Only Human

by Jenny Diski

  And it must have been then, too, that Abram began an inner journey of his own, though being Abram his steps would have been slow and I do not think he heard a tune at all. Yet it was he, not Sarai, whose steps eventually led outside himself to clash with the world and its ways. One should never underestimate the unimaginative, and their stolid power, once trouble has colonised their minds, to wreck havoc on the world.

  * * *

  At first it seemed only that there was a new quality of brooding to his usual quietness of manner. Abram was always a doer rather than a sayer or a thinker, but Sarai began to notice a strained look on his creased and usually tranquil face. He had been easy in his silence. Yet now she was reminded of the dark, pained adolescent who had been her briefly troubled brother not yet come to terms with the approach of manhood. Sarai had quite forgotten him. It shook her that that clumsy, reaching boy and her husband were still one and the same. She wondered if her father’s troubles were taking hold in Abram. Terah’s bouts of madness had long since been transformed into a permanent gloom, so that Sarai hardly remembered his sudden disappearances and the tears behind closed doors. And yet her observations of her husband could have been nothing more than an over-observant wife making too much of a passing mood that anyone might fall prey to. He was gentle with her, but more inclined to hold her close than make love, and as he held her, she felt more and more that his arms clung to her while his mind pulled against the comfort and tried to draw away.

  ‘Is something troubling you?’ she asked one night.

  ‘No,’ he replied, too fast, too harsh.

  She realised her strange behaviour the night he asked her about her periods had frightened him. Whatever was going on, he hardly dared to share it with the one person he was closest to for fear that he might cause another storm. Part of Sarai felt dismay at the wedge she had placed between them, but she was still exhilarated by the new space inside herself and her unreasonable anger at the reasonableness of her husband.

  After some moments, he whispered, ‘We are growing old.’

  ‘Yes, my dear, we are.’

  ‘Sarai,’ he tried. ‘Sarai, I don’t know what it is for. When it is all over, what is left? What sense…?’

  She felt her heart lurch towards him, but she ignored it and did not reassure him. She refused to build a bridge over which he might have brought his troubles safely to her.

  ‘It is all for nothing,’ she said.

  His troubles, she guessed, were much the same as her own, and yet their understanding of what it meant to each of them was crucially different, and this encouraged Sarai’s silent anger. Their failure to have children, and his realisation that it was now too late for her to bear them was not, like hers, a sense of part of herself denied, but a sudden and urgent recognition of his own mortality. Perhaps in the end both their interpretations amounted to the same thing, but his focus was more sharply on his own extinction, as if it had never really occurred to him before. His crisis was the newly certain knowledge that he was going to die. Sarai, too, knew that she was going to die, though she was not so taken by surprise by the thought, but for her, childlessness meant that she would die without having had the experience of holding her child in her body, her infant in her arms, and discovering the full capacity of her woman’s body. Well, we all have our own concerns, our own interpretations of the meaning of time passing. Perhaps Abram’s were more honest, more direct. But it angered Sarai that it took the end of her periods to open Abram’s mind to such thoughts.

  ‘Let’s sleep,’ she said. ‘There is nothing to be done.’

  But Abram had awoken. Abram, who had sleepwalked through the decades, through the way of the world, doing everything he was supposed to do, doing everything he could to wrench life back to the normal without wondering about the point of it all: that Abram had been shaken awake and his mind teemed with unaccustomed and disturbing thoughts. For him too, at last, the way of the world had lost its transparency. And though Sarai felt it strangely after a lifetime of loving care and comradeship, part of her was not sorry for his torment.

  His brooding and silence deepened after that until the day when Lot raced through the house to find her.

  ‘Something’s the matter with Abram,’ he panted, pointing wildly in the direction of town, his face a picture of distress.

  Sarai had a sudden vision of her brother Haran and the blood pouring from his throat. In that second, she experienced a lifetime of regret for her coldness towards Abram. But he was not dead.

  ‘A woman came to the shop and ordered a statue of Nanna,’ Lot explained breathlessly. ‘Abram was back in the workshop. I heard him chipping away, but when she spoke, the chipping stopped and he came into the shop holding the half-made block of stone and his chisel. “Why?” he asked her. Well, barked at her. I’ve never heard him speak like that to anyone, let alone a customer. I thought perhaps she owed us money. But even so. She was confused. “What?” she asked, looking at him and then looking at me. “I said, ‘Why?”’ He actually shouted at her. She was quite frightened, and so was I. Abram looked so … fierce. Can you imagine? But she said, “My daughter is to marry and she’ll need the god for her new household.” Abram went right up close to her and waved the block of stone in her face. He had hardly started work on it, just chipped away a bare outline. “We do not sell gods,” he bellowed into her face. “We sell lumps of stone.” No one knew what to say. “Look,” he shouted. “Does this look like a god to you? Do you want to pray to this? Go on, get down on your knees and pray to it for many grandchildren. Ask it to stop the sun coming up in the morning and going down at night. Offer it libations of your most precious oils, sacrifice your finest, fattest kid in front of it, and ask it to keep you alive until the end of time. Go on. Kneel!” The poor woman wanted to run, but she was too afraid of Abram. He wrenched her hands away from her mouth and dropped the unfinished statue into them. “Here, it’s yours. How could a person sell a god? I give it to you. There!” The woman looked down at the object in her hands and said, “But this is just a block of stone. I want a statue for my daughter and her husband to worship.” He screamed, “What kind of fool are you to worship a statue?” I swear, Sarai, he said that. “Why should I bother carving and shaping? Go home and worship a lump of stone. In fact, if I can turn a rough mass of stone into a god with my bare hands, you should worship me. Why don’t you bend your knee to me? In future, I’ll carve statues of myself. I’m the one with the power to transform inanimate nature into deity.” I just stood there. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing, and from Abram. I couldn’t move. I hardly dared breathe, I tell you. Then Abram threw down the chisel and stormed out of the shop. I did my best to smooth things out with the woman, I was terrified she would go to the temple and tell the priests. I said that Abram had had a fever for a couple of days and that he had come into work delirious when he should have been at home being tended. She was terribly shocked, but what had happened, what he had said, was so dreadful that she was inclined to believe me. I placated her as much as I could and promised her a statue, a fine statue, free of charge. And she went away. But even if she doesn’t report it to the temple, she’s sure to talk about it. What shall we do, Sarai? What’s the matter with him? Did he come back here? Have you seen him?’

  Lot finally halted his outpouring of alarm and tears of panic sprang to his eyes.

  Sarai could hardly take it in. She spoke only to his final question.

  ‘No, he isn’t here.’

  It seemed to her as if her sudden flashing memory of Haran had not been so far off the mark. A terrible shudder of fear went through her.

  ‘Quickly, we must go to the temple. He’ll be there.’

  ‘Shall I speak to Terah?’ Lot asked, relieved to be receiving instructions at last, but wishing to be excused from finding Abram.

  ‘No, don’t speak to anyone. Come with me.’

  They ran towards town, until they came into the busy street that led to the temple, and then they sl
owed to a speedy walk, not wanting to alert the townspeople to their alarm. They found Abram at the back of the cavernous space of the temple, standing, leaning against a pillar, almost casually, absolutely still. His hand rested thoughtfully on his beard, his eyes were fixed on the worship of a small family group at one of the shrines nearest to him. He looked calm, but utterly engaged, as if he were studying, or solving a problem in his head. Anyone else seeing him there might have supposed he was looking at his handiwork – the statue being worshipped was his own – and considering, seeing it in situ, whether it needed further refinement. As Sarai looked at him, she wondered if Lot and not Abram had been overcome by a fit of madness. But she knew better.

  She went up to him, signalling for Lot to wait where he was. ‘Abram?’ she said, touching his sleeve.

  He turned to look at her, not at all alarmed. ‘This is all nothing,’ he said, almost lightly. There was even a small smile playing on his lips. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Let’s go home and talk about it.’

  He shrugged and let Sarai lead him out of the temple. It seemed his business there was finished anyway.

  She sent Lot back to the shop and told him not to talk to anyone about what had happened. He was delighted to get away.

  Back in their room, Abram flung himself down on the bed, as if he were exhausted. ‘There is nothing,’ he murmured, the lightness gone now from his voice.

  ‘What?’ she asked, and he looked up sharply at her, sitting beside him, as if it were the first time that he had noticed her there. After a moment, he seemed to make up his mind to take her into his confidence.

  ‘There is nothing, Sarai.’ His voice was hollow, dully horrified, his eyes blank, his strong body prostrate as he spoke. ‘We are born and we die. Nothing else. The rest is emptiness.’

  ‘Well, we do some living in between.’

  ‘For what? We work to feed ourselves. That is all. Beyond that it is all pretence. Beyond that we just try to cover up the truth that we are no more than another herd of animals. Eating, sleeping, working. It’s true that we can think, but we choose comfort rather than thought. I know what happened to Haran,’ he said, with a sudden urgency. ‘I know why he did what he did. But it’s taken so long for me to understand. My whole life. A whole lifetime of lies. We live a lie from birth to death. We’re no better than the ants, but we pretend to ourselves that there is something more. That there are gods who make things happen, who are concerned with us, who are our makers and masters who we can placate and persuade. When, after all, there is no reason, no purpose, no point in anything. There is no placating nothingness. Sarai, we are accidental creatures living accidental lives. And everything we have surrounded ourselves with, gods, priests, commerce, family, all of it is to mask the fact that we live, we die and nothing matters.’

  As she listened to her middle-aged, newly tormented husband, a sense of familiarity came over Sarai that at first she couldn’t place, until she remembered herself as a young child alone in her bed in the dark, with these very same thoughts going through her head. She would think of Terah and Emtelai near by, and her brothers and of how she belonged to them, but then she would recall that she only nearly belonged to them, that by some accident she had been born to another mother, a woman without a name. And following this thought was the possibility that she might have been born into an entirely different family. Beggars, perhaps, or courtiers. The arbitrary nature of who she was had gripped and terrified her, and sent her mind out from the safe room where her loved ones surrounded her, to the lonely dark night, a black horizon, the endless sky, the moon hanging heavy in the darkness, and soon not just she but everything seemed quite accidental, and she sensed we were all lost, even adults, in a vast black purposeless place. That we only seemed to belong where we happened to be, but that really we were just dotted about the earth like dust motes revealed in sunlight. When this panic took hold of her, she pulled her mind back urgently to the comfort of her bed, and the sounds of her home and her family around her, but the damage had been done, and she knew that it was all a charade, and that underneath the belonging, and in spite of the wall of love, was wasteland and wandering. She tried to think about the gods, and how they had ordered the world and formed the earth and sky, and looked down at all with pleasure or anger that resulted in the shape of their lives. But she knew it was nonsense. A story for children. Deeply, she knew that those gods didn’t really exist. But, terrible though it was, the terror of this thought was less than the fear that all her loving connections were human-made consolations for the emptiness that actually existed. That perhaps everyone knew of the emptiness, even adults, but they pretended they didn’t, and shored up their fears with fantasies of purposefulness. Sarai was a child, none of these words could come, but the images, the feelings were stark and irrefutable – at least in the dead of night – and she struggled, when they came to her, to return to her former understanding of the world that was being wrenched away from her. It never worked. She was saved only by her childish body grabbing at sleep, and in the morning light, her fears were put away, not even remembered until the next time they occurred.

  Sometime in the process of growing up, of living in the way of the world, these thoughts had stopped, but now, as Abram spoke, she realised that he was voicing exactly those childhood terrors of hers. After a lifetime of inhabiting a world that was self-evident to him, he was asking the questions that only a child foolishly dared to ask, and which it seemed some children, like Haran, couldn’t give up asking.

  Sarai spoke aloud, voicing her reflections, though not clearly, ‘These are children’s thoughts.’

  Abram misunderstood and took it that she was dismissing his anxieties when she was only recollecting how she had herself experienced them. He looked at her sharply.

  ‘You are all I have ever had in the world,’ he said, as if she, like the gods, had been discovered to be an illusion.

  ‘No, Abram, I meant only that we must live our lives in the world. That the stories we tell about it make living possible. Look at what happened to Haran. It doesn’t matter what is real and what isn’t, so long as we are able to continue. And you and I do have each other. We have made and lived a life together.’

  Sarai spoke these words to her distraught husband as, just days ago, he might have spoken them to her when she was distressed, and discovered the nonsense and lies that she had been living. Why didn’t she confirm his fears and tell him that she, too, shared them? That the way of the world tasted to her, too, of ashes? She told herself she was doing a kindness to Abram, attempting to soothe his fears, but there was cruelty in her rejection of his vision, a refusal to let him know he was not alone. Her lifelong love, her husband. She used the way of the world, which she had learned to despise, to punish him. For what? For being her love and not her teacher, perhaps.

  ‘Our life together will end for each of us in nothingness,’ Abram groaned. ‘We will die, and everything we have known and have discovered and learned will be lost. We might as well not have lived.’

  ‘But since we have lived, we have lived happily enough together,’ she persisted.

  ‘Yes, we’ve made the best of it,’ Abram’s voice was grey with despair, ‘but when it ends there will be nothing. Nothing will remain.’

  ‘No children, you mean.’

  ‘No future. No one even to recite our names before the gods.’

  ‘Recite our names to the gods who do not exist?’

  He turned and looked very hard at her.

  ‘You’re not surprised at what I said. You’re not even shocked.’

  She became angry again at the self-absorption of this man she had loved for a lifetime.

  ‘Do you think I hadn’t thought about death, about childlessness, about the way life has been arranged or worse not arranged by … by … whatever it is, but not us? Perhaps, after all, the years we’ve been together do mean nothing. Do you think only you think? What took you so long to get around to such thoughts? And now you’ve
had them, you can conclude like me that life must be got on with. And that the future is none of our business. Anyway, no one has ever recited my name in the begettings, and nor would they. I would have been forgotten soon enough after my death, even if we had had children.’

  She tasted her bitterness and almost envied his despair.

  He took her by the shoulders and shouted, as if to drown out her words, ‘I can’t bear it!’

  She shouted back, ‘You must bear it! We must all bear it. That is all that there is to be done.’

  He began to shake Sarai, but stopped suddenly.

  ‘No,’ Abram said, shaking his head fiercely. He rose from the bed and abruptly left her in their room, to wonder what this new turmoil in their lives would bring.

  * * *

  Abram was gone for three days. Sarai told Terah that he had gone to a new quarry he had heard about to see if he could improve the quality of the stone they were using. In the meantime, just as in the times of her father’s disappearances, Sarai sent the household servants into the desert to search for him. It seemed that they were all implicated in the family madness. Only Lot remained unburdened by intolerable thoughts, but only, Sarai sometimes suspected, because he had no thoughts at all. He was amiable and always did what he knew was expected of him, but there was something quite insubstantial about him, as if he were hollow. At least he did not seem to suffer like the rest of them. He knew very little about his father’s trouble and had never asked for the details of his death. But it had always hung in the air, just as Haran’s unspoken name hovered like a cloud above the lives of the family of Shem. The slightness of Lot’s personality in this family of strong and brooding men and secretly troubled women (Sarai wondered now, had Emtelai been troubled? But of course she had, with Terah as a husband), was perhaps his only way of surviving the terrible facts of his birthright. But his daughters seemed sunny enough, so there was a chance that this would be the escape route for their apparently doomed family. Sarai began to think it might be just as well that Abram and she had borne no children. Perhaps there was purpose in it, after all.