Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

And what God will tolerate a mortal telling Him Who He Isn’t?

Height was therefore purely incidental to what ensued; it was the tower’s tongue that Y-H-W-H, the G-d who had forbidden vowels, went down and severed.

‘Come, let us descend,’ He said, ‘and there confound the thing they speak with.’

Th thng th spk wth.

As for Cain, return to spongy earth was a blow more terrible to him than death. Away from it for many years, he had forgotten its burial-ground smell, its longing for decay, its oblivious, incessant mulch-making. Insects had grown noisier in his absence; he could hear them scratching at their shells, pulling out their own feelers, even when he was far from fields. The maggots in his dead meat were plumper than they’d been before, quicker, hungrier, whiter. He didn’t dare kick a stone, for fear of what he’d find underneath. For fear of its colour. It was the colour of life he most couldn’t bear on his return.

At least the colour of death cannot be worse, he consoled himself.

The dispersal of language was a further setback to one who was more a story than he was any other thing, and who was therefore compelled to tell himself in the way that other men are compelled to raise a family or an army. He understood no one in Babel now, and relied on signs to secure him approximations of what he wanted. A shave became a hit or miss affair — they either cut him too close, or not close enough, they left the hot towels on his face longer than was comfortable. At the baths, the aches in his back that most troubled him, the pains he couldn’t point to with his fingers, were the ones the Anatolians always forgot to assuage. Lacking language, he at last let his body go, let it fall back into nature like his father’s, did not bother to distinguish himself from a berry.

But language came into being at the behest of wretchedness, marbled with misery, and eventually its loss was a solace to him. Where there is silence there is no betrayal. Now, no one could accuse him of apostasy or tourism. He excited no one’s expectations and let no one down. He didn’t nightly exhume his brother. He didn’t expose his mother’s muddy breasts to the curiosity of a well-dressed audience. He didn’t open and close his father’s hands.

Rendered to all intents and purposes mute, Cain found few pleasures in the hundred or so years of life that were left to him; but slept easily, without dreams, now that he was no longer naming names and had forgotten the word for God.