Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

I will not get what I want here, Cain thinks, and keeps descending.

On the next floor down he has to negotiate a group dressed like desert nomads, standing in a tight circle and holding candles. If he is not mistaken they are discussing his mother.

‘Then Satan moulded the form of woman from the slumbering body of the man, and tricked an angel of the First Heaven into taking up abode within her. And when the angel saw that he was trapped in mortal flesh, he grieved sorely, shedding tears. And all the angels wept to see him weep. But Satan’s heart was hardened all the more, and he filled the woman with a madness and a longing for sin that was unquenchable. And the woman’s desire, brothers and sisters, was like unto…’

The speaker pauses. He is young in body but without colour in his face and without, as far as Cain can see, any openings in it either. A beard has grown over him, like grass over a neglected grave. Only a wandering tongue is visible — an alien soul, a lost fragment of primordial harmony, a fugitive with no mouth to go home to.

‘. . what was it like unto, brothers and sisters…?’

‘A glowing oven!’

‘A raging fire!’

‘A flaming furnace!’

‘A volcano that never sleeps!’

Would that my father were here, Cain thinks, to listen to this description of his wife. Then he changes his mind and thinks, praise be to heaven that he isn’t. People cannot always be relied on to see the funny side of things. Like the angel who wept to find himself trapped in the flesh of mortal woman.

Although he is not dressed to be seen, Cain pushes through the rapt congregation. No one notices him. No one knows that the first ash from that sleepless volcano, the first bun from that glowing oven, is passing among them.

The catechist has begun again. ‘And seeing the conflagration in the woman’s womb, forthwith the devil in a serpent’s form slithered out from the reeds and sated his lust on her with his… with his what, brothers and sisters…?’

Here it comes again… all they can ever think about! thinks Cain. The far limit of every believer’s conception of original wickedness — the old slab of creeping coccygeal joint and muscle.

‘Tail!’ the brothers and sisters proclaim together.

‘Tail!’

‘Tail!’

‘Tail!’

He turns his, but before he can make it to the next flight of stairs a voice blows warm in his ear — ‘I know who you are, of course, being a scholar, and am honoured.’

Cain finds himself looking into the fine but swerving eyes of a man of middle height and middle years, but of more than middle respectability, judging from the sumptuous room — the sumptuous suite of rooms — that extends behind him, and the magnificently brocaded gown he wears open at the throat, where whitening hairs of unusual length and tenuity sprout like lady-fern, and where a stone, not unlike lapis lazuli, swings on a golden chain.

‘My name,’ the gentleman continues, ‘is Raziel, though my ideas are circulated under the pseudonym, Antinomi. I don’t suppose you…’

Cain apologises. ‘I have not long been resident in this country,’ he explains.

‘Of course you haven’t. Of course. Of course.’ An illimitable capacity for pain shows in Raziel’s flickering grey eyes and in the nervous gestures of his hands. He is unable to control his fingers. One moment they are at his lips, then they are plucking hairs out of his chest, then they are up to his scalp where no hairs grow at all. He has removed those too, in his disquiet, Cain decides, imagining the absorption in self-cruelty, the Abel-like concentration of such a task.

He follows Raziel into his rooms. Yes, he will take wine. Yes, he would love cake. Yes, he will accept date wine. Yes, grape if it is superior. Yes, red is fine. Yes, white if it is more suitable to the time of day. Yes, cherry cake. Yes, syrup. No, not if it clashes on the palate with white grape.

While Raziel is in his kitchen, Cain surveys the drawing room which has been offered to him as an alternative to the library, and in which he has been given the choice of sitting or standing — sitting on cushions or on a stool, standing with his back to the fire or the door. The room is divided in the middle so that one half is an exact mirror image of the other, an identical reflection marred only by slight but deliberate distortions — an ivory statuette of a goddess looking back at a clay figure of a demon; the painted vine-trellis on the left half of the ceiling bearing healthy fruit while the trellis on the right bears only berries that are blighted.

‘I am mortified,’ declares Raziel, returning suddenly, unable to prevent his hands wandering to his chest. ‘I have not offered you the loan of apparel. How do you like your sleeves?’

‘How?’

‘Long or short?’

‘I will take either.’

‘Aha,’ says Raziel. ‘Aha.’ It is the sound of a small nerve snapping.

I am in a place, Cain tells himself, where not to choose is to be damned. ‘Long,’ he says.

‘Short will suit you better. And your preferred goblet?’

‘Large.’

‘Aha.’

‘Crystal.’

‘Aha.’

‘Cut.’

‘Aha. And in the stem?’

‘Squat.’

‘Slender is more appropriate to white grape.’

‘Then slender,’ says Cain.

In the event he is offered carrot juice served in an ornamental gourd. And a bowl of fruit. And a copper patera — although his taste runs to pewter — of marshmallow.

It is while Cain is bent low over the marshmallow, trying to keep the sugar off the borrowed gown, that his host slips silently out of his robes. Almost silently. Perplexed by what he takes to be a susurration of draperies, a swoosh as of a tent flap blowing open, Cain raises his eyes just in time to catch, or just too soon not to miss, Raziel emerging prematurely from the chrysalis, still larval white, and quite bare except for a bangle around each wrist, a leather thong about his ankle, and the lapis lazuli humming on the end of its golden chain.

I am about to be required to make a choice again, Cain fears.

‘I know who you are,’ Raziel says.

‘You have told me that,’ Cain replies.

‘You are numbered among the transgressors.’

Cain says nothing.

‘You are reckoned with the sinners, and you bear the sin of many.’

Still nothing.

‘You have trodden on the vestures of shame. How are they to the foot? Are they soft, or do they chafe you?’

Cain keeps his head in marshmallow. He is not going to be caught staring at Raziel’s forelimb which, thanks to the orbed character of vision, he can peripherally discern — a thin, pointed pod, like okra, hanging as though it is a broken pendulum in the dead centre of the room, where each reflection meets itself.

‘You have attained virtue through evil —’

‘I must consider leaving,’ Cain says.

‘You have loved God by loving the devil —’

Cain rises. Because he cannot go on looking down and safely navigate the room, he must look up. Raziel is standing on one leg, like a water bird, and is shielding the back of his head with his arm, as though expecting — as though inviting — heaven itself to fall on him.

‘Abase me so that I may know pride,’ he begs.

‘I don’t hold with paradoxes,’ Cain says.

Detecting threat, Raziel raps out a litany. ‘Strike me down so that I may rise. Wound me so that I may heal. Murder me so I may live.’

‘That would be no way to return your hospitality,’ Cain says, recognising, even as he says it, that he’s wrong.

Raziel sways on his stalk. His handsome head, with its stern discriminating mouth and skidding grey eyes, astounded by the foreign body it surmounts, appalled by the strange importunings it speaks. The swaying is so precarious, one puff of wind would blow him over.