by Marek Halter
Some arrived from the south after crossing the three deserts on Canaan’s borders. They seemed richer, less like peasants, than those from the north and the east, but were just as eager to belong to Abram’s people.
“We come from a land of great richness, irrigated by a huge river whose source nobody knows,” they recounted. “The king who reigns there is called Pharaoh. He is a living god, and has unlimited power. He sits beside other gods who are half men and half birds, cats, or rams. His cities and palaces are magnificent, the tombs of his fathers even more beautiful than his palaces. But his power intoxicates those who serve him. In Pharaoh’s land, they kill men as easily as others squash flies. It isn’t hunger that we fear, but servitude and humiliation.”
Abram never refused the pastures of Canaan to any of the newcomers. He blessed their arrival with as much pleasure as Melchizedek had blessed him at the foot of Salem. With a tolerance that surprised everyone, he never forced anyone to believe in his god, even though his own devotion to the One God was absolute. He built altars to Him all over Canaan, and never let a day go by without making offerings to Him and calling His name: Yhwh! Yhwh! His only sorrow was the silence that answered him. Not a day passed that he did not hope for a new call from God Most High, as he had started calling Him, a new command to perform a new task.
But Yhwh was silent. What was there for him to say? As promised, Abram was becoming a people, a nation, and a great name. And without Sarai giving him a son or a daughter! Since they had settled in the land of Canaan, they had stopped being surprised by Sarai’s sterility.
Everyone—men and women, new arrivals, and those who had walked from Harran—was captivated by Sarai’s beauty.
Hers was a beauty that seemed in itself such a perfect expression of abundance that they were obliged to suppress their feelings of jealousy or lust. Similarly, it was understood that Abram, taking advantage of this beauty like a newlywed, seemed to feel no sadness at having no heir. All was well. Peace and happiness were numbing their hearts and minds. Well-being had become their daily bread. It was an intoxication from which no sorrow roused them. Sarai’s beauty, her flat stomach, her smooth cheeks and neck, her young girl’s breasts and hips, had become a sign of the happiness that Abram’s god, Yhwh, had granted them.
For a long time they did not realize the true miracle they had before their eyes: Sarai’s beauty was untouched by time. The moons, the seasons, the years went by, but Sarai’s youth seemed immutable.
The weight of this silent miracle, though at first it delighted her, was beginning to terrify Sarai herself.
ONE summer’s day, Sarai was bathing in the hollow of a river, as she liked to do when the sun was at its hottest. It was a spot where dense trees formed a chamber of greenery, where the current had hollowed a deep basin in the rock, and where the greenish-blue water was deep enough to dive in. Sarai would often come there to bathe naked. Then she would emerge, shivering, while the hot sun sizzled on the foliage above her, and lie down on the bank, where the rocks, polished by the winter floods and as soft as skin, were still cool. More often than not, she would fall asleep.
That afternoon, a noise startled her out of her drowsiness. She half sat up, thinking it was some animal, or a dead branch that had fallen from a tree. She saw nothing, and the noise was not repeated.
She was resting her chest and cheek against the rock when she heard a laugh above her. A body leaped out from between the trees, seized her tunic, and disappeared with a splash into the water. Sarai had recognized him.
“Lot!”
Lot’s head emerged from the water. With a great burst of laughter, he waved Sarai’s streaming wet tunic above his head. Sarai huddled on the ground and covered her nakedness as best she could.
“Lot! Don’t be stupid. Give me back my tunic and get out of here!”
With two strong bounds, Lot was at her feet. Before she could make a move, he threw her tunic away and embraced her calves. He kissed her knees and thighs fiercely, trying to put his arms around her waist. With a cry of rage, Sarai gripped a handful of his hair. Twisting her hips and pulling on his head, she freed her legs. No longer mindful of her modesty, she managed to place one foot on Lot’s shoulder and push him away. But Lot had become a strong young man. He loosened his embrace, although he did not let go completely. Laughing, and drunk with excitement, he struggled, gripped Sarai’s neck from the back, and placed a hand on her chest. Sarai, her muscles hardened by anger, moved to the side, kicked Lot in the crotch, and at the same time slapped him across the face with all her strength.
In shock and pain, Lot rolled off the rock and fell into the water. Sarai got to her feet, found her tunic, and quickly put it on, soaked as it was. With a childlike moan, Lot hoisted himself out of the river. He lay for a moment on his side, his features distorted with pain and embarrassment. Sarai stared at him, her rage still not abated.
“Shame on you! Shame on you, nephew of Abram!”
Lot stood up, his face pale, his chin quivering. “Forgive me,” he stammered. “You’re so beautiful.”
“That’s no reason. I’m Abram’s wife. Have you forgotten that? I can’t forgive you.”
“Yes, it’s a good reason, and a true one!”
He had almost shouted. He looked away, and sat down on the rock, with his back to Sarai.
“You don’t notice anything,” he went on. “I see you every day. At night, you’re in my dreams. I think of you as soon as I open my eyes in the morning.”
“You mustn’t.”
“It isn’t my choice. You don’t choose the woman you fall in love with.”
“You shouldn’t even dare to say such words. If Abram’s god heard you—”
“Abram’s god can hear me if He wants!” Lot interrupted, fiercely. “You’re the one who doesn’t hear me! You don’t even see that I’m near you more often than Abram. You don’t see that I pay you more attention than he does. There’s nothing you ask of me that I don’t do gladly. But you don’t see me. And when you speak my name, it’s as if I’m still the child you used to scold. I’m no longer that child, Sarai. My body has grown and my thoughts, too.”
Sarai suddenly felt confused and embarrassed. Lot’s voice was throbbing with pain. Why hadn’t she seen his suffering? He was right. She didn’t see him. Or rather, while she saw the handsome young man he had become, thinner and more delicate than Abram, with something feminine in his suppleness, she continued to think of the child he had been, always laughing and playful. Meanwhile, everywhere in Canaan young women must be going to sleep with his image in their minds, dreaming of having him as a husband one day.
Sarai’s anger ebbed. She tried to find some wise and tender words with which to calm Lot. But he faced her, his eyes as bright as if they were coated with kohl.
“I know what you’re thinking. I know all the words you have in your mouth, all the words you could use to condemn me or calm me down. You’re thinking of Abram who’s like my father. You’re going to tell me you’re like my mother.”
“Isn’t that the truth? Is there any greater sin than to covet your mother—your father’s wife?”
Lot’s laughter was terrible to hear. “Abram isn’t my father! He doesn’t even want to be my father; he didn’t adopt me. And you say you’re like my mother. But what mother ever looked like you?”
“Lot!”
“You are the woman I loved for years like a mother, yes. But who could think you as a mother now? Nobody—not even me.”
“What do you mean?”
Lot plunged his hand in the river and sprinkled water on his face and chest, as if he were burning hot despite the shade of the trees. “They’re like blind people,” he said. “But you can’t be blind. Not you.”
Lot seized Sarai’s hands. When she tried to break away, he held them tighter, kissed them, and lifted them gently and respectfully to his brow.
“I’ve always loved you, Sarai. With all my heart, with all the love I’m capable of. I love you so much I was
even happy when you had to become my mother. Fortunately for me—or unfortunately—apart from Abram, I’m the only man who knows how soft your skin is, how firm and warm your body. You used to hug me. A long time ago—though I remember it as if it were only yesterday—we even slept in the same bed for a few nights. I woke up with the smell of your breasts in my nostrils.”
“Lot!”
“Every day since I was a child I’ve been looking at your face. And every day it’s the same perfect face.”
Sarai abruptly took her hands away from Lot’s hands. Now it was she who avoided his gaze.
“How can they not see it?” Lot went on. “I was a child, then a boy. Now I’m a man. Time has done its work on me. It’s molded my body. But on you, Sarai, it hasn’t put a single wrinkle. The women who were young when I was a child now have heavy hips, and their bellies are soft from bearing children. They have wrinkles around their eyes and mouths, their brows and necks are lined. I look at you and see none of that. Your skin is more beautiful than the skin of the girls who want me to caress them behind the bushes. Time has no effect on you, and that’s the truth.”
“Be quiet,” Sarai implored.
“You can ask me anything,” Lot said in a low voice, looking down, “except not to love you as a man loves a woman.”
ONE night soon after, when Abram had joined her in her bed and they were lying side by side in the darkness, still numb from their caresses, Sarai told Abram how Lot had surprised her on the riverbank.
“If Lot’s passion surprises you,” Abram laughed, “you must be the only one. When Lord Melchizedek asked him why he didn’t seem very eager to make offerings on the altar of God Most High, he replied that he’d only be certain that Yhwh existed if He appeared to him looking like you!”
They both laughed.
“When Lot was still a young boy,” Sarai said, “and we were walking from Harran, he was enthusiastic about your god. He wanted me to keep telling him over and over what you said about Him. Now he’s a man, and he says he can’t love me as a mother or an aunt because time has no effect on me. Is that what you think, too? That time no longer has any effect on me?”
For a moment, Abram remained silent and still. Then, in a warm, joyful voice, he agreed.
“But isn’t that a curse?” Sarai asked under her breath. “A punishment sent by your god?”
Abram sat up, letting the cover slide off their bodies. In a long kiss, he ran his lips from Sarai’s neck to the hollow between her thighs.
“My flesh, my fingers, my heart, and my mouth drink their fill of happiness at your beauty, night after night. It’s true: The seasons pass and Sarai’s beauty doesn’t fade. On the contrary. The days move us closer to death as the donkey moves the wheel to raise water from the well. But my wife, Sarai, is as fresh tonight as she was the first time I undressed her.”
“And doesn’t that frighten you?”
“Why should it frighten me?”
“Aren’t you afraid that others are as aroused by it as Lot is, but with less affection and less reason? Aren’t you afraid that your wife may become a source of envy, resentment, and hatred?”
Abram laughed confidently. “There isn’t a man in Canaan who isn’t mad with desire for you. How could I not be aware of it? There isn’t a man or a woman who doesn’t envy Abram and Sarai. But not one of them will dare to do what my nephew Lot dared. Because they know. They know what Melchizedek saw in you as soon as we arrived in Salem: Yhwh wants you to be beautiful, and not just for me. Your beauty is a beacon for Canaan, an offering from Him to the people of Abram. You may not be able to give birth, but Yhwh makes your beauty the seed of our eternal happiness. God Most High is holding back the effects of time on you because you are a messenger of all the beautiful things he will accomplish. Who among Abram’s people would dare to sully this messenger?”
Sarai would have liked to protest. To say that she did not feel that way at all, that all she felt was the weight of the time that never passed and the endless desire to have children. She would have liked to say that such thoughts were merely a man’s imagination, that Abram’s god had not announced or promised anything of the sort, only a people and a fertile seed. But Abram covered her in caresses, reducing her to silence and once again drawing from her the pleasure that was his fulfilment.
Later, in the darkness, Abram’s breath against her shoulder as he slept, Sarai was overcome with sadness. She bit her lips and pressed her eyelids to stop her tears. How she would have preferred her belly to grow round and her face to crease with wrinkles! What could she do with this beauty, which was as dry as grassland cracked by heat? How could a sterile beauty be preferable to the cry of life and the laughter of a child?
Filled with anger and fear, plagued by questions she could not answer, she found it impossible to get to sleep. For the first time since they had left Harran, Sarai was seized with intense doubt.
What if Abram was wrong? What if he was misled by his wish to love his god and achieve great things? What if, in thinking he could hear an invisible and intangible god, he was the victim of his own imagination or a demon’s scheming? In all honesty, what use was the power of a god who could not even make the bridal blood flow between her thighs?
A Child of Drought
Soon after that night, the happiness they had known in Canaan began to disintegrate. The number of people coming to swell Abram’s tribe suddenly increased. Most were from the north, some even from the cities, artisans rather than shepherds.
“Where we come from, the harvests have been bad,” they all said. “The rains haven’t fallen, the fields are barren, the rivers have run dry.”
Abram would welcome them without hesitation. Soon, there was not a single patch of land in the whole of Canaan that was not being used for livestock. In the autumn, the tents were not taken down. The grass in the pastures was short and hard. When they gathered in the big black-and-white tent, there was the first sign of unease from those who had been with Abram from the beginning.
“Aren’t you afraid?” they asked Abram.
“Afraid of what?”
“That there are too many of us in the land of Canaan now?”
“God Most High gave me this land and no other,” Abram replied, “and He did not put any limits on my people.”
Abram might not want any limits, the others thought, but a bad season might well set them. But they said nothing. Just as Sarai said nothing. Abram had become so sure of himself, so confident, that he repelled doubts and questions as easily as a bronze shield repels arrows. He also began to share Sarai’s bed less often.
“Even the greatest of beauties can tire a husband,” Sarai told Sililli, bitterly. “He doesn’t need to make love with me anymore; he’s quite happy now just thinking about it.”
“Men never get tired of those things!” Sililli joked. “They may not be able anymore, but as long as they can get their shaft up, they’re always ready and willing!”
Sarai shook her head, unsmiling. “Abram knows my face and my body will be the same tomorrow as they are today. There’s nothing he can get from me that he hasn’t already had. Why should he be in any hurry?”
She did not say what she was really thinking. There was no need: Sililli was thinking the same thing.
Lot could also see her distress. Since his declaration of love, he had avoided doing anything that might provoke Sarai’s anger. But he stayed beside her, affectionate and silent. They often spent whole evenings together, listening to singing and music in the encampment, or to tales and legends recounted by passing merchants or the old men of a newly arrived clan.
Sarai would sometimes let her gaze linger on Lot’s handsome face. She would give a start whenever he burst out laughing at a joke told by one of the storytellers. His loyalty, his attentiveness, his constant presence made her feel a curious mixture of joy, tenderness, and remorse.
“There are lots of girls who’d like to see you,” she would say to him. “Why don’t you go to them? That’s w
here you belong.”
She did not dare add, “You’ll have to take a wife sooner or later.”
Lot would look at her, with an expression at once serious and calm, and shake his head. “This is where I belong,” he would reply. “This is all I want.”
Sometimes, then, Sarai would open her arms to him. She would clasp him to her, kiss his neck, and let him kiss her, as if he were still a child.
“You’re going to drive him mad,” Sililli would say, whenever she caught them.
“If we can’t be mother and son,” Sarai would reply, blushing, “we can at least be sister and brother!”
“Sister and brother!” Sililli would retort, seriously angry. “When the cows come home! I love Lot as much as you do, and I tell you that what the two of you are doing to him, you with your beauty and Abram with his indifference, is really cruel. You ought to force him to take a wife and a herd and go and make children in the Negev Desert!”
Sililli was right. Sarai would feel a coldness in her chest, and her back would tighten with fear: The sins committed by her and Abram were accumulating.
One night, she had a bad dream she did not dare tell anyone about, least of all Sililli. She saw herself emerging from the river where Lot had surprised her. Lot was not there. She was surrounded by a large number of children, both boys and girls. Strange children with round bellies, as if they were pregnant, and empty faces. Completely empty: no mouths, no noses, no eyes or eyebrows. And all exactly alike, despite the absence of features. But Sarai was not afraid. She walked across the pastures, accompanied by this swarm of children. Everything in Canaan seemed as beautiful as ever. Extravagant flowers had grown in the freshly plowed fields. Flowers on big stems, with vast yellow corollas. Sarai and the children ran toward them, shouting with joy, eager to pick them. But as they drew nearer, they noticed that the stems were covered in hard thorns that made it impossible to take hold of them. The flowers themselves turned out to be balls of fire, like incandescent suns. They burned everyone’s eyes, they burned the fields, they dried up the trees. Sarai began to cry out in terror. She wanted to warn Abram, Melchizedek, and all the elders of the tribe: “Careful, the flowers are going to destroy you, they’re going to transform Canaan into a desert!” But the children calmed her tenderly, happily showing their big bellies and saying, “It isn’t serious, it isn’t serious! Look how big our bellies are. We’re going to give birth to all your sins, and you can eat them when the fields are empty.”
