Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

Could it be, then, that against the very crime from which He so vehemently and particularly swore us, He had originally made no adequate provision? Had left it entirely to the fancy of my father whether he had the stomach for it or not?

My mother laughed again. Low, low. The Eve-laugh, derisive of everything. Almost everything. Her fingers tracing the circles of my brother’s hair. It only became a sin, she said, never mind an unpardonable crime, on the day that I, the afterthought and antidote, was given existence. Until then, until me, there were few distinctions made between one kind of brute behaviour and another. The Lord God, blessed be He, did not concern Himself greatly where your father put his body. But He did concern Himself — as I recall He concerned Himself every minute of every hour — where I put mine.

On the grounds that you might breed monsters?

On the grounds that I might approach monsters.

Rising like a river mist, my mother’s bitterness wreathed around us in the night air, creating an illusion of safe intimacy, encouraging a sort of camaraderie in extremity, the swooning desperation of drunkenness.

So the Law originates, I began, in the Lord’s fear…

Precisely, she said… of a woman’s incontinence.

And morality resides…

Precisely, she said… in the pizzle of a pig.

We should have taken it as a sign, an anti-covenant, that we were not at that instant smitten with madness, blindness and astonishment of heart. He was not listening — that was the one certain conclusion we could draw from the stars not immediately going out in the heavens. He was not at home, else our lives should have hung in doubt before us. He was off, absent, otherwise engaged. I don’t know, now, why it took us so long to work out He was moonlighting, had found Himself another set of nostrils to blow into — but that was the obvious explanation. We had cousins out there and He wasn’t telling us their names.

So I consider I did well, getting His voice to come walking in my garden in the cool of the day, given what other calls there were on His time. But I had to sweat for it. In an element I abhorred.

Of the success or failure I enjoyed, cultivating what nature had never intended to be seen, controlling what nature had always intended should be free, I cannot, in this company, summon the effrontery to speak. The gardens and gardeners of Babel are justly famous. It is no surprise to me, now that I have seen them for myself, that men travel vast distances for the privilege of admiring the smoothness of your lawns and inhaling the perfumes of your rockeries. There can be few sights better calculated to soothe the temper of inhabitants of a blistered land and make them aspire to a green and watery hereafter, than the husbandmen of Babel up early on the seventh day, cutting back their grass, falling upon enthusiastic growth — chickweed, thistle, twitch — and otherwise waging war on that garish propagation which is the combined wish of a hot sun and well-dug wells.

Back! Back!

That so confirmed an enmity to growth should be a prerequisite in all those who call themselves growers would be a puzzle to me were it not for my own experience of husbandry. I have this in common with you, gentlemen and gentlewomen cultivators of Babel: we are each of us convinced that we can improve at every turn on what is natural. Beyond that, I would not dare to press the similarity. Your aim is a quiet beauty, an expression of vegetal serenity that will serve as an example in the moral sphere. And the success of your faith may be judged by the number of your citizens who actually resemble gardens. I, on the other hand, lopped and pruned lustily, as I have already hinted, for purposes that were preeminently political. I did not require that the soil should, merely to soothe the jagged nerves of growers or to harmonise with secular hymn-singing, be more temperate in its yield; rather I wished to educate it in the science of self-dislike. Perverseness, if you prefer. I saw no reason why it shouldn’t feel as odd about itself as I did. I mean as odd as I did about myself. But I suppose I also mean as odd as I did about it.

It was thus that I discovered something disgusting about nature. You cannot be too cruel to it. Short, that is, of wiping it out altogether, there is nothing you can do to it that it doesn’t in some way find provocative, stimulating, a challenge to its ingenuity. An incision is as encouraging as a caress. An amputation a positive incitement. Set fire to it and you can see its gratitude putting forth tender shoots of green appreciation, naked as wounds, almost before the smoke has cleared.

I had observed the same phenomenon in stray animals that took up residence with us, hoping to be adopted, yearning for domestication, greedy, in a way that shamed me personally, for love. Abel made a better fist of giving it than I did. He had a rabbit that would let him stroke it. An ass that would rub noses with him. A rat that walked across his head from one shoulder to another. And Enosh, a miserable pariah-dog of low intelligence who wanted nothing out of life except to curl up in Abel’s lap while Abel lay curled up in my mother’s. How large my menagerie might have been I never found out because I quickly sent packing whatever had expectations of me which I knew I would be unable to fulfil. It is a frightful thing to be looked at by a helpless creature that wishes you to know your power over it, that wishes you to exercise that power, this side of Lilith-like strangulation, in return for a devotion only a sick man could value in his heart.

But what was true of the pain-lust of a stook of corn, and true of a retarded mongrel’s hunger for humiliation, was no less true of us, made in the image of a God that hourly rehearsed feelings of rejection. My father soaked up punishment from my mother as though he were a dried-up river bed and my mother’s coolness to him, rain. I sat myself on the ground and observed the nightly soaping of my brother’s blue-white limbs for all the world as if I’d been frozen in that attitude, mesmerised, pinioned to a tree trunk from which I could not hope to move, when all along I was at liberty to take a quiet stroll in any direction I fancied. My mother visited cruelties on herself, pumping bile around her body; envious, though there was no other woman in our world for her to envy; reclusive, though there was no one for her to hide from; ill-prepared to face a day until she could taste the poison of her own nature in her mouth. And Abel — ah, Abel — never once thought about practising a retreat in preparation for the day when I would begin striking him in earnest.

He visited me occasionally in my garden, once he had grown too big for spinning shells. We didn’t speak much. He had a capacity for enduring long spells of inactivity and silence in my company which I took to be a compliment to me and a proof of our affection. It was not like my father’s taciturnity, which had something to do with finding me uncanny, but more an affirmation of mutual confidence: we didn’t need to talk because we were sure of each other’s esteem. Words are invariably aggressive, belligerent in intention no matter how defensively one pretends to deploy them. The fact that we scarcely used any must have meant that we were essentially at peace.

Mustn’t it?

I hoard my memories of those long mute afternoons. There is never a time when I am not turning them over. They have a burnish on them. A yellow light. Reminiscent of those pulsing sunsets with which the Word once wooed the idea of woman in my mother, when the sky crinkled and curled and swallowed flame, like a leaf swept on to a gardener’s fire in its last second before cremation.

He is aflame himself, my brother, in all of them. There is so much fire around him that I cannot make out the expression in his eyes. Only his mouth is distinct. Lacking colour. Not quite steady. The lips a little apart so that he can show his teeth. A flicker of amusement upon them… not the smirk of plebeian triumph, no, not that, but something the smallest bit like mockery, as if it’s all just too droll, too droll even to talk about, I on my knees mixing blood and bone, stirring mulch, grafting poppies on to convolvulus so that we can have scarlet wound around every post and tree trunk, so that we can have an incarnadined backdrop to our conversationlessness, and he pacing up and down, as mute as his own shadow, wasting his beauty on thin air.