The Red Tent

Leah forgave Rachel her nasty words and grieved for her. She tried to tempt her with her favorite sweets, but Rachel spat at the food and at Leah, who seemed to grow bigger and rounder every day, and as beautiful as she had ever been.

“It was so unfair. So sad,” said Bilhah, who finally got Rachel to eat a few olives and coaxed her out of the stained, stiff blanket. Bilhah was the one who walked to the village where Inna lived, to see if the midwife had some potion that might rouse her sister from her half-death. Inna herself came back and spent hours with Rachel, washing her, feeding her tiny bits of bread dipped in honey, coaxing her to take sips of an aromatic red mead. Inna whispered secret words of comfort and hope into Rachel’s ear. She told her that bearing children would not be easy for her, but foretold that someday Rachel would bear beautiful sons who would shine like stars and assure her memory. Inna promised to put all her skills to work to help Rachel conceive again, but only if she would do exactly what the midwife told her to do.

That is why, when Leah in her sixth month sought her sister’s blessing, Rachel put her hands on Leah’s belly and caressed the life there. Rachel cried in her sister’s arms, kissed Adah’s hands, and asked Zilpah to comb her hair. She took Bilhah aside, embraced her, and thanked her for bringing Inna. It was the first time Rachel had thanked anyone for anything.

The next morning, Leah and Rachel, side by side, walked out of the darkness of the red tent and back into the light of the world, where Jacob stood. Rachel said he wept when he saw them together, but Leah said that he smiled.

“Leah’s first birth was not especially difficult,” said Rachel. By the time she told me the story of Reuben’s arrival, my aunt had seen hundreds of babies born. And though Rachel would forget where she put her spindle the moment she put it down, she remembered the details of every birth she ever witnessed.

She told me that even though Leah’s travail began before sunset and did not end until daylight, it was a straight path. His head was down and her hips were wide enough. Still, the heat of that summer night in the red tent was stifling, and none of the sisters had ever seen a birth. Truly Leah suffered most because of her sisters’ fear.

It began slowly in the afternoon, with small, grabbing pains in her back. Leah smiled after each little seizure, glad to be started, eager to be admitted to the sisterhood of mothers. Confident that her body, so broad and big, would fulfill its purpose, she sang in the early stages. Children’s songs, ballads, lullabies.

But as the night wore on, and the moon rose in the sky and then started to sink, there were no more smiles or songs. Each contraction took Leah up and wrung her out, like a bit of cloth, and left her panting and fearful of the next pain. Adah held her hand. Zilpah muttered prayers to Anath. “I was of no use at all,” Rachel remembered. “I wandered in and out of the tent, eaten up by jealousy. But as the hours came and went, each one harder than the last, my envy waned and I was horrified by the pain I saw on Leah, the strong one, the invincible ox who was on the ground trembling and wide-eyed. I was terrified by the thought that I might have been in her place, that I might yet be. And I’m sure that the very same thoughts made Zilpah and Bilhah shudder and keep silence while our sister labored.”

Bilhah finally realized that they needed more help than Adah could provide, and she went to fetch Inna, who arrived at daybreak. By that time, Leah was whimpering like a dog. When Inna arrived, she put her hands on Leah’s belly and then reached up inside her. She made her lie on her side, and rubbed her back and thighs with a mint-scented oil. Inna smiled into Leah’s face and said, “The baby is nearly at the door.” And while she emptied her kit, she bade the women gather around to help their sister bring the baby.

“It was the first time I’d seen a midwife’s kit,” Rachel said. “The knife, the string, reeds for suction, amphorae of cumin, hyssop, and mint oil. Inna put her two bricks on the ground and told Leah she would stand on them soon. She moved me and Zilpah on either side to lend support when Leah squatted over a bed of clean straw. Zilpah and I became Leah’s chair, with our arms around her shoulders and beneath her thighs. ‘You lucky girl,’ Inna said to Leah, who by then did not feel the least bit lucky. ‘Look at the royal throne of sisters you have.’ “

Inna talked and talked, banishing the frightened silence that had made a wall around Leah. Inna asked Adah about her aches and pains, and teased Zilpah about the tangled mat of her hair. But whenever a contraction came, Inna had words for Leah only. She praised her, reassured her, told her, “Good, good, good, my girl. Good, good, good.” Soon, all of the women in the tent joined her in repeating ‘ Good, good, good,” clucking like a clutch of doves.

Inna began to massage the skin around Leah’s bottom, which was swollen out of shape. She rubbed with stronger and stronger motions as the pains came closer and closer. And then she put Rachel’s hand on Leah’s belly and showed her how to press downward, gently but firmly, when the time came. She told Leah not to push, not to push, until Leah bellowed curses.

Rachel said, “I saw that baby come into the world as I had seen nothing before in my life. Clearly. Without a thought to myself. I thought of my own mother who had seen this so many times, whose hands had guided so many souls into the world, but who died giving me life.

“But I had no time to be sorry for myself, because suddenly a strange red bubble emerged from between Leah’s legs and then, almost immediately, a flood of bloody water washed down her thighs.”

Leah tried to stand, terrified, but Inna told her not to take her feet off the bricks. This was good, she said. He was coming.

Leah pushed, her face red, her eyes bulging, blue and green, glittering. Her legs were trembling as though they would buckle at any moment, and it took all of Zilpah’s and Rachel’s strength to hold her. Then Inna told Bilhah to take Rachel’s place so she could catch the baby; perhaps the birth blood would rouse Rachel’s womb to fill again, too. And so Rachel washed in the river of life.

Leah roared and delivered her son. He was so big it took both Inna and Rachel to catch him, and he started to cry even before they raised up his head. No need for the reeds to clear out this baby’s nose and mouth. They all laughed, tears streaming down their faces, panting from the effort of Leah’s birth.

They passed the baby around the tent, wiping him and kissing him, praising his limbs, his torso, his head, his little sex. They all talked at the same time, making more noise than any six women can make. Jacob cried out to the women to tell him the news. “You are a father,” said Inna. “Go away. We will send for you soon and then you will see your son, your firstborn, when we have finished.” They heard Jacob shout with joy, and call out the news to Laban and Ruti, and his barking dogs, and the clouds in the sky.

The afterbirth fell out of Leah, who was nearly asleep with exhaustion. Inna made her drink and eat before she rested, and put the baby to Leah’s breast, where he nursed. Mother and son slept, and the sisters covered them. Adah watched, a grandmother’s smile lingering even after she dozed off. Inna wrapped the placenta in an old rag and they buried it that night, in the eastern corner of the bamah, as befits a firstborn son.

A few hours later when Leah awoke she named the baby Reuben. It was a joyful shout of a name, a name that fairly dared evil spirits to do him any harm. But Leah had no fears for her strapping boy. Jacob was sent for and greeted his son with great tenderness.

As Jacob walked away from his first meeting with his son, his happiness seemed to evaporate. His head sank to his chest as he contemplated what had to be done next. According to the custom of his family, the boy had to be circumcised, and there was no one to do it but him. Jacob would not let Laban touch the baby, much less take a knife to him. He knew of no other man in the village or nearby hills who knew how, much less why he would do this to his firstborn son. It would have to be him.

Jacob had seen his father cut the foreskins from his bondsmen’s baby boys, and he had not

looked away or even winced when it was done. But he had never done this himself, nor, he now realized, had he watched carefully enough how his father had dressed the wound. And, of course, he had never cared so much for any baby in his life.

It had to be done, though, and he began the preparations, which Zilpah watched and reported to Leah, who was sick at the prospect of having her baby, her prize, put on the altar of the bamah and mutilated. For that’s what she considered it. The flap of skin on the penis meant nothing to her. Indeed, now that she had seen the look of an uncircumcised man, she preferred the look of Jacob’s sex—exposed, clean, audacious even—to the tiny shroud her son wore on his member, which was the source of many silly and crude jokes in the red tent. Once, Leah threatened to take a bit of charred wood and draw a face upon Reuben’s sex, so that when Jacob retracted the foreskin, he would drop his knife in wonder. The women rolled around on the mats, holding their sides, laughing about the tender equipment that men carried between their legs.

But after a few days, the joking stopped, and Leah cried so long and so hard over the boy at her breast that the dark curls on his head were salted with tears. Still, she did not object to the custom of her husband’s father. Jacob had survived this, she told her sisters again and again, mostly to reassure herself. Isaac had been circumcised, and Abram before him. Nevertheless, the thought of her baby in pain and in danger made the new mother tremble, and the realization that Jacob had no experience at the task put her in a frenzy of worry.

Zilpah watched and saw that Jacob was not at ease about the ritual either. Every night, he sat on the bamah with his knife and sharpened it on the altar. From sunset till moonrise three nights running, until the edge was perfect, he honed and polished the blade until it could cut a hair from his head with the slightest motion of his wrist. He asked Adah to make small bandages, woven of new wool taken from the first shearing of the firstborn lamb of the season. He sent word to Leah, inquiring whether she had any of the midwife’s unguents to aid in healing.

On the seventh night after Reuben’s birth, Jacob sat up, silently watching the sky, until sunrise. He poured libations and sang to the god of his fathers. He poured libations over the asherah, too, and opened his hands before her. Zilpah watched all of this and afterward stopped referring to Jacob as “that new man” and began to call him by his name.

At dawn of the eighth day after his son’s birth, Jacob killed a kid and burned it on the altar. He washed his hands, rubbing them red with straw, as though he had handled a corpse. And then he walked to the red tent and asked that the women give him Reuben, the son of Leah.

He called for Laban to follow him, and the two men walked alone to the bamah, where Jacob undressed the baby, whose eyes were open, and placed him on the altar. Jacob sighed a loud, long sigh as he stripped the boy, and then he signaled Laban to grab the baby’s legs. At this, Reuben began to wail. Jacob took the knife in his hands and knotted his brow.

“There were tears in his eyes,” said Zilpah. “He took the baby’s sex in his hands and pulled the skin up tightly, holding it between the two long fingers of his left hand. With his right hand, he cut, with a quick, sure stroke, as though it was an old custom of his, as though he knew what he was doing,” she said.