Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

Afloat on His radiant complacency, the Lord spoke:

‘Blessed be the fruit of thy body, Adam, and the fruit of thy ground.’ (In other moods He had cursed both, promising only sorrow and thistles. Today He had seen His bounty in a glass, and so was bountiful.) ‘Now set aside thy necromancy, which is an abomination unto me, and take thy wife. To her shalt thou cleave, for she has washed for thee thirteen times twenty-seven days. Therefore I say to thee, Take her, for she is thy lawful wife, and has borne thee two sons, and has kept her apart from thee thirteen times twenty-seven days according to my commandment, and now is clean unto thee.’

He was prolix, but He was clear. This time, though, it would be my father’s turn to show particularity.

Clean?

Let the All Surrendering, in His discretion, only turn His back and retire to the chaste hosannas of His angels, and we would see about clean.

I have a theory to explain my father’s failure to accept victory with good grace. It can be blamed, I maintain, on the mischievous intervention of a third party. I have no hard evidence to support such a conviction other than the foreignness to my father’s nature of what he was about to do, and the foreignness to his capacities of what he already had done. The ventriloquism presented no challenges to likelihood; that was his, right enough. Similarly the cumbersome device of the look-alike statuary. That whole side of the project bore the unmistakable marks of his childish wastefulness — an expenditure of time and ingenuity and concentration out of all proportion to any foreseeable result. That the outcome was, after all, such a resounding success for him had nothing to do with crepitation of the abdomen or puppeteering or impersonation. Words were what won him the day, not magic; a linguistic persuasiveness which he could not possibly have found in himself, which he assuredly did not come to me for, and which must therefore, by simple elimination, have been lent him by someone else. And the someone else in question — the someone else I do not hesitate to put in question — had just the temperament, and just the conviction of aggrievedness, and, not to beat about the bush, just the inwrought misogyny (how many thousand thousand years singing of seedlessness does it take?) to concoct the little ordeal to which my father — quite uncharacteristically, I repeat — was soon to submit his wife.

But before the criminal, the crime…

It should have been an occasion for rapturous emotions, their first night together after so protracted a quarantine. They should have burned the skin off their fingertips just touching. They should have drowned in each other’s tears; twined eye-beams until they did not know whose gaze was whose — just as I, put to bed betimes but lying listening with my thumb to Abel’s pulse, willingly mistook the evenness of his breathing for my own. It should have been a night for sweetness and ebullience; after the crushed petals and the music of the flesh and the dancing beneath the moon, a night of subdued riot. They were still in their infancy, remember; sent finished, fully formed into this breathing world, they had scarcely more experience of it than I had. It should have been a night of escapades and monkey-tricks and hot pursuit.

And for an hour or two it was. For a brief atheistic interlude, they gave themselves over to reckless horse-play. Reckless and wordless horse-play — for there had been words enough today — the mad abandon of the mute.

They ran, they chased, they shinned up coco-palms, they fought for fruit, they swung, they fell.

As soon as they had gained their breath, they began again. Shaking nuts out of the trees, pressing dates into each other’s mouths, throwing sand, lassoing each other with loops of vine, piling leaves, like pyres, over their glinting bodies.

Lying on his back, panting, with a moon in each eye, and his legs braced to support her, my father invited his reclaimed wife to climb aboard him, her feet secure in his magician’s hands, her fingers suckered to his knees like clams, so that when he rose and she fell their positions were reversed, whereupon she rose and he fell, and he rose and she fell, and she rose…

They made so much noise, rising and falling, that they woke Abel. I was never far from him at night. How could I be? His heart was still beating for the two of us. I was over him before he could begin to cry, pinching his collapsing lips together. Unable to come out at his mouth, fear spurted from his eyes.

I gathered him up and hoisted him on to my shoulder. Look, I said, pushing aside fronds for him, snatching him a brief clearing in nature. Look, do you know what that is?

He looked. I looked. Brothers in astonishment, we peered out of foliage at our noble progenitors, far gone in hilarity and quite indistinguishable one from the other — a single beast with a circular spine, able to move only by tumbling over and over itself — cartwheeling crazily between the palms, crashing through undergrowth, bringing down figs and pomegranates, threatening to spin off into the night, a permanent revolution, laughing from both ends, lit by a million incurious stars.

Look, I said, our father and mother.

Only when they were bruised and exhausted and had come apart with a sound like the breaking of suction, did my father venture to speak. And only because she was bruised and exhausted did my mother not venture to stop him.

Let’s play at supposing, he said.

My mother said nothing. The first rule of supposing is that silence on either side denotes an unwillingness to play.

I assume this rule applies in Babel too. Unless in Babel you are never unwilling to play at supposing.

In which case you will approve of my father’s persistence.

Let’s suppose a man’s wife go aside, he said. And…

He was having difficulty breathing. They were both having difficulty breathing. And words were as much the reason as the cartwheel.

… and commits a trespass against him…

Still nothing, still no playing, from my mother.

… and a man lie with her carnally… and it be hid from the eyes of her husband… and be kept close…

You use too many ands, my mother said. You sound like God. And I do not know what you are talking about.

… and… AND… she be defiled…

(Defiled? Hidden in leaves, frightened, I rolled Abel’s putty fingers into a little fist and crammed it into my mouth.)

All right, my mother said, let us suppose. But first what am I to suppose is the purpose of this supposition?

My father looked alarmed. Having done all the supposing so far, he was not prepared to be on the receiving end of my mother’s. He put his hands out to stop her. There seemed to be a precise incantatory order, a due sequence of supposings, which he was anxious not to break.

And, he said, and… and the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be defiled; or… or if the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be not defiled…

A laugh without laughter from my mother. A laugh with ice and distance in it, like a sea-bird’s cry.

I see the termination of all your ands, she said. And… and… and… what is to be done to soothe this husband’s jealousy? How to know if it is founded or unfounded? By what means is it to be released from the torment of its uncertainty?

Exactly, said my father.

It isn’t, said my mother.

Now it was his turn to be at a loss. It isn’t what?

It isn’t to be released. Not ever. Jealousy is a broken wing. No flight is possible thereafter.

(Flight! I stuffed Abel’s fingers further down my throat. Was it wise of her to speak of flight?)

Wrong, my father said. And he made the word resonate like the gong it rhymed with. Wrong! — you set free the jealousy by proving or disproving the cause.