by Jenny Diski
——— They had different mothers, Abram and Sarai, so that might account for the difference in how they apprehended the world. But they had the same father, and that might account for the similarities between them. They were enough alike and like their father not to have much chance to slip through their allotted time without straining at it. Or perhaps all that has nothing to do with it. He was a man, and she was a woman. Similar, but different enough to make a difference. Or were they just the way they were, each of them, for no other reason than accident and variety?
One difference between them was that she knew there weren’t any certainties. Who can say why she knew such a terrible thing? But she did, she seemed always to have known that. He discovered a need for certainties so powerful that it nearly destroyed him. What it did to her is hard to say. But it was his passionate wish for certainties that made so much of the story his, and so little of it hers.
If certainty divided them, their love made each of them inescapable for each other. Even when the difficulties began, and even when everything changed, there was still love between them, though it became a hard and bitter thing, hidden, kept locked away by each in their own secret place. Or was it the history of love, rather than love itself? Except at the beginning, it was never an easy love, how could it have been, sliding between the world’s incompatible modalities that were none of their making? None, I say, of any of our making. But, interrupting and corrupting into innocence, love began to do its sticky work.
Abram was ten years older than Sarai. A youth already by the time she formed the first concrete picture of him that would remain with her all her life. He was a marvel. A prince of creatures. Though not then, in her first vivid memory of him, to himself. And in retrospect, prince of creatures hardly suited the swarthy, smouldering, sullen young man four-year-old Sarai watched struggling with the material world. Deep shadows drew circles around the piercing black eyes, his cheeks and chin dark with a rush of adolescent stubble pushing frantically through the troubled, oily skin. His thick eyebrows, which met untidily and became one across the bridge of his nose, curved like a worry line, emphasising the sulky expression on the boy’s face, as if it knew itself to have lost its heart-stopping childish beauty, but was not able to sense the transitory nature of its present coarseness. He was crabby with the heat of the day, his physical efforts and his own clumsiness.
They were in the storeroom of the workshop. Abram stood precariously on tiptoe on a pile of bricks, reaching up to a basket at the very top of the shelves above him. With his fingertips he was trying to knock the edge of the basket out of alignment to get a firmer grip on it, and cursing under his breath. Sarai lay on the floor watching the struggle. Below him Haran stood holding his arms up ready to receive the burden. The contrast between the two boys was startling. Haran, just a few years younger than his brother, still possessed the grace of pre-pubescent boyhood. His loose-jointed limbs fell effortlessly into elegant attitudes, as now, with his arms extended expectantly and his head thrown back, as if he were posing for an artist. His peachy skin was lit up by bright, eager, strangely blue eyes, and a mouth laughing in delight at the uncertainty of the present enterprise. Haran glowed with life, with life and his ignorance of its forthcoming complications, while his older brother grunted and sweated with the effort of making his unruly body perform as he wished. He struggled with his own awkwardness, wishing to reach higher, but being thwarted by his physical enemy. He wanted to perform the task as an adult, to confirm his authority, his dignity as the older, the stronger, the taller, but he felt himself humiliated in front of Haran and the baby, at least in his own eyes. Haran and Sarai were simply having fun, neither of them needing to display a dignity that was just out of reach. They enjoyed the game, while their brother was condemned, by his new-found inability to play, to do battle with intractable reality.
Sarai lay on the floor of the storeroom, slightly to one side of her big brother, and wriggled with pleasure at the adventure of retrieving the topmost basket. She laughed along with Haran at the marvellous uncertainty of the outcome as Abram reached, reached, but could not reach. His fingertips so near, but not close enough to get a grip on the edge of the basket and topple it into Haran’s waiting arms. At any moment he might get there, his fingers inching minutely closer towards his goal, but never quite attaining it. Just another half-inch, quarter-inch, and then – Sarai could almost see it happening – the basket would suddenly lose its footing and pitch downward towards Haran, who would not be able to catch it properly, and collapse under its weight, so that he and it would land together in a heap on the floor, where she would join him in an anarchic scrummage until everything and all of them were fully coated with the powdered pigment that was its dusty contents. The present fun and the anticipated tumble had both Haran and Sarai squealing with laughter and excitement. But although she was laughing at the recalcitrant half-inch between her big brother’s fingers and the substance of the basket, she was not, as he supposed, laughing at him.
However clumsy and oafish he might be feeling, to Sarai he was a resplendent being. Nothing that Abram did could diminish him in her eyes. While she rejoiced in the potential chaos of the situation, she was quite clear that it was the world she was having fun with. Abram, striving, even failing, against the world, remained her human champion. She could see the difference between Haran and Abram. She watched Haran glide through life, kicking and running after a stone as if his feet only touched the ground because he chose it. She could see how Abram was weighted to the earth, how awkward his movements were. How, reaching for the salt at meals, he would invariably knock over a pitcher of water; how rugs tripped him and tables struck him.
But of all the shadowy forms that she had grown to recognise in those earliest years, Abram grew to be the most admired, the most desired. Her mother and father became vital beings, necessary like air but too remote from her own condition to be models for her present infant world. Nahor, their oldest brother, was also an adult. Haran was other in a different way, a quicksilver presence, able, lovely to watch as he negotiated the world around him, but without authority, different, yet reminding her in some way of herself. Abram, however, stood between the child and the adults, an adult to Sarai’s understanding, yet with something almost but not quite reachable about him that neither her parents nor Haran, let alone Nahor, could offer. He was simply complete. As she would be when she became whatever she was supposed to become.
Once the future had entered into her consciousness, in that earliest time, she understood that she was not to remain static in the infant world of her summer garden. That something was to be reached for. Some aim had emerged out of the aimlessness. The stillness in the garden was disturbed into a suspicion of altered destiny, of change, of a self different from the things around her, who stretched forward into more of herself, though what that more, or self, could be remained unknown until she understood Abram as a being that had become.
She became Abram’s shadow, following him, watching him with close and anxious attention. She practised Abramness in her solitary hours, trying on his expression – worried concentration, sulkiness, an occasional sweet smile that emerged from the troubledness, just for his baby sister. She practised walking in his way, even bumping into the furniture and muttering the incomprehensible words he reserved for those collisions. She lowered her voice in an approximation of his gruff, monosyllabic way with words. She loved nothing better than to lie flat out on the workbench – when no adults were around – and watch him working on his figures, carving them as they had to be carved, gazing into his face, his eyes narrowed with concentration, with thought. She moulded mud in the hope that her efforts would coincide with Abram’s figures, and practised concentrating by screwing up her face and sticking out her tongue, to indicate whatever monumental effort lay behind it.
Most of the time, Abram ignored his little stalker, used to having her under his feet or lurking beneath a table, and this too was part of his glorious maturity for Sarai. T
o be ignored by Abram was heaven. One day, she would achieve the status of ignoring some adoring shadow of her own. Every now and then he berated her when she got in his way – as if enough of the static world didn’t already get in his way, he had to have a mobile obstacle to negotiate. He’d swat at her as if she were an annoying bug, or better still, chase her out of his presence, flapping his arms in exasperation. Sarai treasured such moments of attention. Then she would sneak back, silent as an ant, and he, grandly, had completely forgotten her, or pretended to. And sometimes, suddenly, he would shine himself at her. Turn his gaze towards her, call her name, pick her up and speak to her in a voice specially modulated for her alone. With Sarai on his lap, he would explain what he was doing: what the figure he made stood for, what it was meant to be. If the day was truly blessed, he would take her with him on an errand, out in the wide world, where everyone – even strangers passing through – could observe her with her hand enclosed in her big brother’s hand, belonging to him, running to match his giant steps, being urged on: ‘Come on, keep up.’ Me, she would beam out to the passers-by, desperate for them to notice, he’s talking to me.
Now, however, still huffing and puffing towards the basket, on top of his wobbling pile of bricks, Abram spoke in a different tone.
‘Shut up, you two. This is serious.’
Clearly the struggle to reach the basket was not serious, but even Sarai understood that something was. Before the immediacy of this entertaining moment lay days in which the air had become fogged with anxiety. Something strange had come over their father. He had of late become more and more abstracted, thinking always about something else when he spoke. Sarai grew increasingly aggravated by his peculiar absence even while stroking her hair, or kissing her goodnight. The other adults around her talked half the time in an undertone to each other, and sometimes to Nahor. There was a secret, but there wasn’t the bubbling laughter underneath their whispers that usually accompanied the kind of secrets that turned out to be treats and presents for the children. This was another kind of secret that Sarai had never come across before. And there was something about the whispering that made it a larger secret than the ones that usually concerned her. It was not just for her not to hear: it was as if the very walls of the house should be shut out of what the grown-ups were saying to each other. There was no question that seriousness was in the air, and that the basket-reaching entertainment was only a snatched interlude of relief for the uneasy younger children. Their gaiety at Abram’s struggles was a welcome release from the secrecy and gloom that had gathered in their lives. And when, as expected, the basket finally tipped off the edge of the shelf, tumbling into Haran’s arms to unbalance him, and Haran and Sarai finally rolled and squealed messily on the floor together amid its dusty contents, the hilarity went on rather longer than it should have, as if to keep the worried silence from returning. The beginning was already ending.
Their father, Terah, suffered from dark moods, which began to increase in intensity at around this time. Every few months, he started brooding and slowly pacing the courtyard, back and forth, back and forth, his great, bearish body bent forward with the effort of dragging his feet, his brow creased and dark, his head bowed, as if some doom-laden message were coming to him. Sometimes, he would shake his head as he walked, then stop and clutch it in his hands, as if trying to squeeze the thoughts out of it. The children learned to keep their distance when this happened. And then Terah would disappear for a time, and there would be much whispering and concern among the other adults of the household. Terah was nowhere to be seen or heard, though all of the rooms were open to the children, until some days later, when they would be playing in the corridors and hear weeping from a room they had just been told they were not to enter. No one explained these pacings and disappearances.
They say that at Terah’s birth a plague of ravens had darkened the sky, swooping down on the corn seed even as it was being broadcast, and devouring it from the furrows before anyone had a chance to cover it with soil. A year of destitution followed. So it is said. It is also said (though never by her father) that Sarai’s grandfather, the first Nahor, was a soothsayer and a magician, though he couldn’t have been a very good one since he failed to predict the famine that would follow his son’s birth, and a good deal else beside. Perhaps the augury foretold Terah’s intermittently strange behaviour, or perhaps his moods came as a result of the fear of what it might have foretold. Perhaps those ravens one way or another had been responsible for everything and all of us. And perhaps they had been just a flock of passing birds. For all that, Terah was, between his bouts, as good and loving a father as any child might wish for.
The family could trace itself back ten generations, to an ancestor, Shem. Before that, nothing was known, though there was talk of a catastrophe that had destroyed the world; but how many families, in those days, or in yours, could count back so far? Later, she would learn more about this time before, but then, before Shem, all was mist. They were a respected clan, the Habiru, among the clans who had lived in Ur from time more or less immemorial.
During family prayers to Nanna, Sarai watched her father offering up libations to their household god as he ritually recited the names of his forefathers. When she was little, she would shut her eyes and listen to the rhythm of the names falling past her ears, one after another, soothing, hypnotic, like the sound of bright water dancing through a brook.
‘These are the begettings of Shem: Shem begot Arpakhshad. And Arpakhshad begot Shelah. And Shelah begot Ever. And Ever begot Peleg. And Peleg begot Re’u. And Re’u begot Serug. And Serug begot Nahor. And Nahor begot Terah. And Terah begot Nahor, Abram and Haran.’
Though the sing-song of her father’s voice kept its regular intonation and pace from start to finish, Sarai’s excitement began to build like a spring winding up as he got half-way through, and then she would hold her breath with the tension of waiting as the list of unknown, unknowable beings crept towards the knowable present – Serug, whom she had only heard tell of; Nahor, her grandfather, still alive, though only just, when she was born; then Terah, her father, right there, in front of her, speaking those very words, reaching his own name; and then, the excitement peaked, Nahor, Abram and Haran, her beloved brothers, the present, them, all those generations reaching back into the blackness of nothing and arriving at their own living, breathing selves. Of course, there was always a pang at the final name that was never spoken. No mention of Sarai. Of the youngest, newest addition to the list. Of her. She knew, of course, that the women were not counted in the begettings, that she couldn’t be there. But there was always a split second when she half hoped, waiting in the breathing space after ‘Haran’, for her father to pronounce the name Sarai. Naturally, he couldn’t. He wouldn’t even have thought of it. The ritual was fixed and solemn, one didn’t play games with the moon god, it was not for mortals to change his rules. Or for a present generation to play with the tradition of the Habiru, handed down from father to son from all those generations ago. But often, in bed, in the hum of the night heat, she would say the begettings over to herself, like a story, or a poem, and then she would add a final ‘Sarai’, like a sigh, to the list of Terah’s children. Since she wasn’t actually making ritual obeisance to Nanna, she thought it would be all right. And surely, she thought, a great and powerful god like him wouldn’t really mind a small child sticking her name at the end of a list. Anyway, he would be far too busy with important business even to notice.
‘And Terah begot Nahor, Abram, Haran and Sarai…’ ———
——— I made the beginning and I allowed the begettings. The generation of generations was in my gift, as was everything. Reproduction was my invention, and with my permission – go forth and multiply – the humans replicated themselves. That more should come out of the unity was a novelty of my imagining. That the unity should be separated and a third come out of the two was, if I may say so, a masterstroke of elegance. Out of nothing I made companionship. I recognised the lack, thoug
h no such lack had ever existed before. I understood solitude, and I gave my creature company. Of he/she in my own image, complete of itself, of myself, I separated and divided and made two consciousnesses with the thought and the words to look at one another and say I and you. And what thanks did I get? How could I know that from the pair, the third is always excluded? No pair, no third existed before I made them. I found out.
I invented prohibition, they invented disobedience, so I invented punishment. Together, we were beginning to learn. I sent them away from the garden to live in the dust of the world. I gave them pain and difficulty – shame, they discovered for themselves and for me. From us to secrecy to shame. The sequence seems obvious now, but then it was all astonishment. I modelled my creatures from the dust and the rain, gave them life from my breath, gave them self-awareness with the Word, and then things undreamed of in the void followed. Consequences.
I condemned them to bring forth their generations in pain and hardship. I made it a very uncertain, life-threatening business. I liked the paradox – having gained a taste for paradox and other complications of the material world – of life threatening life. In any case, it kept things clear: reproduction was my process, freely given or not given at all. It also, of course, kept humanity in its place, the messy, dangerous business of conception and birth. I made them procreate that way to remind them that, like the beasts over which they had dominion, they were my beasts, of me, but not me. What need had I for reproduction, I am that I am? What use have I for a line, for verification of belonging, needing, loving and being loved? I am that I am.