Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

I wondered if the afternoon itself had anything to do with it, so sudden and violent did I find Semyaza’s willingness to pull down the very heavens, let my mother only wink him to it. It was a day for extraordinary event. Beneath a sun hotter than we had ever yet been punished with, a molten fire-spitting sun, the earth fainted. Birds dropped from the sky. Mosquitoes browned, like dead leaves, in stolen gore. Tusked, probosciformed creatures crawled out of the forests on their bellies, unable to separate their tongues from the dried-up gullies of their mouths. Had my father thought of doing his rain impressions, wherever my father was, he could have called all nature to him. Bleh! bleh! bleh!

It was a perverse, tormenting heat, baking rivers into rocks and melting rocks back into rivers. Plants that had not been there in the morning grew to the height of angels, flowered the colour of blood and fell apart. Irrigated by my perspiration, the tree I hid in rose six cubits every hour, with me in it. Why then should not a seraph stand with his wings open between my mother and that great ball of flame, look shamelessly on her muddy breasts, and chance Hell on a kiss? It was just the day.

Naïve of me. The sun plays no part in incinerations of the kind Semyaza sought. And neither, strictly speaking, did my mother. Semyaza’s nature was treacherous, and treachery stokes its own fires. It needs no circumstances or pretexts or motives. Motivelessness is the very thing it thrives on. Ask any recreant — the slighter the precipitating agent, the sweeter the treason. Semyaza had it in him to whistle off his allegiance to the Lord God of Hosts just to pass the time of day. And of course the Lord God of Hosts had it in Him to watch Semyaza do it.

Azael’s disgruntlement — for all I knew as long standing as Semyaza’s perfidy, and for all I knew they both had been what they were now ever since they’d been bred or hatched from spirit — was, by comparison, mere stripling sullenness. He had been passed over in some way, demoted, valued under his deserts, made an envoy instead of an ambassador — this seemed to be the sum of his grievance. His jaw trembled in remembrance of it, he picked his skin and wore his reddish hair in curls beneath a coronet, presumably out of self-spite, in order to resemble a half-fallen cherub, but he did not look capable of plotting serious rebellion. He did not have the verve or the ambition to go the way of Satan. If there was venery in heaven, a hankering for matter where matter was not meant to be, Azael would certainly have been among those whispering on its behalf. It was easy to imagine him waving a silver sword and turning that pettish, slightly second-hand look of his into a prizeable commodity where languor was in short supply. But futility was his object; failure and oppression the only outcome he looked forward to.

And he was decidedly not interested in my mother.

The moment Semyaza began one of his charged interrogations — ‘Tell me about yourself, Eve. What is it like being a mother? Do you have to make conscious adjustments to the way you think when you go from husband to son? Are you a different woman when you are a wife than when you are with your children? Does your body feel the same to you in both contexts? Whose touch do you prefer?’ — Azael would rattle his hackle-feathers and take off on a short, dipping walk, until his wings became entangled in vegetation, or the spontaneous eruption of fungi beneath his feet made him nauseous, and he was forced to return.

To my surprise — because I thought he might have liked the composition of virgin and child — Azael was not interested in my brother either. It’s possible he did not want a baby pulling at his ravaged flesh, or that he thought two cherubic urchins in such restricted company was one cherubic urchin too many. Whatever his reasons, he would back away, with something between disgust and terror in his eyes, whenever Abel crawled towards him; and sometimes, when the crying started, he would lie belly down in the guggling mud and pull his wings over his ears and head, like a bat, so that everything around him would be black and silent.

Semyaza, though, could not put Abel down. He searched his fat little body for the buds of wings, threw him high into the air to see what sort of flier he would make, swung him across his shoulders, rubbed him between the palms of his hands as though mystified by the substance he was made of. ‘What do you feel when you see him?’ he asked my mother. ‘What do you feel when you see him with me? Do you mind my playing with him like this? Do you fear for his safety? Is that what it is to be a mother — to be continuously anxious? Forgive me for asking, but does love for one child supplant love for another? Do you have to remind yourself not to let such a thing happen, or is maternal love too blinding to be controlled? Can you point to the place where you feel this love? Does it have a specific location in your body, or is it diffused and spirituous as it is with us? Please don’t answer if you would rather not, but it is all fascinating to me.’

All? My mother did not flinch when she said this.

Nor did Semyaza. ‘All — you, your children, your husband.’

Fascinating though we were to him, Semyaza never once inquired as to my father’s whereabouts, or mine.

Later, on a third or fourth visit, while Azael was off limping through the undergrowth, Semyaza for no apparent reason scooped Abel up in a single hand and began to squeeze him. Very slowly, very purposefully, with his fingers supporting Abel’s back and his angelic thumb pressed into his middle, he made as if to close his hand. The baby’s screams kept Azael out of the way. Semyaza held my mother, as surely as he held Abel, at the end of an unfaltering stare. In proportion as he increased the pressure of his thumb did he intensify the coercion in his eye. All three of them were joined in a perfect equipoise of tension; whatever thrill of fear ran through one, ran through them all. Ran through me too, to the degree that I thought I would have to give my game away and come running from the tree, calling for Semyaza to stop, crying blue murder, and shouting for my father to do something useful with his own hands, just this once, and wrestle down an angel.

Then, just as suddenly and unaccountably as he had begun, Semyaza left off. Still without lowering his stare or making any gesture to shadow his naked and unprotected face, he handed back Abel, a spray of crushed flowers, to my mother’s care.

‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I had. to do that. It was a test of my will-power over yours. I did warn you to expect this. It is very important to me to win. You were aware, of course, that it was you I was squeezing.’

She put her baby to her breast. A protective gesture all round. But she was no longer striking poses.

I don’t care what you are testing in yourself, she said. But I would like to know what you are testing in me.

He angled his head, this way and that, so that she should see how unconcealed he was. His brow, his nose, the great sweep of his jaw, as bare as a clump of boulders. Then he smiled, an angel’s smile, irradiating them all. ‘You were created good,’ he said. ‘You have not, however, always stayed that way. We are sent, by a God who loves you, to report on your progress and to remind you of the benefits of perseverance in virtue. Consider the squeeze to be both a token from me, whose essence is perseverance, and a memento from Him, whose essence, as you know, is love.’

He ordered you to hurt a baby?

I am still able to recall the exact tone in which my mother asked that astonished question. Perhaps because I have heard it so many times since, and will go on hearing it as long as there are mothers. Hurt a baby? Can there be those who would wish malice on a baby? Astonishing that they should be so astonished, when all along it is the clamour of young, helpless, demanding life that is most likely to turn us savage, and makes murderers even out of mothers themselves.