Eve Read Free

frown cracks between her eyebrows. Naava wonders why her mother is so dramatic, so wrong about the past. Is it possible that two people can experience the same thing and come away with two different stories?
    Naava takes Eve’s hand, knobbed like a piece of gingerroot. She traces the swollen rivers of blood in Eve’s veins, shutting them off, then letting them rush forth under the skin. She remembers: sitting with Aya and the younger children by the pond, under the shade of Eve’s beloved Garden of Eden tree, telling Eve’s stories to one another in the heat of the afternoon, while the asps warmed themselves and the bees buzzed above their heads. They played the parts—the serpent, Eve, Adam, even the cherubim and the wavering lights. Once, Aya insisted they all chant to Elohim, asking that they be able to return to the Garden, to see where their mother and father had come from. Elohim answered in a breeze; His words sounded singsongy and soft. What’s done is done, my children. His swift reply onlyencouraged Aya in her attempts at further conversation; it did the opposite for Naava. Naava was petrified. Voices should come out of people, not out of thin air. Really, she wasn’t even quite sure she’d heard anything at all.
    Naava felt this: Eve knew so little of what had happened because she saw only what she wanted to see and loved only what she wanted to love. She herself had said this in so many words, hadn’t she?

    On that night in question, Naava hadn’t run out. She remembered it clearly, even if Eve did not. She had stayed with Eve and the children. While her mother and the younger ones argued about whether or not Abel was in serious trouble, Naava went to her loom in the front room off the courtyard, lit another lamp, and began to thread her shuttle and pull colored pieces of wool through the open shed. This was freedom for her, to design something spectacular and watch it bloom like a reluctant flower beneath her hands.
    The desire to create was strong in her, as it was in her mother. Naava knew Eve was with child again, and Naava also knew by the low melon roundness of Eve that the baby would be born around the fall harvest. Naava smiled to herself. Her two favorite moments in weaving were at the beginning and at the end. In the beginning, wondrous visions danced in her head, and her fingers had only to step nimbly, turn gracefully, to translate the images—flowers and trees and rivers and sunbursts—into tangible beauty. At the end, she held the rough cloth to her face and traced the colors and the designs with her fingers, and the satisfaction was sweet, like honey. Naava had already decided to make a sling for the new baby her mother would bear. She had gleaned wool from Abel’s goats, cleaned and washed it, boiled it with walnut husks to turn it into a rich wheat-brown color, rolled it upon her thigh, and pulled it into strands of yarn. After designing her warp—the latticework support for all those threads—she was ready to weave. She was ready to create.
    Naava’s helpfulness came in bursts then, in summer’s early days.
    As she concentrated on her weaving, Naava thought of Abel and how handsome he was, certainly more handsome than Cain. She had begun tonotice, with delicious pleasure, his side glances at her when he thought she wasn’t looking.
    In fact, morning before last, she had been outside the courtyard, on her hands and knees, picking through her collection of cut plants—yarrow, marigolds, geraniums, madder, and chamomile—and sorting them by the colors they would produce when boiled with wool, when she lifted her face, wet around the temples from the morning heat, and looked toward the corral where Abel was shaking a clay jar full of seeds to get his flocks to follow him through the gates and out into the sandy fields. Except that Abel had been watching her, and when she looked up, he diverted his glance, then caught himself and waved, so she would think nothing of it. Naava