Rachel and Leah (Women of Genesis) (13 page)

Yes, Bilhah. You can leave and become a tile sorter, arranging the bits by color and size. But what could I do? Where could I go? If someone hurts you, you can leave. But I can’t leave. My only chance is to send them away from me, since I can’t go away from them. Did you ever think of that?

It was a good thing that she had provoked Bilhah’s temper like that. It was good to know that Bilhah was not her friend, no more than any of the other women in the camp. That was Leah’s fate. To spend her life completely alone.

She cried in solitude, but not for long. Once the first rush of fury was gone, she controlled herself and lay there in the silence, thinking. Not about Bilhah—she refused to let herself think about the harsh things Bilhah had said.

Instead she thought about Jacob. And, following Bilhah’s suggestion, she began to think about how she might contrive to meet him. Not so she could marry him—that thought was absurd. What she wanted was not to meet a husband, but to meet the keeper of the word of God.

She had been thinking about doing that already, before Bilhah said a thing. So it wasn’t that cruel girl’s idea, after all. Maybe it really did come from God.

L
eah made her way to Jacob’s tent early next morning, when the sky was barely lighter than full darkness. When else could she be sure of finding him there? Except at night, of course, but she could not have gone to his tent in the darkness, or it would look as if she were trying to entice him. During the day, though, he would be out in the camp, among the animals, among the skilled workmen, the weavers, the dyers—he cast his attention on everything and showed that he knew all there was to know about tending a great herdsman’s household.

But all of that was Rachel’s world, and that was why he would marry her. Leah could only reach out to one part of him. Not as Bilhah had urged, as a ploy to try to compete with Rachel. What good would that do? No, Leah would do what she planned in the first place. She would come to him as the
keeper of the birthright, and ask him to open the holy books and tell her what God had in mind for her.

Approaching his tent, though, her mind wandered for a moment, and suddenly she realized that she did not know precisely where she was. There wasn’t light enough to show her the shadowy shapes of the tents. And she had lost count of her steps, and which turns she had made. It was infuriating—with eyes as weak as hers, with the whole world constantly blurred, why was she still so utterly dependent on what she could or couldn’t see?

Well, she
wasn’t
. She just had to remember to use her other sense. So she closed her eyes entirely and listened.

There was a shape to the sounds the breeze made among the tents. A certain snap to the doorfly of one tent, a whistling along the eave of another. And there were smells, and the sounds of animals stirring in the dawn, and after a few moments she could hear the sounds of a few people moving about in the camp. That faint thump would be the cook’s assistant dropping the day’s logs beside the fire. And the soft murmuring would be two girls going down to the well to bring the morning’s water.

In moments, someone might come along and see her and insist on
helping
her.

No sooner had she thought this than she heard the faint sound of a man passing his first water of the morning. Few of the men liked to rise this early, and all of those that had to rise at this hour slept on the far side of the camp. So unless some bad dream had roused Father or Reuel or one of her brothers—oh, that was likely, one of those lazy boys rising early, if they were even in the camp tonight—she was hearing Jacob. She almost turned around and headed back to her tent.

She had to remind herself that no one but her could hear so well. There would be no embarrassment, as there would be if a woman happened to
see
him at such an indelicate moment. So instead of fleeing, she boldly walked toward his tent. For of course she knew now where she was, and where it was, and she made a point of walking boldly, with her longest stride—and she was long-legged, a good walker, what a pity it was wasted on someone who could never walk anywhere except the familiar paths of the camp.

She reached the door of his tent just before he did.

“Have you come to see me?” he said softly.

She turned toward him. “Are you already up and about? Then I can come another time. I hoped to talk to you before you had started on the day’s work.”

He stood in silence, and she wondered: Is he looking at me? Are his eyes so good that in this faint light, he can see something to look at?

“They told me your eyes were very tender, and you couldn’t walk about alone,” said Jacob.

“You know who I am?”

“I’ve met everyone in the camp but you, Cousin Leah,” said Jacob. “I was beginning to think you were my brother Laban’s dearest treasure, that he dared not let out where covetous eyes might see.”

She couldn’t stop herself from chuckling a bit, though she hoped the bitterness in her heart could not be heard in her voice.

“Too tender-eyed to walk in the day, but like a hunting cat, you prowl the darkness and find your way by scent and sound and the feel of the wind in your face.”

She loved him in that moment. She had not meant to. She
was here to speak to the priest, not the prince, and certainly not the man. And yet it was the man’s voice that stirred her. The voice of the poet who had found words to make her affliction seem like a mystery.

“Oh sir,” she whispered.

“Jacob,” he said. “I’m your cousin, not your master.”

“I came to speak to you of the holy books.”

He did not answer. Had she crossed some invisible line? Should she not have spoken of them? If only she could see his face!

In the continuing silence she flailed about for words to cover whatever misstep she had taken. “Shouldn’t I have mentioned them? Is it forbidden to ask?”

“No, no,” he said. “I was only waiting for you to tell me what you wanted.”

“Can we … the camp is coming awake, and my question is … private.”

“But it wouldn’t be right for me to take you into my tent in the darkness,” he said.

“That’s not—of course I—”

He took her by the arm. “Here,” he said. “Let’s sit under the awning. People will see that we’re in conversation and no one will disturb us. But it will still be in the open.”

He was so careful, to care for her honor. Or was this a veiled rebuke to her for having been so careless of her own reputation?

“What did you want to know about the holy books?”

“I don’t know enough even to know what to ask,” she said. “My question is a hard one.” And now that she loved him, loved his voice, the poetry of his words, she could hardly bear to bare her heart the way that she had planned. And yet if
she could not speak to God’s servant, how could she ever hear God’s word to her? “Sir. Cousin Jacob. It’s just that I … I don’t know whether the holy books contain what I hope for, but I …”

“You have a question, and you want God’s answer.”

“It’s not a matter of law, you see. My father teaches us the law, though I’m sure he doesn’t know as much about it as you and your father and his father did.”

“Your father is a wise and worthy man, and his camp is known as a place where the law is kept and justice and mercy are both well served.”

“Yes, you see? It’s not to know what’s right or wrong. It’s to know
why
something is the way it is. Why God has ordered the world a certain way, when …”

“When it seems so unfair to you.”

She almost gasped at his wisdom. “Sir, do you already know my heart?”

“No,” he said, chuckling. “Do you think I didn’t have the same questions? Do you think you’re the only one?”

“But how could you have questions like mine?” she asked.

He laughed again, more of a hiss than a laugh, really. “A boy who loved the holy books, with a father who loved them also, and the boy wanted nothing more than to sit at his father’s feet and read the books aloud and hear how his father explained the word of God. Only the father loved his brother better, the brother who had the birthright but despised it, who lived only to ride out to hunt, to lead a band of men in pursuit of raiders and slaughter them all. The violent man, the hairy, bloody-handed man who thought that it was for old men to sit in a tent door and read and write. He was the one his father loved.”

Leah could not believe how easily he spoke of it; and yet
now she saw that it must be that way, that the stories of Esau were true, only she had never stopped to imagine what it must be like to be Esau’s younger brother. “Yet you have the birthright now,” she whispered.

“I do,” he said. “I tried to get it by bargaining, and Esau gave it to me with laughter, with contempt, because he knew that he could reach out and take it back from me whenever he wanted. I tried to get it my mother’s way, by trickery. I could fool my father, but how could I imagine I might fool God? In the end, my father gave it to me as he should, not because I reached for it, nor even because I deserved it, but because he is a man of God, and God led him at the last moment to do his will. Like Abraham finding the ram in the thicket, and sparing his beloved son.”

“So you know,” said Leah. “What it means to be …”

“What it means to be alive when God seems to have no purpose for you,” said Jacob.

“You knew before I even spoke,” she said, tears on her cheeks, but not really weeping, was she? Her voice was still under her control. And in this dim light, perhaps he didn’t even see her tears.

“No,” he said. “Or yes, I did, but not by the gift of God. I heard your father speak of you, and Rachel, and others. Your father and sister love you, but they also speak of you like someone apart from the life of the camp. Like a painted clay cup among the carven bowls, fragile, not to be used. And even before I met you, I wondered what it was like for you, and whether you understood God’s purpose for you.”

“I don’t,” she said. “And I think sometimes that he has no purpose. That I’m here only to be a burden on my father. Until
he can find a man willing to marry a wife who can barely see. Not that I’m blind. I found my way here, didn’t I?”

“You didn’t have to come to my tent to find your way to God,” said Jacob. “Why didn’t you ask him?”

“What makes you think I haven’t? A thousand times. As many times as I’ve had days in my life.”

“So you think he hasn’t answered you.”

“I think he
has
,” said Leah. And she summoned enough courage to finish her thought. “I think he sent you to answer my question.”

“But how can I know the answer?” said Jacob. “I’ve never seen you before this morning.”

“You have the holy books,” said Leah. “All of God’s words are there, aren’t they? Even his words to me, aren’t they?”

“What do you think the holy books
are?
” asked Jacob.

“Father said—the way I understood it … aren’t all of God’s plans for humankind written there? Father says God knows the end from the beginning, and every soul who ever lived or will ever live. I thought … they say that Abraham knew the path of every star. And since everyone knows that the stars guide the lives of men and women in this world, then somewhere in the book he must have charted the course of my star.”

To her embarrassment, Jacob laughed. Softly, but any laughter cut her to the heart.

“No, no,” he said soothingly. “How could you know? Who teaches such things to girls? Or to boys, for that matter. Have patience with me. No one has ever come to me like this, asking for counsel. It’s good that you want to know, and it’s true that there are answers to be found in the holy books. I’ve found them there, but not the way you think.”

“How then?” she said.

“To start with,” said Jacob, “that idea about the stars telling the lives of every person—it’s just not true. That’s what they teach in Babylon and Sumer. What the false priests of Elkenah teach. They made it all up to gain power over people, by pretending to have the secrets of all knowledge. But the stars aren’t tied to people that way.”

“But then what are the stars
for?
” asked Leah.

“That’s what Abraham taught us. The stars are really suns, like our sun, only far away. We don’t see them in the daytime because our own star, the sun, shines so brightly. But they’re there all the time, day and night, shining down on worlds of their own, like ours. God made them all, and he knows their times and seasons. All that we’re given to know is our own world, and our own sun, and our own times and seasons. But to God it’s all known.”

“Abraham knew it, though?”

“He knew it but he didn’t write it all. Every star? It wasn’t important for us to know every star, so there was no reason to write it. There isn’t papyrus enough in all the world to write all the creations of God, and if we could write it there isn’t room enough to hold all the scrolls on the whole surface of the earth. No, what Abraham wrote was the same thing Noah wrote, and Enoch, and Adam when he first kept the book of remembrance as the Lord commanded at the very dawn of time.”

“And what is that?”

“The covenants of God with men, and the doings of men in the eyes of God. His judgments and his mercy, his laws and his love, and how his children serve him sometimes, and fail him often, and rebel against him in every generation. His
sorrow for us, and his punishment, and his generosity and atonement.”