Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

‘Ah, if thou doest not well,’ he said, ‘sin coucheth at the door; and…’

He shook open a wing, soundlessly, and grazed my cheek with his feathers. I became weightless, as though I were a fish and he held me in his talons. A shudder ran through us both, but do not ask me whether its cause was the herring’s impatience or the bird’s cruelty.

And…? And…?

‘And unto thee is its desire.’

I scanned his fiery eyes for explication, but there was none offered. Even this close up, nose to nose as it were — though I did not reach to anything like that eminence — he was the angel of the enigma.

I looked across at Abel who was listening, listening, mouth open, skin not yet thawed, but in whose expression I saw only a sort of pastoral absence, a soul out wandering in sparkling grasses.

‘But,’ said Saraqael, at last, and now he did smile — not extravagantly, not even warmly, more, I suppose, reflectively: reflecting Someone Else — ‘thou shalt rule over it.’

Thou shalt? How did the grammar of that work? Was it an order? A prediction? A promise? Was the kingdom of sin being dangled before me as an enticement, a reward if I did such and such? Or had it been given to me, there and then, with no strings attached?

He must have looked into my mind and seen the riot he had caused, because he shook his head, rattled his feathers — I would say apologetically, except that he did not have apology in him — and corrected himself, or at least corrected a false impression. ‘Thou mayest,’ he said. ‘Thou mayest rule over it.’

It was up to me, in other words. There was no order, no promise, no prediction. Only the teasing gift of liberty. The gift that was no gift. The liberty that was no liberty. For to be told that a certain obligation is to be fulfilled, but that one may, of one’s own choice, fulfil it or fulfil it not, deprives one of all choice. Self-respect insists that under those conditions one fulfils it not. Had they delivered the kingdom of sin, repining and groaning, into my hands, I might have made a resolute and wise emperor. As it was, they merely left the gates open and I rode away. As they knew I would. As they knew I had to, the moment they changed their shalt to mayest.

Our eyes met over this diabolic transaction. It was the last time I was ever to look into the cunning labyrinth which is an angel’s soul; and it was the last time an angel was to look into the undeviating track to ruin which is mine.

He touched me with his plumage, lightly, once, below my ear, then he turned to say his goodbyes to my brother. I watched him take Abel by the arm, high up, almost by the shoulder, almost by the almond-white neck, and lead him in the direction of the soon-to-be-slaughtered sheep. Something in the manner of their intimacy, boy and bird, moved me to tears. Something fleeting and frail in their confederacy. Perhaps it was the unequalness. Or the ungainliness of their gait as they tried to find a common step on the uneven ground. Or maybe it was just that accursed old sadness that capsized my heart whenever I beheld my brother’s back. And then I saw, or rather I did not see, the angel vanish.

Whatever passed between them, this was the last time for my brother, too, that he was to share soul-searching, in his earthly incarnation at least, with an angel of the Lord.

‘Those lentils,’ Naaman remarks to Zilpah, stopping her in their perambulation and getting her to peer with him, father and daughter, into an open sack stowed in the doorway to a seed and spice merchant’s, ‘I hope I will not soon be having to breakfast on such for your sake.’

‘For my sake? Since when have I had any influence over what you eat?’

‘I am not speaking of influence.’ He pauses. ‘I am speaking of respect.’

She doesn’t follow him, but like any child in the company of a parent, she knows that abstract nouns unfailingly herald trouble.

‘Have I failed of it in some way recently?’ she asks. ‘I cannot think what I have said or done to you…’

He turns his eyes from the lentils and treats her to a slow scrutiny. ‘You still misunderstand me,’ he says — and she worries because it seems a long time since he has said anything playful — ‘I am speaking of the respect I feel for you. I hope I will not soon be having to show it in lentils.’

Something comes back to her. In Babel, as in most Shinarite cities, lentils were once served as a funeral meal. The custom is now defunct, practised only in waywardly, wilfully traditional families, but she is alarmed and wonders whether her father intends some threat to her.

He stoops, too tall to bend easily, and slides his hand, palm downwards, into the sack. When he withdraws it, there are still a number of the little red seeds nestling like ladybirds in the hairs that grow upon his fingers, ‘It is not their colour that is significant,’ he says, ‘but their shape. Their roundness suggests the universality of loss. The mortality that rolls through all things.’

‘And why do you fear that I may be the cause of your having to breakfast on them?’

He continues to hold the back of his hand out towards her. Partly so that she should go on looking at the lentils, and partly because he has been told that his long, feminine fingers, with their beautifully tended nails, more violet than pink, and their silken yellow hairs, have a powerful effect on people. Zilpah’s mother used to say that he had hypnotised her with his hands, and admirers of both sexes have spoken of dizziness and other ecstasies occasioned by the combined smell and silence of his fingers.

He would like Zilpah to hear their quiet.

‘Because I am worried about your health,’ he says at last.

‘I am in good health.’

‘That is not what I have heard.’

‘Heard from whom?’

He flicks the remaining ladybirds from the back of his hand. ‘You were seen lying on the road the other day.’

She senses her colour rising and knows that she cannot keep it down. She wishes she had something to hold or otherwise busy herself with, ‘I was not ill,’ she says.

‘Not even temporarily indisposed?’

‘Not even temporarily indisposed.’

‘In a way I think that distresses me more.’

‘You would prefer it that I’d been ill?’

‘I would prefer it that you didn’t lie down in the road.’

She cannot conceal her shame. Or rather, she cannot conceal her awkwardness, and that is a cause of shame. She is too light in stature to bear scrutiny. There is nowhere in herself that she can hide. She is not being fanciful, she is not thinking metaphorically, when she fears she can be seen through.

‘I won’t be lying down in the road again,’ she says.

Naaman throws his head back, arching his neck like a swan, and emits one of his famous laughs. Few people in Babel who have heard this laugh do not want to acquire a similar one for themselves. It seems, somehow, to comprehend everything that is bright and brittle in the city — its temples to forgotten gods, its love of reflective surfaces, its equivocal antiquarianism, its serious unseriousness. Zilpah has been in flight from it ever since she can remember. And she shrinks from it now, as though she has been struck.

‘You don’t believe me?’ she asks, although she knows that that is not the reason he is laughing.

‘I have every confidence,’ Naaman says, taking her by the elbow and hurrying her along, ‘that you won’t be lying in the road again. But there is the question of where else you will be lying.’

‘You are still imagining me in my grave? I have told you, I am not ill.’