Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

And when at last we dared to uncover our heads, we saw that the earth around us had become an entire roost, a nest stretching to infinity, smelling of sweet straw and droppings and leaking yolk. And when we listened we heard that there was not a sound under the heavens but that of laying.

That would teach us to impugn the bounty of the One True And All Providing God.

And now my father with a little f would teach me to impugn him.

Fine. Very good. Right.

I saw the magician’s hand raised. And I saw that it was closed. But in my fear of it I swung my head away and bent my neck, when all along it was my neck, the back of me and not the front of me, that the hand was after. It must have been the thumb that found me first, for the pain seemed to come from one blunt and persistent point of pressure. Then the other fingers joined in, and my whole head began to throb, and when I struggled I discovered I was without footing, held like a rabbit by someone with murder in his heart.

You can tell when you are the pretext for your father’s rage, and not its true object. You sense something stoppered, some bitter failure to find satisfaction, in the violence. A piteous sensation of disappointment, that is not your disappointment, runs through you, keener than any merely fleshly anguish. But the realisation that you are both victims only increases your shame: there is now his ignominy to suffer as well as your own.

So I was doubly disgraced when he carried me, kicking and sorrowful, to the place I had cried to go to; and, because my desire to name the fish merited, by God-like logic, that I should join them, he pushed me face down into the water.

I flooded. Not only my mouth but all those other parts that God loved to abuse and shame us with when He disowned our making — my eyes, my ears, my nostrils — filled and forgot their functions. Confused their functions, rather; for I seemed to see the smell of my own fear, tasted the sound of it as it swam towards me, dazzling in colour, finned, breathing beads of air as unblinking as blindness, that burst with the salt odour of uncreation around my drowning head. I had no ears to hear with, but my father’s words roared like pain through the ruffles of swimming skin by which he held me.

You want to play with fish? Fine. Very good. Right. Here are fish… let’s see you play with them. You want to know one from another? Go on, then, go on… meet them. Introduce yourself. Say, hello Flounder. Hello Gobot, this is Turbey. Go on… go on… let’s hear you!

I came up fighting. Sodden, yes. Fearful, certainly. And with a self-esteem every bit as impaired as my father’s. How could it be otherwise? You cannot be granted as a chastisement what you ask for as a kindness, what you understand to be legitimately owing, and still respect yourself. Because his desires were every day a botheration to the Almighty, my father passed on to me — from first father to first son — the burden of unentitlement. So when I say that I came up fighting, I mean with the weapons of the undeserving: sarcasm, irony, contempt. Who but the already defeated looks for consolation in derision?

You bully me, I cried, because I am the one thing crawling on this earth that you are not afraid of.

(Water was still pouring out of me. It’s possible that I spluttered more words than I spoke. But my dishevelment was a help to me. It seemed to prove my point.)

The minute the sky rumbles, I went on, you bow your head.

Your heart fails you whenever a leaf falls.

You leap like a grasshopper from every unfamiliar sound — and because you have no memory every sound is unfamiliar to you.

You whimper in the night.

You are amazed by the morning.

You are amazed by me too, but because you suspect that in the making of me you might at least have lent a hand you feel you may unmake me when it suits you. I alone am subject to you. And you will damage my spirit for no other reason than that they have damaged yours.

They?

He knew who — he knew what — I meant by they.

Them.

Those two.

Their harmony. Their understanding. Their honey-sweet compliance.

Had I aimed a stone at my father’s heart I could not have dealt him a crueller blow. We did not mention it, this collusion between my mother and the God who had created her as an afterthought, on a passing fancy, to be a help meet to my father, seeing as he looked lost and lonely. We did not mention that the help meet was no help; that God’s afterthought had become His first thought. We looked the other way when He came courting on a thunderbolt, older than time but shining like a lover. Invisible but omnipresent. Athrob.

Athrob — it was my private name for Him. The stress falling on the first syllable, the A as in Ache. Or Babel. Athrob. Still, when I come upon the word, I think of mouldering majesty and unseemly passion.

What we did not mention, though, became more evident with every day that passed: woman had grown to be of greater interest to her Maker than man. She who had scarcely figured in the original scheme now occupied the forefront of His attention. She was the gateway to sin, the reason why of law, the coloration of the concept of a fall. He — HE — had only to look at her to see cause for another thousand legislative niceties and prohibitions. A smile from my mother had Him ransacking the storehouses of His moral system. A single bead of sweat upon her downy arm threw His metaphysic into a fever of activity. He could not take His mind off her. And in her belly stirred the future.

Was not the future, you may ask, already on the earth in me? No. I was the past, the punishment and the forfeit for that sin which He That Is Without Sin had hatched out of His consuming jealousy. Fantastical fictions boiled in His brain. Stories of treachery, envy, malice, spite. A whole bubbling mythology of celestial insurrection and perfidy and disguise, all to posit the idea of a grand and almost worthy adversary, without whom, as an explanation of my mother’s indiscretion, the Lord God Almighty would have been thrown back on the shaming proposition — shaming to Him — that she freely chose cohabitation with that inert lump of dough, originally intended as a companion for things bestial and creeping — my father.

At my birth there had been only lamentation.

Hence the stone I aimed at my proper father’s heart.

Not another word, he warned me. Not so much as a letter.

He showed me his hands. Closed. Name one more unnamable relation, his hands said, name one more unnamable mother or one more unnamable God, and you will never name anything again.

I submitted — another link in the great chain of submission — lowering my dripping head, bowing my bruised neck, and allowing him to lead me, though I might with as much reason have led him, to where my mother laboured. Or rather, to the environs of where my mother laboured. Not too close. I was on rations as to proximity. His idea. Not his, His. I was to be kept at a distance, out of sight and out of touch, so that I should not breathe contamination on the future. The expedition to find and name the fish had been conceived on high, precisely in order that I should be removed from the scene at the very hour that my mother’s swollen stomach was expected to reveal its contents. And, of course, in order that my father should be removed likewise. Very neat. Very tidy. Two tiddlers in one net. Leaving the field free for Him to run errands, boil water, mop brows, hold hands. Bend that mighty back in the exquisite degradation of service. Savour the most corrupt of all inverted rituals — worshipping one’s own handiwork. And be the first to see that bloody little head appear. Except that, in the event, my father could not keep his distance or his nerve; and would rather have drowned me than miss out on his wife’s wailing.