by Jenny Diski
The child was circumcised, it was true, but beyond that there was no mention of Abram’s lord, no sacrifice sent up in thanks for a promise fulfilled. The child Isaac was new life to Sarai, another beginning that dissolved the life-long shadow that had encased her heart, and gave her back her long-lost stepmother, the half-loved half-sister, and the anonymous woman who began it all. And to Abram, Isaac was the promise of future. The family of Shem would remember its past in times to come when the son of Abram, and the son of the son of Abram, recited the begettings. Abram’s name would echo in a world in which he had disintegrated into mere dust blown away; his existence would be reiterated in the speaking of his name. And Sarai, who cared, or thought she cared, for none of this, cradled new life in her arms, felt the warm damp breath against her breast, the sweet smell of a love created in the flesh, of a blank beloved life that grew further into the world and relationship with every passing day. She held what had been born out of the long, difficult labour of love between her and Abram, and it had life. It kicked and grasped and thrived and lived, lived, lived: this singular truth of Sarai and Abram, of their time, of the fact of them. Of us.
The lord of Abram’s hopes and hopelessness was very nearly forgotten in this affirmation of holding together. The world took on a renewed importance. When Isaac was weaned, Abram held a great feast to celebrate his son in the world. Then they travelled again, this time a family of substance, more a progress than desert wandering, while Abram consolidated his land, and claimed more, digging new wells, and making treaties so that his son could continue the task of making a nation whose people would number more than the stars in the sky or the sands of the desert. They settled at last in the west, in the land of the Philistines with whom a covenant of land rights was agreed, and there in the place of the well he had dug that he called Beer-sheba, Abram planted a grove of trees to shade the rest of their days, and as an afterthought dedicated it to his lord ———
——— And so we have at last this happy, human family. Ha! Humanity congratulating itself on the splendid achievement of being human. You will recollect the recent invention of human justice, so touching in its concern for life, for fairness. Oh, yes, they taught me a thing or two about good and evil, and human decency. ‘Far be it from you that the righteous should be as the wicked. Far be it from you.’ How touching. What sensitivity. What development. What drivel. Remember Hagar, the Egyptian child who moved even me to pity, though not to love? You hear no further mention of her in this story of heroic, embattled humanity struggling with eternity. What of her, and the wild lad who was Abraham’s original son? What of those innocents entangled in the needs of the house of Shem? The not-so-satisfactory first fruit of Abraham’s loins had remained a thorn in Sarah’s flesh. Now that she had a child of her own – not the way of the world, but the wish of the Lord – Ishmael was an embarrassment. He was also a threat to Isaac. The wild boy teased the new child, laughed at his milksop nature, his mother’s doting, his acquiescence to comfort and conformity even as a toddler, his willingness to allow himself to be immured in a solid wall of love. Ishmael played dangerous games with the lad. ‘Just stand there with this pomegranate on your head, and I’ll shoot it off with my arrow…’ And then there were the looks he shot from under his black angry brow at young Isaac when he thought no one was watching. But Sarah was always watching. Yet the wild boy was human too, just as human as those who are so proud of their capacity to dream and invent the future conditional. He was one of theirs, just like those who thought so well of themselves, but he was inconvenient, not the pretty reflection they wished to see. And he was as he was, not because of me, or anything that I did or planned, but because of them, because he was born out of their distorted wishes, a temporary solution that grew knowing he had no real place in the world in which he had been engendered. A love-bereft child. They did not wish to see themselves in his dark, unhappy countenance. The humans made Ishmael, the troubled, fidgety lad with no place of his own.
And does the other narrator, so full of humanity’s merits, mention that Sarah, seeing the surely righteous grievance in the eyes of Ishmael, sent him and his long-suffering mother away, into the desert? That she expelled them from their highly wrought civilisation? Or that Abraham, in his magnanimity, having at last found his quiet life, gave them a skin of water and a loaf of bread and pointed them towards the wilderness, where they foundered, the water gone, the bread eaten, and waited to die? Is that not part of the story, too? Such fine humanity. So moved by itself and its troubles. So dangerous to those who subvert their story of themselves.
Well, they were right. Ishmael, having been made what he was, was indeed a threat to Isaac, the pale, compliant child. And since I needed Isaac, the child of Abraham and Sarah, just as they did, I did nothing to stop the expulsion of Hagar and her boy. But I would not let them die. Even I would not do that. I struck a well for them, and made them sturdy in their desert surroundings. I turned Ishmael’s wild, sharp eyes into those of a hunter, a survivor, hardened to the life of the wanderer. He, too, would become a great nation, this first son of Abraham. ‘Let Ishmael thrive,’ he had begged me, and I keep my promises.
Now, Abraham and Sarah had what they wanted. A future, and a point to the past and present. And me, what of me? Did I have what I wanted, what, at the hands of the humanity that I had made, I had learned to want? Love? The love of my chosen one? The image of myself that I had set upon the earth? The only image I had created, it seemed, was their vision of themselves in me. I had learned to reflect them and their paltry human wishes. When I looked at them I saw myself longing with their longing, dreaming with their dreams. I needed Abraham’s son just as Abraham needed him: to ensure a future for myself, because in the face of the fact of flesh and its inexplicable ways, eternity was not enough. I had been used to provide them with what they needed in order to justify their existence, to bear their limitations, but what had I received in return? I wanted the love of my creation, I wanted proof that the world was mine, after all, now and ever shall be, world without end.
‘Abraham,’ I called, after so long a silence, his and mine.
‘Here I am,’ he answered quietly from the shade of his grove. No longer falling on his face in amazement or mirth. Just ‘Here I am’, as if his presence on earth was a separate fact from my existence. The time had come to test the truth of this ———
——— You begin a story, a telling, and by the end the story tells itself. Finally, motive, justification, character and meaning are futile. The end is reached, and by the end, none of it matters, because only the ending makes sense of anything that went before. Only a story without an end sustains the notion that the dreams and struggles of its protagonists account for more than the workings of chance and necessity. The only story without an end is one in which the narrator arrests the narrative. Happy endings, sad endings, inconclusive endings: nothing but artifice, just ways of stopping short. There is only and always just the one ending. The interruption is indeed the narrative.
Abram’s dream was to create a story without an ending, but he did not have the strength to do without the authority of a dream narrator. Sarai took up the narrative, grasping the real nature of the story, but she did not have the strength to dream. Both were interrupted by what they called by different names, but which grew strong enough to call itself I am and make itself the way of the world, the end of all narration. In the end, it destroyed them, broke their love and their lives, but after all, it was only the way of the world that was made and remade by those who lived in it.
* * *
Sarai woke very early one morning to the end of her story. It was well before dawn, and she heard, in the distance, men talking in low tones in preparation for a journey. She picked out Abram and Isaac among the voices, and wondered lazily what excursion they might be making that they had not mentioned to her. Men’s business, she thought, half asleep. A hunting trip; a father showing his son the extent of his territories, what would one day be his; a lesso
n for the lad in the nomadic life, a few days of hardship, away from the soft devotion of the women, so that a boy might learn to be a man. The men creep away in the early hours, leaving the women to sleep so that there will be no fussing and fretting. Sarai let them go. She would cherish the boy when he returned, exhausted and proud, no doubt, of managing to keep up with his father and the two other lads who went with them. Abram would come back pleased to have stripped some of the sweet boyishness away from his son, before returning him to his mother, whose anxiety for her child’s well-being was understandable enough. God knew, she was hardly a weak woman, and she knew that Abram knew that whatever strength the boy had was from her at least as much as from him. But how she watched him, feasting her eyes on his growing limbs, how she enfolded him, this miraculous Isaac, who, after Sarai had spent so long a time in the barren wilderness confronting intractable matter, had at last come to her.
He was a quiet, considerate boy. A child of elderly parents whose carefulness with himself was as much concern for his mother and father as for his own interest. He knew the weight he had in their lives, had been told all his years how he was the child of promise, the son who had come long after all hope had gone. If a certain passivity resulted from his wish to live up to his promise, not to disappoint, it was understandable. He was content to permit his mother to encircle him with her arms and tell him stories about the way of the world, and his father to take him off and train him in the necessary skills of that world. He was pleased to do so, pleased to give so much pleasure to those who had waited so long for him and had surrounded him with their wall of love. Sarai lay back and allowed herself to finish the night’s sleep, happy enough with the image of her husband and son, her Abram and her Isaac, striding together across the desert landscape ———
——— ‘Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.’
The man of few words said nothing. Not a muscle in his face moved as I demanded the death of his boy. What had I expected? I had confronted him before, and received his dumb silence in response. But this was surely worth a gasp, a plea, a cry for mercy. Nothing. He gave me nothing. The next morning he saddled up his asses and set out with a couple of lads and his precious son, well before dawn, well before Sarah was awake to ask the nature of the outing, and headed off in continued silence, in the direction of Moriah. He was implacable in his obedience, cruel in his refusal to rebel, just as I was implacable and cruel in my search for reassurance of his devotion. Who was mirroring whom, I cannot say. It hardly mattered any more. We had become each other’s grim shadow.
‘Father?’
‘Here I am, my son.’
To me; now to the boy.
‘Where is the sacrificial lamb?’
‘The Lord will provide, my son.’
And not another word. They built the altar. He laid the boy on it and tied him down. He covered the lad’s eyes with one hand and with the other raised the knife.
I knew everything I needed to know about the human. I knew that neither he nor I would ever have love between us. My will, my wish would never be enough. He tested me, and found me wanting. I could not sacrifice the hope of love, the future of love. I was not strong enough to exist purely as will. I had created something else, desire, and I could not risk an eternity of loss. I could only prove obedience. It was no longer enough. If I took the human future, the dream, I would have nothing left for myself. Was Abraham prepared to lose his dream to prove I could not have his love, but only his obedience? Was there, indeed, love at all, and not merely will? Had love been my invention, after all?
I had been rendered too weak, too fearful, too human to pass the test. I called out to him before the knife fell.
‘Abraham, Abraham.’
‘Here I am.’
And those were the last words he ever spoke to me ———
——— There was to be a future. But that was all there was to be. The past disintegrated, blown to fragments by the wish and the fear. The fragments remained: this time and that time, but they no longer cohered. They no longer offered a story that made sense. Stories would be told – and told and told – that were worked like shapeless clay or lumpish stone into the semblance of sense, but the final form was always in the wishful eye of the shaper, never in the original material itself. The clay needed dreams and wishes breathed into it before it became anything recognisable. The present remained, but meant nothing, a bleak corridor, too dark to see ahead, too narrow to permit a backward glance. Sarai’s heart was turned to stone by her final glimpse of the past before the ever-present darkness swallowed her up.
There never was such a silence as at the return of Abram and Isaac to the glade at Beer-sheba. Abram shut himself away in a room whose door remained closed to everyone. Isaac stood in front of his mother, a wraith, a pale, shivering ghost, transparent almost, like glass, and although he opened his mouth, no sound emerged. She laid him down in her bed and bathed away the beads of sweat that rolled down his face with cool water, and soothed his shaking body with her stroking hand. Finally, he slept, and when he woke, he told her in his new pale, ghostly voice of what had occurred on the mountain in Moriah.
And then there was a sound such as no one had heard ever before. People stopped what they were doing, stopped breathing even, as three long, languishing notes rang out and seemed to still the very air around Beer-sheba, so that the howl of loss that is the way of the world could be heard to the ends of the earth and at the very edges of time.
Then silence fell again like a weighty curtain and Sarai took herself away to Kiriath-arba in the land of Canaan, leaving the future behind her.
* * *
And here she lies on her bed and waits, while we keep watch, while the tears slip down her ancient, expressionless face without any sudden surge of passion or obvious cause, as if the tears were welled already, brim full behind her shrunken eyes, and leak like spillage over the lids whose muscles are not strong enough to dam them up. She is waiting. That is all.
ONLY HUMAN. Copyright © 2000 by Jenny Diski. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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ISBN 0-312-28054-8 (hc)
ISBN 0-312-30517-6 (pbk)
First published in Great Britain by Virago Press, a division of Little, Brown and Company
First Picador USA Paperback Edition: October 2002
eISBN 9781466853072
First eBook edition: August 2013