by Jenny Diski
‘Not yet, he doesn’t. So the Canaanites will just bow before you and go off to find some other place to live, will they? And you will proceed to start a nation. With whom will you do this, Abram?’
‘Sarai, the Lord will provide.’
‘How are you supposed to claim this place for yourself and your mountainous lord?’
‘We will travel through the land and build altars to him, proclaim him as the Lord of this country and of our people.’
So it seemed that Shechem was not to be their final stopping place. Now they were to become the entourage of a peripatetic teacher with the word of a new lord in his ear, wandering and proclaiming. Life, Sarai decided, takes the most unexpected turns.
Abram built an altar to his lord in the sacred place of the local Shechemite god at Moreh. The local people didn’t seem to mind at all. The more gods the merrier as far as they were concerned. People stopped and listened politely as Abram proclaimed his new god, and although they were unconvinced at his claims of the superiority of this lord over the other deities, they accepted that to Abram, his personal god was better than the rest. Everyone felt the same. Some gods you worshipped, but your own god held a special place in your heart. It amused them, Sarai thought, to see Abram so passionate about his. Religion was what made the world work, there was no reason to limit the possibilities and every reason to add to the pantheon of gods another who might come in useful. These were practical believers, as the family of Shem once had been, until the strange passion of Haran had tainted them with special longings.
They pulled up their stakes and continued south into the hill country between Bethel and Ai, and there too Abram added an altar of his lord to the local holy place. And so they went: Abram built altars and proclaimed, and the rest of them got on with life on the move and became quite used to it. They had a holy man among them now. Abram, Sarai’s brother and husband, seemed lost. The reliable, stable presence of his uncle, more like a father, was gone from Lot’s life. To all intents and purposes Sarai ran the little group, while Abram walked beneath the sun and stars, pacing the days and nights away with glazed eyes, intent upon doing the work of his lord, while the rest of them followed in his footsteps and kept a reasonably sensible life going. Lot was distressed. He was quite unable to understand what had happened to Abram. He had no interest in this new god or any other: he wanted life simple. Sarai tried to reassure him, and he came to her now instead of Abram when he was confused or troubled. And all this time, she suppressed the fury and disappointment, and smoothed the surface of the turmoil in which she was living. Was her Abram mad? Were they following the wayward steps of a man who had lost his reason? Sarai had no doubt that they were. And yet a kind of normality emerged, a sort of ordinariness that they all hankered after. It did not look much like the normality they had once known as a settled, wealthy family, but the days and nights of wandering became their days and nights, and Abram’s impassioned daydream led them through the land as well as any group. Abram was inspired, but it was easy enough to ignore that and to feel they were just another band of travellers making a living in a difficult world. There is nothing so extraordinary in the universe that humanity can’t make mundane and everyday ———
——— I, who belonged to eternity with no beginning and no end, who had created the earth and the seas, the day and the night, mountains, valleys, rivers, the frozen waste, the searing desert, the seed, the egg, the male, the female, and seething, sentient life to flourish on my world; I, who am I am, the Word, the Creator, the Destroyer, beyond all life and death; I, the omnipotent, the omniscient, the singular, discovered at last what it was to be the object of love.
It came as a surprise to me. I had not built this into creation. Why would I even have thought of it? My universe was a perfect machine for self-replication, a divinely ordained mechanism that ensured decay and renewal at every level from the cell to the cosmos. All life, from the single cell to the myriad-celled collective that called itself an individual, had a built-in necessity to reproduce, to make a living and to degrade back into the substance of the earth from which it was made. It was simple and self-ordering. I began it, and it continued because it had no other choice but to be the way I made it. There was no need for a special relationship of feeling between one individual and another. I had not created it, had not even conceived of it, because it was simply not necessary for the mechanism to work. And yet, that is what happened, without my will, without my consent, as a kind of accidental by-product of the gift of self-consciousness. Of course, I need not have given them self-consciousness, the pattern of the universe did not require it, but I made humankind in my own image, they were to be my mirror. And they made something of their own, and discovered that their self-consciousness implied the separate existence of the other that I could never had imagined in my eternal solitude. An independent awareness like a polished glass which one conscious being could peer into and see itself reflected, and reflect back from its own consciousness to the other. This reflective process they call us and love. I had been the creator, the punisher, but I had never been part of an us. How could I when I was eternally, unalterably, I am? And yet now I myself experienced this strange capacity that humanity had developed in spite of me. It turned towards me and I felt, for the first time in all time itself, the power of something I had had no hand in creating. Abram, given the promise of a dream come true, had turned his human feelings towards me. He loved me. Abram was mine in a way that no other creature on earth had been mine before. My mirror mirrored me at last and showed me what I had never dreamed of.
Adam and Eve and their offspring had learned to fear me. This was right. It was as I expected. Noah had been dumbly obedient, and then, perhaps noticing that he had done nothing to help any but his own flesh and blood, spent the rest of his time in an alcoholic miasma. That was the limit of my relations to the creatures I had made. I made rules for them, and they learned to obey or suffered the consequences. But it had not resulted in a humanity that pleased me. With Abram my approach was different. I instructed him only to leave the security of his life and trust in me. I looked for a man with an overwhelming need and I made him a promise, I did not issue any threat or prohibition. And the remarkable result was not just obedience but devotion. I asked only that he trust me – though why he should have done, for the life of me I cannot say. I had discovered something deeply and specifically human: the wish to trust, to love. I had only to ask it of someone whose hunger for it was great, and it was mine. And I had not even known it was there.
Always, always, I had to learn from the life I had made. This love that Abram turned on me, like a beam from my own sun on the darkness of dawn, was beyond the power even of I am to imagine. It was the greatest surprise I had ever had ———
——— Yet love was no surprise to Sarai. She had grown with love, was placed inside its cocoon with her first breath of air. She suckled it from the milky breast, felt it in the heartbeat inside the body that held her in its arms. Love grasped at her before words formed in her mind, before fear and friendship developed. Love came to her in every breath she took as if those to whom she belonged had exhaled it into the air. It was the very source of life. Love, indeed, might even have been implicated in death. And all the difficulty she had known could also be placed at love’s door. Love was so obvious, so soon, that when it took its leave of her, she had no way of understanding her existence in the world. The heartbeat stopped, the air was no longer breathable, and she lost her place in the universe. Love surprised her only by its absence.
Yes, she managed their new life well enough, but whether she was living in it is another matter entirely. Perhaps, if she had known more of the world, if she had been born many, many generations later when the world whispered its centuries of experience to those who would listen, she might have been grateful to have possessed so much love for so long and reckoned herself lucky that she had had any at all. But I doubt it. Love wraps you in its embrace, but it does not prepare you for
its loss. The shock is not that you are no longer loved by your beloved, nor that you no longer love, but that love can be lost. The death of love filled Sarai with a retrospective terror that love was never what she thought it had been; hers or Abram’s; that she might have been deceived all her life about the central fact of her existence. The love she had known, when she had known it, was indestructible, an absolute truth. Now that the absolute truth had dissolved, it could not have been either absolute or truth. What had it been all along? She had thought that whatever happened in the rest of the world – the tragedy of Haran, the death of Emtelai, even her lurking guilt and fear that she was not completely part of the family – the love between Abram and her was unbreachable. It was more real to Sarai than tragedy, death and guilt. It was the very nature of her world, the bedrock. And now it had changed and shown itself to be mere feeling. An accidental convergence of feeling. A random event that circumstances could alter. A mutual comfort that was subsumed by a greater need that had not been satisfied by their time together. Love needed more than itself to survive. In the end we are nothing more than the machinery of the universe, and love merely an element in its mechanism. Only reproduction mattered: to the universe and to humans. And when it failed in individual cases, it mattered not at all to the universe. Only the individual cases cared, driven as they were to do the bidding of necessity and finding themselves purposeless. Lot had not had the fortune of a wall of love as Sarai had and she had pitied him for that, yet Lot’s children served the purpose of the world as well as hers would have. And she, the recipient of love, was left with only her own life, her time not yet over.
You could say that Abram was more attuned to the universe than Sarai. He raged against the futility, and found in his desperation another way to retrieve love and promise, whereas Sarai discovered the truth of the world, the coldness of the universe, the callousness of whatever was responsible for the treadmill of continuation. Love was a lost dream, and life itself shrivelled.
Now there was famine in the land – as if the world itself were concurring with Sarai’s view of it. This was not Mesopotamia, where sophisticated cities took precautions against such things. The Canaanites had no stores of grain against drought and crop failure. The pastures dried up as Abram’s entourage reached the Negev, and scarcity was everywhere. The land of Canaan became as barren and emptied of promise as Sarai herself.
‘We must go into Egypt,’ Abram decided.
It seemed they had to make their own way in life just like regular folk who lacked the blessings of Abram’s lord. Sarai was tired of this game.
‘And what does your lord have to say about this, about leaving this land he promised to your seed, which we’ve traipsed across, building altars and sacrificing our finest animals to him? What of that great nation he mentioned, and all the blessings we were going to receive? This land, which we’ve given up everything, home, family, security, to get to, cannot sustain even our handful of sheep let alone our promised posterity. Perhaps you could have a word with him. Or has he offered us Egypt instead? I dare say the Pharaoh will be delighted to hand it over to us.’
Abram’s face darkened. ‘This is a test of faith,’ he said, with the coldest look in his eyes she had ever seen, and he went away without another word. She had failed the test. This new icy Abram made that clear as they prepared to leave. Sarai knew how he hated her ever-sharpening tongue, her acid disbelief, but it was all she had to sustain her in the chaos of her life. He thought it easy to deride his faith, but he did not know how she envied him his lord, or rather his passionate vision and his belief in it. How much simpler it would have been if this lord had spoken to her too, and she had been compelled to believe that life had some point. She might have pretended. Then Abram would have embraced her and they would have been united in love and purpose once more. But her lack of faith in Abram’s vision, her exclusion from it, had degraded her love. The truth was she did not love Abram well enough any more to sacrifice her scepticism to him. That was the centre of her agony.
They left the land of starvation and went down into Egypt. Abram did not speak to Sarai again during that journey until they were at the limit of the Negev. It was clear, however, that he had been thinking about her. Often, she would look up, as if someone had called her name, and see Abram, pausing from whatever task he was engaged in, looking back at her. It was not unlike all those decades before when she caught him glancing at her with a new aspect in his eyes, seeing her as a woman when before she had been a sister. Now, his look was sharp and analytical, and she remembered, too, how in his workshop he had stared and stared at an unworked piece of wood or stone to find its real nature from which he would carve the statue that existed within it. There had been more warmth in his regard for the inert stone or wood than she saw now as he examined her from a distance.
It may have been his first realisation that the love had soured between them. Sarai had been struggling with this knowledge ever since those last weeks in Harran, seeing in his devotion to his new lord the disappearance of their love, but Abram had not thought about it in that way. Absorbed as he was in his new passion, he had not given Sarai any thought at all. He did not know that he had transferred his love, the meaning of his life from us to a vision in his own head. Now, it seemed to dawn on him, or at least he appeared to be looking at Sarai and wondering who she was, what she was to him after all, having known her all her life. Sarai saw in his glance the sudden recognition of the distance she had travelled from the chamber of his heart to existing simply as another object in the external world. An infinite, unimaginable distance not so very many months before; now, between the two of them, in the Negev, at the brink of Egypt, it was an accomplished fact. She had known it already in her own dismayed heart, but it took that new look in Abram’s eyes to establish it finally as a reality as they travelled south into Egypt, away from their promised land to the land of plenty.
He came to Sarai in her tent one night, waking her from a fitful dream.
‘You are still a good-looking woman,’ he said.
So strange. Her husband, her lover for all that time past, speaking these words with calculating eyes, and in a voice that might have been describing the terrain they were to pass through.
‘It could be dangerous for me if the Egyptians think you are my wife. We are strangers here, we don’t know what kind of men these are. I have heard that they appreciate older women. They might kill me on your account. We mustn’t provoke them. It will go better for us if we tell them that you’re my sister.’
It will go better for us. Sarai absorbed his words in her abdomen, not through her ears or brain. There were so many thoughts caught in his words that she could only feel them, not unravel their meaning with her mind.
‘A sister again,’ she breathed.
She had not been Abram’s sister since she had become his child bride.
‘In Egypt. It’s purely practical.’
And still, it seemed, the anxious child in her had not been erased by the years of their love: she actually gained a little relief in retaining that much relationship with her husband and family. He had not said half-sister, he had not said that she was nothing to the house of Shem. Even that degree of belonging was better than none, she thought, beneath her horror at Abram’s words. The fearful child who craved connection desperately sought and found that much comfort. At the same time, a middle-aged woman looked at her husband of decades as he repudiated her, and saw the infinity of troubled distance that lay between men and women in the world.
‘How fortunate,’ she murmured. ‘We won’t even have to lie.’
Her brother did not reply, but left her tent to get some rest before they began their sojourn in Egypt.
* * *
He was right. She was still an attractive woman, at least in Egyptian eyes. Word got around that a group of Habiru had arrived to escape the famine in Canaan and that their leader had a handsome sister. The Pharaoh was known to take an interest in foreign women, and it was not
long before they received a visit from his emissary welcoming them to Egypt and inviting Sarai to the palace. The request, with a good deal of flourish and fine words, was made, of course, to Abram, while Sarai sat beside him in the tent, receiving not a glance or a nod from the ambassador.
‘My master requests the company of your sister this evening.’
As he spoke, slaves arrived with gifts sent by the Pharaoh, evidence of his generosity and goodwill to the Habiru whose future existence, it was clear to both parties, now depended on his benevolence. Their camp filled with the Pharaoh’s largesse: sheep, cattle and camels, male and female slaves, donkeys and she-asses; enough to ensure a comfortable living for the small group all the rest of their days. A king’s ransom, you might say. Did Sarai see a shadow cross Abram’s face before he took refuge in the formality that was so useful in enabling transactions of this kind to be made without overt disgrace to either party? She was sure it was so, and he did not look her in the eyes as he nodded his permission to the Pharaoh’s ambassador to take her to his master.
Great fear will provoke the craven stranger to emerge in the best of men. Perhaps not the very best of men, but such paragons had not been born in Sarai’s time. Abram’s fear of death at the hand of a sexually covetous Egyptian ruler was not simply about his immediate survival, but a greater fear, beyond his physical safety, of the death of promise. His extinction without issue would have denied what was now the centre of his life – it would have contradicted the word of his lord, and made a nonsense of the faith that he had discovered in his terror of futility. Sarai was sure this was so. She made herself sure of it as she accompanied the ambassador to his master’s quarters in the royal palace. How else could she have suppressed the implied futility of her own existence? ———
——— They are never to be trusted. None of them. Deceivers of me, of each other, of themselves, how can anyone who is not me plumb the depths of their deviousness when they themselves don’t comprehend its amplitude and complexity? For the first time I found myself wishing I had the human capacity to deny. I, too, have my yearnings; I, too, would defend myself against too much disappointment if I could. This all-seeing business has its drawbacks. The peace of my eternity had been desecrated by mistrust and anxiety – new-found consequences of my tinkering with infinite emptiness, of my creation of the other.
