Adam & Eve (12 page)

With more determination than I had ever felt before, I stumbled toward the water till my knees buckled. I folded at the waist, and my face bowed into the sand. I heard the snapping of the flames on my back. The fur collar around the back of the leather jacket was burning, and I willed myself to rise, to stumble forward again toward the waves. I would fall into the water, then I would roll. The water would save me. Staggering toward the sea, I yanked off the jacket, but my unsteady legs gave way again.

Twisting myself, I rolled over the sand toward the surf. Though I thought to extinguish the flames by crushing them with my body, the rolling wrapped me in so much pain that I knew I would lose consciousness to escape it. My long skirt came untied and fell away. My blouse and my back were burning. I rose onto all fours and determined to crawl, but I stopped to rip away my blouse. My alertness was waxing and waning.

When I smelled my hair burning, I tried to yank it out. The seared skin of my naked back screamed. Though I collapsed forward, I drove my fingers down into the wet sand and pulled my body toward the water. Once more. Again I pulled and lunged forward. A wave broke over my outstretched hands
and my forearms, over my forehead and face, finally—yes—dousing my back.

When the water receded, I gasped for breath and made myself roll sideways despite the pain. Sharp sand embedded itself into my burned back. Completely nude, I rolled into the water, turned faceup, and knew that I had killed the fire in my hair. The water was shallow, stunningly cold, divinely welcome to the burn on my back. For the briefest of respites, I floated on my back and registered the presence of the sky.

Remembering that the plane would surely explode, I rolled over and swam two strokes downward. When my hands met with slush, I knew I was now entirely submerged. Holding my breath under the water, I shoved my fingertips into the sandy bottom. I determined to stay attached there, moving my legs against the water only enough to keep my body anchored. Perhaps a foot of ocean covered me. If I turned over and sat up, surely I would be able to breathe—but not yet.

Finally, through the water, the muffled sound of explosion reached my ears.

I waited underwater as long as I could, then rolled over. When the skin of my buttocks found the unstable bottom, I realized anew that I had discarded or lost all that I wore—except Thom’s memory stick. I held it tightly. Had Thom given me a fireproof cord? The watertight, fireproof titanium case still hung from its black silk cord around my neck. I sat up, gasped for breath, and opened my eyes again.

The Piper Cub sat in a wigwam tangle of metal; its green-painted canvas was scorched brown and black. A bit of feeble and harmless flame continued to lick at the wreckage. A few jagged metal scraps of the exploded gas tank lay on the beach. I knew I was hurt, burned across my back and scalp, but for the moment I felt nothing but relief. And triumph. I was alive. Lucky.

Remember your name is Lucy, and Lucy is part of the word lucky. It’s always lucky just to be alive. Words my grandmother once said to me.

I sat in the water and surveyed my situation. What I saw around me seemed cut from the fabric of pure simplicity—blue sky, green sea. Unspeakably beautiful. More: my eyes glorified the sandy yellow neutrality of the beach. Cloud billows without motion hung in the blue.
Lucky merely to be alive.
Green water incessantly rocking like the sublime comfort of Grandmother’s soft sway.
Lucky.

For a brief moment relief and beauty held pain at bay before their power dissolved. As though I and the plane were falling again, I saw an endless sea of bubbling green treetops rushing toward me. I heard again the desperate coughing of the little plane.
No:
I was sitting in the sea, not far from shore, coughing. Like a struck gong, my body rang with pain.

Think,
my mind commanded itself.

Up there, from the air, I had seen someone, a man who might help me. Or I him. Like something discarded, he had lain on the riverbank.

Go on,
inner voices commanded.

You know you can bear anything.

Where had I heard such voices? They seemed the voices of Thom’s parents—Thom, who was dead—his parents’ voices speaking from Auschwitz and Treblinka.

I must ignore the twisted wreckage of my plane. The pale beach was a blessing I must claim. I stood up in the shallow, blue-green water and took a step toward shore. I remembered the word
Lascaux.
A man named Pierre Saad had entrusted me with ancient, irreplaceable pages relevant to the book of Genesis, which I had thrown out the airplane door. The pain of the burn slammed against my back, and I staggered.

I shifted my feet in the slushy underwater sand to recalibrate my balance. Somehow I would reclaim the codex. My hand enclosed the memory stick.

T
HE MAN BORN
as Jacob ben Ezra was an identical twin; so identical were he and his slightly younger brother that no teacher could tell them apart, and often they even succeeded in deceiving their mother. Their mother said they had knocked at the gate to the world at just the same moment, but Jacob had elbowed his way past his slightly smaller brother and so became the firstborn. Because the younger one, who was not smaller, had thicker hair on his head, he was named Esau. When they started school—two merry black-haired, brown-eyed, bright little boys—their mother tousled their hair, felt the difference, and realized that by this comparative method she would always have a way to distinguish who was who. She shared this secret with no one, not even her pious husband.

In temperament the boys seemed quite different. Esau shared his father’s interest in scriptures and memorized them with great exactness; he could recite the entirety of the book of Genesis by the time he was eight, and Exodus and Psalms, though he found the meaning of poetry more slippery than prose, by age ten. In this way, he earned his father’s special protection. Jacob’s interests were more scientific: he observed the world with focused curiosity, and when he had classified the plants and bugs of the neighborhood, he lifted his
eyes to the heavens and learned about the stars of the constellations over West Jerusalem and to identify the planets. He liked math.

Jacob had one other passion discovered quite by accident: he overheard a portion of an Easter service held by touring Methodists with an American singing “Jerusalem, the Golden.” Never had Jacob heard such stirring music and beautiful tones. And this was his place, his home, celebrated in the song. The man’s voice itself was like a golden trumpet. The melody soared, yet it had a martial beat to it that made the boy want to march, then soar. Like a fanfare in the middle of the piece—
do, sol, me, do
—the music spanned a rapid octave; the notes climbed like quick feet mounting the golden steps to heaven.

“Listen, listen!” he commanded, wanting Esau to join his rapture.

“It’s the wrong religion,” Esau sensibly answered.

But Jacob knew he must have this music and more like it in his life.

As soon as he found his courage, Jacob told his father, “I would like to be the man who sounds the shofar at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.” As preparation for his lungs, Jacob proposed he take up the trumpet. Soon he realized his mistake: the trumpet was too brazen; the mellow French horn was just right. And he liked stuffing his fist into the bell to modify the pitch or to act as a mute. It was as though he himself had entered into the life of the music, as if he had joined with the instrument, from his lips on the mouthpiece to his hand inside the metal bell. He had become an instrument of the instrument and of its Glory.

Both boys, then, had their spiritual side. Esau said he wanted to become a settler and help reclaim the land for God’s chosen people. Jacob said that God’s kingdom was not of this world, and he had no interest in claiming a patch of dirt. He thought of orchestras and French horns playing Handel’s
Water Music
and of von Karajan’s Beethoven when he thought of where he wanted to be.

When the boys were thirteen, on the first day of school, they entered the public bus with special excitement. At Jacob’s insistence, they had hatched an exciting plan: a new variation on an old theme. Jacob had insisted that they sign up to study different languages: Greek and Hindi. But actually they would
both study both languages, by swapping places every day. They whispered and giggled like girls, and then the bus blew up.

Jacob was spared, but Esau was decapitated and his body almost entirely destroyed. What Jacob saw when he opened his eyes in the wreckage was their two school satchels leaning together as though in conspiracy. The blue and yellow bags were covered with dust, but he knew their contents—their lunches, their wallets, their books and new blank notebooks—were safe inside. His brother was gone. Jacob reached out for one of the bags, opened it, and saw the Greek grammar that belonged to Esau. With all his heart, he grabbed the satchel to his body and let no one take it from him.

Beside his hospital bed, the orderly opened the satchel, saw the wallet and the identification card, and gently spoke to the boy, calling him Esau. Jacob felt his own eyes narrow, and in that moment he became Esau.

When his parents came to his bed, his mother put her fingers in his hair, but she had no point of comparison; the amount of dust in his hair was distracting, and the dust made his hair feel thicker, too. No, Jacob would not let his brother die. To become Esau he resolved to give up music and to study the scriptures, seated patiently for long hours beside his father. When other boys in yeshiva made careless errors, Jacob-now-Esau flew into a rage.

One day one of his teachers said, “And do you still want to take on the hazards of being a settler, now that your dear brother is gone? Would you break your parents’ hearts twice?”

“No,” he answered thoughtfully, “yet my faith is strong that God promised this land to Israel, in perpetuity. I will find other ways to do the work of the Almighty.”

“And how shall you love God?”

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, with all thine soul, and with all thine might.”

Esau, born as Jacob, became Rabbi ben Ezra, a rabbi of narrow and exacting precision. Often he studied with cotton in his ears, lest some accidental strain of heavenly music tempt him. He grew to dislike commentaries on scripture
that were imaginative, and asked always what was the letter of the word. His disdain for anyone unfortunate enough not to be among the chosen people hardened into hatred, though he collected paintings of the archangel Michael wearing medieval armor regardless of the religion or ethnicity of the artist, and also paintings of the fiery cherubim sent to guard the gates of Eden.

When a wealthy diamond merchant, an oil sheik, and an American real estate broker paid him to organize an interfaith group to guard the glory of God the Creator, Rabbi ben Ezra proposed the name Perpetuity.

It was he who selected an Arab to wrest the unholy secrets of astrophysics from the scientist Thom Bergmann, and he who reviewed the files of Christian fundamentalists to select a Texas businessman for the Genesis mission. It was God who packaged both threats in the possession of and on the person of an American widow.

L
IKE A CRUEL
and prodding finger, a shaft of Middle Eastern sunlight abused the raw flesh between my shoulder blades where I had been burned. With absolute determination, I focused my gaze on my feet and slid them through the shallow margin of the sea toward the shore. When I left the water, my soles made contact with firm dampness, then dry sand. I was dazed with pain and the terrible brightness of the beach.

Desperately, I remembered the nude man lying on his side on the riverbank. His image became a talisman, an amulet against the torture of my burns. He had seemed too perfect, his torso and limbs too smoothly sculpted, to have been dead. Surely his body had curved in mere repose, a graceful arabesque.

Of course there should have been no sea near the position where I went down. From the beginning, I realized I had fallen into a place that was no place. Like a person in a Rousseau painting, I inhabited a landscape and a situation that combined realities with imaginative vision. Nevertheless, I would find where the river met the ocean, then follow the river backward to the place where the nude man lay. As I walked along the beach, I felt stronger, more clearheaded. Almost, I could imagine myself healed.