‘Take the Levites from among the Children of Israel,’ he chanted, loosening his sandals, ‘and cleanse them. And thus shalt thou do unto them, to cleanse them: Sprinkle water of purifying upon them, and let them’ — he reached for the hem of his gown and drew the garment slowly, slowly up his trunk — ‘and let them shave… all’ — the truth was before her now, any moment, any moment now — ‘and let them… shave… ALL… their… flesh.’
It seemed to Korah that his wife took an eternity — as long as it would have taken him to count the keys to his treasure — to examine the shame that had been brought upon them both. She turned him around, touching his hallowed and inflamed skin only with the tips of her unsanctified fingers. Where was it all? The dense fleece that had covered his neck and shoulders like a burnous, and whose texture had reminded her, miles from water, of black seaweed — where was it? The odd, unruly straggle of finer hair that sprung up where his spine ended, where the first murderer was reputed to have grown a tail, and which spread up his lower back like vine — where was it? Gone, gone. Gone too — sheared with microscopical attention — the sleek thistledown that had matted his buttocks and his thighs. Barbered, his legs appeared thin and girlish, too insubstantial to bear his importance. But worst of all, when she turned him about once more, to look a second time, like a horse-dealer, like a stock-breeder — worst of all, his privates: loose and defenceless, absurd, a boy’s privates, a children’s joke, a secret not worth the keeping.
Raw meat.
‘And Moses did all this,’ she finally asked, ‘with his own hands?’
There was a particularity in her question which Korah could not meet with his eyes. He merely nodded.
‘Even though the ordinance has it that you should do it to yourselves?’
‘It is considered a greater honour — altogether more of a koved — to receive purification from Moses personally,’ Korah said.
He felt that in her concern for what had been taken from him, his wife had missed what had been given.
But no sooner did he hear himself speak than he remembered how Moses had held him by the hands and feet, and lifted him bodily, although he was much heavier than the prophet, proclaiming, ‘Now, Korah, art thou clean!’ An honour indeed, but he could not deny he had disliked the sensation of being raised, of being carried and cleansed and sprinkled by Moses, as if he were an infant or a ram, and all his material substance counted for nothing.
‘Besides,’ he went on, for the purpose of pacifying himself no less than his wife, ‘Moses purified his own flesh likewise, and that of his sons.’
‘A small price to pay, had he shaved every man in the house of his father, for making a fool of you. What hair worth speaking of does he have to lose? Or his sons, who must squint their eyes against the sun, their lashes are so thin? But even had they been a quarter as lustrous as you are — as you were — do you suppose he would have cared how far they were debased so long as he could debase you with them? You are a fool if you still do not know how much you gall him.’
Because Korah’s intelligence was secular, that does not mean it was free of superstition, untouched by the protocol of priestly ambition, or given over completely to his wife’s. ‘What I do know,’ he said, ‘is that you cannot call a man debased who has been sanctified — and what is more has been singled out for sanctification — according to the law.’
‘The law! Do not go on making an ass of yourself, Korah. Enough for one day!’
He forbore to argue. Shirtless, shoeless, hoodless, hairless, bare as a rat, he was uncertain what dignity was left to him to stand on.
He smiled, showing the gold in his teeth. Had his mouth been big enough to house three hundred teeth he would have crowned each one of them with gold. But even then he could not have flashed her a more sumptuous smile than he did now. At the last, his smile said, there is only one law I choose to obey.
She, though, his law-giver, was still arguing with him in her head. She stooped, gathered up his clothes, and held them out for him to see. Evidence of his barbering, needles of hair, nap, clusters of curls that might have been a child’s, still clung to his white linen.
‘What proof have we,’ she demanded that he tell her, except that she would not suffer him to tell her anything, ‘what proof have we that this Torah we hear so much about is not Moses’s invention? Do you never suspect its authenticity and origination? Are you not surprised that a God who roars out of the throat of a fiery mountain should bother, for our small behoof, to proliferate such trivialities — every day a new inanity, and every new inanity spawning every day a dozen more? Take this latest vagary into which your high priest has fallen: blue fringes. Blue fringes! Upon these garments of yours, which you are lucky I do not burn, I am to sew a tassel, and then upon the tassel I am to put a riband of blue. Tell me, Korah, why my seamstressing is a matter of importance to a busy God.’
All that is gold glisters in Korah’s mouth. ‘Angel, fringes ribanded with blue are to remind us, every time we look upon them, of the commandments of the Lord.’
‘You call this reasoning? Were I then to sew scorpions into your shirts and tell you that the Lord commanded them, would they too not bend your thoughts to heaven? And what is there in particular about the colour blue — and do not say, the sky — that lends it this magical property of a memorandum? If there is a virtue in blue wool, then let blue wool be brought out and we will clothe the congregation in it forthwith, and not be worrying ourselves with knots.’
III
For this, the rabbis of the Gemara would remember Korah’s wife.
‘Thus it is written,’ they would say, comparing her with the wife of On (the Husband of His Wife): ‘Every wise woman buildeth her house; but the foolish plucketh it down.’
Woe to her, and to hers, who speaketh against the fringe!
IV
On her husband too, as of course on Sisobk the Scryer, her words made a strong impression.
The very next day Korah sought an audience with Moses. Two hundred and fifty of his followers accompanied him, among them — allowing that one who comes before in time is not disqualified from following in spirit — Sisobk. Garmented in tekhelet — vestments of forget-me-not blue that covered them from neck to ankle — Korah’s men flapped like a banner of insurrection outside God’s chosen prophet’s tabernacle.
Korah himself, though, a study in humming sapphire and sea-sick turquoise, began his questioning with exaggerated courtesy.
Korah: We have come to you to learn your ruling, Moses. To these garments is it required of us — on pain of our iniquity becoming a byword among nations — that we attach fringes?
Moses: That is the commandment.
Korah: A blue fringe?
Moses: Yes, blue.
Korah: It must be blue?
Moses: Blue to recall to you the sea, which will in turn recall to you the firmament, which will at last put you in mind of the Throne of Glory. Where sits He who brought you out of bondage to be your God. Yes — blue.
Korah: But if a single fringe of blue suffices to fulfil the commandment when the garment is white all over, or all over some other colour (which might equally, by the by, remind us of the firmament), then should not a garment which is already blue all over meet the conditions of the commandment more satisfactorily still? If we were to learn that the Lord preferred an offering of goat to an offering of a lamb, we would send out for goat, not cut Him up a lamb and stick whiskers to it.