Eve (33 page)

Was this what Elohim had spoken of in the Garden?

When I thought of the other possibility—that of Abel
not
choosing me, my self-righteousness guttered like a singular flame. How devastated Elohim must have been when we turned our backs to Him, wanting nothing more than “other,” even though we did not yet know what other was.

Naava woke with scarlet spots upon her breasts and stomach. She
pulled at her skin. “No,” she exclaimed. “No, no, no.” She touched the papules daintily; they were soft and round. She knew it was worse than a simple heat rash, and she cringed to think that she would have to go to Aya for help.

Her beauty. Her pride. She did not want to live.

At the morning repast, Aya announced with a smile that Naava had abundantly more upon her face and neck and back. Naava thought,
What kind of wretched face do I display to the world?
The spots begged her to scratch them, tear them apart, let them weep, but Aya snapped, “You’ll look like a warthog.”

Naava wanted to retort, “You would know,” but she was feeling feverish and a bit of malaise and had not the gumption. Besides, Aya had promised a cool poultice that would take the itch away. Naava would wait until
after
Aya had given it to her to say what she felt. All her plans were ruined.
Who knew how long this affliction would last?
She could not return to the city looking like a piece of raw speckled meat.

Cain joked, “What beast have we here?”

She stomped her foot. “Stop it this instant,” she snapped at him.

He laughed through the meal and continued to torment her, calling her
“maggot face” and “cheese face” and “wormwood.” She wondered why she had ever lain with him.

Ever since that day in the city, Naava had pondered her encounter with the prince. True, she had imagined licking the salt from his earlobes and kissing the hollow of his neck. In her dreams, she had stroked the hairs on his chest that curled like spirals—but no, she was getting this all wrong. That was Cain. The prince’s chest had been bare. She felt her hands and feet go numb with delight, her lips go slack with hunger. She envisioned breasts and buttocks cupped. She gripped his swollenness in her mouth and rolled it about on her tongue, teasing it, coaxing it to grow, just as she had done with Cain. He groaned, she believed, for she had made him happy. She wanted him to like her. She wanted him to love her.

She had been a coward before, when the moment had come. The prince had tried to do all those things and more, there upon the hard swept earth, and she had rejected him; she had pushed him away. She had acted like a child, afraid of adventure and thrill.

Why should she have felt these emotions if she was not ready?

In truth, what kind of Elohim would create such desires if He did not want them to be fulfilled? Show her Elohim or Cain’s gods. Did they know lust? Did they know love? They did not. Not as Naava knew it, for she knew of no one else who felt those coursings as she did, in her heart, or in her loins.

She and her prince would taste each other and be full.

In the meantime, Naava would allow Cain to teach her. He was red, like fire and heat and jealousy. For this sort of thing, Naava needed passion; she needed the blazing surge of anger so that she might learn quickly what sort of thing love was. He would give, and she would take. She would be a fast learner.

Then she would be ready for the prince.

Harvest was two moons away. It would creep up on us like a jackal
if we were not careful. Adam had latched on to Abel and Cain’s agreement—that of offering their first fruits to Elohim at harvesttime, in gratitude for all He had done. And since Adam knew more about green things than about Abel’s leaping and bounding things, he had begun to follow Cain around, pestering him with questions and plans.

I saw the eagerness on Adam’s face. This had been a wish of his too, that we do more to acknowledge Elohim. He had always been a true believer, unlike me, who had struggled with Elohim’s absence and what I saw to be His utter disregard for us since the Garden. Indeed, it was Adam who insisted on holding hands and giving thanks before each meal.

Adam related to me that as he and Cain had trudged out to the fields one morning, he began rattling off all the chores that needed doing before harvest. “We must cull the dates and the grapes,” Adam had said. He had been studying the ground intently, searching for signs of moles, so he had not noticed the growing irritation on Cain’s face. “We must repair the fences around the vegetable garden, so the rabbits can’t get to it. Then I think we should—”

Cain swiveled to face Adam. “Enough,” he said in an exasperated tone. “Why don’t you stick to the orchards, and I’ll do everything else.”

Adam’s face shriveled like a mushroom past its prime. He did not want
Cain to see his disappointment, so he turned and said, “Yes, you’re right, you’re right.” He rubbed his forehead, then turned and clapped his hands. “We’re going to do this thing! Elohim will be pleased.”

Cain studied his father’s face briefly, then turned and plodded off toward the river, toward his date palms.

Without telling Cain, Adam had begun to weave reed mats to shove underneath the thin-skinned expanding gourds, to prevent the fruit from softening and ripening into the soil. He pruned the plants; he pulled out rogue specimens. He came in from the fields, his face streaked with dirt and his fingers black with earth. He sighed happily and said, “We shall have a bountiful harvest this year.”

What a difference, this feeling that Elohim would be pleased, rather than angry with us. It seemed that since we left the Garden it was all we had experienced of Him.

The cry that burst from my lips in the Garden was
Forgive me.

I wanted the thing undone. But just as clouds cannot take back the rain, I could not take back our eating of the fruit.

Listen to me carefully now.
Forgive. What did this word mean? What was I asking of Elohim? To forget my disobedience? To remember but not to hold me accountable? To overlook my action and let me stay?
Yes, yes, it is the latter I wanted. That, and not to die.

I did not want to die.

Nothing can be taken back. I carry the thorns of Adam and my children in my body, where
I
have been hurt, and it is not so easy a task, this forgiveness. I wish it were easier. The mind and body do not forget the fast-beating heart, the palsied hand, the choking cries that come from an attack, be it physical or emotional. Abuse pummels the body and leaves it limp—but alert. For the next time. Think of it as a bloodless rising in one’s breast, to preserve and camouflage oneself against further predation.

This forgiving business is left for those of us who have been hurt but remain alive.

Dead creatures cannot forgive an injustice. Can a hare
forgive
the jackal’s teeth? Can a mouse
forgive
the eagle’s talons? I think not.

So I struggled with this thing
called forgiveness. What did it mean?

Another thing: What was I supposed to do when someone believed, erroneously, that I had wronged him and would not forgive
me
? What was to be done about that?

It is Adam’s deafness I am referring to.

After losing our first baby, I woke on the mountainside, stiff and unknowing, cupped in Adam’s embrace. A light snow fell about us, like ash from a fire. A squirrel busied himself with a nut, then chattered and fled when I turned my face upward. I could feel the silver ice cutting into my crackling face.

Little by little, I remembered. The expulsion, the bear, our baby. The memories flooded in, wild and dark. This was the moment I always thought of, the irreversible severance of the thin membrane between happiness and sorrow.
How is it torn so quickly, so easily?

I thought of the child, its hands curled like fern fronds, one thumb inserted into the slit of the mouth, and the eyes, dark and knowing, like cat eyes glowing in the night. I thought of other things we had dug into the ground, bulbs and seeds and offshoots—and the one Tree of Life seed— and I wanted to believe that, just like them, my baby would come springing up out of the ground, all green and living, and reach its arms out like branches that I could hang on to.

It was wishful thinking, I knew.

After a brief discussion in which neither of us mentioned the child, Adam and I surmised that the black stream in the hanging valley below us would zigzag its way through the sharp plummeting ridges and eventually end up in the great sparkling sea we saw in the far distance. If we could find the stream and follow it, or at least skirt its shores, we could end up on that distant sandy plain where there was no snow. Little did we know how flawed our assumptions were.

The plain was moons away, not days.

For the most part, I am pleased to admit, we were extremely resourceful. We had had reliable teachers—yes, I am counting the animals as our teachers—and now we reaped the benefits. We mimicked the rabbit and
the bark beetle and gnawed on bits of fibrous bark; we remembered the deer and plucked the remaining raspberries and blackberries and elderberries from their vines; we foraged like the monkeys—for nuts, ants, termites, mushrooms, fungi, snails, caterpillars, even birds’ eggs.

Before we made our way down to the river—slippery handhold over slippery handhold, our wrists aching, our legs shaking with exhaustion— we slaked our thirst on melted snow in the dips and hollows of leaves and branches, but the eating of it only chilled us.

All in all, we lasted many days on such subsistence, although our bellies and tongues longed for the rich diversity of the Garden.

One morning we woke to a dense fog and a hushed melancholy. A single drop of water dripped from a leaf or a branch onto another—
plawp.
The trees snapped with sudden wings. Then we heard footsteps nearby, delicate
tap taps
of an oryx or ibex or gazelle. A coucal called
hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo.

It was the clattering and clacking of horns that changed everything.