Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

The Anatolian has soft wet soles and is skilled in the art of spreading his weight. When he walks over Cain’s back it is as though an army of jellyfish is on the move. ‘There is no reason for you to apologise for yourself, sir,’ he says. ‘You are not the only gentleman who comes here more than once a day.’

If I had laughter in me, Cain thinks, I would spend it now. ‘I am not talking about the baths,’ he explains. He is flat on his stomach, able to use only one corner of his mouth. ‘I am speaking existentially. Things are out of my hands. I’m out of my hands. Other people are deciding my movements. Other people are my movements. If I didn’t exist they would invent me.’

‘If you didn’t exist,’ the Anatolian replies, working at Cain’s coccyx with his heels, ‘You would want them to invent you.’

Cain winces. He is sore where his tail is reported to be — such is the power of rumour. He thinks about saying, ‘If I didn’t exist I wouldn’t have any wants,’ but this is not the sort of conversation he is after. Among the desires he comes to the baths to have satisfied is a desire to lie on his stomach, talk through one corner of his mouth only, not see the person he is talking to, not hear the person he is talking to, suffer no interruption whatsoever, in short, to a prone musing accompanied by dim physical pain but rescued from the sharper pangs of solitude.

‘Mmmmmm,’ he says, to remind the Anatolian of the conventions. ‘Mmmmmnnnnn.’

The Anatolian climbs off Cain’s back and rubs himself with beeswax. The next stage in the treatment is a speciality of his and a particular favourite of Cain’s. He uses his torso as though it were a rolling-pin, ironing out whatever tension is left in his clients’ spinal columns after he has finished walking over them. Because he is as flocculent as Esau, the effect is of being finely punctured by a rotating brush. Cain can take no end of this, and sighs before the bristling masseur has climbed back on him. And sighs again. And sighs a third time, before registering that the Anatolian has pulled up a stool and is still waxing himself absent-mindedly.

Cain does the last thing he ever wants to do when he comes to the baths, and raises his head from the table.

Taking this to be an invitation to speak, the Anatolian pursues his theme. ‘If I didn’t exist I would make someone invent me,’ he says, ‘I could not bear to have missed this…’ He holds his hands up like goblets and extends them, agitatedly, to all corners of the steamy massage room, as if afraid he may not catch the precious streams which are pouring forth. ‘. . this… life!’

Cain looks at him. A young, fiery man, black as Nanshe’s eye, thistled, stinging, a man of points and edges, a projectile. Who has thrown him? Setting aside his youth, they are not dissimilar, he and Cain. They are both travellers, they are both far from home, they are both stocky, firm in the leg like foot-soldiers, they both like to talk. But someone — Someone — has taken the Anatolian by his ankles or his crop and flung him, hurled him with such vigour into life — life! — that it is impossible to imagine him ever losing his velocity and landing. That’s the way to leave; that’s the way to turn your back on home. Fly like a stone out of a sling. Not slink, as he did. Not slope. Not sneak. Not snake.

But when did Yahweh ever reach out to any of His chosen children and fling them, just for the fun of it — just for their fun of it — through the firmament? When did it ever occur to Him that they might like it, to feel the wind rushing past their bodies, to see the earth, in all its colours and undulations, flashing beneath them, to smell exuberance, precipitation, power coming from their skin, instead of fear, hesitancy and obedience? A jealous God, angry every day, He could not confer what He had never Himself experienced. He nudged His way through the skies, and nudged Cain into exile.

I Am What I Am Not, thinks Cain. I am not a meteor. I am not a shooting star. I am not a missile. I am not a goblet held up to catch the precious streams of life. I am not an Anatolian masseur with soft flying feet.

I am a nudged man.

He must have said it aloud, because the Anatolian twists on his stool and allows perplexity to pass, like a spring shower, across his handsome, hopeful face.

‘How would you answer the call of life if you were me?’ Cain asks him. ‘What does life say you should do when you are conscious of a light but persistent pressure on every side — to do this or to do that, to be here or to be there, to honour him or to honour her? How do you know where your life lives and what its voice is?’

The Anatolian laughs, showing his white teeth, his red mouth — something else Cain cannot do. ‘Why do you worry about sides?’ he asks. ‘Why do you let yourself be pressed on this side or that side? Life understands only two directions — up up up or down down down.’

He is back on the table now, remembering his occupation. The human roller. The rotating brush.

Cain braces himself against the shock of the first fine puncturing of his skin. He is pleased to be flat on his stomach again, able to use only one corner of his mouth. ‘I don’t suppose it is necessary to ask you which direction your life understands,’ he says.

Another laugh from the Anatolian, which seems to penetrate the entirety of Cain’s ganglionary system. ‘Up up up,’ he cries. ‘I’m going up up up up up. And you?’

‘Me? I’m following you.’

‘Up up up up up?’

‘I don’t know whether I can manage five. Up up up, certainly.’

But he can manage five, and is thinking down down down down down.

Those lentils… That pottage which would decide who went where and owned what in Israel.

Like many another crossed in love, Sisobk has become bookish and biblical again. Scholiastic. Disputatious. Talmudical.

Sisobk the No-Longer-Sentimental. Sisobk the Sophist.

He is not of a mind to adjudicate between the two opposing theories of that most famous and far-reaching of all thick soups:

(a) that it is the price Esau exacts for his birthright, proving in what low esteem he holds his inheritance;

(b) that it is a ritualistic business meal of the kind brothers may be expected to tuck into after closing a perfectly amicable transaction as to real estate.

The important thing, whichever way you look at it, is that Jacob — father of the Twelve Tribes — is a sodder of slops.

The rabbis know it too. This is why they worry at those little red seeds, as though they are beads threaded on a rival religion’s string.

Now that he is, so to speak, back home again, Sisobk is not averse to whiling away the odd lonely hour in the company of those cacophonous Babylonian schoolmen. They are easy to summon. You don’t need steam. You don’t need entrails. You don’t even need a trance. One hint of an interrogative and they’re yours. Of all the foreshadowy company waiting, pacing, jostling in the small back rooms of time, they are the most vociferous, a passion for exegesis prevailing over all other passions — even the passion for righting wrong, even the passion for justifying the unjustified self.

‘I’ll ask, you answer,’ says Sisobk, settling in for the evening. If he had a chair he would settle into that. But he must make do with his rat’s nest of a bed. Some men write in bed. You can always tell. You can smell the sheets. Sisobk has no sheets, but he doesn’t mind if the odour of rags permeates his symposium with the future.

‘First question: Why is Jacob sodding pottage?’

Because it says: Jacob is a plain man, a quiet man — the word is tam in Hebrew — a man whose lips speak what his heart believes, a man of modesty and simplicity, not given to kitchen skirmishing, who would sooner prepare pap in his own pan than a banquet on another’s brazier.