Births and the new moon brought the two women together inside the red tent. But Leah slept facing the western wall while Rachel hugged the east, and they spoke to each other only by way of their sisters: Leah through Zilpah, Rachel through Bilhah.
Now, Leah had no choice. Inna had not returned and Rachel was the only one who knew the herbs, the prayers, the proper massage. There was no one else to ask.
As Rachel left to attend a birth in a nearby camp, Leah made some excuse about fetching water and rushed her steps until she was at Rachel’s side. Leah’s cheeks burned and she cast her eyes downward as she asked her sister to help her as she had helped Ruti. Rachel surprised her with the gentleness of her answer.
“Do not do away with your daughter,” she said. “You are carrying a girl.
“Then she will die,” Leah answered, thinking of Rachel’s miscarriages. (Inna had pronounced them all girls.) “And even if she lives, she will not know her mother, because I am nearly dead from bearing.”
But Rachel argued for all of the sisters, who had long saved their treasures for a daughter. “We will do everything for you as you carry their girl. Leah,” she said, using her sister’s name for the first time in either woman’s memory. “Please,” she asked.
“Do as I say before I tell Zilpah,” Rachel threatened mischievously. “She will make your life a misery of scorned goddesses if she discovers your plans.”
Leah laughed and relented, for her wish for a daughter was still strong.
While I slept in my mother’s womb, I appeared to her and to each of my aunties in vivid dreams.
Bilhah dreamed of me one night while she lay in Jacob’s arms. “I saw you in a white gown of fine linen, covered with a long vest of blue and green beads. Your hair was braided and you carried a fine basket through a pasture greener than any I have ever seen. You walked among queens, but you were alone.”
Rachel dreamed of my birth. “You appeared at your mother’s womb with your eyes open and your mouth full of perfect little teeth. You spoke as you slithered out from between her legs, saying, ‘Hello, mothers. I am here at last. Is there nothing to eat?’ That made us laugh. There were hundreds of women attending your birth, some of them dressed in outlandish clothing, shocking colors, shorn heads. We all laughed and laughed. I woke in the middle of the night laughing.”
My mother, Leah, said she dreamed of me every night. “You and I whispered to each other like old friends. You were very wise, telling me what to eat to calm my upset stomach, how to settle a quarrel between Reuben and Simon. I told you all about Jacob, your father, and about your aunties. You told me about the other side of the universe, where darkness and light are not separated. You were such good company, I hated to wake up.
“One thing bothered me about those dreams,” said my mother. “I could never see your face. You were always behind me, just beyond my left shoulder. And every time I turned to catch a glimpse of you, you disappeared.”
Zilpah’s dream was not filled with laughter or companionship. She said she saw me weeping a river of blood that gave rise to flat green monsters that opened mouths filled with rows of sharp teeth. “Even so, you were unafraid,” said Zilpah. “You walked upon their backs and tamed their ugliness, and disappeared into the sun.”
I was born during a full moon in a springtime remembered for a plenitude of lambs. Zilpah stood on my mother’s left side, while Bilhah supported her on the right. Inna was there, to be on hand for the celebration and to catch the afterbirth in her ancient bucket. But Leah had asked Rachel to be midwife and catch me.
It was an easy birth. After all the boys before me, I came quickly and as painlessly as birth can be. I was big—as big as Judah, who had been the biggest. Inna pronounced me “Leah’s daughter,” in a voice full of satisfaction. As with all of her babies, my mother looked into my eyes first and smiled to see that they were both brown, like Jacob’s and those of all her sons.
After Rachel wiped me clean, she handed me to Zilpah, who embraced me, and then to Bilhah, who kissed m
e as well. I took my mother’s breast with an eager mouth, and all the women of the camp clapped their hands for my mother and for me. Bilhah fed my mother honeyed milk and cake. She washed Leah’s hair with perfumed water, and she massaged her feet.
While Leah slept, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah took me out into the moonlight and put henna on my feet and hands, as though I were a bride. They spoke a hundred blessings around me, north, south, east, and west, to protect me against Lamashtu and the other baby-stealing demons. They gave me a thousand kisses.
In the morning, my mother began to count out two moon cycles in the red tent. After the birth of a boy, mothers rested from one moon to the next, but the birth of a birth-giver required a longer period of separation from the world of men. “The second month was such a delight,” my mother told me. “My sisters treated us both like queens. You were never left lying upon a blanket for a moment. There were always arms to hold you, cuddle you, embrace you. We oiled your skin morning and night. We sang songs into your ears, but we did not coo or babble. We spoke to you with all our words, as though you were a grown sister and not a baby girl. And before you were a year old, you answered us without a trace of a baby’s lisp.”
As I was passed from my mother to one aunt after another, they debated my name. This conversation never ceased, and each woman argued for a favorite she had long hoped to give to a daughter of her own womb.
Bilhah offered Adahni, in memory of my grandmother Adah, who had loved them all. This led to a long session of sighing and remembering Adah, who would have been so delighted by all of her grandchildren. But Zilpah worried that such a name would confuse the demons, who might think Adah had escaped from the underworld and come after me.
Zilpah liked the name Ishara—which gave homage to the goddess and was easy to rhyme. She had plans for many songs in my honor. But Bilhah didn’t like the sound of it. “It sounds like a sneeze,” she said.
Rachel suggested Bentresh, a Hittite name she had heard from a trader’s wife. “It sounds like music,” she said.
Leah listened to them all, and when her sisters got too heated in their arguments about her daughter, threatened to call me Lillu, a name they all hated.
In the second full moon after my birth, Leah rejoined her husband and told Jacob my name. She told me that I picked it myself. “During my sixty days, I whispered every name my sisters suggested into your little ear. Every name I had ever heard, and even some I invented myself. But when I said ‘Dinah,’ you let the nipple fall from your mouth and looked up at me. So you are Dinah, my last-born. My daughter. My memory.”
Joseph was conceived in the days following my birth. Rachel had gone to Jacob with the news that he had finally sired a healthy girl. Her eyes shone as she told him, and Jacob smiled to see how his barren wife took pleasure in Leah’s baby. That night, after they had enjoyed each other in the gentle fashion of familiar couples, Rachel dreamed of her first son and woke up smiling.
She told no one when her moon blood failed to come. The many false starts and early losses haunted her, and she guarded her secret closely. She went to the red tent at the new moon and changed the straw as though she had soiled it. She was so slender that the slight thickening of her waist went unnoticed by everyone but Bilhah, who kept her own counsel.
At the fourth month, Rachel went to Inna, who told her that the signs looked good for this boy, and Rachel began to hope. She showed her swelling belly to her sisters, who danced in a circle around her. She put Jacob’s hand on the hillock of her womb. The father of ten sons wept.
Rachel grew swaybacked. Her little breasts grew full and painful. Her perfect ankles swelled. But she found nothing but delight in the complaints of breeding women. She began to sing as she tended the cooking fires and took up her spindle. Her family was surprised at the sweetness of her voice, which they had never heard raised in song. Jacob slept with Rachel every night of her pregnancy, a shocking breach of manners and an incitement to demons. But he would not listen to warning, and Rachel basked in his attentions as she grew large.