by Jenny Diski
‘At my age, I will engender a child and at Sarah’s age she will give birth!’
And his grim hee-hawing redoubled. He was not speaking to me, but to some invisible witness who previously had not existed in the world. The god of amusement, the lord of irony. Humankind creates gods for itself at the drop of a hat. And yet, he was not entirely lost to me – I noticed that he spoke of her with the name I had given her. He was bitter, but he was still mine. He kept silence, he laughed, but he did not refuse anything.
Finally, the laughter subsided and he looked up, his eyes damp with mockery.
‘I’ll settle for what I’ve got. Let Ishmael thrive.’
Such a divided man, this man who of all humanity I wanted, so weak. Even in his rage at me, throwing his worldly son in my face, he asked for my blessing. He could not commit himself entirely to the world. I could not play the human game of humour, and took his words at face value, as indeed, in part, they were spoken. I would have him trembling again in his uncertain world.
‘Sarah will bear you a son. And in memory of your laughter, his name shall be Isaac. My covenant will be with him. As for Ishmael, I will bless him, he will thrive. I will make him a great nation, but not your nation. Your nation, and my people, will come from Isaac, to whom Sarah will have given birth by this time next year.’
With that, and with all the humourless dignity I could muster, I turned off my light in the world and disappeared from the face of the earth.
And why I troubled myself with all this, I don’t know. I was the creator. They were mine, of me, in my own image. How could they not love me? How could they resist me? How could such a thing be possible? ———
——— When the madness came again, Sarai realised she had known all along that it would. She woke one morning to a great groaning that seemed to come from all sides of their compound. Abram had been absent most of the previous day and the whole night. When she went outside, she found women ministering to all the men, servants, herdsmen, even the smallest baby boys, every one howling or moaning in pain, while the women held their hands to their faces in shock at what they saw. Abram’s personal assistant was sitting in his room crying, while his wife screamed and gesticulated beside him on the bed dipping and squeezing a bloody cloth into a bowl of water.
‘What’s happened?’ Sarai asked the servant. ‘Have we been raided in the night?’
He shook his head, only able to stammer out a word or two.
‘Abraham … this morning … ordered … all of us…’
‘Abraham?’
She found Abram, sitting in the opening of his tent in the glade, naked apart from a bloodstained rag across his lap, and rocking back and forth in pain.
‘What have you done?’
‘The Lord’s work,’ he answered, looking up at Sarai with a small, sad smile on his face and, wincing, lifted the rag from his lap.
She stared at his mutilation.
‘He appeared to me. I saw his light. He promised…’
Again he smiled.
‘… he commanded … I and all the men, all the male children must be circumcised. It is to be a sign of our nation. I am renamed Abraham. You are renamed Sarah. Our son, the son we will have this time next year, is to be called Isaac, after my laughter.’ He continued to smile, awaiting Sarai’s response.
She looked down at the mess between her old husband’s legs and nodded. ‘At last your lord and I agree about something. If I have a son, I will certainly call him Isaac. What else is there to do but laugh in the face of such craziness?’
She would no longer try to fight against it: the madness was the way of the world too, as much a part of what had to be recognised and accepted as all the rest of nature. She only wished that she could participate in it. She heard no voices, received no visions, was given no instructions. Her madness had been nothing but empty anguish. There was no alternative reality for her. The god of Abram was cruel indeed.
She fetched clean water and cloths and set about bathing Abram’s wound.
‘This lord gives and takes away. In the old story, he created life, the first life, and told them to multiply. He paraded the rest of the world before Adam and told him to name them. Now, it seems, you are the new Adam. But this time he has taken back fertility and naming for himself. What is left to you?’
‘Work and love.’ Abram spoke with resignation. ‘And pain.’ He winced.
‘Love? Isn’t that his too? Doesn’t he also demand love from you?’
‘He does not understand human love. By default, it is ours. There is nothing I can do about the Lord, but there is nothing he can do about our love.’
‘Do we still have love?’
‘It is all we have, Sarah. Us is all we can have that can’t be touched.’
‘You’ve come to a strange wisdom, Abram.’
They sat on together in their tent in the world, close and quiet with each other, until the sun had set. Perhaps, after all, there could be both the madness and the way of the world. And if there was laughter, it might bridge the gap between Abram’s longings and vision and Sarai’s world of desert and necessity. The Lord could command, but Abram and Sarai could sit in silence and smile.
* * *
The following day Abram, host of the Orchard Hotel, sat in the entrance to his hospitality tent shaded by his pomegranate trees, nursing his wound, in the shimmering heat of the midday sun. Sarai lay in the cool interior sleeping lightly, easily roused by the sudden sound of Abram’s voice. She raised herself from the cushion to see three men approaching along the heat-hazed road towards the tent, one, walking a little way in front of the other two, swathed in bright white. She heard Abram call out, ‘Sir, please, rest with me a while under the trees. Have a little refreshment. Be my guest at our Orchard Hotel.’
Then he turned to the darkness of the tent. ‘Sarah, we have guests, prepare a fine meal for the travellers.’
In pain, Abram rose to his feet and went towards them.
The man in bright white nodded and signalled to Abram to wait where he was. The men made themselves comfortable, but no one spoke during all the time the bread was baking and the lamb roasting. When the food arrived, they ate in silence.
‘Where is Sarah?’ the man asked, when they had done.
Sarai moved into the shadows by the entrance of the tent, to listen and look. He seemed, apart from his ability to shake off the dust of the desert, an ordinary enough man. Hardly all knowing, since he asked for her whereabouts, but she heard that he had asked for Sarah.
‘She’s inside the tent,’ Abram said.
‘Sarah will give birth to a son by you this time next year.’
Sarai gasped with rage at the impertinence of this stranger who mocked her ancient sterile body. Then, outraged, she began to laugh. ‘How delightful,’ she rasped through her laughter. ‘Shrivelled with age, I am to become an object of desire to my equally shrivelled husband, and a breeder at last.’
The man turned towards her. He stared hard for a moment into the tent, without amusement, and returned his attention to Abram. ‘Abraham, why does Sarah laugh at the idea that she will conceive? Is anything beyond the Lord? I will return in due time and you will have a son.’
Sarai stopped laughing and looked closely at the man who called them by the wrong names and promised in the name of Abram’s lord. If this was one of Abram’s visions, then she at last had been included, or at least permitted to be present. For a moment she was afraid. Not of the man, nor even of the power of the lord, but afraid that she might believe in the comfort offered by her inclusion, by that ‘Is anything beyond the Lord?’ And if she did, what would all her past life become? Hiatus, error, loss. She did not want to lose her life again, this time to belief, not even to assuage the misery or the emptiness. It was hers, her existence, she had lived it in the growing understanding that it was to be lived, that that was the point, the only point. She would not relinquish it to dreams of comfort. She stepped out of the shadow into the light and faced
the man.
‘I did not laugh,’ she said, challenging him with her manifest lie.
‘Yes, you did laugh,’ the man replied, too insistently, and as Abram rose painfully to accompany the strangers on their way, she smiled a brittle smile at the man in bright white to let him know that, whoever and whatever he might be, still, she could choose ———
——— She knew who I was, but still she lied. Such a lie. ‘I did not laugh,’ when the sound of her mockery rang in the air. She meant ‘I will not believe in you, no matter how you confront me with your reality.’ What creatures are these, who can simply deny what presents itself to their senses? What power could I have in the face of flat denial? I gained a new understanding of my weakness. Abraham, after all the decades of promises and disappointment could choose to believe, and Sarah could choose to deny. And I was subject to their choices, I, their maker. If only they had known, they needed no child, they had one already, and not Ishmael. How strangely things had turned out. I could create and I could destroy, but I could not deny, or choose to believe or not believe, because I am that I am and I know what there is to be known. There was nothing, it seemed, that I could do about Sarah except destroy her, and now that Abraham had discovered how to laugh, what could I do but shake my power at him from time to time and give him what he wanted? These were, it seemed, my limitations. Endurance, denial and humour were my limitations. The world I had created was my limitation. As ever, it seemed, I had only the display of raw power.
Abraham and I walked towards the road that led to the cities of the plain. Sarah followed us at a distance, not knowing, perhaps not caring that I was well aware of her. Abraham, of course, had only ears and eyes for me. But the display I intended was not for him alone. If my murmured words of warning carried back on the breeze to the woman, so much the better ———
——— What is a poor human to do faced with raw power but invent justice? Call it whistling in the hurricane, but call it too the best we can do. Justice is just a numbers game, with a hastily invented set of rules that are forever ignored by one of the players. It is, in the end, as arbitrary as accident. But it is distinctively arbitrary, a recognisably human pomposity in the face of capricious oblivion. As the lord promised Abram a vivid example of what he could do to those who failed to please him, so Abram gave his lord a lesson in the nature of the creature he was threatening. The battle was incommensurate, to be sure, like a squeaky-voiced philosopher in the ring with the heavyweight champion of the universe, but Abram squeaked his novel idea and, for a moment, caught off-guard his lord of the heavy punches. What more can be done, except to refuse to enter the ring at all? Abram, in his longing and rage, had learned deviousness, fancy footwork, but not refusal.
‘Far be it from you,’ he taxed his lord. ‘Far be it from you to destroy the righteous along with the wicked.’
Sarai listened to her husband working his lord like a herdsman bargaining with a buyer at market, playing the numbers and value game for the lives of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, her Abram who only the day before had butchered himself, slicing off his foreskin at the command of his incorporeal lord, and she wondered not just at his faith but also at his self-belief. And then, of course, there was the sheer dumbfounding stupidity of it.
‘What if there are fifty righteous folk among the wrongdoers? Will you destroy them for the sake of the bad ones?’
‘If I find fifty good people, I’ll spare the place for their sake.’
‘Forty-five?’
‘I’ll spare it for forty-five.’
‘Thirty?’
‘I’ll spare it for thirty.’
‘Twenty?’
‘I’ll spare it for twenty.’
‘Ten?’
‘For ten,’ said the visitor, whom Abram took to be his lord, turning away suddenly, and shaking the dust of the earth from his feet to make his getaway before the negotiations threatened parity between man and deity.
Perhaps, Sarai wondered on later occasions when she thought of this event, she had not been sleeping as lightly as she supposed inside the tent. Her recollection ended there, and memory put her once again in the darkness of the tent under the shade of the pomegranate trees. It didn’t matter: the moment had redeemed something of her Abram, rebalanced him in her mind, so that the craven mess between his shaky old thighs, that enfeebling wish to be excused the reality of being human, was offset by a mind that reached for a way of being human, absurd perhaps, incommensurate certainly, hopeless without a doubt, but a stand, nevertheless, against the outrage of impotence. Abram invented justice out of the niggling of the human mind, something with which to reproach the arbitrary, to challenge it with a quality it could never conceive. Abram had begun the task of teaching the lord the nature of the humanity he was dealing with. Or in Sarai’s dreams he had. Self-belief, stupidity, both, whatever it was, she was moved by him as she was moved, in spite of herself, by Ishmael’s turbulent struggle with the world. To battle with the mind’s wish for comfort was as much as could be expected of any creature. To risk the void, the emptiness, to reject the arms that threatened to enfold you, to draw you into the surrounding walls of love, was to begin a journey towards finding a way to exist in spite of the void. Sarai woke in the pomegranate orchard and found a heartbeat within herself, the passion for her brother, her husband, her fellow, that had withered but not after all died. After the waiting, love had returned.
Or else in Sarai’s dreams it had. Perhaps the reflowering of love from the desert interior was simply herself spitting in the face of Abram’s lord. Who knew better than she that it is easy enough to confuse wishes for reality, oneself for the other, solitude for solidarity? Even so, even if it were so, it was still a beginning. Her invention or Abram’s, the notion of fairness took its place in the world and gave humanity something to fight omnipotence for. An idea took hold and stood against the anguish of inevitable failure.
Abram and Sarai stood together and wept in each other’s arms in the following dawn, looking down at the cities of the plain gone up in smoke, humanity and its habitations erased by a force beyond control. Only Lot survived the end of that world, the marginal man, living always on the outskirts, never looking back. Only the last hope of the family of Shem, Lot and his daughters, remained to repopulate between them the devastated plains, the house of Shem for ever, it seemed, destined to turn in upon itself for its survival, while up in the hills, the old couple held each other firm against the shuddering aftershock beneath their feet ———
——— And here’s the irony: it had come to the point where I needed the son of Abraham and Sarah. I had to ensure a continuation of their line, for what else was there for me in this unequal love between my Abraham and me? I needed the son, and the son of the son. I required the future, stuck as I was in eternity, while my merely fleshy beloved was doomed by the physics I had set in place to die. What would there be on earth for me if Abraham died without the son of my promise? I, too, was trapped in the way of the world. If Abraham had learned to be content with a contingent life, supported by Sarah, what would be left to me of my creation? All along, it turned out, my promises, my enticements to the human, had been promises to myself. How else could I ensure my continued presence on earth but by the continuation of Abraham’s line? I longed to remain implicated, and I saw that humanity had the capacity to go its own way.
Now I feared abandonment. I knew the terror of bleakness, and eternity had become just that. I had created life, and in doing so, I had created loneliness. I could not bear not to love Abraham and the continuing fruits of Abraham.
And I knew, too (I’m not all sentiment) that there was only one way to separate the human pairing, Abraham and Sarah, as I saw them sustain each other against the worst I could do. Only a child, only a child between them could break the bond between them that kept me outside Abraham’s heart. What they most wanted was the final weapon I had against them. A child who represented such different desires to each of them, and to me, was t
he only way to sever the love that held me at bay.
ENDING
And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.
GENESIS 22:1
Whoever the story belongs to, the events took place in the world: in the world of wishes and dreams, perhaps, but what more human a world could there be? If Abram’s fear of oblivion had caused him to invent this most personal and interrupting lord of the narrative, his humanity had shown that lord that there could be no commerce with the creator’s creation except by learning the trick of wishes and dreams. We taught him a thing or two about being human. I am that I am learned the power of we would be. We paid the price for longing, but received in return a tenacity, in spite of all the fallibility, all the subjection to the arbitrary. The lord of Abram learned that we were not easy prey to our fantasies of transcendence; that we invented and then resisted our own dreams and wishes with all the perversity we could muster. His story, her story, my story: it doesn’t matter. The need to tell it makes it a human story, whoever authors the narration. Eternity needs nothing, humanity needs a story. And perhaps, after all, eternity is nothing without humanity interrupting it.
* * *
And Sarai, at last, quite out of the way of the world, conceived a child in her old age. Well, strange things happen. Cities disappear in storms of fire, shaken to destruction by the writhings of the earth. Mountains fall from the sky and blacken the sun. Rains fail to come or come in torrents that desiccate or wash the fields and habitations bare of all sustenance. Men and women talk of love and blight each other’s existence. Children are abandoned, children cry with fear and lie limp with hunger, children die. And Sarai and Abram had a boy whom they named Isaac, after the laughter that rises in the gorge once the weeping at these things has finally died away. It is all the way of the world.
