1997 - The Red Tent Read online

  Upon Jacob’s return, he brought Rachel a beaded necklace and spent his first night with her. Leah was still nursing, so he called Bilhah to him again often during the next months, especially when Rachel was away attending a birth.

  Jacob and his third wife spoke very little when they were together, but their bodies joined in straightforward postures, which yielded them both pleasure and release. “Jacob said I gave him peace,” said Bilhah, with great satisfaction.

  Bilhah conceived. Rachel greeted the news with kisses and rejoiced with her sister. As the months passed and her belly grew, Rachel coddled her and asked her to name every sensation, every twinge, every mood. Did Bilhah know at what moment life had taken root? Was the tiredness of pregnancy felt in her knees or in her eyes? Did she crave salt or sweet?

  The two of them shared a blanket during Bilhah’s pregnancy. The barren woman felt the slow swell of her sister’s belly and the gathering heaviness of her breasts. She watched the flesh stretch in tan bands across the brown belly and thighs, and noticed the changing color of her nipples. As the child grew in Bilhah, draining her of color and energy, Rachel bloomed. She grew soft and round along with Bilhah, and the hollows that sadness had carved in her cheeks disappeared. She laughed and played with her nephews and the other children of the camp. She baked bread and made cheese without being asked. She lived so deeply inside Bilhah’s pregnancy that during the ninth month, Rachel’s ankles grew swollen, and when the time came for the baby to enter the world, Rachel called Inna to be midwife so that she alone could stand behind Bilhah during her travail and hold her and suffer with her.

  Happily for Bilhah, the birth was as simple and quick as the pregnancy had been difficult. After a morning’s worth of panting and groaning, she stood on the bricks while Rachel crouched around her. Bilhah’s elbows rested on Rachel’s splayed knees, and it was as if the two women shared a womb for the awful hour when the baby pushed his way out. Their faces strained and reddened together, and they cried out with a single voice when his head appeared. Inna said it was as though a two-headed woman had given birth and declared it one of the strangest things she had seen.

  When the boy was delivered and the cord severed, Rachel held him first, her eyes streaming, for a very long time. Or so it seemed to Bilhah, who bit her tongue and waited for the moment she would embrace the first issue of her womb. Bilhah’s eyes followed Rachel’s every move as she wiped the blood from the baby’s body and checked to see that he was whole and unblemished. Bilhah barely breathed as the moments passed and her arms remained empty, but she said nothing. By law, this son belonged to Rachel.

  Years attending so many births had made Rachel’s heart tender, and with a great sigh she placed the boy in Bilhah’s arms, where he lifted his eyes to his mother’s face and smiled into her eyes before he took her breast.

  At that instant, Rachel woke from her dream, and saw that the baby was not her child. Her smile faded and her shoulders sagged and her hands clawed at her girlish breasts. Inna had told Rachel that if she let the baby suck there long enough, he would find milk within her and she could become his milk-mother. But Rachel had no faith in her body’s ability to sustain life. Putting a child to nurse on an empty breast would cause suffering to her son, who was not hers at all but Bilhah’s. Besides, Bilhah might sicken and even die if she did not empty her breasts, for she had seen that happen. And Rachel loved her sister. She hoped the baby at Bilhah’s breast would be as good a man as his mother was a woman.

  Rachel left Bilhah with her son and went to find Jacob. She told her husband that the baby’s name was Dan, which means “judgment.”

  To the woman who bore him, Dan sounded sweet, but to her in whose name he was borne, it had a bitter ring.

  The sight of the baby in Bilhah’s arms, day after day, shattered Rachel’s confidence again. She was only the aunt, the bystander, the barren one. But now she did not rail against heaven or plague her sisters with temper. She sat, too unhappy to weep, under the acacia tree, sacred to Innana, where the birds gathered at dawn. She went to the asherah and prostrated herself before the wide-mouthed grinning goddess, and whispered, “Give me children or I will die.”

  Jacob saw her suffering and gathered her to him with the greatest tenderness. And after all the years, all the nights, all the miscarriages and broken hopes, Rachel found delight in his arms. “I really had no idea why Leah and Bilhah sought out Jacob’s bed before those days,” Rachel said. “I had always gone to his bed willingly enough, but mostly out of duty.

  “But after Dan opened Bilhah’s womb, somehow my own passion finally matched Jacob’s and I understood my sisters’ willingness to lie with him. And then I was newly jealous for all the years that I had missed of the wild sweetness between lovers.”

  Rachel and Jacob spent many nights together exploring the new heat between them, and Rachel hoped again. Some midwives said that pleasure overheated the seed and killed it. But others claimed that babies only come when women smile. This was the tale she told Jacob to inspire his caresses.

  During the last months of Bilhah’s pregnancy, Zilpah went to Jacob’s bed for the first time. She did not offer herself as Bilhah had, though she was at least five years older, as old as Leah, who had borne five live sons by that time.

  Zilpah knew it would happen someday, and she was resigned to it. But unlike Bilhah, Zilpah would never ask. Leah would have to command it. Finally, she did.

  “One night, when I was walking in the light of a full moon, she appeared before me,” Zilpah said. “At first, I thought I was dreaming. My sister slept as heavily as Laban and never rose at night. Even her own babies had trouble rousing her. But there she was, in the stillness. We walked in the bright white light of the lady moon, hand in hand, for a long time. And again I wondered if this was really my sister or a ghost, because the woman beside me was silent, whereas Leah always had something to say.

  “Finally, she spoke with careful words about the moon. She told me how much she loved the white light, and how she spoke to the moon and called to her by name every month. Leah said the moon was the only face of the goddess that seemed open to her because of the way the moon called forth the filling and emptying of her body.

  “My sister was wise,” said Zilpah. “She stopped and faced me and took both my hands in hers and asked, ‘Are you ready to swallow the moon at last?’

  “What could I say? It was my time.”

  Indeed, it was possible that she had waited too long, and Zilpah half hoped she was too old, at five and twenty, to bear. Age alone was no good augury. Rachel had been barren from her youth, despite all her efforts. And Leah, fertile as a watered plain, showed no sign of giving off. The only way to discover what the mother of life had in store for Zilpah was for her to go in to Jacob and become the least of his wives.

  The next morning, Leah spoke to Jacob. Bilhah offered to put henna on Zilpah’s hands, but she set her mouth and refused. That night she walked slowly to Jacob’s tent, where he lay with her and knew her. Zilpah took no pleasure from Jacob’s touch. “I did what was required of me,” she said, with such a tone that no one dared ask her to say more.

  She never complained of Jacob’s attentions. He did his best to calm her fears, just as he had with his other wives. He called for her many times, trying to win her. He asked her to sing songs of the goddesses and brushed her hair. But nothing he did moved Zilpah. “I never understood my sisters’ eagerness to lie with Jacob,” she said, with a weary wave of her long hand. “It was a duty, like grinding grain—something that wears away at the body but is necessary so that life can go on.

  “Mind you, I was not disappointed,” she said. “It was nothing I expected to enjoy.”

  Zilpah conceived during Bilhah’s pregnancy. And soon after Bil-hah’s Dan was born, it truly did appear as though Zilpah had swallowed the moon. On her slender frame, the belly looked huge and perfectly round. Her sisters teased her, but Zilpah only smiled. She was glad to be free from Jacob’s attentions, for me
n did not lie with pregnant women. She gloried in her new body, and dreamed wonderful dreams of power and flight.

  She dreamed of giving birth to a daughter, not a human child but a changeling of some kind, a spirit woman. Full-grown, full-breasted. She wore nothing but a girdle of string, in front and in back. She strode the earth in great steps, and her moon blood made trees grow everywhere she walked.

  “I loved to go to sleep when I was with child,” said Zilpah. “I traveled so far in my blankets those months.”

  But when her time came, the baby was slow to appear and Zilpah suffered. Her hips were too narrow, and labor lasted from sunset to sunset, for three days. Zilpah cried and wailed, sure that her daughter would die, or that she would be dead before she saw her girl, her Ashrat, for she had chosen her name already and told it to her sisters in case she did not survive.

  It went hard with Zilpah. On the evening of the third day of her labor, she was all but dead from the pains, which, strong as they were, did not seem to bring the baby any closer to this world. Finally, Inna resorted to an untried potion she had bought from a Canaanite trader. She reached her hand all the way up to the stubborn door of Zilpah’s womb and rubbed a strong, aromatic gum that did its work quickly, wrenching a shriek from Zilpah’s throat, which by then was so hoarse from her travail that she sounded less like a woman than an animal caught in the fire. Inna whispered a fragment of an incantation in the name of the ancient goddess of healing.

  “Gula, quicken the delivery Gula, I appeal to you, miserable and distraught Tortured by pain, your servant Be merciful and bear tbis prayer.”

  Soon, Zilpah was up on the bricks, with Leah standing behind her, supporting the birth of the child conceived in her name. Zilpah had no more tears by the time Inna directed her to push. She was ashen and cold. She was half dead, and there was no strength even to scream when the baby finally came, tearing her flesh front and back.

  It was not the hoped-for daughter, but a boy, long, thin, and black-haired. Leah hugged her sister and declared her lucky to have such a son, and lucky to be alive. Leah named him Gad for luck, and said, “May he bring you the moon and the stars and keep you safe in your old age.”

  But the rejoicing in the red tent was cut short because Zilpah cried out again. The pain had returned. “I am dying. I am dying,” she sobbed, weeping for the son who would never know his mother. “He will live as I did,” she wailed, “the orphan of a concubine, haunted by dreams of a cold, dead mother.

  “Unlucky one,” she whimpered. “Unlucky son of an unlucky mother.”

  Inna and Rachel crouched on either side of the despairing mother seeking the source of this new pain. Inna took Rachel’s hand and placed it on Zilpah’s belly, showing her a second child in the womb. “Don’t give up yet, little mother,” Inna said to Zilpah. “You will bear twins tonight. Didn’t you dream of that? Not much of a priestess, is she?” She grinned.

  The second baby came quickly, since Gad had opened the way.

  He fell out of his mother’s womb like ripe fruit, another boy, also dark but much smaller than the first.

  But his mother did not see him. A river of blood followed in his wake, and the light in Zilpah’s eyes went out. Time and again Inna and Rachel packed her womb with wool and herbs to staunch the bleeding. They wet her lips with water and strong, honeyed brews. They sang healing hymns and burned incense to keep her spirit from flying out of the tent. But Zilpah lay on the blanket, not dead but not alive either, for eight days and more. She was not aware of the circumcision of Gad or her second son, whom Leah named Asher, for the goddess Zilpah loved. Leah nursed the boys, and so did Bilhah and one of the bondswomen.

  After ten days Zilpah moaned and lifted her hands. “I dreamed two sons,” she croaked. “Is it so?” They brought the babies to her, dark and thriving. And Zilpah laughed. Zilpah’s laughter was a rare sound, but the names made her chuckle. “Gad and Asher. Luck and the goddess. It sounded like the name of a myth from the old days,” she said. “And I was Ninmah, the exalted lady, who birthed it all.” Zilpah ate and drank and healed, though she could not nurse her sons. Her breasts had gone dry in her illness. But this was a sorrow she could bear. She had two sons, both fine and strong, and she did not regret her dream daughter. When they grew to boyhood and left her side, Zilpah sorrowed over the fact that she had no girl to teach. But when she held them in her arms, she tasted only the joy of mothers, the sweetest tears.

  Inna told her that she should take care not to bear for at least two years, but Zilpah had no intention of going through such pain again. She had given her family two sons. She sought out Jacob one morning before he left for the pasture, and told him that another pregnancy would surely kill her. She asked that he remember this when he called a wife to his bed, and she never slept with Jacob again. Indeed, Jacob had trembled when he learned that he had gotten twins upon her. He was one of two himself, and it had caused him nothing but grief. “Forget that they shared their mother’s womb,” he ordered. It was so, not because Jacob commanded it but because the two were so different. Gad, long and lean, with his flutes and drum; Asher, the short, wiry husbandsman with his father’s talent with animals.

  Leah’s next pregnancy also brought twin boys—Naphtali and Issachar. Unlike Zilpah’s, though, these twins looked so much alike that, as children, not even their mother could always tell them apart. Only Bilhah, who could see every leaf on a tree in its own light, was never fooled by those two, who loved each other with a kind of quiet harmony that none of my other brothers knew.

  Poor Bilhah. After Dan, all her babies—a boy and two girls—died before weaning. But she never let her sorrow poison her heart, and she loved the rest of us instead.

  Jacob was now a man with four wives and ten sons, and his name was known among the men of the countryside. He was a good father and took his boys with him into the hills as soon as they were able to carry their own water, and he taught them the ways of sheep and goats, the secrets of good pasturage, the habits of long walking, the skills of sling and spear. There, too, far from the tents of their mothers, he told them the terrible story of his father, Isaac.

  When Jacob and his sons stayed in the far pastures keeping watch where a jackal had been seen or simply to enjoy the cool night air of a summer month, he would tell his sons the story of how his grandfather, Abram, bound Isaac hand and foot, and then raised a knife above the boy’s throat, to give El the sacrifice of his favorite son. El was the only god to whom Jacob bowed down—a jealous, mysterious god, too fearsome (he said) to be fashioned as an idol by human hands, too big to be contained by any place—even a place as big as the sky. El was the god of Abram, Isaac, and Jacob, and it was Jacob’s wish that his sons accept this El as their god, too.

  Jacob was a weaver of words, and he would catch his eager audience in the threads of his tale, telling of the glinting knife, Isaac’s eyes wide with fright. The rescue came at the last possible moment, when the knife was at Isaac’s throat, and a drop of blood trickled down his neck, just like the tears falling from Abram’s brimming eyes. But then a fiery spirit stayed the old man’s hand and brought a pure white ram to be sacrificed in Isaac’s stead. Reuben and Simon, Levi and Judah would stare at their father’s arm, stretched out against the starry night, and shudder to think of themselves on the altar.

  “The god of my fathers is a merciful god,” Jacob said. But when Zilpah heard the story from her sons, she said, “What kind of mercy is that, to scare the spit dry in poor Isaac’s mouth? Your father’s god may be great, but he is cruel.”

  Years later, when his grandsons finally met the boy of the story, by then an old man, they were appalled to hear how Isaac stuttered, still frightened by his father’s knife.

  Jacob’s sons adored their father, and his neighbors respected his success. But he was uneasy. Laban owned everything he had attained—the flocks, the bondsmen and their families, the fruit of the garden, the wool for trade. Nor was Jacob alone in his resentment of Laban. Leah and Rachel, Bilh
ah and Zilpah chafed under the rule of their father, who seemed to grow more crude and arrogant as the years passed. He treated his own daughters like slaves, and cuffed their sons. He profited from the labor of their looms without a word of thanks. He leered at the bondswomen and took their beer as a bribe against his lust. He mistreated Ruti every day.

  The four sisters spoke of these things in the red tent, which they always entered a day before the rest of the women in the camp. Perhaps their early years together when they were the only women in camp created a habit in their bodies that brought on the flow of blood some hours before the bondswomen. Or perhaps it was simply the need of their hearts to spend a day among themselves. In any event, the bondswomen did not complain, nor was it their place to say anything. Besides, Jacob’s wives would always greet them with sweets as they entered to celebrate the new moon and rest on the straw.

  Ruti said nothing, but her blackened eyes and her bruises reproached them. No older than Leah, Ruti had grown haggard in their midst. After the birth of her sons, Laban had treated her well—the tight-fisted goat had even brought her bangles to brighten her wrists and ankles. But then she gave off bearing and he began to hit her and call her names so ugly my mothers would not repeat them to me. Ruti’s shoulders stooped with despair, and several of her teeth were broken from the force of Laban’s fists. Even so, he continued to use her body for his own pleasure, a thought that made my mothers shudder.

  For all their pity, Jacob’s wives did not embrace Ruti. She was the mother of their sons’ rivals, their material enemy. The bondswomen saw how the sisters kept themselves apart from her, and they followed suit. Even her own sons laughed at her and treated her like a dog. Ruti, already alone, kept to herself. She became such a ragged, battered misery to look at that no one saw her. When she came to Rachel, desperate for help, she seemed more a ghost than a woman.