After Abel and Other Stories

by Michal Lemberger

  But she watched as Lot grew more scared. He pushed back at the men and raised his voice to be heard.

  “Friends. You have known me for many years. You know that I deal honestly.”

  A derisive laugh went up from one or two of the men, but Lot ignored them. “These men are on the road to Ur,” he added.

  “What are they paying you?” one voice called out of the crowd.

  “Yeah! How much are you getting to host these men?”

  “We are all citizens here,” another called out. “We should all get a share of their bounty.”

  Finally, Pildash spoke. Unlike the others, he didn’t raise his voice. And he wasn’t drunk. “Why should you be the only one to get the honor of hosting them? Bring them out here to us. Let’s see how tights their assholes are.”

  Another ugly howl rose from the mass of men. She could smell the stink of them from up here. Lot continued as if no one had spoken, but he raised his voice a little higher, his fear audible at its edges. “They had heard of me from my associates in the west and so sought me out. I have offered them a meal and a bed for the night. That is all. They will be on their way in the morning.”

  It wasn’t working. She could see that. The men were just getting more and more worked up. From above, she heard the door slam as Lot rushed back in. She ran back down and into the house to find him flustered, his cloak ripped at the neck where someone had grabbed him.

  “I have to do something,” he said to her. “They’ll break into our house and drag these poor men into the street.”

  “They’re a drunk mob, she replied. “Throw them some coins and they’ll be happy.”

  “You heard them. They want the men.”

  “They want money.”

  “They’ll do unnatural things to those men. I cannot let my guests be raped by a bunch of drunken farmhands.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. They don’t want to do them any harm,” she said, with as much vehemence as she dared. Her husband could be irritatingly literal sometimes, but woe to her if she pointed that out. She had long ago learned to soothe his pride if she wanted to get anywhere. “They want to shake them down. Someone saw the men’s bulging saddlebags. Now they think they’re rich, that they should pay some sort of tax to be allowed to stay here for the night.”

  “They’re my guests! I must protect them,” he insisted. “The men outside are out of control.”

  “Then go out with a few skins of wine as a peace offering, compliments of the visitors.”

  “You’re not listening to me, woman! Didn’t you hear them? What do you think ‘let us see how tight their assholes are’ means?”

  “It means they want to see if they have any gold hidden under their clothes! Come on,” she added, forcing her voice to be as soothing as possible. “These are our neighbors. You know them. They’re as corrupt as the next person, but what you’re suggesting is truly unthinkable.”

  But Lot wasn’t listening to her. He was pacing, his head bent in concentration.

  Finally he lifted his head. “Go get the girls,” he said.

  “The girls?”

  “My daughters. Go get them.”

  “Why?” she said, no longer trying to hide her alarm. “What are you going to do with them? What do they have to do with this?”

  “They’ll take the girls instead.”

  “You’re going to throw our children to that mob? Are you crazy?”

  Finally, he looked at her, but it was as if they’d never met before, much less buried four children together. “I have no choice. Our family’s honor is on the line.”

  Fully hysterical now, she cried out, “Honor! Those men will kill our girls. They will rip them apart from the inside and leave them for dead. How much honor can you have if you are willing to let that happen to your own children?”

  “You heard those men! They will do that to my guests! Besides, you’re the one who said they wouldn’t rape anyone.”

  “I said they wouldn’t rape the travelers. But they have money. They can pay off those drunks and everything will die down. You’ll go back to your dinner and this will all be forgotten by morning. But our girls have nothing but their bodies. They have nothing else to offer. If, by some miracle, they manage to survive what twenty grown men can do to them, we’ll never be able to marry them to anyone. You’ll ruin them forever. Or kill them first.”

  She was still coherent, but in tears and clawing at her husband’s clothing. But Lot had heard enough.

  “Get them! Now!” He turned back and opened the door again to face the crowd. She could only hear the first few words out of his mouth—“Friends! I’ve come make you an offer”—before the door closed behind him.

  Before she could move, before a thought could form in her mind, a well of anger rose from her stomach into her throat. In an instant, he went from her husband, the man who had brought her into his home and bed so many years before, to a viperous stranger. She would fight him, to the moment of her own death, if she had to. He won’t take them, she thought. That monster won’t take them from me.

  She only had a few minutes. She ran back to the courtyard, grabbed whatever she could—tufts of goat skin, batches of raw wool left over from the recent shearing, and a pot of oil still cooling next to the fire. All the while, she shouted to the girls, “Run up to the roof. Now. As fast as you can. Grab whatever valuables you see on your way. Silver plates, gold coins, jewelry. Anything.”

  They were slow to move, began asking questions, “Why, Mama?”

  “Not now!” she screamed. “Just run.”

  She stuffed the wool into a piece of still-bloody goatskin, grabbed an unlit torch from the ground and thrust it into the oven, waited for the loud whoosh as its end caught. Then she hurried up to the roof. Her daughters soon followed, each carrying a saddlebag bulging with small objects. She had no time to inspect what they’d taken. She was already putting the torch to the pile of hay in the corner.

  “Mama!” they cried. “What are you doing? We’ll burn up!”

  “No, we won’t, we’ll be long gone by the time this is big enough to harm us.”

  From below, she could hear her husband trying to speak over the noise of the angry crowd. Slowly, slower than she could stand, a wisp of smoke rose from the hay pile. Once it did, she started grabbing tufts of wool out of the skin she had brought up and shoved them at her children. “Start lighting them,” she directed.

  Confused and scared, the girls did as they were told and dipped each piece into the pot of oil. Their mother hopped from their roof to the neighbor’s, grabbing a flaming ball of wool as she did, hurling it down into the narrow street in front of her house. The girls followed her, handing her their fiery missiles as they moved. They went from rooftop to rooftop, setting each hay pile on fire and throwing more projectiles down to the city below.

  “Mama,” panted the younger girl, “what are we doing? They’ll kill us when they realize what we’ve done.”

  “They won’t see us,” she said. “They can’t see us over the lip of the roof. And anyway, by the time anyone below thinks to look up, we’ll already be on another one.”

  “But what are we trying to do?” cried the older girl. “And why? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m saving you,” was the only answer her mother would give.

  From below, they could hear screaming as people all around the cramped city began to notice that their streets and homes were on fire. The worst of it, they saw, was concentrated near Lot’s house, where a few men had been hit directly and were trying desperately to put themselves out. They rolled on the ground, screaming in fear and pain, but it was too late for them. Their neighbors watched as they were consumed in flames.

  “Help!” came the people’s desperate cry. “What vengeance is this? Why does God rain down fire on us?”

  Panic spread as people rushed to save their own homes, pushing others down, trampling them if they had to. By then, she and her daughters had reached the roof of the farthest
home, where the poorest inhabitant of the city lived, an old widow with no family to care for her. Dependent on begging and whatever she could gather to sell in the market, the widow lived in a small house set into a narrow patch of the city wall.

  The three women had to hop down to reach its roof, which had no hay pile and nowhere to sleep on hot summer nights. She was sure her daughters could jump down from there to the ground, but her own old body was already feeling the effects of the run across the city’s rooftops. I’ve come this far, she thought. Just see them to safety. They are all that matters.

  Standing at the lip of the house, they could hear the screams coming from all over Sodom. The fire had spread farther than she could have imagined, “Quick,” she told her daughters, “throw away the wool,” and she flung the still-burning torch as far as she could. “Now, jump,” she said, practically pushing them off the roof. As soon as they were off, she followed, landing hard on one ankle, but she didn’t stop to think about it.

  Once on the ground, she banged on the door. “Open up,” she shouted. “We have to escape!”

  The old woman inside shuffled to the door.

  “The city is on fire,” she said. “We’ll help you out the window, but we must be quick.” The three younger women pulled the old lady to the far end of her tiny house. Through the window they could see the plain stretching as far as the shimmering lake and the distant hills beyond it. They lifted her out and set her down onto the ground outside the city walls, then followed her.

  “The city is on fire!” she repeated when it became clear the old woman didn’t understand what was happening. “Get as far away from it as you can.” Then, to her daughters, she shouted, “Run. Head for the lake. Don’t stop and don’t turn around. There’s nothing here for us anymore.”

  The girls took off, sprinting like gazelles across the flat land. She followed behind, going as fast as she could, the heat from the blaze growing stronger on her back. Soon, she could barely see her daughters in the distance, just two slender forms moving easily through the night. But her ankle throbbed. Her breasts pounded painfully against her chest with every step, and she struggled to find breath.

  “Keep going,” she told herself. “Get them to safety. Save your children.”

  Eventually, she felt the ground change beneath her feet. She had run past fields, her husband’s and others’. The earth was harder, paler in the brightening moonlight than the rich soil of the plain. She was getting closer to the lake. They wouldn’t be able to stay there, out in the open, even on a warm night like tonight. They’d have to go further, up into the foothills, but she felt safer now that she had run this far.

  Up ahead, she could see her daughters, the surface of the water winking behind them as they waited for her to catch up. But she couldn’t take another step. She was too tired. Her breath caught with every inhalation. She worked hard every day of her life, but she had not run like this since her own childhood, when there was time for games, when she and her brothers and sisters ran through the flocks, teasing the animals and running away before they could get hurt.

  Bending over, her chest heaved painfully. She rested her hands on her soft thighs. Her whole body seemed to be trying to breathe. Even her arms and legs shook from the effort.

  Standing back up, she reeled as the blood rushed away from her head, sent her body staggering and turned her to face the way she’d come. The plain stretched out behind her. In the distance, a few small figures scuttled away from Sodom, which was still burning, higher now than she ever thought possible.

  Only then, as she watched those tiny human shapes, did the truth of what she had done hit her with its full force. Those were her neighbors, people she had lived among for decades, ever since Lot brought her here, one child on her hip, another in her womb. Images of the life she had led, of her husband and children, passed quickly through her mind. Then others. Her friends. The courtyard she’d claimed as her own. The bed she had shared with one man since the age of twelve. It was all gone. Her husband, who would have whored his own daughters out over some foolish sense of pride, he was in there too, and though her rage still flared hotter than any fire, she felt, in that moment, what it was to lose an entire life, her own history of love and of loss.

  For the first time, she saw what her hands had wrought. I have killed, she thought. I have killed and I have destroyed. She had to repeat it aloud a few times before she began to believe it. “I have killed today. I have killed to save my own.”

  It was only in that moment, when her body struggled to reassert itself and her mind fought to align her pride at having saved her children with her grief at losing everything she still held dear, her whole valued life, and horror at what she had wrought, that she started to cry. Huge, dehydrated tears poured down her face, heaving sobs wracked her body. She shivered, cold sweat mingling with the heat of her long run, and she sank down, crying harder than she ever had cried before, harder even than the morning her own mother had sent her away into her new marriage and the long life ahead of her.

  She could see her girls walking toward her, and though she didn’t want them to see her cry, didn’t want them to doubt what they had done, she couldn’t stop. Something had opened within her. Try as she might, she could not close it.

  “Stand up, Mama,” one of them said. “You have to keep moving or your muscles will seize up.”

  And she would. She would get up. She would let her daughters, each as tall as she was now, half-carry her along the lake’s shoreline and up into the hills. She would find a cave for them to stay in for the night, her girls curled around her like lambs, would collapse into an exhausted, grief-stricken sleep. She would wake the next morning to explain to her bewildered children that they could never return to their homes, that they would have to forget all they had ever known, even their father, and look only into the future. She would calm them when the full shock of what they had done hit them, and their fear of God’s wrath shook within them. She would explain that they had done God’s work the previous night, or the work God should have done when a man would ask a mother to sacrifice her virgin daughters for his own stupid honor. She would tell them they were instruments of God’s wrath, that God had guided her hand and theirs when they set their home alight.

  And then they would all sleep again. When they next woke, she would drink the water her daughters had collected from a nearby spring and eat the figs they had picked from a tree along the way. She would face their anger when they accused her of ending their lives, of making sure that there would be no man left in the world who would have them. She would soothe them, say that the riches they had stuffed into the saddlebags before they ran from the city would buy them a new life. She would brush off their suspicion that fatherless daughters could achieve anything other than lonely destitution. She would promise to find a way.

  Within a few days, once her ankle healed, she would keep that promise, take them to a small market town where no one knew them. She would find an unscrupulous or incurious broker who would take her money and hire a man for her. Her man would go out, purchase land where the three women would live.

  At first, he would ask when, as she had promised, his master would arrive. After a while, in the face of her silence, he would stop asking. She would direct him to buy sheep and goats, to hire field hands and shepherds and slave girls. And when they had enough new wealth, she would send the man out again to find husbands for her daughters. She would see them married and grow large with child. She would hold her grandchildren on her lap and know she had done something good. But for all that she would go on to do, Lot’s wife, who had once been called Puha, would never rise from that spot by the side of the moonlit lake. She would never stop crying fat, salty tears for the life she left behind in flames.

  DRAWN FROM THE WATER

  “A certain man of the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw how beautiful he was, she hid him for three months. When she could hide him no
longer, she got a wicker basket for him and caulked it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child into it and placed it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile. And his sister stationed herself at a distance to learn what would befall him.”

  Exodus 2:1-4

  I have a special job for you today, Miriam,” Amma says. She woke me even earlier than usual today. Everything is black, the walls of our hut, the ceiling, and the sky outside that I can see through the doorway.

  It’s hard to get out of bed so early. Usually, Baba is gone by the time Amma rubs my back until I open my eyes. Not today. Baba is standing right behind Amma when she wakes me, which is how I know this is important.

  Baba holds up the basket that Amma has been working on for weeks. First, she sent me to the river to gather long reeds for her. She cut those up and wove them together so that I couldn’t see through them at all when I held the basket up to the light. After that, she carried it down to the river to line it with thick mud. That sat in our hut drying for days, but it didn’t bother me.

  It was different when she started to rub pitch on the outside. Our hut smelled so bad that I had to hold my nose every time I walked in. She tried scrubbing her hands with sand to get the sticky off. She plunged them into river water. Nothing got it off, which is why she made me hold the baby for hours. “Don’t let him cry,” she told me, so I rocked and made funny faces and dipped my finger into cane water and let him suck on it. Amma fed him a lot, too, but it was getting harder to keep that up.

  He’s not a bad baby. He squirms around, and he cries. A lot. That’s not a problem at night. All the Egyptians go home to their real houses and leave us alone, but during the day they’re everywhere, and if they catch anyone hiding a baby boy, they become enraged.

  It’s always like this when they pass a new law. Right at the beginning they’re so strict, and anyone caught breaking the rules gets in big trouble. After a while, though, they relax a bit. Baba says they get bored and look for new ways to torment us, but Amma makes him shush up. She tells him not to talk like that in front of me, because she doesn’t want me to repeat those things where an Egyptian can hear me.