Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

‘I’d say your father means that the breast was snatched from the poor devil too early,’ puts in the potter, who shapes a hundred unyielding breasts upon his wheel each day.

‘More likely that the milk when offered — I’m not entirely sure this is a conversation you ought to be included in, my dear — did not flow as freely as it should have,’ says Naaman, staring in stylized embarrassment into the dregs of his sherbet. ‘For it certainly appears to be the immediate prospect of delivery, the instant of effusion itself, that precipitates his distress.’

‘Then let us hope,’ says Asmar, ‘that the demons of disappointment are not curdling his milk even as we speak.’

‘He will be the first man to have eluded them, if they are not,’ says Naaman. Then, observing the look of puzzlement on his daughter’s face, he explains, ‘We have extended a traditional Shinarite welcome to our guest this evening. He has always refused all offers of gentle company in the past, but we felt we could tickle him into a little soothing tonight. Eh, Asmar?’

‘As you say, Naaman,’ answers the potter, with a brief tug at the ring which dangles from his ear. ‘As you say, the demons are doing their worst by him at this very moment.’

Thinking about demons, Zilpah feels her breasts rise.

Thinking about chameleons and bats, Zilpah feels the pulpy lips she has inherited from her father fill with blood.

Thinking about effusion and the unsmiling teller of a single tale who would forestall even anticipation, Zilpah believes she can feel her milk begin to surge.

All the while, Naaman watches her with care.

And all the while, the satiric poet Preplen watches Naaman.

He too, although it is not good for him to be drinking anything but water, is taking a light evening refreshment. He is sitting close to Naaman’s party and is listening to every word that has been said. This isn’t the reason that there is a twist in his spine and that he hunches over himself so that he is at all times in his own shadow. A lifelong habit of sleeping with too many pillows under him is to be blamed for the first condition; suspiciousness of soul for the second. But it hasn’t helped to straighten him or lighten him to have heard what he has heard.

As a foreigner himself he is sensitive to local sarcasm and gossip. As a foreigner, what is more, from the same neck of the woods as Cain — born west of Nod with a whiff of forbidden Eden in his nostrils — he is more than usually on the watch for that form of high Shinarite disdain which goes by the name (the name he has given it) of anti-Edenitism. And as a performer in his own right he is insulted that Naaman hasn’t recognised him, or estimates him so lowly that he does not see any necessity to practise discretion in his presence.

This third objection is not unconnected to the second: it being proof-positive of what Preplen means by anti-Edenitism that those who exhibit it do so without discretion. But then all of Preplen’s objections — and in the course of a single day he broods over and raises many — are blood-related. Here is another reason why his spine is swivelled and each part of him casts a shadow over every other.

The moment Naaman’s group leaves, Preplen cranks his neck back so that he can look up, makes certain there are no birds in the sky to unsettle him — for the poet is uneasy in the company of anything that can attack him from above — and begins to move his lips. His voice normally is guttural and confidential, like gargling. But on this occasion, perhaps because he does not want to lessen the virulence of his malediction, he emits no sound. Or at least no more sound than a person gifted with preternatural hearing would need in order to understand him. ‘Cursed shalt thou be in the city,’ he appears to be mouthing, ‘and cursed shalt thou be in the field. Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land. Cursed be the man that trusteth in man. Cursed be the man that trusteth in woman. Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out. Cursed…’

But whether the object of his curse is Naaman, some other citizen of Babel, or himself; whether his words are a promise of suffering to come or a reiteration of deprivation already undergone; and by what means he has succeeded in extinguishing all light both to and from his person — not even Sisobk the Scryer, who has been watching Preplen watching Naaman, and who, as chance would have it, just happens to be gifted with preternatural hearing, is able to tell.

In fact, Sisobk the Scryer — who answers, when he answers at all, also to the names Imdugud the Insightful, and Enki the Enlightener, and Talmai the Tipster, and Ningursu the Nobody, according to how he feels about himself — has not been watching what he seems to have been watching. His attention, in so far as he can be said to possess anything so steadfast, is taken up with what is present only in the hereafter, using that word strictly in its secular sense. He is not, though, entranced or stupefied. His eyes do not roll. His limbs do not tremble. There is no fowl lying eviscerated on his table. Unlike most professional prognosticators, who are stolid by temperament and look to artificial stimulants to prick their powers of foreboding into action, Sisobk the Scryer is suggestible stone-cold sober. A single feather, dropped by the smallest of those birds from which the poet Preplen flinches, is enough to send his fancy scudding into unborn time. Were he able to nail his imagination to a bench, or bury his mind under a flagstone in the here and now, Sisobk thinks he would willingly sacrifice all he knows of the forever. But his senses are as slippery as fish. Sounds wriggle from his hearing. Smells side-step him like mud-crabs. Thought squirts through the fingers of his reasoning the moment he tries to clamp his mind around it. And nothing will stay still once it has occurred to him.

This includes Cain, whose unheralded arrival Sisobk had of course been expecting, but whose lack of curiosity as to the long-term prospects for his name, his progeny, his reputation — prospects which Sisobk is peculiarly well-positioned to vouchsafe — is surprising, even to a man who has answered, in his time, to the name Urirenptah the Unsurprisable.

Surprising and, it should be said, dispiriting. Dispiriting and, it should be said, insulting.

Darius the Dispirited. Imhotep the Insulted. Shmuel the Slighted.

What it amounts to is this. The prophet has been endeavouring for some weeks now to secure the fratricide’s friendship, or at least his interest, or failing that, his notice; but so far he has received nothing for his pains but curt rebuffs.

No, Cain is not desirous of learning, thank you, what has become of the children he has not sired yet, nor of their children, nor of their children’s children, nor of their children’s children’s children.

No, Cain is not remotely tempted to hear how he is spoken of by men, waiting in the womb of time, who have so imperiously mastered science that they are capable of destroying a thousand strangers in a single act of faceless aggression, and not merely one frail and unarmed younger brother, nose to nose.

No — absolutely no — Cain is not somewhere in his heart gratified to foreknow that there are sects grown up, rebellious blasphemers and murderers-in-the-mind who take their name from him, calling themselves Cainites and believing him, their patron-saint, to be the seed, not of his father with a little f and not of his Father with a big one, but of a still greater and more potent force whose will it was that he should be the inaugurator of killing.

Well, be surprised then, but there it is — Cain is not curious or grateful.