Adam & Eve by Sena Jeter Naslund Page A

back and registered the presence of the sky.
    Remembering that the plane would surely explode, I rolled over and swam two strokes downward. When my hands met with slush, I knew I was now entirely submerged. Holding my breath under the water, I shoved my fingertips into the sandy bottom. I determined to stay attached there, moving my legs against the water only enough to keep my body anchored. Perhaps a foot of ocean covered me. If I turned over and sat up, surely I would be able to breathe—but not yet.
    Finally, through the water, the muffled sound of explosion reached my ears.
    I waited underwater as long as I could, then rolled over. When the skin of my buttocks found the unstable bottom, I realized anew that I had discarded or lost all that I wore—except Thom’s memory stick. I held it tightly. Had Thom given me a fireproof cord? The watertight, fireproof titanium case still hung from its black silk cord around my neck. I sat up, gasped for breath, and opened my eyes again.
    The Piper Cub sat in a wigwam tangle of metal; its green-painted canvas was scorched brown and black. A bit of feeble and harmless flame continued to lick at the wreckage. A few jagged metal scraps of the exploded gas tank lay on the beach. I knew I was hurt, burned across my back and scalp, but for the moment I felt nothing but relief. And triumph. I was alive. Lucky.
    Remember your name is Lucy, and Lucy is part of the word lucky. It’s always lucky just to be alive. Words my grandmother once said to me.
    I sat in the water and surveyed my situation. What I saw around me seemed cut from the fabric of pure simplicity—blue sky, green sea. Unspeakably beautiful. More: my eyes glorified the sandy yellow neutrality of the beach. Cloud billows without motion hung in the blue.
Lucky merely to be alive.
Green water incessantly rocking like the sublime comfort of Grandmother’s soft sway.
Lucky.
    For a brief moment relief and beauty held pain at bay before their power dissolved. As though I and the plane were falling again, I saw an endless sea of bubbling green treetops rushing toward me. I heard again the desperate coughing of the little plane.
No:
I was sitting in the sea, not far from shore, coughing. Like a struck gong, my body rang with pain.
    Think,
my mind commanded itself.
    Up there, from the air, I had seen someone, a man who might help me. Or I him. Like something discarded, he had lain on the riverbank.
    Go on,
inner voices commanded.
    You know you can bear anything.
    Where had I heard such voices? They seemed the voices of Thom’s parents—Thom, who was dead—his parents’ voices speaking from Auschwitz and Treblinka.
    I must ignore the twisted wreckage of my plane. The pale beach was a blessing I must claim. I stood up in the shallow, blue-green water and took a step toward shore. I remembered the word
Lascaux.
A man named Pierre Saad had entrusted me with ancient, irreplaceable pages relevant to the book of Genesis, which I had thrown out the airplane door. The pain of the burn slammed against my back, and I staggered.
    I shifted my feet in the slushy underwater sand to recalibrate my balance. Somehow I would reclaim the codex. My hand enclosed the memory stick.

A LIFE IN WEST JERUSALEM

    T HE MAN BORN as Jacob ben Ezra was an identical twin; so identical were he and his slightly younger brother that no teacher could tell them apart, and often they even succeeded in deceiving their mother. Their mother said they had knocked at the gate to the world at just the same moment, but Jacob had elbowed his way past his slightly smaller brother and so became the firstborn. Because the younger one, who was not smaller, had thicker hair on his head, he was named Esau. When they started school—two merry black-haired, brown-eyed, bright little boys—their mother tousled their hair, felt the difference, and realized that by this comparative method she would always have a way to distinguish who was who. She shared this secret with no one, not