Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

He is gratified to discern a consistency in his prejudices. He has always skipped the Sodomites whenever their unruly city has figured in the Cainite gospel. He doesn’t know why. They just never felt right. Not even their name — who wants to get his tongue around Sodomites? They seemed there only to swell the Cainite numbers. To pull in whole cities no less than errant individuals. And although there were women in Sodom deserving of Cainite commendation — women who one day disported with strangers shamelessly, and the next refused them so much as a crumb of hospitality, and the day after that, to keep strangers always guessing about a Sodom welcome, pulled out whichever of their limbs declined to fit into a doll-size bed — they none of them quite touched Sisobk’s soft centre. They didn’t have the wife of On’s devotion, or the wife of Korah’s audaciousness. There were women in Sodom, in other words, but there was no woman.

The more he thinks about it, while tramping the wards of terminal infirmaries, closing eyes from which all light but the light of womanhood has fled, holding wasted hands which are still and always will be women’s hands, the more convinced Sisobk becomes that Cainite heroes are nothing without Cainite heroines. Take Esau… Or rather, take Rebekah, Esau’s mother…

A look of faraway fondness passes across Sisobk’s face. A delicious nostalgia for what has not yet been. A happy remembrance of things to come. Ah, Esau!.. pity about all the red hair, but… ah, Esau! And ah, Rebekah! He is sitting on the corner of a hospital truckle-bed, wheeled out to ease the final hours of someone’s forgotten mother. He can hear the soul’s wings whirring, clumsily, unaccustomedly, like a game bird’s. So much effort to depart. So much effort to have stayed. So much effort to have conceived and carried and given birth. Without exerting any pressure he holds on to what is left of the woman’s ankle, his fingers meeting in a circle no bigger than a baby’s or a barber’s mouth. And suddenly he is not where he is… he has slipped, slid, sidled out of the hospital and himself… and is somewhere else, somewhere the same but somewhere else… for behold! — he is in the womb of Rebekah… no… no… he is the womb of Rebekah.

Rebekah is famous for her womb. Was it sealed, the way a maiden’s is supposed to be, when she left Padan-Aram to be the wife of Isaac? Or had she, as the rabbis like to speculate, been ‘fingered’ by her father, or her brother, or Abraham’s messenger, Eliezer? There are those who affirm that when Isaac ‘fingered’ her and found her faulty, she explained she had hit a stumpy bush after falling off her camel in surprise at seeing him, Isaac, walking towards her on his hands. A man should not be so novel when he first greets a wife that others have found for him.

But Rebekah’s womb was going to be famous however she came off that camel. ‘Be thou the mother of thousands of millions,’ it was said of her; ‘and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them.’

Sisobk the Seminal is not conscious of quite such a press of numbers, but he is full, the bearer not of one embryo but of two, and already the nest of rivalry and dissension. Afloat in the same fluid, the twins agree on nothing. They fight for elbow room. They jostle for pole position. Whenever Rebekah, proud in her striding, goes past a temple erected to the worship of idols, the red twin, the strong twin, rejoices at the lewdness and the merriment he hears; but when she passes a synagogue, the slighter, lighter brother struggles to break free, impatient to join the mournful sanctifying. And so they kick together, one eager for the joy of life, the other for its lamentation.

Speaking with the best interests of her womb in mind, wouldn’t Rebekah do well to stay at home, passing neither synagogue nor temple? No. She welcomes the conflict in her belly, relishes the war being fought without words within her, because she knows it will end up a war for her love.

Weary of the buffeting — so much effort, the conceiving and the carrying and the giving birth — Sisobk becomes the buffeter. Esau, bristling with more hair at forty weeks than Sisobk himself has managed to grow in forty years. Sisobk doesn’t like the prickles. His gums ache from prodigious teething. His expanding bones knock against his skin. His finger-nails pierce the soft pouches of his little clenched fists. Time to leave, time to head for the light. But, as he winds his shoulders for the great leap of life, he feels a hand tugging at his ankle. The hairless one, holding him back, determined that he will either come out first himself or keep them both in, drown his brother with him in the black sea of maternity. Feeling her boys twist inside her, Rebekah shivers with pleasure. Sisobk summons up Esau’s strength, draws on a desire to be alive he never knew he had, and… jumps!.. dragging them both into the world, himself first, bloody and triumphant, the other, the brother — conserving energy, intent on marring his twin’s victory, and because he cannot find it in his tiny embryonic soul to concede precedence — still clinging to his heel.

Isn’t it the whole point of twins that you cannot be one without being the other? Thinking he is Esau, Sisobk is startled to hear a faint cry from the truckle-bed, and to see that, Jacob-like, he still has hold of the dying woman’s ankle, and that her foot is blue.

He looks into her worn-out eyes. ‘I am the puller and the pulled,’ he tells her, orphically. ‘I am hairy and I am smooth. I am a cunning hunter and a plain man. I dwell in fields and I dwell in tents.’

He pats her hand, closes her eyes, and covers her up. At the far end of the ward another one is being wheeled in. There is so little of her that even from this distance Sisobk can count her ribs and see the lilac dye of death beneath her skin. He shuffles over and sits himself on the corner of her bed. ‘If you gave birth to twins,’ he asks her, ‘one too feeble to come out of the womb under his own steam, and the other with such an excess of life in him he landed fully grown between your legs, red all over like a shaggy carpet, which would you prefer?’

She has less hair herself than the baby Jacob had. And lacks force to hold on to anybody’s ankle. She makes a faint sound from the back of her throat, like a page turning.

Sisobk inclines an ear. ‘Just what I think too,’ he says. ‘Neither of them.’

His theory is this.

If Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison; but Rebekah loved Jacob — then clearly she loved him only to spite Isaac, who had ‘fingered’ her near Hebron, made her the mother of thousands of millions, the first two of whom were such as no mother could bear to look upon, and now passed his days and nights blind in his tent sampling game.

On his own, Jacob had little to recommend him to a mother of spirit. While Esau flew through the fields, a red flash, spearing supper for his father, Jacob stayed quietly indoors and sod pottage. The ruse whereby Rebekah got the lesser of her two sons to steal the greater of her husband’s blessings — disguising him in goatskins and teaching him to lower his voice — served a psychological and a practical purpose. She could see her favourite looking manly for an hour, and then, by warning him of Esau’s wrath, remove him from her sight for a period considerably longer.

Sisobk the Scryer closes another set of eyes and leaves the infirmary. These women! He had wanted to persuade Cain to accompany him to that fissure in the desert, that divide which never cooled or closed, and through which, if you listened carefully and knew what to listen for, you could hear the cries of Korah and his company, browning for all time, like meat in a casserole. But now he would like Cain to go with him to the well at Padan-Aram where Rebekah is waiting to be spotted by Abraham’s servant, carrying her pitcher — a damsel very fair to look upon, a virgin whom no man had ever known.