Havah (3 page)

The One made us.

Yes. From the earth, Adam. From Adam, Ish and Isha.

Why?

To keep the garden.

The beetles and animals and plants seem to do that well enough on their own.

And to name the animals.

Why are they here?

Who can know but the One that Is?

That he seemed unmoved by these questions only incited more curiosity in me. But then his mouth curved in a lovely smile, and I knew he had wondered as much himself, and that while he had imparted to me many things, many others were mine to learn.

To learn is joy, Isha.

Then he fell silent. Finally: “There is something, though, that I should show you.”

On the western end of the valley where the river runs to the lake, mist loitered long after dawn. The trees, which murmured from the valley to the hilltops, stood mute. The call of insect and bird and creature seemed oddly blunted here, but the underlying murmur of every living thing sharpened in sonance, its pitch more crystalline than I had heard it at any other place.

The adam waded into the river ahead of me. I hurried after him, relieved when he reached for me. But this was no frolicking swim. He pushed into the current, crosswise. Damp enveloped our heads and clung to my hair.

As we swam toward the middle of the river, I began to think that we might never reach the other side. I could not see it through the mist, nor could I make out the bank behind us anymore. Just as I began to wonder if we would find ourselves perfunctorily washed into the delta of the lake, our toes touched the pebbled river bottom.

I caught my breath.

Before us sprawled a small island in the widest part of the river. And in the middle of the island grew a tree with a fruit so singular I knew I had not seen it anywhere else in the garden. It was perfectly round like an oversized berry, larger than the plum. It was the color of the sun as I had seen it blazing between the northern and southern ranges the night before. Heavy on the stem, every one of them seemed bursting with juice, ready to drop at the slightest breeze, though I saw none upon the ground.

My stomach rumbled as we climbed onto the bank. But before I could take two steps toward that tree, the adam caught my hand tightly in his own.

“No!”

I blinked at his vehemence. “Hungry.”

“This one you cannot have.”

It was the first time I heard
no
uttered from lips—human or otherwise.

“Why?” I considered the fiery-gemmed giant with new appreciation. It seemed ancient, older than any other tree in the valley—already I understood something of time—its branches twined like the horns of the gazelle, pointing toward heaven.

“It is the knowing of good and evil to eat it.” His eyes flickered to the tree and back. His mouth was taut as the skin of that fruit.

He does not want to be here,
I thought with amazement. And then:
No, he both wants and does not want to be here.

I did not understand this opposition in him. Nor did I know the meaning of good or evil or the conflict behind them—only that it seemed to pulse from the roots of that tree.

Overhead, the sun emerged from a cloud. It gilded the grass and the leaves of the tree and then set the fruit ablaze as though it were not fruit at all, but a wealth of stars snared in verdant constellation. Within seconds the mist was gone.

There is more. If you eat it, you will die the death.

The death? What is the death?

When the adam turned the full brunt of those eyes upon me, they were gentle.

Pleading.

Why do you ask these things, Isha?

Because I do.

The death is an end. An end against the wish of the One.

Almost as one we turned back to the tree.

When I would have stroked those twisting branches, he stopped me again.

“Do not even touch it!”

I did not understand this death. I understood, however, obedience to the One. Had I not woken when the One said, “Wake”? Had I not walked in assurance of those words,
I Am?
Had I not seen the might of that hand? To think of it struck me with elation and yearning for the man in whom I saw his likeness, as a shadow cast upon the earth by the soaring eagle.

My stomach by now had gone silent. But standing before that singular tree, I suddenly wanted nothing better than to eat until I was filled. Then I noticed the other tree on this small island—a shrub, really, innocuous beside her more glamorous sister. It bore little purple berries.

The adam drew me away as his gaze fled back to the magnificent tree. This time when he touched me, I felt myself ravenous—for the tart apricot and crisp water of the spring, for the voice of the One and raw heat of the sun and the shade of the willow . . . to sink my fingers into the mane of the lion and run my palms against the adam’s side.

I drew his arms around me like a mantle. I tasted the salt of his neck. He groaned and I thought he might fall to his knees.
I give pleasure!

And then:
Such pleasure will I give him.
I did not know all the intricacies, but the One was a whisper in my heart—what secrets should be kept from me?

To learn is joy, Isha.
I heard it again, as the man had said it.

Indeed. It would be.

“Not here.” The roughness of his voice was adrenaline and seduction. He pulled me toward the river, his mouth hot on my ear, his fingers bold. Just as we gave ourselves to the water, a rustle sounded from the brush. There—a flash of gold through the branches, daylight refracted by scales so brilliant that they rivaled the fruit of the majestic tree.

“What is that?”

“What?” He murmured into my hair.

I pointed. The creature on the island stared out through the boughs of the smaller shrub at me.

The adam hardly looked up. “Only the serpent.”

We crossed the river, fell dripping upon the bank. He bent to my neck, my shoulder, my navel. I languished in pleasure.

I will satisfy you.

Yes.
Agreement. Yes. A plea.

Feel the sun.

I feel it.

Feel my fingers.

I feel them.

How I love you.

I gave myself up to him.

I am the horn of the antelope, twining toward heaven. I am the leaf, twisting upon the stem. I am the sweet water that rushes from the rock, thrilling the hands that dip into it, slipping down the thirsty throat.

THAT NIGHT, AS THE cricket and the frog took over the song of sleeping birds beneath the ascending moon, he wept against my shoulder.

“How I have longed for you,” he said, the lovely voice broken like earth crumbling in water. I held him and my heart swelled like the river that overruns its banks.

How mighty, how great the One must be,
I thought,
to send the heavens careening, and yet hear the cry of a single heart.

I covered his mouth with my own. We did not sleep until dawn.

I DREAMED I WANDERED through the mist. Grasses licked my calves, their wet blades like tongues as I walked for what seemed an hour. After some time I realized I did not walk on grass at all; my feet were immersed in water. I had found the river and walked into it, it lapped at my ankles and knees.

When the mist began to lift, I saw that I stood not in a river but in a vast landscape of water, blue as lapis, stretching to the horizon in every direction. I raised my hands to the rising cloud and became the expanse of air between—my feet took root in the depths of the sea; my fingertips spanned the heavens.

But now, as I looked down from a mighty height, the water began to move. It roiled one direction and, at the same time, another, so that it seemed it would pull itself apart—and indeed, the ocean produced gaping holes bored down to the caverns of the earth. No, they were not holes at all but dark masses, rising here—there and there!—up through the ocean where it had gathered itself away, pushing up through the water like the horns of the hart in spring. Higher they rose with a great, cracking roar so that the sound must echo to the stars. The oceans rocked and heaved like water in a breaking jar, and the land came together with a mighty crash so that the edge of one mass pushed up onto another, craggy teeth bared like an animal’s to the sky. On their ragged edges shone onyx and quartz and obsidian, like jewels spilled from a broken cask.

There among vibrant sediment: ochre—red, like the blood of all things living, such that ran in the clay-colored flesh of the adam sleeping at my side.

“THE BIRDS,” I SAID one day as we collected the stigmas of the narrow-leafed saffron. “Do they eat the fruit of the splendid tree?” My vocabulary was, by now, rampant. I had exhausted the adam in my pursuit of words—for the sun at her zenith, the trees in their species, each part of a fruit and every kind of seed, for the names for the skins and pulps that defined them. I learned language for quantities and things unseen—the name for waking and for pleasure—for thoughts intangible, scientific, and speculative.

The adam sat back on his heels. “I have not seen it.”

“Do they understand the death?” A day did not pass that I did not think of the mystery of that tree and the death within its lovely fruit. A thing “outside the wishes of the One,” the adam had called it. How could something outside the will of the One exist—in beauty, no less?

“If eating the fruit is against the will of the One, what other things are against that will?”

He studied me with a frank mixture of appreciation and consideration. “I don’t know, though I have wondered the same, myself. Truly we come from the same flesh, you and I!” He laughed softly and smoothed his hair back from his forehead.

“The One has not revealed anything more, or you would know it.” He frowned then. “Before you came to me, I thought often of that place, much as you do. But now you are here, and it is practically forgotten to me.”

But not completely.

“The serpent. How lovely he is,” I said.

“If there is a creature that understands the death, it is that one.”

I wondered at that, curious about the thing that set the serpent apart aside from his obvious beauty—curious, too, about the cloud that seemed to cover the adam’s eyes when he thought back to the time before. We knew nothing of grief or regret. We had cause for neither. But this I knew: he had been less content then. I understood something of that; since swimming to that island, I was conscious of it always. I judged my position on the river by that island’s proximity and by the fringes of the mist that seemed to settle about that place. Gathering licorice root on the hillside, I would look down on it and see in my mind the thing cloaked within the veil. And I was aware, as I had not been before, of the scent of that fruit in the bouquet that was my valley, hearing even the rustle of that tree above the others in the strongest breeze.

THAT NIGHT I SAID, “I want to know about your life before.” The adam set aside the bark he liked to twine into cord.

When he reached for me, I went into his arms, folded into them, nuzzled my cheek against his shoulder. He was silent for a long moment before he finally spoke.

“Once you were a part of me, and I was a human without counterpart. I was the adam, a human, no more. How like a husk they seem, those days, the weeks, the months that I learned the ways of my body and of the animals, and the elements. I learned all things of the green life that sustains us: what part of the fruit to eat, which seeds would grow when I poked them into the soil, and which one would lie as something sleeping for a season. I knew how to harvest the chickpea and chew the pod of the carob tree, how to find the meat at the heart of the almond and the properties of wormwood. The One was always with me, murmuring through the trees and whispering atop the grasses. I saw his face in the majestic mount, heard his sighs rumbling from the heavens, saw his thumbprint in the tiniest mustard seed.

“In those days the animals came to me, to see this adam bearing the likeness of the One. I marveled at their diversity. I scrubbed the mane of the lion and stroked the tail of the nimble fox. I caught the frog up in my palm and touched the wings of the serpent.
How lovely you are, Adam, made of the One that Is,
they said. And how lovely they were to me. I gave them names, and they knew themselves better for my having known and named them. This went on for days.”

He absently traced the curve of my ear. “It did not take long to notice that though they dwelt in multitudes, there was one of me. They were male and female, but what was I? Both? Neither?

“I applied myself to knowing the way of the animals and my place among them. I roamed the hills and the plain beyond the eastern gate. I learned the hierarchy of the wolves, the gestation of the ewe. I surveyed the mountain and swam in the great lake. But I always came back to roam the hills, to gaze down into the valley.”

I pictured my vantage from the orchard, the island shrouded in mist and the fruit shining like gold upon it.

He whispered. “I was aware of it always. I wondered whether I could understand the evil. I pondered the death. I called on the One who whispered to my heart, and he denied me nothing, but in my loneliness I longed for more.

“One day as I wandered through the reeds—the very place where I first lifted my head—I
saw
it.” His eyes were shining as he said it, dark blue, the color of lapis from the hills of Havilah. “A
footprint,
a man’s—but not my own.” Tears slipped from his eyes, and the look upon his face was filled with longing.

“I ran along the bank, crying out, wanting nothing more than to touch that foot, to touch that hand. But even as I did it, I heard a voice saying,
I Am, Adam. I Am!
I fell down on my knees. It was the first pang of loneliness I had ever known, and it was as acute and sharp as any craving for food or sun or sleep or bliss as I have ever experienced. It came again, like a whisper:
I Am.
”