Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

They behold him. He is the outcome, their looks concur, whether or not they know what to make of such obvious information.

They smile, seeing as they are not to appear suspenseful.

‘A story is not a staircase,’ he tells them. ‘Or if it is, it is a rotten one, with treads missing, and no handrail. And the object of all your climbing — if climb you really must — may after all remain the lowly step you began from.’

A joke? They smile, seeing as they are not to laugh.

He would laugh himself, were he capable of laughter, to hear the word story so often on his lips. I am as crass and false and obvious as the rest of them, he thinks. I am as conceited and banal as they are.

By ‘the rest of them’ he means those other story-tellers with whom the city teems. In Babel everyone is either a story-teller or a story-listener.

Ever since the small-business deities of Babel, who had managed their temples like bazaars, complained of trade, abandoning the soaring city to its public servants and civil functionaries, its curators and impresarios, the people have abandoned themselves to a love of fancy, a childish play of the suppositional faculties, an orgy of wondering and marvelling which can be satisfied only by the continuous importation of alien jugglers and acrobats and impressionists and haruspicators and monologuists-in-metre. All over town little brown men from beyond the Indus sit cross-legged on the steps of vacated ziggurats, whistling out fairy-tales which uncoil like snakes from writhing baskets, for the diversion of a population that has never cared for fairies. In the parks of palaces, in museum gardens, albino poetesses with streaming hair shrink from the light and hymn creation praises to the sun. Mythologising is afoot in every rationally laid-out square. An elfin grandiloquence pipes upon the precisely engineered canals. In short, the entire plain of Shinar is jabbering, and Cain is jabbering with it.

But at least tonight he believes he has frustrated the little bit of Babel it falls to him to entertain. He may not have expelled gross expectation from his audience, but he has driven it to the dunce’s corner of the room. This means that those who wish to go on listening to him can look forward, inexpectantly, to a further instalment of his narrative — always provided that curiosity and caprice have not, in the mean time, crept back to light their countenances like children’s.

East of Eden, journeying without the prospect of change from one ant-hill village to another, he had heard tell of the crystalline cities of Shinar — Ur, Larsa, Erech, Babel, where theatres had been quarried from white mountains, and gleaming limestone ziggurats rose in neverending tiers until they grazed the sky.

The men of Nod were as clay-caked as their habitations; they moved upon the earth ruminatively, indistinguishable from it, with their heads lowered, smelling of their own animals, the straw they slept on, and the silt of rivers. But in the cities of Shinar, a blue-eyed, high-shouldered citizenry walked upright on paved streets and flung ladders to the clouds. Larsa was walled and colonnaded; Erech was so devised that every passage you made across it was a scented promenade through groves of orange trees; Ur had cisterns from which iced water was piped invisibly to your dwelling; and Babel, cut in alabaster, its towers covered with gold and silver, the jambs and lintels of its gates inlaid with worked ivory, its meanest walls set with multicoloured cones like the hats of sorcerers, sent up a commotion, night and day, that was at once the roar of its populace and the exhalation of its self-esteem. In Babel, where you could wear your finery at any hour, without fear of slush or mire flying off the wheels of hand-carts or seeping up through broken flagstones, crowds dressed as though for temple worship gathered around splash-less fountains to be amazed by tumblers and troubadors, by balladiers and minstrels, clowns, contortionists, gleemen, joculators, caricaturists, interpreters of archives — any foreigner, in fact, who was willing to please them with a demonstration of such genius as was not native to the city: levity, hyperbole, dissimulation, retrospection.

To the ears of vagabond-romancers such as Cain, stranded in the fuming marshes of Nod, the far-off pavements of Babel rang like music in a nearby room. No two earth-clogged itinerants could talk for long without the topless towers arising between them, even though for some the rumours were altogether too seductive to bear.

No, they said, shaking their heads with a bitterness that belied their certainty. No. No. Those platforms that defied the longest vision, disappeared into the mists of heaven and wore out men’s hearts with climbing? They would believe them when they saw them.

The alabaster mountain, whiter than a woman’s breasts? Just a grey crumbling chalk cliff in their surmise.

The gold and silver? A trick of gilding.

The multicoloured cones? Botched stone-masonry.

The diversion-thirsty crowds, doling out appreciation and applause as a rich man tosses crumbs? Just the usual street urchins with pebbles in their pockets.

But the possibility that they were wrong, that those who loaded up their asses and headed for the enamelled peaks would find every report confirmed, perhaps surpassed, by actuality, preyed on the minds of the most vehemently sceptical and made Babel blaze even more fantastically in their imaginations than it did for the rumour-mongers and their dupes.

Cain was not proof against the day-dream of performing in shaded squares that never emptied, but his motives for bending all his thoughts on Babel were as much to do with topography as vanity. If he went to sleep with applause breaking like the tide around his head — the secular sound of spiritual adoration, the body expressing the soul’s approval — it was to specific images of a place that he woke hungry: the rearing towers, the tiled courts, the streets that never oozed, the barbers’ shops, the jewellers, the tailors, the decorated surfaces, the baked imperviousness of the houses, the baths from which you emerged drier than when you’d gone in, and with a skin so soft a breeze would bruise it. To feel hard surfaces beneath his feet, to be free from the demeaning suck and pull of mud, to have his clay mortality barbered off him each morning, to escape the God of leaking creation — were these not powerful inducements in themselves, without entering into professional speculations, for him to turn his back on the bog-men of Nod?

As for whatever other advantages might accrue in Shinar — well, he would leave those to brute chance, if he should be so lucky as to find so Godless a thing, and the passage of pure pagan time.

‘So, our Edenite friend deems us to be worthy, at last, of hearing the next chapter of his misadventures,’ muses — amuses — Naaman, the city’s most senior official in matters relating to civic buildings and their uses as places of public entertainment and religion. The latter being, in spirit if not in letter, defunct in Babel, Naaman’s principal responsibilities are for the issuing or revoking of licences to street performers, the transference of this or that monodrama to this or that theatre, the allocation of tickets to citizens of degree and influence. It falls to Naaman, in other words, to make or to break reputations.

Which might be why there is frequently an expression of merriment on his face — womanly merriment, it should be said; the merriment of languid mothers — and why, as he sits and takes sherbet in the dying sun, he extends his long legs and throws back his head, confident that no attack will be made on his exposed throat.