Only Human

by Jenny Diski

  Eventually the time came when Abram stopped talking to Sarai about the children they would have. If his hand hovered over her belly now, it was for the sensual pleasure of feeling its silkiness against his rough work-hardened fingers, and later, perhaps, silently noticing the work the passage of time had wrought on her no longer taut, no longer so silky flesh. They continued for many years with their life, and in spite of the lack of children and the workings of time and habituation, they remained, remarkably, lovers and in love. Sarai knew that there were discussions and then arguments with Terah. Once again she heard voices raised in her father’s rooms. Later she learned that Terah was insisting that her husband take a concubine, that it was his duty to produce an heir. Not that her father loved her any less as his daughter, but his plans for Sarai as a daughter-in-law had not worked out, and the future of the family of Shem was playing on his mind. It was certainly playing on Abram’s mind, but it was not only love for Sarai that stopped him from taking a new wife. He was as dutiful a husband as he was a son. He was too loyal to Sarai, to the idea of wife, to accede to Terah’s demands. And if Sarai’s relationship with him shifted once again, it might bring back to mind the nature of their former relationship. It would have been quite normal for him to find a woman to have his children, yet he balked, even though his desire for offspring and the securing of the line was quite as strong as Terah’s. He perceived himself as a one-woman man, Sarai’s Abram, quite out of his time, when a man might reasonably have a multiplicity of women. It was his nature to choose and stay with one woman, one lover, one friend. Perhaps that was all he could cope with. But he felt that he must remain committed and devoted to a single other, and in a world where wives were repudiated not just for failing to bear children but for having an aesthetically displeasing cast in one eye, Sarai appreciated this trait in her singular and remarkable man. So Abram chose Sarai instead of posterity, and the dissent between him and Terah grew.

  Still the marriage was barren. As the decades passed, they continued to love each other, and were as close as any brother-sister, husband-wife had ever been, and yet from such closeness no children emerged. It never once occurred to her or anyone else that it might be Abram who was unable to have children. But, of course, Sarai’s inability to conceive was at the back of her mind a punishment, perhaps, after all, worse than dying in childbirth, for her long-ago guilty resentment of Emtelai’s happiness. The notion that her thoughts had contributed to those deaths had not disappeared with the passing years. She deserved not to have children.

  So the years accumulated behind them. They became as settled and respected a family as they had been in Ur, the business thrived and nothing this time broke the thread of their lives. Terah aged further into his silent contemplation in the courtyard, and Abram’s glossy black hair became speckled with grey, and the skin at the corners of his eyes criss-crossed with time. Sarai aged too. Her waist thickened, her breasts were no longer firm, her thighs no longer taut. Yet she saw in her glass that the girl she had been, who was no beauty but was desirable for her sheer youth, had aged into a handsome woman. Abram’s desire for her did not diminish, and her appetite for him remained. His strong, compact body still felt good beside her. And they knew all the better how to pleasure each other. They were companions by day and each other’s comforter at night. They no longer made love in the hope of producing children, Sarai knew, but for and to each other. Their childlessness was never spoken of, but it made their caresses all the more tender. He was a good man. She couldn’t have asked for better. And if she had failed him as a bearer of children, she was, he often told her, everything, everything a man could ever hope for in a lifelong friend and wife. Abram did not want any other woman, however much Terah said it was his duty, and she could not bring herself to pretend that the idea of his lying in anyone’s arms but hers would not break her heart.

  Eventually, Lot grew into a fine young man, with his father’s fair good looks and a winning smile. As Abram continued to refuse to take another woman, Terah turned to Lot, for all the unsatisfactoriness of his paternity, and found him a wife. This time Terah was not betting his future on a slip of a girl. Lot’s wife was a big-hipped sturdy woman in her middle twenties, no beauty by anyone’s standards, which accounted for her availability at such an age, but as fecund-looking as a nanny goat in heat. It was impossible not to imagine her heavy, bouncing breasts dripping milk, or her great thighs parting with easy regularity to allow babies to slip into the world like eels through a net.

  ‘Looks aren’t everything,’ Terah assured the alarmed young Lot. ‘We need a baby-maker. Make the babies and you can have all the beautiful young concubines you can cope with.’

  Lot did not have the innately dutiful character that his uncle Abram possessed and which, paradoxically, had caused him to reject Terah’s wishes, but he was not a strong-minded young man. Perhaps the shadow of his unmentionable father weighed on him and made him fearful. He was too willing to please, too tentative to argue his case. Terah had always been hard with him, fearing, perhaps, that he might have inherited Haran’s waywardness. But if Haran was a wild young man, Lot, for whatever reason, was tame. He married his prodigious bride and set about making babies. When they came they were girls, not quite what was wanted, but the pressure on Abram was lessened a little. At least there was a chance of sons of Shem to come.

  If Lot’s babies eventually took some of the pressure away from them, it was still hard for Abram and Sarai to see them feeding hungrily from their mother’s breast, and growing into their own young lives. Sarai was fond of them, but their very existence was a reminder of what she could not do. Abram and Sarai let silence bear the strain of their disappointment at having no heirs of their own. She had managed to submerge her guilt deep into the recesses of her mind, and it seemed as if Abram had come to terms with the situation. In fact, in his monumentally patient way, it turned out that Abram was only waiting until all hope was extinguished before allowing his despair to emerge and change the course of all their lives, just when it had come to seem that their lives had been all but said and done.

  It wasn’t until several months after Sarai’s periods had stopped coming that Abram began to exhibit behaviour that caused her anxiety. Eventually he noticed that she no longer slept apart from him each month. Men do not keep an internal calendar as women are inclined to do.

  ‘Is it over?’ he asked one night, resting his bearded cheek against her belly after they had finished making love.

  ‘For months now,’ she told him, caressing his hair, fully grey now, but still thick enough to please her raking fingers.

  He was silent for a moment.

  ‘Now there can be no surprises,’ he said, and turned his face full into the flesh of her stomach.

  She heard this with wonder.

  ‘Abram,’ she said, lifting his head to look into his face. ‘After all this time, did you still hope there would be?’

  ‘No, no, of course not.’

  He brought himself back to lie face up beside her.

  ‘But you said…’

  ‘I suppose there was always a faint chance that something might happen, just the possibility. I don’t mean I was expecting … only now there can be no chance…’

  ‘All this time?’ She was astonished. ‘All this time, and you still thought we might have a child.’

  He was uncomfortable. ‘No, not really. Not exactly thought. It’s just that now all possibility is over. I suppose, you never know, you can’t be sure that something won’t happen, not until now, not until it’s too late for anything…’

  Sarai had had no idea. She had known there would be no child after the first years. She had learned to greet the sight of each monthly flow with a grim nod of recognition of how things are, not with bitter disappointment. Her monthly period existed merely to mock her infertility. But that was better than to feel, month by month, year after year, that the blood washed away another lost child, another life that her body had failed to make, that her ar
ms would never hold, breasts nourish, lips kiss, eyes feast upon. To have had to experience such loss every month after the first number of years would have drained her of her own life. She took her menstrual blood to be a discharge of a faulty mechanism, no more capable of sustaining life than an empty sack. She came to know deeply that she did not have the ability to nourish new life. Barrenness was the nature of her interior, and to hope that it might change each month, and to have that hope dashed with deadly regularity would have made her quite mad. Abram’s love for her exterior body was all that had prevented her from hating herself utterly. It gave her the right to exist. Yet now it seemed that each month, for all these years of months, he had hoped and suffered disappointment.

  And now, for all the pain she realised he must have felt, Sarai burned with anger.

  ‘How could you?’ she shouted at him, and began to beat his chest with her clenched fists. ‘How dare you? How could you have hoped all this time?’

  Abram had no idea why she should be screaming and flailing at him, and nor, at that moment, did Sarai, but she could not stop. The tears streamed down her face as she hit out and tore at him with her nails in such rage that he had to grasp her wrists to stop her drawing blood. And even then her anger was so powerful that she broke free and scored his cheek and chest with bloody scratches. They had had arguments over the years, but never had she been so incandescent, so beyond control. Abram was afraid of what he saw. Instead of trying to take her wrists again, he enclosed Sarai in his arms, clutching her raging body tightly against his so that she could do nothing more than writhe against him.

  ‘Stop, stop, stop,’ he called out to her, in a tone that begged rather than ordered. He sounded fearful, confused, but for long minutes she was unable to do anything except fight against him to break free so that she could gouge at his flesh and scream at him. It came from nowhere, but took her over entirely, and Abram could only hold her firm next to his beating heart until eventually, from sheer exhaustion, her screams transformed into deep sobs and her fight subsided into despair.

  Only very occasionally do we understand that the years which seemed in their passing to have been easy enough to live through in fact have accumulated, accreted like scar tissue, and made a difference to our very substance. Without that chance remark by Abram, Sarai might have lived and died without knowing that each second, each dismissed thought, each suppressed anxiety changes who you were from what you might have been to who you are. An obvious discovery once it is made, even back in those days, but still she managed to live through the decades of her childhood and middle age until that moment, in the unexamined belief that life was time passing, and something external to the one who lived it. Now, when she might most reasonably be subsiding into the final portion of her existence, she discovered in her unaccountable rage all the moments of the earlier decades vivid within her as if, at last and all at once, they were jostling for a last-minute recognition.

  She was, by the standards of the times, quite old now, and by any standards beyond her reproductive purpose as a woman. What was she doing beating and screaming at her even more elderly, devoted husband, when until then she had been all silence, appreciation and acquiescence? It was unseemly, at the very least, to say nothing of pointless. What had Abram done to deserve the marks she had scored on his body? From her madness and fury she screamed an answer, one that, in the excitement, neither of them recognised as the plain truth.

  ‘All wasted, all wasted,’ she howled at him, as he held her close in his clutches. ‘Your damned obedience, your wretched dutifulness, your devotion has wasted our lives. How could you do this to me? In the name of love, how could you condemn me to this half-life, this pretend world we made of love and nothing else? How could you have not cried out all this time? You never wept on my naked bosom. We never wept and raged together. You are not loyal. You’re a traitor.’

  They both thought she was babbling insane nonsense. Neither of them paid much attention to the meaning of what she shouted, only to the state she was in. But after the rage had subsided, in the days and nights of what seemed to be restored normality, her words came back to her and demanded her attention. She was shocked at the anger she discovered, so powerful as to seem, that night, entirely to possess her. Abram was shocked also, but he feared Sarai was ill. Her shock was at discovering she was someone quite different from who she thought she was, that she was someone who in a long, contented enough life, had never spoken before. Where once the way of the world had sufficed as explanation for what and how she and everything was, now it had become her gaoler and her enemy: the dark deviser of her acquiescence and unconsciousness of her own self. And Abram, her beloved, was complicit in the crime of wasting both of their lives.

  She did not have any precise notion of what an unwasted life might have been. It was not that she perceived several options she had failed to take. The way of the world was too powerful to allow such imaginings. But it was enough to discover that she was getting old, getting near the end, at least at the point where nothing new was going to happen (‘Now there can be no surprises’), only more or less much the same, and that there might have been other ways of living or thinking or being. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t conceive of them, what mattered was that she understood there were unsuspected possibilities, when all along she had been led to believe, allowed herself to believe, that there was only one life to be led: the one that she lived in. Even her inner rage seemed a precious new discovery, an alternative to the suppressed guilt and unfulfilled hopes that had led her life by the nose since she was a tiny child. Perhaps it was no one’s fault. Of course it was no one’s fault, but one of the revelations of that wild attack on Abram was the satisfaction she felt at unfairly and unreasonably blaming him. The very unfairness and irrationality of her accusations gave her a sense of freedom such as she had never experienced before ———

  ——— Irrationality! Oh, yes, irrationality. Who could have foreseen such a trait? It should have been so simple. I give life, and life, in gratitude and in order to continue, does what its creator wants. In the end, it was not disobedience itself that was the cause of the problem between me and my creatures right from the beginning, it was irrationality: a rogue tendency that arrived like a virus out of nowhere. A – believe me – unintended corollary perhaps to the great big brains I had bestowed on them to think me with. A side effect of complexity, I suppose. And what rational being could have suspected the accident of irrationality? It was their capacity to risk everything for no good reason at all, for the sheer pleasure of the unreason of it, that was the cause of the disobedience in the first place. How could I, pure reason, deal with that? Disobedience I could punish, but what could I do about the irrational? It made no sense to me. It seems so straightforward: don’t eat of that tree or you will be punished. Punishment is bad. Life is good. Carry on doing what you are doing and it will go on being good. What reasonable being would disobey? Human being. For me the strangeness of my creation had been the incidental invention of consequence, but these piffling creatures did not just embody consequence, they even chose to ignore it. Got above themselves, and were always trying to get above me.

  I admit to a loss of confidence. A feeling of lowered self-esteem. I could have retired into eternity, but always at the back of my mind was the troubling fact of the continued existence of my creation. It wasn’t just my promise to Noah – though my word was my word and if I didn’t keep it, it would become theirs – that stopped me from destroying the whole shebang. It was my own sense of failure. How could I am fail? Where would that leave me? I resolved to try once more, but this time to infiltrate humanity with my kind of human being. I would start small and build my kingdom on earth from within. I searched the world for another Noah, but this time a solitary, needful one whose history I could develop and control. I remembered that death and future were my chosen weapons. Once again I took what I had learned from my creatures whose life-spans were mere puffs of existence compared to my eternity.
Now I would use cunning to make the world I wanted. Time, after all, was on my side ———

  ——— Nothing changed immediately after Sarai’s outburst and her new understanding of her life. Not so that it could be noticed. When morning came, Abram looked at her nervously, but she shook her head in reassurance that the tempest was past. Only the scratches on Abram’s face and chest remained to show that anything had happened the night before. But it had happened, both Abram’s realisation and her own. The scratches on each of their souls did not heal and could not be explained away as an accident in the workshop.

  From that moment there was the beginning of a distance between them that had never existed since the troubled days at the beginning of their marriage. Neither of them was aware of it at first. They carried on as old friends and old lovers, but some part of Sarai remained separate, as if a new place within her had been created on that night, a place of seclusion that Abram could not penetrate with either love or familiarity. From then on there was the way of the world, which was lived as it had to be lived, but there was also a new inner world of Sarai’s own, where the way of the world was called into question, where question followed question, where ready answers had no authority and dissatisfaction provided secret satisfactions of its own. It was tentative at first, but she began to get the hang of it gradually, and soon found it possible to exist in both worlds simultaneously. In her interior world, Sarai began hesitantly to dance and to discover that the tune the world played was not the only one.