Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

Zimri: Is this woman permitted me in concubinage or no?

Moses: She is forbidden thee.

Zimri: By whose proscription?

Moses: By the Torah’s.

Zimri: Then where, as a faithful exponent of the Torah, does that leave you? Is not your wife a Midianite? And what is more, is she not the daughter of an idolatrous priest?

Moses would be at a loss to find any response other than tears.

Sisobk the Scryer gleefully scrolls and re-scrolls the scene on the runny walls of his steaming room:

Zimri: Well, Moses, what sayest thou to this?

Moses: Boo-hoo.

Moses could have argued that he had met and married Zipporah long before God’s revelation to him of the Torah. But he did not. He could have shown that, however idolatrous her father, Zip had become as pious and pernickety a proselyte to Hebrew ways as any in the camp. But he did not. Instead he brought his hands up to his eyes, and wept.

It is sometimes said that it was because of this faintheartedness that God buried Moses where no man knoweth of his sepulchre and no seer seeth his boo-hooing, unto this day. Alternatively, it is argued that to be granted such a ringing obscurity is the highest proof of God’s favour.

Who would dare adjudicate between two such liberties taken with the name and justice-mechanism of the Almighty? The truth is — whatever HE thought — that Moses’s courage failed him, time and again, and always at the same extremity: that critical push when his accusers charged him with sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy in sexual matters. He could not look them in the face. He could not defy them to say their worst. He stuttered and knew he was not in the clear. He had wished to be impeccable, and with that very wish — for why should a man be impeccable? — he had muddied his home waters. That much Korah knew about him too. And it was enough to persuade him that Moses was no more incapable than less exalted men of begrudging others their domestic happiness, their physical content, and every bit as prepared, on that account, to do them mischief.

Such as appointing Elizaphan to a position of authority above their heads.

Korah was helped towards this radical mistrust of Mosaic motives, it goes without saying, by the very person on behalf of whose sex he had agreed to smell a rat. On his own he would not have thought to enter sympathetically into the feelings of poor Zipporah, left to swallow sand and shudder without company each night, imagining what it was in her, what it was about her, that appalled her husband. On his own he would not have noticed — would not have had a motive for noticing — that Moses averted his gaze whenever a woman, any woman, passed by him, thereby investing her, whoever she was, with the most libidinous and inflammatory properties, as though her look alone, had Moses been mad enough to meet it, would have cast him into hell. Only someone who had herself been made to feel she carried this potentiality for destruction in her glance could have conveyed the idea of it to Korah, and made him see how little it contained of flattery or compliment. For this knowledge, as for so much else, Korah was indebted to his wife. ‘The mind of your prophet,’ she told him, ‘is a stables. He must assume that you are all in the identical mental condition, you men. There can be no other explanation for the stream of stipulations which every day issues from him anew, in relation to the bolting of the doors.’

‘The doors, my dear?’

‘The stable doors.’

He levelled an innocent’s finger at his temples, at his mind. ‘I hope you are not implying, my love…’

She turned her face from him, depriving him of its fine points of light. She might have been sheathing a dagger. ‘If yours is clean,’ she said, ‘that is only because you have me to sweep it.’

More than most, a rich man needs a clever wife. Without her, his complacency would blind him to the thousand upon thousand tiny insults to which his merit is continuously subjected. Korah did not himself think, while it was happening, for example, that being shorn by Moses of every hair on his body was any particular affront, or at all too high a price to pay for the privilege — the simcha shel mitzvah — of priestly consecration. But when Korah’s wife beheld him pushing a path through a throng of astonished onlookers, bald from head to toe, napless, exfoliated, tonsured — he whose raven hair had hung as comely as the ten curtains of the tabernacle and been a source of pride to him almost as great as his three hundred bow-legged mules — she let out a gasp which told him at once he had yet again submitted himself unwittingly to ridicule.

‘Who did this to you?’ she cried — the woman’s wail, the terrible female lamentation which all men, rich or poor, await with dread. The last inordinate expression of outrage, for which only women have the vocal chords.

‘My love…’

‘Who did this?’

He smiled a sheep’s smile, though he could see in the reflection of her dagger eyes that it was pig she saw, the pink flesh of forbidden porker.

‘My own,’ he pleaded, ‘anyone would think I’d been assaulted.’

‘You have. Tell me who was your assailant.’

She knew, but she would make him say it.

‘Assailant?’ He laughed an ass’s laugh.

‘Tell me.’

He hung his head. In the circumstances, a bad idea. ‘Moses,’ he said. ‘King Moses.’

‘You allowed him to take your hair!’

It had gone further than she yet grasped. Korah wasn’t sure how best to break it to her. Should he remove his clothing and then recite the ordinance, or should he recite the ordinance and then remove his clothing? He decided to remove his clothing while reciting the ordinance.

‘Take the Levites from among the Children of Israel,’ he chanted, loosening his sandals, ‘and cleanse them. And thus shalt thou do unto them, to cleanse them: Sprinkle water of purifying upon them, and let them’ — he reached for the hem of his gown and drew the garment slowly, slowly up his trunk — ‘and let them shave… all’ — the truth was before her now, any moment, any moment now — ‘and let them… shave… ALL… their… flesh.’

It seemed to Korah that his wife took an eternity — as long as it would have taken him to count the keys to his treasure — to examine the shame that had been brought upon them both. She turned him around, touching his hallowed and inflamed skin only with the tips of her unsanctified fingers. Where was it all? The dense fleece that had covered his neck and shoulders like a burnous, and whose texture had reminded her, miles from water, of black seaweed — where was it? The odd, unruly straggle of finer hair that sprung up where his spine ended, where the first murderer was reputed to have grown a tail, and which spread up his lower back like vine — where was it? Gone, gone. Gone too — sheared with microscopical attention — the sleek thistledown that had matted his buttocks and his thighs. Barbered, his legs appeared thin and girlish, too insubstantial to bear his importance. But worst of all, when she turned him about once more, to look a second time, like a horse-dealer, like a stock-breeder — worst of all, his privates: loose and defenceless, absurd, a boy’s privates, a children’s joke, a secret not worth the keeping.

Raw meat.

‘And Moses did all this,’ she finally asked, ‘with his own hands?’

There was a particularity in her question which Korah could not meet with his eyes. He merely nodded.

‘Even though the ordinance has it that you should do it to yourselves?’

‘It is considered a greater honour — altogether more of a koved — to receive purification from Moses personally,’ Korah said.

He felt that in her concern for what had been taken from him, his wife had missed what had been given.