Only Human

by Jenny Diski

  Even he, even Abram, who first recognised and proclaimed me, could not suppress a wily and wilful human nature. Naturally, like all humanity, he could delude himself about his true motives, but I was not blessed with the capacity to overlook what it was inconvenient for me to see. Who was there to bless me with such a gift? I saw what I saw, and that was everything. I who had created the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, how could I choose not to know what there was to be known? Abram loved me, he believed in me, he had faith in my word, trusted that my promise to him would be fulfilled, and yet in spite of his wish to be mine, in spite of his being mine, there was a place of uncertainty, a dark spot where the possibility of his being wrong survived in spite of his desperate need. A seed from the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil had stuck in humanity’s gullet and forever raised its doubts.

  She thought only that Abram betrayed her when he presented her on a plate to Pharaoh. But it was more profound than that. To betray his human love was one thing, but to betray his trust in me, in I am, who had chosen him out of all the world and all of time, that was betrayal indeed. She and I, though rivals for the affection of our chosen one, were more allied than she knew, or would admit to knowing. What, after all, could it mean that Abram had relinquished to the seed of another man, the woman, the sister-wife through whom my promise of his posterity, the nationhood of the Habiru, had to come? What sort of obedience was that? What kind of faith? What love?

  When I told Noah to build an ark, he built an ark, he did not hedge his bets. Wasn’t that what Abram was doing? How could there be danger in Egypt when I had promised him success? What could there possibly be to fear with my protection? But I saw something worse than a less than perfect faith: I saw resistance, the old wilfulness, the desire to control his own destiny. Did he think I would not know what he was doing, giving Sarai to another man? Did he dare to issue me with a challenge? Yes, he did. If his faith was incomplete, so was his fear. This puny creature of my invention, without even a child to his name, demanded proof of my intentions, and threatened to throw his posterity in my face. And what could I do? Could I kill him? Could I turn my back on him? I had my needs, now, too. Drawn out of me by the feeble, fleshy creatures I had made one idle moment in eternity. I, the creator, had not created love: the creatures I made in my own image had done that, invented alliance and turned it into desire, longing, need, yes, love. And now I loved, as if I had caught it like a virus, as if I were their creation, as if I were a mere emotional being like them. I who drifted with eternity, solitary, needing nothing, I, it seemed, had fallen – oh, how appropriate the metaphor – in love. How could I kill Abram? Abram was all I had ———

  ——— It is astonishing how the breath continues and the heart pumps. Believe in mechanism. Nothing else endures. Mechanism alone is impervious to the emptiness of the universe, to the sterility of its own purpose. Only mechanism persists beyond hope and reason. There was not much of a notion of natural science then, but Sarai observed her continuing intake of breath, her throbbing heart, and knew that there resided the power and mystery of existence. All any of us have in reality is the heart beating, the breath coming and going; life ticking on with no concern for love or heartache, for hope or emptiness. Whatever Abram’s lord might have been, for Sarai only mechanism could master her despair. Where nothing else exists, nothing else makes sense.

  That night in Pharaoh’s house Sarai experienced leaving home in a way she had not when she left Ur and then her father in Harran. For the first time, she was a stranger in a strange land. Her place all her life had been with Abram, as brother, as husband, as homeland; no landscape was strange while Abram accompanied her through it. Nothing new, no change struck ice into her heart, because she remained where she belonged. She was fortunate to have had it for so long, I suppose. And yet, it seems that love and security do not accumulate. Many years of safety and certainty of love disappeared that night into cold reality as if they had never existed. They provided no protection, left no residue of strength with which she could sustain herself in this first moment of utter aloneness and desolation.

  The Pharaoh was an elderly man, but his hands were soft and supple as the finest gloves made from the silky underbelly of day-old kid. No chisel had ever slipped and scored the skin, no rough, raw material had sanded his fingertips until they grew protective pads of leather and lost their sensitivity. Nothing had ever been worked by those fingers other than the sheerest silks and cotton, and the choicest flesh. Those remarkable hands parted the robe his servants had wrapped around Sarai after bathing and scenting her, and set about their investigation of her body with such delicacy that they might have been the antennae of a butterfly. His fingertips barely grazed her breasts, her belly and her thighs, needing only the most minute stimulation to awaken his desire. His face, and his body once he had shed his own light robe, was hairless and smooth as an infant. There was no coarse beard, no dark curling growth on his limbs and chest to disturb the perfect contact between his flesh and hers. He smelt of spiced orange, his lips, sipping at her moist skin in the heat-still night, travelling the length of her body, felt cool and fresh. Her Abram had been an ardent lover, but this man was an artist who had distilled vast experience into a masterclass on love. He seemed with the lightest touch of his tongue tasting the salt of her tears to be savouring the precise quality of her dismay, and testing it, like an alchemist, with his fingers reaching between her thighs, against the rise of her desire which, oblivious to her heartache and in spite of her tears, began to flutter into life under his expert touch and gentle murmurings. She was not crying for Abram. She had been deserted by him. She was weeping for her own abandonment, for the newness, and even the sweetness of the hands on her body, for the unfamiliar voice that murmured sensual sounds in her ear, for all her fears of being cast out and sent away now come true. She was alone, left to drift in the tide for the first time in her life. This was a gentle, cradling tide. This practised, pleasure-loving-and-giving Pharaoh treated Sarai like an exotic treasure and showed her possibilities of physical love she hadn’t dreamed of, but the universe was too large, too empty and she was too alone in it all of a sudden for her to appreciate that she might have been given up by Abram to be raped by someone far worse.

  When he pushed her thighs apart and prepared to enter her, he whispered, ‘I will commend your brother to the gods for giving you to me.’

  Sarai spoke for the first time as she felt the pressure against her vulva, which had received no other man than Abram. ‘It was my husband who gave me to you.’

  She was speaking to herself, telling herself the truth of what was happening to her.

  ‘I was not told of any husband. I heard only of your brother, Abram,’ the Pharaoh said, surprised at his poor information. The pressure against her vulva remained but was stilled.

  ‘Abram is my husband. He lied. He feared you would have him killed if you thought he stood in your way.’

  The pressure withered. The Pharaoh sat up.

  ‘Is it true? He is your husband? He thought that I would kill a man to take his wife?’

  There was a silence as he looked into Sarai’s face and saw she was speaking the truth. Then a look of distaste came over his fine chiselled features.

  ‘What kind of people are you that expect such barbarous behaviour? Is this how you treat each other? To kill a man merely for a woman?’ He paused, feeling his ardour fade to nothing at the thought. ‘It is out of the question. I cannot make love to you.’

  Sarai decided not to take it personally. He got up and put his robe back on, then handed her the robe that had been discarded on the floor beneath his. With great delicacy, proving himself the gentleman he was, he turned his back as she covered herself. He was quivering with offended pride as he spun round and indicated with a regal sweep of his hand that she take her place on a couch. For a while he paced up and down in front of Sarai, stopping once or twice absentmindedly to fill her wine goblet and offer her delicacies from a
tray.

  ‘Do the men of the Habiru kill each other over women?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘No, my lord, not as a rule. But we are strangers here. People tell stories about foreign places. You hear things. It was said … My husband could not be sure what kind of reception he would have. It was a precaution.’

  It was clear enough that the Egyptians did not kill each other over women, but Sarai was not certain that a blow to their pride would not merit the death penalty. Even so, she heard herself excusing Abram to the morally outraged Pharaoh with a certain amount of wonder. She recalled the sweet gentleness of his hands exploring her body, and a part of her wanted to rest her head against his breast and howl her misery at him. Instead, she tried to assuage his anger against her husband for a crime that appalled both of them.

  The Pharaoh paced and brooded for some time. Then he sat on a chair opposite Sarai. ‘My dear,’ he said, in paternal tones, ‘you and I have been used disgracefully. Shall I have him put to death? You are welcome to take your place among my concubines in the palace. You will be well looked after, and, who knows, in time, I might overcome my … physical distaste at your revelation.’

  ‘Please, my lord, let him live. There are people who depend on him. And he has been under great mental pressure. Let us leave your country in peace, and perhaps he will have learned something about strangers.’

  Sarai stayed the rest of the night in the palace with the Pharaoh who, now he could no longer feel sexual desire for her, became a charming and informative host. She heard about Egyptian society and the nature of monarchy, and in turn she told him about the peoples of the desert, about the life of wandering tribes, and about the life of women, her life – though she omitted to mention her other relation to Abram, telling him she had been adopted as an orphan by Terah, since she feared such a revelation might be too much for her host. She did not know that brothers and sisters regularly produced heirs to the Egyptian throne. At last, late into the night, they slept, chastely, in separate rooms, and in the morning the Pharaoh’s servant woke Sarai and took her to the throne room. Abram had already been summoned and was on his way.

  Sarai’s husband entered the great hall of the Egyptian king with his eyes lowered. This was a normal precaution, but in truth he was relieved to be able to avoid meeting Sarai’s eyes. Well he might be. Abram bowed his head, and waited for the Pharaoh to speak. Some enraged part of Sarai urgently wanted to see him punished for what he had done. She had to hold herself back from falling at the Pharaoh’s feet and begging him to impose the death penalty after all. She stood frozen beside him, looking at Abram, bent low on the ground.

  ‘What have you done?’ Pharaoh boomed dangerously at Abram, who looked up, startled and afraid for his life at the rumbling threat in the voice. ‘Why did you tell me she was your sister?’ Abram glanced anxiously at Sarai, uncertain as to how much exactly the Pharaoh now knew. She felt disinclined to help. ‘Why did you not tell me she was your wife? Do you think I need to steal other men’s wives? I have not touched her. Take her, and get out. Go.’

  The Pharaoh’s men accompanied them back to their camp and waited as they pulled up the stakes and prepared to leave.

  ‘Does he want us to leave the gifts he gave us, do you think?’ Abram asked Sarai.

  ‘I don’t think he cares very much, but I doubt he will want anything from you. Let us take the wealth he gave us. You risked a great deal for it, my brother.’ ———

  ——— I maintained my silence, not deigning to reveal my part in securing the soundness of the future mother of my nation. Damn fools, both of them, him and her. But he, at least, was wretched with his disobedience. She actually believed that she herself had prevented the Pharaoh from violating her. Abram, in a moment of rebellion, had wanted to subvert my power and take human control of fertility even if it meant another man’s seed impregnating Sarai with my promise of posterity. I would not forget his recklessness with my word. But Sarai remained stolid in her disbelief. Abram believed but wished I were not his master; Sarai would not even recognise my hand in the affairs of my creatures. It was galling. Very galling.

  I afflicted the Pharaoh with his inability to penetrate the woman. He withered at my command, not her words, nor at his sense of propriety. How easily the human supposes the world to be under their control. What faith their lack of faith gives them. But I was too angry to make a display of my displeasure. I would bide my time with Sarai. Abram I tormented with my angry silence. I was learning the ways of love. I turned my face from him and let him stew in his own shame and guilt at his betrayal of his Lord ———

  ——— They left Egypt and returned to the Negev with a burden of wealth that was matched only by the weight of Abram’s guilt and Sarai’s misery at how it had been obtained. They travelled in stages back the way they had come, setting up and striking camp, heading northward, back, Abram announced, to the high ground between Bethel and Ai, though for all Sarai cared they might have been burrowing deep into the bowels of the earth. She became – how did the others put it to each other? – unwell.

  Abram appeared to have returned to something like his old self. Troubled, deeply troubled, but solid and strong, a leader of the group with a direction and a purpose. He was almost the man who had been Sarai’s youthful husband when life and love had completed themselves for her in him. But she did not care what conclusions he had come to in his mind, how the adventure in Egypt had resolved whatever needed resolving in his soul. She did not even care when no tent was raised for her, and she took her place once again beside Abram in his bed. He was gentle, though he did not make love to her; but nor did Sarai did care about that, neither the one nor the other. She had thought herself a stranger in a strange land when she lay, feeling discarded, in the Pharaoh’s arms while his satiny fingers played over her breasts. She thought then that she could get no further from her life, but now, as the distance grew between Egypt and herself and she lay once again in the dark strong arms of her Abram, she was more asunder than the stars from the sands of the desert. It seemed as if the sweet Egyptian fingers on her flesh were the last thing that had held her in place in the world, and that now she floated away, ungrounded by any human touch. During the night, as they retreated from Egypt, while her body remained stranded in the desert, she lost her connection to it and drifted upwards, into the icy blackness of the night sky, into the bloody, searing heat of the midday sun.

  All through that journey back through the Negev, they fed her, washed her, and carried her away from Egypt. She was an empty shell, a shed skin, that Abram and the others treated as if it were still a person, though no gesture was made by her hands, no expression appeared on her face, no voice issued from the husk of her body. She was aware of the vacated space, but she, like the others, could only observe it from a distance, wide-eyed with terror, reaching out with invisible hands to get a purchase on it so that she might regain her grounding on earth. Even human unhappiness, even the bitter disappointment of lost love and betrayal was preferable to the floating terror and helplessness of disembodiment. She had thought that night in Pharaoh’s palace that she no longer wanted to live; now she would have embraced either life or death with equal gratitude for rescuing her from this fearfulness, this inhuman statelessness that she could never before have imagined. I think, if he had spoken to her, she would even have heard Abram’s lord.

  But he did not speak, and for a long time neither life nor death released her from her agonised isolation. Everything passes, they say. This is true of life on earth, so far as I can tell. Everything passes, but nothing entirely goes away. Conditions change, states alter, circumstances shift, but they do not disappear. The form transmutes, but the substance remains, the elements from which the state was made reform but retain their potential to re-create what was there before. There is only so much stuff on earth from which all things, all flesh, all mind, are made. The particles reshape, but always the shadow of what they were and what they could become again remains. What is known st
ays known. What has been can be. What could be might be. Everything passes but nothing ceases. So gradually Sarai regained her place within her body and among her people, the horror passed, but now she knew how tenuous the connection was between herself and the world, how easily it might be snapped, so that she remained always in a state of dread and watchfulness. And she knew that she would rather die than exist in that lonely space again.

  She came to herself, as Abram, Lot, his wife and the girls put it, by the time they reached Bethel. Abram returned to the altar he had built in the place between Bethel and Ai and invoked the name of his lord. Sarai’s return to health, along with the Pharaoh’s refusal to sleep with her was a double cause for calling out his renewed faith to his god. Though the lord was still maintaining his silence, events on earth had confirmed him to Abram, who now reiterated his faith with the scent of barbecued kid moistened with tears of gratitude and penitence. Sarai’s Abram had become a passionate lover again, and he would worship his beloved and wait until it graced him with another precious word. Sarai no longer had the energy to feel jealous. She merely watched and began to learn how love lives apart from its object, attaching itself to whatever it might, and enthralling mere humans in its arbitrary grip ———