by Tosca Lee
I knelt down with my basket and got out my knife. Reut crouched near me, crunching contentedly on a rib. My stomach churned, and the smell threatened to choke me. The hide was a paltry bit of nothing, though I did salvage the horns. Watching Reut so preoccupied, I decided to take away a rib and the one remaining shoulder blade. If nothing else, Reut could amuse herself with them in lieu of our stores and bedding if I could only stand to have them nearby.
Suddenly, I despised myself. I had gone from ruling the animals to scavenging like a hyena.
It was, by now, late in the afternoon. I had lost track of the day in the midst of my find. I pulled Reut away from the carcass by the scruff—she would have kept at it until there was nothing left, I thought—and hurried away with her in my arms. She licked her jaws in a way I found disgusting. I could smell flesh everywhere and vowed I would wash in the river even in the dark if need be.
When I came to the knoll where I had left the animals, they had only grazed as far as the next hillock. Even so, they would not come when I willed it, or even when I called to them, and I was forced to trudge all the way to them to bring them back, Reut chasing at their heels.
The sun dropped, twilight stretched into a moonlit dusk. How strange, the earth by moonlight that night. The hair of the goats and lamb seemed very white, as though washed clean of briar and dirt. The hills lay in repose as jackals cried in the distance. The air, smelling crisply of grass and damp earth, stood still as though lost in thought.
There is beauty still. In the loveliness of this night, I could believe that the seed would make right our wrong, that the earth would one day return to the thing it had been. Surely there would be restoration for it and for us.
When we returned to the cave, the fire was completely out. I sighed and tethered the goats to a bush that they had long ago nibbled to nothing more than a stand of twigs. I fumbled in the darkness of the cave for my fire kit and pulled apart the unraveling fibers of a basket that had been eaten through by rodents. When Reut came in to investigate I pushed her away, and she went out, sniffing at the ground, most likely to pester Gada.
At last a tiny flame leapt to life. How much more quickly I made the fire than Adam did of late! When it finally began to devour the tinder, I searched in my basket for the spoils of the day, realizing that I was ravenous. My fingers encountered the bit of pelt and, inside its loose package, the cool, raw flesh of the gazelle. I jerked back as though stung by an insect. What had I been thinking to bring this abominable pile here? The bones might even prove a liability, attracting unwelcome company.
I drew out the horns and several bundles of hyssop and a few haws as I thought about what to do with the animal flesh. So absorbed was I that I forgot about bringing the animals in and putting up the briar fence.
With a remnant, perhaps, of that sense I once possessed, I felt the presence before I heard the first nervous bleat of the goat.
Alarm came as a sick prick against my spine. The goats bleated, more loudly, almost in unison. When Reut set in with a fit of bravado, I grabbed the remains of the ruined basket and held it to the fire. Leaping up, I ran out of the cave toward the bush where I had tethered the goats.
Reut crouched in front of the bush in a warbling, growling stance that I would have found adorable had I not just spied the object of her attention: a lion less than ten paces away. Reut, hunched low, jinked forward, but the attention of the lion was firmly on the goat and her kid, skittering nervously on the tether.
I ran without thinking toward the lion, the grass basket blazing in my hand. I thrust it out, and the lioness drew back then circled in again. Why, she was so thin she was hardly more than a sack of bones! She paced nervously to the side and back, her eyes never leaving the kid.
That is when I recognized her.
Levia.
How pitiably thin she was! And then I saw the reason: her jaw was wrong, the angle of it off. Broken. Now, when she turned and paced back again, I could see her distended belly.
She was pregnant, and she was starving.
I whispered her name and then spoke it more loudly, but her eyes were those of a wild thing. She circled, confused by Reut’s racket and the grass torch now burning my hand. But her eyes were on the kid. Just then, Gada, closer to the river, bleated.
Levia hesitated, then started toward the river, but I threw the burning basket toward her. She shrank back, and the basket rolled away, flames sputtering against the ground. Weaponless, empty-handed, I ran for the bush where the goats were tethered and, with a strength beyond my strength, tore free half of it from the ground. I dashed forward, brandishing it with a shout, my heart having shriveled like something forgotten in the sun. I swung the thorny bush and with all of my spirit willed her to run. I could not bear to hurt her—she obviously suffered already. How much I would have liked to have comforted and helped her. But cognition had long since fled her eyes, and I was with child, too.
She paced, staggering once, and then fled. Reut chased after her on oversized paws until I shouted for her to come back. To my surprise, she obeyed.
I stared into the darkness long after Levia disappeared. In the distance the whooping call of the hyena—so close! I forgot the endless dusk that I had gathered like a blanket about me earlier. I stayed like that, beneath the beautiful indifference of the moon. A mist was coming in, rising from the river toward the bank. I could feel its cool fingers twining through my burned ones.
The world knew nothing of peace.
14
In my dreams I saw her: the scarred and craggy head once so smooth beneath my palm, the broken jaw that once tilted to the sun as I scratched her neck, the lean frame gone gaunt as the babe in her belly leached the last of her strength.
She staggered as she left, and I knew she would not survive long. The hyenas that whooped through the night waited for her—and the cub inside her, too.
The next day I did not weave. I did not gather food or rushes. I took up Adam’s spear and left, Reut at my heels. I followed her prints—there was no scat—south along the river. Though I moved with purpose, my heart was a weight in my chest.
Just before midday, I saw vultures circling beyond the cresting bluff that overlooks the river.
I broke into a run though I dreaded more than anything what I was soon to come upon. I shouted and waved the spear overhead. The avian gathering—how I hated the circling of birds!—fluttered, resettled, and scattered to watch.
Her body was gutted. Nothing remained of her unborn cub. Nearby lay the mauled carcass of a hyena.
So she had had some fight in her after all. I covered my mouth.
I am the moon that sees without blinking. I am the stars, which look away. I am the eye that stares at them both and sees nothing.
To what lengths we have come.
Where had she gone? Was she nothing now but the workings of a body—flesh and bone and hide—that, when damaged beyond repair, simply ceased to be?
Where was the spark of her, like the latent flame within the rock, that part of her that had once commanded me, “Scratch”? Did the One keep some great valley in another place for such creatures when they left this one?
I thought for the first time in months of the ones in the air who had played silent witness to our lives in the valley. I had seen none of them since then, but surely they existed yet in planes unseen by me.
And so I hoped that Levia did, too, and her unborn cub with her.
It was my only comfort as I scraped the new pelt long into the night.
ADAM RETURNED SEVERAL NIGHTS later, his basket on his back, beneath the rising moon. I heard him on the path and hurried out to meet him. He was humming.
Humming.
Levia’s vacant eyes haunted me by the hour. And he was humming.
“Husband.” I reached for his basket. It was the first time I called him that—it had been our word for the mate of a female animal. He looked at me with surprise but said nothing as I took the basket from him. Reut danced excitedly at
his feet, and even Gada bleated a greeting. I felt strangely betrayed by this show from them and by his great attention to ruffling Reut’s fur and biting her on the ear when she began to tussle with him.
But then, watching them, I could nearly pretend I had not seen what I had seen. First the gazelle—Reut had dribbled diarrhea all over the front of the cave after devouring every bit of flesh from those bones and parts of the bone themselves—and then Levia. I had not let Reut near Levia but had shoved her away from the carcass that day, calling her hyena and worse.
Adam ate the remains of my evening meal by the fire. I had not been hungry for days. At some point he took note of the baskets neatly stacked along the wall of the cave, mended or replaced if they were damaged beyond repair. They contained all the possessions we had in the world. It seemed a very great amount.
“Good,” he said when he finished. “We go the day after tomorrow.”
Something welled to a head within me. “Is this your opinion? Or have you made a decision for my mind as well?”
He blinked up at me. It was the same confounded look Levia had given me by light of the moon.
I turned away with a sob.
When he just sat there, staring like a fish, I said, “You come back, telling me that we will go here or there, not caring what has happened to me while you were gone!”
When he came, clearly puzzled, to lay his arms around me, I began to weep—for the gazelle, for Levia’s eyes, vacant as a skull’s. For her cub, too. I had remembered sometime in the night as I sat scraping fat and membrane from her hide, the day that Ari had planted that life within her.
Lastly, as he held me in silence, I wept for us.
After a while I thought that his limbs slackened as though he might drift to sleep even on his feet and drew back to look at him. But his eyes were open, and I saw by the light of the hearth the fatigue etched in them. He was so young, but how old and worn he looked to me in that moment!
“I don’t know what happened, Isha. I have not known. Tell me.”
I lowered my head to his shoulder, feeling like an unreasonable wretch. It was not the first time I had been angry with him for not knowing my mind. “It is my wrong. It will wait.”
I wished I had not seen the relief so plain upon his face as he said, “Come then and lie down.”
I did, and he fell asleep at once.
I gazed at his profile in the light of the embers. His hair was dirty and untamed. His beard seemed to have thickened in the short time he had been away. I searched his face, slackened in slumber, for any indication of my trials. But there was none.
I lay again in his arms feeling very much alone.
The next morning, as sunlight flooded the entrance to the cave, I showed him the hides of Levia and the hyena and the smaller—much smaller—piece of gazelle hide. When he made a hoarse sound, I knew that he had noted the markings on the lion’s hide.
“What have you done?” Horror was plain on his face.
“Levia is dead,” I said with dull voice. As I told the story first of the gazelle and then of Levia’s appearance outside the cave and of my search for her carcass the next day, his expression changed to one of confusion.
“I did not know,” he said, blankly. “I did not know.”
I had never felt more acutely the chasm that lay between us.
A DAY LATER WE made the journey down the river. I had not wanted to go before, but now I was glad to leave. After a few hours of walking, I felt better than I had in days and found myself wanting to run. It would have felt like leisure to stretch my limbs, to test them fully for the first time in what seemed years, to feel the hard flex of muscles cramped too often around the hearth. But we had all of our possessions and the animals with us, so I contented myself with the feel of the air blowing off the river and through my hair and the sun on my shoulders and face.
The adam walked with his spear, occasionally jogging off toward the river to inspect a cache of stones. Gada and the goats meandered everywhere so that Reut nipped occasionally at the heels of one or another before wandering off for a while to occupy herself with I knew not what.
At least the world can hold wonder for her.
I felt the adam’s eyes upon me often through the day. Finally, he said, “It is not good for us to be alone. We should not be separated again.”
“I agree, though it may not always be practical.” Secretly, I agreed for different reasons; I still feared more for him than for myself.
The river bent far to the east and then widened and shallowed into spreading waters full of reeds and birds. Willows stooped near the bank, and olives grew upon the hills of the western horizon. The scent of lavender wafted from across the water. We took our rest beneath a stand of poplars before he led me to a place away from the river—though not so far that it would take more than minutes to run to it if I wished—on a low terrace beyond the floodplain. There I saw his industry of the last days: he had built up a low house of stone covered over with green sapling boughs. As we came closer, I saw that many stones were in fact mud fashioned into loaves, apparently mixed with grass.
“I will build a more permanent roof and have already thought of better ways to make the mud loaves for the next one,” he said, with a critical eye toward his work. But the old smile tugged at his mouth.
“It is a wonder,” I breathed. As I stood there, I could nearly hear the sounds of voices—human like ours but not our own. “And here we will raise our children,” I said.
Together that night we made our bed, laying the pelt of Levia over our sleeping mats and lying naked beneath our garments. In darkness lit only by the glowing embers of our small fire, I gazed up through the sapling roof at the sky. The jewels of my crown, forgotten to me for days, peered through the ceiling back at me.
One day we will again lie beneath the stars. One day we will leave this place and find our way north to the valley again.
We would have no need of any landmark to find our way then—only the compass growing in my belly.
Lying beneath the sapling roof, the knowledge of our return before me, I knew I could be content here until then.
WE DESIGNATED A MIDDEN, dug into the earth. We had not had one near the cave until the day I realized that the pervasive stench outside it was not the earth or any strange fissure in it but the evidence of our bellies turned foul. Now we dug a pit well away from the house.
Gada and the goats were mindless—nothing at all like the animals we had known so long before—and I finally stopped expecting them to have a brain in their heads. We tied them to a bit of shrub by day, or else Adam or I took them grazing in the hills. We brought the animals in with us those first nights, but soon after, Adam began to build them a pen of stone and mud. It need not be wind-fast, he said, but only enough to keep out the hyena and the fox, the jackal and the lion. Soon after it was finished, Adam captured a pregnant ewe, and so our little flock continued to grow.
About that time the babe began to move inside me. The first time I felt it, it was a gentle flutter against my abdomen—then against my bladder—as though to say, I am here.
I had put my hope and expectations upon this child. Now, with a great, irrevocable rush, I gave it my love. Was it possible that I could love anyone more than the adam? That I could love a thing that was a part of me but not a part of me, eventually to be two where there had been only one?
Adam had.
Now for the first time I understood.
Flesh of my flesh.
Over the next weeks and months my belly grew: first as a hard bump, then long under my ribs, and then larger, rounder, and crossways from side to side. I was fascinated with the changes in my body. My breasts darkened around the nipples and swelled larger than I had thought possible. The adam was fascinated too, though I couldn’t bear at times for him to touch me. At night as I curled against him, I felt the growing presence between us and thought, for the first time since our expulsion, that all was well in the world.
Of co
urse, it wasn’t. Rodents ate much of our seed stores. Strange rot ate the rest. Reut dragged half-eaten remains of hares and birds and other animals home on occasion or buried them near a tall poplar by the house. Occasionally, the food we ate loosened our bowels. Mosquitoes plagued us near the river.
The days of the valley seemed like another life. Not forgotten—I could conjure in dreams the smell of apricots and hyssop, the taste of licorice, and even the crispness of the waters of the abyss drunk straight from the narrow falls and streams. But it seemed harder now in waking hours; there was ever before us the work of gathering, retting, cooking, tool-making, weaving, grazing, and milking. Sweat ran in rivulets down the neck and back of Adam as he cleared a small area for our garden. Here we would plant vegetables, cresses, herbs, garlic, chickpeas, lentils, and flax. He cleared another for an orchard and a vineyard.
We gathered pitch for glue and burned out the middle of wood pieces that we would later carve into bowls. We took apart and reinforced the house with new bricks baked in the sun. We spent our evenings eating and working by the light of the fire. Those were long and weary days for me; I was ungainly and uncomfortable and ravenous. I criticized and then snapped at and then clung to Adam, never wanting to be alone but unable to abide his company. I was irritated when he spoke and then by his silence—by his inattention during the day and his arm over me at night.
One morning he announced that he was going to look for more animals.
“Then I will go with you,” I said, but he shook his head.
“You have to stay with the animals here, and you are too heavy now to move quickly enough to be any help.”
My irritation flared, but for the first time in days, I said nothing. I worked, sullen, through the day after he left, entertaining a hundred complaints—and only fifty apologies—and napped in the afternoon as I was more and more wont to do. By the time I heard his step outside that evening, I knew he had found no animals.