Rachel and Leah (Women of Genesis)

by Orson Scott Card

  But Leah did not want to teach Zilpah how not to offend her. She wanted to teach herself how not to be offended.

  She knew perfectly well what people were saying, because several women made it a point to be sure she overheard them: “There goes Leah, off to pout inside her tent again.” “Well, at least that’s better than her having a fit over nothing the way she usually does.”

  And it was better. The camp was more peaceful. Of course, this realization led Leah to have the obvious childish, spiteful thought: Things would be even better if I were thoughtful enough to get sick and die.

  But that kind of thinking led nowhere, she knew that. It had nothing to do with walking with the Lord.

  So in her brooding, instead of going over and over again how unkind people were, she would try to find excuses for them. Sometimes there was no excuse—they had clearly meant to hurt her, and it had worked. But most of the time there was no intent to offend.

  When someone thought she knew something that only people with good vision could know—who it was who was visiting the camp, for instance, or how the first buds were coming out on the trees—then wasn’t that a good thing? Wasn’t it proof that they had forgotten that her vision was bad?

  And when they made allowances that she didn’t need, and offered to help her to do things she was perfectly capable of doing, wasn’t that good, too? They were just trying to help, to make her life easier.

  As she trained herself to think this way, she stopped feeling hurt and angry so often. She began to be able to say, “Thank you for offering to help, but this is a job I like to do myself.” Or she’d say, “It’s so silly, because I know most people can see it, but I just can’t make out things that far away.” At first they almost cowered, expecting her correction to turn into a rage. But gradually they realized that she wasn’t going to rage at them over such things, and then they responded more naturally, too.

  It was with Zilpah that she practiced speaking kindly. It didn’t come naturally to her—of that she was ashamed, now that she recognized it. And Zilpah’s response was to ask her very specific questions about her malady. “Why can you see perfectly well what dress I’m carrying, but you can’t see the bruise on my forehead from the stone that stupid boy threw?”

  Then Leah would explain that the dress was brightly colored, and she recognized the bold striped pattern. But the bruise was not so very different in color, and the edges were gradual. “To my eyes, it’s just a shadow, if I can see it at all.”

  “So you can see colors but only if they’re really different?”

  “If I get very, very close then I can see almost everything. But from farther away, everything is just different smears of color—in bright light, that is. When it’s dark, then I’m almost completely blind.”

  Having somebody listen while she explained things was nice—she remembered that she had had a few such conversations with Bilhah, too. And, like Bilhah, Zilpah took some care to remember what she had been told. She made fewer mistakes. She began to know when help was needed and when it wasn’t. And, perhaps most important, she began explaining to other people what Leah’s actual limitations were—and what they were not.

  When Bilhah had tried to do this, Leah had furiously told her to stop. “I don’t want you gossiping about me! Can’t I have any privacy in this camp?” Now, though, Leah realized that the more people knew about her tenderness of sight, the better they’d understand her.

  Of course, all this did not happen at once. There were still rages in the first few months, and now and then in the first few years. Times when someone’s deliberate offense hurt her so badly that she lost control and her temper flared.

  Then she would weep bitterly afterward, ashamed before the Lord and before the people of the camp. They all knew she was trying to be different now, so when she lost her temper she was sure they all said, She’ll never change, she’s always going to be that way. But at least the poor dear is trying! It’s better than it was!

  Her refuge was always the holy books. She came every morning, and even though it was hard to face Bilhah for the first few weeks, she would concentrate on the words themselves, playing them in her mind for as long as she could. The method was a good one: Bilhah reading a phrase, and then silently copying out the words on the new scroll. It gave Leah time to let the words sink in, to ponder them. She could think much faster than Bilhah could write, so it was as if each phrase held its own sermon or story as it worked out in Leah’s mind.

  Bilhah never became friendly or warm, and Zilpah commented on it afterward until Leah asked her to stop. “I hurt her,” said Leah. “Why should she be warm?”

  “Because she’s nobody, for one thing,” said Zilpah. “Not as big a nobody as me but still a nobody, and you’re the lord’s daughter, so she should consider herself lucky she gets to read to you!”

  “She’s copying the word of God. I consider myself lucky that I get to sit by her and hear the words as she reads.”

  “Honestly, mistress, sometimes you take this business about being kind all the time way too far.”

  “I don’t think I can take it too far,” said Leah.

  Zilpah teased, of course. “Oh, yes, Robber Man, please take everything I own. And wouldn’t you like to beat me with sticks for a while?”

  “I mean with the people of the camp,” said Leah. “I’ve been unkind for so long, I think it won’t hurt me to try a little harder. And Bilhah isn’t nobody. Neither are you. When we’re there listening to the word of God, he’s talking to us all the same.”

  “Gods don’t pay attention to girls like me,” said Zilpah.

  “Not gods,” said Leah. “How long have you been in this camp, and you still talk about gods?”

  “All my life, and yes, gods. Doesn’t your father have those two gods he brings out at festival time?”

  “They aren’t gods, they’re just statues representing the Lord and his great Angel. So we remember who it is we’re praying to.”

  “So what do the prophets do, hold those statues up to their ears to hear what the gods are saying?”

  “God, not gods,” said Leah. “It’s the word of God, the Lord, and the prophets hear inside their hearts, weren’t you listening when Jacob explained it?”

  “I heard him talk about that dream he had of a ladder leading into heaven and all the angels praising the chief god and singing … whatever it was they sang.”

  “Not the chief god, the only God.”

  “Oh really? Then why call him ‘the most high God’ unless there are gods that aren’t so high?”

  “Zilpah, how can you listen to the words of the prophets and still know absolutely nothing about what they say?”

  “I try to listen,” Zilpah answered honestly. “But a girl can think her own thoughts, can’t she?”

  “Or fall asleep,” said Leah.

  “Only the once!”

  “Only the once that you fell over,” said Leah. “What about the dozen times that you snored a little sitting up?”

  “I never.”

  “You often.”

  But it was all right that Zilpah didn’t listen all that well. She was a different person, with her own desires and thoughts. The words would have their effect even if she didn’t listen closely. The day would come when she would realize what she was hearing.

  Just as the words came to mean more to Leah. The more she understood, the more she realized how little she had understood before. She wanted to go back and read everything again. But instead of demanding it, as she would have before—she could imagine herself going to her father and wailing about how unfair it was that she could never go back and reread things the way Bilhah could whenever she wanted—she told herself, it’s good to know that even what I’ve already heard, I haven’t truly heard because I didn’t understand it. There are years ahead, till Jacob leaves and takes these books with him. Perhaps then I can think back and remember things that I didn’t understand at the time, and the Wisdom of God will make them clear to
me.

  God could not have invited me to walk with him, if he didn’t mean to show me the path. So even when the books are gone, I must believe that God will not forget me.

  It was the confidence, that peace that came from the quiet hours of listening and thinking and even, occasionally, understanding with perfect clarity, that sustained her through her own failures and through the difficult times when she succeeded in curbing her temper.

  And after a while, the miracle happened. She was no longer pretending. She really didn’t get angry. She couldn’t remember why she ever had. There was no reason for it. She was not ill-treated.

  Finally it dawned on her: She had never really been angry at the people around her, the poor things. She had been angry at her own blindness. She had been angry at God for his unfairness. And now she wasn’t angry because she no longer wished for things to be different. Her eyes were as they were. They kept her from doing certain things. But the things that mattered most to her, she could do just fine. Tender eyes would not keep her from walking in God’s path.

  She was no longer pretending to be someone else. Nor could she honestly say that she had become a new person—though she knew that some people spoke of her that way. She was still the same Leah she had always been. Only now she was not trying to make everyone pretend that she was the equal of Rachel. She was content to be herself. Most of the time, anyway.

  If she still cried herself to sleep some nights, that was nobody’s business but her own. It’s not as if the pain of her limitations had gone away. She just didn’t let it make her angry anymore. And she no longer used it to get her father to do her bidding.

  The years went by and she got older. She developed a woman’s body. And her father began allowing serious suitors to come and see her. She was pleased that the men he brought were not chosen because they were so desperate that any miserable blind girl would do. They were men of real stature in the Haran or, one of them at least, in Byblos. And some of them were still young, not older men looking for a replacement for a dead wife or, worse yet, a young second wife who would have to live under the domination of the living first wife. Father was showing her real respect.

  And she strove to merit his respect, meeting the men gracefully, speaking candidly about the condition of her eyes and how it limited her—and how it didn’t. She had told Father that she preferred to explain it herself, instead of having it talked about when she wasn’t there. “Whatever you say, Father, they will assume that it’s worse than you’re admitting. But if I say it myself, explaining it simply, then they’ll be able to see that I really can do the things I say I can do. And they’ll also learn that I’m honest and that I’m not stupid, I can talk clearly to a man without false modesty or shame.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that decent girls don’t talk to prospective suitors on their first visit?”

  “Because they have nothing to say and for them to talk would only reveal their ignorance.”

  Father laughed at that, and let her speak.

  But after each such meeting, it would come down to the same thing: “Father, I don’t think he would be happy with a wife who worships the true and living God of Abraham and Isaac.”

  “Do you think I’d bring them here if they hadn’t already promised that you could worship as you wish?”

  “Father, they say it, and they may even think they mean it, but when they take part in the public rituals and their wife makes a point of not being there, how long before they start asking me and then begging me and then demanding that I not shame them?”

  “What do you know about how men act?” Father retorted.

  “Am I wrong?”

  “Men are different from each other, not all the same.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Because there’s not one of these men that would let me raise my children to serve the God of Abraham and him only.”

  And to that, Father had no answer. Except the obvious one. “Leah, there’s only one Jacob, and he’s promised to your sister.”

  “I don’t want my sister’s husband. He’s my teacher. He’s a prophet of God. That’s all he is to me, and that’s enough. He can keep on being those things to me after he’s married Rachel.”

  “He can if I’m able to talk him into staying here. I don’t want him to go off and take Rachel away, but I think he’s going to want to make his fortune and how can he do that as my steward?”

  “Well that’s easy,” said Leah. “Change the terms of his bondage. Allow him to keep a certain portion of the increase of the flocks, and allow him to take men into his own service. Let him build up his household in the shadow of yours.”

  “But he’s a proud man, and that would be a gift.”

  “He’s been your steward for how many years now? And have you prospered? Have your flocks increased to such a degree that you now have men roaming far and wide through the grasslands?”

  “A portion of the increase. Now that’s a thought. To keep him here with Rachel. Not in bondage, then, and not even as a steward. More like a …”

  “A son?”

  “Partner,” said Father. “I already have all the sons I need. Sometimes I think I have a few extras, though that’s an evil thing for a father to say.”

  Leah didn’t think it was evil, just accurate, but she kept that thought to herself.

  “But we were talking about your husband. Leah, there aren’t a lot of men who worship only the true God, and not the version of God called Ba’al.”

  “I know.”

  “If you’re determined to marry only a man who will let you raise your children as you were raised …”

  “I intend to do a much better job than that.”

  Father looked really hurt.

  “Father,” she said impatiently, “I intend to raise my children without their mother being dead.”

  “Well, that’s what your mother intended, too,” said Father.

  “And wouldn’t it have been better if she had lived?”

  He nodded and looked off into space. It embarrassed Leah, to realize that she had been so insensitive as to make a kind of joke about the death of her mother when she was too young really to remember her. Father still loved her and missed her, and her death was a hard thing for him to have to talk about, and Leah hadn’t known that till now.

  “Father,” said Leah. “I want to be a wife and mother. But I know it may never happen. I’ve always known that. I thought it would be my tender eyes that caused it, but if the cause of my loneliness is that I couldn’t find a husband who would serve God, then I can bear it without rancor.”

  Father hugged her then, and wept a little. “Oh, Leah, I want you to be happy, especially now that you—took control of your life and …”

  “And stopped making everybody else miserable?”

  “You have become again the child I adored so much when you were little. I always understood why you were so frustrated and angry, and so I bore it, but I always prayed to the Lord and his Angel that you would be happy, and I see now that my prayer has been answered.”

  They spoke of these same things from time to time, a bit of it here, a bit of it there. Leah knew that Father was more and more anxious for her to marry before Rachel did. “I don’t want tongues to have your name in derision.”

  “If I don’t marry, then Rachel shouldn’t be held captive to my solitude. I’m happy she has a husband who adores her, and such a man! She’ll marry, I won’t.”

  “You will marry,” said Father. “It’s impossible that we won’t find the right man for you.”

  “You’re so sweet, Papa,” she said. “But I can bear it, as long as you promise me that you’ll never make me depend on my brothers.”

  “They’re different men now,” said Father. “Work has been good for them.”

  “They’re not different men,” said Leah. “The only difference is that they’ve learned to hide what they really are from you.”

  “I see. Leah can change, but Nahor and Terah can’t.”

&
nbsp; “They hate Jacob,” said Leah simply.

  “They love him! They’ve learned everything they know from him! Well, except for what they learned from me, I’d like to think.”

  “They aren’t the grateful kind,” said Leah. “But they know you want them to feel that way, so they pretend in order to make you happy.”

  “And you know this because they’ve taken you into their confidence?”

  “Because of how they still treat the servants when no one’s looking.”

  “Except you.”

  “Remember my eyes, Father. They don’t think I can see, either, and I can’t—but I can hear much better than they think, so I overhear them talking.”

  “They’re plotting again, and you didn’t tell me?”

  “Not plotting, Father. Just complaining. Jacob had better be long gone from here before you die, Father, or their first act will be to kill him.”

  “They get angry sometimes, that’s all.”

  “I think that can be said of most murderers, don’t you think?”

  “What do you know about murderers?” Father laughed at the thought. “Leah, I’ll find you a husband, and you won’t have to worry about living in Nahor’s house.”

  And so it went, month after month. Father always promising to find a husband, Leah patiently meeting each inappropriate man. Now and then one of them would profess to be worshippers of the true God, but Leah would quickly find out that they had no idea who the true God was. “I’d rather marry a man who is honest about not believing in the Lord than a man who pretends he believes solely in order to fool you into giving me to him.”

  “Oh, no,” said Laban. “Now you add honesty to the list of requirements?”

  “It wasn’t already on your list?”

  “I’m not sure I know any honest men, at least not in Haran or Byblos.

  “Keep searching, Papa. Miracles sometimes happen.”

  Then she went back to her study and contemplation and prayer. Back to trying to learn how to walk with the Lord.

  CHAPTER 20

  To Rachel it didn’t seem like seven years. It didn’t feel like waiting. It was just … life. Each day had a morning, a sunrise, a sunset, meals and sleep, and in between, work, the smell and music of the sheep and goats and cattle, the breezes and winds, the hot sun and the cold rain, the laughter and anger of shepherds, and through it all, Jacob, like the tree in whose shade the animals gathered during the heat of day, or the water they thirstily drank. He was not at the center of Rachel’s life, he was at the center of everyone’s life.