Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

Moses: There must be a mezuzah upon the doorposts of every habitation.

Korah: Must?

Moses: Must.

The pungent smell of a rival’s dicomfiture, sweet like the meat offering to the Lord, spiked with stacte and salted just so, reaches Sisobk’s nostrils at the very moment it reaches Korah’s. As a mere reader, Sisobk can enjoy only a sedentary, second-hand exultation; as an actor, albeit one who recites lines written for him by his wife, Korah is able to point a long, jewelled finger at the first expounder of Mosaic law, and cry, ‘I do not hear the word of God in any of these absurdities.’ And to show that he has some idea how a real God thinks and speaks, he thunders now — ‘The Torah that thou dost teach Israel cannot be the Lord’s and therefore must be thine. Thine and thy brother Aaron’s, whom thou dresseth like a bridegroom and calleth High Priest. But he is a High Priest, Moses, in the service of no one but himself and thee!’

And that, for one day, was as far as Korah was prepared to take it. He needed to speak further to his wife, repeat his performance for her, watch the dagger flashing in her glance. He needed to test the resolve of Dathan and Abiram, to say nothing of other grumbling Reubenites camped close by him. And he needed to ponder tactics, to regroup his intellectual, no less than his military, forces.

He could not, without damage to his cause, go on dismantling the Torah, law by law. Moses was capable of inventing new ones quicker than he could ever hope to discredit them. Besides, he did not want his campaign to degenerate into merely rote rejection, gainsaying without discrimination. He knew the limited life of an appeal to the people based on irony and denigration. He was not a rich man for nothing: he understood that the common mind tires quickly of criticism, suspects the motives of those who practise it, and always gives its vote at last to the state of things as it is, to the dead weight of incumbency. Possessed of envy in the ratio of at least a hundred to one above all other emotions, the mass of mankind naturally holds envy to be the mainspring of action, and so lives in awe of that inert power of prior possession which, because it already has everything, cannot be suspected of wanting anything more.

‘If I were a democrat I would despair,’ he told his wife.

‘If you were a democrat,’ she answered him, ‘you would not be my husband.’

He put it to himself that he had no hope of toppling Moses until he could learn to leaven ridicule with sentiment. The people liked sentiment almost as much as they liked authority.

‘What brings a tear most quickly to your eye?’ he asked his wife.

‘Desert wind,’ she told him.

She was the wrong person to try. If it was affectibility he was after, Dathan and Abiram — petty agitators and hoodlums, keepers of low company, confidants of the poor — were his men.

‘Widows,’ Dathan said.

‘And orphans,’ added Abiram.

‘Widows of anyone in particular?’ Korah was curious to hear. ‘Merchants’s widows? Treasurers’ widows?’

‘Just poor widows,’ said Dathan.

‘And hungry orphans,’ added Abiram.

Korah fingered his rings, thanked them, and went away to think. Among the many things he thought about were his shaven body, his wife’s opprobriousness, and the part Moses had played in both.

The next afternoon he was once more outside Moses’s tent. But this time, instead of calling on him and asking for a ruling, he assembled a multitude to whom he related a story which had been told to him, he swore, and not by some filthy dreamer or parabolist either, that very morning. Inapposite as many of his audience would doubtless find the agrarian content of his narrative — cruelly, bitterly inapposite to speak of fields and farming here, amid the scant wells of Kadesh-Barnea — he trusted they would none the less recognise the injustice and the sophistry to which each of them was hourly subjected by Moses and Aaron in the name of their phantasmagorical Torah.

‘There was a destitute widow,’ he began, ‘a pauper’s relict, mother of two starving daughters, orphans…’

Sisobk the Scryer, follower of Cain, is already overcome with grief.

Now that my father was occupied modelling effigies out of clay and whistling thunderstorms through his teeth, I was once again thrown back on my own company. This meant that I could resume spying on the progress of my mother’s amours. Her muddy infatuation with my indolent baby brother. And her more stately meeting of minds with the Ethereal.

I was of course lying when I told my father that I had no information to impart relating to this second matter. How could I possibly have been ignorant of what was taking place? What kind of a son would I have been to my mother had I not seized every opportunity to observe her in her finest hour, captor and mistress of her Creator’s heart? Regardless of all other family considerations, I believed that the sight of at least one of us exultant was owing to me. I had named fear in all its shades, shame and shrinking in all their fine gradations; if there was self-congratulation going, I wanted to name that.

As for not being straight with my father, I considered myself above reproach. I had not seen anything that would have satisfied his jealousy. Had I been able to deliver him a foolishly besotted Jehovah, wooing my milk-filled mother with shy looks and flowers, His hair slicked down like a water rat’s, His beard combed and smelling of aloes, I would not have hesitated. Ridicule is the jealous man’s salvation, the breath of all our being; and could I have conjured my poor perplexed father some, I would have. But this was not how the Lord came courting. He knew better than to put in a personal appearance. That is unless one considers the shekinah — His glow, His aura, His glorious refulgence — to be personal.

It is a rare thing to be hidden in a tree watching one’s mother making up to a golden cloud. Though not as strange as it would have been, I maintain — thinking of those stories of love between mortals and divinities which I have heard since I came among you — had I been hidden in the selfsame tree watching my mother presenting her hindquarters to a gander. I am speaking of degrees of strangeness only. Strangeness to me. It would be a poor return of your famous Shinarite hospitality, and a waste of all my wanderings, were I to entertain preferences for one god’s way of attending to his needs over another’s. Some deities are compunctious when it comes to employing their versatility to satisfy their lusts, and some are not; that is all there is to it. Yahweh happened to be one of those who didn’t hold with irresponsible metamorphosis. It’s as likely to be a question of stomach as morality. He — Yahweh — just felt more comfortable keeping His own shape.

And so He philandered with my mother through the medium of pure light. I employ no figure of speech when I say that He took a shine to her. Irradiated her. Lit her up from without and within, while He Himself throbbed above her in the sky like a flaming sunset, or flowed molten like a river ablaze with stars.

For my part I was not overly impressed. Display, when all is said and done, is only display. Coruscations of the heavens only management and timing. Who knows, He might have cut a more awesome figure after all, had He come down snorting and pawing the ground, with a brass ring through His nose and His pizzle bristling.

That, anyway, was how it struck me at the time. Reflection has since taught me that He knew to a nicety what He was about. He kept His distance and lit fireworks not only because that was what He was best at, or all that His fastidiousness would allow Him, but because it enabled Him to creep the long way round the back of carnality. Much of the harm that sex had done to His original scheme — conjoining what He had intended to be separate, fusing what He had meant to keep distinct — He now saw His opportunity to undo. He would reactivate the allure of the inaccessible. Restore hopeless yearning to the central position in human affairs He had always wanted for it.