Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve (14 page)

T
O THE NORTH, FOLLOWING THE TRAIL OF THE
bears, Adam had some time ago come across a mountain-enclosed valley of plenty where there was abundant hunting. He would take his sons there, talk with them, and inform them which of their sisters they would couple with. Eve wanted to protect Aklia. She was afraid that Cain would reject her as a substitute for Luluwa. She begged Adam to be sure to placate Cain before they returned.

They left a few days later, at daybreak. Eve went out to see them off, veiling her sorrow. She walked with them until the bright sun was high above. In the distance she could see the dark mountains beneath the unpredictable autumn sky. The ocher leaves lining the ground crunched beneath her footsteps. The water of the river was running dark, muddled by the rains that loosened the earth, the roots, the stones along its banks. When they took leave, Eve asked them to raise their hands when they reached the edge of the valley where the vegetation began to thin. That way she would be able to see
them once more from a distance. She saw that her sons were puzzled, as they were used to her seeing them off without ceremony. Cain probably imagined she was doing it for him, she thought. Usually the three men did not go out together. It was rare for his father to ask him to come along. Adam and Abel usually went together and left Cain to go with the girls, or alone, looking for mushrooms, or for fertile land where he could plant his seeds. Clearly he was pleased that his father had asked him this time. Abel was also in good spirits. He loved his older brother. As a boy he always tagged along after him, imitating what he did. Often Abel's attempts to keep up with Cain ended in the inevitable accidents of childhood. Then Cain had to bear the wrath of his father, who scolded him for not taking care of his brother.

Eve waited on a promontory until after the men waved, the agreed-on salute, and disappeared into the distant vegetation. Then she sat down on the ground and burst into tears.

“Eve, Eve, don't cry.”

The Serpent was sitting beside her. She was not crawling on the ground. She had the same form she'd had when Eve first saw her in the Garden of Eden.

“I dreamed about you,” said Eve, amazed. “I dreamed about you as you were before, just as you are now. Did Elokim forgive you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think he will forgive us, too?”

“In his way, perhaps.”

“What will happen to my children?”

“They will know Good and Evil.”

“Will they suffer?”

“I told you that knowledge leads to suffering.”

“You always say things so I can't understand you.”

“I know no other way to talk.”

“Tell me what evil is. Are you evil?”

The Serpent laughed.

“Me? Don't be ridiculous. Evil, Good, all the things there are, and will be, on this planet, originate right here: in you, in your children, in the generations to come. Knowledge and freedom are gifts that you, Eve, were the first to have and that your descendants will need to learn to use for themselves. Often they will blame you, but without those gifts their existence will be intolerable. The memory of Paradise will run in their blood, and if they succeed in understanding Elokim's game, and do not fall into his traps, they will close the circles of time and will recognize that the end can be equal to the beginning. To arrive there they will have nothing except freedom and knowledge.”

“Are you saying that we will create Good and Evil on our own?”

“There's no one else. You are alone.”

“And Elokim?”

“He will remember you from time to time, but what he forgets is as vast as what he remembers.”

“We are alone.”

“The day you accept that, you will be truly free. And now I must go.”

“Will you fade away like the Garden? Will we see each other again?”

“I don't know.”

“I think we will. I don't think you will forget me.”

“Accept your solitude, Eve. Don't think of me, or of Elokim. Look around you. Use your gifts.”

The Serpent evanesced in the afternoon air. Eve walked back the way she'd come. A strong wind was blowing. A storm was approaching. She wondered if they would endure the reality of being alone. Would they be that alone? She remembered the skins they had covered themselves with after they left the Garden, the wind that saved them from death when they had leaped from the mountain, the recent round, occult moon. Why those signs? Could it be that the Serpent wanted them to forget Elokim? It was true that if they were alone there would be no one but them to recognize Good and Evil, or to learn not to expect anything other than what they could provide for themselves, or to determine on their own, unaided, the purpose of life. Perhaps that was the freedom the Serpent was talking about. If Elokim had enticed them to take it, so he could forget them and go forth to create other worlds, then knowledge, everything that had happened since their expulsion from the Garden, would have been a gift and not a punishment; it would show he trusted that they, and those who issued forth from them and lived and multiplied and inhabited those expanses, would find for themselves, and would construct, a way of life that would console them for the certainty of death. But then how could she explain Elokim's mandates? Cain with Aklia, Abel with Luluwa? How would their freedom survive if they had to go against their hearts and obey unknown designs like those? Why did they always have to face the anxiety of such dilemmas—obey or disobey—and punishments? No, thought Eve. We are not alone. We would be better off if we were.

She returned to the cave. It was drizzling. She found Luluwa and Aklia weaving palms for the baskets they used to collect fruit. The silence of premonitions weighed over them. Ever if Eve or Adam had not said anything, Aklia and Luluwa had sensed that their father's trek with his sons was more than a hunting trip. They had bled. They were women. Life waited inside them.

“When will they be back?” they asked. “It won't be long,” said Eve. She knew the hearts of the girls as well as she knew her own, but she could not bring herself to warn them of what lay ahead. She formed the words, chewed them, felt them move in her mouth, but something in her refused to speak them. She wanted the girls to be light of heart, wanted to delay their pain, to keep them wrapped in the tightly knit fabric that had enveloped their lives, and which now, as soon as words were spoken, would be ripped apart. She had never thought she would experience greater pain that what she had suffered when her children were born, but the pain that in recent days filled the air she breathed was as cruel as the pain locked in her memory. To know that there was precious little she could do to console the suffering they would endure brought a feeling of tightness to her chest. She dreamed herself following them along edge of precipices, roaring rivers, fires. She dreamed that her voice lay dead in her throat when she tried to warn them of the danger, the abysses, the tigers.

T
HE DAYS WENT BY. EVE WENT TO THE RIVER TO
catch fish and crabs. The leaves were beginning to pale in the trees; there was a smell of wet earth, and a sad air of dying summer floated over the land. She squatted beside the riverbank with her palm basket to wait for fishes to come closer. She saw the gleam of the water, its transparency, the foam of the current milling around the edges of the rocks. Perhaps she was exaggerating her worries, she thought. What is happening to me? She did not recall a time when she had been so dispirited. Why not expect her sons to be content with their mates? They all would love each other. They were siblings. They would not have to separate, or to renounce love. Not knowing the intimacy of the flesh, perhaps they would bear the change with less pain than she foresaw. Perhaps it was the depth of her desire for Adam that led her to imagine an equal passion in Cain, in Luluwa. Abel would not object to his mate. Aklia preferred Cain. Much as she tried to convince herself, however, she could not imagine Luluwa and Cain
resigned to ignore the instinct that had bound them together from the time they were young. She heard footsteps on the dried leaves. The Serpent, she thought. She looked up. It was Cain.

He came spilling over with words. Each with the impact of a sharp pebble. He threw them out in a hailstorm of feeling, without catching a breath. Jeering, passion, the cutting incisiveness of what he was saying was new in the air of the Earth. When did Cain's saliva turn bitter? Eve asked herself. She came out of the water, holding the basket, a couple of fishes jumping inside. She straightened her back and looked at him, eyes wide, the thumping of her heart pounding in her ears. Cain looked like he had been turned into stone. Hard. His face, hard, his mouth wide, down-turned, as if words took up more space than his teeth could hold. He spoke of beating, tearing, crushing, burying. He accused her for having given birth to him, for eating the fig, for losing Paradise, for allowing Adam to love only Abel. Idiot Abel. Only when he said “Luluwa” did his voice stumble, and he, aware of the effect, paused to recover the tone of injury and to describe, without a hint of brotherly love, Aklia's small, strange face that Eve, as long as she lived, could never consider any less beautiful than any of her other children's. It was hearing him say the things he said about Aklia that pulled Eve from her stunned, mute surprise.

“Go to the old cave, Cain, and do not come back until you are ready to ask for my forgiveness.”

Straight as a staff, with her hand pointing into the distance, blazing with pain and fury, she watched Cain shrink before her icy stare. She heard his footsteps crushing leaves when he
turned and marched off, striking rocks, tree branches, anything in his path, with the staff in his hands.

 

A
DAM'S DECISION
, E
LOKIM'S WILL
, had like a cataclysm ripped apart the intimate fabric of their lives. Screams, imprecations, laments, Aklia's devastated face, and Abel's frightening silence were what Eve found when she came back from the river. Adam was pacing back and forth, bewildered.

“His rage reminded me of the time I killed the bear with my bare hands. Cain fell on me. Then he turned on Abel. Blind. Abel did nothing. He covered his face with his hands. I had to pull Cain off him. They both ended up sobbing. Cain came back running. Abel said nothing. He didn't speak all the way back here. I talked to him. I explained. He just looked at me. It was terrible,” he said.

Eve led him from the cave. She took him to some rocks beneath the shade of a group of palm trees that grew in line with their new refuge. Still trembling, filled with anguish and anger. She sat down with her back against a stone. She didn't know about broken bones, but she imagined invisible bones that could fracture and make one crumple.

“This is like a new punishment.”

“We obeyed. We saw the signs in the sky. You conceded.”

“We lost Paradise. What will we lose this time?”

“I don't know, Eve. Perhaps this test is for them, for our children. Elokim must want to test their freedom, to know if they will obey him.”

“They are very young. They won't understand.”

Eve shook her head. She covered her face with her hands.
She could not cry. She wanted to protect her children. She could not resign herself to believe this was the trap that would make them lose their innocence. Liberty was a gift, the Serpent had said. But it seemed that Elokim himself did not understand freedom. He wanted them to be free, but he trapped them in those incomprehensible mandates. What was he made of? she asked herself. Of doubts, like us?

“What shall we do, Adam? How can we soothe Cain?”

“Time, Eve. Cain and Abel are brothers. Cain will understand that it wasn't Abel's decision,” said Adam. “He will have to understand that there are bloods that must not be mixed. I will send them to make offerings together. You and I will make them see that they must reconcile, that they must understand Elokim's designs.”

“As well as you and I understood?” Eve asked ironically.

The next day Cain still had not returned.

“I will send Aklia to look for Cain,” said Adam.

“No! Don't send Aklia,” she burst out. “I'm afraid he will do her harm. I will send Luluwa. He will listen to her. It will do the two of them good to talk.”

Eve had Luluwa get up from the corner of the cave where she had been rolled in a ball since the previous night, her legs drawn to her chest, face between her knees, sobbing. She looked at Luluwa. She was so young. Her body and face had just left childhood behind; her body was still babbling a new language. Eve wondered what it was like for her children to grow and mature. Neither she nor Adam had experienced that. But she did know the fierce desire to disobey demands whose reasons one could not discern. And she also knew the consequences.

“Go look for Cain, Luluwa.”

Aklia burst out crying. Abel's confused face was filled with quiet sorrow.

Luluwa went out to look for Cain. She went at midday and returned with him at dusk. It had been many hours. Eve looked at their faces cleansed of pain. They had disobeyed, she thought. They, too.

Cain knelt before Eve. He asked her forgiveness. Eve embraced him. She clasped him to her bosom. What will your punishment be, my son? she thought.

A
DAM 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.