Only Human

by Jenny Diski

  ‘I want her out of the house. I want her out of our territory,’ she screamed at Abram.

  ‘But she’s practically a child. And she’s pregnant.’ Sarai heard what he did not say: pregnant with my child.

  ‘Have you no pity?’ he begged.

  Sarai was pitiless.

  ‘This is your fault. You and your lord can pity her. For me she has nothing but contempt and knowing eyes.’

  ‘But you –’

  ‘It is your fault. Your fault,’ she shouted, drowning out his unreasonable and irrelevant rationality.

  Abram, perhaps the first among men to wish for a quiet life in the midst of the earthy and conflicting demands of his women, withdrew from the debate. He shook his head and raised his hands in a gesture of submission. ‘She is your slave-girl,’ he murmured. ‘You must do whatever you think is right.’

  And, thus absolved, he left the young woman who carried his only child to his fuming, guilt-enraged wife.

  Sarai could do no more about her behaviour to Hagar than Hagar could do about her innately youthful triumph over her mistress. They were both prisoners of human conflict, of wishes perversely come true, of the accomplishment of desire at the cost of peace of mind. They might have seen each other as their own selves shifted in time, as connected by suffering whose difference was no more than random, as puppets choreographed by mere circumstance. But their emotions colluded with the way of the world to keep them apart, to make each feel the other to be inimical to their own gratification. For all her belief in her capacity to will a child of Abram’s into being from whatever source and make it their own, Sarai now saw Hagar as a weapon in the armoury of Abram’s lord, a turncoat in the battle between herself and him. Perhaps she had even acted against her own interests, unknowingly in the interest of the lord, should he exist, in gifting Hagar’s fertility to her husband. Winning the battle, she had perhaps lost it irretrievably. Now Abram would have a child and a woman, and the child was not Sarai’s and the woman was not her.

  The pampering stopped, and Hagar was isolated from both her former life and her new one. She lived in her room, unvisited, belonging to and the concern of no one. As her loneliness grew, she began to understand what was happening to her, and Sarai came to fix that understanding in her mind.

  ‘We have found a wet-nurse. When the child is born it will be taken from you immediately. You will return to your duties. You will not speak to the child. You will have nothing to do with it. As a matter of fact, it may be better if we sold you out of the household. We will see.’

  It was not that Sarai had forgotten about her own birth mother whose name she never knew. On the contrary, the thought rose incessantly to her waking and sleeping mind. A faceless concubine had carried her and then conveniently died, causing no embarrassment to the family that took the unformed infant and made her theirs, almost theirs. Sarai felt no sympathy for this echo of her own beginnings. Instead a knot of cruelty formed inside her at the memory of it, and swelled until Sarai could contain it no more. She rejoiced in the desolation of the girl, in her forthcoming anguish as the child she carried was snatched from her and she was sent away from it for ever. Or perhaps, Sarai wondered, she might allow her to remain, obliged to watch the child grow, never knowing what Sarai herself had always known, that it was not entirely a part of the family that surrounded it with their wall of love. These thoughts were not willed, they were not even quite consciously registered, but they were indulged in like half-understood dreams and unreasonable fantasies, floating about in her mind bathed in the nurturing amniotic fluid of a cruelty that had lain dormant since early childhood in the minute cracks between her love for the family of Shem and her fear that she did not really belong to them. She had no power then to punish them for not being hers, or, more obscurely, for making her theirs and withdrawing her from where she truly belonged, but now, all these years on, providing she did not examine herself, she could exact retribution from Hagar. Perhaps that was what she had wanted all along: to punish. To punish the lost and the dead, to punish Abram, and to punish his lord. Her childlessness had provided the opportunity: it was what had made her all these years and at last, potent as a god. Well, she was only human.

  So far from the beginning, so far from the garden of the eternal present. From the knowing nothing, feeling only the breath of the passing wind on the external boundaries of one’s being. Loss. From that moment on, loss. You would think we might adjust to it, so soon is it part of our existence, so much is it the essence of our existence. And yet for some it seems that loss sensitises them to itself, so that they quail at the slightest encounter with it, at the merest indication of its possibility, until, finally, every good threatens them with its potential loss, and all they can experience is fear. Until, indeed, all experience is fear of loss ———

  ——— How difficult these humans make life for themselves. How they scrape and dig away at themselves until they find the intolerable murk they might have left well alone. Always in search of self-disgust and always finding it as they scratch away the layers which are all that protect them from their reality. What do they expect to find in all that blood and ordure? They look for gold and find shit. What else? They are matter. That is the truth, their crushing truth. The more they look, the more they find matter, deeper and deeper, and the mess that matter is, and their minds revolt at the truth of themselves. Poor minds, unfit for the reality they are made of.

  My fault, I suppose, but I did not know that mind and reality were so inimical. Mind was all the reality I knew. And why should I feel pity for them? Their minds were supposed to reflect mine, to turn away from the accident of their embodiment, the clumsy necessity of creation, to turn a blind eye to the matter of their existence and to dwell on me, on the glory of my immaterial perfection. But flesh and blood were too strong for them, and their minds, perverse human minds, turned on themselves and tried to shine a light on their condition. I gave them too much and not enough. And their reality, which was not mine, turned against me, gave them a place of their own to stand. Neck deep in shitty matter, to be sure, but a place none the less. These sorry sacks of blood and pus called the world theirs, called their realm of predestined decay beautiful, interpreted their own insignificant doom as tragic, and reworked the necessary drudgery of feeding, defecating and reproducing into a high old destiny.

  And I longed for them. I had eternity. I had a perfect solitude. I was not sullied by material being. I had no need to strive for anything. I lacked nothing. And yet I watched them struggle against necessity, against the blackness that would consume each and every one of them, rendering all their thoughts, dreams and imaginings to blank nothing, and I was moved. These little lives, snuffed out in less than a breath of my eternity, were so engaged, so busy with their fleeting, hopeless existence.

  And out of the brief and pointless span of their lives, they had invented meaning. There is no meaning in eternity, in constancy, in perfect singularity. Meaning was a wonder they had created for themselves, out of desperation, to conceal the blankness, the void over which they walked with every step of their lives. I had no need of meaning, and yet this redundant fantasy that my poor creation created, disturbed and threatened me, and I realised that if I were to be anything at all to these humans, I had to become their meaning. But more than that, I discovered that if I were to be anything to myself, beyond blank perfection, I needed them to become my meaning.

  It was Sarai I had to overcome, and she had given me the means to do it in the child growing in Hagar’s belly. So when Hagar tried to run away, to return to her own people, I stopped her with promises of future. Her son would never be the son of Sarai. Hagar had to remain in Sarai’s presence and the son grow before her eyes so that she and Abram would know they had failed in their bid to take the world from me. Ishmael would be other in their camp, a wild child, raging at his condition of unbelonging, a constant reminder of the mess humans made when they tried to have the world their own way. Ishmael would be Sarai’s pai
n, the alternative that was no alternative. And Abram would look on the boy and wonder about the son I had promised him. He would have the son of his flesh, but not the child of my promise. Love and longing outweighing pity, as it does for humans, I sent Hagar back to suffer Sarai’s abuse and Abram’s neglect and create the conditions for her bellicose son to punish Abram and Sarai with the consequences of rebellion. Had I, by now, learned the full complement of human characteristics: love, longing, pity, hate and now cruelty? How would I know?

  Still, there was something left of I am: and I let time, of which I had so very much, of which they had so little, pass.

  LAUGHTER

  Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto him that is an hundred years old? And shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear? And Abraham said unto God, O that Ishmael might live before thee! And God said, Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him.

  GENESIS 17:17

  Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?

  GENESIS 18:12

  The world had another trick up its sleeve to show Sarai. If you do not succumb to despair, you succumb to life. It is the worst of all the losses. The anguish is weathered by time, the intolerable becomes bearable, the pain mutates into a mere background ache. It is the moment when life goes on, when you know the truth, the outcome, the fact, and yet the breath continues, sleep overcomes you at night, your eyes open in the morning and you rise with the day, you eat from hunger, you drink from thirst and find there is relief and even transient pleasure in both. You have not died from despair, and therefore you will live. After a while, you do not even notice how terrible such a loss of loss is.

  Abram and Sarai lived a kind of peace, a sort of short-term eternity. They had challenged the Lord and in some way had won. Silence had fallen on Abram’s inner ear. There were no more promises, no more enticements for him to look beyond the world around him for meaning in his life. A son had been born, a life had been made, a new generation could be imagined in the future of which he could not be a part. No more could be asked of a life. Sarai had given him all that a man could hope for. She had given him back his world, the only one he could be sure of. And if the child were not Sarai’s own, he was still of the house of Shem, fathered by a man of the house of Shem, as she was. There was enough of both of them in the boy. They had done what they could do and made a future without assistance from the lord of so many unkept promises. Sarai had brought Abram back to reality, and now they both lived in it, together, life going on, for better or worse.

  Reason prevailed, and the child was not taken from his mother. Hagar and Ishmael lived in their own rooms of the house, and the boy was brought daily to spend time with his father. Sarai kept a distance, and no longer tormented the young woman who had assuaged Abram’s dynastic terrors. But, from her distance, she watched with wonder as Ishmael grew to boyhood. It was as if the boy had caught the awkward, troubled young man she remembered Abram once to have been. Dark-browed and uneasy in his own skin. But for Ishmael this was not a phase he passed through, it was the essence of himself. Even as a toddler, the world and he collided, as if they were inimical. He crashed and stamped around, elbowing obstacles out of his way that did not seem to be in the way of others. Unable to rest, it seemed, he was never still, always in search of the new, never content with the present. He fought against sleep, refusing to allow himself to relax however tired he became, stopping only when he dropped from exhaustion. He was not a lovable child, and Sarai was not unhappy to see it was so. He resisted the invitation of adult arms, even those of his mother, as if some danger lurked in embrace. He was, however, more alive than any child Sarai had ever seen. Fidgety with life, forever displacing himself in the world with dark, disordered energy.

  What could be done had been done. Abram and Sarai were full with years, life was no more for the making, it had been made. It was there, spread out in memory, so they could see what had become of them. They had known love and loss, security and despair, and discovered that all those things were survivable; the best and the worst. Now they lived with each other, the keeper of each other’s story, only their own version of the other, it was true, but the sole witnesses of each other’s life. Their existence became regular and even gentle, neither disturbing the other with dissatisfaction. If they thought their own thoughts, they did not trouble each other with them, and the thoughts no longer demanded action in the world.

  The year Ishmael was born, Abram planted an orchard of pomegranate trees in the glade at Mamre, and when they had grown he set a tent in their shade where he could spend his days watching the world go by and offer it refreshment on its journey. Now they would stop still, pleased to do so, and allow life to pass, pausing on its way to tell a tale or two in return for hospitality. Very likely, the Orchard Hotel was the first purpose-built traveller’s inn, and much appreciated it was, not just by wayfarers who rested, ate and drank with the elderly couple but by the elderly couple too, who had, it seemed, at last devised stillness for themselves. A way of being old and waiting for their lives to come to a conclusion ———

  ——— As if I would have no say in it. As if mere decision was all there was to be done. And as if, in this telling of a story – both tellings – I were not having my say. As if my say, indeed, were not the story itself. The story’s mine, not hers, never was. The interruption is the narrative, the interrupter is the narrator. As if her story could be the story. I am the interruption and the narrative. I am the Word and the maker of time. I am the commencement and the conclusion.

  And yet, and yet, beside all that, despite the power of the beginning and the end, I had discovered from these humans the inconclusive middle: the wish, the desire, the longing that muddles the clean divisions of my creation. I found myself wanting. And I discovered that the power of wanting can interrupt the simplicity of eternity. I had made, in all innocence, in the only innocence that had ever existed in the universe, creatures who disrupted the very story of the world with the desire that I had not dreamed of, and had had no desire to know. And as a result, I could not leave that speck of humanity alone. I called it love, after their naming. I called Abram my chosen one, my beloved. Yet what it was I loved in him, I couldn’t say. Myself, I suppose, the reflection of myself in his blank compliance. His wilfulness, or rather hers imposed on him, had darkened my reflection. I wanted it back. I wanted my place in the world. From love, from aggravation, from the need to retrieve the woman’s subversive narrative, to come to my own conclusion, I could not let Sarai and the world have their way.

  This time I made an appearance. I thought something a little extra was needed, and I hadn’t felt the earth under my feet – nor my feet – since I wandered in the garden with the first of them. I chose an impressive, light-filled monumental mode for my materialisation.

  ‘I am El Shaddai,’ I shimmered at him, catching him unawares, and offering him a name so mysterious that even I didn’t know what it meant. Very gratifyingly, he fell flat on his face at my pronouncement. I took it to be fear and trembling in the face of the creator, but I had cause to wonder not much later.

  ‘Walk with me,’ I said. ‘Be blameless.’

  Thus, obliquely, I proposed to overlook his rebellion, his outrageous siding with Sarai against me. A clean slate was what I was offering.

  ‘Be blameless and I will grant my covenant between me and you, and I will multiply you very greatly.’

  He was silent. Yes, I know I had granted my covenant before and that he had already multiplied himself, but he needed reminding what was what and who was who. Ishmael was not promising material for a multitude of nations, that much was clear, now the lad was thirteen and not at all improved in character. Abram still needed me, though he stubbornly refused to acknowledge it. I raised the covenan
tal stakes a notch or two in the face of his continued silence.

  ‘You shall no longer be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham. I will make you the father of nations, and kings shall come forth from your seed.’

  Silence, still silence.

  ‘And I will give you and your seed this land, the whole land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding, and I will be their God.’

  Not a word.

  ‘You shall keep my commandments. This is my covenant which you shall keep: every male among you must be circumcised. You will circumcise the flesh of your foreskin as a sign of our covenant, and every male child through the generations shall be circumcised at eight days old.’

  When would this man speak? Not even refusal. Nothing, still that sullen silence, even after I demanded that my power be inscribed on his penis, that he prove, after his lapse, that his fertility was mine, his future was mine.

  I wanted the sign of my control over one other thing.

  ‘Your wife shall no longer be called Sarai. Sarah is now her name. And I will bless her with your son, and from her will issue nations and kings.’

  And finally I got a response. He threw himself on the ground, once again, and lay face down shaking all over his body. At last, I thought, I’ve got him, he’s mine. But then I identified the sound he was making. It took a moment before I recognised it for what it was. There is no laughter in eternity. There are no tears in my realm either, but those tears I had encountered before in my curious creatures, indeed, I learned that tears brought them closer to obedience to me. But though the sound Abraham made was close to weeping, it was quite different, and his sobs were tearless howls of mirth. Not a pretty sound. And whereas tears drew them closer to me, this laughter kept me at a distance, drew a circle about my Abraham as he squirmed on the ground and left me outside, unable to break through the wall of laughter. There were words among his convulsions.