring.”

My son concurred with a swift kick.

I WOKE TO THE gurgling of my bowels. Beside me, Adam was gone away to the land of visions and did not notice when I lumbered from my mat, taking up his spear from where it leaned by the door.

Outside, the dawn had only begun to tinge the thick air gray. Mist had rolled in from the low banks of the river so thick that I could not see the tips of my fingers if I held my arm out in front of me. Sounds might carry very far within it, as though all the earth had been enclosed in a single house. Other times, it seemed to mute the sound of everything.

As I made my way toward the midden, I thought I heard a muffled footfall behind me.

“Adam?” There came no reply. I called again. Nothing.

I went on, the familiar shapes of lavender shrub and poplar solidifying out of the mist as though they were the only real things in all the world. I stopped at one of the poplars and leaned heavily against it, the spadelike leaves brushing against my cheek. My lower back was so stiff this morning—stiffer than it had been any other day. The ache in my legs seemed to emanate heat up through my groin.

A soft footfall sounded again. I straightened, despite pain.

“Adam?” But I knew it wasn’t him.

I turned and faltered a step. There! Just ahead—the form of a man passing by! But it was only his back, as though he walked across my path too far beyond me in the mist for me to see clearly. “Wait!” I hurried forward, suddenly lithe for the first time in weeks.

Then, with a flash, I
knew
that back, the curve of that shoulder suggested but never fully seen by me. I cried out with a broken sound a word that I had nearly forgotten, hardly known to my lips because it had been voiced always from my heart.

“Adonai!”

I fell to my knees and leaned heavily on the spear. A sound that is grief and relief and pain and love all at once came from my throat like the cry of an animal. I held out my arms. I could have wailed. I could have laughed. I cried instead.

A breeze billowed through the mist, and it began to separate. I cried again, “Adonai! Adonai!” not knowing if I cried it aloud or with every fiber of my spirit. I forgot the valley. I forgot our exile. I forgot the impending child heavy in the womb as an overripe fruit upon a thinning stem. I forgot even the adam.

I knew only the One that Is.

But the mists swirled and cleared, and there I was, on my knees, fluid rushing down my thigh, my bowels demanding release. Terribly mortal, horribly human, in as low a state as a human might be.

Where was he? Where had he gone?

I fumbled to my feet, stumbled several steps to the place he had been.

But there was no one.

In a daze I made my way to the midden as the first light of dawn burned away the mist.

Squatting there, dirtying my nostrils with the stench of my bowels, feeling the ache more pronounced in my back by the moment, I felt as wretched as I ever had. I was near to bursting and emitting all manner of foul matter. No wonder the One had turned away!

I moved with slow resolution back toward the house, the pain in my lower back like fire. And then I understood. I was not abandoned. By the help of the One I had conceived this seed. Now, by the omen of the One, I would deliver him.

I bent through the doorway as Adam, just stirring, glanced at me with sleep-laden eyes.

“I need the mat,” I said. I had made a mat of tightly woven rushes for this purpose. He stared at me for a dull instant before springing to life. He pulled the mat out from the cache of our things and laid it on the floor. Then he came to help me to my knees.

Was there pain? Of course. There is always pain. I cried out at first in surprise—and later in agony. It was by then terrific, near blinding, searing. My head hung down as the fallow deer when it has run too hard, too far, before it drops.

In the last of those moments, I sagged in the adam’s arms, but I was not there. I had returned to the mists, to hear again my cry after the One, to see again the form of that shoulder, of he who went ahead of me.

I am the mystery of the gate. I am the consort of every living thing. I hear! I live!

It is said that he rent me in two. That he split me apart with a violent birth. That I howled in agony for days, knowing what would come from him. That is not true. I have seen few women in my life deliver so smoothly a firstborn child—without even the songs or sympathy groans of other women to soothe them. Women now have all the comforts of mother and sister in their bed. Of women learned in herbals to ease them.

I had none of these but relied on the midwifery of Adam, whose gentle hands had delivered countless animals.

The truth is this: in the last moments before the birth, I felt a burst of euphoria—like that which comes from running long distances, that dulls pain and makes us think we have grown wings. In the last moment, I lifted my head. I bore him in pain, yes. But I bore him in strength as well, knowing I took part in the mystery of this creation. The plants and the animals, created by God, created in turn after their own kind, in a reflection of the character of the One.

And now, so too, did I.

“It is a male!” There was awe in Adam’s gaze. I was in awe of myself as well.

“I have gotten a man,” I repeated softly, as we did not then have a word for
boy.

I inspected him as I first gave him suck of the golden milk coming from my breasts. I was taken with his pudgy thighs and his downy hair, his tiny penis and the faint lines upon his feet, entranced by this miniature of his father. He gazed back at me with eyes that, I was certain, had seen the One face-to-face only moments prior. They were not blue, as Adam’s, but brown, practically black as mine. I searched them for a sign of the Creator. He gazed at me as one astonished, unknowing what he sees.