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But as a mountain erodes and crumbles and as a rock is moved from its place, as water wears away stones and torrents wash away the soil, so you destroy a person’s hope.  You overpower them once for all, and they are gone
— Job 14:18-20

The light was dim and shown through the darkness ineffectually, revealing nothing, as if someone had thrown a single strand of thread into a great, churning sea. 

But Adam shone the light in the dark water, for without it he would have nothing, no chance at all, and he may as well be shivering on the shore, tossing pebbles in the torrent.  For finding Hillel would be no more possible than dropping himself down the casement of a dark, deep well.  

He knew he would return without him — without even his body.  What would he say to Dinah?  And even more weighty, what would she do?  This man, gone forever, was her lover.  And Adam knew that she loved him more than he.

Adam had grown observant in the last few years, and his hair, which was black, shaggy, now merged with his beard, which was gray.  He looked ten years older with that encirclement of white around his square jaw and set blue eyes.  He was like an animal peering from some confine which he thought was safe but was only an illusion.  Yet his den could be breached by something as small as a young man with a hole in his heart.  By a slight fellow with a shrunken chest and callow eyes who had stolen his wife’s heart.

As Adam crept back to the house, which was set on a hill not far above the savage river, he did not know how he could tell her.  He would have to say it, but when he tried to form the words, they came out miscarried, not quite living beings.  He could only say “Hillel is dead. He’s dead.”  That was all. Your lover is dead.  You’ll never see him again.  Despite it all, he did not want to say those words to her.  Because in the end he loved her, and her pain nestled against his pain and they were one.

The spreading banana tree had toppled over near the sheds.  The stand of pines, planted by some lost soul yearning for a distant land, had been uprooted and lay strewn about the muddy field, as if the God had plucked out the very heart of life.  All about, rivulets of water sprouted and surged down toward the distended river. Adam jumped over a gully where fuming water crashed against a boulder before pouring down the hill.  Dinah stood at the door.  Her dim green eyes smeared with mud, her hair in disarray, the very apron she wore torn to shreds as if she were already in mourning for the man she truly loved. 

She followed her husband into the house.  The ceiling had caved in around the mantle. A thick paste of plaster and wood had congealed on the floor.  Even Adam’s religious books, which he had covered with a blue tarp, were exposed to the cutting rain.  She was standing there, biting her lip.  He could see the chords in her necks swelling.  Deep black scorings lay beneath her eyes.  Despite it, he thought her beautiful.  He remembered the girl he had taken home to the farm, with her lithesome body and her carefree speech.

“Where is he,” she asked quickly.  Her hopeless look confirmed the obvious.  He had left with Hillel and came back without him.  Hillel was dead.

“I can’t find him.  He’s gone,” he skirted around the molten words.  “I searched.  I looked but it’s so dark, it’s impossible.  I looked longer than I should have.  The whole hillside is ready to sheer away.  All the crops are gone.  The equipment is gone.”

“But Hillel, where is he?  Where?” She was pleading now, and he had no choice.  He prepared the blow that would hit her.  He tried to muffle his words between his tongue and pallet, but he could not.  So, he just said the words.

“Hillel is dead.”

Adam sat at the table, ready to calculate all the losses, to balance up, on the sheet he had laid out in his mind, all that was gone and never to return.  But first he had to settle this terrible matter of Hillel and his wife.  Dinah demanded an explanation; it was her right, he knew, by law, that it was older and deeper than matrimony.  It ran in her veins and cascaded out toward her limbs and settled in every crevice of her skin.  She had loved Hillel, and now he was a body in a black, streaming river.  There was a ritual to be enacted, and Adam was supposed to play the role of High Priest.  He was required to lay the body out for her and ready it for sacrifice.  But his heart felt weak and his hands trembled as if he was giving up on life itself. 

Adam had spied them once making love.  He had every right to stride in, take Hillel by the throat, and squeeze the very life out of him, to compel his soul to beg and plead not to be snatched from his body.  And this was a body which just a few minutes ago been caressed, fondled, and enfolded, by the safety of a woman.  Adam could have taken that flesh and made it squirm under his great hands.  But he did not.  

He stood there and watched as Hillel moved on top of his wife.  Dinah accepted his movements and returned them.  Their mouths were close together, but they did not kiss.  It was as if they were simply breathing into each other, allowing the breath of one to penetrate the breath of the other.  This exchange appeared to have more control on Dinah than did Hillel’s lovemaking.  He was a strip of a boy, no more than twenty, and it was not his sex that Dina wanted.  It was this vital breath that he exuded.  Adam stood there for a few moments, feeling he was sinking lower on the floor.  He appeared to see them as if from a great depth.   They made love on a high alter, as Adam sank into a lump of mud.  When he quietly closed the door, he moved away from the hall and viewed the falling rain through the tarnished window with growing alarm.  This was love.  Adam knew it in his heart.

“We were walking next to the wadi, which is completely full of water,” he explained to Dinah, and then backtracked. “It’s a torrent.  There isn’t a thing left standing.  Not a stick.  You should see it,” he began to falter.  “Hillel wanted to leave.  But I couldn’t hear him above the wind and rain.  I had him talk close to my ear, like this,” and Adam gestured toward his own ear, weaving with his hands the image of Hillel, his lips nearly touching him, his head steeply inclined.  “He said he wanted to leave.  That he had to leave.  He wanted me to help him to get over the wadi.”

“But why leave now, during this?” Dinah asked wildly, forgetting all that was going on around them, talking as if this was just a rainstorm and not the culmination.  

“How should I know?” Adam answered, leaning forward.  His strong body nearly eclipsed the table.  A clap of thunder responded through the house.  He looked up at the ceiling and felt extremely tired.  Adam had suffered long and hard in this land, had given Dina a wide berth for her to play out all the manifestations of her sorrow, had lost two children to malaria, and now that world, its good and ill, was being washed away before her eyes.  God was effacing this creation.  God was taking what men like Adam had wrought and returning it to mud and dust.

“How do I know what people want?” he restated firmly.  “Hillel came here and you gave him Hebrew lessons. We are old enough to be his parents, and we treated him like a son.  I would have given him everything.  I loved him. And then, just like that, in the middle of this deluge, he wants to leave. Why fight it out with us when he can run?  Maybe that is what he was thinking.  When we’ve given him the life from our blood . . .”  Adam stopped, knowing he would go too far.  What would he say next: when I gave him my wife to sleep with?  When did I allow my wife to sleep with him?  When do I turn a blind eye to their desire?

He had no time to finish, for the ceiling collapsed, and when he stood up, a beam across his back, a piece of roof on his head, he could not find Dinah.

He tried to call his wife’s name, but no sound came out of his mouth.  Or if it did, it was quickly overpowered by the wind and rain.  Adam ran his hands through the debris.  Everything was smothered in the pulpy mass of dry walls and mud.  There was little left, a few pieces of wooden furniture, then they disappeared, carried away by an unseen stream beneath the surface of what Adam could see.  But he kept up a measure of desperation.  He knew it was the only thing that would keep him at his task: the idea that if he moved as fast as he could, with as much haste as he could muster, that he would find Dinah alive.  That he would conjure her back to life.  

Adam pushed his arms through a twisting swale of mud.  The whole hillside was sliding down toward the wadi and Dinah could be buried here, or there, in the very places where his hands and arms groped desperately in the red and black muck.

This was what Adam knew: once she leaned over Hillel to point out a stanza of poetry, and as she did, her right breast grazed the boy’s shoulder.  He could see his wife’s body relax, as if a great hand had unclenched within her. And for Hillel, the equal and opposite reaction: his body stiffened, his posture became erect.  His was the body of a man’s suddenly awakened to the possibility of a woman.  There was nothing unique in the actions themselves; just the slight brushing of skin against clothing, but it was enough to signify for Adam that his wife loved this young man.  

Hillel had come to them filthy and thin, yet another demobilized solider looking for work.  His Hebrew was halting.  He worked with Adam in fields and pastures and with Dinah at grammar, syntax, pronunciation.  He was long and thin and did not speak much to Adam when they worked.  With Dinah he flowered.  She brought out the language that was latent in his soul and set it loose like a bird trapped in the bones of his rib cage.  He began to recite poetry.  He spoke to her of his ideas and plans for a future he did not really have.  And he could see Dinah grow red and flushed beneath the weight of his eloquent, hopeful words.  For who does not want to believe in the power of a beautiful future?  Who does not want fresh, untrammeled love? Dinah wanted all of this, and she listened to Hillel’s swan song of earthly pleasures until she could stand it no more.  Then one night when Adam reached out for her, she was not in bed.

Adam walked down the dark hall.  Outside Hillel’s room, he heard their urgent, shared breath.  

Adam strained his hands through the earth.  But it yielded nothing.  The farm had sluiced down to the wadi, and the wadi, through the steep valley, to the troubled, swift Yarkon River, and then into the brown, frothy ocean.  

The Jews would be tossed into the sea, not as their enemies predicted, but through this ferocious act of God.   Adam sat upright.  Water streamed around and over him. With his great bulk and heft, he appeared immune from its mighty force.  He wound his way down the hill to the wadi.  Giant hummocks of mud had formed against unseen obstacles, forming shifting bands of muck, twisted into immense, obscene formations.  Adam wound his way down to the wadi, which had clogged with debris, forming a vast dam; behind it, a pool of red water had formed, the tips of its angry fingers ready to top the wall.  Dinah was standing against it, red with mud.

“You pushed him in,” Dinah yelled, her voice hoarse and strained.  “You killed him.”  Behind the cake of mud, he could not divine the expression on her face.  It was as if her features had been effaced of all reasonable emotion.  For a moment Adam saw Hillel on top of her, working his way inside her body.  Reaching deeper into the core of this woman than he had ever achieved, filling her with all the intangible love and hope that she wished to make real.

“No,” Adam answered.  “He wanted to leap across the wadi.  It was suicide. I grasped him by the hand, but I couldn’t bring him back.  The current was too strong.   His fingers were wet.  He wanted to leave, right now, right then, and I don’t know why.”

“Because I wouldn’t leave you.  So, he said that he would leave me.”  Dinah took a step forward and violently shook Adam’s shoulders.  “You must tell me.  I gave him up for you.  Now pay me back, did you kill him?  Did you let him slip?  Did you allow him to go into the water?  What did you do?”

One night Dinah stole back into Adam’s bed.  Adam was awake and felt a pull in his loins.   From deep inside, curled next to innards, he felt the sensation to reclaim what was his, to recapture, once more, the body that had been his alone, but was now held by another man with a superior claim of love.  

He climbed on top of Dina, who was still warm and soft from her lover, and quickly moved inside her.  Her arms went up, as if to stop him, but her push quickly became a tight embrace around his neck.  Adam moved up and down in her, sensing the vital core of Hillel, and felt analogous to the great love they shared.  For a moment, until he reached the end and lay next to her, spent and barren, he was racing alongside Hillel, keeping pace, fighting for Dinah’s love and sharing in its bounty.

A hand stretches out, and Adam grasps it.  Odd, he thought, that he had never held Hillel’s hand before.  He had felt the lingering effects of Hillel’s fingers on Dinah, on the smooth mound of her stomach, on her brown legs, around the nipples of her spreading breasts, but he had never touched his hand directly.  And now here he was grasping it, as Hillel’s legs dragged in the wadi’s swift water.  And the sensation of his hand was not what he expected at all.

“You killed him.  He tried to cross the wadi, and couldn’t make it, and you let him go.”

“No, Dinah, no, I loved him.”

“What grounds did you have to love him?” Dinah pressed.  “Why would a man in your position, my husband, love him?”

The hand was cold and clammy.  Such a hand should be warm, pulsing with the life of his wife, a life that Hillel had shared and encapsulated.  He watched his wife bloom under those caresses, and now, here was that hand, pale blue and trembling, ready to fall into the water.  Adam felt great anger. What right did Hillel have to let the love of his wife fall from the fruit of her quickly dimming youth, and drop rotten on the ground?  Why did he decide, on pain of death, to escape this place, where he found her love, her warmth, her acceptance?  

Adam calculated that in the world there were two poles of existence: love and uncertainty.  Dinah had taken love.  Hillel grasped the cudgel of uncertainty, swung it carelessly, and fled.  Now Adam held Hillel’s life in his very hand.  

“We must go, that dam is sopping.  It will break.  We’ll be carried away to the sea.”  Adam grasped his wife’s arm, but she stood firm.

“You must tell me, did you kill him?  You must, or I won’t move from this spot.”

“I tried to hold him.  He slipped.  He moved beyond me.” Adam snapped.  “We’ll both die here.  If you don’t come, all three of us will die.  We’ll join Hillel and then nothing will be left.”

The fingers slid from him gently, softly, as if he was dropping a wet leaf from a great height, and watching it waft down toward a sodden earth.  Adam was lulled by the image.  Yet Hillel’s fingers beguiled him, sliding away, and Adam saw Hillel’s eyes gazing at him from the chop of red water; he scrutinized his quickly forming sense of terror; he spied the slipping certainty that life was so solid and firm that surely it could not be so easily snuffed.  

Dinah was gone.  The great breach of mud carried her down the slope and into an abyss of hissing water and mist.  The expression on her face did not change.  There was only a glimmer in her eye, which welled from deep within her soul.  The flicker was the light of hope being dowsed.  Adam, with his girth and strength, held onto the old retaining wall, fighting the great rush of water, amazed at its manifest strength.  This is what man must contend with, he thought as he felt his grip come loose.  This is what awaits us.  The world funnels down into water and mud.  And then his hands lost their grip, and the world was engulfed in water.  And a surge of mud followed.