Bilhah put me on her lap, for which I was nearly too large. Her arms were barely long enough to reach around me, but there I sat, a baby once again, embraced in safety while Bilhah whispered the story of Uttu into my ear.
“Once, before women knew how to turn wool into string and string into cloth, people roamed the earth naked. They burned by day and shivered by night, and their babies perished.
“But Uttu heard the weeping mothers, and took pity on them, Uttu was the daughter of Nanna, god of the moon, and of Ninhursag, the mother of the plains. Uttu asked her father if she might teach the women how to spin and weave so their babies would live.
“Nanna scoffed and said that women were too stupid to remember the order of cutting, washing, and combing of wool, the building of looms, the setting of woof and warp. And their fingers were too thick to master the art of spinning. But because Nanna loved his daughter he let her go.
“Uttu went first to the east, to the land of the Green River, but the women there would not put aside their drums and flutes to listen to the goddess.
“Uttu went to the south, but she arrived in the middle of a terrible drought, when the sun had robbed the women of their memories. ‘We need nothing but ram,’ they said, forgetting the months when their children had died of cold. ‘Give us rain or go away.’
“Uttu traveled north, where the fur-clad women were so fierce they tore off a breast to ready themselves for the endless hunt. Those women were too hotheaded for the slow arts of string and loom.
“Uttu went to the east, where the sun rises, but found the men had stolen the women’s tongues and they could not answer for themselves.
“Since Uttu did not know how to speak to men, she came to Ur, which is the womb of the world, where she met the woman called Enhenduanna, who wished to learn.
“Uttu took Enhenduanna on her lap and wrapped her great arms around Enhenduanna’s small arms, and laid her golden hands around Enhenduanna’s clay hands, and guided her left hand and guided her right hand.
“Uttu dropped a spindle made of lapis lazuli, which turned like a great blue ball floating in the golden sky, and spun string made of sunlight. Enhenduanna fell asleep in Uttu’s lap.
“As Enhenduanna slept, she spun without seeing or knowing, without effort or fatigue. She spun until there was enough string to fill the entire storehouse of the great god Nanna. He was so pleased that he permitted Uttu to teach Enhenduanna’s daughters how to make pottery and bronze, music and wine.
“After that, the people could stop eating grass and drinking water and ate bread and drank beer instead. And their babies, swaddled in wool blankets, no longer died of the cold but grew up to offer up sacrifice to the gods.”
While Bilhah told me the story of Uttu, she put her nimble hands around my clumsy ones. I smelled the soft, loamy musk that clung to my youngest auntie and listened to her sweet, liquid voice and forgot all about the ache in my heart. And when her story was over, she showed me that the string on my spindle was as evenly made and strong as Leah’s own handiwork.
I kissed Bilhah a hundred kisses and ran to show my mother what I had done. She embraced me as though I had returned from the dead. There was no more slapping after that. I even came to enjoy the task of twisting clouds of unruly wool into the fine, strong threads that became my family’s clothing and blankets and trade goods. I learned to love the way that my mind wandered where it would while my hands followed their own course. Even when I was old and my spinning was of linen rather than wool, I recalled my auntie’s perfume and the way she pronounced the name of the goddess, Uttu.
I told Joseph the story of Uttu the weaver. I told him the tale of the great goddess Innana’s journey to the land of the dead, and of her marriage to the shepherd king, Dumuzi, whose love ensured an abundance of dates and wine and rain. These were stories I heard in the red tent, told and retold by my mothers and the occasional trader’s wife who called the gods and goddesses by unfamiliar names and sometimes supplied different endings to ancient tales.
Joseph, in turn, told me the story of Isaac’s bind
ing and the miracle of his release, and of our great-grandfather Abram’s meetings with messengers from the gods. He told me that our father, Jacob, spoke with the El of his fathers, morning and evening, even when he made no sacrifice. Our father said that the formless, faceless god with no other name than god came to him by night, in his dreams, and by day, in solitude only, and that Jacob was sure that the future of his sons would be blessed by this One.
Joseph described to me the wondrous grove of terebinth trees in Mamre, where our great-grandmother spoke to her gods every evening, and where someday our father would take us to pour a libation in the name of Sarai. Those were the stories Joseph heard from Jacob, sitting among our brothers while the sheep and goats grazed. I thought the women’s stories were prettier, but Joseph preferred our father’s tales.
Our talk was not usually so lofty. We shared the secret of sex and begetting, and laughed, aghast, to think of our parents behaving like the dogs in the dust. We gossiped endlessly about our brothers, keeping close watch on the rivalry between Simon and Levi, which could flare into blows over something as trivial as the placement of a staff against a tree. There was an ongoing contest, too, between Judah and Zebulun—the two oxen among the brothers—but theirs was a good-natured battle to see which was the stronger, and each would applaud his brother’s ability to lift great rocks and carry full-grown ewes across a meadow.
Joseph and I watched as Zilpah’s sons became my mother’s champions, for Gad and Asher were embarrassed by their own mother’s eccentricities. Her inability to make decent bread sent them to Leah’s tent. They did not understand or value Zilpah’s skill at the loom, and of course they had no way of knowing her talent for storytelling. So they carried their little trophies—flowers, brightly colored stones, the remains of a bird’s nest—to my mother’s lap. She would tousle their hair and feed them and they would strut like little heroes.
On the other hand, Tali and Issa, the twins of Leah’s own womb, were not so fond of her. They hated looking so much alike and blamed their mother for it. They did everything they could to distinguish themselves from each other and were almost never seen together. Issa attached himself to Rachel, who seemed charmed by his attentions and let him carry and fetch for her. Tali became fast friends with Bilhah’s Dan, and the two of them liked to sleep side by side in Bilhah’s tent, hanging on the words of their big brother Reuben, who was also drawn to the peace and stillness that enveloped my aunt, Leah tried to bribe Issa and Tali back to her with sweets and extra bread, but she was far too busy with the work of her family to pine for attentions from two of her many sons. And she did not suffer for lack of love. When I caught her watching one of her boys walking toward another mother’s tent at nightfall, I would pull at her hand. Then she would lift me up so that our eyes could meet, and kiss me on one cheek and then on the other, and then on the tip of my nose. This always made me laugh, which would in turn always bring a warm smile to my mother’s face. One of my great secrets was knowing I had the power to make her smile.
My world was filled with mothers and brothers, work and games, new moons and good food. The hills in the distance held my life in a bowl filled with everything I could possibly want.
I was a child when my father led us away from the land of the two rivers, south to the country of his birth. Young as I was, I knew why we were going. I could feel the hot wall of anger between my father and my grandfather. I could almost see the heat between them on the rare occasions they sat together.
Laban resented my father for his accomplishments with the herds, and for his sons who were so plentiful and so much more skillful than his own two boys. Laban hated the fact that he owed his success to the husband of his daughters. His mouth turned sour whenever Jacob’s name was mentioned.
As for my father, although he was the one who caused the flocks to multiply, the camp to fill with bondsmen, and the traders to make their way to our tents, he was never more than Laban’s servant. His wages were meager, but he was thrifty and clever with his little store of goods, and he had been careful with the breeding of his own small flock of brindled goats and gray sheep.
Jacob hated Laban’s sloth and the way he and his sons squandered his own good work. When the older boy, Kemuel, left his post guarding the rutting goats one spring, the best of them died from the battle between the strongest males. When Beor drank too much wine and slept, a hawk made off with a newborn kid Jacob had marked for sacrifice.
The worst was when Laban lost Jacob’s two best dogs—his smartest and his best loved. The old man had gone for a three-day trading journey to Carchemish and, without asking, had taken the dogs to tend a herd so small a boy could have managed on his own. While Laban was in town, he sold them both for a pittance, which he then lost in a game of chance.
The loss of his dogs put my father in a rage. The night Laban returned to camp, I heard their shouts and curses even as I fell asleep. Afterward, my father’s scowl was impenetrable. His fists did not unclench until he had sought out Leah and poured out the details of this latest grievance.
My mother and aunts had nothing but sympathy for Jacob. Their loyalty to Laban had never been strong, and as the years passed, they piled up reasons to despise him—laziness, deceitfulness, the arrogance of his thick-headed sons, and his treatment of Ruti, which only worsened as the years passed.