Havah (33 page)

The One has been silent, but surely he cannot deny Adam, his first child, to whom he gave his strange and holy language before ever it was profaned by human use. Surely he cannot stay silent to him forever.

On the fourteenth day of our journey, Adam is feverish. He drifts in and out of consciousness. We bathe his forehead and put up the tent for him in the noon sun, and travel by night.

During the day I go off by myself. I cry to the One—not for my sake anymore but for the sake of my brother, my lover, my father.

How desperate these days! My heart quickens between hope and despair. We pass the old settlement without stopping; there is no time. I want to go to the grave of Hevel, but it is nothing now but a patch of earth.

“ARE YOU AFRAID, MOTHER?”

I do not know how to tell Shet that I have no fear of the death, for I have been dying it for nearly a millennium. I do not fear it because I return to the place my sons have gone. There, even in the earth, I will wait—surely the One is faithful. Surely the One is good.

I do not tell him that I wait for the birdsong to seem somehow more heavenly and ethereal at once, as though from a throat that never devoured anything so base as a worm. For the air to smell of apricot and peach, for the sound of a river fed by the waters of the abyss. I start at the stir of every breeze, at the whisper through the stunted grass on the plain. It cannot have been a lifetime ago that I heard the sound of the One that Is in the garden, that I waded in the reeds and wandered through the grove.

But there is no birdsong other than the warbler, and the air on this most stifling of days does not stir at all except with the buzzing of flies.

We are farther beyond the settlement than I have ever been since those first days. I search memory as one does a moldering basket in the back of the storehouse. I know this place—it is the one we came to after our flight from the valley. It is the place I first wished to die.

We stop along the river and water the animals, and my eyes have fastened upon a hill overlooking the bend ahead.

“Stay here a while,” I say, hurrying away from the river. There are signs now of refuse. We are not the only ones to have ever come this way. I make my way along the hillside, my eyes scanning every shape, every tree.

It is the narrowest scrape of path, just barely worn from use—another’s, not mine. There now, I see it—the mouth of the cave. My heart springs within my chest, though I would never have thought that I should rejoice to see this place. I run up the path, skittering on rocks, my feet less nimble than they once were, but briefly remembering what it was to be agile.

I enter the cool of the cave. The sound of the air, circling at the entrance, is like an old song. The sun, descending in the west, floods the back of the cave.

With my shadow upon the back wall, I think,
It might be a day in that same year, and I might be coming here for the first time, not knowing how to cook food, never having touched meat, repelled by the skins that I wore, lying on the floor. There! That rock was my pillow as I waited to die.

Seized by impulse, I lie down.

No wonder I hoped to die. How had I ever abided any bed such as this? But I lay here three days until the adam’s snore roused me. I chuckle, but the sound catches in my throat. How strong was the man who had clung to me like a child, begging me not die. Now here I am, willing him to live only long enough for me to beg entrance, a miracle, anything, from God.

I sit up, seeing some small signs of use of this place—I think I recognize some of our hearth stones, scattered, burnt on one side. Brushing through the debris, I find some small pieces of flint. They are just splinters now. Suddenly, I wonder—

I crawl upon my hands and knees toward the back, feeling against the wall, beneath every crevice. I search like that for long moments, like a crazed woman, frantic.

I lift a smooth bit of polished stone.

The cord has rotted away, but there, unmistakably, is the figure of a woman—worn, but still perfect.

It is a sign. As we have come out this way, now we retrace our path. As one reentering the womb, we go back the way we have come.

Shet is looking for me by the time I return. I know my face is shining, beaming.

“Mother! Where were you? What is that, a cave there?”

“Come away, Son, and tonight I will show you a wonder.”

That night, as one of the men makes our simple meal, boiling gruel in a skin over the fire for the adam, I draw Shet near me and show him the thing in my hand.

“You cannot know what this is, but it is a miracle.” I tell him the story of the day that his father gave it to me, and Shet weeps upon hearing it.

“Then—then this comes from that place.”

“It does.”

“It is a real place.”

“Of course. It has always been a real place.”

The next day I swear I have found the place where we fell, exhausted, near the river. Here, we sprawled among the onagers and the deer. Where I searched for it painstakingly before, memory floods back as effortlessly as a second twin slipping from the womb.

We journey north. As we go, I point out familiar landmarks—there, that hill where I fell down and thought never to rise again. And here, where his father put down the lamb before hoisting it back onto his shoulders and running as thunder struck from the heavens again and again.

Today my heart hammers in excited staccato. “Very close now!” I shout, like one of my children. And then, “Very, very close—this is the mouth of the opening, the place the river came out! There, let us climb that hill and look down upon it.”

But upon cresting the hill, I am stunned. Below us, on this side of the river, is a small settlement.

“Who are they, Mother?” Shet asks.

“I don’t know.”

We climb down. As soon as the people of the settlement see us, they come out. I see the wariness in their posture. Shet goes ahead, and by the time we get there, slowed by the litter, they have come to help carry it.

“Great Mother!” the man who comes to meet us calls out. He wears a strange headdress with feathers on either side of it, like wings. Upon his tunic are many small metal disks, nearly like scales, hammered flat. “We are the descendants of Hanokh who have left the city to live in the wilderness. But here now lies the Great Father of us all. Let us give you shelter and comfort in the hour of his death.”

“No!” I say, desperate. “No, we have come to return to the valley.” He squints at me. His skin is dark and his nose slightly hooked. In this way he looks almost birdlike. Indeed, I suppose he bears some resemblance to Irad as I remember him. “We have come to return to the valley. Surely you have heard the tale. Well, I tell you it is true, and I have promised the adam on the promise of the One, the Great Creator, that I would return him.”

I feel tears in my eyes. “Can you tell us the way to the valley, where comes this river, and there are mountains, as these, on either side? Is this the pass leading to that valley, where there are fruit trees in bloom, and grapes on the vine, and pistachios that grow wild—” I catch my breath, remembering the first time I ate pistachios and how the adam had chuckled, drawing out the shells from my mouth.

The man, their chieftain, turns to point upriver with his staff. Now as he turns his face away, I see there, fastened against the back of his head, a mask crafted without eyes, so that they look out like something empty and soulless. My skin chills, then prickles. I stare, not hearing at first what he says. Perhaps Shet does, too, but the effect cannot be the same for him as for me. He has not seen the being I have seen, even so recently, in my dreams, gazing down at me with one face and up at God with another.

“Beyond this gate is another mountain pass, and the mountains are as you say. And there is water that flows down on either side—”

“From an abyss?”

“I do not know, lady. Because there is thunder and lightning and sometimes fire there, so we do not—”

“Yes!
Yes!
Please, as your Great Mother and one hand-fashioned by the One, I ask you to take us there at once!”

He frowns, his face drawing down. “There is no good passage into that place, Mother.”

“There must be. Either way, I must see it. Perhaps I can find it. I must see it with my own eyes.”

“Pilgrims come, even the great father Kayin, to find this place that you speak of, and they have all gone away disappointed. Only visions of fire have they seen but even then, only in dreams.”

I gasp. Yes, it might look like fire, the beings lit up like hot metal on either side, as the lightning sparked the sky and the thunder crashed overhead.

“Take us.”

“Will you not rest first?”

“We cannot. We dare not. Adam dies.”

We trudge along the river, and my senses are like the wolf’s, smelling everything, sharp as the hawk, seeing everything. Do I know this bend? Did I pass it in the terror of our flight beneath a blackened sky? Do I know this shape of the mountain from here, as I looked back to see it outlined in obsidian and lit up by fire?

We travel through the afternoon, never slowing. I know they are amazed at me, at my strength and sure-footedness, but in fact, a heaviness is in my chest. I feel it in moments when I stop, but then my heart buoys me up and I forget. I feel no pain. Not even the blisters on my feet.

Adam opens his eyes for a while, and Shet walks beside him, shielding him from the sun with an outstretched part of his mantle.

“Ah!” Adam says. “The sky, how blue!”

“Yes!” I say, coming to walk next to him. “Yes! as your eyes, my darling, my love. The first time I saw them, I thought they were the sky. Did I ever tell you that?”

He smiles at me, saying nothing, and a short time later he naps.

We pass the first gate near the settlement. It is a small settlement, perhaps only a hundred people. As we go, I ask the leader, whose name is Abarja, “What is this headdress you wear—what does it mean?”

“It is the Kerub, the winged creature like a man that we worship.”

I stare at him. “You know the winged men? The golden men?” Now I can see as the sun reflects upon the scales of his tunic how he gleams in the most crude representation of that resplendent creature. That terrible creature.

“No, lady, but we came here after a lone traveler told a tale of two great kerubs with shining wings and faces within the flame at this very place you seek to go. He said they forbade all entry, and anyone who looked upon them was struck with fear, and some even died of it.”

“Nonsense, or I would not stand before you.”

He gasps, eyes wide. “You have seen this creature?”

“Do not forget who I am or who Adam is! We were there at the beginning of the world, when you and your father and his father were not even a thought! I have seen this creature, and he is terrible, and you do wrong to worship him. He is a great being, and surely he is divine, but he is crafted by the most high, for I have seen him kneeling before the One that Is.”

“Then surely he is a god that kneels before the One, for who can see the Great One in the flesh and survive?”

“I can. And I tell you, you do not do well.”

He says little after that, the feathers of his headdress ruffling in the wind. But I do not care what he does. I care only that we find the entrance.

At last. At last.

We walk for hours. The sun is sinking by the time we come to the place. I recognize it from a great ways away, and now, as we draw closer, there is a distant rumble from the sky.

“There, Mother. You see the river that comes from that place? But you see how it takes up the entire gorge. There is nothing else.”

I cry out and rush forward and break into a run. No. No. There must be the garden. The One promised. All these years I have waited. All these years I have lived with the promise, clung to it.

But as I stagger forward, I see he is right. The river comes out of the pass, wide and moving quickly. As I run to its edge, I can see nothing beyond it but more water, joined by trickles and falls in some places down the mountain—yes, yes! They are the same! But where there had been a garden, there is only water now. The gorge is deep here. There are no beings on either side, as in my dream, though the mountains are the same.

The island is gone and the trees upon it—surely, they are in the river, buried, dead, and washed away. I recognize the slopes above the water—and there, where they opened up, the outcrop that had collapsed when we had fled, burying, crushing the wolf.

Thunder sounds from far away.

“Mother, we must stop,” Shet says. “Father—we are losing him.”

HE IS SLIPPING AWAY. And we have come, we have found the place—but it is no more. I run from the camp and scream as loudly as I can, “Adonai! Adonai!” Again and again, until I am hoarse with it. When I fall down, Shet is there, holding me up as I sob my grief—not for the death, for this we knew would come, but for my failure to give to Adam the thing I had promised.

We are banished. There is no hope. We die.

We die.

I wail and beat my breasts.

“Come now, Mother,” Shet says, “And recover yourself. He is slipping away. You must come. It is close.”

He supports me as we walk back, and I try to wipe my face with my hands.

“My husband,” I whisper. “I have failed you. It is no more.”

He squeezes my hand, faintly, weakly. “It is my wrong,” he says, his breath a rasp.

“How can you say that?”

“Had I not eaten, perhaps the One would have forgiven you to keep us together. Had I kept . . . Had I watched . . . better. Had I stopped you as I could have—”

“If not for the transgression, we would not know redemption.” But the words are hollow in my ears.

“Then I am glad . . .” His voice trails off, and his breath is slow to regain its strength. “But, Isha—” and now tears squeeze from his eyes—“I am sad to leave you here.”

I show him the pendant, close his thin fingers around it. His eyes widen, and a small sound escapes his lips as he clasps it.