Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

Divinity, I must allow, had been invoked at my birth too. I have gotten a man from the Lord, my mother had sung out, to the consternation of my father and the Lord both.

It turned out to be a masterstroke of diplomacy, reminding the Latter, at a time when He was thinking hard about washing His hands of us, of His complicity in our natures and His instrumentality in our continuance. It flattered His powers and tickled His sense of occasion.

But it was a masterstroke of irony also, taking into account the circumstances of her getting, of her begetting, at the instigation, so she’d been led to believe, of Satan who, it was even hinted, was still in there, still in my mother where he’d entered, and would not be dispelled again except by prayers and promises. ‘Me? Oh no, you can leave Me out of it; you have gotten a man from the very Devil,’ was the reply she dared Him to come back at her with, knowing what havoc that would have played with the politics of the cosmos, and the principle of there being only One (infinite and indivisible) Creator.

There was scant irony now, though, about the awe in which she held her own fertility. She squatted, round-shouldered and double-chinned, wherever she found mud, or mud found her, milk streaming from her, the smell of black earth coming off her skin like gasses from a compost heap, her expression drowsy with the voluptuousness of maternal knowledge, her lips swollen and pendulous, caked with clay, cracked from kissing the sun. The clay only quickened the kissing. The more her infant rolled in it, the hungrier she got for him. It seemed she could not stuff enough of herself into his mouth, nor enough of him into hers. And when the ravening stopped — not from surfeit but from exhaustion — a rapt contemplation took over. For hours without end she would stare at him, stunned upon her breast or howling in his faeces, as though every movement he made was essential to the unravelling of a riddle, as though he were a godling of the chthonic mysteries and she, so long as her devotions never wavered, his high priestess.

If the Only True God saw the beginnings of apostasy in this, He kept His counsel. He could not have been unaware of what advantages flowed His way from it. He took a long view of things. And in the short term, too, the benefits outweighed the unorthodoxy. For while my mother’s attentions were consumed by each infinitesimal spasm of my brother’s person, she forgot my existence altogether; and so long as her thoughts dwelt on dark sources and germination, on slime and seepage and renewal, there was nothing she could discuss profitably with my father who wanted to be a conjuror. As a votary of loamy secrets there was only certain company she could respectably keep. And He — the Certain Company in question — not needing to be asked so much as twice, not needing, if the truth is told, to be asked so much as once, popped in between a dirt-born husband and his single recompense, between a solitary son and his assuagement. She was not to be available to make it better for either of us. ‘Thou shalt not lie with her, nor touch her, nor touch any thing upon which she sitteth.’ The All Prohibiting One had spoken. ‘No, not even with the tips of thy fingers. For she has conceived seed, and born a man child, and is unclean.’

So much for seed. So much for me who came from seed.

My father wanted to know how long she would be unclean for.

‘According to the days of the separation for her impurity.’

And… how long would that be?

My father’s incautiousness, or absent-mindedness, or inability simply to feign knowledge when he lacked it, always astonished and terrified me. Of all subjects, my mother’s impurity was the very one not to have suddenly gone vague about. Were we not forcibly enjoined, just as regularly as the blood issued from her, never to forget those swarming haemophobic stipulations?

Every bed whereon she lieth all the days of her issue shall be unto her as the bed of her separation; and whatsoever she sitteth upon shall be unclean… and whosoever toucheth those things shall be unclean, and shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and purify himself in fire, and boil himself in oil, and graze himself upon rocks that he might rend his flesh and remove therefrom every spherule and atom of uncleanness, and, still finding a speck or droplet, be it no more conspicuous than a mote, shall run howling into the howling wilderness and there deliver himself, as an abomination thrice abominated, unto the jaws of wolves…

If my father was still looking for guidance as to specifics — When you say whatsoever she sitteth upon, O Lord, am I to understand that you truly do mean whatsoever? — what did that signify except that thus far he had not been obeying God’s injunctions to the letter?

I waited for the thunderbolt to strike him, or the whirlwind to carry him away. How long are the days of her separation? Longer than thou shalt live to see! But the Voice that finally replied to him was temperate, you could even say jovial. ‘She shall be unclean seven days,’ It said. ‘But unto you’ — what fun It had shrinking my poor father into that worthless you, what a good time It was giving Itself reducing back to dust what It had once, with a single syllable, enlarged from dust — ‘but unto y-you’ — It could barely get it out now for amusement — ‘but unto you she shall be unclean… twenty-seven.’

This time, at least, my father knew better than to quibble. But when the twenty-eighth day came round and my mother waved him away with a nod in the direction of the Source Of All Taboos — nothing to do with her, ask Him; her mind, and come to that, her body, was engaged on other things, mud, milch, manure — he sought further clarification.

And was told: ‘Unto you she shall be unclean twenty-seven days.’

But had he not already…?

‘Another twenty-seven days.’

Again he accepted the ruling, again he waited, again he appealed, and again he was put off a month. This procedure was repeated, four, five, six times, until my father, afraid of spending the second half of one year as uncomforted as he had spent the first, cried out, What then am I to do? Go in to my own cattle?

‘Whosoever lieth with a beast,’ the Lord reminded him, ‘shall surely be put to death. Defile not yourself therewith; it is confusion.’

But I thought that He did not put His accustomed feeling into this warning, and that for all He cared my father could defile himself with who, or even what, he pleased, so long as it was not my mother.

From this one hundred and sixty-eighth day of my father’s expropriation can be dated the growth of a new, though largely undeclared and wordless, friendship between us. I should take back growth. It is too organic a term to describe anything that could possibly have occurred between two such determinedly inorganic people — we had inanimate longings on us, my father and I; we yearned after brute matter — and it gives an impression of slow and purposeful development quite inappropriate to our circumstances. Growth? If we are to be accurate about these first probationary years of creation, nothing grew. Things just appeared. We woke up one morning and where thorn and thistle, bramble and briar, had not been, there thorn and thistle, bramble and briar, were. This was a consequence, partly, of nature being compelled to serve a vindictive function. When we erred in the eyes of the Lord, it was nature He visited upon us, cursing us with the very ground we trod on. With every new transgression, a new prickle to madden us. A word spoken in irritation, a show of less than abject gratitude, and bugs never before seen or imagined, lice without ancestor or precedent, came to nip us in the night. But even leaving aside these vegetable or verminous chastisements, the ground hourly threw up surprises and anomalies out of no other motive than confusion. The seasons had not settled yet; our zone was simultaneously temperate and torrid; we lived at one and the same time in jungle and in desert. Grow? Why should anything bother with the tedious process of growing when it could fling itself out of marsh or sand-bowl on its own say-so, because no one had ever told it it couldn’t?