Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

He let out a little laugh — no, he let out a little air. It’s the day my mother…

He couldn’t find the words for it.… met my father?… married my father?… did the deed of knowingness with my father…was chosen to be a help meet to my father?… was extracted from the glop and gristle of my father’s innards?… was, to leave my father out of it, to all intents and purposes born? Single out one anniversary for my mother and you singled out them all. If this was the day, then it certainly put forward claims to noteworthiness. Unless you argued it put forward even stronger claims to be forgotten.

But I didn’t turn my mind to this. Or to the accuracy of his time-keeping. My curiosity had narrowed to something smaller, hairier, stickier than the seeds of common groundsel I carried, for the purpose of yellowing out a family of purple loosestrife, in my fist. How long, was all I wanted to be told, had he been indulging this sentimentality.

I had already been told. Always. That’s to say, for as many years as he could remember.

Without me? Without asking me if I’d like to join him in the commemorative gesture? Two brothers, one bunch?

But you don’t believe in such things, he reminded me. You have always scoffed at such… festive proclamations of periodicity and connectedness.

I didn’t believe in them? I thought we all didn’t believe in them.

He shook his head. His nimbus of curls spiralling like golden worms. An expression of closure, of not wanting to air or raise any difference of opinion between us, dimming his features. I could see he was ready to be somewhere else now, away spinning shells, off with his sheep, unconscious on his back in a dead stupor of exquisite over-attunement. It saddened him too much, saddening me — was how I understood it.

So they’d kept up this ritual of giving and taking just between the two of them?

Yes.

And my mother would be expecting him to keep it up today?

Yes. But I can gather flowers for my mother by myself.

I wouldn’t, of course, hear of it. What, let my brother chance the fairness of his skin on murderous thorn or nettle? Risk him fainting from the smell of primrose or the delicate configuration of freesia? No. I would not have been able to live with myself. I scattered my seeds and took him by the wrist — not meaning to pinch hard — and led him to the buttercups I had bred red, and the cornflowers I had empurpled, and the bearded speedwell I had crimsoned by a method of chromosome interference so drastic that I knew what it was to be a god.

Here, I said, gathering him armfuls of my favourite mutations. Here. Here.

I loaded him up until he looked like a sport of nature himself.

Will that do? I asked.

I couldn’t see his face, but his voice rang clear through all the vermilion foliation. Absolutely, he said. Let’s just hope my mother likes the colour.

You see: he did enjoy a joke.

Is there any distinction to be drawn between love and sorrow?

Everything about my brother broke my heart. The slightness of his stature. The passivity of his temperament. The pale incision that was his mouth. The flicker of grey agitation in his eyes. Above all, his back. Not specifically its slenderness and tensed expectancy — as though it knew the direction from which trouble would finally come; but just the sight of it receding. I hated seeing him go. No wonder turning one’s back on a king is counted a rudeness. The action has a finality which is too suggestive for the fraught nerves of monarchs. Whenever Abel turned on his blue-veined heels and left me, I thought I was seeing him for the last time. He will vanish from my sight, I thought, and that will be the end of him.

As though it were my sight, and my sight only, that gave him existence.

Whether this small confidence I had in his viability was first and foremost a sorrow for him, or a sorrow for me, I cannot say. But if I feared it was only my sight that gave him physical life, it’s possible I was also afraid that the idea of him was alive only in my sorrow. The moment he no longer broke my heart was the moment he would no longer be there.

I cannot determine, although I coined the word, whether this is solipsism or not; only that everything around me that was human saddened me. Abel closing my picket gate behind him, bearing a bouquet of unnaturalness bigger than he was, distressed me unendurably. Because of him the gate was sad. The flowers were sad. Growth was sad. The idea of a small person carrying a large bundle was sad. Giving was sad. Getting was sad.

Mothers, of course, are always sad. The tears you are bound to shed for them come to you in their milk. But my mother’s milk had curdled now, and any other child she bore would cry from the sourness. And this made me sorrier for her still.

I climbed into my old tree, sick in my stomach that after all these years I had not overcome the desire to inflict pain on myself by observing what I was not meant to see, by sitting in on the drama of my exclusion. The signs of my erstwhile frequenting were gone. The branches were no longer shaved of their bark, no longer smoothed and polished from my restive vigil. I couldn’t see where I had been. But the tree knew me, creaked more in pity than in welcome, and parted its leaves so that I could watch.

Watch Abel make his presentation to my mother. Watch my mother receive it from him, the only person who remembered her.

Ah! she said. Not as in surprise, but as in grief.

She had taken to saying Ah! frequently now — her own expression of the dolefulness of things. Eventually she would pronounce an Ah! over my father and his unwieldy carpentry, which he would have to accept as the nearest he would ever again come to being loved.

Meanwhile I matched her with an Ah! in my own heart. Perhaps I outmatched her. Out-Ah’d her. For although this pageant of filial devotion was touching to behold, pitiable because transient, because inessential, because contingent, because it didn’t have me in it, what was truly distressing was that neither of them could do better, each was all the other had to mark a ceremonial, to people a procession — she him, he her.

Whereas she, who had once been beloved of the Lord and as near as matters abducted by an angel, and he, my poor Abel, shaped to be a cup-bearer to a more sexually curious god than Ours ever was, should both have been garlanded by celestial courtiers, fanfared by bugles, swept up in the arms of those soft-bearded strangers we all languished for, whose raiments would be of gold and whose admiration for our mortal beauty and accomplishments would be unbounded.

Ah!

We weren’t enough for our ambitions, that’s why I was so sorry for us. Or maybe we weren’t enough for mine.

Either way, we were too much or too many for God’s.

He dropped into my garden at last, in plenipotential disguise, and as good as told me so.

‘Until pain entered the universe,’ he tells her, ‘there could be no sensuality worth speaking of.’

‘That’s so sad,’ she says, shaking her head.

This is how they spend their evenings now — he cogitating, she whimpering. The philosopher and his dog.

His words have sent a shock of electricity through her hair, and fine strands of it break from the careful containment of her pigtail and incline towards him like needles as he speaks.

Were he to reach out and pat her he would bleed.

‘There are sadder things,’ he says, wondering if she intends ever to go. She has adopted an attitude on his bed that has a worrying permanence about it, her knees drawn up sculpturally to her chin, her buttoned back occupying the junction of his two walls so naturally that she appears to have grown there, like crystal out of rock.