Havah: The Story of Eve by Tosca Lee

Coming in October 2008 from the acclaimed author of Demon: A Memoir. Tosca Lee has this brief excerpt of Havah on her website:

I have seen paradise and ruin. I have known bliss and terror.

I have walked with God.

And I know that Elohim made the heart the most fragile and resilient of organs, that a lifetime of joy and pain might be encased in one mortal chamber.

I still recall my first moment of consciousness—an awareness I’ve never seen in the eyes of any of my own children at birth. Of course the memory is fainter now, like the smell of the soil of that garden, like the leaves of the fig tree in Eden after dawn—dew and leaf green. It fades now with that sense of something once tasted, savored now in memory.

His eyes were blue, my Adam’s.

His breath a lost sough, the scent of earth and leaf mold that was his sweaty skin has faded too quickly. So like an Eden dawn—dew on fig leaves.

How I celebrate that blue, shrouded now in shriveled eyelids—he who was never intended to have even a wrinkle! But even as I bend to smooth his cheek, my hair has become a white waterfall upon his Eden—flesh and loins that gave life to so many.

I think for a moment that I hear Elohim, and that he is weeping. It is the first time I have heard him in so long, and my heart cries out: He is dead! My father, my brother, my love!

I envy the earth that envelopes him. I envy the dust that comes of him, and my children who sow and eat of it.

This is my love song: I will craft these words into the likeness of the man before I too return to the earth of Adam’s bosom. It is my testament to the strength of the heart, that it has such capacity for joy, such space for sorrow, like a vessel that fills and fills without bursting.

My seasons are nearly as many as a thousand. So now listen, sons, and hear me, daughters.

In the beginning, there was God…

But for me, there was Adam.

Read our review of Demon here.
Read our interview with Tosca here.