Sunrise on the Mediterranean

by Suzanne Frank

  Avgay’el turned her carders, pausing to look around at us all. “So then: Yahwe looked upon the earthling, for he was growing to be a monster in the land. His imagination created evil thoughts, which grew into bad actions. Yahwe’s heart was saddened, as a father whose son chooses an infertile life. ‘I will cleanse the earthlings from the land,’ he said. ‘Human and animal, crawling creature and flying bird. I regret that I made them.’ ”

  The women watched her, sad eyed at the thought of God’s pain. I tried to force myself not to make her words fit anything I knew. I wanted just to hear the story and enjoy it for what it was: rainy day in the harem, the camaraderie of women working together, spellbound.

  “Noach the Innocent warmed Yahwe’s heart, though.” Noah, of course. Why should I be surprised? Rainy weather like this did make one think of arks. I heard her say that God told Noach to enter the ark because he was upright among the nations. “Gather in seven by seven—male and female who are mated—from every clean creature.”

  Seven by seven? What happened to two by two? “From the unclean creatures take one male and one female. Seven by seven birds, male and female. They spread the seeds of life across the earth’s face.”

  “I wish he would have left the snakes,” Hag’it said. “They could have drowned along with the unclean people. I wouldn’t have missed them.” The rest of the women laughed. Avgay’el smiled, then turned her carding tools again.

  “So: Yahwe said that in another seven days, water would fall on the earth, unrelenting for forty days and nights. In this way he would wipe the earth of all the creatures he had formed from clay. Noach, his wife, his sons, and their wives entered the ark as Yahwe had said.

  “Now look: For seven days, then the water falls for forty days and nights. Yahwe shuts the door on Noach. The water lifted the ark, and for forty days it floated above the land. The water consumed everything, wiping the face of the earth clean. The ark floated across the face of the earth. All the high mountains were subdued by the water.”

  I thought of flying over the Swiss Alps, the snowy peaks that poked through the clouds, easily visible from twenty-five thousand feet. Those heights covered by water? It seemed ludicrous, but my skepticism lever was getting rusty. God seemed to manage well outside my ability to understand or believe. And in the end, did my belief, or disbelief, really change anything?

  Avgay’el continued. “The waters rose fifteen cubits above the submerged mountains. The nefesh had vanished from the land. All that had walked, or flown, or crawled; all were erased. Only Noach and his company continued to exist.

  “Now the rain from the sky was held back. The waters came, so they were going. Now look: The window Noach had built is opened. He reaches out with a dove, to see if the waters have rolled back from the Land.”

  How many versions of this had I seen in art? From the Renaissance to the present day: the animals’ heads poking out of the windows in the ark, Noah releasing the dove, waiting for its return.

  But this time I saw what I’d never noticed before. The terrible loneliness of being the only people on the planet; the overwhelming fear of a God who was introspective and flexible enough—in a way—to destroy his creation because it wasn’t up to his standards. As though those people and animals had been pots; thrown, glazed, and fired but warped beyond repair and useless. Thus they had to be destroyed.

  But for the first time, I understood God. This was a perspective that I could understand. God as a creator—who was less than pleased with his work. How many times had I painted over a canvas? Pitched out a sculpture? Rethrown a pot?

  My musing made me miss when the dove didn’t return, though I knew already that moment in the story. Avgay’el sipped some wine, refreshing her voice before continuing. “Now Noach built an altar to Yahwe, took from the clean creatures, the clean birds, offering them up: burned sacrifices on the altar.

  “Yahwe’s heart was soothed; his nose smelled a pleasing scent. He thought: Never again will I pass judgment on the earth because of the actions of the earthling. When they use the gift of my creativity for evil thoughts, it results in evil deeds. Nevertheless, I will never again destroy all that lives, just to destroy him.”

  I heard the first small voice calling for his mother. Avgay’el finished quickly. “So here they were: the sons of Noach leaving the ark. Shem, Ham, and Yafat. From these three sons, man spread across the earth.”

  We’d all carded our tufts into strands that would be made into thread. As we handed back the paddles, I saw the mushroom stagger in. She was bloody, her face bruised.

  I felt sick, filled with premonition. “’Sheva,” I said, running to her side. “’Sheva, what happened?”

  She said nothing, just stared into the distance. Shana took her arm, shook her sharply. “You! ’Sheva!” but even that brought no result. Avgay’el touched her hair, noting a bite mark on her neck.

  A big bite mark. Oh no, no, no, I thought.

  “Lift her dress,” Shana said.

  I was one of the ones who helped. The girl had been mauled. Assaulted in the mud. The women’s expressions were all solemn, but no one was weeping. Avgay’el and Shana exchanged glances.

  “Carry her into the straw, Klo-ee,” Avgay’el said. “Shana will examine her.”

  I picked her up, slipping my arm beneath her knees. She was so fragile, now catatonic. Someone had abused her? This seemed inconceivable. These people didn’t even rape when they sacked a city! I laid her down on the straw, while the women brought wine for her, then lamps so they could see. Hag’it acted as her pillow, cradling the mushroom’s head in her lap, brushing her moonbeam-colored hair away from her face. Ahino’am brought heated rags, which we used to gently clean off the mud and blood.

  Her dress was removed, and she was wrapped in an animal skin, shivering and teeth chattering. Shana, Avgay’el holding up a lamp over her shoulder, examined the girl. I didn’t watch, but I did note that she had just started growing pubic hair. She was a child, no matter what her body proclaimed.

  Bruises marred her skin; it was easy to follow what had happened: he’d held her down with his forearm, just above her throat. If she moved, she would choke. A big knee had ended up in her soft belly. What kind of brute were we talking about? Her thighs had been wrenched apart and held. We practically could have taken fingerprints of the assailant!

  Shana’s small hands were quick. Dadua’s sister shook her head sadly, her eyes glittering with tears. “Her maidenhood is gone,” she said. “I will tell Dadua.”

  “What is the penalty?” I asked. I was fairly certain who had done this, who had defiled this poor child.

  Everyone looked at me blankly. “Uri’a’s guilty, of this I would swear. I told you how he was looking at her earlier.” I looked around the room. “Is there a prison? Will he be flogged?”

  Avgay’el frowned at me. “At times I forget you are Pelesti, Klo-ee. There is no punishment. They will be wed.”

  “He raped her? Now he’ll get to marry her so he can rape her at will?”

  Dadua’s wife shrugged. “It is the least elegant way to get a bride, nachon—”

  “What are the other ways?” I asked, still outraged.

  “Seduction or purchase,” she answered. “How did your husband get you?”

  “He asked me.”

  They gasped. “He didn’t pay for you? He didn’t seduce you so that you were bound to him?”

  “Lo. And he certainly didn’t rape me!” I looked down at the sleeping mushroom. “She is just a child! Now she will have to endure this behavior forever!”

  “This is good for her,” Shana said stoically. “Not the experience—it would have been better had he used soft words and gentle touches—but she is a slave. He has treated her as a freedwoman. Now she will be the wife of a gibori. She will have her own slaves, a home, clothing, children. Ach, it is a blessing!”

  I was going to be ill. “A rape is a blessing?” I gasped out.

  “Batsheva was no one,” Shana said.<
br />
  I knew that “t” and “th” were interchangeable in this alefbet. As were “b” and “v.” Presto-chango and omigod, I had been grinding grain with Bathsheba? Surely not the Bathsheba? This scrawny, bucktoothed girl couldn’t be Bathsheba of biblical fame? Mother of Solomon, the world’s wisest man?

  “Now she will be a mother, with fine, strong sons.”

  Why not, Chloe? I looked down at the mushroom— Bathsheba—and realized her days of being no one were rapidly drawing to a close. Didn’t David kill her husband to get at her? Suddenly that murder seemed more justifiable.

  The perpetrator was already married to her according to the law; now it was a matter of the formalities. Since ’Sheva was a slave, Dadua served as her father. Shana donned a headcloth to approach the king on ’Sheva’s behalf.

  We covered up her sleeping body, then dispersed.

  I staggered through the rain, thinking about God’s proclamation that misused creativity was the root of evil actions, the ultimate reason the “earthlings” were destroyed. Yet this kind of imagination was the only thing that allowed a person to grasp the idea of a god, especially an invisible one.

  I really was going to become a Hindu.

  CHEFTU OPENED THE DOOR, sensed immediately that something was wrong. There was no welcoming fire, no smell of something burning, no cheery greeting. It was cold, dark, and in the quiet he heard her tears.

  He ran through the house to the balcony. Chloe was seated with her back against the wall, sobbing. He crouched beside her. “Chloe? Beloved?”

  She immediately jerked upright, wiping her face. “It’s this late? I’m sorry, I—”

  She made to get up, but she was speaking English, so he knew she was extremely upset. He pressed her still, his hand on her shoulder. Her face was splotched, her nose running, her eyes bloodshot. He sat beside her, hissing a little as the cold rain touched his body. He needed to change his linen tunics for wool to survive a Jerusalem winter.

  He kissed the back of her hand and waited. She stared out the window, onto the brown hillside. “Why are we here?”

  Cheftu shrugged. “It is where the lintels brought us?” She sniffed, rubbing her nose with her hand. “God, what I wouldn’t give for Kleenex!”

  He didn’t know what a “kleenex” was, but he had a makeshift handkerchief. She thanked him and blew her nose.

  “We are here, but nothing has changed. I think we probably messed up history, because we kept the people who had done this stuff before from doing it this time.”

  “Stuff?” he repeated, confused. “Beloved, you must speak clearly when you choose English. What stuff?”

  “Jersualem. The Ark. Bathsheba.”

  So she had heard. Uri’a the Hittite would marry Bathsheba. At some point the Bible said that David would see her bathing, then after a night of passion she would be found pregnant. Attempts would be made to lure Uri’a into bed with his own wife, but they would fail.

  David would arrange for Yoav to get Uri’a killed in battle.

  The king would marry his paramour.

  N’tan, the tzadik, would disguise the story and tell it to the king, asking for his judgment. David would grow furious, claim that the man in the story deserved punishment. Then N’tan would utter the phrase that became his legacy: “You are that man.”

  Bathsheba and David’s first child would die. They would have another, who would be Solomon.

  Everything was happening, just as Holy Writ said. Not as Cheftu had imagined these Bible stories would be enacted, but it followed the very words.

  The very words an Egyptian scribe in the Israelite court reported.

  “What about that ‘stuff’?”

  “Why are we here?” she said, looking at him. “This history is already in place. We weren’t needed. This was pointless!”

  He looked into the sky, wondering how le bon Dieu, if indeed he dwelt in the sky, felt about her comment. “Shall we start with Jerusalem?” he said.

  Chloe shrugged. “Sure.” She blew her nose again. “It was invaded. We know that.”

  “You know this from history?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “How do you know that you weren’t the essential piece to this invasion?”

  “Jersalem was invaded by David. You’re saying I’ve always been a part of this history?” Her voice sounded tinged with hysteria.

  The concept was staggering, he had to admit. Then again, it made sense in a circular sort of way. “Now look: You talk of destiny, a path that God has made for you.”

  “You sound like Avga’el when you speak Hebrew,” she commented.

  He glanced at her and continued speaking. “Then you talk of history, of a path you know was carved.” He shrugged. “It follows that perhaps you have always been in this history; perhaps being part of the invasion is your destiny.”

  “And being a writer of the Bible is yours?”

  Cheftu realized that if the one statement were to be true, then the other might be as well. So history was fabricated by the future? It didn’t follow Greek, linear thinking, the thought processes of Europeans or, he guessed, Americans. But it had the Byzantine twists of the East, the legacy of the labyrinth, in its reasoning.

  It had imagination. It was a creative way to weave history. Was it possible that scores of people were traveling from one time to another? Did people from beyond Chloe’s future travel to beyond the past he and Chloe were aware of?

  Perhaps they were not as unique as he’d thought? “If what you are saying is anywhere close to being the truth, then if I weren’t here …” She trailed off, shaking her head. The rains, which had slackened, started heavily again. “The idea is staggering: no Jerusalem for the Jews? or the Christians? or the Muslims?” She was mumbling to herself. “No Middle East peace knot, but no monotheism, either?” She looked at him. “If there were no Jerusalem, where would the Temple be built? Where would Christ be crucified? Where would Mohammed return to earth?”

  Cheftu shrugged. It seemed a ridiculous idea, all of this history perched on one ivory set of shoulders. “Yoav picked you.”

  “Why? Why me?”

  “He obviously knows more of your military experience than I.”

  “No, he didn’t. No one knows of my military experience.”

  “Will you tell me?” Cheftu heard the hope in his tone. He’d been curious for years, but she never spoke of her modern life. In fact, he knew more of who she’d been from RaEm’s comments than from her own. Did she know how amazing she was to him?

  “Sure, why not?” Still speaking English, so she was yet upset.

  “How did you serve?” he asked. “Officer in the air force, the USAF.”

  Cheftu shook his head in amazement. “A military that flies, mon Dieu, what wonder! Tell me from the beginning.”

  “I started high school early because I’d skipped around so many schools. Which meant I started university early. By the time I graduated, I was only twenty years old. My plan was to do a stint, maybe five or ten years, in the air force as an officer.”

  “Why?”

  She chuckled. “Someone from my family had always been in the military. In the English branch of my family we’ve fought since Cromwell. I’d grown up hearing about the War Between the States from the American side. My father had served in Vietnam. It was tradition, it was important to me.”

  “But you are a woman.”

  “You noticed?” she said teasingly.

  Cheftu kissed her hand. “A little.” He winked. “Did that not present problems for you?”

  “Of course it did, but I didn’t care. The more difficult it became, the more determined I became. I felt like my family’s honor was on my shoulders.”

  “Did they support you?”

  “You must be joking. My father was livid, Mimi cried, and my mother tore up an entire rose garden in her fury. Only my siblings supported me, understood.” Chloe linked her fingers with his. “I was the last of us to declare my filial freedom. So … I di
d the training.”

  She looked away, her gaze seeing some other world.

  “I was in Te—the same state where my grandmother was.”

  “Mimi?”

  “She would have loved the way you say that, with the accent on the second mi.” She smiled at him, her green eyes dark with pain but fighting through it. “You’re so French.”

  Cheftu kissed her hand. “Oui, madame. Continue?”

  “At the last minute, before finals week, I had a chance to go see her. It was a Friday afternoon; the leaves were changing with the seasons. I let myself into her house. It was a big Victorian, with a wraparound porch.” She wet her lips. “Mimi was sitting in the living room, in the dark, crying.” Cheftu reached over and squeezed her hand, fighting to understand through her américain accent. “She had just heard from her doctor. She had cancer.”

  “Mon Dieu,” he whispered, aching for her. Cancer—that unknowable, unconquerable illness that took so many, for no reason. Even in Chloe’s time it was the same? An ultimate evil?

  “Well, I was finishing my last semester of university. I’d been on a temporary assignment for the air force, close by. Mimi did chemotherapy, she tried, she tried… . But after a year, when I’d been on active duty, it was obvious she could no longer take care of herself. My father couldn’t come home, my mom had come back sporadically, but …” She sighed. “I went to my commanding officer. I told him that Mimi didn’t have long and I wanted to be with her. So we made a deal.” She glanced up, smiled. “I haven’t bartered often, I’m lousy at it, but for this I fought with every tool I had.”

  “What was your arrangement?”

  “I would leave active duty, go into a temporary retirement, but continue reservist assignments. Which meant that out of the month, I was active for a week and active for a whole other month out of the year.” She shrugged. “Most of my skills were computer based anyway.”

  “Com-puu-ter?” This was a new technology—fortunately he knew that from RaEm. Exactly what it meant, he did not know. However, from RaEm’s comments it was recreating the world in much the same way movable type had.