The Red Tent

“My own father rarely addressed me and seemed to prefer my brother’s company,” he whispered. “But once, while we were traveling, we passed a tent where a man was beating a woman—wife, concubine, or slave we had no way of knowing.

“Isaac, my father, sighed and told me that he had never taken any woman to his bed but my mother, even though she had only given him two sons early in their marriage. Rebecca had welcomed him with tenderness and passion when they first were married because as her groom he treated her as though she were the Queen of Heaven and he her consort. Their coupling was the coupling of the sea and the sky, of the rain and the parched earth. Of night and day, wind and water.

“Their nights were filled with stars and sighs as they played the part of goddess and god. Their touches engendered a thousand dreams. They slept in each other’s arms every night, except when it was her time for the red tent, or when she gave suck to her sons.

“That was my father’s teaching about husbands and wives,” said Jacob my father to Leah my mother on their first night together. And then he wept over the loss of his father’s love.

Leah wept out of sympathy for her husband, and also out of relief and joy at her good fortune. She knew that her own mother had cried on her wedding night, too, but those had been tears of despair, for Laban had been a boor from the beginning.

Leah kissed her husband. He kissed her. They embraced again and again. And even on that first night, when she was tender from being opened by a man, Leah responded to his touch. She liked the smell of him and the feel of his beard on her skin. When he entered her, she flexed her legs and her sex with a kind of strength that surprised her and delighted him. When Jacob cried out in his final pleasure, she was flooded by a sense of her own power. And when she followed her breathing, she discovered her pleasure, an opening and a fullness that made her sigh, and purr, and then sleep as she hadn’t slept since she was a child. He called her Innana. She called him Baal, brother-lover of Ishtar.

They were left alone the full seven days and seven nights. Food was set out for them at dawn and at dusk, and they ate with the ravenous hunger of lovers. By the end of the week, they had made love in every hour of the day and night. They were certain they had invented a thousand new methods for giving and taking pleasure.

They had slept in each other’s arms. They laughed like children at Laban’s stupidity, and at Zilpah’s strange ways. But they did not speak of Rachel.

It was a golden week, every day sweeter but every day sadder, too. There would never be another time when Leah and Jacob could wander in each other’s memories or lounge during daylight in each other’s arms. These were the only meals they would ever share, talking and finding in each other kindred spirits for business and family politics.

They decided that Jacob would emerge from the week feigning anger. He would go to Laban and say, “I have been duped. I was given strong wine and you gave me the harridan Leah rather than my beloved Rachel. My labor for Rachel was repaid with a swindle, for which I demand restitution. And although I spent these seven days and seven nights with your eldest girl as my duty required, I do not consider her my wife until you make me a dowry in her name, and until Rachel is also mine.”

And that is precisely what Jacob said when he left the tent. “I will take the maiden Zilpah as dowry for Leah, just as Bilhah will be dowry for Rachel. I will take another tenth of your herd for relieving you of your ill-favored daughter. And to be fair, I will work for you another seven months, as the bride-price for Leah.

“These are my terms.”

Jacob made this speech before everyone in camp on the day he and Leah emerged from their seclusion. Leah kept her eyes on the ground as her husband recited the words they had rehearsed the night before, naked, sweating each other’s sweat. She pretended to cry while twisting her mouth to keep from laughing.

As Jacob proclaimed himself, Adah nodded assent. Zilpah turned white at the mention of her name. Laban, who had spent the week drunk in honor of his daughter’s marriage, was so stupefied he could barely sputter a protest before throwing up his hands, cursing the lot of them, and returning to the dark of his tent.

Rachel spat at Jacob’s feet and stormed off. By the end of the nuptial week, she had come to regret her panic. She had lost forever her position as first wife, and then she had heard the sounds from the bridal tent—laughter and muffled cries of pleasure. Rachel had poured out her sorrow to Bilhah, who took her to see two dogs mating, and two sheep, none of whom seemed to suffer in the act. Rachel went to the village and told Inna what had happened. Inna told her tales of passion and pleasure, and took Rachel inside her hut and showed her how to unlock the secrets of her own body.

When Jacob found Rachel at their accustomed tree, she cursed him soundly, calling him a thief and a bastard, a devil and a pig who inserted himself into sheep and goats and dogs. She accused him of not loving her. She shrieked that he must have known it was Leah, even when she was veiled, sitting beside him at the wedding feast. He could have stopped it. Why hadn’t he? She cried bitterly.

When her tears were spent, Jacob held her to his chest until it seemed she was asleep, and told her that she was the moon’s own daughter, luminous, radiant, and perfect. That his love for her was worshipful. That he felt only duty toward Leah, who was a mere shadow of Rachel’s light. That she, only Rachel, would be the bride of his heart, his first wife, first love. Such pretty treason.

So it happened that the day before the next full moon there was a second wedding feast, even simpler than the first. And Rachel took her turn in the tent with Jacob.

I do not know much about that week, for Rachel never spoke of it. No tears were heard coming from the nuptial tent of Jacob and Rachel, which was a good sign. No one overheard laughter either. When the week was over, Rachel crept to the red tent before dawn, where she slept until the following morning.

At the first new moon after Leah’s bridal week, there was no blood between her legs. But she kept this news to herself. Amid the hurried preparations for Rachel’s wedding, it was easy enough to conceal the fact that she did not really need to change her place on the straw or use a rag between her legs when she moved around.

Two days after Rachel entered the nuptial tent with Jacob, Leah went to her mother and put Adah’s dry hand on her young belly. The older woman hugged her daughter. “I did not think I would live to see a grandchild,” she said to Leah, smiling and crying at once. “Beloved girl, daughter mine.”

Leah said she kept quiet about her pregnancy to protect Rachel’s happiness. Her status as head wife would be assured with the birth of a son, and she knew from the first that she was carrying a boy. But Rachel was furious when she learned that Leah was with child. She thought her sister had kept the news from her as part of a complicated plot to shame her, to assure her own role as first wife, as a way to cause Jacob to abandon her.

Rachel’s accusations could be heard from as far away as the well, which was a good distance from the tent where she bellowed. She accused Leah of asking Zilpah to help cheat her of her rightful place. She insinuated that Leah was pregnant not by Jacob, but by a hare-lipped, half-witted shepherd who loitered at the well. “You jealous bitch,” Rachel screamed. “You evil-eyed lummox, you only wish Jacob loved you as he loves me, but he never will. I am the one. I am his heart. You are a brood mare. You pathetic cow.”

Leah held her tongue until Rachel was finished. Then she calmly called her sister an ass and slapped her face hard, first on one cheek and then on the other. They did not speak a word to each other for months.

I suppose it only natural to assume that Leah was always jealous of Rachel. And it was true that Leah did not sing or smile much during Jacob’s week with Rachel. Indeed, over the years, whenever my father took my beautiful aunt to his bed, my mother kept her head bent over her work, which grew as her sons increased and as Jacob’s labors yielded more wool to be woven.

But Leah was not jealous in the way of silly girls in love songs, who die of longing. There was no bile in Leah’s sadness when Jacob lay with his other wives. Indeed, she delighted in all his sons and had most of them at her own breast at one time or another. She could depend upon Jacob to call for her once or twice in a month, for talk about the herds and for an extra cup of sweet beer. On those nights she knew they would sleep together, her arms locked around his waist, and the next morning her family would bask in her smile and enjoy something good to eat.

But I am rushing my story. For it took years before Leah and Rachel finally learned how to share a husband, and at first they were like dogs, circling and growling and giving each other wide berth as they explored the boundary between them.

Even so, at first it seemed a kind of parity would prevail, because at the next new moon, Rachel, too, found she had no use for the rags or the hay. Both sisters were pregnant. The barley crop was enormous. The shepherds slapped Jacob on the back and joked about his potency. The gods were smiling.

But just as Leah’s belly began to swell against her tunic, Rachel started to bleed. Early one morning, nearly three months after her wedding, she woke the whole camp with her cries. Leah and Zilpah rushed to her side, and found her sobbing, wrapped in a bloody blanket. No one could comfort her. She would not let Adah sit with her. She would not permit Jacob to see her. For a week, she huddled in a corner

of the red tent, where she ate little and slept a dreamless, feverish sleep.