Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

They had also fallen out over theology. Their souls, he maintained, were composed of millions of particles of light, stolen from the original Realm of Light and imprisoned in their bodies by the Demons of Darkness. Eventually these particles would be gathered back to their natural source and they, Adam and Lilith — Lilith and Adam, if that was how she preferred it — would no longer feel strangers in creation.

Gibberish, was her opinion of this theory. Their souls were nothing other than toads and worms, put there by Satan, who was good, to remind them that life itself was the invention of God, who was bad. She would ask him to remember this when he satisfied his lust for debauchery upon her with his serpent’s tail, and initiated a seminal process that was bound to end unhappily. Do not expect me, she warned him, to look kindly on any infants born to us in perpetuation of this evil.

It was not a marriage made in heaven. Even before she left him he was searching his desires for alternatives, and practising how to ask God for Eve. A smooth skin, was his first stipulation. A gentle disposition. Calm eyes. A strong maternal instinct.

But now, in his dreams, he was missing the abrasion of Lilith’s badness. Her fiery stare. Her stables-stench. The nettle-sting of her embraces, which a man might simulate only by taking the head of a wart-hog or an enormous pineapple into his arms.

He cried out for her. Lilith! Lilith! But she was out on the night with the vultures and the screech owls, hunting for newborn babies — the abode of toads and worms — to strangle and devour.

He fared no better with his twin.

You could say, because there was no name, because the first and last of his nightmare was a hopeless search to find the name, that he fared worse.

Hence his grief. He was one half of a whole, he had once shared a completeness, complemented a reflection, but he could not remember with whom.

He had loved someone dearly but he could not quite — no, he could not at all — recall the face. He could recall only the last recollection of a recollection. And that was featureless.

He could not hear the voice either. Or make out the shape. Or guess the sex. Or be certain of the species.

He was beholden, he acknowledged debt, he rejoiced in obligation and fantasies of requital, but his gratitude hung disregarded in the black waters of his memory, like an unbaited hook.

He went wandering high and low, hoping for a trace, an intimation in some passing countenance. But no one passed. Not a single person.

He began to search the faces of animals. Horses, pigs, jackals, cattle, ostriches, bears. Except for the ostriches, who took his curiosity to be an impertinence and ran from him in rage, all the animals were good about it, showing him their profiles, right and left, and letting him peer long into their molten eyes until he was satisfied they were not who he was looking for. The bears were especially sympathetic, and laid saddened paws on his shoulders, as though they had gone twin-hunting themselves in earlier days and understood its anguish.

But it was with cats that he came nearest. In them he saw a misincarceration as tragic as his own, a confused isolation, a companionlessness that stretched every second between eating and sleeping into a futile eternity. If ever a creature was an incomplete half of an idea, a cat was. He tried to engage them in conversation on this topic but they professed not to know what he was talking about. If ever a creature was sufficient to itself, they told him, a cat was. He told them, in his turn, that they were bound to say that. They reminded him that he was the one who had stopped to talk. He said it wasn’t his intention to challenge, only to condole with them. They thanked him but wished him to be assured that they didn’t need his condolences. He thanked them but explained that he badly needed theirs. They said they were not in the business of commiseration. He offered it as his opinion, though they might take it or leave it, that that was because their alienation from the other half of themselves had led to a hardening of their hearts. They said they would leave it. He said they had chosen badly. They asked who he thought he was to know what was best for them. He asked who they thought they were to know what was best for themselves, when half of themselves was missing. Thereafter it always ended with his getting scratched.

On these nights the cries that were torn from his chest were not so terrible as when the monkey-men had him, or Lilith was out on the wind. They were more like yelps or whinnies, the sounds of merely routine animal excruciation. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t torment in the dream and bitterness in the aftermath; it simply meant that it was the missing twin who suffered it.

I don’t know whether I could have been of any help or comfort to him, even if I’d had the courage to go near. Ours was not a touching family. We didn’t give embraces easily — my brother’s bath-time was hardly evidence of ease — and we didn’t receive them comfortably. We could be rough and ready with one another, we could cuff and clip and buffet, provided that every blow was glancing and there was no lingering in looks or clinches. Had my hand rested on my father’s skin for any longer than it takes a lizard to lick up a fly, I believe it would have burst into flames. To this day I carry no knowledge of what his flesh felt like — which is in accordance, I suspect, with how the Lord wanted it — and only guess that it was clammy: oily and rubbery but cold, like octopus.

I can’t imagine on what basis he’d be able to offer any more detailed a description of mine.

Modesty — I mean modesty in the sense of bashfulness not inexpectancy: pure bodily unwillingness and shame — had been his trouble from the start. Often, when Abel had fallen asleep coiled like a kitten in my mother’s lap, and hot nights and bitterness had salted and loosened her tongue, I learnt things about my father I would never have heard from his own lips. Such as, that at the very moment of his creation, when the clay was still wet and the outline of the pattern still indistinct, he had sought the means to cover himself; that his functions were a horror to him, impossible to perform in the sight of an earthworm let alone an All Seeing Creator; that, solitary and unpaired upon the planet, without the sensibilities of another of his kind to consider, he nevertheless put a smothering hand to his mouth every time he belched or hiccoughed, and suffered agonies rather than audibly, in the hearing of no one, No One, break wind; that he had been fashioned with more ingenuity than forethought, to propagate his species out of his single self (small wonder he invented a Lilith) — by fission rather than by fire, like an amoeba rather than a phoenix — but had demanded a wife for companionship and pleasure because he could not approach, could not contemplate, could not without abhorrence envisage, the alternative.

I take it that by the alternative, I asked, you mean celibacy?

She laughed. From low, low in her chest one of those ashen, acrid, mother’s laughs that make a God-hater and father-killer out of every son. I mean, she said, his pigs.

His pigs? Wasn’t that…? Isn’t that…?

I wanted to be sure I had this right. We had all heard with our own ears — and frequently enough to be in no doubt that He expected to be obeyed — the Vowelless One pronounce against confusion: the familial confusion which is wrought when a man uncovers the nakedness of his father’s wife, or lies with mankind as he lies with a woman; and the still greater confusion of the fields — confusion worse confounded — the defilement of man and, oh God, beast! ‘Surely the man shall be put to death,’ He had warned. How could I forget that? I had discussed the self-same topic with my father on the eve of his taking up ventriloquism. And how could I forget what came next? ‘And ye shall slay the beast!’ It seemed so tough on the poor beast, who might just have been ruminating in a field, jaws going, without a lubricious thought in its head.