Only Human

by Jenny Diski

  That night she wept for more than just her horror of spilt blood. She was unclean, Nikkal had told her. She must not approach her father or brother while her period was flowing. She must keep to herself, to the company of women, and then, when the bleeding was over, she had ritually to wash and pour a libation to the gods. Every month. She was no longer free to hang about her beloved Abram, or stroke her father’s knee whenever she wanted. She was no longer a child. She was a mother in waiting. A creature quite different from men. Dangerous, even. Necessary but contaminating. Closer, in her ritual uncleanliness, to her poor, disgraced brother Haran than to the rest of her family.

  ‘Why?’ she asked Nikkal.

  ‘I’ve heard stories,’ she said.

  She told Sarai an ancient tale of the beginning of the world, quite unlike their own story of the beginning. It was something women knew, because women had always asked, as she had, why the birth of children should mean such trouble for them alone. It was whispered between them during the time of their uncleanliness.

  ‘It’s just a story,’ Nikkal said.

  But it was the strangest story Sarai had ever heard, about a single god, alone in the universe, who made and punished and destroyed at will, and a humanity entirely at his mercy. Of course, the gods of Ur destroyed too. There had been a flood long ago in their history, but only one god among many was responsible, and other gods tempered his fury and the effects on humanity. The Babylonians had their champions in the pantheon. These other stories that the women told each other, and it was now Sarai’s turn to hear, left her with a sense of helplessness, a sense of being without anyone on her side. It was terrible, but apt as the first blood leaked from her own body and she learned that this was a reality over which she was to have no control.

  ‘Don’t speak of this to men,’ Nikkal warned her. ‘The priests would accuse us of blasphemy. It’s women’s business.’

  ‘Don’t the men know about it?’

  ‘There must be some things men don’t know about. They don’t know about bleeding and childbearing. Rather, they don’t think about what it means for women, they care only for the results. Let’s keep it to ourselves and have some stories of our own.’

  ‘But it’s such a terrible story. Can’t we pour libations to this god? Can’t we do anything to change his mind?’

  ‘You have too much faith in the gods’ concern for us. Anyway, I didn’t say the other story was true. We tell it to each other to explain why we have so little choice in our lives as women. Men’s stories don’t concern themselves with that.’

  ‘So it isn’t a true story?’

  ‘Does it describe your situation as you have just discovered it to be?’

  ‘It seems to.’

  ‘Then it’s true enough. That’s as true as human stories can get.’

  Sarai imagined the long stretch of life ahead of her, and the uncountable months of bleeding and isolation.

  ‘Every month, until I die?’

  Nikkal smiled.

  ‘No, eventually the monthly flow will dry up. And then you will be relieved, but also, believe it or not, grief-stricken. Then you will conceive no more babies and you will grow old. The thing has started and, from now on, the course of your life will be marked by blood and its absence. Everything will stem from its appearance and disappearance. It is the way of the world. You are one of the women, now. One of us.’

  She made it sound a dubious privilege.

  That night, as Sarai wept at her new alienation from Abram – how many days would it be before she could fling her arms around his neck and see him smile at her childish adoration? – she heard his voice coming from Terah’s tent. They were talking in urgent tones, her father insistent, Abram arguing, but their voices were lowered so it was not possible to make out what they were saying. It was not until her period was finished and she had been ritually cleansed that she discovered what they had been talking about.

  She was called to Terah’s tent as soon as her ablutions were over. She ran to him with relief, and hugged him, climbing into his lap as she had always done. He kissed her gently on the cheek, but eased her off his knees, telling her to sit on the stool in front of him. He was not unkind, only intent on creating a new distance between them. Sarai was mortified, but as she sat, he reached out and took her hand, holding it cupped between his palms.

  ‘They say you are a woman now,’ he said, with a sad smile and a slow shake of the head.

  Sarai couldn’t say anything, the thought of the blood flowing between her legs, and of her father knowing about it, perhaps everyone knowing about it, was too shaming.

  ‘It’s a sign, that it should have happened now. A sign that the family of Shem will not be destroyed by the troubles that have fallen on us. From you will come new life, we will grow through you, and our losses, my lost sons and their offspring, will be made good.’

  Sarai listened without understanding.

  ‘Your children will make us strong again. A new generation. You must be married.’

  Still, she listened; still, she failed to understand. Whom could she marry in this desert? Whose children could she have that would enlarge the family of Shem? Was she to be given to some passing group of nomads? How would that help their clan? If this was to happen now, who was there? Surely, Lot, her nephew, was the hope of the family’s continuation, and he was still just a baby. How could she bear children who would remain within their bloodline?

  ‘If Lot were older,’ Terah said, seeming to read her thoughts. ‘But we cannot wait for so long. We need the strength of a new generation now, as we head for a new life. Sarai, these are desperate times. You are different from my other children, apart from them, born from another womb.’

  She felt a stabbing pain around her heart at these words. It had never been said in such a way before.

  ‘But Emtelai said she adopted me, that she had become my mother.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. But now it turns out to be for the good, as if it had been meant. You are one of us, but also distant enough. You can be married to Abram, and your children will truly be a new generation of our family.’

  ‘Married to my brother?’

  ‘He is your half-brother. It will do,’ Terah said, nodding resolutely into the distance as if to elicit the agreement of someone who stood behind Sarai. But there were only the two of them in the tent.

  ‘Abram’s wife?’ She said the words only to hear them spoken aloud.

  ‘The new mother of our people. You will be the matriarch that the generations to come will all look back to.’

  ‘Abram’s wife?’ she breathed again.

  ‘Sarai,’ Terah said gently, ‘it is unusual, but it is not impossible. It is necessary. You’re fond of Abram. He has always been your favourite. He is a good man, sturdy, solid, responsible. He understands the importance of family. Who would look after you better than him? Whom could you trust more than him? It’s not perfect, perhaps, but these are not perfect times. We have no other choices. We must not die out, we must not dilute the family. Ideally, we would wait for a child of Lot and yours … but we must do what we must. Can you understand? You are a clever child, surely you can understand the importance of keeping the family going?’

  Sarai just managed to stop herself from whispering, ‘Abram’s wife,’ for a third time. But she could hardly concentrate on what Terah was saying for the way the phrase bounced around in her head all the while. She was to become her beloved brother’s wife. Her beloved half-brother’s wife, as her father had corrected her for the first time in her life.

  She left Terah’s tent having had her deepest longing and most dread fear realised simultaneously – and discovered the longing and the fear to be so inextricable as to have been virtually identical all along. As a small child she had cuddled up to Abram and whispered to him that she was going to marry him when she grew up, that she would never leave him and that they would be together always. Abram laughed and said she would feel differently when she was older, and wou
ld want to make a life with someone else. Terah would find a suitable young man whom she would come to love and cherish. Someone with melting eyes and soft cheeks who would sweep her off her feet. Someone outside the immediate family, so that new ties were made and the family enlarged. It was the way of the world.

  ‘Someone I don’t know?’ she would shudder.

  ‘Someone you don’t know yet.’

  She would shake her head vigorously. She would only ever want Abram. She was going to stay with him for ever.

  ‘Please don’t marry anyone before I’m old enough to marry you,’ she would beg him. ‘Wait for me.’

  Apart from her childish love for Abram, she had wanted also to be enclosed for ever within the family that she secretly feared she was not entirely part of. It was as if she could only truly be a full member if she remained a beloved child of the house, if she were contained for ever within the wall of love that protected her from not quite belonging. All the while she was a child, no one had called her half-sister. And yet, it turned out now that only by being called half-sister was her immature dream of being for ever Abram’s loved one going to come true. And so the way of the world was subverted into her deepest desire precisely by what she dreaded most. As her father had said as if it had been meant, all her hopes and fears exploded into reality. Her dreams came true and, of course, translated from wish to life, were quite different from anything she had imagined.

  But (she had so much to learn, she still knew so little. Oh, my heart) as soon as they were betrothed, Abram began to keep a terrible distance from Sarai. Even when he came directly upon her, he would avert his eyes, look down at the dust and sand, off to one side, anywhere rather than let his gaze rest on her. He would mumble something that seemed to contain no words and even less affection and pass hurriedly on, always with some urgent business to attend to. He never spoke to her after her interview with Terah; it was as if their forthcoming marriage had severed the lifetime of love and comfort they had between them. And yet sometimes she would turn on an impulse and catch him looking at her from a safe distance with the strangest expression she had ever seen in the face she thought she knew so well. He would immediately turn away, but not before Sarai had observed him. No one had ever looked at her that way before: the familiar affection turned to something darker, more intense, his eyes burning towards her as if he were seeing something – her, for heaven’s sake – for the first time. It frightened her a little, but although she suffered anguish at the sudden loss of easy contact with him, she thought a lot about this new Abram she fleetingly glimpsed, and brought his face with that new look to her mind’s eye, savouring it. Why, she really did not know. It was her last moment of true innocence ———

  ——— Ten human generations on and humankind had taken my exhortation to be fruitful and multiply to their hearts. Rather, to their loins. These creatures, which I had made analogous to myself, took image for reality. Mistook their image for my reality and believed themselves real, simply because their flesh – the roughest of metaphors for eternal existence – took up space in the world. With their flesh they recreated and re-created, with their flesh they destroyed and were destroyed: and so they believed that the flesh itself was proof of life, instead of a poor necessity resulting from the nature of the nature I happened to make.

  First disobedience, then death, and now the pleasures of the flesh became the next fine invention of my creatures. And I am no fool: in each of these moves, they were asserting their authority – reaching beyond their remit as my creatures, licensed on earth, in my likeness, made to reflect my likeness to myself – to imagine themselves sufficient unto themselves.

  The few had turned into the many. A great proliferation occurred over those ten generations, a mass of them, which they took to be greater than my singularity, and all conversation stopped between them and me. I was alone again. In all that time, after Cain, I took no interest, let them get on with imagining that they were lords of their own universe. I did not care. I would not care. I retreated into silence. I turned my face from their insouciance towards eternity. I let life and death and all its murky consequences swamp the earth I had so meticulously ordered.

  But from the ordure, a single quavering voice finally reached my awareness, calling out to me against the tidal wave of concupiscence. I turned to look at the earth again, and heard the pleading of a single man, Enoch, and saw what a mess humankind had made of my world. I did that man a favour, and took him out of the ugliness only he seemed to have the misfortune to recognise, and mingled him into eternity, thinking he was the last who would walk in my way, and that rescuing him was the last I would ever have to do with humanity. Yet once I had looked on my formerly sweet and empty earth, I found it hard to look away. And an anger rose in me, unlike anything I had experienced before.

  They had got on with their lives, these humans. They were resourceful with my resources. They had built cities, and used the substance of the earth itself to fashion their wants. Forged metal into tools, carved rock and woven vegetation into shelter, ornament and musical instrument. What did they need me for? And in the dead of night, when neither cities, nor tools, nor walls, nor music quite soothed their fear at the smallness and vulnerability of the human condition, they turned and grasped each other in a bid for solace. The world I made was a ruin, a seething mass of flesh hacking away here and constructing there in a fervour of activity, all held together with the mutual self-comfort of gluey sexual desire. There they were, discovering this, that and each other. And of me, there was not a thought ———

  ——— Their father married Abram and Sarai in his tent in a ceremony that barely deserved the name. In front of the statues of Nanna and the other household gods, Terah intoned the begettings, leaving out the names of Haran and Nahor while adding Lot to the end of the list, as was usual these days. Sarai’s name was still absent, but on that occasion everyone noticed it, not her alone. They hardly constituted a congregation, their tiny tribe and servants, but they managed a marriage feast, sharing the youngest, most succulent lamb of their small flock with the gods. It was a quiet affair, perhaps the first quiet wedding in history.

  Sarai’s personal things had been moved from the tent she shared with Lot and Nikkal into Abram’s. After the feast, he escorted her to her new quarters and dropped the flap behind them. A separate sleeping place had been made up for Sarai. She turned to Abram. ‘Nikkal has told me about being a married woman.’

  It was almost a question. What Nikkal had told her, about the matter of getting babies and wifely duties, she vaguely knew already from other children. She gave Sarai no more than the general details, adding that it was the lot of a woman to do whatever her husband wished. But nothing she and her friends had talked about, or Nikkal spoke of, had anything to do with Abram. Husbands, duty, lying under the heavy weight of a man, receiving his seed, all that she could take in, but Abram was Abram. Even at that moment in the tent, she could only feel that she was with her darling ever-helpful Abram, not alone for the first time with her new husband. She appealed to him for guidance as to what to feel or think or want or do. She expected her brother to comfort her in her confusion, to sort out and ease the difficult situation she now found herself in. Instead, he turned his back, threw a cloak over his fine wedding clothes, and for the first time in days spoke to her in a clear, deliberate tone. ‘One of the ewes is due to lamb. I must go and check on her.’

  And he left her.

  This was the real beginning of Sarai’s life as a woman. It took her very much longer to understand, but what she learned then was how little Nikkal had told her about what being a woman meant. The sexual explanation was nothing, mere mechanics, compared to this new relation she discovered she had to the world, and the sudden loss of childhood expectation that others would know more, and help her through the mysteries and difficulties. She had felt alone with her confusion ever since the death of Emtelai and the baby, but it was bewilderment and aloneness of her own making. This new distress
was not a secret of her heart, it was a sense of being lost in the real world and of not knowing how she was supposed to live in it. It was not a private terror, it concerned others. It concerned, above all, her trusted brother Abram. Yet she was abandoned on this most confusing night of all by the one person to whom she would instinctively have turned for help. He would not help, and she was left alone to try to understand what was impossible for her to grasp: that he could not help, that his confusion was as great as hers. He had no better idea of how a brother and sister might become husband and wife than Sarai, and it was worse for him, perhaps, because he was older and understood how deep the confusion was. She only knew there was a new stranger in her life, and that he had been the person she trusted most in all the world.

  Sarai took off her pretty clothes and slipped under the rugs of her bed. It had been placed at the back of the tent, behind Abram’s mattress. She blew out the lamp and lay in the dark, listening. There were no sounds from the other tents, just the wind whistling in the cold night air of the desert, and the occasional bleating from the sheep and goats. She tried to pick out the cry of the ewe in the pain of her lambing, being attended by Abram, but she heard nothing out of the ordinary. Perhaps sheep lambed silently – not like Emtelai whose bellows of pain she had heard years ago. Perhaps the ewe was soothed by Abram’s tender murmurings and stroking. Sarai began to cry at the thought of Abram gentling a new lamb into life. She wept in her dark tent until exhausted she finally fell asleep.