ADAM ORDERED HIS SONS TO PREPARE THE GIFTS they would take as offering to Elokim.
Cain did not want to go with Aklia. When Luluwa left with Abel, Cain was squatting to prepare his tools. Luluwa looked at him as she went by. Her eyes were burning. Eve caught the exchange. She saw Cain’s arm grow tense, saw his hand tighten around the handle of a spade.
The altar where Adam usually left his gift was near the old cave, south of the solitary mountain that rose amid the rocks of the reddish plain.
Cain hurried. His brother had the advantage because he had left ahead of him, but knowing Abel, Cain was sure he would take his time in choosing among the sheep of his flock. Cain went to the garden where he had sown squash. He cut the first ones he saw, and added a handful of wheat and a cluster of grapes. He moved with haste and was able to reach the site just as Abel and Luluwa were arriving. His brother was carrying a sacrificed sheep over his shoulder. His best, of course. It was handsome and fat and the blood of its slashed throat was spattered across Abel’s neck and chest.
Cain was the first to stand before Adam’s altar. He set down his offering. Then Abel stepped forward. He attempted to lay the sheep beside his brother’s offering, but Cain stood in his way.
“I am sorry, Abel. You will have to look for a different place to lay your offering”
“I thought we would do it together.”
“You were mistaken.”
“But there’s enough room.”
Cain pushed him. He tightened the muscles on the right side of his body and threw his weight against Abel hard enough to make his brother lose his balance.
“Cain!” exclaimed Luluwa.
“You be quiet,” Cain shouted at her.
Abel looked at his brother, incredulous. He looked him up and down. He stepped aside and began to pick up stones to make his own altar. His brusque movements betrayed his astonishment and discomfort.
Cain was watching his brother out of the corner of his eye. Luluwa was sitting on a rock, her back bent over, her arms crossed at the waist, her foot jiggling nervously, making designs in the dirt.
Very soon Abel had improvised an altar, on which he laid the lamb. Then he knelt. He was very quiet; his eyes were closed.
Cain knelt, too. He heard his heart throbbing in his arms, in his legs, spurred by the stimulus of a rage that completely filled him and prevented him from thinking or praying.
The darkening sky announced a downpour. Luluwa looked at the black, ominous clouds on the horizon. She felt the wind rear its head among the trees.
Suddenly a blaze of lightning blinded them. They breathed in the odor of burned flesh. The lightning had struck precisely on Abel’s lamb, consuming it. Nothing was left on the rocks except the outline of the animal and a pile of black ash.
Abel looked at Cain. He smiled beatifically.
“Praised be Elokim,” he said loudly, and prostrated himself.
Accursed be Elokim, thought Cain; may you, Elokim, be accursed. You favor my brother, just as my father does.
Cain had never heard the Voice. When he did hear it reverberating in his head, he began to tremble. He heard the remonstrance clearly: “Why do you curse me, Cain? Why are you sad? If you are heedful, and just, I will accept your offering as well. When you insult me you insult yourself.”
Cain ran off, shamed, contrite. He did not stop until he found Eve.
He laid his head on her breast as he had when he was a child.
“The Voice spoke to me. It spoke to me, the Voice,” he repeated. “I heard it, Mother. I heard it.”
Eve cradled him. She calmed him. Cain’s confusion was a ripping in her heart. All her other children had at one time or other heard the Voice. All except Cain. Now that he had heard it, she intuited that along with his terror he felt finally that he had at least been taken into account. Adam, who had just come down to the refuge, learned through Eve what had happened. He saw Cain held tight in her arms. Before he could react, Abel and Luluwa came into the cave, slipping hurriedly along the steps. Cain leaped from his mother’s arms and went to stand in a corner, his back against the wall, his face sullen. Abel could not contain his emotion. Elokim himself had taken his offering, wrapped in a ray of light, he said jubilantly. They all had to have seen it, he exclaimed. “Of the sheep I laid on the stone of the offerings, only a few ashes remain.”
Luluwa not only corroborated what Abel said, but also reported the altercation between the brothers. She reproached Cain. That wasn’t the way he would gain Elokim’s understanding, she said. Cain’s eyes glittered in the darkness. Impenetrable. He said nothing. He allowed them to celebrate Abel and censure him. Aklia cast an oblique glance at him. She tried to sit by his side, to take his hand. He brushed her away with a cuff that no one felt more than she did.
Cain did not sleep that night. He paced outside the cave, in the moonlight. Eve looked out and saw the anguished silhouette, the fury of his steps. She went back to lie beside Adam, beset with worry and unable to sleep.
The next day, Cain went with Aklia to the field. Adam thought that he was more tranquil. Luluwa was agitated until they returned. Eve could not quiet the noise inside her. It must be the autumn, she thought, everything slowly dying: the trees stripped of their leaves, the nights growing shorter, the hooting of the owls, the sound of steps on the leaves, steps that do not exist except in my imagination. The world was tense, crouched down; it reminded her of how the air had stilled after she had eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Eve cuddled Aklia. “Cain doesn’t love me,” she said. “Not Cain, not Abel, not Luluwa, not my father. Who am I, Mother? What is my destiny? I see the bands of monkeys and often I want to go with them. I look like them. They would accept me.”
“But you are not one of them, Aklia.”
“I would be more comfortable. They wouldn’t reject me.”
“What do you know, daughter?
“I know that Cain will not be my mate. What do you know, Mother?”
“I know you are not a monkey.”
“And what would it matter if I were? At least I would know what I am.”
“But you can think.”
“How do you know they can’t?”
“They merely survive. They do not speak.”
“And that is bad?”
“I don’t know, Aklia. Sometimes I don’t know what is Good and what is Evil. Please be calm. Go to sleep.”
Eve thought a long time about what Aklia had said. Looking at her face, she remembered the monkey that had invited her to climb a tree in the wooded valley, and then had shown her the way back to the cave. She held Aklia close. Silently, she wept. Aklia’s hair grew wet with her mother’s tears.
CHAPTER 28
ISOLATED FROM THE OTHERS, CAIN DEVOTED HIMSELF to his seeds. He harvested lentils and wheat; he turned the earth for the plants that would come up in the spring. He went back to the cave at inopportune times. He watched Luluwa and Abel. He refused to speak to Aklia.
Adam avoided sinking into the sadness that threatened them all. He had survived till now and would continue to survive. He and Eve would reproduce if it turned out that their children did not. With time, Cain would temper his restlessness. If Cain’s mother and father had endured the loss of the Garden, then Cain, too, would have to endure. He would have to wait. Time passes and carries off nonconforming behavior with it; one accepted what one could not change. Eve had circles beneath her eyes. She slept very little.
The routine of the hunt was restored. Winter was coming and they had to prepare for the cold, dark nights, for the chill earth and naked trees. Abel and Adam again went out together. Aklia, Luluwa, and Eve brought mushrooms, herbs, and fish to the cave. The nights were tense, filled with sounds and footsteps. Eve closed her eyes tight and refused to see who was walking around. She forced Adam to stay quiet. One early morning she thought she heard a band of monkeys at the other end of the footbridge. She sat up and looked for Aklia, but couldn’t see her; ho
wever, by morning Aklia was there as she always was. It was a dream, Eve told herself.
A day came when Cain emerged from his aloofness. Eve thought that maybe she would be able to sleep as she once had, not the fragile sleep interrupted by sounds that she had no way of knowing were real or imaginary. She saw Cain go to Abel, and saw them talking, and had to leave to hide her tears of relief.
The following morning the brothers left together. Eve watched them go in an air of peace. Bent over the channel he was digging to divert water from the river and shorten the distance they had to go to satisfy their thirst, Adam smiled at his wife.
The day was light and crystalline. Toward dusk, Eve was painting vessels; Aklia was sharpening hooks; Adam was finishing the channel for the water. The sound of rustling leaves, of someone running, made them look up.
Luluwa burst from the bushes, panting.
What was it in Luluwa’s eyes that had shaken her so? Eve sprang up anxiously.
“What happened?” she asked.
Luluwa opened her mouth. No sound came out.
“What happened?” her mother repeated.
Adam and Aklia left what they were doing.
“Cain struck Abel. Abel isn’t making a sound. He is on the ground, with his eyes open.”
Luluwa began telling them. She said that early in the afternoon, as she was weaving baskets, she saw that it was futile to try to set a rhythm between her hands and her thoughts, and decided it would be better to go look for Cain and Abel. Worried, she left without notifying anyone because she felt whirring insects buzzing in her head, and a flock of disoriented birds flapping their wings in her breast. She ran as fast as her legs would carry her to the wheat plantings. She asked herself where Cain might have taken Abel, because she did not find them there, or up river where the mushrooms grew, or where the squash lifted their orange heads. She wondered about the old cave, the fig trees, the peaches. She ran on, panting. As she went, she startled monkeys in the trees, wild pigs. In her course, thorns scored her skin. When she reached the little grove of peach trees, she picked up the scent of Cain. He had been there, but he had gone on. She sniffed the air, circled the solitary mountain, climbed up on some rocks to see if from there she could catch sight of her brothers. She saw something lying on a small promontory. She ran that way, calling to Cain not to leave, to wait for her. When she got there, she bent over to ease the sharp pain shooting through her ribs from having run so fast.
“I thought that Abel was sleeping stretched out on the ground, and that Cain was by his side watching him sleep. But then I heard Cain’s moans. I saw him sitting with his head between his knees. He was rocking back and then forward with his hands laced behind his neck. The instant he saw me, he yelled. He began to sob. What happened to Abel, Cain? And he told me: He is dead, Luluwa. I killed him.
He is dead Luluwa, I killed him. He is dead, Luluwa, I killed him. He is dead, Luluwa, I killed him. Eve heard the phrase and all the words in the world other than those disappeared. She wanted to think, and only He is dead Luluwa, I killed him. She wanted to speak, and only He is dead Luluwa, I killed him She kept seeing those words, seeing the image that Luluwa described: Abel on the ground and Cain saying that over and over.
Luluwa continued: You killed him? I asked, unable to understand. I thought, we’ve never seen anyone die. I thought Cain was mistaken. Then I knelt beside Abel and I began to call to him. I saw the blood beneath his head. A red aureole. I saw that Abel was staring at the sky. I shook him. I begged him to wake up. Abel was cold, icy cold, like the water in the river. He doesn’t wake up, Cain told me. He told me he had already tried. He told me that he did not hear any sound inside Abel. He shouted that he had killed him.
“And he killed him,” moaned Luluwa, herself sobbing. “He killed him. It’s true. I saw him. He’s dead. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t speak. He stares straight before him. And he is cold. Cain killed him. Cain killed him! He didn’t mean to, but he killed him. Poor Cain. What will become of us now? Where is Abel? Where is death? What will we do to make him come back?”
None of them had died yet, Eve thought. They couldn’t die, Adam thought. Eve remembered the Serpent. It was not easy to die, she’d said. Elokim will not let that happen, Adam told himself. Eve and he a long time ago had jumped from the peak of the mountain, thinking they would die, only to fall in the river without a scratch.
“Come, Luluwa. Take us to your brothers.”
CHAPTER 29
THE FOUR OF THEM RAN WITHOUT STOPPING. THEY ran through the autumn countryside. It was growing dark. In the sky the clouds were blazing in the red light of sunset; the dark and hostile earth returned the sound of their feet pounding rhythmically on the ground. A pack. A terrified pack. As they passed, birds flew up from the trees. Animals caught the scent of their anguish. None came near them.
He is dead, Luluwa, I killed him. Eve wanted to erase the words, but they were as loud as the sound of heels thudding one after the other on the path. And if it was true? And if Cain had killed Abel? They all knew how to kill. Even she did. Fish died in her baskets. Their tails flailed against its sides when they were out of the water. But kill another like themselves? How could Cain not have known his strength? Luluwa told them that Cain had struck his brother with a rock. That was how Adam killed rabbits. And that was how he told her he had killed the bear that mangled his dog. What had Adam done, what had she done, when they killed their first creature? What cruel forces had they unleashed in order to survive? In order to eat? And why had Elokim so disposed? Had he known what he was doing? And had it been done with the abandon he displayed in painting the sky, in conceiving flowers and the wings of the birds? Was he thinking at all? Since he did not live the way they did, how could he decide their lives, decide what could or could not be?
Luluwa pointed to the promontory. They climbed. Aklia moaned and stumbled along. Eve saw her putting her weight on her hands to push forward, to move more rapidly.
“Don’t hurt your hands, Aklia.”
Aklia looked at her with gentle eyes. She said nothing. She made only a sad, high sound.
Adam saw the figure of Abel lying flat on the ground. He had killed too many animals not to recognize the signs. But he ran to Abel to touch him. He was the first to rest his head on Abel’s chest. His weeping was hoarse, immense. The air absorbed his wailing. It was a call, an admission of defeat.
Eve approached Abel slowly. Her legs were trembling. She recalled the feeling of having Abel in her womb. The slippery wax and blood on his little body. Her eyes stopped at the boy’s feet. They were stained, flat, large. The toes. Her children’s little toes. When they were born nothing else had so filled her with wonder. The feet and the tiny ears, the lobes curved like shells. She went closer. She saw his staring eyes. She bent down and touched his eyelids to close them. She did it without thinking. Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Beautiful Abel. Sleeping. She stroked his forehead. His skin so cold. Sadness spread slowly through her body; it was as if water were filling her body until she couldn’t breathe. She dropped down beside Abel’s head. She caressed him. She wanted to put her arms around him, to hold him to her bosom, to hug him tightly, console him. How lonely he would be now, she thought. More lonely than they, who were themselves so lonely. Adam was weeping. His lament issued from a place that seemed to be not in him but in the earth itself. She took Abel’s head and laid it in her lap.
“Help me, Adam, help me hold him. Put him in my arms.”
Adam helped her. She cradled her son. She rocked him. There was no way to weep for this pain, she thought, tears running down her cheeks, spilling onto her breasts. She clasped Abel to her. “Where is your life, Abel? Why aren’t you moving?”
He was so heavy, so forlorn. She touched his head. The wound in his skull. It was not bleeding any longer. She felt the void in her womb. She felt the absence of her son like a emptying out of herself. Only water flooding through her. Water, choking her until she was able to emit a deep moan, to l
et go in the pain of knowing that she would never again see Abel alive. Never.
She saw Aklia leaping about, Luluwa moaning.
“Where is Cain?” Eve asked. “Where is my son Cain?”
“I don’t know,” Luluwa answered. “I don’t know.”
“Look for him, Luluwa. Look for him so he can help us carry Abel to the cave. We can’t leave him here.”
It was deep into the night. Adam lit fires. One on each side of Abel, Adam and Eve sat by their son beneath a dark, starry sky.
Aklia had fallen asleep.
“I remember when I became aware that I was,” said Adam. “I remember, and I think it would have been better never to exist.”
“I remember when I ate of the fruit of the Tree. I should not have done that.”
“Abel would never have died. It all started with you, Eve.” He looked up. He looked at her with grieving rancor.
“Without me, Abel would never have existed,” she returned. “We wouldn’t have loved. The life that had to be began with me. All I did was fulfill my destiny.”
“And death began.”
“I gave life, Adam. The one who began to kill was you.”
“So we could survive.”
“I’m not blaming you, but once we accepted that it was necessary to kill in order to survive, we allowed necessity to rule our conscience, and we let cruelty in. And now look how cruelty has come to roost in our lives.”
“It was inevitable. As inevitable as your eating the fruit.”
“If Elokim hadn’t forced us to cross the twins between the pairs, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”
“Why did he create us, Eve? I don’t believe that I can suffer more than I am suffering now.”
“The Serpent said that Elokim made us to see whether we would be able to return to the beginning and regain Paradise.”
“So perhaps we are not the beginning?”
“From what she told me, in the Garden we were the image of what Elokim wanted to see at the end of his creation. When we ate the fig, he altered the direction of time. Now to go back to that point of departure, our children and the children of their children, the generations that will come after us, will have to begin all over, to regress. That was what she said.”
Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve Page 15
