by Jenny Diski
Perhaps, after all, there was some sense in Abram’s plan to leave Harran. Though his new god was his excuse, he had the same memories as Sarai: did he feel a return to that life would soothe his mental agony? Whatever his intentions, the effect might be the same. And what was there to keep them now in Harran? As Sarai thought of it, she wondered if the return of the dutiful, plodding Abram of their life in Harran was what she, herself, wanted. Her recollections of their youth in the wilderness did not make such a return to normality attractive. She found, in spite of her alarm for Abram’s state of mind and a fear of yet again walking away from their settled life, a kind of excitement building in her, borne perhaps of nostalgia. But it brought a sense of possibility, of movement through the world, of change that she hadn’t known until then that she had been missing. The nomadic life might clear Abram’s mind of the despair that caused voices in his head. And even if it did not, she thought, Abram could have his god, and she, perhaps, could have something of the old Abram, and room, as well, to breathe.
His decision to leave had already improved his state of mind. There was no more talk of the lord, only plans for disengaging themselves from the city, what they needed to take with them, which servants could be persuaded to come, who would stay and look after Terah. He was full of energy.
Not long before they left, Lot came to Sarai.
‘Can we come with you?’ he asked nervously.
‘We don’t know where we are going, and Abram isn’t well,’ she said. ‘If you stay, you will be head of the household. You can rebuild the business and be your own master.’
As she spoke, she realised that it was just this prospect that alarmed Lot. He could not imagine himself in charge of a family, making the decisions. He wanted to tag along, even if his leader had no idea where he was going, he wanted to follow. Even if Abram was mad as a rabid bat, it was better to go with him than be in charge of his own life.
‘But you are going. You’re sensible. I trust you.’
She thanked Lot for his faith in her. Why not take Lot with them? He was a willing worker, if told what to do. Another man, and one not likely to get carried away with godly thoughts, would be useful. And she was fond of the girls. She would have missed them. Terah would be well taken care of by the remaining servants and his new old cronies.
Terah did not bat an eyelid when Sarai told him that they were to leave. He sat in his shaded corner of the courtyard and nodded solemnly.
‘Yes, that would be for the best,’ he said. ‘The gods will appreciate Abram paying such a penance, and it’s right that you should go with him. You are his wife.’ A shadow passed across his face as if he had just remembered something, but it passed like a wind-chased cloud. Sarai let Terah’s misunderstanding of Abram’s motives go. He didn’t mention Lot, but she didn’t get the feeling that he would be greatly missed. Terah was settling in well to the life of an elder, and learning to wear his suffering as a badge of pride among them. Perhaps the rest of the family had become an embarrassment to him. He had found a life for himself, and he was glad to see the back of them.
FAMINE
Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee; and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
GENESIS 12:1–3
Again.
For the second time in their lives Abram and Sarai relinquished the past. Once again they left everything, but this time they were truly wanderers. They had no destination, apart from a vague promise locked inside Abram’s head, that there would, sometime, somewhere, be one. To a land that I will show you. That was where they were going, according to Abram. He gathered the small party together on the outskirts of Harran: Lot, his wife, their three girls, their children, the dozen servants who agreed to go along, and told them, his eyes burning with the glory of it, ‘We will be shown our new land.’ His conviction had to do for all of them. A second-hand assurance of destination did not sound promising to anyone, and yet, in spite of doubting that they were going anywhere much at all, they went along. Lot and his family, because life had become too difficult in Harran; the servants perhaps for the adventure, perhaps out of a fondness for Abram and Sarai; and Sarai, because she wanted what was no longer in Harran and knew no other way to find it. She was lost already, she had come to the end of the life she had lived before then; her safety in this world in the form of love had vanished. Her heart had closed and locked. What did she have to fear from the wilderness? At least she would be lost and moving. In Harran there was only stagnation.
There was another difference between that first trek from Ur and now; then they had taken all their wealth with them, now they had very little that was surplus to their needs. Abram bought the sheep and goats, this time not in order to appear to be an ordinary nomadic group but for subsistence. Abram took only what he had to from Harran to get started on their new journey. They bought sheep and goats and donkeys, they bought tents. They were truly wanderers in the desert.
‘We will be provided for,’ Abram said calmly.
Sarai envied his conviction, but she felt no very great alarm at leaving most of their worldly goods behind. She was almost intrigued and energised by the new uncertainty of her life, and after all, their former wealth had not provided her with any great security. Any life was better than the sadness of those last weeks in Harran. And when she saw Abram in the middle of the new herds, surveying and checking the animals, and watched the twisted ropes of muscle in his neck visibly relax, and the throb in his troubled temples ease as he bent to examine a pregnant ewe, she believed that whatever the future held, there would, on the way to it, be some peace of mind. There would be some sense in rising in the morning, because even if they didn’t know where they were going, they knew that the animals depended on them for pasture and water. There was something to care for. They would move from well to well, from town to town, from desert encampment to encampment with no less reason than any other travelling group who did not have the personal word of an invisible lord to justify their existence. They would buy and sell and barter according to their needs. They had no settled place, nor any destination, but they would have a rhythm of necessity to their lives. There was life to think about beyond their own, and Sarai hoped the anguish that had caused the voice inside Abram’s head would ease and leave them both in peace.
Yes, of course, she saw what she looked for. She ached for life to return to the way it once had been. She wanted the rhythm of their old nomadic life, or the throb of the time when they were first lovers to wash away the memory of her anger, the taste of bitterness, her unsought vision of life as arid and wasted. She wanted love back so that she would not have to consider what a life without love might mean. That was why she willingly left her sedentary life; that was why she let it happen ———
——— Ha! She let it happen! What had she done but follow orders I had given my chosen one? I spoke and Abram obeyed. That is what happened. That is how it happened. She may talk of madness and despair, and of voices caused by anguish. But the voice was mine, the plan was mine. The relation was between Abram and I am. I had made an us of him and me far more compelling than she could imagine with her time-tainted human love, which had produced nothing. Between Abram and me, a future would be created. I could give him what she had failed to provide. She was just flesh and bone. I was almighty, I was eternal. She speaks of sheep and goats. I had destiny in my gift. Abram was mine ———
——— Yes, it may be. This was a time of raw sentiment for Sarai, of a final clinging to hope. It was the recollection of a spark, a brief moment of foolish reaching for what had gone. She had faced hopelessness and for a short period she grasped at the past, and the illusion that it was retrievable.
And she loved those first month
s in the desert. Perhaps she knew all along that there could be no return, that life was lived in only one direction and memory merely tormented the discontented with its capacity to look backwards, but, as in a dream where the dreamer suspects they might be dreaming but refuses to vacate the dreamscape, Sarai allowed memory to whisper to her of the past and chose to believe it said future. Though she thought she was humouring her deluded husband by going along on his trek to nowhere as ordered by no one, she was in truth no more in touch with reality than Abram. Foolish old woman. She heard no inner voice of salvation, but in her own way she was just as capable of self-deception.
Abram’s voice had been silent since it told him to leave, but he did not doubt that he was following its purpose and that it was following his progress. Love was recovered on that journey, but it was not Abram’s old love for Sarai. He was kind and gentle, and treated her with consideration and respect as was due a wife of decades, but when they made camp, he erected a tent for Sarai beside his own. Now she slept apart from Abram for the first time since they had married. She would have been a foolish woman indeed to expect either of them to feel the same physical passion for each other after all this time, but they had retained their physical love until this crisis; it was no longer discovery, it had become history, and they had touched each other with the memory of all the years between them, with the eroticism of time. They had touched and been touched by their familiarity with every part of each other and delighted by revisiting and remembering. Even now, Abram had not lost his passion, his capacity for devotion, but it was focused away from Sarai, turned simultaneously inwards and towards eternity, missing his flesh and blood wife entirely. He loved her, of course, dutifully, as one loves a long-standing partner in life, but he desired the one who promised what she had failed to achieve. Sarai saw him, at night, wandering from his tent, in the light of the stars, absorbed and utterly abstracted, waiting. The look on his face reminded her of all those years ago when Terah had spoken to him of marriage and she caught him glancing at her in an entirely new way, seeing her afresh. Now that look was for what lay beyond the massed stars and the uncountable sands of the desert. The world itself was his promised bride, and he had no doubt that the secrets it held would be revealed to him. Could Sarai be jealous of the world? Could she envy a phantom voice that distracted her Abram into another love? Oh, yes. Yes. Sometimes, of course, in the midst of her solitary raging, she would realise how ridiculous her anger was against a spectral voice engendered by despair. And then her rage would double, because her jealousy was not just ridiculous, but impotent against a seduction by a dream. A real rival would have been preferable. At least, had Abram taken a concubine rather than this lord of his, she would have retained her position as senior wife. Now, as he mooned over his phantasm, she became entirely irrelevant.
* * *
They journeyed south and east, according to Abram’s instinct. It didn’t matter to Sarai which direction they took. There was plenty to keep her busy. She was in charge of the smooth running of the group, much as she had been during their sedentary life in Harran, supervising their food supplies, helping to spin and make cloth to replace the wind- and sand-blown garments as they wore away. The girls and the children would come to her with their arguments, and their complaints against their mothers, just as their mothers would sit with Sarai and bemoan the lives they were leading and the depleting effects of pregnancy and child-care. The servants brought her their problems. And Abram brought her sick and abandoned kids and lambs to nurse back to health. She had a way with sick animals, he said. She soothed and sorted. Nothing in any of their difficulties seemed overwhelming to her, it was easy enough to cut through the tensions, to murmur easing words and find quite obvious solutions. Only her own existence seemed insoluble, and yet it went on day by day. She had a function and she had everyone’s trust and respect. She liked the practicality of life on the move. No one guessed that she was in any pain. Her pain, like Abram’s, was about what could not be touched or seen.
It isn’t even true to say that Abram did not love her any more. He did. But she was no longer the central passion of his life. He did not sink into her arms at night as if that was the final purpose of the day’s doings. He did not tell her how he desired her and how he needed her, either with his voice or his body. And worst of all, in failing to do these things, he did not tell her how much she needed him. It may be that this was the most painful loss, the one she could least of all face: she no longer needed Abram. She was cut adrift in a world in which she was able to manage perfectly well, but from which all purpose had been abolished. She could have imagined, though she dared not do it, an existence without Abram, a life of her own if Abram should leave or die. This was the most fearful thing. Abram was no longer the object of her life, the source of her being. If, after a lifetime, she no longer needed Abram, what had that lifetime been for?
Whatever the answer, it had certainly not been for the purpose of reproduction. She might nurture Abram’s sick lambs and her nieces, but it had not been given to her to bring children into the world and grow them into the next generation. Whether her body was at fault, or Abram’s capacity to engender children, or even if it was the will of the gods or Abram’s lord, it was a fact. Perhaps there were other women in the same circumstances, but she did not know them. In any case, it was her life, her body that was definitively deprived; the lack was the centre of her life as she looked back on it then. Whatever might have been, was not, because she had failed to have children. And what was, their aimless wandering in the desert, their loss of home and birthright, was the result of the same failure. Childlessness was as close to Sarai as her heartbeat or her guilt over Emtelai and the baby, and now closer both to Abram and Sarai than they were to each other. This also was the way of the world, but no one had thought to mention it.
* * *
They came to a land called Canaan. It was no different from the other places they had travelled through, a mixed land of desert and wells, lush enough in parts to sustain herds, with settlements here and there but with nothing of the urban sophistication of Ur or even of Harran. It was distinguished from the lands around by being the homeland of the Canaanite people, descendants it was said of Ham, who had so disgraced himself with his drunken father, Noah, and who was the brother of their ancestor Shem. The Canaanites worshipped gods very similar to those they had left behind in Harran, and lived in settlements or travelling bands like themselves. They took no offence at Abram’s group moving through and making camp in their land. There was room enough for all of them. It seemed to Sarai to be just another place they were passing through on their journey of promised but never-to-be-reached destination. But she was wrong, at least in part.
They made camp just outside the village of Shechem, not far from a glade of oak trees called Moreh, which was the sacred place of the local deity to whom the people thereabouts sacrificed and prayed for the well-being of their herds and crops. One morning, not long after they arrived, Abram entered Sarai’s tent in the yellow light of the early hours. Even in the dimness of dawn his face glowed with excitement.
‘We have arrived,’ he told her, kneeling beside her bed. ‘This is our destination.’
She turned his words over in her sleepy mind until they made Abram’s kind of sense.
‘Here? This place is where we were coming to all along? Shechem?’
It seemed a long way to come for nothing very special.
‘This land. Canaan. This is where my seed will develop into a nation.’
She stopped herself from snapping that so far his seed had failed to develop into a single baby, and she could not see how it was going to make the leap directly into nationhood now. Abram never was strong on irony and he looked even less likely to appreciate it at the moment.
‘Won’t the Canaanites have something to say about it?’ she could not resist saying.
‘Sarai,’ he said, whispering urgently, trying to focus her mind on the importance of what he was saying, �
�I have seen the Lord. He appeared to me last night, and told me that this was to become our land. It is his promise to us.’
‘To you,’ Sarai insisted. ‘What did he look like?’
She treated her husband’s fantasies as she would a child who mistook its dream for reality.
‘I saw him. Yes, I saw him, but what I saw can’t be described. I was walking in the glade of trees, and he was there, in front of me, but though my eyes saw him, he was a presence more than a figure, an air, a quality of light. There are no words, no picture that I could make of him.’
‘Him?’
‘Of course.’
Of course. That much of this unpicturable vision would have been blindingly obvious. Of course.
‘And he said?’
‘I give this land to your seed.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Yes.’
‘He didn’t say how?’
‘Sarai, you don’t understand. This is the Lord. He has revealed this place to me and what it is to become. Believe me, he is not like any other god we have ever known. If you had heard him, seen him…’
‘But I haven’t.’
‘But if you had, you would understand. This Lord is all powerful. He can do anything. He is the Lord of the mountain peak who sits above all things and beings, all other gods, all men, higher than any, more potent than any. The world is in his gift. The Lord, this Lord High God, has chosen me. He has chosen us. We are to be his people.’
‘What do you have to do to transform your seed into a nation?’
‘Only to believe the Lord. That is all. He requires nothing else.’
