Eve (8 page)

As if to justify my thinking, Cain returned from visiting their growing city yesterday afternoon, mesmerized. He did not even touch the food I set before him until he had his say. “They are building this tall mountain with stairs. They build it to reach to the clouds where their gods and goddesses dwell. The people live in terror of them; you should see! They pray and offer up enormous amounts of food and strong drink to them, on altars. They insist that if they don’t, the gods are vengeful creatures and will wreak havoc upon them by sending raging fires or flooding rivers or disastrous storms their way. Sickness too.” He looked at me. “Crippledness. Disease.” He ate finally, tearing off a hunk of cold bread with his teeth. He spoke with a full mouth. “The gods protect them from these things.”

Father grunted and said, “Be careful who you listen to, my son. Have
these people
seen
these gods? Interacted with them?” With his fingers, he scooped up dripping meat chunks from his bowl and stuffed them into his mouth.

“They have statues of them!” said Cain, slapping his thigh. “Likenesses of them, everywhere. On their rings and bracelets and medallions. In the marketplace—on woven rugs and chiseled walls. Everywhere!”

Abel snorted. “Just because the people make semblances of their gods doesn’t mean they exist.”

Cain’s face reddened. He sneered, “Just because Father and Mother tell us stories of Elohim doesn’t mean
He
exists.”

Mother said evenly, “Had you been there in the Garden, you would not speak as brashly as you do now.”

Cain was not to be deterred. “Why, then, have you lost children, Mother? Why does Aya have a crooked foot? Why do some of my plants, for no reason at all, grow spotted, wither, and die? Why do Abel’s flocks suffer losses from hoof rot and coughing disease? Why?” He leaned forward, the weight of his hands slicing the air. “I’ll tell you why. Elohim doesn’t exist.” He struck his fist against his palm for emphasis, and we all jumped. “So long we’ve been blind. So long we’ve trusted. In someone who … is… not… there!”

Mother’s eyes darted to Father’s. They were pleading,
Do you hear your son? Do you hear his blasphemy?

Father did a curious thing. He leaned back. He stopped eating. His hands hovered like hummingbirds. No one spoke. He was quiet, too quiet, so that I thought Cain’s words had silenced him, but then he said slowly, “I do not have answers, my children, for why Elohim allows such things. I do not think He is like these gods, though, from what Cain is telling us. He has created—how can I explain this?—the world in a certain way. We have sunlight, we have storms; we have health, we have pain. They are part of His creation, part of how the world works. He does not concoct ways to torment us, at least that is not how He appeared to us”—he waved to Mother, to include both of them—“when we knew Him in the Garden.”

Cain laughed scornfully. “So your god does not intervene? Is that what you’re saying?”

Still, Father did not raise his voice. He spoke hesitantly, trying to order
his words. “I do not claim to know everything, Cain. I wish, for once, we could talk about this rationally, without letting our emotions get the better of us. Listen closely. Possibly Elohim
allows
suffering—pay heed that I have
not
said He
causes
it—so that we enter into a sacred space where we need Him and hear Him more clearly, in the thick of all our sorrows.”

“Then you have created Him in your need,
because
of your need,” said Cain.

Father pushed his bowl away, so he would have room. “An example,” he said. “I shall give an example.” He rubbed his hands together briskly, as though the movement itself would lend life to his words. “When you were a child, I carried you. You had neither the strength nor the coordination to walk. Then, at some point, you wanted to walk on your own. So we let you take those first wobbly steps by yourself, and now look at you.” Cain looked ready to interrupt, but Father kept at it. “Had I insisted upon carrying you for the rest of your life, you would have been weak and completely dependent upon me. I do not think you would have desired this.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with Elohim,” said Cain.

“I stood back,” said Father. “I let you stumble and pull yourself back up. You became stronger because I did so.”

“Perhaps,” said Cain. “But I, for one, do not want my god to stand idly by, doing nothing if I am in trouble.”

“If you call upon Elohim’s name, and so does your enemy, whom will Elohim aid? Whose side will He be on?” said Father. “You are reducing Him to what He can do for you. What will you do for Him?”

Cain guffawed. “I do not do anything for Elohim. From now on, I worship the city’s gods. I offer sacrifices to them, like the city people. I offer up praise to them, so they will protect me from harm.”

It was as though we collectively, as a family, drew in a deep breath at the same time. No one said anything. There it was. Cain’s statement of contradiction, of impiety. Mother’s mouth opened wide—out of shock, I think.

Father said, with a wave of his hand, “I will not stop you. You are free to choose whom you will. Love and respect cannot be coerced.”

“But, Adam—” said Mother.

Father looked up at her miserably. “It is not for us to decide what our children must decide for themselves,” he said.

So now Cain has set about learning what he can about the gods of the sky.

And I have set about trying to fix my foot. I am an ingenious girl. I am Aya the Cook and Aya the Bird. Before bed, I yank my foot straight and wrap it in Naava’s wool to hold it sturdy but when the time comes for the unfurling, it curls back in like a leaf that has memorized its life. Then I walk with my knee facing out, but that only serves to give me severe cramps in my inner thigh. Despite my cleverness—for I
am
clever!—I still have not come up with a reasonable solution, and that is disappointing to me, solver of all things confusing.

Why is it that I can fix all my family’s problems but not my own? When Naava needs more colors for her wool, I offer hints on how to get them— red cabbage leaves for pink, elderberry fruit for blue, safflowers for yellow, onion skins for yellow-brown, pomegranate rind for red (although this is more effective on leather), black walnut hulls for a rich dark brown, and turmeric for orange. I want to say,
Why do I have to be a cistern of knowledge for you? Why do you not experiment yourself to see what you can come up with?

I attempt to cover my disgust, but it’s very hard to hold my face still.

I am kindest to and most tolerant of Abel. He prides himself on knowing his sheep and goats like a man should know a woman—not in a rutting way but tender nonetheless. Several moons ago, he woke me early one morning and whispered, “Please come.” The only other sounds were of Father’s snoring and bird chatter.

I stumbled out behind him into the murky darkness and rubbed my eyes. He said nothing, simply walked toward the lean-to where the animals bedded down for the night. The shelter was a crude hut made of willow boughs and sun-dried bricks, and although Abel cleaned it regularly, it had a particularly foul smell to it—that of urine mostly. I wrinkled my nose but did not complain. My brother needed my help.

Abel held the gate open for me, and we made our way to the far side of the shelter. He approached a ewe lying on her side. “She’s ill,” he said. “It’s her udder.”

I knelt down next to the mother sheep, hearing the dry
crick
of barley stalks beneath my knees. I put my hand on her crimped-up wool and stroked her. “You sweet thing.” She bleated, a helpless and ashamed apology for her weakness. I felt her flesh with my fingers; my eyes were useless in the gloom. Her udder was swollen hard. Her nipples were cracked, with open ridges. She
baa
ed again.

“Help me get her up,” I said. I slid my hand under her shoulders and said, “Ready.”

Abel and I lifted her, but she collapsed, refusing to stand. She cried out again, and now the other sheep answered her sad bleatings—a miserable, plaintive morning chorus.

“Massage her until the skin grows soft,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

“I’ve already tried that,” said Abel. His voice wavered.

“Do it again,” I said. And then, thinking to comfort him, I added, “Talk to her.”

“I do, I do,” he whispered.

As I left him there and walked out into the gray morning, I heard him stifle a sob, and then he was weeping, huge gasping gulps that would not stop. Something went slack in me, and I felt a wrenching—an unhappy realization that Abel, the object of my endless admiration, loved his stupid and stubborn beasts more than me or any of my family. It was as though he had already learned, like me, that to look to others for satisfaction or happiness was sure to end in betrayal. In animals, this was not so— thank Elohim for this!—and Abel would have known this when he gave me Goat. Dear sweet mischievous Goat. But I wanted my brother to love
me.
He had already demonstrated that he thought me whole, as Elohim intended, and no one else had done that.

We force-fed the ewe dandelion tea to induce the flow of her milk. I pounded figs into a pulp and applied the poultice to her softening udder. I gave Abel a small clay pot containing a few hardened drops of storax resin, mixed with a little oil and rose water, to assuage her irritated and cracked nipples. “Be faithful with this,” I said.

The next morning I found a gift from Abel—a large flat smooth stone next to the
tinûru. Incredible,
I thought,
his heart is soft like the river mud,
and I retrieved my love for Abel out of the backwaters of my mind, and it
rose up within me, like sweet hyssop. Maybe he cared for me more than I knew. Maybe this was the only way he knew how to show it.

I lifted it—and almost fell face-first, it was so heavy!—held it in my palm, and felt the cool heft of it. On its surface was the most detailed impression of a winged animal, a cross between a bird and a lizard. The animal was long gone, of course, but there the memory of its tender life had been etched into the rocks surface. I traced the dips and turns of this strange beasts burial and wondered,
Will it be so with me, when I am gone? Will there be anything left of Aya to remember?

I ramble on: Forgive me. I tell you this: I solved one of Mother’s problems this morning.

As you may know, life is full of surprises. Anything can happen, this I believe. As the sky turned from gray to pink, I threw a basket over my shoulder and went out onto the plains to collect dung for my fire. Goat followed and fanned out behind me, stripping leaves with her lips, dancing up on her back legs to reach the highest ones. I held a forked stick in front of me. It served two purposes: to jab the ground before me—for I never knew what wildlife I would disturb—and to fling the dung piles over my head and into the basket. I left the fresh dung piles, black against the raw earth, still rank and strong, and took the lighter and crustier ones, the ones that had baked in the sun like Dara’s pots and jars. If I saw plants I needed, I tore them out of the ground and tucked them into the sash of my robe. Cress for the stomach. Nettle for the blood.

On that despicable day of the visiting ladies, Mother had found me hiding in the pantry and said matter-of-factly, “You will lose Dara’s dung-collecting and pottery-making. She’s going to take care of those peoples babies.” She added quickly, out of guilt, I thought, “They will provide us with goods that we can’t make ourselves. Cain will be quite pleased at our arrangement.”

“Don’t they have any children to look after their own?” I said, shocked.

Mother stared at me. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Maybe they send their children to the fields or set them to other tasks.”

“Dara is only six,” I said.

Mother blushed. “I know.” She touched her fingers to her cheeks. “Did you see their colored fabrics and shiny jewelry?” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked down at her feet. “I think this might be good for Dara … and for us.” She bit her lip. “They will not harm her.”

So Dara is going to be exchanged for goods. I, Aya the Bird, am not one bit jealous. The work she will have to do! The slobbering, screaming babies she will have to take care of! No, thank you. But Naava, my sister with the honeyed skin and the walnut hair and the perfect limbs and the glances of her brothers—oh, that I might glean looks like those one day!—drinks from the cup of bitterness, of jealousy. She glares at Dara and snaps at her. She thinks Dara has stolen her chance at freedom, away from here.