by Tosca Lee
Zeeva, my hungry girl-twin, took special interest in the preparation of food. Through her mistakes and my observations, we began to throw dough against the sides of the oven to bake it. She was as brashly featured as Hevel, so that as she grew older she looked more Hevel’s twin than Ashira’s. When Hevel was at her cook fire—as he often was, since he was voracious as she—I thought they looked like two halves of the same person even more than the adam and I. They were so alike, so headstrong, sampling every simple pleasure without worry for the mysteries that seemed to pique me and Lila and plague the thoughtful Kayin.
Zeeva’s twin, Ashira, grew more pretty by the year, with her wide hips and long, straight hair, outpacing her sisters in loveliness. She seemed to be always singing. She was unique in her coloring, her skin more golden than any of ours, whereas Zeeva’s was as dark as Kayin’s when he had been in the fields all day. Ashira took even more interest than Lila in each of my pregnancies and came to sing to me with her lovely voice and stroke my hands as I labored. How she loved to hold and sing to each baby from the moment of birth. She sang a new song for each of them the moment they were in her arms, and it was the same song she would sing to comfort them when they fell down or, much later, when they were in their own pregnancies, or—for some—when they died. Because of her eagerness and growing skill, Adam became less and less present at the births of his youngest children. I think those young ones nearly thought of her as their mother, having opened their eyes upon her first.
My next child after the twins was also a girl, and I grieved for that; secretly I wished for another boy, a companion for my sons. Though I loved my daughters and yearned for the company of other females, I felt an affinity for men. I had known a man before any other human. My first children had been boys. Their needs were simple though their fears were myriad and complex. How fragile in their own way they were, too. I have always contended that girls are the sturdier of the genders and wondered in secret if the One that Is might not best be identified with the strength and creativity of the female heart.
Renana, who came after the twins, was a keeper of wisdom and a storyteller. By the time she was eight, my youngest children were always to be found in her lap. She made up stories for each of them, different ones for different children, which she continued in segments when they pleased her, like little bits of cake pinched off a bite at a time.
My children were all innovative and clever and, compared to their descendants, I daresay they were geniuses. But none was as clever, in my mind, as Kayin.
It was to him that Lila ran with shining eyes to display her handiwork once she had dutifully shown it to me. He saw with a fine and appreciative eye the innovation and skill with which she created her fabrics. It was he who inspired Hevel’s first attempts at hunting with his unconventional sling. It was to him that Zeeva went with her finest flour cakes, which rivaled and surpassed mine, to smile at him through her lashes.
It was a wonder to me, the way the girls looked at him. How strange! Had I ever looked at Adam the same way? I watched their silliness, the way they took pains over small gifts for him in ways different from what they did for their other siblings or their father or me. The first time I saw Lila, who was not given to flirtation, touch his arm and lean in toward him, I was stunned, as though I had seen a three-legged heron draw a lion from the river. Zeeva was less adept at flirting, nor did she need to be; plenty of men through the years followed their stomachs to her hearth. Ashira, however, was most gifted in this particular skill never learned by me. The first time I saw her cast down her lashes before Kayin and then Hevel in the same day, I was amazed—and more so at the expression on Kayin’s face, and later, the color high in Hevel’s cheeks. Kayin went to Ashira when he wanted to lie down to the sound of singing—until Hevel began to give him baleful looks and Lila fell silent.
One day when they were both young, a quarrel broke out between Ashira and Renana over who should have the new cloth Lila had woven on her pegs—as though Lila herself would not make the final decision. “Go!” I said, ordering them from the house, tired of their wearisome competition.
“Take it to Kayin, and let him arbitrate you harridans.” Besek was at the breast, and my nipples were sore and my back as well. My legs ached to stretch, to remember that they were made to run—far from the noise and smells of this place.
“I should have it because Lila made her last one for Hevel, and I am the next eldest,” Ashira said.
“No!” Renana shouted, already impervious. “Me! Lila promised.”
“Lila never promises but makes everyone wait, you stupid donkey!” Zeeva burst out.
“Out!” I shouted, waving them out.
Besek raised his hand in imitation of me, laughing. Zeeva made a face after the two of them as they stormed out together, calling for Kayin, heels flashing.
When they returned a scant half hour later, the scowls were gone, and they came into the house together.
“What is this?” I said, still cross. “You come back now with peace?”
Renana swooped down next to me and retrieved Besek from my lap. “We gave it to Kayin.”
I raised my brows.
“He said, ‘What, have you brought me a gift, sisters?’” Ashira said, smiling prettily. “And we started to tell him about our argument. Well, he looked so downcast—”
“He loved it so much,” Renana said. “Hevel already has one, he said, even though he was only second oldest. So we let him have it.”
I felt the wry smile on my lips. So clever, my son.
That night, when Kayin came in wearing the piece over his shoulders, I saw the way his sisters beamed at him, bouncing to sit near him and tell him that yes, indeed, it was handsome on him—no doubt to remind him of their generosity. I knew, though he had not told me, that he would keep it until the next one flew from Lila’s pegs, and then give it to whichever of them did not receive the new one.
At times I was frankly amazed that such a creature might have come from me. He was a dark-skinned beauty, my Kayin. His eyes deepened as he matured so that one might never know where the black of his pupil ended and his iris began. He was beautiful as obsidian is beautiful, sharp as it is sharp . . .
And like the edge that, struck too fine, crumbles in the end.
IN THE TWENTIETH YEAR after our exile, I was a great matron. I had by now eight children. Noise was everywhere: gossip and arguments, instruction or storytelling. Voices raised in song, complaint, or laughter. I was by then both delighted and alarmed by the spectrum of emotion in my brood—delighted at the way laughter could spark the same in anyone else nearby, alarmed at the wrath in even tiny children. Too many times I had seen a child strike out at another in anger.
In all this time we told the tale of the One’s creation of the world. We told it accurately and diligently as remembered from my dreams. We spoke of truth and untruth, of right and wrong.
But we did not speak of the fruit. That tale we did not tell.
For all that our children knew, we were created free-thinking and fallible, to forge our life here amid struggle. For all they knew, this was the way it had always been. We taught them to keep the teachings that we gave them: Honor the One. Never tell untruth. Never raise a hand in anger. Never assign blame for one’s own actions. This one, most particularly, I emphasized.
Perhaps I had not forgiven Adam completely, after all.
I feared for the day one of my children or children’s children would ask why the One should create creatures that might do harm or say unholy words—this seemed an obvious question to me. But it was long years before that happened.
Meanwhile, our children grew in stature and intellect, maturing over the years in a way much slower than today. Yet, despite our contentment, life had become one long drone for me: the days filled with the same tasks, surrounded by the same voices and cries and tantrums.
By the time Lahat was weaned, I had begun to feel a bone-weariness that no food or rest could satisfy. It was as though each
of my pregnancies had leached vitality from my very bones. Kayin often came to me after evening or morning meals, saying he wasn’t hungry, pressing the best portions of his food upon me. I ate them to appease him; he thought me thin, though I think it was only because he was so accustomed to seeing me full of child.
Well, I could change that.
I announced to Adam that, as the field, I would lie fallow for a season. Though I did not shun him completely—he understood these cycles as well as I, and those fertile days within them—opportunity was rarely at our disposal when we wished it. So the pleasure of our lovemaking, furtive and impulsive as it was, was replaced by the pleasure of feeling nothing but my own weight within my body, a flat belly and breasts that were solely mine once more. Now, I thought, perhaps we might talk as we once had. We might take our pleasure in the afternoon or swim in the river beneath the moon.
But that did not happen.
For as much as he sought me out before—which was to say, not often, as we hardly ever had time to ourselves—he sought me less often now.
Fine, then. I would not suffer for it.
I worked outside the house. I went with Hevel to the high pasture. I waded in the river with Lahat.
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, asham
ed 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.
