by Jenny Diski
——— She was ripe for the taking. But I decided that I did not want her. She was to be nothing more than a vessel between Abram and me. I could have called her name when she was floating free and vulnerable, and she would have heard me, reached out in gratitude for my voice to steady her chaos. But I am a most particular I am. I wanted only the devotion, the trust of Abram, my chosen one. I desired – the first desiring I had known – the dyadic us that my inventions had invented. The woman was nothing more than the means of securing Abram’s love for myself. I had no wish for her mental comfort. She who refused to recognise my power or even my existence would get no succour from me. I left her to herself to know the paltriness, the mere contingency of life on earth without the gift of my voice and the introduction of my purpose. I rejoiced in her lovelessness.
They settled in the land between Bethel and Ai, among the Canaanite and the Perizite peoples who had long inhabited the area, staking their initial claim in the place that was to become their nation according to Abram’s lord. Not that they mentioned this to the Canaanite and the Perizite, to whom they were merely a small band of settlers who could, if they were not warlike or greedy, be accommodated and traded with. They knew nothing of Abram’s new-fangled god or his territorial intentions.
Abram was robust with faith. Lot, on the other hand, untroubled by any calling from the lord, was beginning to hanker after a life of his own. All his life he had followed and obeyed. It had taken a long time, but eventually even Lot found his wish to please eroded by a desire to see himself as autonomous. Now he was no longer a boy but a man approaching young middle age, with a wife, several mistresses among the Canaanites and a wish to stand in his own light, away from Abram’s shadow. When they left Egypt, Abram had separated the herds of sheep, goats and oxen, giving half to his nephew as his own. Now that their wandering seemed to be over, and they had become a settled people, they began to experience the difficulties of a sedentary existence, or rather the difficulties that people have when sharing, rather than merely passing through the land.
After the cosiness of us, comes us and them. Lot’s herdsmen began to antagonise those who cared for Abram’s beasts, mocking them with their master’s sterility.
‘They’ll be ours soon enough. Why not give them to us now?’ they jeered. ‘Hey, give us that new calf. New life is wasted on Abram. When the old man dies, it’ll come to us anyway. No matter, come to think of it. You keep it for now. You feed it and fatten it, and we’ll inherit it.’
Abram’s lads complained of the contempt they had to suffer from Lot’s people. Abram tried to soothe them, but loyalties divided them into two camps, dangerously eyeing each other, though in their daily existence Lot displayed an elaborate respect for his uncle. The game became too hazardous for a small alien group trying to live in a new land inhabited by real strangers. And Lot’s underlying resentment of Abram was not going to stay underground for ever.
‘We must not quarrel amongst ourselves,’ Abram said, one evening at dinner.
‘But, Uncle, when have I ever quarrelled with you?’
‘Perhaps we have too much now to be able to share the same territory. You must go and make a life of your own. Look around, choose what land you want. If you want the east, I’ll take the west. If the west suits you better, then I’ll be content to live in the east.’
This benevolence on Abram’s part did not seem to take into account that none of the land was either his or Lot’s to divide between them. But the Lord’s promise was enough for Abram to regard the indigenous population of Canaanites and Perizites as mere campers on the land of Abram’s nation-to-be. Sarai said nothing, but marvelled at the perfect mixture of wisdom and foolishness that mingled in her former love.
The next morning Lot announced that he would take the richly irrigated plain of the Jordan river to the east as his own, leaving Abram with the mountains and desert land of Canaan. He took his wife, his children, his grandchildren, his mistresses, his herds of sheep, goats and oxen and his followers and made permanent camp on the outskirts of Sodom. The cities of the plain were not for Abram, who hated their noise and distraction. The clamour of cities was too great. He needed the silence of the rural night to listen for the word of the Lord, should it ever come to him again. And Lot, though attracted by their energy and sophistication, chose at this time to live near but not within their boundaries. He was torn with wishes frustrated by hesitancy, his father’s son in his desires, but his grandfather’s adopted boy in his fearfulness. He had not grown up well, but how could he, that child of shame and exile? Now, for all Abram’s apparent graciousness, he was being exiled once again. Lot was a soul condemned to a boundary life and indecision. The apparent freedom of choice bestowed on him by Abram was a fraud. What real option had Lot but to choose the almost easy life and leave the stony ground of virtue to Abram who wanted it so very much? Lot, that baby Sarai had cherished so much when she feared she had caused the death of love, she now saw might never have had a chance to grow straight and strong, and thus able to covertly manipulate the world as Sarai’s oh-so-righteous, and once – and still, and still? – oh-so-beloved Abram ———
——— Her love. Her lifelong knowledge of her beloved. Only now did she begin to see a glimpse of Abram’s deviousness. And she did not know the half of it. I knew him through and through, and yet, omniscient as I am, he still surprised me, still, so politely, challenged me. Challenged me. Such is the deluding power of love: knowing everything isn’t enough.
It was time to speak again to my chosen one.
‘Abram,’ I whispered, in his yearning ear. ‘Look all around you, from where you stand on your mountaintop. Look to the north, to the Negev, to the east and to the sea. All this land I give to you and to your offspring for all time.’
Of course, it was his already, since Lot had chosen the plain of Jordan. But I decided to formalise the arrangement with a retrospective gift, adding, of course, the promise of future that I knew Abram wanted above all else. He heard me, but said nothing. Sulking, I swear.
‘I will make your seed like the dust of the ground,’ I coaxed. ‘Can a man count the particles of dust? Neither will your offspring be countable.’
A little devious this promise, but I was dealing with a devious man. Yes, I reiterated his future, but I also, you will please note, reminded him from what he had come and who had made him. Just dust.
And still he remained silent. Who did he think he was? Me? And yet, and yet, there was something in me that responded to his withholding of himself. It was new for me to taste my own silent rebuke. It even amused me that Abram had learned the trick from me. Very adaptable, these humans. My chosen one chose not to speak to me, as if I were the petitioner, and my promises, my gift of nationhood, were mere trinkets to placate a sullen lover. She believed that Abram’s faith was lost and then restored. But it was a good deal more intricate than that. Abram had never lost his faith. He knew who I was from the moment I first spoke to him. He knew my power. But he also had the temerity, the quiet temerity, to know the extent of his own power. Certainly, I could crush him and his to dust, extinguish him from the fact and the memory of the world; but I could not do that without extinguishing too my light in the world, my image of myself, my beloved. He knew the power of having been chosen and played me with it as Adam and Noah had never thought to do. Is this what they mean by evolution? ———
——— Not long after Lot went his way, Abram spent the night communing with the stars. He returned at dawn to his tent, and announced to Sarai that they were moving south once again.
They made a new permanent settlement in Hebron, by the Oaks of Mamre, and there he built an altar to make sacrifices to his Lord. Abram was now a bit of a lord himself. They were a wealthy tribe, with an increasing retinue of followers and, of course, the slaves from Egypt. They lived well, as if they belonged in that land, and indeed as if the land belonged to them. Sarai returned to her old task of running the household, no longer the same woman she had bee
n, but relieved that an approximation of normality had returned to her life. Human laziness accounts for a good deal of contentment. Abram built up the herds and traded in the area, for all the world as if he were a prince of the region. He developed the look of a substantial man, and if during his encounters with other traders and breeders he told them of his Lord, well, everyone had their little ways. No one minded and no one took very much notice, but every now and again a small band would arrive and join the settlement, brought by their household head who had given a more careful ear to Abram’s part-time preaching. Whether they were convinced by his proclamations of the Lord, whose attributes seemed few and far between – invisible, silent except to his chosen one, full of promises but short on delivery – I can’t say. More than likely it was something about Abram himself that attracted them. He existed in a microclimate of calm air, confident even in the way his feet touched the ground as he walked. He seemed so solid, so certain, so quiet. You might think his god not much good for anything, but Abram you would want to get to know better. That Abram. The one Sarai had loved for so long as brother and husband.
And now, seeing him the way others did and she used to, did she love him? She always loved, would always love what he had been, who he had been for her, but that was an Abram of her memory, before the madnesses, before Egypt. And it was a memorised love, not a living current vibrating through the connective tissue that tied together body and soul. She fed on it during her quiet moments, as a starving prisoner might recall the finest meal he had ever had. A middle-aged woman, recollecting young hands on a young body, whispers in the night, looks passing like secret letters between outsiders who, they were sure, knew nothing of the depth of feeling they had for each other. Sarai cherished the physical memories of her young husband, and also the remembered safety of her strong brother, the idol of her childish dreams, the apotheosis of everything a person might become. Yes, yes, all that. But did she love him now? No. Yes. How little wisdom age brings to one’s understanding of one’s feelings. To her understanding of her feelings. She was numb, and yet it was a numbness that was underlain by something she could not quite retrieve but which had not entirely disappeared. Perhaps there was a residue of love for the love she had had for him. Perhaps she loved him, always had and always would, then passionately, now numbly. I cannot say. She did not feel love, but does that mean she did not love him? Yes. No. No matter, they were married. Completely married. They rubbed along, an old couple, living the life they were supposed to lead, except for the children they did not have, and the grandchildren they would not have.
* * *
And it happened that four kings from the land between the two rivers, that Mesopotamia where, long ago, Sarai had begun her life, made an alliance and decided to make war on the rebellious client princes of Sodom and Gomorrah and the other rulers of the cities of the plain around the Dead Sea. The rebellion failed and the princes of Sodom and Gomorrah ended up in bitumen pits, while their conquerors sacked the cities. On their way home, the triumphant army passed Lot’s encampment, on the outskirts of the city of Sodom. They stole what they did not destroy and carried Lot and his family off with them as their prisoners. There was always trouble around Sodom and Gomorrah, and Lot, as if it were irresistible, had chosen the cities of the plain to make a new life of his own.
When people stay still, war begins. They had decided to stay still, and now the history of the region they inhabited became their present context. A new fact of life. And once again Abram showed himself to be remarkably adaptable to change – so strange, Sarai thought, remembering the troubled boy lodged in her mind. When they had had to become travellers, he learned trade and animal husbandry. When they became settlers, he learned war. Her Abram gathered men around him, armed them and trained them as if he had been born to military command, turning herdsmen into a troop of fearsome fighting men that marched north up to the land of Dan, to rescue the nephew he had so recently sent away. Apparently, war is not so difficult to learn. Apparently, necessity can make warriors of us all. And blood, the blood of Terah that flowed in Lot’s veins as well as Abram’s, was worth spilling blood over. Well, what else was there to do? Lot was family. He and his children were all the family Abram and Sarai had beyond the unreasonable promise of Abram’s unreasonable lord. What future was there for the house of Shem if its youngest and only fertile members were allowed to die? It seemed that Abram did not trust in his god quite enough to leave him to sort the problem out. Abram returned, established by his latest works as a warrior and a prince of the territory, with his family intact. The surrounding leaders recognised him as one of them rather than risk him rising against them, and a treaty was proposed. What more could any man want, especially a man so afraid of doubt as Abram? They received a visit from Melchizedek, High Priest and King of Jerusalem who blessed Abram to El Elyon, the local Lord High God of the gods. Sarai’s Abram, now all politics and cunning, abjured the spoils of war in the name of the Lord, the Most High God, which sounded to her ears like a canny compromise of deities, from this man who had once known only the simplicities of carving and emotional distress. She looked in wonder at her long-loved husband, now a man of the world, a worldly man, and she supposed that he had found a way at last to do without the lord of vague promises who for so many years had ridden on his back ———
——— After the war, lagging behind as ever, I appeared to my chosen one in a night vision.
‘Fear not, Abram,’ I whispered my word in his ear like a freshening wind, ‘I am your shield. Your reward shall be very great.’
A little late, I grant, a touch post facto.
‘O my Master, Lord,’ he said, barely looking about him, and in a tone of voice that seemed to me somewhat to undercut the reverential terms he used to address me. My first taste, I believe, of sarcasm. ‘What can you possibly give me when for all your promises, and my worldly success I will die childless?’
His worldly success? Did he think he had become a warrior all on his own? Did he think he could be anything or anyone in the world without my assistance? Yes, he did. Why, I saw him smile to himself when I first spoke, as if he thought (and wouldn’t I know what he thought?) he alone had triumphed against the foreign kings. As if I, the Lord, I am that I am, needed him. Ha! Ha, I say.
‘You will have a son that issues from your loins,’ I whispered in his ear. ‘Look up, Abram. Look into the sky and count the stars. Can you number them? That is how numerous your heirs shall be.’
It was a fine cloudless sky that night. Abram looked and dreamed of a posterity that might memorialise his worldly success. I pressed my claim. ‘I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur to come to this land your offspring will inherit.’
‘My Lord, how shall I know that this will be my land?’
Always just a little sceptical. Always needing a deal. He was almost mine again, but these humans need ritual, treaties and such, to feel secure. A gentlemen’s agreement just won’t work with them. A formal covenant was required.
‘Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she goat and a three-year-old ram.’ The old three times three trick. I don’t know what it is about the number three but it always works a treat. ‘Oh, and get a turtledove and a young pigeon,’ I added, just for complexity’s sake. I hurriedly invented a rite. Cleave them, pass between the parts, that sort of thing. Divisions into two is another good way of getting the attention of my creatures. A pantomime ensued, and before Abram could decide that the whole thing was stuff and nonsense, I sent him into a deep, receptive trance and intoned both the good news and the bad.
‘Your offspring, as numerous as the stars, will become strangers in a strange land, enslaved and afflicted for four hundred years. But I will punish the nation that does this to them, and they will emerge a rich people. And you, Abram, father of the nation, you will grow to a great old age and live in contentment.’ At which I performed some hocus-pocus with a flaming torch and a smoking brazier and made the covenant that would make Abram fin
ally my own.
‘To your seed I have given this land from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates,’ I boomed. That, I thought, should do it.
What more reassurance could the man want, apart from the actual achievement of my promise in the form of a flesh-and-blood son? But I had to keep something in reserve. I had to have something ———
——— Another vision. By the standards of Abram’s god they were coming thick and fast now. Four times this lord had visited, four times he had promised, over the passing years. And how the years had passed. Decades. So many promises, and still no child. Of course, when Sarai was newly beloved by Abram, she, too, had been full of promise, and what had emerged from that? Whether Abram was so weak, so hungry for future, that he had to invent the supernatural to fulfil his empty longings, or whether this lord of his actually existed, he was still Sarai’s greatest rival. Either Abram and the house of Shem were all she had, or the terrible coldness, the vast emptiness would descend, and she did not believe she could live any longer in so vacant a world. It had become a matter of life and death for Sarai. She saw that desolation stalked her, as it had stalked Haran, and perhaps, after all, it was she who had taken over his despair and would come to his conclusion. She had such thoughts. If all the good in her life was over, the love, the belonging finally seen to be irrevocable, what was there to continue for? Where was the point? If Haran could end the intolerable, so could she. It began to seem a courageous, incisive act. Or at least an act that she could perform. Abram had his belief; Sarai had the possibility of ending her life.
Histrionic, you might say. What gave her the impression that her life had to be so different from that of the rest of the world? Love, I think. The wall of love that had surrounded her, imprisoned her even, the adored brother whose eyes were opened and became the adoring husband. Should she complain about such early fortune in a world where very few feel so cherished for so much of their lives? She had had love and had it doubled for so long. Is lack of love or loss of love the worse condition? No, love, love itself is to blame. Love, the idea, the existence of the idea, makes us histrionic whether we possess it and lose it, or never have it at all.
