Only Human

by Jenny Diski

  ‘Lot,’ she suggested.

  ‘Yes, and Lot.’

  ‘What will the gods do? Won’t they be very angry at being smashed?’

  ‘He broke models, Sarai. The things we made are just images of what we worship. They aren’t the actual gods themselves. If we could make gods in this workshop we’d be more than the gods, wouldn’t we? We’d be creating them. No, Haran just broke pieces of wood and the gods will understand. Our family gods will protect him. He’ll calm down and come back to us.’

  But he didn’t. He didn’t get the chance. One morning before dawn, Sarai woke to the sound of terrible wailing, even more desperate than the cries she heard at Emtelai’s death. She ran to Terah’s room and found him tearing at the air, surrounded by the servants and her brothers, Nahor and Abram, trying to calm him, but looking distraught themselves. Sarai stood in the doorway, and saw in Terah’s eyes a wild hopelessness she had never seen before. He howled like an animal, wrenching away from the arms of his sons trying to catch and contain him. Abram saw her and took her in his arms.

  ‘Is Father ill? Is he dying?’ she asked in a terrified whisper.

  Abram’s eyes were overflowing with tears.

  ‘A terrible thing has happened,’ he said, holding her tightly, so that he was whispering gently in her ear. ‘An accident. Haran. Very bad.’ There was a sob and he stopped speaking.

  ‘Has Haran been hurt?’

  ‘He’s gone. We’ve lost him.’

  ‘Gone where? Won’t he come back?’

  ‘Haran has died, Sarai.’

  She couldn’t take it in. Old people died. Women in childbirth died. Babies died. But beautiful young men, frantic with energy, glowing with life, didn’t die. Her laughing, blue-eyed brother reaching up to catch a falling basket couldn’t have died. And aged fathers, who might once have wept for dead wives and infants, did not weep for the death of a youthful son. The sons wept for the fathers. It was the way of the world. Sarai knew that. How could such a travesty have happened? Had such a thing ever happened before?

  ‘Was he ill? I saw him yesterday and he wasn’t ill.’

  Abram didn’t answer. He picked her up and carried her back to her bed. She fell asleep eventually with him stroking her hair with one hand, while the other covered his eyes in an effort to contain his tears.

  * * *

  The grieving in the house of Shem was very great. Yet they did not go to the temple to share their sorrow with the gods and the people of the city. They did not even pour funeral libations at the family shrine. This grief was huddled and horrified. No outsiders came to console Terah as they had when Emtelai had died. A curious silence settled over the house, as if the wall around the courtyard not only contained the weeping that occurred within but kept the whispers of the world outside. Haran was buried in the dead of night, unceremoniously, and only Sarai’s father and brothers were present when they placed him in the tomb alongside his mother and baby sister.

  After the burial no one spoke of him again. The silence was omnipresent. Whatever they were speaking of, they were always not speaking of Haran. Sarai couldn’t understand why. In her life she had known a sense of strangeness: with her own semi-alienation and her father’s moods, she had experienced love and loss in the everyday life of the family, but this was her first encounter with blank mystery. Her father’s grief was more than mourning the loss of his son. He refused to set foot outside the house. Soon, Abram and Nahor were at home all day. No one mentioned the workshop. Nahor and his wife increasingly kept to themselves, and Nahor spent many hours at the family shrine, muttering and making sacrifices. Only the baby, Lot, behaved normally, laughing and gurgling, struggling to crawl, grasping at ankles. Sarai spent a great deal of time with him. Even Abram was distant. He seemed to keep her at an arm’s length. She supposed he feared her childish questions.

  This went on for many weeks. The house became dark and silent. Nahor and Milcah kept to their own quarters and were the only ones to leave the house. No one came to them, except one or two remote relatives from the city, who came at night and sat in a baffled silence as Terah rocked back and forth with his head dropped in his hands. Sometimes he murmured, ‘What reason? Why?’ But no one tried to answer his question.

  Some weeks after Haran’s death Sarai learned what had happened from a sweetly persistent friend of her own age who visited her against his parents’ orders.

  ‘They said I mustn’t come here. Your family is defiled.’

  Neither of the children knew what that meant, but they both agreed that it sounded awful.

  ‘They said you would be punished, all of you. That your brother des-desecrated the temple.’

  ‘But he died. He was ill, he must have been, because he was so young and he died.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t ill.’

  ‘How could he have died if he wasn’t ill?’

  ‘He did it himself. Made himself die. He cut himself and all the blood in his body poured out. He cut his throat open at the foot of Nanna’s shrine, and the blood spurted all over Nanna. And when the priest found him in the morning, Nanna’s face had been chipped away, so it was just a blank. Haran did it before he cut himself. That’s why no one will buy idols from your brothers, and they closed the workshop. You’re all forbidden to enter the temple. The house of Shem is unclean.’

  There was no animus in her friend’s voice. He comprehended it as little as Sarai did, and was just reporting what he’d heard from the adults. But she shoved him hard enough to make him fall over when he finished speaking, and then ran back into the house shouting, ‘We don’t want to go to the temple, anyway.’

  The family disgrace did not disturb her thoughts as much as the image of her lovely Haran’s blood spilling from his body, or the unbearable idea that he had deliberately drawn a knife across his throat. Worst of all, most strange, was his wish to die. Sarai could not imagine what such a feeling must be like, or what terrible suffering would have been contained in such a mad desire. She tried to feel his pain as the most awful she had known, but nothing she had ever felt had made her want to let the lifeblood out of her body. Her mind squirmed at the horror he must have suffered before he did such a terrible thing.

  Sarai ran to Abram and sobbed on his chest.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know,’ he murmured miserably at her wailings. ‘He spoke to me once of doubt. Doubt about everything. It was as if he woke up one day and didn’t believe in the world any more. Perhaps it had something to do with Father’s moods. I don’t know. Something in Haran would not leave him alone. Wouldn’t let him live.’

  He wasn’t speaking to Sarai any more, although he still rocked her in his arms. He was trying to explain to himself what had not been talked of for weeks. He didn’t sound convinced, but it was a relief to Sarai just to hear the sound of Haran’s name being spoken for the first time since he left them. It may have been a relief to Abram to speak it ———

  ——— I might have brought the whole experiment to an end, there and then, with that first human birth, but I had discovered anger, and with what could I be angry if I destroyed the object of my anger? And I was curious, too. So much had come from so little. So much consequence. What else might these helpless individuals have to show me?

  Death, of course. I knew nothing of death as they invented it. How could I? I had created life. I had to ask the boy, the farmer, where the shepherd was, just like I had to ask the first pair where they were in the garden that I had made for them. Hiding, always hiding. From the boy, a shrug. The first shrug. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ All new to me. Brother? And that denial of something I had never even envisaged: responsibility to one another. They had made relationship and obligation, and with their perversity immediately negated what had never been thought before. Am I my brother’s keeper? I just wanted to know where the lad was. The scent of roasted sheep meat pleased me. It was a new sensation in the world I had made. And it had stopped. It was an innocent enough question. But suddenly, there was a
family. And suddenly, there was death.

  By any logic, if death was going to occur on the earth, it should be of my will. Yet now they went beyond me. Appropriating creation and devising its end also. No death had happened until then. I had not invented it when I made the first he/she. To tell the truth, it hadn’t occurred to me. Yes, I warned them in the garden that I would destroy them if they disobeyed my single prohibition, but that was my prerogative. Dust to dust. Destruction. And when they disobeyed me anyway, did I destroy them? No, I did not. I made life difficult, but I did not – check it and see – destroy them. Indeed, I told the woman that she would become the mother of all the living, and I made them coats of skin, when I sent them into the wilderness, and with my own hand clothed the nakedness they were making such a fuss about. I was angry, but I promised and comforted as well as punished. I did not kill them.

  It crossed my mind, though, that I had not taken life-span into account. Were my creatures to live for ever? Clearly not: only eternity and the I am that was once within it could do that. I had, however, made no particular arrangements about the end of the life I had created. I needn’t have worried. Cain, the sedentary farmer, first born of the first born, took care of that.

  ‘What have you done?’ I cried at the boy, as the scent of Abel’s roast lamb was replaced by something new and altogether more acrid rising from the earth. Eve discovered she could make life, like me. And her son found he could destroy it, before any such thing was on my mind. Cain had taken life, my life, the life that I had made. Did I kill him? No, I condemned him to wander the face of the earth for his impertinence. ‘But without protection, anyone could kill me,’ he whined. The cheek of it. No one was killing anyone before he started it. Now, he wanted protection. I should have smitten him there and then. But how would that have countered this further appropriation of my power? I resolved to outlaw death caused by any other hand but mine. I made a new rule, and gave Cain a mark, so that all should know that death was my business. Of course, the rule was already breached before I made it, but what else could I do? It seemed I was always to be one step behind these humans ———

  ——— Eventually, the isolation and the shame became too much. In any case, the family could no longer make a living in Ur. One morning Terah called his sons, the servants, Lot’s nurse and Sarai into the courtyard. He sat in his chair as usual, his face fallen, his eyes reddened as they had been ever since his younger son had died.

  ‘We must prepare to leave this place,’ he announced, in a voice that was more a groan than a declaration. ‘We will find another city and begin again to build a name for our family. We will redeem the wrong done by…’ He could not name the name, nor even his relation to him. It was pitiful. He looked so old, far too old and weary to be talking of starting again. He looked like one for whom everything had been over for too long. He drew a breath. ‘I have two strong, skilled sons, a good daughter, and … and a grandchild. We will leave this place. We will make a new life.’

  Nahor stepped forward. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I will not give up everything because of what that foolish boy did to us.’

  There was an astonished silence. Terah had not been asking, he had come to a decision and was telling the family what the future would be.

  ‘Are you not of our family?’ he asked, too quietly.

  ‘Perhaps I am not,’ Nahor replied, just as quietly. ‘And perhaps if I was not, I could live here with Milcah and make a family of my own. One I need not be ashamed of. It will be better if you go and live somewhere else. I will remain here.’

  Terah looked at him for a long moment. Then Nahor took Milcah by the arm and left the gathering.

  ‘Two sons dead,’ Terah whispered, while Sarai looked towards her beloved Abram, her last brother, standing stock still with grief, and realised that they both stood in the ruins of their world.

  So normality ends, cataclysmically. Perhaps the seeds of the cataclysm are sown in the normality itself; perhaps the cataclysm is merely a part of the normality. How would a young girl know? How would anyone know? Then or now. Nothing more than bad fortune, perhaps: a flock of ravens passing over a clear blue sky. But accident is too terrible a thought for a child in the midst of a cataclysm. To Sarai, as she pondered it in the wreckage of the wall of love that had surrounded her all her years, there seemed to be a pattern, a movement, and it was one in which she seemed to be most dreadfully implicated. It began when Emtelai and the baby died – or worse, when Emtelai told Sarai of the impending birth and the small cloud arrived and hovered over them. Then Terah’s mood darkened permanently, and Haran killed himself, and Nahor left the family, and now they were to tear up their roots and head off into the desert. All these things occurred, as they had not occurred to any other family Sarai had known, and they seemed to her, these things, to follow one another, and finally, to follow one from another. They were to leave the wall of love behind them, a ruin, and Sarai was to live with the secret knowledge that it was she who had wrenched away the first stone.

  And yet this terrible burden she was to carry was itself nothing more than ordinary. As ordinary as beginning in the garden and discovering desire, as ordinary as the longing to become the object of one’s infantile desire. The omnipotent and fearful belief that you alone have caused a crack in normality. That your growing private thoughts have torn apart a world that would have survived intact for eternity had you never been born into it. Fear, sadness, confusion, doubt and loss: the consequences of separateness and the creation of love. Just part of being born and participating in the human dance. No one escapes.

  LEAVING

  And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai; and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah … But Sarai was barren; she had no child. And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram’s wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan …

  GENESIS 11:29–31

  The disgraced remnant of the family of Shem set off into the desert. They had an initial destination: Harran. Travellers had told Terah of this city, in which, though far away to the north-west of Ur, the inhabitants worshipped the same familiar gods. Perhaps the family skills could be used there, where their disgrace was not known. They were headed for a place where it seemed possible that they might remake their old life: like and unlike. The name probably counted for something, though it was pronounced more gutturally than the name of Sarai’s dead brother. Perhaps it gave Terah some pleasure to name the place when he could no longer name the son.

  It was a small party, just the close family (minus Nahor and Milcah), Lot and his nurse, Nikkal, and those few servants who were willing to go with them. They left in the dead of night, like criminals, like the outcasts that they now were, their movable possessions packed on a line of asses. The plan was to trade goods and pick up some livestock on the way, so that they might have a source of food and seem much like other desert wanderers. There were six hundred miles of wilderness to cover before they could return to any kind of normal life. But what did they know about the care of sheep and goats? They had had servants to buy the animals in the market, servants to cook them: they had eaten their flesh, sacrificed lambs and kids to the gods, but rear them, travel with them? Terah resisted the idea of giving up their urban identity to become ‘carers of beasts, of stinking, stupid animals’. But Abram insisted. He would learn to care for them, he assured his father, and the journey would be safer if they appeared to be like the other nomads they would come across, rather than a wealthy citified family with all their worldly goods, helpless in the desert.

  ‘We will be helpless in the desert,’ Terah replied, from within his cloud of gloom.

  ‘We will learn not to be,’ Abram said, his fierce black eyes already turned away from Ur to a new life.

  This, of course, made Terah feel much worse.

  ‘That I should have to learn a new life, and such a life, at my age…
’ and he sank his head in his hands and began to sob.

  But Sarai was young enough to be quite excited about an entirely new way of life. She had often watched the nomadic children when they came to the city, wild and free creatures, they seemed, strong and sunburned, and with a grasp of the world and their place in it that she envied. She wondered if she could be like them, once they had left the loving yet constraining wall of her house for the open spaces of the desert.

  Sarai was thirteen by the time they set off for Harran. During that first week of desert living, walking and riding by dawn and dusk in the sand-blown emptiness, sleeping in the heat of the day and under layers of rugs in the iciness of the night, she had her first period. She went to Abram, afraid that her life was pouring away.

  ‘I’m ill,’ she told him. ‘Blood is leaking from my body.’

  Abram lowered his eyes. ‘You must talk to Nikkal,’ he said, without looking at the girl. ‘She will explain.’

  Sarai was surprised by Abram’s lack of surprise, and by his refusal to explain what clearly he understood. He had never before evaded her questions if he had any kind of an answer. She stared at him, fearing the unimaginable worst.

  ‘It’s women’s business,’ he said, with finality.

  Nikkal told the astonished Sarai about the process of reproduction. She was not surprised at the girl’s shock, which now replaced the fear Sarai had had that she might have a life-threatening illness.

  ‘Every month? I’ll bleed every month?’

  ‘You’re a woman now. It shows that you can bear children of your own.’

  Sarai had never doubted that she could. That was what all women did. But that it required a monthly blood-letting was strange and terrible. Blood was sacred. It was spilled only to honour or placate the gods. Then it was called sacrifice, and the creature sacrificed forfeited its life. What was more precious than blood, which was life itself? New life, apparently. And yet how could she forget what she had heard from her friend in Ur? The image of Haran’s blood spurting from his throat, emptying him of life, flashed hideously into her mind. His death; Sarai’s assurance of new life. That Nikkal should be so calm at her flow of blood when Haran’s had caused such grief and turmoil was a mystery she could not fathom. How could she not feel terror at the sight of the bright fresh blood dripping down her thighs, and the thick, dark clots that issued from the very centre of herself?