Havah Read Free Page A

“Yes.”
    I did not say that I craved two presences above any other pleasure and that as long as they were there I could do anything. But even as I thought it, he gathered me against him, stroked my hair, my side, my hip.
    Ah. I drowned in contentment.
    That day he took me to the broadest part of the valley. Together we sat beneath the shade of the great oak. I observed the wolf, bounding through the brush. Farther on, wild sheep grazed on the hillside. Far above them a goat stood beneath the sun.
    “Wolf,” he said. But I heard from him another name: Yedod.
    “Sheep,” he said. But I heard from him: Adina.
    He had named them after their kind, but he had named them intimately as well. They were as distinct to him as he had been to them before me.
    Levia, the lioness, came and lowered herself to her haunches beside me. After a moment of decorum, she sprawled onto her back.
    Scratch!
    The adam, arms outstretched upon bent knees, laughed. “For a long time I thought it was the only thing she said.”
    Levia lolled, eyes rolling. After a time her mate came down from the hills to drink from a nearby stream. When he lifted his head, his intent for Levia was so strong that I felt the tug of it as surely as though I were Levia herself. It was the same I had sensed from the adam the day before. The lioness started up from beneath my hand and went out to meet him, rubbing her sleek head against his jaw. Pleasure emanated from them both.
    I exhaled, keenly aware of the adam’s eyes upon me.
     
     
    “THERE WAS LAUGH,” I said a few days later. The adam had washed me in the river until my skin prickled. “Not you.”
    “There was laugh ter. ” He brushed water from my skin even as the new sun lapped it from the tiny hairs on my arms. “The One that Is.”
    The One made us.
    Yes. From the earth, Adam. From Adam, Ish and Isha.
    Why?
    To keep the garden.
    The beetles and animals and plants seem to do that well enough on their own.
    And to name the animals.
    Why are they here?
    Who can know but the One that Is?
    That he seemed unmoved by these questions only incited more curiosity in me. But then his mouth curved in a lovely smile, and I knew he had wondered as much himself, and that while he had imparted to me many things, many others were mine to learn.
    To learn is joy, Isha.
    Then he fell silent. Finally: “There is something, though, that I should show you.”
    On the western end of the valley where the river runs to the lake, mist loitered long after dawn. The trees, which murmured from the valley to the hilltops, stood mute. The call of insect and bird and creature seemed oddly blunted here, but the underlying murmur of every living thing sharpened in sonance, its pitch more crystalline than I had heard it at any other place.
    The adam waded into the river ahead of me. I hurried after him, relieved when he reached for me. But this was no frolicking swim. He pushed into the current, crosswise. Damp enveloped our heads and clung to my hair.
    As we swam toward the middle of the river, I began to think that we might never reach the other side. I could not see it through the mist, nor could I make out the bank behind us anymore. Just as I began to wonder if we would find ourselves perfunctorily washed into the delta of the lake, our toes touched the pebbled river bottom.
    I caught my breath.
    Before us sprawled a small island in the widest part of the river. And in the middle of the island grew a tree with a fruit so singular I knew I had not seen it anywhere else in the garden. It was perfectly round like an oversized berry, larger than the plum. It was the color of the sun as I had seen it blazing between the northern and southern ranges the night before. Heavy on the stem, every one of them seemed bursting with juice, ready to drop at the slightest breeze, though I saw none upon the ground.
    My stomach rumbled as we climbed onto the bank. But before I could take two steps toward that tree, the adam caught my hand tightly