He thought about it. All this took time. We had been given no guidance. Only a jumble of prohibitions. And you cannot construct much of a cosmology out of those.
Unless, I went on, you would argue that a wife can betray her husband with an Immanence?
How were we to know that that is what wives do all the time? Our terrors, in those days, were all tangible. We feared first and foremost through our eyes. So it made my father feel immediately better to see his Rival losing clarity, dismantling even as he watched. The more God receded to the realm of pure idea, the more my father saw himself reassembling into solid fact. For the first time since he had initiated the conversation his fists had become unclenched — one, two, three, four fingers and a thumb visible on one hand, and, yes, one, two, three, four fingers and a thumb visible on the other. Soon he would be making what was not himself vanish again.
But he was still red around the eyes. He had had a bad time of it, imagining God’s feet touching the ground, God’s arms…
And he was still without a wife. He said: Do you know what puzzles me now?
I tried to guess. What you were ever doing worrying about it?
No, he said. What she sees in Him since He can’t be seen.
I could have replied: It’s a puzzle what my mother sees in anyone! But I didn’t want to fan my resentments into life, just as we were putting out my father’s. Maybe she is impressed by what He can do, I ventured. Maybe He shows off His powers. Floods rivers for her. Drains bogs. Splits tamarisks with lightning. Invents wart-hogs. Changes the earth’s colour. Shaves slices off the moon and then makes it whole again.
My father’s eyes opened like moons themselves. Tricks! he said. What you’re saying is that He does tricks for her!
I laughed. Yes, I said. He does tricks. What else do you expect a God to do?
He didn’t reply. Suddenly he wanted to be alone with his thoughts again. We sat a little longer, watching the granite beneath our feet change from grey to purple to red to brown, then we made our way down the mountain in silence.
From time to time I thought I heard strange noises coming from the rocks, and once actually ran off in pursuit of a sound that put me in mind of a new disgusting creature that He had visited on us — a creeping, hobbling half dog, half cat-like thing that secreted sticky fluids as it moved, seemed to be of both sexes simultaneously, and preferred offal to all other foods. Another of God’s tricks to please my mother? I had given it the name hyena, in imitation of its laughter, and it was a hyena which I thought I heard. But I was wrong. When I reached the place from which derision had seemed to emanate, it was empty. When I put my ear to the stones that had seemed to sing and whistle, they were mute.
The moment we reached level ground it began to rain. A brief sporadic pitter-pattering at first, followed by a heavier, more rhythmic fusillade, like the galloping of horses. Mysteriously, though, this was rain that was not wet. I looked up at the sky; a few courtier clouds, billowing pink, attended the dying of the sun. Immediately above us it was clear, in preparation for the ritual entrance of the stars. My hair was dry. The ground I trod on was dry. Yet rain hissed around me, squelched underfoot, gurgled among the rocks we had quit, parched just a few minutes earlier.
I turned to remark on this strange phenomenon to my father, who was dawdling behind me, too preoccupied, I supposed, to have registered with his own faculties that we were caught in an invisible downpour. He was smiling broadly, with his tongue out, pretending that he couldn’t get it back in again — a piece of nonsense that had a history between us, taking me back to my first childhood and our earliest collusion in mischief. Bleh! bleh! bleh! he used to say to me when he had scored some minor triumph over adversity or had got himself in and out of trouble with my mother. And I, lacking words, used to tongue it back: Bleh! bleh! bleh!
After all this time, and in the light of what we had been mulling over on the mountain, it was odd seeing him standing there with his eyebrows wild and his hands hanging and his tongue adrift, saying bleh! at me once more.
You’re looking pleased with yourself, I noted.
So I should be, he said. I fooled you, and you’re the clever one.
For a moment I wondered whether he meant that he’d been having me on all afternoon and was no more a jealous husband than he was a philosopher.
He watched me not understanding him. That gave him pleasure, too.
The rain, he said.
I said, there is no rain.
The rain you can hear, he said.
I listened. It’s stopped, I said.
He was more than pleased with himself; he was out of his skin with excitement. That’s because I’ve stopped, he said.
What do you have to do with the rain?
He came up close to me, dropped his tongue out and pointed to it. All in the mouth, he said. All in here. Tongue, teeth and air — that’s all you need. Do you want to hear thunder? Listen…
And sure enough, rumbling in from the very direction in which we were heading, from where the smell of holy excreta and gushing milk was already reaching us, I now could hear thunder.
Well? What do you think?
I said I thought it remarkable.
So much for weather, he said. Nothing to it. Tricks? I’ll show him tricks!
And before we were home he had done a cloudburst, a river in full flood, a gale howling unimpeded across the waste howling wilderness, a thin oozing thistle wind, the bark unpeeling from a Tabor oak, locusts in flight, duck fat spitting in a fire, a crocodile devouring our new enemy the hyena, and, in his lowest voice, for just the two of us, the Lord God making up to Eve on a quivering breeze.
But it was not until the next day, when I saw him fashioning a clay doll, a puppet, a marionette, a dummy, a golem in the image of himself, which it was his intention to sit upon his knee and animate — actually produce sound and personality and opinion and, who could say, maybe even rebellion from — that I realised my father’s campaign to win back my mother in fair and open combat had begun in earnest.
4. Hairless In Kadesh
I
Now Korah, the son of Izhar, the son of Kohath, the son of Levi, the son of Jacob…
Jacob?
Sisobk the Scryer pounds his temples with the heels of his little hands. He has been reading the Old Testament in his room all morning, descrying scripture in the steam that rises from the jorum of frothing water he grips between his knees, but he cannot get to Korah for the knot of roots, the rotting bark and dead wood, that chokes Korah’s ancestral tree. Jacob? What is Jacob, the ankle-grabber, the thief of his brother Esau’s birthright, doing here? Sisobk knows Korah’s story better than he knows his own, and never until now has the name of Jacob figured in it.
The future is not something Sisobk is prepared to play fast and loose with. You can’t have people slipping in and out of it at will. Hence his resorting to that unnatural expedient, that aide-mémoire of second-rate diviners — steam. He means to clear the blockage in his faculties.
A thin moustache trails across his lip like a lost platoon of ants. This he traces with two fingers, as though its presence is a surprise, or perhaps a disappointment, to him. Then he pinches his nostrils, compresses his tiny eyes until they squelch like raisins, lowers his red perspiring head into the fumes, and tries once more to turn the pages of the Book of Numbers.
NOW Korah…
His mind lurches, slides, stumbles, scalds — so much ash wheezed up from the bronchitic chest of a volcano. Korah to Levi, Levi back to Izhar, Izhar on to Kohath, from Kohath back to… But it’s no use. Again it all unravels with the unauthorised intrusion of Jacob, the smooth one.