1997 - The Red Tent (7 page)

Rachel made no reply. She said nothing for a long time. Bilhah wondered if her sister had slept through her words, or whether her offer had offended. Bilhah said she waited so long for a reply that she began to wonder whether the words that had been gathering in her heart had not even passed her lips.

Bilhah was accustomed to silence and waited. Finally, Rachel turned and kissed her, gathering the small woman close to her body, taking comfort from her warmth. “And the tears she shed were not bitter or even salty,” said Bilhah, “but sweet as rainwater.”

Bilhah knew that even though her offer to Rachel was made out of love, it also served her own heart’s desire. She understood Rachel’s longing because it was her own. She was well into her childbearing years. The sounds of lovemaking in the close world of our tents had roused her at night, leaving her shaken and sleepless. Attending her sister’s births made her wish to become part of the great mother-mystery, which is bought with pain and repaid with an infant’s sparkling smile and silken skin. Her breasts ached to give suck.

Honest Bilhah revealed every corner of her heart to Rachel, who knew the emptiness her sister described. They wept together and slept in each other’s arms. The next morning, Rachel sought out Jacob and asked that he sire a child upon Bilhah, in her name. This was not a request, for it was Rachel’s right to have a child of Jacob.

There was no other permission to seek or get. Jacob agreed. (Why would he not? Leah nursed her latest son and Rachel’s back had been turned to him for long months.) So that night, on the full moon of a chill month, Bilhah went to Jacob, and left him the next morning, no longer a maiden, though not a bride.

There was no henna for Bilhah’s hands, no feast, no gifts. There were no seven days to learn the secrets of Jacob’s body or the meaning of his words. When the sun rose the next day, Jacob returned to oversee the flocks, and Bilhah went to Rachel, and recounted every detail of her night to her sister. Years later, she told it to me.

She wept when she entered Jacob’s tent, and she was surprised by her own tears. She had wanted to be initiated into the mystery of sex, to open her legs and learn the ancient ways of men and women.

But she was lonely walking into her husband’s tent alone, without sisters or ceremony or celebration. She had no right to the rituals of a dowered bride, and yet she missed them.

“Jacob was kind,” Bilhah remembered. “He thought my tears were a sign of fear, so he held me like a child and gave me a woolen bracelet.” It was nothing. No precious metal, or ivory, or anything of value. Just a woven braid made from leavings, the kind of thing shepherd boys make absentmindedly, sitting under a tree in the heat of the day, out of tufts of wool caught on brambles or blown to the ground. Jacob had twirled the brown, black, and cream-colored strands against his thigh until he had enough to plait into a braid.

He took the simple thing from his arm and cut it to fit hers. Such a sad little nothing of a bride price, but she wore it throughout her first year as Jacob’s third wife, until it fell apart one day and she lost it without even knowing where. Thinking of her bracelet, Bilhah smiled and with her forefinger traced the place where a bit of string had tied her to Jacob.

“He comforted me with that poor gift without a word, and I stopped crying. I smiled into his face. And then, oh, I was so bold, I could hardly believe it was me. I put my hand upon his sex and laid his hand upon mine. He lifted my skirt and massaged my belly and my breasts. He buried his face between my thighs, and I almost laughed out loud at the shock of pleasure. When he entered me, it was as though I had fallen into a pool of water, it was as though the moon were singing my name. It was all I had hoped for.

“I slept in Jacob’s long arms, cradled like a child for the first time since my mother held me, may her name be set in the stars. For that night alone, I loved Jacob.”

Bilhah told all of this to Rachel. It was not easy for my beautiful aunt to hear it, but she insisted that Bilhah leave nothing out. And the younger sister repeated her story as often as Rachel asked to hear it, until the memory of Bilhah’s consummation became Rachel’s own memory and her sister’s pleasure and gratitude became part of her own feelings for Jacob.

The day after Jacob knew Bilhah for the first time, he was called away to do business with a trader in Carchemish, a journey of two days. Bilhah suffered in his absence, for she was eager to lie with him again. Rachel suffered in the knowledge that Jacob had found happiness with Bilhah. Leah suffered because she felt so distant from her sisters’ lives. Zilpah watched it all, said little, and sighed much.

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 men 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.