Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

‘Pull that down,’ Saraqael ordered. ‘Dost thou think nothing is to be restrained from thee? An altar of earth shalt thou make unto the Lord, not a tower whose top may reach unto heaven.’

Very well, Saraqael.

All I knew of death was in his voice. It was without music, without colour, without desire. And yet it seemed to have an under-voice which seductively whispered: ‘Come, come, I have music, colour, desire within me, if you can only find it.’ And off they went every time, my poor gullible father and mother, haring after the angel’s miserable mystery, only to run slap into his invariable rebuff.

‘You only have I known of all the families of the earth,’ he once said, eking out the messages he had been commissioned to deliver from God, ensuring we were always wondering what else he was holding back; ‘therefore will I punish you for all your iniquities.’

And they shone upon him, my beggared parents, not curious as to who these other families were, then, that did not enjoy the favour they did, and not struck by the cruel logic that had them paying so high a price for this unique acquaintance. No, there was compliment to them in there somewhere, and they would suffer any humiliation to lay their hands upon it. Gladly suffer, for the punishment was the very token of His love. His, meaning God’s; but also His, meaning the angel’s.

Saraqael’s.

I had to look away. It is no sight for a son, the pain-lust of his parents.

And it is no sight for a sibling, his brother’s angelolatry.

On the face of it, Abel fared better with Saraqael than my mother and father did. He kept his distance more. Was more subtle in the means he used to wheedle appreciation out of the angel. He was of the angel’s party in this, of course, being himself one who had to be coaxed, caressed, bathed into animation. Consequently the contest could almost be said to have been even — each giving only as much to the other as the other looked prepared to give to him. Watching them in the early morning in Abel’s paddock, thinking about exchanging a salutation that would not on either side cede sovereignty, a passer-by (had we been blessed with passers-by) would have supposed them either to be stalking ghosts or to be the spirits of the dead themselves.

But this equality of tactical torpor did not extend beyond disconnected sociableness. The minute our working day began and Saraqael again fell to schooling us in the science and theology of sacrifice, Abel became the panting pupil, starting out of his skin whenever his teacher noticed his application, as eager to please, to be seen to be assiduous, to be praised for his virtues and punished for his iniquities, as the rest of us… I mean the rest of them.

So the offering is to be of the herd, of the flock, he said — repeating what he’d been told, wanting to be certain that he’d investigated every corner of every stipulation — does that imply selection over and above what is blotched or spotted?

Saraqael moved a muscle in his cheek to show satisfaction with the question. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘For obvious reasons, not every animal is suitable to be an offering.’

Obvious reasons?

‘Yes. In the first place the beast must be your own.’

I asked why that was.

‘Because that which you have not reared does not belong to you…’

And?

He didn’t like me. I could see that his hackles were high, as high as was consistent, anyway, with his severe cropping; and that his whole plumage shuddered, not so much angrily as hypersensitively, whenever I spoke. ‘And what does not belong to you cannot be given in sacrifice.’

I take that point to be covered, said Abel, by the use of the words herd and flock, so some further consideration as to selection must be intended.

‘If a man’s offering be a burnt sacrifice of the herd,’ Saraqael instructed, ‘let him offer a male without blemish.’

Why, I asked.

‘Why no blemish?’

Why male.

‘Because of the superiority of the flesh of the male and because of his greater value to the offerer.’

Does the value to the offerer affect the savour of the offering?

Did I detect a feathery flinch, a stiffening of the already stiff wing-carriage? ‘It proves,’ he said, ‘the sincerity of thy devotion.’

And is that the matter finished, Abel wanted to be clear, as to limitation?

‘Not quite,’ Saraqael pronounced. ‘An animal is not suitable for sacrifice upon which any sin has been committed.’

Any sin?

‘Any uncleanness.’

That still didn’t help Abel. His fingers fluttered at his lips.

‘Any sexual uncleanness,’ Saraqael spelt out.

My poor brother’s face twisted horribly at this. And mine twisted horribly for him. It is a most painful thing to see the collectedness vanish from the face of someone you love. It is as though you are privy to the undressing of their soul. And you know you will never be forgiven for what you have seen. But why did Abel’s soul undress itself just then? It could not have been that Saraqael’s words reminded him of some guilt. No, nor even of an intention towards that which would end in guilt. He was too conscious of his beauty to think of wasting it on an unappreciative ewe. No, it had to be the fantasticality of the suggestion that shamed him. The vast scope for wrongdoing in his nature which he had not, until now, even begun to put his mind to. Sexual sin? Upon a burnt offering designate?

What a child he was, or what a narcissist, not to have long ago ticked this off the unending list of conceivable abominations. Was it possible that he carried in his head some other list, of crimes he thought he never could commit? Were we that different, even though we were brothers?

Saraqael read both our minds. An expression of the finest, most unadulterated angelic distaste passed over his features. Passed? No. The revulsion twitched and stayed. I was relieved that neither of my parents, off carving altar-stones and collecting frankincense respectively, was here to see it. Though in another sense I wished they had been. It would have done them no harm to learn what an enemy to themselves they had tried to please. ‘Humans,’ Saraqael as good as said — for it was his skin that spoke and not his mouth — ‘inhabitants of this lowly sphere, will stoop, in fact or in their thoughts, to anything.’

If it is true that higher up the hierarchy there had been strong resistance to the initial creation of fruitful flesh down here, and the implantation therein of chosen seed, then Saraqael had assuredly been of the circle which had counselled against it. He was not Semyaza. He was not here in fulfilment of a raging desire to be among us. Abel caught his fancy, true enough, but his fancy was always passing. He intended soon to be gone from us. Departure had been in his eyes from the start. And we would vanish from his thoughts, Abel included, the moment he opened his shoulders and took off.

Speaking for myself, there was nothing in his travel arrangements I would have wanted him to alter. But nobody willingly contemplates his disappearance from another’s mind. You want to lodge somewhere in the memory even of those you despise. Especially of those you despise. And I liked the idea of lingering a little longer in the angel’s.

Which must have been why I decided to go on worrying at the edict against tainted flesh. So an abused animal, I said — nudging, nudging with my lowered horns — is no more savoury to the Lord than a lightly prized one?

He looked surprised that I needed to ask. No, not surprised — how could any of us surprise him? — sickened.

You see what I’m driving at, I drove on. You tell us that an animal which is not the offerer’s own, and which on that account he values not at all, is unsuitable as an offering for precisely that reason. But now you also tell us that an animal which might be exorbitantly valued, which is very much the offerer’s own, is unsuitable for that reason.