After Abel and Other Stories (2 page)

 
PS3612.E454A6 2015

 
813'.6--dc23

2014041274

Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan.

Book layout and design by Amy Inouye, Future Studio.

For Anina and Lula

In men's stories her life ended with his loss.

She stiffened under the storm of his wings to a glassy shape,

stricken and mysterious and immortal. But the fact is,

she was not, for such an ending, abstract enough.

—Mona Van Duyn, “Leda”

CONTENTS

F
OREWORD
by Jonathan Kirsch

After Abel

Lot's Wife

Drawn from the Water

The Watery Season

Zeresh, His Wife

City of Refuge

Shiloh

Saul's Daughter

And All the Land Between Them

A
UTHOR'S
A
FTERWORD
: The Book of Ruth

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

T
he Bible may not be the oldest artifact of the human imagination, but it is the starting point for three world religions and, perhaps even more impressively, a work of authorship that still casts its long shadow across our global civilization. That's why the stories of the Bible have inspired men and women to engage in daring acts of reinvention, a tradition that begins within the pages of the Bible itself, where later-added texts put a new spin on older ones, and continues across the last several millennia. In that sense,
The Alphabet of Ben Sira
, a medieval collection of sometimes-bawdy Bible stories, and
God Knows
, a modern novel styled as the autobiography of King David as reimagined by Joseph Heller, are all examples of the same phenomenon.

And so
is After Abel and Other Stories
by Michal Lemberger. She comes to the Bible honestly, by which I mean
that she is willing and able to penetrate the veil of piety that conceals some of its most fascinating and consequential secrets, and she has mastered the intricacies of biblical scholarship that allow us to understand when, why and by whom the Bible was written in the first place. Above all, she is able to enter and inhabit characters who exist for us today only as stray lines of text in the Bible, and she allows us to see the biblical landscape through their eyes.

Lemberger sets herself a lofty goal: “I imagined myself into characters and situations that are well known by dint of being in the most popular book ever published,” she explains, “but from an angle that, I suspect, most have never considered.” Her exercise in empathy is more than a literary conceit; it can be understood as a reverential act that honors one of the core values of the Bible: “You know the heart of the stranger, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exod. 23:9). But it is also a courageous effort to crack open the ancient text and allow the reader to glimpse new meanings in the ancient scriptures.

From the first page of her narrative, and throughout the nine stories collected here, we hear voices that originate in the pages of the Bible and yet, at the same time, ring with passion and candor that is the handiwork of the author. She starts each story with a spare line of biblical text and draws from it a marvelous vision of real
people in a real world, and she spins her stories with such conviction and audacity that they come fully alive.

“This won't make it into the official telling,” Eve confides to the reader. “The men who will come later to write it all down will leave this part out. Something always gets left out.” The Bible tells us that Adam named all of the animals, but it is Eve, in Lemberger's telling, who names the parts of the human body: “Shoulder, elbow, nipple, stomach, shaft, scrotum.”

After Abel
also belongs in another and more recent biblical tradition. Women have been (and still are) excluded from the study and teaching of the sacred texts in certain circles of all three Bible-based religions. Lemberger, however, is to be counted among the women who assert the right to engage in the work of biblical scholarship and have distinguished themselves by their achievements. It is no accident that Lemberger has chosen the most intriguing women of the Bible to write about, some of them deeply familiar—Lot's wife, Miriam, Hagar—and some, like Zeresh, wife of Haman, who have been almost entirely overlooked. Each woman in
After Abel
, however, is depicted with a narrative richness that is mostly lacking in the Bible. The Bible repeatedly shows us that men are privileged to talk to God, for instance, but in Lemberger's stories, women enjoy the same opportunity and exercise it in defiant ways. “You won't trick me again,” Hagar says to
God or his emissary. “I know your ways now.”

Like the best examples of modern
midrash
, Lemberger's stories can and should be read in conjunction with the passages of the Bible from which they grew and flowered. I suspect, as the author surely intended, that the comparison between the sparse biblical text and Lemberger's lush narratives make a point about how women were regarded by the original authors and editors of the Bible. She has liberated these remarkable women from the constraints imposed on them by the priestly custodians of the sacred text, and she has given them a new birth as figures of flesh and blood, heart and brain.

—
Jonathan Kirsch

Jonathan Kirsch is the book editor of the
Jewish Journal
, a longtime book reviewer for the
Los Angeles Times
, a guest commentator for the NPR stations in Southern California, and an adjunct professor in New York University's Professional Publishing Program. He is the author of thirteen books, including the best-selling
The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible
.

AFTER ABEL

“Adam knew his wife, again, and she bore a son and named him Seth, meaning, ‘God has provided me with another offspring in place of Abel,' for Cain had killed him.”

Genesis 4:25

T
his won't make it into the official telling. The men who will come later to write it all down will leave this part out. Something always gets left out.

For so many years, it was just the two of us, and only God to talk to. He's great and powerful, but He doesn't have much to say. He talked enough to set this whole world spinning, but after that, shut His mouth. Now He parcels out His speech: a sentence here, question
there, and short commands in between. And then Adam, trying his hardest to imitate Him, thinking he's like God because he guards his words, as if exhausted by all that naming he did before I came along. It leaves a woman lonely.

My first boy, Cain, his feet too soft for the hard earth at first, looked to his father for guidance. I thought his early babbles meant a change, but then he fell silent too, hoarded his words as if they were too precious to share. Only Abel, child of my heart, would fill the long nighttime hours with stories and songs. His voice was not pleasing, but it was a sound in this great empty world.

Adam and I had to figure it all out ourselves, how our bodies fit together, what they were capable of. We got better over time, found a private language our bodies could speak, but in those early days of fumbling, it was all buck and roll over. Not much in it for me, to be honest. He thinks he has it so bad, all that work in the fields, but I'm right there beside him, sowing and harvesting, breaking my own back to get us fed. He never almost died from his labor the way I did the second time.

Another thing that won't make it into the final telling, I'm sure, is the way his labor can lay a man out at the end of a hard day's work, irritable and hungry if the fields don't give, the goats run away, but when I labored to give birth to Abel I bled so badly God Himself had
to step in. That was my first witnessed miracle. If He hadn't saved me, there'd be no more humans. No one around to feed the two babies I'd already birthed, either. No one to replace that one with this new one.

Finally I've figured out how to put them to my breast. It's only now, with Seth, that I've learned how to lift him without the bruising or swellings that hardened under my skin in the months after Cain and Abel were born. He bumps his head against me, mouth open and searching. He lays his hand against my skin as he suckles, smiles up at me, his mouth stretched around my nipple, sighs in pleasure. But it took losing Abel to learn it, and here's me with no girls to teach it to. Just these boys, full of jealousy, and murderous. One dead, the other gone. Where to, I have no idea. We found the body in a field, his head bashed in, face and neck covered in blood already turning to brown, and his brother disappeared. I lost two in one moment, and I felt a gash open in my stomach at the sight of that boy, whom I had brought into the world at the cost, almost, of my own life.

Who was there to teach me what a mother feels when she loses a son? Not God. He'd retreated somewhere beyond our vision. Not Adam, who clasped his hands together, looked down at the ground, and then spent the night with his back turned to me.

When we first found him, I thought he would get back up, his skull would undent, and we four would go
back to how we'd been, growing and tending to the land and animals. I think now that Adam understood at once, but it took me longer to recognize or admit to that fly-covered finality.

It's not that I hadn't seen death. Animals died around us all the time. Mauled, torn apart by predators. Some fell sick or got old and curled up under bushes to depart in peace. One bad winter, we lost almost all the lambs. Adam took those deaths so personally at first, each a brief disappointment. Maybe it hardened him, crushed his first impulse to label, to name each creature as it came before him. Which is why it was left to me to find the right names for my sons.

I didn't make the connection between that body lying twisted on the ground and our own brief lives. I thought people lived by a different set of rules. God spoke to us, after all, even if less and less often as time wore on. Surely that made us special. Surely that meant we'd live forever. Scraped, bruised, broken, yes, but we lived. Adam never lost his limp after a fall off a rock shelf on our travels east out of the Garden, but it didn't kill him. It barely slowed him down. That very night he mounted me with an intensity I had never seen in him before. Not a year passed, and I got rounder and rounder, with rumblings under my heart and God mum on what was happening or why.

There too, I had the lesson of the animals to thank,
how they also got fat and then lay down to push out their young. So I watched and learned. And Cain was an easy birth, slipped out of me like a gift. Now, two hard births later, I know what a mercy that was, how God took pity on me. Or maybe He just fooled me, wanted to show me how carefully I should have attended to His words. At the time, though, I thought—but didn't say, I never said it out loud—that God must have been trying to scare me with His talk of difficult childbirth.

That first time, a little panting, some cramps, and then him, slick and covered in white, his face puffy, but his form a perfect replica of his father's. It seemed a wondrous connection—the beauty of Adam's body making this new thing with me. I was fooled by it, fooled into wanting more, my desire growing stronger as the weeks and then months passed. It was just as God had promised, though I didn't pay close enough attention. My desire was for my husband. I was so young, my body alive to its tiniest sensations. I wanted Adam again and again. After we fled the Garden, wrapped in the skins God had covered us with, we found out what cold was and clung to one another. But the warmth between our bodies made Adam's clothes bulge and his breath quicken. His weight on me, the rocking of his body into mine, made me crave more. Dark came so early in those days. Nights I spent cataloging every part of him, naming and touching—shoulder, elbow, nipple,
stomach, shaft, scrotum. Each a discovery, a new source of delight.