Havah (20 page)

Surely Adam would miss our stolen time. But he came in from the fields at the end of the day—sometimes after having gone to the river with Kayin to wash. He ate. He slept.

I stopped speaking in the evening. He did not seem to notice. We went entire days without exchanging a word. The pleasure that had kept us conscious of each other, if only for the reference to our own needs, had been replaced by utter silence.

Was this as it would be, then? I had waited for a return to the days of the garden, thinking the adam and I would go back to our former intimacy. But as days passed into months, I told myself I did not care about the intimacy we had shared practically as children ourselves—only that we return to our valley. There I might run by myself or with my children. I might roll with the wolf in the grass. It would not matter to me.

But it did. And silence—and the prospect of more silence—injured me deeply. We had had our moments before, though we never discussed them in front of the children. This time we did not need to; their eyes cast between us, from one to the other and back, as we came in and out of the house, as we took our meals and got up to tend the fire or chores without a word.

The lives of my younger children, of course, were filled with larger concerns: who got to eat what, how evenly the cakes were divided, who would sleep next to Ashira, who Renana had made her newest flute and drum for, when Hevel would show them the new lambs dropped in the night.

But Kayin noticed it all. One day he drew me out of the house to a stand of poplars—the very ones I once sat beneath even as I carried him. I remember it well: the sun through the fringe of his lashes like light through the branches of a tree.

“I do not like the way Father treats you.”

For a moment I thought I might weep—whether for my distance from Adam or for the sweetness of my son’s heart, I did not know. But I dared not give tears space upon my cheek.

“Kayin, my love. He treats me as any sibling. That is what we are. Do you not have your tensions with your sisters?” Even though I knew I disguised the truth, I did not think I could bear to discuss this with him.

“Mother, I know that you have . . . visions of a destiny for me . . .”

I looked at him sharply, with quick hope—had he seen the One? Had God revealed himself to him?

But his face registered only anguish as he said, “I know it, though you will not say what it is. But by the One, let me never disappoint you!”

“Shush, stop. You do not disappoint.” My fingers covered his lips, but he took them in his hand.

“You are perfect to me, Mother, in every way.” How earnest, how naked was his face. “It is no secret to anyone, least of all to me, that there is some great hurt between you and Father. So I mean to say that should you ever wish to, need to . . . should you ever feel that you would leave, go away from here, know that I would care for you—”

“Nonsense,” I snapped. “Why would I do that? Stop this now.” My head hurt; I could not think through the implications of what he was suggesting or the position of his heart except that I knew he loved me more than he would love any woman ever. I was the first woman, the first he had ever seen, and the epitome for every woman after. I knew that what was beautiful in a woman to him was only lovely insomuch as it resembled me. Surely that was only natural.

He said quickly, recapturing my hands, “Please, Mother, if you knew how I love you—”

“My son—” But I was unable to speak. My mother’s tears, always near the surface, came too readily. I lowered my head to his shoulder and wept.

“Mother, please don’t cry.” His voice was musical as the running brook, rich as the purr of the lion. “I didn’t mean to upset you—only to reassure you that I am yours. Oh, how you break my heart!” He dropped my hands and drew me into his arms.

Then Adam happened to find us: Kayin holding me, his hands around my waist and nape, my head upon his shoulder.

“What’s this?” he demanded. Kayin stiffened against me. “Will you cry on the shoulder of your son when you should be teaching him to be a man?”

I stared at him. “How dare you!”

“Kayin, it is time you took your own woman rather than hiding your face against your mother’s hair. Would you sleep with your face in her bosom, too?”

My anger blazed. “Do not say these things! What would he do with his own woman? Ignore her? At least he would not leave her always alone!” I knew the moment I said it that I should not have.

Adam spun away, and I watched him go, hardly daring to move in case I should tremble. Not even in his betrayal of me had I felt this kind of anger.

Kayin’s jaw set in a hard line—ah! So like his father! “I will go talk to him.”

“No. You will not. You will be a man. He is right: It is too long that Lila has kept her own counsel. Do you not see how her eyes follow you?”

I might have said it of any of my daughters. For the rest of his life, women would follow Kayin—with their eyes, their thoughts, their feet. Though I knew I might wound him, I could not help myself now.

“Would you let your younger brother bear first fruit of this family? I am tired of bearing! You must do your duty. Or not. It won’t matter. Oh, why will the One not come to you! Have you not sought him, have you not beseeched him? You must!”

He cried out, “I have sought him! I have sought him, and I have beseeched him! Every time I am alone, my words are only for the One. Perhaps this destiny you wish for me is not mine to bear but another’s—”

I slapped him so fast and so hard my palm stung.

I had cuffed my children in their tantrums and occasional insolence. But never like this. I had never struck any of them in anger or in fear. I gaped at him, at myself.

He blinked at me, his dark eyes filling like great indentations in the ground after a rain. Turning, he bowed his head slightly and then strode swiftly away.

I moved in a daze through the rest of the day. Adam came in late and went directly to his pallet. I loitered near the fire, listening for any sound along the path from the field or the direction of the foothills. I excused myself to the midden to empty my bowels, loosened from nearly the moment that I had walked on shaky legs home from that conversation.

Kayin did not return that night.

Adam did not speak to me. Well, wasn’t this fine! What—was I to be shunned by both of them through no doing of my own? Or perhaps he was as aware of me as I of him, each of us too stubborn to give any indication. But soon I heard, as I had once in that cave so many years ago, a soft snore from his pallet.

I wanted to kick him.

Never mind him. Where was my son?

“I will find him, Mother.” Softly, from the darkness. Hevel. He worried; I knew it from the sound of his voice.

“Go,” I said, ashamed and indebted to him at once.

I lay by the fire for a long time after that, knowing that if I only went to the fields I might find both my sons throwing stones at a mark in the darkness, in the way of brothers who need not speak. I knew that if I found them I could tell Hevel to go back to the house, and there on the hill might draw Kayin into my arms, my firstborn, my love, and that he would weep against me and I could whisper that I am so sorry, and that I love him so greatly, and that I have put too heavy a burden upon him even from the moment he was born, allowing him no moment of humanity or fault. I knew that with a few words I might remove from him that blight as one incises a boil.

But I could not. He was our one hope. He must not bend like the reed in the water though I strike him or his father belittle him out of his own frustration and jealousy.

So Hevel went and I lay by the fire in the house. I do not know what was said between them, but when they returned the next day, well after we had broken fast and their father had gone to the fields, the rigidity was gone from Kayin’s shoulders even if the smile was gone from his eyes.

“Mother, forgive me.” He bent over me near the hearth. I did not move as he kissed me but gave only a slight nod.

Not until they had gone, and after Ashira had taken the children out with her, did I cover my face and wept.

FOR THREE YEARS I lay as the fallow field, feeling lighter and, slowly, rejuvenated. I wandered the orchards and picked fruit in the sun and went to the river to bathe almost every day. In my liberty I know I left my younger girls to carry Lahat with them, but there would be time enough for me to take up the nursing sling again and time enough for them to run wild before they had children of their own. Zeeva, round faced and pleasant to everyone, had already declared her intentions to Besek—at which Lahat had wailed, saying there was no wife for him.

“Nonsense. There is Renana,” Ashira said.

“No.”

“No? And why not, silly goat?”

“She wants to marry Father,” he said, snuffling.

AFTER ALL THOSE MONTHS of nothing but the most perfunctory words, I made my peace with Adam. I found him in the orchard, keeping his own company. When he saw me, he made to rise.

“Wait.” I came up behind him, slid my hands over his shoulders.

We made up in our way.

We did not share words of endearment. Spent, we retreated in silence. I knew there were things on his heart he would have laid plain another day, a lifetime ago, but did not now. Neither did I. I wanted to speak to him of Kayin, and though I meant to broach the topic with the best and purest of intentions, I knew it would disrupt the uneasy peace between us. It could wait.

21

When I returned to the house, I was met by Renana’s accusing stare. New to pubescence, filling into an earthy beauty, she was the one who resembled me the most. I even imagined I saw Adam’s eye stray to her on occasion. But of course, she was near to the age I might have been, had I an age, when I first came to his arms.

“Where have you been?” She had Lahat by the hand and looked for all the world like a young mother scolding a wayward girl.

“That’s no worry of yours.”

“Lahat has been crying for you. He fell and scraped his knee and cut his lip.” She thrust the boy toward me.

“Children fall down,” I said, annoyed with her. Was I allowed not one moment of pleasure? It already came at such a cost that I must bind my tongue and say none of the things that in another time would have already been known. How tiresome, the binding together of two accords to construct one!

I took Lahat as Renana went out in the direction of the field.

WE HAD HARMONY FOR a time after that. The adam and I kept our peace, and though I did not keep myself from him, I did not grow heavy with child that year or the next.
Perhaps I am done bearing,
I thought. It was the way of animals, I knew, to bear only for a time.

In the summer of the third year, Ashira’s belly grew round. Hevel shone like a dark sun and walked often with his father and even spent more time at the house, sending Zeeva or the sullen Renana with the flock instead. I was relieved for the reprieve from Renana and unmoved that she claimed to suffer out in the sun all day, so glad was I to have Hevel near me by day for the first time in many years.

Zeeva was delighted to be gone from her chores, to spend the day gathering herbs and roots and even the licorice that I loved on the hills. She came back singing and spent those evenings enthusiastically pounding the pulp out of some poor root or another. We all reaped the benefits of her good humor.

“Something must be done about this house,” I declared to Adam one day. We had already expanded it three times; it could not continue to stretch indefinitely, like a woman carrying a litter of children. He agreed, and that year, after the grain was in and the vines were tended, he and Hevel and Kayin began planning the work of a second home. Hevel had by then already chosen a parcel of land across the hills.

“It’s so far!” Lila proclaimed upon his announcement. Her outbursts were rare and abrupt when they happened, like a clap of thunder from a blue summer sky.

Hevel laughed and took her hands. “You can run the distance in three breaths. Or is it that you are growing slower now in your age? What, are those donkey knees I see?”

I chuffed. What did they know of age—what did any of us, for that matter? We had begun to note the new slowness of Reut, who moved about as one always tired since her last litter of pups. She chased them when they returned from the hills with Hevel or Renana but no longer went with the flock, preferring, instead, to stay near the house. Though we knew something of the slowness that overtook the limbs of aging animals—and age progressed more slowly then than now—what did we really know of age?

“Kayin,” I said, loud enough for Lila to hear, “one day you might build on the other side of the orchard, and then we will shout to you so you can send to Hevel’s house when we want him!”

Lila slid me a sidelong glance.

That fall we made the procession to Hevel and Ashira’s new home. They carried with them their mats, all of their belongings, and several stores of food. We had long ago built a storehouse, and there would always be a ready supply of food there, but Adam had separated a portion for them for the beginning of their own. He also gave to Hevel half the flock, from which Hevel gave several milk goats and two lambs apiece to Besek and Lahat.

“See,” Hevel said, “I will mark your lambs like this.” He showed them the ear of one of the lambs, “So you can know which ones are yours. With these you will make a flock of your own.”

“What is that mark there?” Lahat asked, pointing to one of the others. Indeed, they all bore the mark of a circle and a line except for the youngest, whitest lambs, which would, according to his way, remain nameless—and I assumed unmarked—until they had grown past the age of sacrifice.

“That is my mark, so everyone knows who the rest belong to, you see?” Hevel drew it in the dirt.

“Everyone knows who they belong to,” Renana said, droll.

“What does it mean?” Lahat asked.

“This is my stone, that I hurled to kill the fox. Do you remember that?” Besek shook his head. “What? My brave deed?”