Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

Not as now, Semyaza sans Azael.

Azael’s role was never clear. Apart from the camomile and talcum he fought Semyaza over, there did not appear to be any reason — though I have thought of one since — for him to have come among us. As a representative of the Divine he made a poor impression, and as a proxy suitor to my mother he was ineffective — a go-between whose jaw quivered like the pistil of a lily. He brought her gifts sometimes, it’s true, airy trumperies of fine-spun glass and gilded tracery, for which she had no earthly use. And he would unexpectedly touch her cheek, or draw back her hair to admire the ornaments in her ears. But these actions, although marks of sincere affection I believed, were meant to demonstrate how far he was from registering my mother’s power, how little she agitated and therefore interested him.

He was on a mission he had no regard for, so much can be safely said, and that mission could only have been the chaperoning of Semyaza. ‘Watch that one scrupulously; don’t let him out of your sight for a single minute,’ God must have directed him, knowing what evil follows when two creatures not of the same sex — man and beast, bee and flower, angel and mortal (species makes no difference) — are left alone together; but knowing just as well how unsuited Azael was to do His bidding. Having entrusted the progress of His affairs to an angel He could not trust, the All Anticipating confided His compunctions to a second angel in whom He had no confidence.

Once again this may look to you like callousness, but see it from His point of view: what else is a First Cause to do to spice up the tedium of predestined effect? Looked at from their point of view, of course, it is small wonder, with so much of their future already, as it were, in the past, that Azael chafed and fingered his bangles, and that Semyaza singed his very eyelashes in a furious plummet to perdition.

Inefficient as Azael had been as a restraining influence on his fellow intermediary, it was his not being there at all that told me this time Semyaza meant harm, that the suddenness of his landing and the impetuosity of his grab for my mother were expressions of more than merely enthusiastic attachment. I heard my mother call — one long noooooo — and the sound of Semyaza starting to beat his wings, a flapping like frightened geese, and then I was out of my tree and running. I reached them just as they were airborne, and might have been able to hold on, perhaps even to add the ballast that kept them grounded, but the downdraught from Semyaza’s wings knocked me over, and when I was on my feet again they had risen level with the tops of the trees, not secure in their ascent by any means, but circling in a death struggle of feathers and flesh, Semyaza’s shoulders pumping frantically, my mother writhing in his grip and tearing at him where she had once rubbed lenitives and where she knew he could eventually be clawed apart. Hearing Abel howling, I ran to him and gathered him up in my arms, pressing his heart to my ear, in case the shock of seeing his mother flying should stop its beat.

To this day I am unable to say whether Semyaza intended to make off with my mother, to fly her to some far-flung corner of this or another planet, for the purpose — and why not? — of starting a brand new race, half-human, half-divine, half-pedestrian, half-pinioned, or whether he was prepared to risk all on possessing her just this one afternoon, just once in full flight, before dropping her cruelly and carelessly to earth. Nor am I able to say for certain, should that single hour of glorious rapacity have been his objective, whether or not he achieved it. Ferociously as my mother fought, they were in the air long enough for an angel of Semyaza’s strength, whose lust had been brimming over for millennia, to have had his way with her as many times as the Lord God Almighty had surely warned him, at the cost of his virgin sempiternity, not to. But I believe, on the evidence of her cries — on the evidence of both their cries — that she eluded him. I was a student of wails and screams. I had named every gasp and groan, every sob and sigh my mother emitted in pursuance of pleasure or sufferance of pain. I had listened to Abel mewl and my father yammer and the angel Semyaza bleat and crow. I knew what triumph was, and submission. And I heard neither. Only lamentation. Even as their aerial engagement grew in desperation — no quarter called for, no quarter given — only a low threnody like mourning, a melancholy expression of shame, each for the other and, more inconsolably still, each for himself. Semyaza, because the hour for payment was at hand, prize or no prize, but prizeless he would have no weapons to ward off bitterness throughout the long night of his headlong fall. My mother, because below her she could see, foreshortened, her two sons locked together, looking up in terror and astonishment, their faces and their bodies, like the ground around them, spattered with blood and tears and feathers and the semen — colourless and thin like the distillation of pure spirit — of a balked angel.

It ended in a way that no one, unless perhaps Semyaza himself, could have anticipated. I had not given my mother up. I felt sure she had the beating of her abductor, if only because he was not constructed efficiently to bear his own weight let alone another’s. But I feared his coming apart too suddenly, at too high an altitude, and the distance my mother, who was not constructed for flight at all, might have to fall. I listened for that loathsome rip, the sound of his wings being torn finally from his back; I willed the event on, but I dreaded it too. And when I saw them at last begin to tumble, unmistakably to lose control and height, I felt the weight of terror drop upon my shoulders and I buried Abel’s face in my neck.

But Semyaza had not come apart; he was still entire, whole but shrinking, losing form and outline, collapsing in on himself like a carcass that was host to maggots, as though, at a silent word from Whoever had loaned him substance, his materiality had instantaneously been called in, and there was now nothing to prevent his liquefaction. Slowly, slowly, as in one of my father’s recurring nightmares, Semyaza dissolved, his corporeality trickling into the very mud from which he had swept my mother, and to which she was now returned, until even his plumage — every quill and barb and vane of it — had oozed away, and he was once again intangible, ideal, a thingless thing of irreducible spirituality, just another bad idea of God’s.

He left no trace, no magical discoloration of the earth, no holy pool which would fill up unaccountably on his anniversary and from which no animal would dare drink. He did not leave so much as a puddle or a stain. And there was no mark of his passing signalled in the heavens either, not a pillar of light for his soul to ascend by, not a single forgiving golden aperture in the clouds. Unless it was precisely by the refusal of all magniloquent effect — the leaden sky itself, the repossession of radiance and light, our sublunary sphere seemingly evacuated — that I Am Who I Am expressed His feelings.

A slime the texture of quicksilver, covering my mother’s flesh and making her burn and shiver all at once, was the only souvenir of her adventure. Months later she would still be trying to wash it off, discovering beads of it, as tenacious as lice, in her hair, upon her belly, between her thighs. And I too kept finding it on me, mercurial proof — of which I was inordinately proud — that she had taken me in her arms the moment she was safe, and that she and I and Abel had held one another in silence for as long, it seemed, as we had previously not held one another at all. Until darkness dropped with a sudden thud, like a coconut, and my mother put her finger first to her own, then to my lips, and said: