This Is Why I Came

by Mary Rakow

  AND GOD HEARD the word, thinking it a dream, and opened his eyes.

  TO HIS CHILDREN and their families, a great gathering, Noah said, “There are times when even the marriage vows cannot be kept. Times when extraordinary conditions make it impossible.” The small children were quiet, so he continued. “Your mother and I deserted each other,” he looked at his daughters and sons. “But God is merciful.”

  When Noah spoke these last words mercy itself made its way into the ear of God and quickened him. Noah continued. “The holiness of God is boundless and his love is without limit. So we must forgive ourselves and start again, here. For God’s love is greater than any form in which it dwells.”

  IN THE WHITE glistening hall without end, God heard Noah and stood, remembering himself and his power. He smoothed his hair and remembered that he alone was the source of all holiness. He felt the fullness of his royal power and draped himself again in the imperial robes, his embroidered cope, and stood on the exuberant foliate pattern that appeared on the rug, gold armlets on the sleeves of his tunic, his chest lavishly decorated with strings of pearls. “I will espouse myself again,” God said and put on the palladium of the defender of the walls. He walked toward the opening of the hallway full stride then ran, pearls banging against his chest, taking with him the new gift he created for his betrothed and, breathless, he stepped, magnificent and noble, out of the palace of memory.

  NOAH LOOKED UP to the holy mountain and, seeing a great nimbus of light, fell to the ground and the congregation with him. Something on the surface under his fingertips was changing. He turned his head. The same was happening to the hills and the sky.

  Trembling, he asked God, “What is this?”

  “I made it for you.”

  “But what do you call it? It is everywhere and so beautiful!”

  And God said, “Color.”

  WHEN GOD ASKED Noah to name the colors, he protested, “I’m not good with words. My wife was the one.”

  But God said, “Please. Do it for me.”

  Looking at the nearby tree, the smooth fruit as it was changing, the leaves one color, the trunk another, the branches and the birds, each its own, Noah thought of his wife’s smooth hair when she was young, that it would have been the same color as the smooth fruit of the tree, so he called it, “chestnut.”

  “YOU CAME BACK,” Noah said.

  And God answered, “You made me anew.”

  THEN NOAH NAMED the different bands of color around the face of God an “Arc” and called them “red,” “orange,” “yellow,” “green,” “blue” and “indigo.” The last he called “violet” and told God, “This will be your color. The color of penance and royalty.”

  5

  Abraham and Isaac

  EACH STEP ACROSS the sand, for the seven days they walked, Abraham rehearsed the history of his holiness. I gave You not only my lambs without blemish and my new calf but also my ripest fruit. . . .

  It all came back to him as he walked. Isaac ahead, bound by ropes at his wrists, weights on his ankles, the two soldiers accompanying them on horseback.

  He liked having an audience, liked walking and making his son walk, the humility of it. Isaac wearing the same scarf around his mouth, the black one reserved for this purpose. It was a glorious sight to Abraham, sparkling and vivid.

  THE SOLDIERS LAY Isaac on the pile of stones and retreated as they had each time. Abraham already aroused by the sight of his son, bound and helpless, the little twigs.

  COVER ME WITH your sweetness, Isaac! Your child’s body without hair. Your legs like peaches. Give me your skin, let me pull it over my head and shoulders like a cape. Your foreskin over me, that I might go into the tent of your body. You smell of powder. I have to strike the match, don’t you see? Your ankles quivering but I am covered with shame, Isaac. Bathe me with your blood. Bring the song of salvation back to my lips.

  YOUR ASHES ON my forehead, your ashes on my beard.

  6

  Isaac Afterward

  OR MAYBE ABRAHAM did not kill Isaac.

  SO THAT AFTERWARD Isaac had nightmares that became dreams in daytime, no longer requiring darkness but stood firm against sunlight, that real.

  WHEN HIS SOFT peach hair grew coarse and curly over his body, the dreams became one dream recurring, all the parts taken into himself, the flame carried seven days, the ascent, the stones against his back, the ropes, his father above him, the flame that singed his forearms before it was withdrawn.

  “TAKE ME,” he begs in his dream, the other bringing silk ties from a closet, binding Isaac’s ankles and wrists. Mind binding the body, the body bound so that the mind, immobile, relieved at last, rests. Across the sheet, the pillow cases, a sliding door. In such a room, on such a bed, in just those moments, unable to move, he pleads, make flight impossible. Even the notion of flight. “Tie hard,” he says. The frantic bird, panicked, bats its wings, escapes the bush into air and then is shot down, the dog pointing, its paw cocked, its tail straight out, let that not be me. Bind me to this ground. Press hard, your body on mine, until it registers as pain. Take me to that edge where death waits, flammable. Hold me there until love seems again possible, until I surrender to it, facile, untarnished, O sweet liberty.

  7

  Sarah and Abraham

  ONCE HOME, FEELING the weight of a deed he could not remember, he asked the soldiers why they were mounted, why the fancy saddles, why was there blood on everything he touched? He heard the stones cry out. The black scarf.

  He demanded Sarah replace the bedding, the drape, again and again, the plates. Awake many nights in a row, wildly gesturing, saying of the bedroom, the garden, the hills, “This is all illusion! Now I have clarity! Now I am really myself!” Adrift in the moonlight then collapsing to bed, asleep for days and then for weeks, eating nothing but broth, crying at small things that didn’t usually make him cry, saying, also with tears, that he loved her, that he was not a great man, pacing as if the whole project of the world were in his head like a problem to be solved.

  WHEN HE TOOK their first child and returned alone, Sarah wanted her child back but not her husband. Each time, again and again, she loved him less, then despised him, then hated.

  With each child, she took the clothing, blankets and toys and buried them along with the knife, waiting for her husband to be himself again, for him to rise clear-eyed, to wash and ask pleasantly, “Where is Zachary?” or, “Where is Nathan?” or, “Where is Deborah, I haven’t seen her all day?”

  “You’ve had a dream,” she’d learned to say. “We had no such child.”

  BUT THIS TIME, on this day, in her old age, Isaac, whose skin smelled like honey, Isaac who would be her last, the soldiers mounted and waiting, the scarf taken from the drawer, she said to Abraham, “I accuse you!” and then, “I accuse us.” And she recited the name of each child he had slain. “You, Abraham of the Chaldees.”

  He was packing his knapsack and stopped. Eyes wide with fury, he raised his arm against her but she stood firm, saying, “Return with Isaac or you will live alone forever.”

  8

  Isaac in the Field

  “TELL ME ABOUT them,” Isaac said when Sarah revealed I that he was not the first child born but was the first to survive and took him to the place marked off by a fence where flowers grew inside it and out.

  She drew back in memory to that room always at her fingertips where the details glittered, unmistakable, and said, “Nathan was an archer, and your father made him a small bow and five arrows. The bow was red and the arrows had quail feathers. Deborah loved to sing, so I let her nap outside, under the tree. Zachary was taken from my breast. I’d wrapped him in a blue blanket that morning when your father took him from me. He was our first. The blanket is buried there,” she pointed. And Isaac wept with his mother.

  Many days Isaac and Sarah walked to the field of flowers and many times he asked her about his brothers and sister, to hear again the details, which she gave to him unaltered, day after day, the exa
ctness of the repetition holding him like a protecting veil.

  He learned from her that love sees the other and pays attention to what it sees and he wanted to be like Sarah. Of the flowers that grew by the fence, he asked, “What are these?”

  “Carnations,” she answered. “See how their petals are variegated, being both red and white?” And he did see.

  “And these?”

  “Butterflies,” she said.

  “TELL ME ABOUT myself,” Isaac finally asked because he could not see himself clearly either. Much of the time he didn’t feel visible at all.

  He studied her carefully as she spoke, memorizing her words because they felt like news to him and they were news.

  “Well,” she began, “your knees are a bit bony but your arms are very strong.” He looked down at his body. “You cry out in your sleep and you have every night since you came down from the mountain.” He returned to her eyes, binding himself to them. “When you were young, you liked spiders and frogs,” she smiled.

  They waited a long time. Then he asked, “Am I here?”

  “Of course you are here, Isaac. You’re right here with me.” She reached out both hands and touched the sides of his face. “These are your two ears,” she said. “And these, your two eyes.” She laid her hands on his lashes, then continued to his ankles and feet. “You are Isaac, my son. My beloved.”

  Many days they went to the field and Isaac asked her to do the same thing, never tiring of being seen and being touched by her at the same time. “You have two ears, two eyes. You are here, Isaac,” she said. “Feel the sun on the backs of your hands? Feel it warming the top of your head?” And he tried to learn it.

  WHEN SHE DIED, he grieved for her in the field where he lay in great stillness, studying the red and the white of the carnations, the rough wood of the fence, the flight of the butterflies and told himself, “I am Isaac. I am here. And I am real.”

  ONE DAY AS he slept, he saw a fountain glistening in the sun, and on it, three youths. Their heads were bent down, their arms crossed over their chests and he recognized them as his brothers and sister even though they all looked exactly the same. He remembered when he lay strapped firm to the stones that his father looked down but didn’t really see him there. His eyes were glazed and intent, as if seeing something with a painful clarity that Isaac was not part of, something more real than Isaac and the stones and the wood, the fire and the blade.

  ISAAC MEDITATED ON the fountain and wondered if this was how his father saw each of his brothers and his sister when they, too, were on the mountain. That they lay under a film through which their father saw only the innocence he desperately wanted. And Isaac wondered if in those moments, knife in the air, they each had disappeared from his view as he had disappeared. That they were each only a passageway for their father. And he considered, then, that sometimes violence is not even personal, which was another wounding. And he saw, given its power to blind, that the hunger for innocence in an adult can be the most dangerous hunger.

  9

  Isaac and Rebekah

  SEEING THE SEVERE immobility of his son, that he stayed days and nights alone in the field, Abraham sent his servant to find a good wife for Isaac.

  REBEKAH LOVED ISAAC and when he took her out to the field and said, “Lie on me, cover me,” she did. When he said, “Tell me who I am,” she said, “You are Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah, and husband to me, Rebekah.” She learned to touch him, saying, “Here are your eyes, Isaac. Here are your ears.” And in this way, she drew him to her so that, in time, Isaac came to love Rebekah.

  He loved her even later when they had two sons and she deceived him over the birthright, which she did without pity. Isaac thought, greed isn’t everything. And it isn’t the worst thing. So he found that it was easy to forgive her. Partly because even in deceiving him, she was strong and purposeful, and so was like his mother had been on the day she dressed her hair with belts of velvet and wore her fur-trimmed coat and, standing firm, spoke the words that stopped his father.

  10

  Moses and the Burning Bush

  HE WATCHED THE bush burn without being consumed and was mesmerized because he saw motion and stillness held together as one thing. He rushed toward it despite his age and sore legs, then heard a voice and, fearful, stopped and took off his shoes.

  WHEN, FINALLY, HE climbed down from the mountain, people pointed, pulled back, cheered, exclaimed that his face shone like the sun. Light radiated from his body with each step, the dull sand sparkled under his feet. Light came from his fingers, his toes. He told himself, at last, I am aflame with love! At night, in his bed, under the sheets, he checked. It was true. His body glowed. “I bore you up on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself,” he heard God say.

  Panting, he returned the next day and then a third, but saw only roots and sand. He took off his sandals but heard no voice. Through each hour of daylight then evening then night then the moon, he waited and in the morning walked home. A week passed. It was always the same. Two weeks then three. No voice, no flame. Nothing.

  EVENTUALLY, HE STOPPED climbing the mountain. His face felt cool again.

  Looking in the mirror, he saw only his thinning hair, his slack shoulders, the glow gone. His family and friends jeered, resented his privilege, bitter that it hadn’t produced anything new for them. Had produced nothing useful at all.

  He knew if he let disappointment come, he would crumble, so he told himself, it’s better this way. Perhaps the invisibility of God is a sign of mercy. Not only mercy but magnam misericordiam. Great mercy. He tapped the smooth surface of the glass, as if for persuasion, and said, “The Almighty was perfect when he was invisible. Actually, I am relieved. The Almighty was so . . .” he searched for the word, “so particular.”

  DAILY, HE DEMONSTRATED to himself that fire does, in fact, consume what it burns. He liked to strike the match, to set the wood aflame. He sat outside doing nothing else. Liked to watch until the twigs burned to ash.

  Over time he set many things on fire, pieces of furniture, wooden cups. He moved his bed outside, kept a fire burning day and night, constantly feeding it. This straw, this torn blanket, this chair, this picture frame.

  THEY LET HIM drift, alone, apart. His clothes smelled of smoke. He smeared ashes on his face, filled his mouth with ashes, coated his tongue, his ears, rubbed ashes on his eyelids, hoping to rub away the memory of what was too sweet to carry. And in this way delivered himself back to the world as he had known it. He told himself, there is no mountain, there is no God.

  He felt the certainty of the world he had created, certain in all of its smallness. A flat, diminished world but one that comforted him, no longer forced to see all of the ways he was not like the God. No longer forced to see all the ways he failed at love.

  But at the same time a voice inside called out,

  Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.

  Pity me, O God, according to Thy great mercy.

  11

  Manna

  MOSES LED HIS people out of bondage in Egypt where they had lived for five hundred years. He led them out together, six hundred thousand on foot. But in time they murmured, saying, “When God struck the rock, water swept down in torrents. But can he also give us bread?”

  This angered God but an angel came, saying, “Give them bread from Heaven. Remember, you are the spring of holiness.”

  So God put on a chiton the color of hoarfrost and when he came down from Heaven his chiton covered the land. He rained food on them like dust, in their midst and all around their tents so that, day after day, they could eat the bread of angels. And God was happy and no longer vexed with his people because he gave them all that they craved and told himself, “They will remember my kindness and will know that they are my people and I am their God.”

  BUT IN TIME they lamented again, saying, “We remember the fish we used to eat without cost in Egypt, and the cucumbers, the melons and leeks, the onions and garlic. Now we have noth
ing to look forward to but this manna. If only we had meat!”

  And God’s anger kindled again toward his people. But he overcame his anger and called the quail and they came to him. And he said, “They will eat bread in the morning and flesh in the evening and in that way they will know that I am the Lord their God.”

  For forty years there was no lack and each person had his fill.

  BUT GOD’S ANGER was not hidden from his people and when they told the story of the manna and the quail, and when they wrote it down in sacred books, his anger came more and more to the fore. In the first version, they said, “He gave meat until it came out of the nostrils and was loathsome to his people.” And in the next version, that a plague caused death to those who gathered too much manna or quail. In the beautiful book of Psalms, the last version, they wrote, “. . . before they had sated their craving, while the food was still in their mouths, God’s anger rose and he slew the strongest among them. He struck down the flower of Israel.”