by Jenny Diski
It was still dark when she woke and half opened her sore and swollen eyes. A shadow above her added extra blackness to the darkness of the early hours. Abram was crouched beside her bed, motionless as a statue, wrapped in the cloak he had been wearing when he left the tent. He might have only just arrived, but she sensed as soon as she recognised the shadow looming over her that he had been kneeling, hunched above her mattress, looking down, for a long time.
‘Abram?’ she whispered, more puzzled than afraid.
He looked startled, surprised that she was awake, although he was gazing intently at her when she opened her eyes. He didn’t answer. She lifted her hand to his face, just touching the strong broad face she had always loved to stroke for the warmth and reality of him under her palm. She was still barely awake, reaching out for age-old comfort in the night, waking to a weighty chest full of the sobs that sleep had failed to shift. He let her hand lie on his cheek and continued to gaze down at her as if he could not be interrupted in the middle of his thoughts.
‘Is the ewe all right?’ she asked.
‘You’ve been crying,’ he said, and moved his face closer to her to see more clearly.
She reached her other arm up, out from under the cover, and encircled his neck with both her arms as she had done so often before when he bent to kiss her goodnight. And he allowed the pressure of her clinging arms to dip his face closer to her. With their lips no more than a silken thread apart, all was suddenly stillness between them. It was as if they had been struck by some spell that froze their faces together, lips almost touching, him above her, and their eyes locked on each other. They did not breathe, nor move a muscle, but only looked and looked into the eyes that burned with looking into their own. Sarai learned something of desire in that moment, they both learned, conversing silently on the craving that was building from some singular point deep inside each of them, like a glowing spark ready to flame up. They told each other of their passion without words, explained its nature without dialogue, taught and learned the physicality of the flesh without exposition. They held stone still while desire did its work within them, and both of them felt it doubled by the inner longings of the other reaching beyond the boundaries of the skin that had previously kept them separate. They were already making love, static in each other’s arms and staring fiercely still into each other’s eyes. They learned in that long moment everything the flesh needs to know about being in love. She was wrong about the limitations of love. For a moment, that night, love seemed to have no limitations. All the love in the world, a brother’s love, a lover’s love, a husband’s love, combined and compounded, and she gave herself easily up to it, the simple and obvious arithmetic of love. The first object of her desire would now love her in every way she could and could not yet imagine. What she had longed for, whom she had longed for, now longed for her, and would give himself to her completely. So love was completed by desire, and desire by love, and it seemed so simple. Half-brother, half-husband, half-sister, half-wife becoming wholly love and whole. And she thought that all the ways in which it was possible to love another had come to her that night in the person of her beloved Abram.
And then, as all this fired through her body and mind, she felt the muscles at the back of Abram’s neck knot rigid, arresting the downward motion he seemed to be about to make and that she was preparing to rise to receive, and he jerked back from her so suddenly that he had to stand up and totter backwards in order to keep from falling.
He severed the look between them, saying nothing, but using the momentum of his attempt to regain his balance to turn his back on her and fling himself down on his mattress. The darkness engulfed him like his cloak, and he turned his face to the wall of the tent, to become, to Sarai’s stunned eyes, a huddled shadow far off in the unreachable distance.
* * *
They were not really wanderers: they had a direction, a final destination. In their own minds, they kept themselves apart from the nomads they encountered along the way, with whom they traded and exchanged.
‘Let them think we are like them,’ Terah told them. ‘But always remember where we have come from and where we are going. We are not desert nomads, we are making a journey. Resettling.’ He was adamant about this.
However he thought about himself, Abram turned out to be a talented herdsman. The sheep and goats increased under his care, and if Terah despised this temporarily necessary skill, Abram seemed to immerse himself in it. For Sarai, the business of the days, breaking camp, cooking, moving from well to well, negotiating watering rights with their owners, trading goods with other groups, buying and selling stock, everything was tinged with the thought that when night came, she and Abram would each lie on their separate mattresses in their tent (‘This playhouse, fit for children and other such primitives,’ Terah observed contemptuously), which for a brief moment she had imagined would become more to her than all the city walls and solid rooms of their life in Ur. The love she had fleetingly glimpsed had had such clarity, like a straight line from familial love to its re-creation. From love to love, she had thought, with a little heartache thrown in by life, just to increase the necessity of remaking love as it was supposed to be. Yes, yes, that simple line turned out to be, in reality, a labyrinth, a confusion of all the knots and tangles of the human heart that two needful, isolated young creatures could not possibly have perceived, let alone unravelled. But why should a time-corrupted palate, requiring a strong sceptical seasoning, no longer beguiled by a simple story of love, see more accurately than thirteen-year-old Sarai in that moment when everything was perfectly clear in the mutual gaze with her beloved? That Sarai fights to retain her innocence. Look at her with knowing, experienced eyes, and she resists, as if what she didn’t know then was quite as powerful as what older eyes know now.
* * *
There was nothing very unusual about Sarai’s failure to conceive by the time they reached Harran. Her periods had not even settled into a regular rhythm, and with the disruption of their flight into exile no one was surprised. It was better anyway for her to grow up some more, they said, childbirth is dangerous to any woman, but at her age the risks were even greater. The body has its own wisdom, Nikkal said. Terah, of course, was in a hurry to secure the continuation of the line, but how could he, who had lost his wife in childbirth, be anything other than patient? Sarai was his daughter as well as his daughter-in-law, and he loved her. There was no great anxiety, and Abram and Sarai were too stunned with the meaning of their intimate separation to speak of it either between themselves or to anyone else. As ever Abram bore the burden of duty and obedience: no ewe or nanny goat ever gave birth without him being in attendance, when Terah called he was there, he never missed the family prayers – but at night he only flung himself on to his mattress when he presumed Sarai was asleep, and rose in the morning before he imagined she would be awake. In fact, Sarai was rarely asleep when he crept into the tent, and usually awake when he left, but the yawning chasm that had opened between them kept her silent. In public, he treated her with the appropriate familiarity and in the tone of a husband for a wife. The years of intimacy they had shared as brother and sister had disappeared overnight, vanished as if they had never been, to be replaced by a shadow-play of marital respect and distance that onlookers assumed concealed the private intimacy of lovers.
Did Sarai’s beloved have a proclivity for order and orthodoxy? A distrust of imagination? A slight tendency to pomposity? Perhaps. If these inclinations were not innate, they were certainly instilled in him by the wildly destructive example of Haran. Now, in their wasteland wanderings, in the guilty emptiness of his heart, those qualities hardened like scar tissue.
Sarai ached for lost love, separated from the brother, and outside the family line, and yet not connected to the husband, she was alone in the world, secretly, as she had been when Emtelai died and she had to remain in silence with her private shame. If Abram no longer loved her as a brother, and he could not love her as a wife, she was lost, as distant
from belonging anywhere, to anything or anyone, as the cold stars hanging in the desert night ———
——— I gave them the Word: live, I told them, and, of course, they rearranged it. There was no guessing what people would come up with. I looked and saw they had made the vile and the evil in their interaction with each other. From the single us, bad enough, came a larger us. Groups, boundaries, inclusion and exclusion. Just by being plentiful and having the word. None of that existed in my world where eternity and I had rubbed along without disturbing each other. But they had flesh and disobedience, and from the order I had made out of chaos, they had fashioned a chaos of their own, constructed from the deceptions made possible by the juxtaposition of self-consciousness and body. They invented love and lies, and thought themselves giants in the universe.
But from the evil they had produced, I made a deduction of my own: I invented goodness. Again, I was way behind my creatures. They had all the fun on their side. But at least I was learning to function in their oppositional world. It was an attempt to salvage something of my own from that wayward bunch of losers. I needed to find one creature who might represent this new notion in a world devoted to its dialectical opposite. Unfortunately, I had already mingled Enoch, that solitary voice who might have represented goodness if I had thought of it soon enough, so he was unavailable in eternity. I searched and searched and found nothing on earth to match the evil, so I had to make do with good-enough, set about flexing my will.
Noah was nothing special, I have to admit. He wasn’t so much good, as I had envisaged it, glorious in his opposition to the filth and fleshiness of his kind, as dull and unimaginative. But I had decided to act, to rid the world of flesh and start again with better material. If he wasn’t that special, he was at least better than most. To destroy the world in its entirety would have been to admit that it was badly made. It wasn’t. The earth was fine, a lovely working of particles into a coherent whole. I regretted only having made life; that was the source of my pain. My first pain. So I decided that I would begin again with the life on earth, and this time not make from scratch a creature that would think itself into dominion but save one grateful man and his family, who would know to whom they owed their continued, miserable existence. And if in choosing Noah I was to populate the world with dullness, well, so much the better. I had seen enough of the results of autonomy and imagination. Now I wanted obedience.
If nothing else, Noah was that. He didn’t once question my intention. He didn’t question anything. I spoke, he listened. He didn’t query who I might be, but took my word for it when I told him I was his and everyone else’s creator, and that I had determined to make an end of all flesh and bring ruin down on a ruined world. I would drown the world and all that was in it, wash away the filth, cleanse it for a new start. Make an ark, with these exact dimensions, I told him, inventing the craft of shipbuilding as I went along and hoping it held water. I will save you and your family, and you will save a breeding pair of each animal I have created, I ordered, indicating in this way, exactly how I regarded the Noahs. It was to be more a prototype of a natural history museum than a lifeboat. Perhaps I was simply too weary to start again from the beginning; and it may be that I had got accustomed to there being something other than eternity. Noah surpassed himself in lack of imagination. He did not utter a word, he just got on with collecting the gopher wood and reeds. He did not question my decision to destroy all his fellow beings; he did not wonder why he was chosen to be saved. He did as he was told, as smug and stupid as you could wish. When they’re not getting above themselves, they’re plain servile. If Noah didn’t engage my passion the way his arrogant fellows did, at least he boded well for the docility of the future generations he would father. Did I regret wiping out all imagination and creativity in my beings? Perhaps, a little, but at least I would be in charge of creation once again. I would, at last, be ahead of the game. That was the main thing.
DOUBTS
And they came unto Harran and dwelt there.
GENESIS 11:31
Another beginning. At that time, it was the way of urban living that strangers were given a chance to become (or often enough, re-become), possibly because the other inhabitants didn’t care enough about them to stop them, but also because tradition and the past were not as valued as they were by itinerant people. The future is what matters in the town and, of course, the present with its buying and selling, its daily encounters with the familiar and the new, and the sense of remaining while others come and go. People who wanted to stay, provided they were not a financial burden on those already there, helped to sanction the idea of future on which the town thrived.
Harran may not have been the throbbing metropolis of Ur, but it was a busy, bustling town, a crossroads through which traders passed after stopping to make sales and recuperate at the inn, giving and taking news from and to far and wide. If news of the shaming of the family of Shem had reached Harran before their arrival, they were given no indication of it. They sold their livestock, for Abram, Sarai and little Lot, with much regret – Lot wept and Abram wanted to – but greatly to the relief of Terah, who shed years at the sight of solid walls and urban hubbub. Some of the family wealth was converted into brick and labour; a house was built and a workshop, and the group set about becoming members of the community. Once the family had shown themselves to have been only temporary pastoralists, and at ease with the ways of the city, they were welcome enough.
There were, of course, other makers and sellers of icons. Abram had to go slowly, but gradually he was accepted, and his solid, meticulous idols found a market among the wealthier families of the town, those who liked to think themselves more discerning. Terah once again had a courtyard to sit in, and he settled into his daily meditations with relief. Abram chipped and carved to make the same gods he had made in Ur, but with Lot at his side now, instead of Sarai, a new small apprentice who would be the next generation, along with Abram and Sarai’s children, in the Shem family business.
This was their new life, as close as Terah and Abram could make it to their old existence. There was nothing to be done about the loss of family members, but they contrived to create a near replica of their former life, just as Abram created images of the old gods. In time, both of those simulations would become subject to intense questioning by Abram, but now all his intensity was taken up with remaking a life for the family to compensate, perhaps, for the new life he was failing to make with his sister-wife.
Sarai regretted the end of their time as travellers. While they were on their way to somewhere, still unsettled, so too was her future. Once they were no longer on the move, the desert wind billowing the walls of their tent and carrying the sound of bleating newborn lambs and kids, when there were no more cool dawn-and-dusk treks, or sweltering days when they sheltered from the blasting sun, too enervated to think clearly; once they were within new solid walls and were where they intended to be, then Sarai’s future would be settled, and the loss of brother love and lack of husband passion a fixed reality, not an aspect of a time between. But even after they arrived in Harran, contingency continued to put off the future. The building of walls, the business and new relations took up a great deal of Abram’s time, and under Nikkal’s guidance Sarai began to learn a woman’s household skills, cooking, keeping accounts, spinning and weaving, tending the garden. But at night, she would lie in the room they shared, alone in the bed they did not share, and remember the momentary look between them and then Abram’s recoil. The moment when one love was severed and another denied. They should have been, and were supposed by others to be, builders in the night hours too, making a new generation whose home would be Harran, whom they would surround with a wall of love, just as they had known it in Ur. From the ruins of childhood security, they should have been remaking a place of lasting safety for the new children. It was the way of the world. And yet how strange that we have such faith in our notion of the way of the world and how it will continue to operate, when it has already failed to
conform to our assumptions of its natural course. Still we suppose that we have only to make an effort to restore normality, as if our courage at putting tragedy behind us and a steadfast vision of how things ought to be will be rewarded by a return to the regular ———
——— They are incorrigible. You would think having witnessed the death of every living thing on the surface of the earth by drowning (or in the case of the fish, who presented a problem, by steaming – my last-minute solution being to make the rain hot enough to deal with them too), that my only chosen survivors would have devoted themselves to walking in my way, to pleasing me in all things. Initially, doubtless in the throes of relief at standing again on dry land and leaving the foetid enclosure of a box full of animals, Noah showed some gratitude, and made me a delicious burnt offering. I mellowed, thinking things had taken a better turn. I promised never to annihilate life again. Frankly, I realised there was not much point in repeating the procedure. There was an essential flaw in life itself, some reaction between will and flesh that would never be eradicated. I had to admit that what I had made was not perfect. Naturally, when you come to think of it, since only eternity and I am could be that. I would have had to re-create myself to achieve a perfect creature, but I had no wish to share eternity. Either the whole project had to be wiped out, or I had to acknowledge that my plan for a mirror image had gone awry. If I were to see myself in the humanity I had created, I would have to contemplate the differences. Life was defective. It was inherently wayward. I would simply have to settle for this better-than-the-rest remnant I was left with. Noah of the prosaic obedience would have to suffice to repopulate the world. It was the best I could do without admitting out and out defeat.
Yet even the dully dutiful, the unquestioning Noah had a spark of volition, a capacity for the unexpected. Having been saved out of all living things, this chosen one became … what? The world’s first drunk, that’s what. He planted a vineyard, and spent his days tending it and his nights in an alcoholic stupor, like the first old sea-dog that he was, sprawled in his tent, dishevelled, naked with the heat and the drink, so that anyone entering could take advantage of his flabby, exposed flesh. Two of his sons, Shem and Yefet, had the minimal decency to cover him up. The third, Ham, remembered the lascivious ways of his former world and took to practising them on his paralytic old father. Don’t ask. These were my chosen ones.