Adam & Eve by Sena Jeter Naslund Read Free Book Online Page A

had come the year before college, when I had studied psychology on my own as a high school senior and then scored well on the psychology test for college graduates. Before Iowa.
    It was not the
remembrance
of things past that I wanted, but their recovery. And not of
things
but of the natural self I once embodied. Suddenly I was glad to be alone, and I felt like a smart, young girl again, full of power, back before Thom entered my life.
    I fingered the memory stick and took it off, for the night. Restless, I got up and went outside to view the Egyptian night sky. From the dazzle of stars in the dark, I picked out constellations. Had Thom really found out there a planet or planets that hosted life? Not among any of those tiny lights visible to me. Beyond that. Did those beings have eyes, and did they look this way and imagine us, bare forked creatures?
    In the morning, I lifted the tent window flap and squinted at the world outside. Mercilessly the morning sun had filled the world with painful brightness. Other small tents were spaced around me. How to take life by the hand and sally forth?
    Another night when the setting sun, swollen like the belly of a pregnant woman, slid down behind the peak of the obelisk at Luxor, I wished someone were there to see it with me—a man to whom I would say, with some satisfaction, that the Arabic word for sun was feminine. I pronounced the word for sun and thought of how I might spell it in the Roman alphabet:
sham su?
    If that imagined man were Gabriel, he would laugh and call me “smarty pants” for my effort with Arabic. Likely, he would also pinch my cheek in apaternal way. Gabriel was ten years older than I was, but then Thom had been twenty-three years older. I was glad that Thom had gotten to live as long as he had, though he had not made it to sixty. Unthinkable really, that I myself should ever arrive at age sixty.
    Marry Gabriel Plum? Why not? I had known him since graduate school days in Iowa City. He had come there to study the Van Allen radiation belts. He had known Thom. Perhaps Thom had saved Gabriel’s life by pushing him out of harm’s way as the piano hurtled downward. I thought bitterly of the unbearable, premature relief I had felt seeing Gabriel lying on the pavement, clear of the shattered piano.
    Did I want to move on with my life? Or did I want to move backward, to childhood, to a time before loss and grief? Both, of course.
    When I looked at the broken columns and damaged images of temple ruins, I only felt how broken and damaged I was. It was only as I stared at the waters of the Nile that I felt any peace. A river can be like a great life-supporting artery flowing through the body of a country. The Mississippi, the Nile, the Thames, the Seine, the Danube, the Rhine, the Amazon, the Ganges, and the Yangtze. Such a river is an artery with its own pulse. Such a river is its own heart as well as that of the land it parts and nourishes. I wished for such a conduit of life to flow through me and enliven all my parts. Or some ocean to rock and lave me. A tour of ruins, however noble or ambitious, was not enough.
    After a week with the tour group, I decided to strike out on my own. When the guide said, “I am forbidden to allow you to leave the group,” I replied, “I state in this letter that I have left without obtaining your permission.” Then I turned and walked away, carrying only my small suitcase with me. If they wanted to transport my other baggage for me, let them. I could not say what possessed me to do such a thing—to follow a mere name:
Nag Hammadi.
It was a whim, an impulse. No, it was part of a desire to be free. I wanted to test myself as an independent woman.

IGTIYAL!

    A MONG THE N AG H AMMADI texts—sometimes called the Gnostic gospels—was one purported to be written by Mary Magdalene, an actual disciple and possible lover of Jesus; another, the repressed Gospel of Thomas, had been construed as stressing the humanity rather than the divinity