Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

‘Not in the shop,’ they tell him.

‘Not at this hour.’

‘Not when we’re so busy.’

And anyway, they want to know, who is this him he’s waiting for?

Sisobk is astonished they need to ask. Does anyone else come here? In his mind’s eye he has always seen it as a place given over wholly to the cleansing of Cain. ‘The murderer,’ he says.

The barbers make little round mouths at one another. Of course, the murderer. Aha, the murderer. Incontestably and without a doubt and how could they have been so stupid as to have forgotten, the murderer.

‘Can I leave a message, then?’ the prophet asks.

‘Verbal,’ says a barber, ‘or will you be writing it on your foot?’

‘Will you tell him,’ Sisobk persists, ‘that I’ve located the fissure.’

‘Just so we can be sure about it,’ inquires a barber, ‘which fissure exactly is this?’

Not having been here for defoliation, Sisobk is unprepared for the success of fissure.

‘Where the God of Israel unzipped the desert,’ he explains, ‘and swallowed all Korah’s followers but On.’

‘But on what…?’ a barber would be told.

‘I think he means but one,’ another ventures.

‘On — On!’ Sisobk tells them. ‘On — the husband of his wife. And that’s someone else I want to talk to him about.’

‘On?’

‘On’s wife.’

‘Careful,’ they warn him, ‘we’ll have no wife talk in this shop.’

‘Unless it’s bloody,’ says one.

‘Oh, it’s bloody,’ says Sisobk.

‘And hair-raising.’

‘Oh, it’s hair-raising,’ says Sisobk.

‘And barbaric.’

‘Oh, it couldn’t be more barbaric,’ says Sisobk.

‘In that case,’ they all say together, ‘and seeing as we’ve nothing much else to do, why don’t you tell us about her?’

Which is how Sisobk the Scryer comes to be sitting on the floor of Cain’s barber-shop, with possibly as pretty and excitable but certainly as numerous a gathering around him as he has ever mustered, spinning stories from the Cainite bible, the Haggadah, and his head.

‘There was a wife,’ he says, ‘a brave, beautiful, suffering woman…’

But we’ll tell it our way, before he has the budgerigars falling off their perches and a cage of psittacosis on his conscience.

It is night in the desert.

Soon, very soon now, the earth’s crust will crack and a gash like the shadow of forked lightning will open in the sand.

There is little movement about the camp. There are no more meetings. No more mutterings. Now is the time for waiting. Only Moses and Aaron are out, muffled against the coming chill, fringed against temptation, bejewelled against impertinence, wound, in gorgeous linen and phylacteries, against the night-flying infection of scepticism. Only Moses and his brother Aaron visiting the tabernacles of the unrighteous, making one final appeal to the spirit of God within them.

‘I have said my say,’ Korah declares. ‘Be gone.’

Ditto Dathan.

Ditto Abiram.

And On? He is asleep in his tent when Moses and Aaron come by. Asleep, snoring and drunk. He has his wife to thank for this condition. ‘Sit here, drink this, say nothing, and I will save thee,’ she has told him, knowing how unfitted he is to save himself sober.

He has been a no one, a no On, a nebbish, all his life. ‘What matters it to thee who runs this hell-hole?’ she asked him, when he returned puffed with the rhetoric of conspiracy from his first secret meeting with Korah. ‘Thou art but a disciple, whoever rules.’

He rubbed his hand over his face, frustrated because a hand was not a sponge. He gets hot when his wife asks questions of him. ‘I don’t have a choice in the matter any longer,’ he protested. ‘I have participated in their counsels and they have sworn me to be with them.’

‘You have a choice,’ she told him. ‘Sit here, drink this, and shut up.’

He obeyed. Why not? Trouble in the tent, trouble out of the tent… a man’s only friend is his wineskin.

He snoozed through the rebellion, through Korah’s twitting of Moses, through the gainsaying of the Law, and he snoozes now through the last errand of mercy that Moses and Aaron make to his tabernacle.

Or at least to the environs of his tabernacle. What stops them getting any closer than the length of a dozen donkeys, lined up nose to rump, is the sight of On’s wife sitting at the entrance to her tent, her hair unloosed. They see the tumble of black curls with moonlight in them, reaching almost to the sand, and they retreat. It is not seemly for a man to look upon the unloosed hair of a woman not his wife. More to the point, it is not safe. It distracts a scholar from his studies and a prophet from his tablets. It inflames…

Sisobk the Scryer makes a meal of this, of course, to put before the barbers. But we must assume a smaller proportion of hairdressers among our readership. Besides, it’s common knowledge what a single strand of hair inflames in already hot places…

Suffice to say that rather than risk a fire in their natures, with the earth about to open any minute, the brothers feel for their fringes, turn on their heels and consider On to have relented.

On’s wife sits on her seat and watches them go: Moses, affecting the stoop of unappreciated beneficence, of gentle-heartedness misunderstood; Aaron, stiffer in his gait, the golden bells on the hem of his ephod and the onyx stones on his shoulders flickering like fireflies in the darkness. The desert has turned quickly cold, the sand between her toes sharp and icy suddenly, like broken shells. She shudders. Inside the tent On is snoring loudly, as helplessly given over to unconsciousness tonight as he was yesterday the slave of Korah’s eloquence. There is nothing and no one that cannot sway him. He bends before the gentlest breeze. She can keep him safe only so long as she can keep him drunk. But safe for what?

On’s wife is not as far gone in despair as many women in the camp. She does not succumb to the wilderness hysteria that keeps some wives hidden inside their tents, screaming and laughing, sometimes unable or unwilling to move a limb, frightened of sun, sand, scorpions, convinced they have been led into a habitation fit only for ostriches and dragons. The terrain of her disquiet is emotional not vegetal, crossed not by wolves and jackals but by wild yearnings and savage disillusionments. She is a rare gift that no one is worthy to receive. She is an unseen flower (we are handing back to Sisobk for this) — an unsung poem, a golden goblet of untasted wine upset in a desert at midday.

In short — a woman.

She sits, without a shawl, waiting for the fireflies that flicker around Aaron to go out. A light wind has got up, bringing with it the smell of spices and sea and rotting jungle from afar. It lifts her hair, separating the tresses as loving fingers might. Without warning, the wind turns around. She can hear voices on it now. Altercation. Defiance. Scorn. The peevishness that would surely be finding a path to On’s small spirit had she not closed its ears.

Then all words are engulfed by a terrible sound, as of the earth tearing. She does not see the rip. She only feels the ground give way, heave like the deck of a ship, slump like the back of a grudging camel, then subside altogether, as though a mole of enormous size has begun mining beneath her. A hand reaches up from the underworld and claims the stool on which she is sitting. Something tugs at her skirt. And then she sees the tent begin to lurch.

Inside, although the ground is not yet broken, a great whirlwind has been raised. Vessels heavy with wine and oil take to the air and rain down their contents. Rugs which had once belonged to Pharaohs, inducements from Korah, are thrown about like leaves. Mezuzahs and phylacteries unscroll themselves, scattering scripture. Everything is in violent and fastidious motion, impelled by an urgency of separation. In these final moments all things wish to be inviolably themselves. Including On’s bed, which shakes and rolls, seeing its way of being rid of On at last.