by Tosca Lee
In my heart I offered every paltry thing I had within my possession if only the One would fill again the lungs of Zeeva’s child. The child of my boy. The child of my child. But what can one woman offer to God? Only tears and pain and fear and promises. I offered them all.
But his body lay still, his eyes open and turned toward the dark heavens.
ZEEVA TOOK AWAY MATNAN’S body and would not let anyone touch it for days as she washed it and sprinkled it with sweet herbs. Ashira, who had delivered him, was allowed at last to paint the ochre upon his hands. He had not lost his blood, but it was the only ritual we knew for the giving of one back to the soil.
For weeks Zeeva’s oven lay cold. For months afterward it produced only bitter and flat bread. Not until the next year, when her belly quickened, did she bake her sweet cakes again.
In all this time I had no comfort from Adam—nor did he receive any from me. We remained apart, each of us to our own grief, each of us to our own thoughts and questions and railings at God. If ever I needed proof that we could exist, one without the other, I had it now; we might as well have dwelt on two sides of the world.
Zeeva’s child came, wailing to life. She named him Goral for the lucky chance of his conception so soon after Matnan’s death and would not let him, even as a child, out of her sight. Her house was full of the sound of children, for it seemed she bore one nearly every other year after that.
But one day every spring her oven lay cold and her hearth without fire.
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Every time a child slipped from the womb into Ashira’s hands, I looked into its eyes and wondered if just the moment before they had gazed upon God. But if they had any memory of the One, it was gone by the time they could speak. Sufa’s eldest claimed that she had memories of being held in Ashira’s arms after her birth, but that is the closest thing to a memory of the womb I ever heard.
Ashira eventually took young Lahat—not so young anymore—to her home. With his one eye he seemed to see in her all that was lovely, and she had in him a mate who had known the brother she loved.
In those years there seemed to be noise everywhere, of music and industry and bartering by the edge of the settlement. Adam and my eldest expanded the fields and the storehouse. Children quarreled and took ill. Sometimes they injured themselves in falls and fights, breaking limbs and taking fever. Kanit, who had once nearly died this way, became the most practiced medicine woman of our growing family, combining her knowledge of herbs with her mother’s midwifery. All others sought her for remedies for everything from toothache to infertility to bad dreams.
Eventually Adam and I came together—in silence. And this aging body surprised me yet as I continued to bear children. How easy was my burden now. They slipped from the womb with nary a pause. How much I had labored in those early days! And where once I fed and clothed and disciplined each of them, it was the hands and breasts of others—in my house and in the houses of my daughters—that did so now, so that all of their sisters and nieces were like mothers, and all of their brothers and nephews were like fathers.
But life, between such stunning moments, held fewer and fewer revelations. And as the years went on, I began to despair that the One had indeed forgotten us, though we had by then built a high altar upon which we made our sacrifices. Every year Adam drained the blood of the animal and flayed it. Every year I saw in my mind Kayin throwing himself on the pile of his offering. Ashira, who always fell silent for a day after the offering, seemed to retreat a little less each time—especially after Lahat came to live with her. Lila, who spoke less and less through the years, went off on her own in those days, and no one could find her. She always came back, and when the little ones would ask where she had been, she would say only that she was listening to the wind. And perhaps because that was no stunning story, they would not ask any more except what the wind had said. To which she replied that it was a secret meant for her alone.
Most of the time life was a chain of monotony spent contemplating those things that could not be reconciled. So many lengths of woolen thread went into thinking through where the adam and I had begun to lose each other. So many new pots went into remembering everything I had ever said to Kayin to lay the burden of our hopes upon his shoulders. So many meals went into remembering each of Hevel’s gestures and expressions.
In all this time the One was silent.
Within twenty more years our settlement grew so large that something had to be done. Disease had begun to spread too easily among us; already that spring several children had lain ill with fever. Lahat, with his mind for engineering, designed the systems of streets and even sewers, transforming a rough collection of dwellings into a city. But his improvements had no effect on another disease that had broken out among us: strife.
Sufa had created her own troubles years prior, turning two brothers by Zeeva against each other in vying for her. When she announced she was pregnant, the brothers met by the river, and a fight broke out. With visions of Hevel and Kayin before us, we appealed to them to stop, calling enough men to the scene to force them to, if necessary. At last they ended their feud, and the older brother eventually took one of his sisters to wife.
Sufa rejected the other brother after that and never said which of them had fathered her baby. The next spring, Ashira delivered her a daughter, which she named Tzukit. Later that year our settlement divided. Ten families left.
Two years later my son Mazor and one of the eldest sons of Zeeva and Besek came to our house to sit before the adam and me, to say that they were leaving, going south to find lands of their own where they might begin their own settlement. They had traveled there and found fertile land and, farther south, a great marsh where there were many fish.
We watched them go with their wives and somber hearts. Sufa hid her face from Mazor as he left and never spoke his name again. Later she bore a son to Asa, her brother, who came to live in her house the rest of her days.
Eight or nine years after that, word came for the first time of Kayin. A small party of only four people—two men and their women—came to us, having found us by the clay tablet left in the old settlement so long before. Several of Kayin’s offspring, quarreling—was it a universal affliction?—had left the wandering way of life and gone south and settled there, they said, repairing the old house and plowing again the fields that had lain fallow. Kayin himself was well, they said, and his flocks flourished.
I did not ask about the mark on his head, and they did not speak of it.
My children’s children were increased by two more generations before we heard further news of my son. This time a large party of Kayin’s children and their children came to visit us.
“I am Hanokh, the son of Kayin,” the eldest one said. And indeed, I saw both of his parents in his face. He motioned to the others in turn, saying, “This is my sister, Sivan, and my brother, Dedan, and his sister, Atalya.”
They had kept to the same way, I noticed, of calling one’s sister-wife one’s “sister,” when indeed they were all siblings.
“And this is my son, Irad.” He indicated the third man with them. They came with children, too, though what I remember most is my fascination with the variance of their coloring, of their eyes and the shapes of their heads. I had looked at the birds once and remarked at the great diversity of God. But never had I thought to see such variety in my own brood.
When I learned that Hanokh was Kayin’s eldest son—there were sixteen siblings by now and forty-two children of these children—I asked that he tell me everything that he remembered of his early life and of his mother in those days, up to this day. He spoke of the flocks that numbered in the thousands, as Kayin and his sons were capable herdsmen, and of the chants of Renana, which had become the anthem of his entire clan.
Hanokh said that when he returned he would settle in a place along an eastern river and put to use all of the great store of Kayin’s knowledge of cultivating to build a great settlement. He did not seem to carry the curse of his fathe
r, and he meant to settle in a place where life might be easier than the wandering life of Nod.
“We lost two children to the fever last summer. Father mourned for months, eating little and crying out in his sleep with the name of his brother.” He rubbed his face. I saw the grizzled look of his father in him and the bowlike lips—and the shape of Renana’s eyes. “I never wish to report the death of a young one to him or any sibling again.”
They stayed with us for several months, making music with their strange instruments around the fire. And in their songs and chants, I heard Renana and the drums she once played. Such a gift she had passed on to them! Within their music I heard the sound of cicadas and frogs and of locusts and the running of water from mountain to river.
That night as we danced by the fire, I danced the dance of the mother pushing forth her children into the world and of the woman who knows the generosity of her hips and nourishment of her breasts. I danced the dance of the orchard and vineyard and of wheat swaying on the stem. I danced the dance of the one who places her hopes in one place, like a bird laying her egg in a high nest, who later finds it crushed. I danced the dance of Kayin, wandering like the sands, and of Hevel, whom I missed that night with such intensity that, when at last I was out of breath, I went away from the fire and the music and the dancers and mothers holding sleeping children and wept against a willow. I wept for my children and, most ashamedly, for myself.
Something had changed; I knew now I would no longer give back my life to have it all as it was, as it had been before. My children were too many, and I knew no other way of life. The valley I craved seemed little more than a dream that I did not even remember most nights.
There Adam found me. He said nothing but caught me up in his arms. He kissed my tears, and there were so many that he kissed me for what seemed forever—on my eyes and face and cheeks and lips and neck. They had run like water from the high abyss to wend around the foothills. And then he lay down and spread out his tunic beneath us.
“I can still taste it,” he said, hoarse with emotion. “In you.”
“What is that, my brother, my love?”
“The valley. I taste the earth of it in you, the soil that was once my father and mother, sweet as it was, pungent and rich as it was. I can taste it still, in you.”
We came together, if not truly one, as we had once been, as much one as we had ever been since. When we lay exhausted, I knew that I had conceived. Where my last pregnancies had been realized belatedly and acknowledged by me with a sigh, I covered my belly and gazed up at my crown and wished for the smile of God. Nothing more. I asked not for that return, nor the reconciliation for which I had lived my entire life—as one on a journey thinks always of his destination so that he misses the land around him.
I asked only for blessing. It would be enough.
AS HANOKH PREPARED TO leave, I said to him, “Tell Kayin your father that his mother is bearing him a brother.” Though I did not say it, I knew he would understand that this was the one to stand in the place, after so many years, of Hevel. Hanokh smiled and bowed his head. And then I drew him aside to speak to him privately.
Never once had he mentioned anything of a mountain gate or a valley. I had listened without asking, thinking it a better sign if he might mention it without my asking, but now he was about to leave, and I could wait no longer.
“Have you ever gone west of Nod, my son?”
“Of course, Mother, we have roamed in many directions. Father was most anxious that we should do this very thing. He seemed to search as one does for magical waters.”
If only you knew.
“Did you go through the mountain pass, toward the great mount that yields the waters of the abyss?”
He frowned. “We went through many passes, though I do not know this abyss you speak of. We have passed, however, between the rivers to the place where their source is one. But beyond that we have not gone. Thunder and great lightning roll off the distant mount in ill omens, and we dare not pass.”
My skin prickled. “Was there . . . a pillar of gold light, as though two giants with wings pointing to the heavens stood by the gate?” I lowered my voice, knowing I sounded as fanciful as one of my storyteller daughters entertaining her audience of children.
His brow wrinkled. “On occasion the lightning comes down, and sometimes it is not white but green or even the uncanny color of fire. Is this what you speak of?”
“Yes.” Hope sprang to life in my heart. “But you saw nothing else in that place? Not even the valley through the pass?”
“No, Mother. The storm was great and the lightning too bright. And now that you mention it, I am not sure there is a pass at all but only a river that flows from that place with nowhere to pass on either side of it. Are you sure there is a valley beyond it?”
“No.” Not anymore.
I bid him farewell that day with troubled heart. But had he said that they had found the valley, had walked in its waters and eaten from the trees, I would have been filled with jealousy and envy of my own grandson and would have begrudged him every joy he might have found there.
No. We must be the ones who find it, if it exists at all. We are the ones who kept and ruined and fled it. We must be the ones who return—if it is not by now just the frayed fancy of an aging woman.
The next year Shet was born. I called him “replacement” because I had been weeping for Hevel when Adam came to me. Where I had given many of my later children to their siblings and nieces to suckle for me, I nursed this one myself, much, I know, to the jealousy of some of his older brothers and sisters. And though he had Hevel’s same gusto for life, he looked nothing like the brother he had never known—though he caused just as much trouble.
Adam held him with a rare light in his eye, with much the same look I had seen on his face at the birth of our first sons. He began to come in earlier from work to see his son and to make him new spears and slings and tell him stories. I felt in those days almost as though we revisited those early years—except for the audience of growing numbers around us.
I had not thought it possible, but I am happy again.
Although we came back together in those days, Adam did not mention the One. Shet heard the stories of our sacrifice and of my dreams of the beginning of the world from Ashira’s songs or his siblings or, sometimes, even from me. But I didn’t really have the heart to speak of it. My faith then was a tender little flame, carefully shielded in the last refuge of my heart, and I would not expose it even to my son, for I had begun to worry that it might go out.
When Shet was four, Zeeva called for a bad omen. She had seen a sign in the entrails of a goat. That spring, the river flooded its banks, seeping into the fields and the settlement, ruining houses and crops and stores. The mosquitoes became unbearable, laying eggs in the still ponds and puddles of water that seemed to be everywhere, and soon many within the settlement fell ill. Three children died that year.
Several years—nearly ten—later, traders came down from the north, and with their goods of copper and cloth brought word that Kayin and Hanokh had indeed founded a settlement, the fields of which were rich.
“Tell me, my son, of your forefather, my son Kayin,” I said when Adam was gone from the house.
“He does not stay long near the settlement when he comes,” the man said, explaining that his flocks were too large and his tents too full not to be a strain. The man himself was young, perhaps only forty, and his hair was lovely, falling in ripples to his shoulders. He traveled with a brother that I could not guess for older or younger. Both of them had dark eyes and full lips and reminded me so very much of Kayin that I wanted to hold them to my breast and tell them stories of those first days.
They were careful when they spoke of him, and I sensed that there was something else, a strange unease. I knew then that they must all know the mark of Hevel upon him. And indeed, when they presented me with gifts, there were among them metal objects that bore the mark of the circle and the line. I wept
when I saw it, and though the men saw, they said nothing.
Traders brought goods from the city of Hanokh almost by the year. Strange metal knives and tools, and news. Irad was a great-father by then of more than twenty children, and his city flourished.
That night I gazed at the stars and tried to picture so many people at once. I could not. I grieved that I had not laid eyes on each of them and told Adam that one day we must go to this settlement that was by then a city.
A strange phenomenon happened in those years, so gradually that it was a long time and several generations before I noticed it. Even then, Adam had to point it out to me.
“Do you see the bird symbol on each of their pots?” he said one day as we perused the wares of a new party of traders from Hanokh. “Does it put you in mind of the hawk you once drew for Asa as a symbol of God?”
Indeed, now that I saw it, the resemblance was clear. When I asked one of the men about it, he smiled and said that indeed, this was the hawk spirit that is the messenger of God. But by the next time, many years later, when I heard it being explained to a young girl, it was no longer the messenger but the god itself. At that I had raged, calling it falsehood and the teller a liar and an idiot and several more things, breaking every pot and other image of it I could find.
They would not stop me, the Lady of the Rib, the Great Mother, as I was called, but several merchants never returned.
The greatest shock of all came the first time I saw the insignia of an all-too-familiar creature on a finely made pot. It was winged like a bird but had four talons and a tail. And then I realized that the rendering of its feathers were not feathers at all but scales.
“Where have you come by this image?” I pointed with a trembling finger.
“It is the symbol with which our master marks his pots.”
