This Is Why I Came

by Mary Rakow

  IT WAS EASY. Abel was sleeping when Cain carried him to the spot where the first ewe was slain and, lifting a large stone, threw it down on Abel. And when it was over, Cain felt relief, Abel lying there.

  He waited for Abel’s eyes to open, to return like the grape and the wheat, but Abel’s eyes did not open. He watched his brother’s blood seep into the dirt so that the earth became soft like a full sponge and still Abel remained as he lay.

  CAIN LIFTED ABEL and ran with him to the fields that once were his and made a bed of the dry vines and lay down cradling his brother saying, “You will rise up like the wheat that comes and is gone and then comes again.” But Abel did not rise up. Cain watched Abel’s skin turn blue then white then grey and stroked the cold flesh of his brother as it stiffened. Then horrified, thought, what have I done?

  DAY AFTER DAY, Cain lay with his brother on the vine heap, covering him with his body, fighting off vultures, flies, but Abel did not stir. And Cain wept for his brother because he saw that Abel was not like the wheat and the grape and the barley but was like the ewe after all. And he repented for what he had done and wept and wondered, will this come to everyone? And Cain named what had happened to Abel, “Death.”

  BUT ON THE seventh day, through the dry stalks, through the stiff, putrid body of his brother, came a voice like the voice of the earth saying, “Come, find me, Cain! Come find me!” and it was Abel when they were young, playing in the tall rows of corn, before the accident, when Abel could run like the cheetah. Abel’s voice was alive and real and Cain thought, my brother is neither like the wheat that comes back nor the ewe that is slain. And he considered Abel and thought, perhaps we are all like this, neither wheat nor ewe. And Cain called Abel and himself and his family and neighbors, “Human.”

  3

  Cain and the Dream of the City

  CAIN DREAMT OF a city and the dream grew around him like comfort. Alabaster staircases with graceful, shallow steps, tall white buildings like layered cakes, boulevards, lanterns, ballrooms, music halls, museums, a scriptorium with a gold-tiled vestibule, precise instruments, a fencing school, astronomy, tradesmen, mask-making shops, a jester, a harlequin, ivory beds, combs, pins and spoons. Irrigation canals, coats of arms, gymnasts competing in parks. He dreamt of diverse nomenclatures, sciences, precise theories of color, laws of motion. He would have a tea shop and serve cool drinks garnished with colorful paper umbrellas, honey-dew and mint. He wanted smooth surfaces, glossy and promising, clarity, simplicity, the manufacture of elegant things, accouterments, precious objects with fine joints. Nothing with blood in it. Nothing with breath.

  In the sumptuousness of the city, draftsmen and masons would build towers that reached Heaven. He would climb them with ease and would be able to speak to God that way. And God would say, “Cain, leave your sorrow and guilt here with me.” And he would at last be free of the burden he carried for the death of his brother.

  SO CAIN LEFT the land of his family and journeyed east, toward the sun.

  BUT GOD CAME to Cain in a dream saying, “If you build towers to Heaven you will be like us.” And Cain woke from the dream and did not build his city with its towers and porticos, did not procure the skills of artisans and chefs, because he saw in God the jealousy that had poisoned his own heart and the heart of his brother.

  Instead, he rose from his bed and, using the skills he already possessed, employing no one, made a garden. He fenced off the land and filled the enclosure with gravel, which would never die, and in this way he occupied himself, raking his garden year after year, making a small, elegant world without wheat or olive trees, blood or breath.

  BUT ONE DAY, in this quiet activity, the future came vividly toward him.

  He saw a city with canals and small islands and slim boats manned by men wearing striped shirts. Engineers had built homes, museums, restaurants, and some strong beautiful buildings with bell towers that reached to the clouds.

  Inside were statues and paintings. In the damp climate painters learned that plaster did not set well so they shifted to canvas and wood. Cain saw one painting titled, “Cain Killing Abel” and cried as he raked because he did not recognize himself or his brother there and felt again the gap between himself and the world. The year was 1544 and people were dying in great numbers. The painter also died of the great plague and Cain noticed his tomb in a building called Iglesia de Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.

  He saw that, though towers were built, men and women did not climb them to talk to God but entered Santa Maria Gloriosa and other such buildings to lay their burdens down without climbing at all. He watched them go in and come out. Many seemed changed, as if possessing what he himself longed for. To feel light again, innocent and at peace. He called what people seemed to find in those buildings, “Forgiveness.” And he named the places where they seemed to find it, “Church,” “Temple,” “Synagogue,” and “Mosque.”

  WHEN THE VISION lifted and Cain was again alone with his gravel and rake, he felt how much he wanted to live in such a city, but he could no more transport himself into that future than he could into the deep past before Abel’s injury, when they were in the sweet field.

  He found himself held in the sound of the gravel parting as he drew the fingers of the rake slowly through it and surrendered to the sound, his body heavy with the death of his brother. But then Cain heard a soft song coming from a land of ice and snow and blue light. A chieftain was dying and words came to him, which he sang, and the words then came to Cain as he raked more slowly still, setting the end of the rake in the groove he’d just made, all parallel, ordered, all bloodless and clean. The words of the snow king came into Cain’s garden and settled onto the gravel and then settled into Cain’s heart.

  Hear me, smith of the heavens,

  And heal me.

  Drive out,

  O king of suns,

  Every human sorrow

  From the city of my heart.

  4

  Noah

  EVERYTHING HAD ASTONISHED God. Making all of creation de novo, from nothing. He even liked the sound of it, murmuring “de novo” to himself.

  He first created nothingness, a deep blue robe, and covered himself with it, his neck and thighs, down to his ankles, then the sky and the stars, over 243 species of turtles alone. And last, to see himself more clearly, he created man, male and female, all of his intimacies, his genitals, torso, his breasts and thighs, to never die. Seeing that it was good, God espoused himself to it like a young groom, binding himself as with a vow, to love his espoused forever. Exuberant, he gave his bride every herb bearing seed, every beast, every fish and fowl and crawling thing, dominion over all he had made as a wedding gift, a dowry.

  BUT WHEN THEY multiplied on the earth, instead of love, like himself, he saw wickedness and it grieved God. He had trouble seeing himself in the breeze, in the pony’s hide, in the daffodil and most of all in man, where the heart was so powerful for ill. It afflicted God, recalling that wedding union, that shower of rice. The more he paced and searched, the more he could not find himself, not in man and not in the mountain or glacier, the forest or the rivers, so that in time he recoiled at the thought of looking, and came to hate what once was magnificent, and to hate himself for making it and espousing himself to it.

  He dreamt of drowning with his own hands everything in the sea and on the dry land. Giraffe and lemur, every hive of bees, every plant that pollinates, every fruit in decay, every bird in flight, every mammal suckling its young. And when he considered man, his anger was unstoppable. “You always want one more thing. But I don’t have one more thing! There’s just me. If I gave you myself, you’d find fault with me, too.” He imagined drowning all that belonged to man alone, every embrace and dream, every memory, every idea and regret, every instance of laughter and relief. And God calmed himself this way, soothed by the violence of it, the erotic charge of destruction.

  NOAH FELT THE anger of God and waited to see what he already sensed. A great wind came and bent the tre
es to the ground, snapping them, then the night sky bright with lightning, the stars disappeared. “All this might be severed,” he said to his wife as he looked at the sky, sheltering his eyes. In the bellowing cattle, he heard the anger of God. In his neighbor’s argument. For many nights he was frightened and could not sleep. “The minute God stops forgiving us,” he told his daughters and sons, “all of this,” he gestured in an arc, “will come to an end.”

  He beckoned God but heard nothing. He lost his appetite, his sense of direction. His wife, hanging out clothes, watched him and remembered what she’d seen when they first met, that he was unlike other men, a visionary, his eyes full of a future. He spoke of what they could make together, a shared life. It was what she most loved in him, so that she said, “Make it of gopher wood,” because sometimes her suggestions brought him back to himself, and it did. Noah rose and paced, marked out measurements in the yard, drove in stakes with white flags, three hundred cubits by fifty, and determination returned to his face. He raced and hammered, outgrowing one ladder then the next, his teeth grinding as he slept, never fast enough. He ordered his sons to gather all that was beautiful on the earth, kumquat and alligator, hen, lizard and magpie.

  WHEN HER SONS were gone weeks then months, leaving behind wives and small children, the wives becoming despondent, frantic, then despondent again, her grandchildren forgetting the names of their fathers, Noah’s wife grew bitter. As he hammered, Noah wept for all he could see, animals, neighbors, bushes and trees so that she wondered how thin the line was between vision and madness.

  When his sons returned, seeing the assembly, he wept again, for all that was strange and lovely, leopard, hyena and whippoorwill. Ferocious animals collared and tied to stakes, makeshift cages held in place by ropes. Bulbs and ferns gathered in boxes, and saplings.

  Some of the pairs already mating, neighbors protested the noise, smell, and commotion. Some moved away. The sound of hammering was constant, the awkward vessel casting its enormous shadow over the garden and the house so that she had trouble keeping hold of her affection for Noah, and thought, if this continues, he will strip everything I care about away.

  WHEN THE FIRST raindrops jangled the wind chime outside their bedroom window, Noah woke and pulled open the blind, sickened. Grey drops, a mist, hovered over the fields, the horses pawed the ground. Again, he called out to God but heard nothing so ordered his sons to lead the animals in two by two. His wife walked apart, not with him, up the ramp, hoping, in the noise and confusion, he wouldn’t notice.

  THE LOWLY GRASS was the first to disappear, the cats and mice floated on the streams between houses. A dog swam in the current, a chest of drawers. Noah’s daughters shielded the eyes of their children, ordered them away from the windows, their friends and playmates frantically swimming then screaming then going under. Rocks and boulders, fences, rooftops, people on the roofs screaming, people in trees leaping to the ark, the thud of their bodies and others leaping to their deaths. The water rose and the ark rose until just the uppermost leaves of the trees were visible, the giant hawks waging war against it. The footpaths on the hills disappeared then the tops of the hills and then the water crept up the mountainsides, the goats stampeded straight up, leaping across rocks and ridges, terrified. Noah thought, surely God’s holy mountain will not disappear, but then it did, and there was nothing left to see but water and sky and Noah thought, God has brought the waters of the flood over his head like a cloak.

  WHEN THE DOG floated by, Noah said to himself, love is stronger than this. And he clung to that one sentence as to a plank floating on the water, a single plank, repeating it to himself again and again.

  As whitecaps formed on the water, slamming into the ark from all sides, the giant swells, the sea creatures, great whales calling their distress, “This is how much God loved us,” Noah told himself, losing balance, grabbing the ledge. Somehow a birdcage bobbed upright before going under, the parakeet frantic on the swing.

  DAYS PASSED, WEEKS. Noah rationed the food more strictly, put the animals on half-stock, the grain for mules. Afloat, isolated, Noah’s wife saying, “What made you think we were a seafaring family?” The children had nightmares, months became a year then two until, finally, the children forgot what they’d seen and composed new rhymes and games and hand-slaps, the girls jumped rope to the sound of it. Horses, goats, sheep gave birth, the stillborn thrown into the sea. Wives grew hungry for new touch, experimented, comingled.

  Fighting, grumbling, the ark became a floating prison without destination or purpose. “You brought us here just to die!” his wife accused. One dead child already thrown overboard. Animals restless to fly, to run. The children’s legs shrunk, their arms grew crooked, their vocabularies became crude. They spoke to each other in guttural sounds and Noah turned away thinking, this is the death of language.

  He wanted to touch his wife but she withdrew, so he slept in the storeroom, the key around his neck. Tied himself to the shelf now empty, where grain had stood in bags and made his bed there, the smell of pitch near his face. He bumped against the inside wall of the ark, rubbing against it like fire, combustible, while the anger of God slammed the side of the vessel again and again without cease, the slamming waves then thunder.

  When his wife banged at the door complaining of cow dung and shortage, ants, the multiplying rats, he ignored her, tied the straps tighter, binding himself to the anger of God whom he also cursed for drawing him into life in the first place, for making the moon and the stars, for making his wife, so beautiful when she was young, the trees that sung when he walked her home. He cursed God for the primrose, the flesh of the date, the smell of crisp meat, loganberries and wine, the shade of the pines, so that his body, his senses, flailed at the memory of it. Most vehemently he cursed God himself whom he once loved more than his wife, his family, his flocks and fields.

  He recalled the night his good neighbor stood at the door saying, “It was a mercy killing,” and handed Noah the pillow he’d put over his wife. He relayed how he’d sat at the edge of the bed telling her a story from his childhood, a happy story that made her mouth smile, the side that still moved, then reached for the pillow and pressed it to her face. “A large pillow,” he emphasized, asking Noah to burn it for him. Large enough to cover not just her face but her chest, shoulder to shoulder, so that nothing was left to chance.

  Some nights Noah wondered if he should have done the same thing. His wife and family senseless on the water, the life they had, obliterated, their future would be what? To throw each other overboard when it was time?

  He practiced telling himself, this is not the absence of love but love broken, love is stronger than death, love perdures. Telling himself this when his oldest son knocked reverently but firmly on the door saying, “Father, come out. Mother died last night and we need you. We’re throwing her into the sea.”

  NOAH LOOSED THE straps and unlocked the door and saw that his grandchildren were adults, his own body too frail to walk unassisted, his wife’s hair grown down to her feet. They took off her wedding ring and gave it to him, then wrapped her in a linen cloth, and, lifting her body over the rail, let her go.

  As he watched her body disappear, he put the ring to his lips and tongue to taste her salt there and recalled how his wife had for many nights beseeched him to come out but he’d refused, and when, through the door, she asked his forgiveness he withheld it from her. He had needed her to be with him when they walked up the ramp, had needed her all of the time, and when she lingered behind, shuffling in the rabbits and butterflies, he told himself, this is the beginning of the end.

  Unforgiven, she’d passed years carrying a candle behind her cupped hand, speaking to him through the door saying, “Come back to our marriage bed, please come back to me.” But he did not unlock the door. In their bed alone, she’d imagined her husband returning to her, to the little rope-strung bed he’d made for them, the maroon blanket, the flickering lamp, their arms around each other, speaking soft words with tenderne
ss. “We were a couple, we were a pair,” she would remind him, rubbing the red marks on his ankles and wrists where he’d bound himself to the shelf, his bruises, splinters in his back and on his feet. He would watch her pluck them out, her hair grown coarse, not as soft to the touch. He would notice this and she his haggard face. They would lie side by side, her back inches from his face, the mole near her backbone, between her shoulder blades, the sag of her skin. “We’re still alive,” he would remind her. “And we have each other,” she would add, bringing his wrinkled hand over her shoulder to her breast.

  In that moment, ring to his lips, the endless sea before him, Noah saw God abscond down a marble corridor without end, his blue robe flapping at his heels. He watched God walk away until he came to an empty throne, seraphim and cherubim carved in linden wood, plated in gold, and instead of seeing him mount the throne he watched God crouch behind it, hidden.

  IT FRIGHTENED NOAH. The rocking stopped and a great silence swept through the ark. The animals, silent, the children in their play.

  In time, the waters shrank and the dry land appeared. His sons opened the door, released the animals and the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, while Noah stayed in the empty ark. The Almighty has exhausted himself, that is all, Noah thought. He doesn’t even want his anger anymore.

  He rummaged for berries on the floor, the abandoned pot long cold, the barley and lentils rotten, the tallow gone from the lamps. He would stay in the ark until he at least felt grateful that there was a limit to God’s anger, no matter how long that took.

  HE SAW THE white hall without end, God crouching there year after year, without majesty, emptied, only the sound of his own breathing, magnified, the inhalation and exhalation falling off the walls, echoing without interruption. He saw the throne sprinkled with blood, the blood of all the animals and children and men and women who had been drowned, and those who had died and were thrown overboard, his wife. And so Noah rose, shut the storage room door, descended the ramp, and slowly gathered stones. He lit a fire and watched the smoke rise as it always had in the world he had known. He called his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all dispersed, taking the llama and parrot, the salamander in its shallow dish, and they came. In the white hall, the throne sprinkled with blood, he could smell it, he could hear the breathing of God, slow and deathlike, and Noah spoke the new word in a language he did not know. “Hilasterion” he said to the sand and the worn hem of his robe. And Noah pitied God and came to love his fragility because he was like man. “Mercy Seat,” he said again, place of propitiation.