Work Text:
A Covenant
THAT NIGHT OLD ABRAHAM was shaking the toff like it was full of spiders, and toothless Sarah tolling off the set of all things that could fit around her waist back east in Ur, where she was young, and Abraham’s daughter held Isaac's skinny arms still around his narrow chest so we could dot-dot-dot his face with sap. It was a raw year in Canaan, and all of us nervous,knowing some new storm was in the air. That god of his was back, an airless brush-fire and a voice booming in his head, and his coming meant no good thing for us and never had.
Abraham was a wanderer. His god told him tall tales of the stars and the sand, and he left his home somewhere back around the dawn of time, wandered down West to our own country, sold his pretty wife Sarah for a caravan of slaves and sheep and goats, and snatched her back again with trickery. Then his god said, Abraham, tent up in Canaan, and cut a covenant on the bodies of your men and boys, and I’ll carve out a nation for you and yours. And Abraham did. He lined us all up, the geezers on down to the babies, and scratched a line in the dust, saying, on one side of this line is a knife and glory, and on the other is the wilderness. I’ll give a skin of water to any man who leaves, and no more. To the man who stay goes the love of God and my love. But the ones who leave will be strangers to my house, and strangers to all my descendants.
By the end we were half, and the ones sent away were made to set out alone, and to stumble down west to Egypt or back to the land of the Chaldeans with only their wineskins and their bitterness at the ones who stayed, and the women and girls tried to run after their men and were brought down kicking and biting. Some ran away in the night, and what became of them none of us knew, though Abraham said, God will provide what bears providing. And it was years still, before Isaac was born, and even Abraham in his wild faith began to look like maybe he’d driven out half his property for nothing. You could almost feel sorry for him, limping around and squinting at his shriveled old wife in wounded expectation, if you were someone else and far away.
That poor bitch Sarah was old from the start. When we were born she was already old, and when she gave birth to Isaac at last, she was brittle as brush and could barely breathe to speak, and after the baby was cut and bandaged like the rest of us, they handed him down to the Abraham’s daughter to carry up the pasture and down while Sarah slept. The Nile girls called it a curse on Sarah, a face full of ash for an answered prayer, that she should be shut out of childbirth in her youth, and robbed of her rest in age. The old man called it a blessing.
Abraham’s daughter couldn’t say.
She was a big bone-heap of a girl, one of them fathered rag-tag on his way to the promised son, and she took to Isaac as his mother never could have, being young and sharp-sighted and untouched by any but the usual bitterness. When Sarah dried up fast, she carried down skins of sheep’s milk and fed him with the bag pushed up against her chest, and sang him songs of Ur whose words she didn’t know. She taught Isaac to put his hands on the lambs to calm them, and to shoot on the bow, which was too much for his strength. The kitchen-women called her Kabish, meaning spider, because she was all legs and arms, and because she was a nuisance to them. Isaac called her the same, but what her real name was no one asked or cared to hear.
Now, Abraham was proud of the wounds he made on us, and proud to tent up in a land where no one wanted him. He told us all the story as if we’d asked for it, and shushed Sarah when she set in on the festivals of Ur, the gentle bovine idols and the men who loved her, the music and the shoes she wore to dance in. All that is in the past, he said. The future belongs to the generations yet to come. And his face was alight with fear, and his knuckles were white on the toff as he rattled it.
Do we have to take a lamb? Isaac asked. His voice about to crack on the word lamb, and his sister puts her hand on his shoulder, as if she’ll keep the lambs safe from Abraham whatever his god says, and Abraham sets in to telling how particular his god is about his burnt flesh selections, how he sips the smoke from the air and tastes in it youth and firmness and even what color its wool is, but anyway, God will provide the lamb when we reach the mountain, and Abraham’s daughter stared straight at the old man seeing what we all saw, and maybe something more besides, and looking like a struck flint on a black night, and she held her brother close against a danger he couldn’t see.
Stop it, said Isaac, wriggling free. If we take one out there, won’t we be stealing it?
Abraham said, It’s God’s land and God’s lamb to give us. If I take you out there and we make our offering, God has promised in the fourth generation that our sons will be kings in this land. And what’s ours in the future is ours, isn’t it? What’s time to the God of the mountains?
And he spread his horny hands in the firelight, measuring out for glowing Isaac and glowering Ishmael the breadth of what he had seeded in them, whether they wanted it or not: a great nation, a destiny made manifest. He shook his toff and beat the drum a thundering thump, thump, saying, Those Canaanites better get used to our songs!
And the songs he called his were old Nile work songs, sung in a mocking slur that turned their joy and pain alike to mush, and little Isaac danced his jerking bent-back dance they called Egyptian, and his sister danced with him, because they were born here and don't know any better. They jerk and bump and shriek with laughter in the smoke, and Hagar scorns them all under her eyelids, and here’s poor sunken Sarah telling her tales again of light and barge and lamb-kebabs, and here’s the kids not knowing a word of what she’s talking about.
In the morning we rose and set hard for the mountain, and when we reached the roots of it he said, wait in the bush, and we waited, the beasts and the both of us, holding the tent-poles. And Isaac looked over his shoulder at where we waited, and we stood there twisted up like rags with knowing and not wanting to know.
. . . .
A Journey
The mountain had a name, Moriah.
The Canaanites called it another way, but they were long gone already, her father said. The wind was getting ready to lift them up and scatter them, to make room for Isaac and his people. Her people too, if it came to that. All his seed would be nations.
The land, too, Canaan, further than she could see or walk the breadth of, the whole earth and pitiless sky was Canaan, but it was bound to take another name, the way her father was bound to take a new name every time his god asked something of him.
The Lord provides, he told her. Sometimes with a brush of his hand to her hair like a guilty caress.
Isaac grew to fit his name. He laughed easily and ran over everything like water. The favorite son, the miracle baby, he was given the second-best portion of everything, and no one scolded him. Ishmael, who was older, pushed him down when he could, and answered his questions with lies, and then his lip would shake a little or he would run into the tent with his fists clenched, but nothing had ever really hurt him, nothing could hurt him but Abraham alone.
Maybe she didn't know how she knew to be afraid. Maybe there was no time to ask how or from what. The danger was a cloud with no shape, a cloud in her throat, a pulse in her hand against the bow. The god slurping his soup in the shade of the tent long ago, and the same shattered look on her father’s face. Something terrible in the mountain ahead. The land was a pulse that was her footsteps on it. She was a drum that had the name drum.
A Promised Land
“And then what?”
Ilya’s sister smoothed the edges of each dyed cambric petal, dotted the long ends with glue, and crimped the ends forward with a clamp. She did all this without looking up and without stopping. “You know what. Didn’t you hear it a thousand times?”
Ilya leaned both elbows on the kitchen table, spilling flowers to the floor. “I forgot.”
“That’s a lie if there ever was one,” said his sister. “Pick those up.”
She twisted two of the green wires together and made a loop at the end, and set to work on a new flower. All the flowers would be ladies’ hats one day. They made a pile on the table and littered the worn white floor. Ilya picked one off the floor and began bending the petals down toward the hollow center with thumb and forefinger. “Verochka, what, though? After she yells out, what does he do then?”
“Don’t pick,” she said sharply. “You’ll waste them.” She snapped the flower out of his small hands, re-crimped the petals and threw the flower on the pile. “You can twist stems, if you want to help.”
Ilya perched on the chair that wobbled. He liked to thump it back and forth on the floor. He held one of the wire stems between two hands and looked up at his sister. “Can you show me?”
“No. I’m busy. You know how. Just watch me and do what I do.” Her fingers moved close under her narrow nose and dark eyes, and so quickly they seemed to Ilya like a machine she had made from her body and no longer fully controlled. “So she lifts her bow to shoot the knife from his hand, like, and the angel says. . .”
Ilya thumped his chair and boomed the words in his best thunder. “ ‘Daughter, what is your name, and how dare you defy the Lord and your father?’ ”
His sister rolled her eyes.
“If you know what, why do you always have to hear it? Hand me that hook now.”
He scowled and scrambled on the floor for the hook and set it on the table next to the new flowers and the stack of leaves and petals.
“What did she say, though?”
“Do you have any brain at all? You know it by heart what she says.” Vera made a show of sighing. “She said I never had no name from my father, and who are you to make him kill a boy you never met, when there’s a fine fat ram in the bushes there, and what kind of God are you anyway.”
Ilya clapped his hands and giggled. He loved to hear Abraham’s daughter tell the angel off, as though she were one of the neighborhood girls scolding a landlord. “And he was mad,” he said. “He was all on fire at her.”
“Angels don’t get mad.”
“Why?”
Vera thought a moment, peeled glue from one of her fingers.
“Well, they got no hearts to be broken, and no blood to get hot. If an angel gets mad, it’s a fallen angel anyway, and God won’t trust it to go sending messages about things. This one just stopped dead in its tracks, and it thought a moment.”
“They don’t think like you and me,” said Ilya.
“If you know it so well, why don’t you tell it? You help me out by telling me a story for once, and then I can rest my voice and get all this done before Mama comes home, and she could rest longer.”
He quieted.
“I don’t know how to say it.”
Vera pinched her flowers for a long time in silence, and Ilya twisted wires and spoiled them and watched his sister’s fingers and twisted them again more slowly, one green stem after another, with a loop at top to glue the cambric, and another at the bottom where it would be sewn against the hat or dress or handbag.
Even when his sister checked his work, she never stopped crimping and gluing petals. After a little while, she spoke again.
“Well, you’re right,” she said. “Angels never had to think much. You and me have to think things over a hundred times a day or so, but angels, almost never. They just stay in heaven, mostly, bask in the light of God all the time, and it makes them hard put when they have to say anything other than don’t be afraid.”
“Which is what he said to them.”
“Which is all any angel knows how to say mostly. But now—” she bent to pick up a new stack of petals from the floor beside her, “now this one had to think a second. And the thinking of this angel was clouding up the whole sky, thinking on this girl, and the boy tied up to the altar, and all of this, and meanwhile, Abraham’s daughter—”
“Why didn’t she have a name, though?”
“She just never did.” She rubbed her nose without breaking the rhythm of her gluing and crimping. She was behind on her work for the week, and their mother needed to sleep. "Do you want to give her one?”
Ilya thought a moment. “Verochka,” he said.
His sister laughed. “Not likely. So the girl then. . .”
“Verochka the Fearless.”
“Whatever you like. So Verochka Abrahamovna shot an arrow close to her father’s head, and he dropped his knife in fear that she would kill him dead to save her brother. And the blade shattered on the rock of Mount Moriah. And the angel said – well, you know what the angel said then; it's written in the Scripture. And while Abraham was wrestling with the ram to get its throat slit and all, his daughter cut the bonds from Isaac and ran him down together through the brush into a little cave, and—there, look; you’ve made me drop it, talking nonsense. Go under the table and get me that flower, and don’t pinch it. Hold it by the stem.”
He ducked under the tablecloth and held still for a moment, imagining the cave around him, and the madman with his knife above. "Was Isaac shivering all over?”
“I guess he was.”
“And the angel came to get them”
“And said what angels always say.”
Ilya set the flower on the table. “It was stupid for Isaac to go back. Why did she let him go back at all?”
“Because she had to. Because he wanted to go.”
“I would have shot the angel, pew! Right out of the sky." He stood on the chair and threw himself to the ground, imitating the angel's death throes. They were like the death throes of the lead villain at the Little Portage Street Theatre, down to the distinctive final sweep of the arm in an arc above his head. "And then I would have run back over where Abraham was, and shot him. Pew!” He clutched his throat and staggered, thumping the table and spilling flowers on the chair and floor and his sister's lap.
His sister laughed. “And what good would that have done anyone?”
“If he tried to kill me,” said Ilya. “Of course I would shoot him. Then we could get away and be rich. What happened to Verochka?”
Vera pursed her lips. “Well, she went with her brother to the promised land, and got what they call a good job at the waist factory, but her own uncle fired her after she asked for a raise. Then she took up with the Eternal Spring Flower Company of Hoboken. . .”
“No, no!" Ilya drew the tablecloth over his head to shut out the teasing. "You know!”
“What happened to Abraham’s daughter, no one knows. There’s a story that says she became the queen of the Canaanites, which we don't know if they ever even had a queen, and some say she went to Egypt to find her mother who had run away, and later on it was one of her great-great granddaughters who found Moses on the water. All we know is she was given some blessing, and she left the house of her father. Some people say she asked the angel to change her into the stars and the sand, so she would guide the wanderer.”
“Like us,” said Ilya."
“Sometimes. But maybe for all the people who ran off on account of Abraham’s covenant.”
“Why doesn’t it say in the Scripture?” said Ilya.
“Not all true things are written in the Scripture,” she said. “Now get me a cup of water, and go play. I’m twenty behind already. You can hear more when Mama makes the coffee.”
Ilya sat up on the floor beside the stove, thinking as his sister made four flowers and twelve stems. “We’re not in the Scripture, are we,” he said.
“No. That was all written long ago.”
“And there's no America in it at all. But here we are, though.”
She nods. Here we are. She turns to her flowers and her hands move so quickly Ilya can’t follow them. He sets the water near her, but it is long before she can even set her flowers down and lift it. Soon the room has grown too hot and close for Ilya, and he runs down the dark stairs into the street, and the long stone shadows of America cool the pavement beneath him. His sister remains. When her mother returns from her night shift, she puts the coffee on and they work together, filling the big straw basket by the door and the empty brewery boxes, and the sun goes down on their fingers still making invisible flowers before he returns.
. . .
A Fragment
And when they both returned to the camp, Isaac shivered bitterly, and Abraham gathered him to his breast. But his daughter he did not look on, for she had defied him and set her feet on the sacred hill, and because of her his covenant was broken. She went down to where we were sleeping and lay under the bushes a little way from the camp, and in the morning she rose and returned to the mountain.
In the morning he told to Isaac and his young men that the sacrifice of his son was a test, and he passed the test because he knew in his heart that the god of the mountains was good and would stay his hand. Isaac was glad but shivered still, and the young men could not quiet his flesh with words or kindness, and Isaac said, Where is my sister? Where is my Kabish?
Then Abraham told his young men to go into the wilderness and bring back the girl, saying
Freedom to the first man who finds my daughter, freedom and wealth to the man who brings her to me, for she has defied her father and broken his covenant
And one of the young men spied her through the brush, under the angel’s airless light
He saw her talking together with the angel, calmly dragging her bow along the ground, and she heard his coming and saw him. But the young man did not call out. He turned back on his path and told his master, Master, there is no sign of her here.
Then the other young man saw that there was a light, and he said to Abraham, Surely, the angel of the Lord has found her, and they brought rope to bind her hands, and Isaac followed.
But when they came to the place where the angel and the girl were speaking, the angel said to Abraham, Set down your pride, and listen! Return with your daughter to Beer-sheba, and let her be given cakes and kill the lamb for her table, and let her be named by you, for she has made with the Lord a new covenant, and given her life to save your only son from God himself. For this she will be called blessed, for she above all others has made her sacrifice
But the daughter of Abraham said, I will take no name from my father, for he listened to the voice of God and raised his hand to slay his son.
And she said, I will return to my fathers house, but only for the sake of the flocks whom I tend, and for my brother Isaac, whom I love.
And Abraham said, What right have you to defy the angel of the Lord? Submit, and be blessed, or you will be outcast from my house. And he spoke to the angel, saying,
Send her away, and give her what blessing you will; for she is nothing of mine.
To the young man who led Abraham to his daughter, Abraham gave freedom to himself and to his wife, who was with child. They were given goats and sheep and a measure of gold, and sent away west to Egypt, where they dwelt in peace in the land of their fathers.
And the young man who had seen the daughter of Abraham and said nothing was cast out into the wilderness, for he had hidden the truth from one who had seen God. He was sent away with a skin of water, and Abraham took his wife for a concubine. The names of her sons by Abraham are recorded in the Book of the Fathers, but when they were grown, Abraham sent them away from the land of Canaan; he gave them sheep and goats and male and female slaves and sent them away from Isaac, east into the east country.
. . .
Afterimages
Isaac slept on the ground beside his father, and when the sun rose on the next day, he could not understand what had happened. He remembered everything, but as a dream, fragmented and far away, transparent at times, with the words coming in from another part of the sky. These things pulse under all his daily thoughts: his father’s face all twisted, and the bright knife, the blinding sun and the word Father in a voice no longer his.
When he is older, he forgets he had a sister. He watches his father with a dim and stony unease he doesn’t understand, and blames himself for being selfish and spoiled, for not understanding all his father has gone through. By the time he is grown, he has forgotten that he ever went to the mountain, and the memory is no longer a memory but a self-reproach, and image of his father's pain. He believes the anguished face, the bonds, the raised knife are what he deserves.
He tells Rebekah, I wish I had been kinder to him.
He tries to make amends to his brother Ishmael, to Hagar. He tries, when he has sons of his own, to love them both the same.
.
His sister remembers every detail of the mountain sacrifice but one: She cannot remember that she saved him. She remembers the lambs bleating as she left the homestead, and the hot sand and the grass beneath her feet. She remembers dragging her bow in the dust of the road as she followed the heavy footprints after dark, and hid beside their camp as they slept. The angel, with his folding and unfolding wings and his low, flat voice, is as clear to her now as the day she first saw him, and Abraham's face as he turned toward her is before her still, moving from shock to rage, from agony to resolution and back. She can smell the juniper of that day under any smell, and feel the vast sky closing on her, feel the knife raised above her brother's body.
But she cannot speak. She cannot draw her bow. The knife comes down, again and again, and around him the fiery branches crack and spit sparks. She runs down the hillside into the brush, down and down until she comes to a spring, and there she lies until the world turns black.
When she tells the story to her children, she says, I followed them, I tried to stop him, but I couldn’t.
Sometimes they remind her that Isaac is alive and living in the Negev, that he worships his father’s god out of a loyalty she can't understand, and they see him sometimes at the well, with his wife. And then she remembers Isaac alive, hiding with her in the cave under the mountain, Isaac with his face streaked and sticky, his whole body shaking, saying, I have to get back; he’ll kill me; I have to go.
She shakes her head. I don’t remember, she says. I know it happened, but I can’t look at it.
That’s all right, they say. We’ll remember it for you.
And they remember it, but not well. They forget whether the angel blessed her or cursed her, whether she went back to her father's house or left for the cities of the Plain. By the time they told it to their own children, full of seriousness and purpose, most of what they knew was wrong.
A Sacrifice
Vera rose before her brother, before her mother came home, at the breach of dawn. In America the days were shadowed, and the nights blazing and full of smoke. The cars rumbled endlessly thought the streets, and there were shouts in the walls and sudden sharp laughter, and someone cooking pig's blood or cabbage always, as though there were no day and no night, a country outside of time. She got Ilyusha up and scrubbed his face and hands by the stove. "I don't want to go to school," he said.
"You have to," she told him, though she had no better words for why. "Else you'll wind up breaking your back like Mama and me, making ugly flowers."
Ilya was at his most stubborn when he was sleepy, and he had barely slept that night. "I want to help you," he said, yawning. "I can make stems. I can glue."
"That's no good," said his sister. "This is how you help us. Listen."
"I don’t want to." He shook his head heavily, kicked his stocking feet against the floorboards. "I want to help make money"
"Shush," she said. "You help how you can, or it's no help at all. If I were an ox in a plough, do you think it would help for you to get in beside me and be dragged down into the dirt? If Mama were a fish, would it help her any for you to dive in the ocean and drown?"
"I don’t know," said Ilya stubbornly. "Probably." Vera handed him the pencil case and his coat, and he took them and sat staring at them as he would at hateful gifts, a string of fishbones and an old sock for Christmas. "Why can't you come with me?"
"Because I'm too big. Picture me in a classroom full of six-year-olds. You're just the right age, and in a few years you'll read and write, and learn be a rich man. Wouldn't you like that?"
"No," he said. "I want to stay with you," he said.
"Oh, well," said Vera. "I want to eat ice cream every day. But I can't, even if I could have it, because it'd make me sick. That's this. It’s for all our own good as well as yours, Ilyusha, if you go and get an education. Then you could read to us while we work. Think about that, now, and be brave.">
"I don’t want to."
"You don’t get brave because you want to be. You get brave because you do. Because you need it for someone.
Ilya made a face.
"Do you remember Abraham’s daughter?" she said. He nodded warily.
"She never went to any school, though."
"She was brave, and she did what she had to. Like you will."
Ilya slid down from the narrow bed. He imagined a teacher, pinched-faced and ugly like in the Sunday comics, and him shooting her full in the face with a bow. He pictured a dungeon full of children who had been bad, and all of them rushing outside with a yell when he kicked the door down.
"All right," he said.
Vera lifted her brother up against the rope bed and fit his feet one by one into the soft pinching boots. "That’s my fighter, she said. "May there be a light for his eyes and a path for his feet. Come here."
She buttoned his brother’s thin jacket and set the red hat on his head. “Now let’s hurry before you’re late. Take your own bag now.” Ilya buttoned his boots grimly. He was shivering now like a shirt on a line, like a bare branch in winter.
They went down the narrow stairs together into the dusty light, and Ilya swung his pencil case in wide arcs, hanging close to his sister's skirts as though he could disappear into them at need. He thought the streets looked ghostly today, as if they would not be the same when he returned. He imagined coming out of the hulking school building at three o’ clock only to find the doors all changed, the faces strange, the pickle-seller gone from the corner where his friends sold newspapers in the evening.
Vera didn’t know what to warn him, how to say what school would be. She only knew that it would be hard, and that he had to go. She told him what any angel says, the only thing angels know how to say most of the time. Don’t be afraid. But it was Vera who was afraid. The building they came to was bare and ugly, and surrounded by a high black fence and a yard bare even of weeds. The children beyond the gate were wild with the same chipped-tooth concrete wildness that seemed to grow deep and fast into everything in America. Don’t be afraid. He runs away toward the school, brave, brave like Abraham’s daughter in the face of the angel’s fire.
She doesn’t know if she has saved her brother or sacrificed him, sealed his heritage or cut him off forever. She presses forward on her toes, watches him run headlong into the mob as the shrill bell rings, the same bell as in the factory that was full of cotton dust and choking heat. Ilya! It’s already too late; he can’t hear her, and the men in the doorway laugh at her stricken face and her hands at her mouth or at her being simply and suddenly alone on their street.
Jealous, girl?
A little big for kindergarten ain’t you, sweetheart?
Nah, she's just the right size to learn a lesson or two
I’ll be your teacher, kitten. What do you say?
She turns her head as the tenement girls have taught her, and her imitation of them is no longer an imitation but a part of herself, and walks away from them fast without looking back. The doors of the school close on silence, and Vera walks by herself through the noise and the shadows of America, to her mother who has already put the coffee to steam and begun the day’s flowers without her.