by Tosca Lee
I remembered for the first time in more than a century the image that Lahat had drawn into the dirt. He had been the master of the potters’ trade for decades now, spawning new masters in turn in other settlements. I turned away from it, repulsed, feeling that it mocked me, feeling, too, betrayed by my son.
I should tell him. We should tell him. We should tell them all. They do not know the thing they celebrate. But even now we had not spoken of it, letting them know only that we came from another place and that we had erred in myriad ways all the journey of our lives along the river, trying to please the One with our offerings and deeds, waiting for the day that all would be made right.
Between the two of us, Adam and me, I no longer knew if we could bear to tell them the truth.
29
Generations passed. Young fingers that were once meddling, curious, and questing, chastised and slapped for their mischief, became the hands upon the plow and the loom and the grindstone, holding back new and younger hands from trouble. Eventually, those hands became the hands that rested on knees and upon chests in repose near the fire, corded and sunspeckled and traced with veins.
I became increasingly enamored of art, and it began to spring up with great abundance. There had been little luxury for it in the beginning, when Adam had carved his pendants and we had made our marks in the clay and upon the dirt, when Lila had woven her patterns into her textiles, and Renana had recited her poetry and chants and Ashira her songs. But now there came a great swell of creativity in music, and great innovation in its instruments: drums of rawhide, lyres, and flutes and rattles. Every time traders came in with their musicians, especially from the northern city of Hanokh, the music was more brilliant than before, bringing to mind more vivid images of the land from which it came and of the sky and even the insects.
How I loved these nights, for though I might still run as swiftly as any young person, nearly, I found my legs better suited in these years to dancing. After food and enough sweet wine, I inevitably found myself on my feet. Sometimes I saw Adam, watching me from across the fire, and knew he found me—despite everything—lovely yet.
But not as much as before. One of those years I paused to consider myself in a bronze mirror—a gift from the city of Hanokh. I touched my face, searching the image of the crone for the girl that had once peered from the water at me. How lovely you are, daughter of God and man, the serpent of half-truths had said. He had told truly, as he had told truly that we would not die—not that very day, at least.
I did not like the way girls preened of late. They wore ornaments of bone and leather and metal, putting beads in their hair and stringing them sometimes through their ears and around their ankles. They painted their hands and mouths and necks as one adorns a jar. They put tattoos on their foreheads and feet and breasts.
I owned by now many ornaments, and my storehouse of adornments grew by the season from every visitor to come to our settlement. I wore them when it suited me, but it was not for them that people gazed at me with admiration yet. My hair was still black, not having sprouted the gray that Lila’s had. My skin was firm, for I healed better and faster still than many of my children. My legs were strong, my hips were fine. Other parts of me . . . well.
ONE SPRINT, WHEN I was nearly six hundred years—there had been a time when I had not even known to count so high—there came word of killings. A feuding clan had invaded another and wiped them out nearly to the man and child.
Adam declared that we would not eat, that we would fast as one mourning, for three days.
He did not need to declare it for me; I had no appetite. Soon after, he gathered to him Lahat and Asa and Besek, saying he was going to talk to these southern clans.
“Do not go!” I clung to him. “They are not in their right minds.”
“They will not harm me. They wouldn’t dare, lest every hand remaining on the earth turn upon them in return.”
“Is that the only thing that would stay them, this fear of death visited upon them?”
“It is the only language they understand.”
“Let me go with you then.”
But he shook his head. “You are needed here.”
Again, he would leave me as he had in those early days! But I heard the unspoken half of that statement: In case anything happens to me. And I knew there was real danger.
“Give them this message,” I said. “Wisdom does not seek to shape the future with frail, human hands.”
How we should know.
He was gone for almost a year. But I knew he was well and hale. I would have known it if he were not.
SOMETIME AFTER ADAM’S RETURN—after the clan had committed themselves to fasting and ascetic life in atonement, strange news came from the north. Irad’s great-grandson had taken two wives. And while I had seen it done that one woman gave another to her husband, or that a man—or woman, in Sufa’s case—should leave one love and go to another, these were the days where ceremony and social rite had begun to surround the forming of these unions.
More and more couples sought the advice and blessing of the patriarch and matriarch of the city. More and more couples—and their parents and grandparents and siblings, sometimes—came to my house to talk of union. I tried my best to talk about it as though I were an expert. But what had I ever known of this kind of thing? There had been no ceremony for us. We had done all that we could to destroy our union!
But these children knew none of that. What was there to bind them but flimsy declarations and the idea of obligation as one family portioned off a piece of the harvest or the flock? What did these ninnies know of anything, sitting here with their wide eyes, beaming at me as though the sun shone through the tops of their heads and out their rear ends? Forty and sometimes thirty years old—barely out of puberty—I thought their families were probably just glad to get them gone from the house, or for another set of hands to help.
But I blessed them, thinking all the while of my own children—they were all my own children—hoping that they might seek more happiness in this life than a full belly and children underfoot. What a great surprise it would be to them when the day of redemption came.
But that day did not come. There was no apparent seed, and the only serpent I saw was the one that formed the potter’s mark. Among my children there were indeed leaders, both male and female, and their triumphs were victories in art and innovation.
But their lows were also among the most grievous and depraved of humanity.
IN ALL THOSE YEARS I carried a void within me. I longed in silence for my son. By night I dreamed of Kayin, with his dark hair and slender hands, calloused from the plough and the hoe.
“I want to go to Hanokh,” I said one day to Adam. I did not need to say that I wanted to be near my son and the children of my son or that I longed to lay eyes upon Renana.
It had been too long.
Shall I tell you of that journey, of the sounds of that city, of the mud dwellings and the altar in the temple? Of how I did not recognize their god as my own? Or how I met, at last, the artisan that was Tuval-Kayin, who was renowned by then for his work in metals—for their beauty and practicality . . . and later for their deadliness?
Upon that journey we visited the settlement that we had once called our own. It overflowed now with houses—more than eighty. We stayed there for a little while on our way to Hanokh and escaped to the field where Hevel lay. It was grown over now, as though there rested no body there at all, and I supposed by now that there did not, that he had become, as his father once—only earth. But there was a marker near it, and gifts and tokens. One among them caught my eye: a metal depiction of a sling marked with a stone in flight.
When we arrived in Hanokh and said our names, the man at the gate sent a boy running into the city. Soon after, an aged woman came flying down the street, her skirts lifted like a girl’s though her face was worn with the scores of the sun and of the wind and of every hardship and struggle.
“Mother! Father!” She threw her
self into my arms, and I wept with her, not for the distance or the years, though I mourned those, too, but because of my pride in her.
“Where is Kayin?” I asked when she brought us into one of the houses and Hanokh, whom I had not seen for many years, and Irad came to join us. A cloud passed over her eyes. So she knows something of strife.
“He is gone again, and who knows when he will return. I said I would not go with him this time. I am weary. How weary I am. How my bones ache. I am no longer young—forgive me, Mother, for you are preserved among women, but how harsh the years have been upon me. No, I wish to be near my children and hear the sounds of the city rather than the goats and the herders who keep them, and the dreary sound, always, of the wind. It never seems to bother Kayin. He stands as one who listens, as though he would hear news or a word.”
I thought of Lila, standing on the hill, waiting and listening.
“We had a famine here last year, and several children and even nursing mothers died. Now there are young ones without mothers and mothers without children. At least one might comfort the other. But now, enough of that. Speak to me of Lahat and Besek and Ashira and the new little ones.”
We talked through the day. At some point Hanokh took Adam off to the fields, and my daughter and I talked through the afternoon in the fine house, taking our meal, brought to us by some young child or another I did not know.
We stayed for nearly a year, seeing everything, the fields in the countryside, the shops. I wanted, in particular, to meet Tuval-Kayin.
He lowered his head when I came in with his mother. “Great-great-mother, I beg you, bless me.” I laid my hands upon his head, and he gifted me with bracelets and beads and a wealth of other items.
The other reason for our extended stay was that I hoped in time Kayin would return to the city. But it might be months or years before anyone saw him, and in all the time of our stay, his flocks were never sighted on the high hills. Just before our departure Renana sent out runners to see if they could spy him anywhere, but they came back shaking their heads.
During that time the high altar in the middle of the city burned often with sacrifice. I could hear music on those occasions, and more than once I said, “Let us go and observe the sacrifice.”
But Renana would stay us. “No! Let us go out to the perfume shops today, for you have seen many a sacrifice,” or, “Let us go see the master weavers.”
Only later did Adam tell me that their rites were strange, that they called upon the One by names unknown to us.
By the time we left, I had met as many of the town’s occupants as I possibly could. And I did the thing I despised in other mothers: I took stock of the younger men without women of their own and spoke beamingly of my great-great-daughters.
Yes, I know. But with age comes the option not to explain ourselves and to change our minds.
When we left, I longed to go west, felt it like the pull of water falling from the mountain.
But I said nothing. There were too many of us. And I think a part of me feared that we might not find the way, which would only confirm the thing I feared most: that the valley no longer existed.
So we traveled south again, from the foothills to the plain along the river, keeping our code of silence, the adam and I.
We held hands like children. We walked away from our camp at night and made love by whatever water we could find.
When we returned home, Adam went out to the fields, moving no less well and working no less long than the youngest men there. On the days that I took him meals, I still thought that of all the men who worked and gathered together in the adamite city, there was no one like him. More than once I saw the gaze of young girls stray to him and wanted to tell them, This is the kind of man you seek out. Not one of those pampered babies that women raise now.
My chest swelled and I felt pride again, as I had not for so many years, at being his companion in the inheritance of all that was this world.
But still I looked for the seed among my children. I could not help but wonder when I saw a young boy dashing across the settlement, Could that be him? But there was no restoration in sight.
That year, in my age, I conceived a child. I had not had a child for many years and wondered if I would bring it to healthy term or cast it forth as I had seen some of the younger girls do. Their wombs seemed to me at times defective, unable to keep children within them. There were more and more ills in those days—ugly and unsightly marks that marred the skin, a man with a spine that curved in his aging, young men with weak eyes who could not hunt well because of it. Already there were women among my children who had ceased to bear, who had lost the courses that marked their fertility like waves on an ocean.
As the child grew fast and strong in my womb and my belly swelled, other women looked at me with amazement and envy.
Heh. Let them look.
30
Little stirred me to shock in those days—not the crowding or corruption of the world, where Kayin’s act no longer stood distinct among grievous acts, or the wrong that had evolved into new, complex, and vibrant hues.
I was shocked instead by beauty. By kindness. By love. They were far more rare.
Sometime after my six hundredth year, a girl came to serve me. She must have been, I think, my great-great-great-daughter or some such. Her name was Naarit. She hung her head and did not look me in the eye. She winced if I said that I wanted for something, as though I expected her to know my thoughts without my having spoken them. There was once a time for that, but that day was done.
One day as she waited upon me and upon Lila, I said, “Are you happy, child? Are you happy with your mate?”
She gave me a look like that of a caged animal. I had seen it before in a woman who had fended off the blows of her husband’s anger until one day he died and pestered her no more. No one knew how the poison got into his food.
There were no bruises upon this girl, but one day in passing her house—I meant to call on her to give her a copper bracelet, thinking it might raise her spirits—I heard a man shout, “Don’t be such a baby! Why can’t you stop asking so many questions? You act so unhappy, skulking about. Everyone talks about you and how difficult you are. As though your life is so bad. Why do I keep you?”
I went inside that house and put the bracelet on her arm.
“Mother!” He bowed nearly to the ground.
“I have heard what you said, and if she is such a burden to you, then let me have your castoff.”
“No, no, Mother, please, take anything, the best that I have!”
“I am.”
I took her from there forever, and Naarit lived with Lila and me after that.
The following spring I went into labor. Ashira was there and Kanit with her. But as the night wore on, longer than any other labor of mine, her mouth, less full now than it once was, set in a line.
I was exhausted. This child would rob me of all of my remaining vitality. After six more hours I was certain it would rob me of my life. Such a thing had happened more than once in our city just in the last five years.
I sweated and pushed. The lamp wavered before me, and I thought I saw the faces of many within the tent.
“Who are you? What do you want here?” But I spoke only to apparitions, faces I did not know.
Through a daze I saw Ashira sit back on her heels and wipe bloody forearms across her face.
The next time I opened my eyes, Adam was there. He held my hand and whispered, “Do not leave me, Isha. Let the child go if he must. Let him return to the One to be held in the arms of Hevel. But do not leave me.”
The strange faces—sometimes human, sometimes too lovely and terrible at once to have been born of anything so base as earth—wavered before me for hours. At last strong arms pulled me into a limp-limbed squat and the voices of my daughter and daughter’s daughter rose in urgent chorus for me to bear down. With a mighty rend, my pelvis tore open. The child heaved onto the floor, and I fell forward.
When I op
ened my eyes, the faces were gone.
IT WAS THREE WEEKS before I could leave my bed, before my hips could support me again.
Elied was put out to nurse with one of the women who had milk enough for both our children; mine had not come in, and I was too weak to suckle him even if it had. Naarit, whose cooking was improving, fed me the broth of a lamb.
On the twentieth day, I said, “Let me hold my son.”
I was 601 years old. He was my thirty-third son and my fifty-sixth child. My courses did not come back after that.
My breasts are plums withered on the branch, my belly an empty wineskin. I am the husk, left only now to dry in the sun.
THE FOLLOWING YEAR WE were hart hit. The locusts returned. The next spring, rot settled in our stores and seed. Children weaned early grew sickly and died. That was the season when Shet’s eldest son, Enosh, became ill, and we feared for his life. Shet came to me one night, throwing himself into my lap as though he were a child, sobbing.
“What shall I do? How can one invoke the mercy of the One—where is the One in all of this?”
I wanted to ask the same. “I don’t know, my son.” I stroked back his hair from his face.
In a whisper, he asked, “How can the One give such strife, such hurt as this, such suffering? Why? To what end?”
“Do you think suffering is the doing of the One? Have you listened to none of our teachings? All good comes from the One. The strife comes from our own hearts. Do you think the One created murder? Do you think the One gives anything other than perfection? A human hand ruined it!”
“But how could that be? And who would have done something so foolish as that?”
I looked down at my hands. “Someday, my son, you will have answers.”
“But there are too many things that I would know that make no sense. And too many things that are not fair. I cannot lose Enosh, my firstborn!”
