Only Human

by Jenny Diski

  They could not conceal the truth from the aged Terah for long. After three days, Abram returned of his own accord. He burst, filthy, coated in dust, into the courtyard where Terah sat in his habitual meditation. Sarai had just come to suggest Terah take an afternoon nap. Abram ignored her and dropped to his knees beside his father. If Sarai had seen him on the street in town, she would not have recognised her husband. It was not just his torn clothes and dirt-encrusted face, nor his tangled and matted hair, dusted dull with sand. His eyes gleamed as if a fire had been lit behind them, and their lids and rims were sore and red, seeming indeed to have been burned with its heat. Abram buried his head in Terah’s lap and began to sob like a small child.

  ‘I’m lost, Father,’ he wept. ‘There’s nothing but blackness. I am in my grave and the earth is piling on top of me. Father, I can only see … nothing, black emptiness.’

  Terah stared down for a long moment at his son wetting his robe with tears, crying out in anguish. Then he lifted up his hands, holding them high, away from Abram’s bent head, avoiding contact, shrinking back in his chair, trying to disengage himself from the burden in his lap.

  ‘Again?’ he moaned, pressing further back into the chair, his hands still rigidly aloft. ‘Again?’

  Abram felt the tension in Terah’s body, and the absence of his father’s consoling hands. He lifted his head and eyes to look up at him. ‘Father? Help me.’

  Terah did not move, but looked down at Abram as if he were seeing a ghost. ‘Will it never end?’ he cried out.

  Sarai ran to Abram and pulled him away from Terah, murmuring sounds of comfort, words, she supposed, though she hardly knew which. She manhandled him as gently as she could out of the courtyard and into the house, aware all the while of Terah needing her attention too, pulled between the two devastated men. She got Abram to their room and left him weeping helplessly on the bed. Then she ran back to the courtyard, calling out to the servants to help her with Terah whom she found with his head lolled back and tears of old and new grief streaming silently down his face.

  For several days Sarai and the rest of the household attended to the necessary details of life: Lot saw to the business, his wife and daughters took care of the children, and Sarai managed the day-to-day running of the household, glad to have practical tasks to think about while coming and going along corridors that echoed with the inconsolable weeping of the two men in their separate rooms.

  * * *

  Between our own needs and the needs of others lies routine. A servant kept a constant watch on Abram, who had spent his tears and now lay silently on their bed, staring into his void. Yet another servant ministered to Terah, whose tears continued to flow. Sarai ran the household with a fervour borne of a terror of standing still. At night, however, she had no choice but to lie beside Abram, who barely registered her presence. She was tired of thinking, of fearing the future and trying to penetrate the past for clues. She discovered a capacity for sleeping through Abram’s wakeful agony, but before she slept, and in the morning when she woke, there was a period when reflection forced itself on her, and then she found herself filling with rage at the weeping, will-less men of her house. The bleakness that paralysed Abram and Terah was no less for Sarai. She felt pitiless, so every morning she threw back the cover and devoted herself to the efficient management of a household that had come to a halt. Either that, or she should take her own despairing place next to Abram and they could all rot into dust.

  Lot could not comprehend any of it. For one thing, he had only half the story, having been deprived of the facts of the family’s past, and for another he could not conceive of the depths to which Abram and Terah had sunk, having no place like that lurking in his own mind. Lot’s world skittered along on the surface, and Sarai, for one, at that time, thanked the gods for it. At least someone in the household was shallow enough to get on with it.

  And what of Sarai’s lifelong love for Abram, her brother, her husband, her friend? Don’t ask. She took very great care not to ask the question of herself at the time. The answer might have finally sent her spiralling down into his helpless condition. With the acquisition of the long view, we do not demand such black and white statements of our emotions. We allow abeyance. But then, to have answered the question in what seemed like an honest way would have been to toxify all her past as self-deception, as meaningless. All that love, and now … Easy to be so much older and wiser, when life is all but past and there is no future to fear, no body that once filled us with love lying inert and unavailable next to us. It is easy to be gentle with ourselves once all of it is history. Beware the wisdom of the old, it is devoid of life ———

  ——— I had had my fill of mankind and its seething, fleshy, unreliable ways. My new plan was to focus on just one man from whom I could create the future and history both, slowly and at my own pace, so that this go round, I would be ahead of the game. I am would become I will be: an I am with a future. I was getting the hang of time.

  Abram was ideal for my purpose. The perfect recipient for my word. I cast about and found this lost and longing man, a reluctant rebel, a dutiful citizen spinning in the turmoil of his unwished-for capacity to think himself into disobedience, and I thought, This one I can make my own. His longing for order (an indelible remnant, I noted with satisfaction, of the image of myself for which I had created these creatures in the first place) made his disobedience loathsome to him, and therefore something I could work with, not, as before, something that worked against my will. I would give him the opportunity to return to order, but make it difficult enough to ensure that it appeared unachievable without my assistance. I would make this one man my own, and then, given patience (and who has more patience than one with eternity on his mind?), the world would be mine once again through the man. Death and the future. I was pretty pleased with myself. Death and the future. What a canny I am I am, I told myself.

  There he was, paralysed by conflict, and by the fleshy accident, shall we say?, of infertility that prevented its remedy; and here I was with the solution, the one and only me. Though I say it myself, I got the tone of the first calling just right.

  ‘Abram,’ I called. But he didn’t respond.

  ‘Abram,’ I called again, more insistent, and he turned his head to see who was in the room.

  ‘Abram!’ I boomed this time.

  ‘Who is it?’ he whispered, not entirely surprised to be hearing a voice out of nowhere. He had been listening for me, and despairing that there would be nothing to hear. I caught him at just the right time.

  ‘God,’ I said, keeping it simple.

  ‘Which god?’

  ‘Your god. The Lord. I am. Forget the rest.’

  He didn’t answer, but let out a sigh. I kept silent for a moment, and let him taste the fear that the voice had gone. Then I gave him the word.

  ‘Go! Leave your country, and your heritage, and your father’s house, to a land I will show you. And I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name a blessing. You shall be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you, and those who damn you I will curse, and all the clans of the earth through you shall be blessed.’

  And I left him to think it over.

  This was new to me. Before, with the first two and then with Noah, I had spoken my curses, announced my punishment for the wrongdoings that mankind had already committed. But this time I took the initiative and I made an offer of more than a lifetime to a single man who believed that he had nothing to give me in return. In fact, he had the world to give me, the only thing in eternity that I had so far discovered I wanted. He didn’t know that. He only knew that I seemed to offer something at the cost of him walking away from everything he knew, everything he had, and throwing himself and his fortunes on the mercy of a voice in his head. Take it or leave it. It was irresistible, of course. I was getting the hang of these humans. At last, I had an edge ———

  ——— Abram found Sarai in the kitchen, giving instructions for the following
day’s meals. It was the first time he had left their room in more than a week. It was also the first time that he spoke to Sarai directly since he had returned from his desert wanderings.

  ‘Sarai, leave that. Come with me.’

  She followed him out to the courtyard, where Abram sat next to her on the wall of the small fountain where Lot’s children had loved to splash.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. With the help of her bondswoman she had cleaned him up on his return from the desert, and combed the knots out of his hair, but there had been nothing they could do about the burning redness around his eyes and their haunted look as they peered at the blackness before them. They were red still, and staring, but now they were not empty. They were full of what he had to tell her. She would have been relieved to see him more animated had she not been alarmed that the gleam in his eyes was too bright, just as before they had been too dull.

  ‘The Lord has spoken to me.’

  Sarai’s heart sank.

  ‘Which lord? You have been alone for the past week,’ she said wearily, brushing a fall of hair behind his ear.

  ‘The Lord, Sarai. The Lord God.’

  ‘The lord of the gods?’

  ‘No, the Lord God. I think.’

  ‘Just the one?’

  ‘I heard his voice. I actually heard it. He spoke to me.’

  Sarai’s heart sank deeper. Despair, and now madness. The gods did not speak. Humans pleased or appeased them, and they acted on the world or didn’t.

  ‘Abram, you were dreaming.’

  ‘No. I have been called by the Lord. Our gods, our statues can’t speak to us. But this Lord called me by name. This Lord blessed me.’

  ‘Why you? Why should this lord call you and … bless … you?’

  ‘Because I was listening for him. Because I was waiting for a call. Because I stopped believing in our mundane gods of stone with their ordinary human relationships and their pathetic interests and rivalries. They are too much like us – more powerful, but still limited, constrained. What kind of god is constrained? Sarai, you should have heard the Lord. There is nothing this Lord cannot do. I’d been waiting for him without realising it, and Haran, if only he had not despaired, if he had waited and listened, he would have heard him, too.’

  ‘So what did he want?’

  ‘The Lord doesn’t want anything. Our false little gods want sacrifice, libation, worship. But a true God has no need of anything. He only has to be heard.’

  ‘All right, what did he say?’

  ‘That from me will come a great nation.’

  Sarai swallowed hard. The anger. The pity. Inextricable.

  ‘Did he say how?’

  ‘We are to go, leave this place. We must go to another land were we will begin again and build a nation.’

  ‘And you call this not wanting anything? This land of ours is … where?’

  ‘The Lord will show it to us.’

  ‘Ah. Does it have a name?’

  ‘He will show us the land. He promised to lead us to it.’

  ‘Is it an empty land, or are other people already living in it?’

  ‘It will be our land. The Lord will show us. Sarai, we have been offered a destiny.’

  ‘Or destitution.’

  ‘Destiny.’

  ‘You may have been offered this destiny. Did your lord mention me?’

  ‘You are my wife.’

  ‘But he didn’t say how this nation of yours will come about? How a wife who no longer menstruates will bear the beginnings of this nation of yours?’

  ‘We must trust him. He spoke to me.’

  ‘And so we will leave everything, the life we have made here – remade here – and start all over again. Another desert wandering. At least last time we had a destination. This time we are simply to wander aimlessly in the wilderness until your lord sees fit to find us somewhere to settle. We were young then, Abram. Perhaps our destiny is to accept our lives as they are.’

  ‘Our future depends on trusting the Lord. I have his word.’

  ‘But I haven’t.’

  ‘But you have mine, Sarai. You must trust me, as I will trust the Lord.’

  She would have laughed out loud, but her husband’s expression stopped her. He was quite mad, she realised. There were individuals in Harran who wandered the streets, fed and cared for by the townsfolk, who heard voices and spoke in riddles. It was understood that men’s minds could go wrong. There was nothing to be done for them but to take care of them and let them rave and ramble their phantasms away. They were harmless, if annoying. And they spoke in the tones and wore the expression of her beloved husband as he sat in front of her explaining the future. It was always the future they spoke of, since their present was intolerable. Their eyes glowed, their minds ached towards another time, a time that did not contain the anguish of now.

  Religion did not go very deep with Sarai. She went along with the rituals and the regular worship, but she was always on the periphery where it seemed that life was more a series of accidents and hard work than reward and punishment. So much had happened to her family, and as a child she had believed that the events were linked in a chain of cause and effect. Perhaps they were, but nowadays they seemed to her to be more related to the nature of the people involved. No gods were needed to account for the tragedies or even for the joys. Perhaps because she was never fully part of the ritual, because her name was never included in the incantations, she found the world itself enough to account for life. Like Abram now, all those gods milling about invisibly interfering with their lives seemed absurd to her. But unlike Abram who needed, for some reason, more than the world to explain what went wrong, Sarai was not quite led to despair by such a thought. She had gone along with religion. It did no harm and there was some comfort to be had in the idea, if not thought about too much, that we were not alone and ourselves responsible for our mistakes and follies. Still, once she was an adult, she could never persuade herself that Emtelai’s and the baby’s death were deserved – if she had, she would have had to revive the old fear that her childish jealousy had been punished by their extinction. This was so outrageous that it was better left unthought, or her rage at the gods who perpetrated such a crime would have been as unquenchable as Haran’s. Sarai had a practical streak in her character that gave her permission to get on with life, no matter how arbitrary she suspected it might be. It was odd that Abram, so accepting and dutiful, should have come to such a passionate denial of religion. But perhaps that was the problem. Facing the reality of death and the fact of childlessness was harder for him, who believed in some higher justice, than for Sarai, who doubted its existence but did not feel obliged to confront it.

  Still, even in his torment, her placid and dutiful Abram was not Haran. His loss of faith was not quite a loss of hope. He could not face such a condition. He was patient even in his despair, allowing it time to resolve his anguish with a voice inside his head. If he was mad, at least he was not dead.

  The workshop was as good as finished. The woman Abram had frightened had told her story and the orders for statues had stopped coming in. Lot went every day to the shop, but there was nothing for him to do. The high priest had come to see Terah, advising him in his despair to devote himself to asking the gods for forgiveness in the hope that they would take pity on an old man and release his son from the grip of madness. Terah now spent his days at the temple, and his nights praying. It got him out of his decline. He had a purpose in life again, and the elders of Harran rallied round. His response to Abram’s news of his new god was to double his sacrifice and bemoan his lot to his peers, who listened with horrified sympathy, thankful that their sons had not been so struck down.

  One night Abram left his bed and smashed every remaining statue in the workshop, so there was no point in Lot even pretending that the business would pick up. There was no stock, and Lot had no talent as a chiseller and carver of images.

  Abram made preparations to leave Harran for his journey to who knew where, w
hile Sarai watched and wondered what her life would be if she stayed and ministered to the madly remorseful Terah, and what it would be if she became a nomad once again with her madly believing Abram. There was no other alternative. There was nowhere for a middle-aged woman with a father and a husband to go. Nowhere except the same wilderness of dementia where her Abram had taken up residence. No one would have blamed her in Harran if she had stayed with Terah and let her husband vanish into his wilderness, but the prospect dismayed her. Terah was completely absorbed in the company of pious old men. Staying, she would have pottered through her later days waiting for death, and she did not have the courage to bring her life to such a foregone conclusion.

  She remembered her old Abram in the desert, young and strong, her older brother, and how the life of a herdsman had suited him. He had a way with animals and he had learned to tend them. When they had trekked away from Ur to escape disgrace and tragedy, Abram had blossomed with his animals. He loved the journeys in the half-light, the cool black night sky smeared with stars, and the sweltering days lazing inside the tent, protected from the blazing sun. He had been strong and fit then, Sarai recalled, striding between the encampment and his herds like the master of the universe. She remembered the lambs and kids whose births they had attended, and the pleasure and astonishment at being present at the beginning of new life, and his fierce determination to keep sick animals alive, refusing to sleep and nursing them back to health, or weeping tears of loss if they succumbed. He was fully alive in that moving landscape, striding with the dust in his hair and sand on his eyelashes. He was her Abram. She remembered him, and how she had loved him. She missed him – missed them both – terribly. Old now, it was easy to forget the pain that had begun for her on their betrothal and left her alone all those nights in the desert when the brother could not make himself a husband.