by Jenny Diski
Full with years though Sarai was, a child well loved, a woman for so long well loved, she was now quietly suicidal in her loveless desert, and bitter with jealousy at this lord, her ghostly adversary who offered Abram the only thing in all the world that could transcend the craving for love – a presence in the future to refute the blankness of individual death ———
——— In the beginning was the Word and the Word was … what was the word? It was, it must have been I am, and yet the power of that word weakened, I felt the I am reduce as my experience of humanity increased. It began to ring hollow, no more than a name among names, and a forgotten name at that. They certainly forgot it, and even I had to dig deep into my recollection of the moment of separation from eternity to regain a sense of the enormity of my Word. Even then, it was only a recollection, not the vivid thrill of knowing myself as being, having been, always to be, within the everlasting present of eternity.
A new word took root, not the word, not the word in the beginning, but a word embedded in humanity, an inadvertent, but of course in retrospect inevitable consequence of the gift of I am, freely given to them. And, from the seed I had planted on the earth that I had created, it grew towards me, its tendrils quivering to grasp and twist itself around whatever it may find, and finding me, it wound itself around my immaterial being until I too was held fast by the word that was none of my making. Love, love, love, love. Not my word. Not of me, of I am wrenched from eternity, complete, undivided, whole, without need, without desire, without longing. It wormed its way into my perfection, this word of humanity, and left a cavity in the flawless I am that ached to be filled. I had learned so much from my creatures, and now I learned the anguish of desire. I learned love.
And I hated what I had made.
And I … I … I … the Lord, the Creator, the Eternal, the Singularity, the Complete, the I am – I craved the love of Abram ———
——— Abram was all patience, waiting at Mamre for his lord’s promise to come true. To all the world he looked as though he led the life of a rich respected leader of his clan, a warrior, a trader. It was a life well lived. But Sarai knew that he was only waiting for his lord to speak again, for the promise of offspring to be fulfilled. The present was mere breathing, keeping on in anticipation of the future.
For Sarai there was only patience, too. There was no future, only a present that stretched beyond the bounds of endurance, to be broken only by the whim of her husband’s phantom. Over time her patience became as pitiless as the desert itself. One night, after more than a decade of waiting since the last promise of posterity to her husband, she sought him out in the grove where he had built his altar to his lord, and where he walked and listened for him in the cool of the evening.
‘Abram, my husband, have you noticed how the years have passed? Do you hear the sound of the multitude of your descendants intoning your name? Do you hear the sound of even one small offspring calling you Papa?’
Abram’s face darkened, but he continued to walk, speaking quietly and swiftly to her with his head down, as if he might detest the sight of her.
‘I trust in the Lord,’ he said. ‘The Lord’s time is not our time. You can’t understand. Please leave me.’
Sarai kept pace with her husband.
‘But our time is our time, and it is all we have. Has it crossed your mind that far from giving you what he promised, your lord has withheld it? What I know about your lord is that he has prevented me from bearing children – that is, if he has any power at all. And yes, I certainly believe this god of yours has power, not just because of the empty ache of my arms which have never held my child, but because I know about him.’
‘Foolishness, you talk nonsense, woman.’
‘No, my dear, let me tell you about this lord of yours.’
‘What can you know?’
‘Stories, my love, I know stories. I know stories that women know, that women tell each other in the seclusion of their time of uncleanliness, when the blood flows and the men keep away. Your lord is an old story. You are not the first to be chosen, did he tell you that? Your lord is capricious, dealing life and death, bestowing misery and hope, enticing and withdrawing like any flirtatious girl who would have her way with the world.’
‘Do you think I would listen to women’s stories?’
‘Yes, you will listen. I will tell and you will listen, because if your lord does not prevent me from speaking, there is nothing for you to do but hear me, and if he does stop my words you will know I tried to speak the truth.’
For a moment they waited in the singing silence of the grove.
‘So,’ Sarai said softly. ‘I will speak.’
Abram quickened his pace and walked ahead of her, but she knew that he was listening.
She told him about the creator god who had made a world that was a desert surrounding a garden where he planted the first man and woman to whom he gave, with hardly a thought, consciousness, companionship, dominion, but from whom he withheld the source of power – the knowledge of good and evil, or so he called it. And when these two began to live fully, to experience themselves fully, to learn about the world, good and evil, autonomy, the nature of reproduction, the nature of companionship, their nature, not his, he punished them. He sent them out of the garden of peace and quiet and easeful tedium to the surrounding desert, which was also of his making. He created difficulty, hardship, pain, this god, this vengeful, secretive god with an agenda of his own. But the man and woman survived, chose to survive. Thrived, even, in the difficult desert. They took what they had been given and made a life for themselves. So the world went its own way, the way of good and evil, the way of everything that is and can be, and the god continued to punish and outlaw, as each of his attributes was taken from him by the resourcefulness of the creature he created. Humanity went about its own business, taking what it had been given – self-consciousness and fertility – and doing the best and worst with them.
She told him how finally, in an act of petulance, this unbodied god had destroyed everything he had made, disgusted with the flesh that humanity had learned to live with for better or worse. How he had wiped out everything and everyone, but saved a single man and his family, a docile man who had obeyed the voice, who was no more than good enough in his generation, and who never once questioned the destruction of his fellow beings, of all the life that had learned to thrive on the earth, who saved himself, but who, eventually perhaps haunted by conscience, by human conscience, had eaten of another tree of good and evil and lived the life he had been saved for in a mist of alcoholic forgetfulness.
She told him how this testy god had turned his back on humanity, and how humanity managed well enough without him. How they learned to reclaim the desert, to water it into a garden of their own devising, to live in groups as best they could, and to improve their conditions by. their own innovation. How they began to build shelters and community against the vagaries of the earth and then to make monuments to their own survival. How out of nothing they began to imagine a future they could not be in, but to which they could leave a legacy to let each generation know that human hands had made their life possible. And the god, fearing for the loss of power over what most terrified and cowed humanity, had confused and scattered them. Separated them, isolated them. Set group against group by estranging them from one another. Instilled dissent and incomprehension. This jealous, vicious god punished and divided and diminished what he had made, for making a life of their own, for managing well enough without him. That was Abram’s lord, who wished above all to control his creatures, who ordered them to multiply but discovered too late that life had a life of its own, and who in his omnipotence could do nothing with it but destroy it.
And now, rather than admit the defeat of wiping out the world that was supposed to mirror him and didn’t, this god looked for another docile man, a man in shock at the turmoil of his life, a man who craved certainty, who quailed at extinction, but who could imagine the repetition of his name by f
uture generations and found compensation only in that thought. This time, the god narrowed his focus to that man alone, easier to master, let the world go its way, he decided, develop a single people from a single person, separate them from the rest of humanity, make the dutiful man promises, bait him with the honour of having been chosen, entice him with posterity, as if posterity were not already his entitlement, and then prevent him from having a child. Keep this hungry man to himself by keeping him hungry. Promise and withhold. It was a small project for the creator of an entire world, but who can say whether that world was not just a small project itself? If this was the wisest god, the world had best go on its way alone, except for those who found such autonomy intolerable, for those who craved certainty and could never find it in fallible humanity. They made the world a great thing, and a single creator their all and everything, so that when they heard his voice, and of course they would hear his voice, they knew they were chosen, were in the presence of certainty and were safe.
‘Your lord, Abram,’ Sarai finished, ‘promises you a destiny, and stops up my womb. He demands your love and leaves me bereft of it. He tells you he loves you and transforms your human life, your only life, into arid waiting. This lord fears humanity, fears its capacity to make connection. He is a separator, a baffled, angry solitary who cannot bear the results of his thoughtless creating. He is an infant who gave birth to parents whose interest in each other he cannot tolerate. He loves you and I love you, yet neither of us has given you hope beyond the grave. He fears that giving you a child will weaken his hold on you. I don’t. I am stronger than him, Abram. I am life. I am of the world. He is not. I will give you a child, whatever the consequences, because I love you and I have my own need, and my love and my need are greater than his. We do not need your god, we need a child-bearing woman, Abram. Take my slave, Hagar, the child of the slave the Pharaoh gave to me. You remember the Pharaoh, your last half-defiant bid for independence both from your lord and from me? Take Hagar as your concubine, make a child with her who will be my child too, because I will it. Let us laugh in the face of this god. You do not need your lord, you need a young woman with a ripe womb. The child will be ours, Abram, because we choose it to be so, just as I was the chosen daughter of Emtelai. We will make our own future.’
And Abram said not a word. He did not try to silence Sarai as she told the women’s story of the creator god, nor did he look at her until she had finished and silence returned to the grove where he had built an altar to his Lord. Sarai waited in the silence, having won or lost her old and only love, having won or lost her bid for life.
Finally, he turned.
‘Can we?’ he asked, piercing her with a bright, black stare.
‘It is the way of the world,’ she said.
* * *
Sarai lay alone in the bed she and Abram shared, savouring her triumph. He had chosen her over his lord, and joined her in a rebellion against impotence and destiny. Which meant that for the first time since she was thirteen years old, Abram was in the arms of another woman. A lush, exotic woman, just far enough from girlhood to ensure a ready womb for Abram’s seed, for him to make his own earthly destiny. Hagar had been a gift of the Pharaoh to Sarai; now she was a gift from Sarai to her husband. A weapon in the battle for his love, a vessel that would carry the deepest desires of both into the world of flesh and bone.
Sarai shadowed the love-making of her husband and the girl with her own body, with the memory of his youthful love for her as her guide. She felt Abram’s imagined hand on Hagar’s breast caressing her own, his lips gentle on Hagar’s mouth pressed on hers, his fingers separating the moist lips between Hagar’s legs testing her own readiness to receive him, his seed pumping into Hagar’s depths finding a long-lost, long-bereft egg of her own to fertilise. In this way, the love and the child would be hers, although the body was not. Hagar was the ghost of the girl that Sarai had been, vanishing the decades, rectifying the slippage of love, and the absence of life that she had suffered. In Hagar, Sarai renewed herself.
When he had finished, Abram left Hagar and returned immediately to Sarai waiting in their bed, to spend the remainder of the night with her. Abram took his wife in his arms and held her against his beating heart, as if his passion had been spent on her. He kissed her slowly, his head buried in her neck, and murmured sleepy gratitude, as if it was with her that he had cried out and into her that he had shuddered life. They slept close and collusive, while in another room in the servants’ quarters Hagar lay unaccompanied and impregnated ———
——— And now, having taught me love, my fine creation offered me yet a new experience, and pity was added to my repertoire of feeling. She did not weep or complain, this young creature wrenched from her world and now used to salve the pain of the woman and the longing of the man, and to wrest from me what was mine to give or take. I had not noticed human anguish before: I, being of eternity, had had no capacity to feel the suffering of the creatures I had made. I dealt in punishment, retribution, in correcting the faults I perceived in a perverse humanity that found ever more devious ways to escape and evade my authority. What other means had I but suffering to promote my ascendancy? I did not feel what they felt, only saw what they did. It took this single girl, and my own newly developed discomfort in love, to perceive at last what suffering felt like. Though she did not weep, I found a place inside her as vast and empty and cold as my own eternity. A place too terrible to be the internal landscape of such a small and vulnerable creature, where loneliness howled like an arctic wind eroding her young heart. She was too frail, too human to share my icy eternity, and yet I saw in her unhappiness my own terrible existence, and I discovered pity.
And I discovered something more terrible still. Wrested into pity, perceiving at last suffering through this singular girl, did not alter or diminish in any way my love for Abram. Pity for Hagar did not convert into love for her. I loved Abram still. It was him I longed for, though I knew that Hagar needed and deserved my love so much more. Having chosen, I found myself unable to unchoose, omnipotent Lord though I might be. I was as helpless in the face of what humanity had infected me with as they. A prey to feeling that refused to adjust itself to rational thought, to reason and convenience. I would have loved Hagar, but I could not. I had only pity for her. Love was locked on the source of her pain. What had Abram done to deserve my love? Nothing. What were his special qualities? None. Except that he had longed for me before he knew of my existence, had called me to him with his need for certainty. Here, at last, was my mirror, a surface so polished by insecurity and longing that it created something to reflect out of its craving to fill its blank surface. Abram caught me by seeing me. He was my chosen one because he had chosen me. I wanted to be implicated in his life and the life of his seed that was mine to give or withhold. I wanted, at last, a tribe of my own, which saw me vividly in its past, present and future. I wanted a past, present and future. Eternity, it turned out, was not enough. I wanted to be loved in time.
And had I learned also to hate? I knew that Sarai was my only rival, that her capacity to fulfil Abram’s desires was the only danger. She might have satisfied him with fleshly love, companionship and the child that would have made me unnecessary. The world would have been enough for Abram whose wish for mystery and meaning would have been assuaged by the proliferation of his generations through time, the progeny of his progeny, the continuation of the begettings, that world without end. What else could I do, I who had never before been chosen by my creatures, but block his route to contentment? Yes, I hated Sarai. She chose the world, when, like Abram, she might have chosen me out of her need. Yet something stopped her, something remained firmly of the world. For her the world was flesh and blood, flesh from blood. She chose the world as meaning. She opposed me with the very means of reproduction that I had burdened her kind with. She was the only thing that stood in the way of my complete possession of my beloved Abram. She was the way of the world ———
——— Sarai suffered
her victory as victors must. Hagar, with a child growing in her womb, discovered her own power. She may have been gifted by the Pharaoh to this wandering tribe, and may have been gifted by her mistress to the bed of Abram, but she had roused the desire of the husband of her mistress and made his child, had created and was nurturing its life, as her elderly, barren mistress had never been able to do. She lived now, with servants taking every care of her, in the main part of the house, a temporary treasure, a carrier of the fortune of the house of Shem. She was young, she was good-looking, she was fertile. She no longer rose from her couch when Sarai came to see how she was. She lolled, sleepy-eyed, savouring her triumph over her mistress, shrugging at her questions – Had she eaten properly? Was she feeling all right? Could she feel the baby kicking yet? – as if to say, what business is it of yours? Sarai tasted Hagar’s contempt and saw her belly swell. The old can comfort themselves that it is blind foolishness for the young to flaunt their youth, their beauty, their fertility in the face of age and incapacity. The old know what is to come for the young who taunt them, how accidental and momentary their triumph is, that time, and not much of it, will take care of the insult. But it is a cold comfort. And Sarai discovered that playing God at his own game gave her all God’s disadvantages. She could manipulate the world, but she could not participate in it. The world swelled with the life that she had willed into being, and mocked her for being unable to indulge in her achievement with any of her senses but that of sight. She could only look. Wanting a child for Abram, for herself, she had not taken into consideration the pain of having to observe someone else actually living the experience. Watching someone else bear her child was, after all, more than she could bear. Hagar’s insolent eyes told her more about herself than she wanted to know. And, like God, Sarai discovered a desire to destroy what she had caused to be made.
