Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

Angels think in prohibitions. Even Semyaza spent every waking minute preoccupied by moral law. Keeping it/breaking it — these are merely alternative forms of the same engrossment. Saraqael was so weighted with injunction it was a miracle he could fly. ‘Whosoever lieth with a beast —’

Yes, yes, I knew that, I said. But I was not talking about the whosoever, I was talking about the beast. And why that beast should have been unsavoury unto the Lord, notwithstanding the likelihood that in any particular act of disqualifying impropriety he or she (or it) would have been the innocent party.

Here in the enlightened city of Babel — praise be to you all — where you show esteem for those of your gods you can remember by eating them and drinking them, my line of inquiry must strike you, at the very worst, as robust. But Saraqael was in the service of an indefatigable Proscriber. A rigorous Segregationalist. And a most fastidious Picker at food. Added to which there is the angel’s own refined character to be taken into account. So it should not be considered surprising that he grew warm with me, fixed me with those coals through which his vision blazed, and unloosed, at last, his sooty pinions — unfolded them, let air and light into them, and shook them, rattled them at me in the way that a bird is sometimes to be seen flexing its feathers in an attempt to throw off something foreign, something unwanted, that has stuck to them.

It was an impressive and, honestly, a fearsome sight. When he extended his wings, it was as though a sea of fire burnt around him, as though he were the fire’s core, its cause and its object, only it was black fire not red, jet not jasper, a great cloud of enfolded smoke and fire, out of the midst whereof a thousand tongues of flame, ten thousand times ten thousand points of feathery light, licked like demons at what they burnt and at what burnt them.

His countenance, too, suffered an eclipse; was like a sun blackened by lightning, incinerated; his coronal of clipped hair as dazzling as an exploding star, the stubble on his chin and above his lips glowing an empty interminable nigrescent blue, the blue-black of undisputed night, the colour chaos must have been when it was left to reign unchallenged.

In my dread I looked at Abel, wondering why he had not, if only out of brotherly solicitude, fainted clean away. But he was transfixed by the angel’s iridescence. His mouth was open. He held his fists, clenched, to the fine bones of his cheeks. He was white of course — when was he not white? — but it was an opalescent whiteness, the whiteness not of pallor but of frost. In his fright he had frozen over.

But it wasn’t only fear that possessed him. As surely as he was iced was he in love with what he saw.

And was not I?

Let me say it now and then have done with it. We fell out once and for all, my brother and I, over colour, over patterning, over — for want of a better phrase — the aesthetics of belief. In the coruscating spectacle of Saraqael’s spread wings and flaming nimbus, Abel beheld the Deity, the Great Designer, with his own eyes and experienced an excitation, an astonishment, a seizure, which he chose from that time onwards to call wonderment and to keep alive with worship. If that was what God looked like, then he was predisposed by the composition of his temper, by the very tone and tincture of his soul, to reverence HIM. It was the Art that won him, just as it was the Art that lost me. I am not saying that I was not struck by the Originating Genius — I had marvelled at It many a time in the days when my mother was the one being wooed — only that It didn’t find a path into my soul. I apprehended Its power, but my apprehension was ungodly. I didn’t deny It, I just didn’t like It. Whereas for Abel there was no disjunction between The Thing he saw and what he felt. There could be no disjunction. Since It was, he must adore It.

I saw the trance into which he’d fallen and knew there would be no waking him. I’d failed in that attempt before, when he cried his childhood away spinning mollusc shells in the dirt. And this was an identical order of insensibility.

The angel saw it too, and was satisfied. After all our efforts, all our Saraqaelising, this and this only was the way to please him. Spiritual abjection. Suspension of disbelief. And my parents weren’t even here to try it out.

But he was satisfied. Now he could go home. Mentally, he was as good as packed. He ran a hand over his cropped head. Lowered his plumage. Took the weight off his spine. Blew away the down that clung to his moist chest. There was still smoke coming off his wings, a fine, weeping, forest mist, and a rich, feathery barn-yard smell. He shook them, flapped them a number of times, protruded them in an angular half-broken attitude, allowing them to cool before shuttering them closed. No further demonstration of divine majesty was going to be necessary. He had landed Abel and had never expected, never meant, to land me. Not without annoyance, I must say, I grasped that nothing of what had just taken place, nothing in Saraqael’s visit, had been devised with my capture in mind. There I had been, hanging out, as I supposed, for critical independence, shielding my senses against a terrible and very nearly irresistible assault, and all along I’d been labelled as a lost cause and earmarked for forfeiture. It hadn’t mattered that I’d cavilled at burning off the first and the best, that’s to say the first and the worst, of my fruit. The Nostrils of the Lord did not twitch to anything but meat anyway. It hadn’t mattered that I’d found the angel gaudy. It was never going to matter how I found him. I wasn’t the celebrant, Abel was. He had the temperament for it, I didn’t. He was the sacrificator, I… I was the sacrifice.

I must have looked what I felt. Or else an angel can see a fallen countenance, can read it as a spiritual condition, even when the face is firm.

‘Cain, why art thou wroth?’ he asked.

Wroth? I waved away his concern, working wonders with my jaw.

‘If thou doest well,’ he continued, mellifluous now, mediative, melted, ‘shall it not be lifted up?’

It?

‘Thy countenance.’

It was as if I’d been kissed not by honeyed lips but by honey itself. I was the bee and he was the flower. Only the flower had come buzzing around me.

You must hold out against kindness when you are in a weakened state. This is the time when angels love to come visiting. They hear the ebb of life’s blood; they see courage evaporating in a thin smoke from the roof-top; they sniff the sweet decomposition of resolve — and they drop, in a twinkling, to your side. Art thou lonely, my child? Art thou troubled? Art wounded? Slighted? Spurned? Piqued? Forfeited? Listen, listen: for out of our mouths will come words of deceptive hope and comfort. That which thou takest to be forfeiture — how if it is only watchful and patient love? How if it is only thy Father — with a big F, with a soft F — biding His time, waiting until thou art ready for Him?

So, they had not given up on me after all. ‘If thou doest well,’ they had promised — half promised, intimated — ‘shall not thy countenance be lifted up?’

My countenance — how heavy it felt. But lifted up — how light it was!

Beware the angel when the blood in your veins is as weak as water.

And if I doest not well? I asked.

He came very close to me, and for a moment I thought he meant to unfold his wings again and embrace me in their fire. But there was no longer any heat coming off him, and no lightning in his face. For the first and for the only time he made me the object of his elusive charm; and for the first and for the only time I was no better than the rest of my family and could imagine no finer compliment to myself, no greater benefaction, than to see him smile.