Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

‘I don’t know how to reply to that,’ Cain admits.

‘You reply by promising that thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And by acknowledging that when the One True Intelligible God demanded such devotion, it was a historical injunction and not a botanical one. He didn’t mean, I am a farmer’s seed and will come up for you if you bow down to Me.’

‘He meant…?’

‘He meant what He meant.’

‘You have to do better than that.’

‘I don’t have to do anything. Neither does He. That’s what He means. He doesn’t have to do. He doesn’t have to give. He doesn’t have to notice. He doesn’t have to reward. Ours is a religion, Cain, a faith, not a system of bartering.’

‘Ours? You have forgotten that I fell out a long time ago with your One True Intelligible God.’

‘So you fell out! So you had a little disagreement! What’s that? He likes a little disagreement. It proves you’re listening. It proves you’re taking an interest. Why do you think He likes blasphemers so much? As long as you keep talking, Cain, as long as you keep talking…’

‘Will you forgive me if I stop just for today? I have not slept. And I followed your —’

‘Tiras.’

‘Tiras —’

‘Real name, Jubal.’

‘I followed Jubal —’

‘Ssh… not here. Walls have ears.’

‘— I came in answer to your note. Am I to assume that the danger you alluded to is more moral than actual?’

Preplen cranks his head up from his chest and, at the risk of splintering, turns his face to Cain. ‘A whore is a deep ditch,’ he gargles, brewing in his throat all the perils of lechery and apostasy.

‘And a strange woman,’ says Nanshe, speaking from the corner of her mouth, and for the first time from anywhere in Cain’s company, ‘is a narrow pit.’

But the unexpectedness of her intrusion proves too much for the plumped-up cushions, and the whole family slides softly from the sofa to the floor.

Somewhere between Preplen’s hatchery and his own lodgings — he is not paying any attention to where his feet are leading him — he stumbles into the girl. He does not see her approach but is aware of an unwelcome radiance, such as one experiences when waking from a doze under a hot sun, and then feels her touch on his arm. A light fingering, exerting no more pressure than a moth might, but adhesive, like the feet of spiders.

‘Zilpah,’ he says. ‘Go back home. Go back to your home.’

He does not think she is a deep ditch or a narrow pit. If he had to choose a metaphor from excavation for her, he would say she is a shallow grave.

But he would rather not call her anything, not even to himself. He is too scrupulous to allow Preplen’s words to have any bearing on his feelings. He is a grown man. He has, without promptings, committed grown man’s crimes. Without promptings he will rid himself of Zilpah. But he is, of course, furious that an attempt has been made to turn him against someone he has already turned against of his own accord. Will Preplen see this as a victory for him, for Nanshe, for Tubal and Jubal and Tekel and Mash? Damn Preplen! And damn the girl!

Thus does every third-party slander work its poison. The intermediary, the bearer of the ear, cannot forgive slander’s object for being slander’s cause.

She falls back from him without ceding a handsbreadth of ground: a wonderful, ecstatic twist of the torso, a sort of unhinging of the trunk that leaves her throat horizontal and her eyes retrograded beneath their lids. The blind whites of a person’s eyes invariably call out murderous impulses in Cain. He sees the raised arm of God in them, the reflection of Creation the moment before It etches another signature on the blank screen of personality. To put out those blind screens would be to extinguish the idea of submission itself.

But he does not strike her. He has been too generous to her, too giving of himself, already. He does not care for her enough to shame her utterly in a public place. Nor does he care enough for Preplen to want word of such a scene to reach him.

In an honourable life there are so many people not to please.

He will not raise a hand to her. Instead, he patiently unsticks himself from her feelers. Plucks her from him, palp by palp.

‘Go home,’ he says to her again. And scores it as a mark alongside his integrity, his independence, that he does not add, ‘You heathens’ whore!’

Were he to look back, once he has left her, he would see that she has gone down on the symmetrical, lozenge-shaped flagstones exactly as his brother Abel went down in his dusty field. She had insisted on knowing how Abel fell, and he had told her. And now she has his attitude to a T. Abel, for all the world — were he to turn and look — Abel ruined at his altar. Very still. Very flat. Only the legs a trifle crooked, the ankles almost crossed, as though a mere trip has been the occasion for the fall. The eyes open. Quite white. The skin dispirited, inelastic, irresolute, but broken only in one place, where it had been peppered with small stones. How she has learned to simulate the symptoms of lapidation without so much as a pebble being thrown at her, he would be unable to say, even were he to look.

But were he to look, he would comment on how much less beauty she possesses in ecstasy than his brother took with him into death.

Somewhere between Cain’s lodgings and Preplen’s hatchery, hunger seizes Sisobk. He is careless about such things as eating at the best of times, but it has been a long night and threatens to be a still longer morning. His stomach growls, prophesying want.

He has followed Cain, following the child, because there are further arrangements to be made — dates, maps, manner of transportation and so on — relating to the pilgrimage to Padan-Aram. Sisobk knows that if you don’t get all this settled early, plans tend to evaporate. He sits, rumbling, on a bench from which he will see Cain when he emerges. And falls into a food trance.

‘Woof!’

He starts. The barking seems to be proceeding from the fricassee which his beloved son, the wild and woolly Esau, has that very moment prepared and set before him. Aiiee, this boy’s venison! Not only does he hunt it, find it, shoot it, he cooks it in a sauce that is so succulent the old man is almost able to forget what a nobody and a disappointment the other son is, standing stirring lentils in the kitchen.

‘Woof!’

Becoming blind now, from old age and good living, Isaac brings his fork up to his face and peers at what is yelping on its prongs. A terrible fear grips him. What if this is wolf, or hound, or hyena, and the Lord is warning him against transgression?

Here is a dilemma of no small portion for poor Isaac, who had nearly once been meat himself, who rejoices in his obedience to pre-Levitical dietary laws, but rejoices no less in his appetite. Does he question the contents of his bowl further and risk forgoing one of the finest fricassees of his life, or does he put the barking down to extraneous desert noises, order the meat to ‘Sit!’ and carry on consuming it?

‘Woof! Woof!’ says his supper.

It is Rebekah, repairing from her dressing room, who decides the issue. ‘You evil little swine!’ she shouts at Esau, sitting sheepish in the corner of the tent, ‘Is your father one of your Canaanite women, that you’d feed him dog?’

‘Funny,’ says Esau, rubbing a hairy orange hand over his hairy orange face, ‘I thought that was a small and unaccountably bad tempered hind while I was chasing it.’

‘Does that mean I’m on pottage tonight?’ Isaac piteously wonders.