Tsk… tsk… tsk…
It is so audible, her patience, that he mistakes it for an interruption.
‘No, you must let me finish. Small as they are, these prepositions determine the courses our lives take. I was not made to be included in another’s orchestration. I am not a fit partner or companion. You must find someone else, someone more agreeable, to be your accompanist.’
He hears her slip from the bed, and in a second she is kneeling at his feet. ‘What have they done to you?’ she says softly, softly as a prayer, pulling at him so that he will join her, make a harmony, find a rhythm, both of them, together, at his feet.
He holds back, keeping what little he knows of balance by staring fixedly at the temples looming in the tilted night. But her pressure is irresistible. ‘What have they done to you?’ she repeats. ‘How have they damaged you so badly, my poor brotherless boy?’
Damage? Has he been describing damage? And who is she to speak of they? But before he can repudiate her terminology, she is on all fours again, turning a blind eye to his disjuncture, like the beasts his father had declined, and is once more ready to compensate him for his loss.
This time he does not rein in the indecorous pigtail.
IV
Where would we be without coincidence and word-play? At the very moment that Sisobk the Scryer is departing the infirmary, reluctant to leave behind the smell of dying woman, Cain the murderer of his brother is running from his apartment to escape the smell of living girl, and Asmar the potter is sitting at his wheel, settling in for a night of sniffing clay.
In a moment we will bring all three of them together, by the nose.
And the word-play? Yetzer and yotzer.
Yetzer is Hebrew for purpose or inclination, inclination one way or the other but usually the wrong way. If you follow your yetzer you are likely to end up doing evil. Yotzer is a potter. It is impossible to forecast what you will end up doing if you follow a yotzer, the outcome being dependent on the yotzer’s yetzer. But it should be clear already what opportunities for moral equivocation lie coiled like paradisal garden snakes in these two words’ seeming sameness. Why fault the pot when you can blame the potter? ‘We are the clay, and thou our yotzer,’ Isaiah reminds the Lord, at the conclusion of sixty verses itemising the ways in which we leak.
Not that there is anything leaky about what Asmar makes, unless we number among his productions his son, whom we shall also introduce coincidentally in a moment.
The sight of Asmar potting in the night is not an unusual one. It is the great ceramist’s boast that he can knock out three hundred amphorae identical in shape and size and glaze in the interval other men squander, between dinner and bed; and in order to keep up with this record he must sometimes be bound upon a wheel of clay until morning. ‘But that’s cheating,’ Naaman has been known to tease him. ‘That is extending the interval unfairly.’ ‘Not so,’ squeaks Asmar; ‘some men do not go to bed until it is light. I know that from the number who come to my window before the dawn to watch me.’
Asmar loves to have an audience when he is yotzing, and finds it hard to understand how any Shinarite who has seen him at his wheel with his fingers wet and flying could ever derive satisfaction from watching anything else. He wears a smock which he has designed himself, a loose, billowing garment that leaves his arms, his legs, and most of his chest free. Asmar would not be surprised were anyone to tell him that his appearance — or whatever the word is that encompasses his dress, demeanour, skill and confidence around clay — has an inflammatory effect on the women of Babel. He has seen three wives into their graves so far, and can conceive of no obstacle to his seeing another dozen. Women are drawn to him, flimsy as he is in stature and squeaky as he is in voice. It is not up to him to decide why, but he assumes it is a combination of well-shaped limbs, engaging manner, free morality (as advertised by his single ear-ring) and familiarity with the first material — the earth itself.
‘They smell something primal on me,’ he explains. ‘They would know, even if they were blind, what I’ve been doing with my hands.’
The chief recipient of such explanations is Asmar’s eldest son, Esay. Asmar is having trouble convincing Esay of the plain and functional let alone the venereous properties of grey earth mixed with a little water. He has the ambition of passing on to his son a successful business and a name loaded with honours, but Esay, though he holds with the wearing of a single ring in his ear, pictures himself in a more verbal profession — perhaps story-telling — earning the admiration of women because of what comes out of his mouth, not what sticks to his fingers. The activity of yotzing itself, by which he means the way it is necessary to sit and the shapes he must make with his hands, is inimical to his idea of creative freedom. ‘I hate having to bear in upon the clay,’ he counter-explains to his father. ‘The pot expresses its true nature by trying to escape from the wheel, by swelling upwards and outwards, by returning to its original plastic matter. But the potter must prevent this. He must be a sort of gaoler to the pot.’
If you would see a yotzer beside himself, Asmar is the man to watch. He flattens whatever is rising from his wheel. He overturns trays of frit and feldspar, sends flying jars of bat-wash, slurry, bowls of blood-red water for moistening his sponges. ‘A gaoler to the pot! What sort of talk is this? Show me the bars! Show me the keys!’ He attacks his boy with biscuit-bats and whirlers, he corners him with cutting-tools, he threatens to lock him in the kiln — he’ll show him gaol! — and not let him out until he’s stone.
‘I just don’t have the right temperament for it, father,’ says Esay, backing off. (‘I don’t have the yetzer for it,’ he might have said.) ‘I’ll only end up setting all my pots free.’
Tonight, as Cain approaches from one direction, and Sisobk shuffles from another, this is exactly what Esay is doing. He is liberating every pot he can lay his hands on — pitchers, ewers, gallipots, amphorae still wet from the wheel — by throwing them at his father. And Asmar, because he is holed up in the production and not the display section of his yotzery, and because he would not damage anyway a yot he has turned with love and exactitude himself — Asmar is retaliating with the only weapon he has by him, which is clay.
What Cain sees when he pauses at the brilliantly lit window — Asmar’s stage — is two men, covered from head to foot in slub the colour of rats, each with a little hoop of gold protruding, and each groping in his primal blindness for something more to plaster on to his assailant.
What Sisobk sees is Cain.
His heart leaps, lurches, begins beating on the right side of his chest. ‘Come with me to Padan-Aram!’ he cries, but then holds back, for the father of nay-sayers, the lover of Zilpah, is in difficulty, is having trouble breathing, can barely stand, must squat right there, right now, in the public street and clasp his legs and drop his head below his knees.
Is this my moment, Sisobk wonders, is this the hour when it is given to me to hold his hand?
For his part, Cain is unaware of Sisobk’s presence. Asmar’s window holds all his attention, fills him with a repugnance which won’t let him look and won’t let him leave. Any other man would find the slime-fight funny. He wishes he could find something droll in it himself. But he is disabled by the spectacle of fisticuffs, cannot see one man raising his hand against another, no matter how farcically, no matter how feebly, no matter how playfully, without tears squeezing into the corners of his eyes, without tight bands of pain encircling his head and chest like hoops around a barrel.