by Jenny Diski
Out of the ruins of the world, Noah, the new Adam, invented the means to get falling-down drunk and his son discovered the joys of taking advantage of the incontinent. I lost all patience. Really, these humans weren’t even worth the effort it had taken to make the rain fall. I left them to it, to drink themselves into extinction. Noah didn’t notice my absence. He was too entranced by the pretty-coloured rainbows he kept trying to point to in the sky.
I withdrew into myself, and had no plans to take any further interest in the earth and its inhabitants. I was content enough. I was perfect. I was everything. Why should I need anything else? I felt fine, just fine.
In my absence, the creatures had managed quite well to proliferate, and the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham and Yefet, had had sons of their own who organised themselves into clans and divided up the land between them. It couldn’t be long before they were squabbling, and thanks to Cain they had the means to resolve their arguments. It was only a matter of time before humanity solved the problem of its imperfection for me. Yes, I admit I peeked from time to time. But once again I was interrupted by the human voice. This time it was not an Enoch crying out against humanity that caught my attention, but a good deal of shouting and banging. The voices were calling to each other, a chorus of co-operation, if you please, intent for the first time in time itself on a single task. It seemed that I could not even rely on the sons of Cain to bring my little experiment to an end. I should have remembered the power of us that I had inadvertently instituted with the splitting of the he/she. And the us all spoke the word that I had also given them. They created cooperation and mutual self-interest out of these gifts I had conferred on them, and were using them to plan a lasting monument to their existence. These worms, these ants, these less-than-nothings, whom I had made up in an idle moment of eternity, had devised a future and planned to begin history by planting lasting evidence of themselves. We will be known, they told each other, when we have returned to dust, by those we leave behind. We will be remembered by the future that we have now imagined into being. And they used the very clay from which I had moulded the first he/she to build a visible message to posterity, as they dared to call it.
And again these nonentities took me by surprise. Out of this and that they made something quite new. Give them one thing and they supposed another, then put the two together to make what never existed before. That was my job. Except that I had done it only once, and very practically. These beings I had created invented ideas as well as things. They generalised from the particular. There was none of that before. And I realised that there would be no stopping them now. They threatened to become more and more like me. Perhaps eventually more like me than me. And that was out of order.
But if they had ideas and method, I had raw power, which is not to be underestimated. I confounded their impertinent plan. I couldn’t wipe them out. I had given my promise, and that meant I couldn’t prevent their ideas, but I could do something about this dangerous ability to co-operate. I had given them the Word and I had given them us. Well, then, I would give them many words and a plethora of us-es, and then let us see how they would convey their damned ideas and instructions and plans to one another. I baffled them with a multiplicity of words until they could only burble and babble at each other like infants. That took care of that, at least until they invented translation, and even then I’d slowed them down considerably. The opposite of co-operation is division, and soon they wandered away in desultory little groups over the face of the earth. So I began to see that death and future, their inventions, could be my greatest hold over these unruly creatures of mine ———
——— For a while, Nikkal continued to tell Sarai not to worry. It was common for young girls at the beginning to take time to settle into the new rhythm of their women bodies and married life. It was even for the best, giving time for her to grow bigger and stronger, better able to withstand the dangers of childbirth. It was the way of the world. Trust it. When the body was ready, she would conceive.
Sarai wasn’t worried at first. For her part she was in no great hurry. The most important woman in Sarai’s life had died in childbirth. She knew its dangers well. And there was also a thought – more a vague unease – that if she were to be punished for her unnameable feelings about Emtelai’s new baby, the time of her own labouring would be most appropriate. And in any case, she knew, though of course she did not say, that it was not just a question of her body being ready before she was able to conceive.
All the wanting, and all the resistance to wanting, was in Abram’s hands. Love and future depended on him. Sarai could only wait to see how these demands of the world played on his fear of confusion. For that was what he feared, just as it was exactly what Sarai longed for. Where she would have put the parts of love together, Abram strove to keep them separate.
Since that first night they had spoken of nothing but practical matters, and only referred to deeper things in their mutual silence at night. I love you, come to me, come back to me, Sarai would not say. I love you, but I do not know how to love you in all ways, so I will not love you at all, Abram failed to reply. Being old enough did not make him know better. Some things do not become clearer with age and time.
But eventually Abram’s craving for conformity and for continuation got the better of his confusion. Gradually, with the silence and emotional separation, his little sister faded from his mind, and Sarai the woman became severed from his past. In order for the direct line of the family of Shem to be assured, it was necessary that Sarai become his wife in deed as well as name. Abram slipped into simplicity and rejected the confusion that had made him reel away from Sarai’s willing arms. There was no choice. He had his duty to his family. He had responsibility towards the future.
And so, one night, a full year or more after they were married, Abram once again approached Sarai in her bed.
‘Sarai,’ he said, touching her gently on her shoulder to waken her. ‘We have a responsibility to the future.’
She said nothing. She did not move, apart from opening her eyes.
‘Sarai, we are husband and wife.’
Thus assured, Abram bent his face down to her, and this time, completing the move that had been aborted on their wedding night, pressed his mouth firmly against Sarai’s. With the tip of his tongue he parted her lips. She gasped at the sudden intimacy and he pulled back a little, not from her, but to look at her face. They had kissed so many times before, so long ago, but there was no pretending that this was like those times.
‘Sarai,’ he said, and for the first time she heard her name spoken by another like a whispered sigh, a breath of longing. And, as he gently drew back the covers and released the ties that held her nightgown closed, she, again for the first time, felt her body as something other than just a practical concern of her own. She was no beauty, but over the last year or so she had changed from an angular, gawky child into the fresh fleshiness that promised to become womanly. At fifteen now, her breasts were small but shaped and firm, with long, dark nipples, and her belly rounded softly between the dipped curves of her sharp, flared hip-bones. Her face, olive-skinned like the rest of her body, was framed with a tangle of thick black curls. She was on the very edge of childhood, at the boundary of womanhood, young and succulent, careless and awkward still, but full with the promise of ripeness. Like generation after generation, endless generations, they grow, and older eyes comprehend how moving, how desirable is youth on the verge of losing its moment. Beauty or otherwise has nothing to do with it. At that moment, whatever Sarai looked like or might become, she was beauty waiting to be discovered.
It was that which Abram had seen, unwillingly and shockingly, hardly more than a boy himself, after their father told him of the change that he decreed in their relationship. He would suddenly catch himself looking at Sarai, as she caught him, with the eyes of a man instead of a brother. Or half-man, half-brother. He noticed the swell of her breasts, the hint of a nipple, and had wondered how they would feel in the palm of h
is hand. He had found himself thinking about her thighs and whether the hair between her legs was as dark and thick yet as the hair on her head. He was horrified that with a mere word, one that he had argued against, telling his father that he could only ever see her as a beloved sister, his vision could shift and he could wonder about the secret changes of a child-woman and what they might promise. He was not a virgin. Haran had seen to that back in Ur, taking Abram with him in the early days of his wildness and introducing him to the charms of women who were delighted to induct his young body into the game of sexual pleasure. He had stopped accompanying Haran only when he saw how lost his brother was becoming to his family. But he had experienced the pleasures of gratified flesh, and the memory returned to him, with a greater understanding of the delight the women took in his youthfulness, when Terah announced Sarai was to become his wife.
Now he broke their caress slowly, reluctantly, tearing his eyes away from hers only because of the urgent need to look at her body. He sat back on his heels to get more distance. His hand followed his glance, to her breast, cupping it gently in his palm to feel its substance, and then tracing its contour to arrive at her nipple, which his finger and thumb stroked into a response. She drew in her breath sharply in surprise as she felt that response deep in her abdomen, and he looked up quickly, locating her eyes again to understand what she was feeling. Then he bent and took her nipple in his mouth, sucking on it gently, until the sensation he created in her made her cry out in its delicious strangeness. He continued down her body, kissing her navel and then the small mound above her thighs which parted apparently of their own volition. Abram kissed the inside of one thigh, and then gently ran his bearded cheek along its length, its roughness against her soft flesh almost painful, but something else as well. He sat up again and began to discard his clothes.
‘Are you all right?’ he whispered.
She nodded, from inside the trance of sensation in which she floated. Again their eyes locked in confirmation of what was happening between them, but this time, she broke the gaze to look at the naked body of her beloved brother and new husband. So dark and strong, so alien and unlike her own small body, Abram was sinew and muscle, rough and solid, covered with body hair where she was smooth, quite other. And although he was not tall, he was massive, ropes of muscle knotted with tension in his thick neck, his shoulders broad, his arms powerful, the arms that had held her so often, strong enough to crush her, or bring comfort to a labouring ewe. She wanted both those things.
He laid himself down beside Sarai on the bed and found the place between her legs with his hand. Once again, after so long, that sudden stillness came over them, a tension between them that made them both hold their breath and seek out each other’s eyes. She marvelled that those eyes she knew so well could look at her in such a way. She marvelled at the ease with which his finger found the damp centre of her sex and how welcome it was.
‘I’ll be very gentle. I won’t hurt you,’ he said, stroking her slowly.
Soon, when her arms began to tighten around him, he lifted his body over her and kissed her, pushing his tongue gradually into her mouth as he entered her, his penis as delicate as his tongue pressing carefully into her body. When he moved deeper, there was a moment of pain, perhaps only of shock, and she made a single cry. He cried out too, as if the pain and shock were his, and stopped still for a moment, and then something loosened in her and with a moan, hers or his, he was fully inside her. And like a dance they moved together, letting desire play a tune that sang to them of everything they needed to know about their own and the other’s pleasure, until with tears and sharp cries they reached a new conclusion.
Apart from her old loving of Abram, now permitted again, Sarai discovered that she loved sex. She perceived the rhythms and transformations it set off within her body. She marvelled at how the physical sensations perfectly, but so differently, echoed her early more generalised feeling of love. As well as being whom she most loved, she discovered Abram as a man. The size and weight of him, the roughness, the hairiness, the smell, pungent and dark, and all that strength containing itself, passionate and careful, big and delicate, surrounding her, inside her. They often stopped moving in the middle of making love and returned to that first still gaze into each other’s faces. Their bodies, locked together but not moving, took over, desire whipping around inside them while they simply looked into one another’s eyes and felt what was happening to them. His long black hair and broad forehead was wet with sweat, which dripped on her face, and smiling, he broke their gaze briefly, to lick the fallen beads away with the tip of his tongue. She loved his arms around her, clutching her, crushing her almost, the hardness of him, and yet his soft moans and murmurings that matched her climaxes, and something utterly lost as he shuddered into his own and buried his face in her neck.
On this new journey from the past to the future, Abram and Sarai set about expanding their old love into its new form, and it seemed to Sarai as right as anything, that whom each most loved and cherished, whom each was closest to in all the world, should be loved and cherished more, and brought closer still. Their marriage was a transformation of their siblinghood. It seemed to Abram that all memory of their earlier relationship, their sibling relationship, had been buried under their present love. They became, in Abram’s eyes, only husband and wife, only lovers, only the pair who would continue the line of Shem. He did not speak about their former life as brother and sister, only about their present passion and future parenthood.
‘We will be happy with each other,’ he told Sarai, as they lay together, exhausted and drifting towards sleep.
She couldn’t imagine any greater happiness. And even then, weak with their love, as she affirmed their happiness by pressing her lips against his neck, desire reasserted itself, and dreamily, half conscious, he entered her again and she received him between her wearied, willing thighs. She still supposed there couldn’t be too much love. But then, at that time, she was not yet aware that love was not all there was in the world. So Sarai welcomed what she thought was the return of her beloved Abram’s old love for her, not recognising that it was a different thing, with a different purpose: an aspect of something more generalised in him. It seemed right to her. She thought that it was simple. She thought it was what it was.
* * *
Nikkal must have spoken to Abram and Terah, because neither of them seemed concerned at Sarai’s continuing childlessness at first. A strange thing, this ‘at first’ which exists only in hindsight. Sarai did not know it was ‘at first’ at the time. The present has no sequence, no continuation. She simply did not conceive and life went on. There was no moment when she detected that they were entering a new phase, because nothing triggered it as nothing continued to happen, whereas a baby would have begun the next stage in their existence. When nothing happens and goes on happening, it is very hard to know when exactly the nothing happening becomes itself the centre of life.
The baby went on being assumed as a year, and yet another went by. Abram would lie with Sarai after they had made love and run his hand against the flat plain of her belly between the peaks of her rising hip-bones.
‘Our child will make you mountainous.’
And they would laugh at the idea of her swelling like one of the ewes.
‘But you will be even more beautiful.’
Sarai wasn’t so sure.
Then the time came when Abram’s hand hovered on her stomach as if he were trying to feel the heat of a new life within; and then as if he were willing that new life into being. And by then Nikkal received Sarai in her tent each new month for her menstrual seclusion with a slight sigh.
‘Perhaps next month,’ she would say, no longer adding that it was perfectly natural.
Still, it was known that some women were slow to conceive but eventually got pregnant. It was a delicate thing. It was also known, though no one spoke of it, that some women were barren, and then all the herbal concoctions that Nikkal infused for Sarai would be no use
at all. Even so, Sarai could not say even three years after they had married that she was terribly alarmed, happy as she was to be fully a wife now to Abram, or even that she sensed excessive concern from the others at her failure to produce a child. They were all waiting, but in the present tense of living, waiting presupposes the arrival of what we are waiting for. It is only in retrospect that we know for certain that it was never going to come.
Some part of Sarai felt great relief at the lack of change, but change came none the less, though it too was not obvious at the time, only later. We are all haunted by the ghost of the present as we recollect the long distant past, so clear now in its shifts and phases. The present lives alongside our sweep of memory, all unknowing about its own nature, existing minute by minute, wondering if this means something, or that signifies something else, but unable to grasp the nature of its own time. All the while the present has its own past to look back to, but there is no guidance in it, submerged as it is by the present now. Only when it’s all over, when it’s too late, can you know for sure that then marks the change that altered the course of a life. The present is blind. Just as well, I suppose. What was there to do about anything at the time? But what is there to do about anything when all is said and done?
Understand, they were a long time in Harran. A very long time. For Abram, Sarai and Lot, it was their home for much longer than Ur had been. They lived the best part of their lives there. The longest part, I mean of course by that strange turn of phrase, referring purely to time: who can say for sure, even in retrospect, that then and not later was truly the best part of their lives? They lived the easiest part of their lives in Harran, easier than it was to become, that much is sure. But let us acknowledge that the easiest may not necessarily be the best. Sarai did not know that the worst of times were to come, but there were moments, too, later on, that perhaps she would not have missed. Not many, but some, probably. So years passed into decades, and youth into middle years.