Only Human

by Jenny Diski

  And yet, once again, for all its absurdity and difficulty, these humans made more of reproduction than I had intended, took it for their own, blinded themselves to the real meaning behind it, and behaved quite as if it was their right to construct themselves a future and a history from the sticky insult of sexuality that I had condemned them to. They take and take, and then mistake all for their own. They made relation to one another – none to me. They made life of their own with the gift of reproduction that I have given all the living things I made. ‘I have created a life,’ she said, for all the world as if the lowest, squirming thing, crawling the face of the earth did not do the same. The human dared to think she could become like me. In my image I made them. And in my image they remade themselves ———

  ——— Sarai was all the more eager to add her name to the latest generation of the descendants of Shem, because she knew she wasn’t entirely entitled to. Not just because she was a girl, but because she was not a full, proper sister to Nahor, Haran and her chosen Abram. Their mother, Emtelai, was not her real mother. Sarai’s mother had been a slave-girl whom Terah took into the household as his concubine when she became pregnant. She did not survive Sarai’s birth, which was just as well because it was rumoured that Emtelai was not at all pleased with her husband’s behaviour. She thought that what men do with slave-girls was their business, but when they bring them, big with child, into the home, it becomes household business, and Emtelai did not care much for sharing her house with another woman.

  But Sarai was a different matter. Emtelai had provided the male heirs to the dynasty, but had failed to conceive again, being by the time of Haran’s birth at the limit of child-bearing age. She was delighted at the prospect of having a baby girl after all the boys, and welcomed the baby, in her newborn motherless position, by adopting her as her own. Sarai did not even know the name of the woman who had given birth to her. Emtelai told her of her beginnings when she was old enough to understand, but assured her that she had become her mother in every way, except that Sarai had not shared Emtelai’s womb like her brothers. Sarai called Emtelai mother, and believed herself to be completely accepted into the family. Even so, children think their thoughts. In her heart, she always knew that a line, as fine as the rarest silk, but a line nevertheless, existed between her brothers and herself.

  Emtelai died when Sarai was eight years old. Perhaps Sarai was not quite enough for her, after all. Emtelai had become pregnant, in spite of her age. There was much celebrating among the family. Throughout her pregnancy, Terah did not once fall into one of his moods. Sarai thought she was happy, too. Emtelai said she hoped she would have a baby sister. She never made Sarai feel that she was about to be replaced by a more genuine article. But it was natural that the child, knowing herself not properly, not exactly and truly to belong to the family, should feel some anxiety at the coming arrival of someone new who did. It was natural that while she looked forward to having a little sister, to being no longer the baby of the family, just as Emtelai suggested, she might also find herself hoping that the new child would never appear. A small cloud gathered over Sarai’s life during Emtelai’s pregnancy. For the first time, a sense of foreboding, an uncertainty about the future that she didn’t dare examine very carefully. It was no more than a tension in her chest, a nameless alarm, a dread or a wish that never worded itself into full awareness. In Sarai’s heart, concealed deeply, the line between herself and the family thickened ever so slightly.

  Emtelai died giving birth to Sarai’s new sister, who was also born dead. It was not unusual: hadn’t the woman who gave birth to Sarai died, leaving her to the family of Terah? But in this case, the child had died too, and no one was left except the already born. Nothing was added to the world, or to the family, except grief. Sarai missed Emtelai. Her mother’s absence was palpable, as if death had created vacant places in the gaps where Emtelai should have been, in the air that should have carried her voice around the house. It was absurd, incomprehensible to Sarai that Emtelai was irretrievable, that nothing was left of her but memory, and that of the promised child not even that remained.

  Terah performed all the necessary rituals, but it was as if only part of him was there, and that in addition to the gaps where her mother should have been, there were gaps in the places where her father still was. And once Emtelai and the child were entombed in the space allotted to her in the family burial house, which should have been empty so much longer, he disappeared in actuality. It was a good many days before the children’s own weeping was joined by the weeping in the room the children were forbidden to enter. Then Sarai and her brothers wept for their lost mother and their bereft father, too. They all wept that things had changed, and Sarai wept to see her brothers, especially Abram, weeping; for what solace could there be if they, if he, had none?

  But Sarai wept also on account of her unaccountable wish, when Emtelai was alive, that the new baby would not come and change their lives. She recalled the shadowy cloud, that dread or wish she had felt at the news of her mother’s pregnancy. The fear grew in her that the arrival of the cloud, the fact that she had somehow allowed it to exist and darken, even slightly, the joy at the news of the forthcoming child, made her in some way implicated in the deaths. With the death of Emtelai and the baby, the memory of her dark thoughts wrapped itself like a caul around her heart, and spun itself like a web to encase her mind: a new tightening, which she would learn eventually to live with, but which would never go away. A feeling as if something was scraping away at her insides came and never quite left. The taut shadows around her heart and her mind contained it, kept it within her, never to be brought to the light of day and never to escape. So, after all, something was added by her mother’s death.

  A life, a normal life, is whichever one you grow up living. And, then again, growing up, each thought, each unanticipated event leaves you wondering: Am I the only one in existence to whom such an idea, such a thing has occurred? It’s not easy. Never was. Never will be. Some questions cannot be asked, not even of those you believe you can trust the most. What if the answer is No, no one has ever thought such a thing before? Worse, what if the answer, That is perfectly normal, is a lie given in kindness? You crave their love, but the love that others have for you makes them untrustworthy. And what of the result? Whatever the answer, how will they feel about you once you have asked the question?

  How could eight-year-old Sarai tease out the words from the welter of emotions that came with the death of Emtelai and her child, and speak them to a beloved other? All she could remember was a rat gnawing away at the joy she felt that her adopted mother was going to have a baby. And then grief at their loss, mixed dreadfully with honeyed relief. Just the sensations, of course, not the words. How would she have expressed this? How could she have said the words even if she had found them? And to whom? To her devastated, despairing father, mourning his wife and child? To her idolised brother Abram, shocked pale at his loss of a mother? Even to formulate the words to herself would have emphasised her half-relation to those who were all she had in the world. Would they not have thought what she most feared they might think: that, no, she was not, after all, entirely one of them?

  It was her earliest lesson in confusion and solitude, and in the limitations of love. She did not know whether half-thought thoughts, unwilled negative feelings, could cause the death of a woman and a child out in the real world. She feared perhaps they could. But she knew she could not ask anyone. She knew that the price for having had the bad thoughts, the terrible feelings, was that they must remain shut up inside her, unanswered questions that would make a question of everything she thought and felt for ever after. Anything was better than losing the trust of those who were everything to her. Any inner turmoil, even a lifetime of uncertainty, was better than tearing down the wall of love with which she was surrounded.

  * * *

  By the time Abram was eighteen, although he had never regained the lightness and grace of his young boyhood, he had come to better
terms with the inevitability of manhood. Haran, although he had shot up in height and strength, nevertheless retained his luminous boyish quality. He was long-limbed and fair, unlike the rest of the family, with a curl at the sides of his mouth that was almost girlish. It was odd that he and Abram should have had the same parents. They seemed barely related. Abram had indeed grown through his clumsiness, but he was not tall, though strongly built, quite stocky, with short, muscular limbs. His face was broad all the way down, an expanse, where Haran’s narrowed from the temples into a fine heart shape. Abram was solid, massive, even, like the stone and wood he chipped and carved into idols. He was much darker than Haran, with deep olive skin, Terah’s heavy eyebrows, and Emtelai’s thick black swathe of hair that fell to his shoulders, and sprouted, cropped close, around his mouth, cheeks and chin. His eyes were entirely his own, huge and slightly prominent, of an ebony so dark that they reflected the least shard of light around him, as if it flew into them by attraction to some inner illumination of their own. His strange and beautiful black eyes searched the world, wonderingly, until they came upon something that held them, and they fell with an intense stare upon whatever it was. Sarai still always hoped it would be her, and sometimes it was. He had grown older without growing away from her. She remained his little sister, and when he spoke to her, his voice would take on a warmth and amusement, just as it had done when they were both still children, back before their mother had died.

  Sarai did not transfer her adoration to Haran just because he was more beautiful than Abram. How he looked did not matter. Abram was lodged in Sarai’s heart as the meaning of the world, meaning in the world. Not, of course, that she didn’t love Haran, or the more remote, entirely adult Nahor. Her spirits always leaped when she heard their footsteps entering the house, having finished their day at the workbench and the shop. She loved them like brothers, she loved her father like a father, but Abram she simply loved.

  The brothers worked at the family business of making and selling idols to the citizens of Ur. They produced great carvings of Nanna, the creator god of the moon, and the other major gods of the twelve months and the seasons, for the temple, as well as making smaller idols for the household shrines of those and the less individual family gods that people would commission. Terah had retired and left the running of the business to Nahor, while he spent most of his time sitting in the courtyard, fanning himself slowly against the heat and the flies. Sarai, motherless, came and went as she pleased, from workshop to home and back again. She loved to watch her brothers working: making images out of formless chunks of wood or stone. But when she marvelled at Abram’s skill in carving, he said she was too practically minded, that the form of the gods existed in the chunks all along, and that his skill was in seeing them right there, already waiting in the rough lumps of matter, so that his tools knew just where to chip and shave. She relished his certainty, but when she sat beside him at the bench with a piece of wood of her own, no matter how hard, or from what angle she looked, she could never see the form of the god in it. So she whittled.

  ‘What’s that?’ Abram would ask as Sarai held up the sliver of sharp white wood that was all that remained after her whittling.

  ‘That’s the form that was in the piece of wood,’ she would tell him, putting it on the bench, and picking up another piece to whittle.

  ‘It’s truly a wonder.’ He would smile, with eyes mock-wide. ‘You always find the wood with the long, thin, sharp god of all things long, thin and sharp. You must have a special affinity with him, Sarai. What is he called?’

  ‘It’s a she,’ Sarai would tell him. ‘And she has a secret name that no one can know. But she takes care of all the long, thin, sharp things in the world. And me.’

  She painted and varnished each one with great care. There were several different colours. Families. A whole tribe of her goddess emerged, and she took each finished one home, to join the rest. When she wearied of the workshop, she would marshal her tribe and have them lead their lives. Caravans of red ones would arrive from the desert carrying all manner of strange and wonderful goods from far away, and the yellow town dwellers would buy them in the market, give them to their children if they were good, take them away if they were bad. There were wars and alliances, too. But the first stick she whittled remained the great goddess, who oversaw the well-being of her tribe, and lay apart thinking god-like thoughts. She was called Sarai, though Sarai never told this to her father or brothers when they came across her playing and asked about the one lying alone.

  They lived well, a respected family in the community. The priest admired their work, even the mighty Hammurabi would order his idols from their workshop. Life was orderly, urban and as comfortable as any in the world. It is true that they were surrounded by desert, and that for food they, like everyone in Ur, were dependent on the nomadic herdsmen and the caravans bringing grain; but Hammurabi was wise, and built granaries which stored surplus grain against the times of famine. Aside from the loss of her mother, and the tightness around her heart, which she only noticed from time to time – as the light faded, in the blackness of the night before she slept, sometimes when she was playing with her whittled tribe and became aware of the isolation of the goddess Sarai in a special way – her life was good. All their lives were good.

  So at first, when Haran started to behave oddly, it seemed to be just the ordinary wildness of a young man. He disappeared for days and returned with dark rings under his limpid eyes and a sullen look around his beautiful mouth. Sarai overheard her other brothers worrying about him. He absented himself from the workshop and was drinking much more than he should. He was also pursuing women, bad ones, according to her brothers. But he would grow out of it, they said to each other, while lecturing him about decent behaviour and family reputation.

  One day, two or three years after the death of Emtelai, Nahor returned home with an infant in his arms. The boy was just a few days old and a wet nurse was found for him. Sarai, of course, was delighted.

  ‘His name is Lot. He’s your nephew,’ Nahor told her, as he put the swaddled baby in her arms for the first time.

  She loved him instantly, feeling his warm, damp breath against her cheek as she kissed his tiny face and the strength of his minute fist clamping itself around her finger if it got anywhere within his reach. She ignored her tribe of whittled wood and devoted herself to adoring Lot and being his aunt. She was aware that, like her, Lot was not entirely of the family. Although Terah adopted him she understood that Haran was his father. No mention was ever made of his mother, as no mention was made of Sarai’s. She felt the baby and she had something in common. Terah, though reticent at first, could not resist Lot’s babyish gurgles and smiles, and soon had him on his lap, or lying beside him in his shaded crib in the courtyard. Haran took no interest in the child on his rare appearances in the family home. Nahor was kindly but distant, while Abram looked with wonder on the child as if his every movement and expression were some code he had to unravel. And he, like Sarai, loved the warm livingness of the tiny creature in his arms. Though Lot was a great addition to her life, Sarai was disturbed by the change in Haran. It seemed to threaten the calm and regularity the family had found for themselves after the death of Emtelai.

  Sometimes, when the older people were together, sipping sweet tea, Sarai would hear them grumbling about how civilisation was crumbling. How good and orderly things had been in their youth, how a person could walk the streets of the city without fear of encountering young people intent on foolishness or harm. They worried that all that had been gained from the wilderness of the past was about to be lost. That life would revert to its original primitive state of chaos because something was wrong with the young. They no longer feared their parents, they no longer feared their gods. They had nothing but material pleasure on their minds, and gave no thought to practical consequences or the retribution of the gods. Nahor, who was married now to Milcah, and seemed to Sarai to belong to that generation, joined in with this talk. But when
Sarai asked Abram about it, he shrugged.

  ‘Old people fear the young. They always have and always will,’ he said, concentrating on his carving. ‘I should think Father’s father spoke with his friends like this about Father and his friends. In three thousand years from now, the old will still be worrying about the world going crazy and civilisation coming to an end.’

  Even then there was something of the prophet about him.

  But there were streets in the city where it was inadvisable for a person on their own to walk in the dark. And Sarai knew that Abram, Terah and Nahor were all worried about Haran’s wildness.

  ‘What is the matter with Haran?’ Sarai asked.

  Abram frowned and stopped carving.

  ‘I don’t think it’s to do with the times we live in. There’s something inside Haran that rages against … I don’t know what, not exactly. The way things are, have been, why … Perhaps he doesn’t know, and that’s why he gives himself up to dissolute ways.’

  Sarai loved it when Abram forgot she was a child and spoke his thoughts to her. She did not ask him what dissolute ways were in case it reminded him of her youth.

  ‘Doesn’t Haran love us any more?’ she wondered. ‘Doesn’t he fear the gods? That’s what Father says. I overheard him say that Haran went into the workshop one night and broke the idols. Just whacked off their heads with a stick.’

  ‘He was drunk,’ Abram explained, but he looked very troubled. ‘I think he wants to fear the gods. But there is something in him that rebels against all authority. And he fears, too, that he doesn’t fear the gods. So he challenges them, like he challenges his family with drunkenness and…’