Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

Just like Zilpah.

He doesn’t know what to do about her.

He thinks about boring her with affection. ‘Perhaps we can try face-to-face congress,’ he suggests one night.

It takes her a little time to turn over. First of all she has to unwind him from her plait. ‘What?’ she says. ‘You mean use me like a woman?’

Already it is going further than he intended. But he is at his wit’s end. A desperate man. ‘Not use at all,’ he says, he whispers. ‘Do you not think there is too much using in this room already? Is it not time I showed you some consideration?’

‘Consideration?’

He wonders if her question is a weapon, and if it’s loaded. But the expression on her face is neutral. She seems genuinely to be curious about what he means by consideration.

As if he knows! ‘Things like calling you by your name,’ he says. ‘And… talking. And…’

‘Kissing?’

‘Yes, kissing.’

‘Stroking?’

‘Yes, yes, definitely stroking.’

‘Looking?’

‘Indeed — looking would be marvellous.’

‘Well, if that’s what you’d like…’ she begins.

‘It is not a question of what I’d like.’

‘You want to hear me say that I’d like it?’

‘Only if it’s the truth.’

‘Truth is to be part of this as well?’

‘Only if you’d like it to be.’

She thinks about it. ‘All right,’ she says, ‘I’d like it to be. I’d like it if you treated me as a woman tonight.’

But before he can mount her, face-to-face, she places two prohibiting hands on his chest. ‘Well?’ she asks.

He doesn’t follow. ‘Well what?’

‘You were going to show consideration.’

He goes very cold. Icy fingers paddle in his heart. He wonders if he could get away, now, with turning her back on to her belly.

‘You were going to call me by my name,’ she reminds him.

‘Ah, yes… Zilpah.’

‘And you were going to stroke me.’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘And kiss me.’

‘Yes, that’s right, I was.’

‘But considerately.’

‘Ah, yes.’

‘And remembering to use my name.’

‘Ah, yes… Zilpah, Zilpah.’ He murmurs it considerately, considerately stroking her, considerately kissing her, lowering himself considerately upon her. And again, ‘Zilpah,’ using her — no, no, treating her — for the first time as a woman.

Considerately.

It is, as he has counted on, an awful experience for them both.

‘I do not work well in concert,’ he tells her, looking up into the darkness, keeping satisfaction out of his voice as best he can. ‘I fear I am disjunct.’

She touches his shoulder. ‘It isn’t important,’ she assures him. Her face is washed in the dew of forgiveness. He can see it out of the corner of his eye, an oval of moist early-morning light. She squints at him, near-sighted as a saint. It has all along been her habit to follow his every changing expression with her stare, but now her night-time seeing seems to be plaited with his, bound with an invisible ribbon of devotion.

He rises from the bed and goes to stand by the window. At this hour the temple stones appear to be alive; not a ziggurat is still, not a flight of steps is where it was a second earlier. They move, in a stately grey-shadowed priestly dance, not backwards and forwards, and not up and down, but with a looming motion that tilts the night.

‘I’m not suited to it,’ he says. ‘I’m not rhythmic.’

He can hear her sniffing — not crying, just gathering her forces for a tremendous feat of understanding that will require the armed support of patience, selflessness, forgiveness, and may even result — who knows? — in lasting cure. He fears her patience most. It ticks in his ear like a promise of eternal life, like the interminable scratching of insects that used to keep him awake under the stars when he lay revolving love and murder in his heart.

‘You have to work at harmony,’ she says.

Tsk… tsk… tsk…

‘When I say I am disjunct,’ he answers, ‘I am describing an immanence, what is bred in the bone, not a learner’s hesitancy for which practice is the remedy. I am unable to make a rhythm with anybody. I have no choice in the matter. My nature is dissonant. I have no co-operative instincts. I cannot dance, for the same reason. I cannot sing in tune or unison. You must have noticed that when we walk together I do not keep in step with you. The very idea of harmonious conjunction with another person, with another body, with another thing, is alien to me; it incommodes me, it embarrasses me, and, to be truthful with you, it appals me. To and by are words I was moulded to accept; blame my Creator, but I fear I fall foul of with.’

Tsk… tsk… tsk…

It is so audible, her patience, that he mistakes it for an interruption.

‘No, you must let me finish. Small as they are, these prepositions determine the courses our lives take. I was not made to be included in another’s orchestration. I am not a fit partner or companion. You must find someone else, someone more agreeable, to be your accompanist.’

He hears her slip from the bed, and in a second she is kneeling at his feet. ‘What have they done to you?’ she says softly, softly as a prayer, pulling at him so that he will join her, make a harmony, find a rhythm, both of them, together, at his feet.

He holds back, keeping what little he knows of balance by staring fixedly at the temples looming in the tilted night. But her pressure is irresistible. ‘What have they done to you?’ she repeats. ‘How have they damaged you so badly, my poor brotherless boy?’

Damage? Has he been describing damage? And who is she to speak of they? But before he can repudiate her terminology, she is on all fours again, turning a blind eye to his disjuncture, like the beasts his father had declined, and is once more ready to compensate him for his loss.

This time he does not rein in the indecorous pigtail.

Where would we be without coincidence and word-play? At the very moment that Sisobk the Scryer is departing the infirmary, reluctant to leave behind the smell of dying woman, Cain the murderer of his brother is running from his apartment to escape the smell of living girl, and Asmar the potter is sitting at his wheel, settling in for a night of sniffing clay.

In a moment we will bring all three of them together, by the nose.

And the word-play? Yetzer and yotzer.

Yetzer is Hebrew for purpose or inclination, inclination one way or the other but usually the wrong way. If you follow your yetzer you are likely to end up doing evil. Yotzer is a potter. It is impossible to forecast what you will end up doing if you follow a yotzer, the outcome being dependent on the yotzer’s yetzer. But it should be clear already what opportunities for moral equivocation lie coiled like paradisal garden snakes in these two words’ seeming sameness. Why fault the pot when you can blame the potter? ‘We are the clay, and thou our yotzer,’ Isaiah reminds the Lord, at the conclusion of sixty verses itemising the ways in which we leak.

Not that there is anything leaky about what Asmar makes, unless we number among his productions his son, whom we shall also introduce coincidentally in a moment.

The sight of Asmar potting in the night is not an unusual one. It is the great ceramist’s boast that he can knock out three hundred amphorae identical in shape and size and glaze in the interval other men squander, between dinner and bed; and in order to keep up with this record he must sometimes be bound upon a wheel of clay until morning. ‘But that’s cheating,’ Naaman has been known to tease him. ‘That is extending the interval unfairly.’ ‘Not so,’ squeaks Asmar; ‘some men do not go to bed until it is light. I know that from the number who come to my window before the dawn to watch me.’