Total Lunar Eclipse: Ancient Goddess Rising

Short Story

For Adrienne Rich

Eastern Europe 1962

This train I now travel is the same one I took to leave Poland for Palestine two weeks before Hitler entered in 1939. Lucky was I to have a husband with foresight. Lucky was I to get out with my two small children, to escape brutal torture and murder — so they tell me.

For a long time I did not think about returning. First not allowed, then not interested. Friends and family feel this way still. I travel alone for the first time. I am being pulled back, yet forward toward something. I cannot imagine what.

(Husband, I did not know what to tell you when I left. My reasons for leaving clear to me, hidden from you. Making up false reasons for going, pretending to want to go to a foreign place once called home. By then so many lies between us it was hard to unravel which one I was continuing with. You pretending to care that I was going. Me pretending to not be leaving. It’s all the same, in the end. We have said our goodbyes. And yet I am going somewhere, doing what I have never been able to do with your demand for plans and clear thinking. I am following my womb. She is leading me home.)

On the train I hear their voices, echoing through my slumber. Loud enough for my conscious mind to register, to instantly grab onto. Young women’s voices speaking passionately of an archaeological dig in the Northeast part of Romania, of things unsuspected and never imagined being uncovered. Young women from Eastern Europe speaking of options I never had: young women archaeologists. When I wake up it is all there, presented to me. A neat package in my mind.

At the next stop I get off and immediately set up transport to my true destination: Romania. To the place of my old home, Lvov, I cannot go. Lvov is now a part of the Soviet Union. Jews are still not welcome there. There, the house that I lived in after marriage, the place where I brought forth three children, the home I fled leaving everything completely intact, remains unavailable to me. I do not want to go to Krakow, the place of my home before marriage; where my husband came to study law, where we met — where I had intended to let this train take me. I only want to go to the Moldavian region of the Northeast corner of Romania — to the place where spades are entering the earth.

“No, no,” the clerk at the ticket window says when I hand her my Israeli passport with the money for the new itinerary. “No Israelis allowed inside Romania.”

I look into her eyes and continue to look into them as I reach into my bag and pull out my Polish passport. I hand it to her. In her eyes nothing changes.

“This will do,” she says.

The wise foresight of the early Israelis has rescued me again, permitting me to hold more than one passport, that I may duel between identities, depending on which will be more readily accepted. Using the passport of a country that threw me out, I enter a country that does not want me, to try to get closer to a place that will not, under any pretext, have me.

After purchasing boots and, for the first time in my life, pants — khakis, the same as I have seen the young women on the train wearing — I go to the store next door and purchase a small notebook, inside whose accepting pages I intend to let myself finally roam free. The deep red, leather binding I hold against my chest, desperately knowing if I do not let it out soon, it will overtake me. I call it “The Journal of My Beginning.”

I have traveled this area before, to vacation near the Black Sea. All the wealthy Polish Jews came here. Trains. Always we took trains. Trains so many took to their deaths, others to escape, and me, I am taking one to return to a place I have never been, yet always known. As innocently as my family that boarded the train to Auschwitz, I board this one trusting, as surely they did, that this will be the train to lead me finally to safety. What a fool.

Nothing looks the same as it did in one’s youth, for many reasons, yet I have forgotten how beautiful this train ride is, cutting its curves through the Transylvanian Alps. The green crowds of trees and the moisture, so much moist green. A moisture which rubs up against my skin, a moisture my tongue drinks off my lips, a life-affirming moisture I have also forgotten. Living in the desert one cannot remember the possibility of lush moist green. Rather there is the dust; one becomes accustomed to the dust. I close my eyes and let the tears, salty and delicious, flow down my cheeks. I remember the smell of my father as I leaned upon him in rest; the train swaying right to left, right to left, right to left. Why don’t I remember my mother?

(Husband, you hesitated a bit at the station. I daresay, for a moment, you remembered me boarding the train in Lvov that other day so long before. I think, for a moment, you felt it — buried deep but still there — the woman I was, and you looked at me with tenderness before you became enveloped in your guilt. To that guilt which seems not to motivate, so only makes things worse, I said, “Good-bye.” To you I said, “Good-bye.”)

Israel is full of archaeology. After the wars and the struggle and the settling of the land, she now slowly opens herself to the spades, revealing what lies beneath. This lifting of earth — peering into her memories — has always been a fascination for me. Yet there are so many little commitments to a woman’s life that keep her bound closely to the house. Three meals a day to prepare, shopping, all that repetitive cleaning and yes, oh yes, in my case, the suffocating need to entertain.

On the flyer I am given at the Tourist Information Center in Iaşi Romania, concerning the dig I have journeyed to, I read, The Cucuteni culture existed roughly between the years 4800–3500 of prehistory. The site, on the Prut River near Iaşi, in Romanian Moldavia, was discovered in 1884. The first excavations were carried out in 1901–1910. Current excavations in progress began in 1961. The civilization, lasting a long time, spread through this region and up into the Bug River Valley of the Ukraine, reaching enormous size and achieving impressive development before disappearing.

Lvov is in the Bug River Valley of the Ukraine. She was there, underneath me, all the time.

In the flyers are images of things found; already uncovered. The remains of magnificent Cucuteni vases and bowls, the characteristic black-painted-on-red ceramic, moving patterns of whirls and swirls and happy, rounded eggs. Eggs within eggs, double eggs, triple eggs, four eggs circling around a fifth egg. Eggs splitting, growing, carrying — eggs becoming.

(Husband, I was glad you did not say anything at that moment. I would have felt the need to appease your guilt, to wipe it away for you, our prehistory — to pretend you had not murdered me for yourself. The silence I took as my cue, prompting me onto the train, this most dreadful silence engulfing me, threatening to swallow me whole, disappearing into the void of unspoken misery.)

I take a room in Iaşi from which I hire a cab daily to transport me to the dig site. The archeologists do not know what to make of me, this woman who keeps returning each day to the dig. This woman they know was not invited. I speak to them in Hebrew that they, for a while, remain unaware that I understand their combinations of mixed Slavic tongue. Among themselves they whisper, “Who is she? Where did she come from?”

I have come from Poland, from the Ukraine, from Israel, from Cucuteni. I have risen back up; never again to be buried, never again to be forgotten.

(Husband, you knew it was unlike me to take a trip alone. You looked at me suspiciously for weeks, yet dared not say anything, lest I offer you an answer. Then you would have to hear. What would happen if you had to name it? And anyway, I did not want to tell you. I did not, any longer, want to fix what it is between us. The distance, I needed. It helped my escape.)

There is a pair of egg-shaped woman’s buttocks, wide open hips, in the museum of the Cucuteni culture in Iaşi. Formed first of clay, then spiral designs carved onto them, after which, in an oven were they baked. These were unearthed on an earlier dig. Inside a bowl-shaped indentation which has been carved into the top of these hips, the place where a woman’s waist would be, where a torso may or may not have once been, in this ancient womb space, are nestled two small, perfectly shaped, eggs.

Similar varieties of these wide women’s hips and buttocks have been found throughout the different sites. Some have the upper portion of a woman’s body as well, but this part is smaller, possessing a small head and shortened arms. What is important here is the lower center, this central space. I spread my feet, stabilizing myself to the blush of pride and recognition that runs up through me. Along with the curving spiral-shaped lines etched upon her are four symmetrical triangles grouped together over her womb, a seed planted within each of them.

(Husband, “Nonsense,” you said, as I stared at the photos of what the archaeological expeditions of Arthur Evans¹ had uncovered on the Island of Crete.

“Take a look at this,” I said. “The sculptures of these women, they say something.” I paused. “Something remarkable about the early women of Crete.”

I was stumbling for the words, the words that are so elusive when one first sees these discoveries, the sculptures and paintings of these women from Bronze Age Crete, breasts exposed, holding forth two mighty snakes or marching in procession; performing rituals, jumping bulls, women grounded in their sexuality in the way only women who feel safe can be; images of women in intimate connection with the Snake. “The women in these books,” I continued, “the women portrayed in these sculptures, appear to be a different breed entirely from the type that exists now on earth.”

“Nonsense,” you repeated. “Those are merely the pretty women of the court. And pretty they were,” you said, eyeing them lustfully before closing the book on me.

I never forgave you for that, for reducing these powerful images to mere objects for you insignificant male fucking. And I never forgot.)

Something about the dirt, the clay hidden within the dirt, underneath, the sound of the shovel sinking into dirt, over and over again, the possibility of hitting something — something powerful, hidden. I feel rock cover within me shaking, breaking open. Within me molten liquids rising, up surging, pushing against. I sit at the edge of the dig. With my eyes closed I place them — the objects only just uncovered, still full of their own dirt — to my forehead listening for them to tell me what.

All over this area the Cucuteni lived, for millennia their villages peacefully spread as they expanded. There are reports of much digging over the border, in the Soviet Union, more and more settlements, many larger than those emerging here. Over there, they do not call it Cucuteni. Over there they call it Tripolye. I hear them, the workers on this dig, “Over there they are digging Her up,” they say. “Over there they are removing Her as soon as they find Her. Indeed, back to Siberia with Her,” they laugh among themselves.

Over there at least they do not pretend to accept Her.

The Journal of My Beginning September 16, 1962 The two-storied buildings they uncovered were ceramics workshops. Piles and piles of ceramics they found within them. “Storage,” they say, “Storage for some sort of votive offering, for an ‘unknown cult purpose.’”

It is widely believed that the first pottery wheel was invented here in this culture by a woman. Tools of the potter are found in the burials of women only, therefore it is also widely believed that this was a woman’s craft, that these sculptures were crafted by women’s hand — messages sent to the future by my sisters of the past.

The people on this dig are of the educated class. When they discover I am Israeli, they begin treating me with concern. They begin inviting me to their meals, humbling themselves, and their collective guilt before me. Some look at me with pity, imagining in their minds what I have survived. Some look at me with wonder, knowing I have experienced the birth of a nation, been part of history. None of them see my biggest wound. Though they still exclude me from talk of the dig, I welcome being able to sit closer. Knowing I shall never leave this place, it makes my survival seem more possible.

The leader of this dig, Dumitru, is an intelligent man closer in age to me than any of the others. I see how the younger women appeal to him, this new breed, struggling to create something for themselves, something new and yet, it is there in their eyes — I see it when they look at him, this longing for approval and acceptance, which gives him back always all the power.

I will not lie. I will not tell you that Dumitru is a bad or detestable man, though I wish I could. It would make for better reading. No. He has shown great generosity toward me. It was he who first came to me, speaking in broken and suffering Hebrew until I could bear it no longer and let my Polish flow out of me. He smiled with relief as we continued forward in mixed Slavic.

The Journal of My Beginning September 19, 1962 Within each house was a giant oven. Some of the houses were very large, divided into three sections. Within each section was found a giant, rounded oven and sometimes even two. The ovens doubled as hearth. The ovens were the center, the center of the houses. There were ovens in every shrine and small shrine model found.

In the museum at Iaşi there were Cucuteni sculptures of women’s hips. Inside Her hips there were eggs baking.

I have lived a lot of life. Never has the thing that lives at my core felt as matched as it does here in the land of Cucuteni — the beige of my khakis blending in with the sand. Poland, my youth, it was awful. The people were starving and fighting. The people were raging. “Dirty Jew,” they called me, chasing me through the streets with rocks and rotten food, chasing my daughters home from school. I knew people hated me and I knew why. But this, this cold unnamed hate I would come to know later — the hate that comes with being a woman — this is a worse hate than any other.

(Husband, when we moved from Poland to create Israel, the land of Zion, you said over and over, “A Jewish homeland, a Jewish homeland,” but it is now just another man’s homeland where he may exert his will in the way that he wishes. I muffle the voice within me. I smother myself as it screams, raging, Where? Where indeed is a woman’s homeland?)

“I have at last found my home,” I say to Dumitru, challenging him one day when he comes to sit beside me, to again struggle forward in mixed tongue. “Are you able to let me live here and work here and finally belong somewhere?”

“The choice is yours to make,” he responds, seeming not at all challenged. He scuffs his boot against the dust of the yet uncovered hill between us. “If you choose to stay, I shall not stand in your way,” he says, rubbing harder with the heel of his boot, beneath which something shimmers.

I gasp, hopeful.

The Journal of My Beginning September 23, 1962, Autumnal Equinox The leaves color as they begin their dying. My body leans toward autumn in spite of the resistance it meets in my mind. I think of these people, feeling the seasons within them, shedding their inner leaves, secure in the knowing that, as the poet says, “they become the trees².”

Villagers work hard now, preparing for the winter ahead. There will be plenty of time for them to rest when the snows have buried them inside their houses, fires burning, around which they shall huddle, making use of all that they work for now.

No one left out. All hands busy. Young and old alike gathering wheat, crushing, storing, animal meat smoking. Into root cellars vegetables are carried, wood is gathered, chopped and stacked.

No evidence of warfare or violent death has ever been uncovered here in the land of the Cucuteni.

(Husband! Revolutionaries! Men! No, no, no. We were there when you needed us. No, no, no. Working in the fields of Zion along side of you. No, no, no. Building this new homeland until you said to us, when enough men came to replace us, “Go now. Go now and leave us. We need to do serious work here. Go cook your meals and do the dishes and wash my clothing like you have always done and like you like to do.³ We do not need you any longer.”No, no, no. We angered against you. “We like it here. We want to build toward a new homeland, feel a part of it, all together, this is what we want.”

“Be gone with you now,” you said. “Go back to your place in the underclass of slaves known as women that I may be waited upon without feeling waited upon; that we may belong to the world of men.”)

The ovens I have already seen in the museum in Iaşi. The small clay replicas of shrines shaped like ovens, matching the ovens they have found inside the houses and shrines they have unearthed. The ovens they would have baked in to worship. This custom done still by the peasant women in the Poland of my youth at holidays, forming the loaves into traditional shapes for celebration, I remember. And so, I am not surprised when he digs up an oven shaped like a womb, a womb shaped like an oven, an oven with arms and legs. An oven with breasts.

“What in the world is it?” Dumitru exclaims, holding it up in the west, trying to see.

“Silly man,” I say, grabbing it away from him. “Inside one of these were you baked. How have you forgotten we are all of women born?”⁴

I cradle it within my arms and run with it. Dumitru chases me, pleading for it back. I will not return it, not until I have touched it, kissed it, closed my eyes and received a picture of my sister whose hands have formed it; strong and firm and confident in the knowledge that from Her comes all life. Oh sisters of past, I cry, my tears moving the dirt upon it. Oh sisters of the past, I rock, holding it. I do not care that he is watching me, my connection to my sisters finally more important to me. After I connect myself to them I hand it back to him. Later as I sit by the river, staring at the water flowing, moving — water people bathed in and swam in and fished in and made love in some 6000 years before, the same water yet different, the water that knows all, the water that holds it all — Dumitru comes to see me, the shrine in his hands. He sits down on the river bank beside me, unafraid of getting his clean and pressed trousers dirty. After looking into the water for some time, he sets the shrine down on the sand between us. It has little legs that allow it to stand on its own. My hands he takes into his before placing them upon it. “Feel it,” he says, looking into my tear stained eyes. “Take your time to feel it,” he says, and he leaves me alone.

When Lilith⁵ first came to me, with her black and awful truth, naturally, I sent her away. With one swift swing of my hand, thumb extended toward the door, I asked Her to leave and so she did. There was no way I could embrace the information She wished to give me and remain inside the life I was living. A young Polish woman with two small children, married to a prominent man, in a world on the brink of another war.

I would not leave my daughters.

Instead, I let the tears fall backward (as you, Husband, headed, whistling, always whistling, to my sister’s bed). My daughters I thought I was protecting as I let the poison flow back into me, burning the lining of my throat, my inner space swollen bitter, separating myself from them for always with the river of pain I allowed to become me.

(Husband, Revolutionaries, Men, No, no. no. When you needed us, Zionists you called us too. You professed freedom for all. No, no, no. Only to be lied to again. After following others blindly onto trains leading to death. No, no, no. We boarded your train and you too abandoned us.)

My father never taught me about Lilith, though he taught me everything else I learned from books. I discovered Lilith on my own one day when I sneaked into his library while he was out of the house. It was there in the books in his library that I discovered that Adam had a first wife named Lilith, who declined to submit to him — refusing to lie beneath him in intercourse — and was subsequently banished to the depths of the blood Red Sea. There in the books in my father’s library, the books full of men speaking to other men, Lilith becomes a demon, a terrifying witch of the night, a baby killer.

Here in Cucuteni, all these years later, I finally understand that Lilith had come, rising from the soil beneath Lvov, to save me.

Ovens, you well know, are no minor matter to a Jew. And when Dumitru hands it back to me, when I hold the oven again, I let myself feel it and oh, the remarkable irony of it. All my relatives, my brothers and sisters of faith, only recently perished inside an oven and I think, what an absolute standing on its head it is,⁶ and yet it is true from which we come, to that we do indeed return. And yes, the symbols are always the same but it is the way in which we choose to use them, it is this which matters and oh, how it matters and oh, how it makes all the difference. And in this horrible moment I find solace in the thought, in the image, of this warm and welcoming oven-shaped womb escorting them safely back, inside Her warm and mucousy, blood-filled womb of the beginning, rocking together toward return.

And then it happens. I cannot get up. I cannot stop crying. I am agony. There is no space or distinction between the feeling and me. I become it, and oh it hurts, hurts, hurts me so to think of these people so involved in celebrating life while I must live in a world that chooses to celebrate death.⁷

I want to be, I want to be, I want to be Cucuteni.

As I lie overcome, the moment at which I always imagined my life would end,⁸ she comes to me, a young Lithuanian archaeologist. Her name is Marija.⁹ None of the younger women have ever approached me. She stomps right up to me as I lie there howling and moaning and rolling within the mess of myself.

“Stop this fuss,” she says. “There is much work to be done.”

She holds out her arm toward me. The sun is bright and blinding as I look up at her. It takes me some time to see that she is handing me a shovel.

©Theresa C. Dintino 2022

Endnotes

¹Arthur Evans, British archaeologist, who in the early 1900’s excavated what he referred to as, “The Palace of Minos,” in Crete.

²Line from the poem, Moccasin Flowers, by Mary Oliver, House of Light, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).

³Adrienne Rich, Of Women Born, (New York; Norton, 1986) 25. A gorgeous manifesto on Motherhood worth everyone’s read. In one passage Adrienne writes about how not only are women forced into doing housework, they are convinced that they like to do it. Women are used to help fight revolutions but then sent back to the realm of domesticity once these revolutions are won.

⁴Ibid.

⁵Lilith: the first wife of Adam. A dark Goddess. Savior of stillborns. Lilith appears to many women who are trying to integrate the inner voice of the raging madwoman constellated by living within the lie of the patriarchy. She comes at times of intense change.

⁶Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade,(HarperSanFrancisco, 1987). Another must-read for any woman wanting to integrate herstory. Riane discusses how for one culture or worldview to co-opt another it must co-opt the images and “stand them on their heads,” meaning use them to push forward a point of view exactly opposite of their actual, original meaning.

⁷Mary Daly, GYN/ECOLOGY,(Boston; Beacon Press, 1978). A radical defining text in herstory, full of genius insights, reclaimed language and questioning commonly accepted beliefs one being the glorification of death and murder.

⁸Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, (New York, Ballantine, 1988) 42. Heilbrun urges us to write a story about a woman that does not end in death or marriage.

⁹Marija Gimbutas, archaeologist and scholar, whose exhaustive research of the world of Neolithic Old Europe and interpretations of the findings from a feminist perspective has inspired so many, this story one small example.