Joseph and His Brothers, page 66
"Gone is gone," they said, "and it doesn't matter what 'gone' means. Stolen, vanished, mutilated, betrayed, sold—it's not worth a snap of the fingers, a sniff of the nose. Was it not our just demand, did we not yearn that he be no more? So then, that has been granted us, the pit is empty."
Amazed, however, by their cold reception of this latest monstrous news, Ruben searched their eyes and shook his head. "And Father?" he suddenly erupted, flinging his arms into the air.
"That has been arranged and settled," they said, "according to Dan's wise counsel. For he should not be left sitting in doubt, but it should be told him point-blank, with tangible proof, that his Du-muzi, his coddled pet, is no more. But we wish to be made clean in his eyes by that same token of proof. Look at what we have prepared, while you went your own way."
And they brought out the tatters of the veil, stiff with half-dried blood.
"Is it his blood?" Ruben cried in his high voice, his mighty body shuddering in horror. For a moment all he could think was that they had preceded him to the pit and had slain Joseph.
They exchanged smiles.
"What delusions and drivel!" they said. "It was done according to our agreement, and an animal from our herd gave its blood as a token that Joseph is gone. We shall now bring it to Father and leave it to him to interpret it in the way he must, for his only choice will be that a lion surprised Joseph in the field and mutilated him."
Ruben sat with his massive knees drawn up and rubbed his fists in his eye sockets.
"Wretches," he groaned, "what wretches we are. You easily chatter on about the future, but do not see it and cannot know it. For it lies before you, blurred and pale in the distance, and your minds lack the strength to bring it nearer and to experience, if only for the twinkling of an eye, what it will be when that hour has come. Otherwise you would be horrified and prefer to have been struck down by lightning beforehand or to have been cast into the water where it is deepest, a millstone around your neck, rather than bear the consequences of what you have done and spoon the broth you have cooked. But I have lain before him, for I had done evil and he cursed me, and I know the fervor of his soul in anger—and I can see, as exactly as if it were already real, his soul's dreadful response to this
anguish. 'We shall bring it to Father and let him interpret it.' Chatterboxes! Yes, he will interpret it. But let any of you watch when he does, and endure it when his soul expresses itself. For God created it both tender and great and taught it to reveal itself in overwhelming power. But you see nothing and can imagine nothing clearly that has not already occurred. Which is why you go ahead and babble on about the future, without the slightest fear. But I am afraid," he cried and stood up before them strong as a bear, tall as a tower, his arms widespread. "And where shall I go when he interprets it?"
The nine sat there disconcerted, abashed, each staring down into his own lap.
"Fine then," Jehuda replied softly, "there's not a man here who would spit on you for being afraid, Re'uben, son of my mother, for it is also brave to admit one's fear, but you are mistaken if you think that there is boldness and merriment in our hearts and around our kidneys and that we know nothing of your fear of Jacob. But what does it avail us to curse what has happened or attempt to undo the inevitable? Joseph is removed from the world, and this bloody garment says so. Tokens are milder than words. That is why we are bringing Jacob this token and are thus spared words."
"You mention bringing it, but must we." Asher, Zilpah's son, asked, licking his lips out of habit, "must all of us bring the token to Jacob at once, and all be present when he interprets it? Let one of us precede the others with the garment and bring it to him; but we others will arrive in due time and appear before him once he has already interpreted it—that seems to me milder still. I suggest fleet-footed Naphtali be the bearer and messenger. Or perhaps we should let the bearer be decided by lot."
"By lot!" Naphtali quickly shouted. "I'm for lots, for I do not chatter about the future without imagining it, either, and boldly admit my fears!"
"Listen, men," Dan said, "for now I will speak a judgment and save you all. For since the plan came from me and took shape in my hand like wet clay and potter's earth—I wish to improve upon it. For we need not bring Jacob the garment, neither one nor all of us. But instead, let us give it to strangers, to those we hire, people of this place and region who are receptive to kind words and a little wool and curds. Then we shall impress upon them what they are to say to Jacob: 'Such and such, and we found this in a field near Dothan and
Stumbled on it by chance in the desert. Do look more closely at it, my lord, to see if it is not your son's garment.' In that fashion. And having said it, let them take to their heels. But we shall delay a few days before we follow after, until he has fully interpreted the sign and knows that he has lost one and gained ten. Are you satisfied?"
"This is good," they said, "or at least worth hearing. Therefore let us accept it, for in this case anything just worth hearing must surely be regarded as very good."
They all accepted it, including Ruben, although he had let out a bitter laugh when Dan spoke of the ten that Jacob would gain in place of one. But they went on sitting outside their tents beneath the stars, unable to bring their deliberations to an end, for they were all uncertain of their fellowship, each unable to trust the others. The nine gazed at Ruben, who had evidently wanted to steal the lad lowered into the pit and undermine them—and they were afraid of him. He gazed at the nine, however, who had remained so strangely unmoved at the news that the pit was empty, and did not know what to think.
"A fierce oath," said Levi, who was coarse but pious and liked to put his expert piety to work by arranging holy ceremonies, "a gruesome oath, that's what we must swear, that none of us will ever breathe a word to Jacob or anyone else about what happened here and what we did with the Dreamer, nor with a wink, blink, or twitch of the eye, will hint at, intimate, or insinuate anything of this story, to his dying day."
"He has said it, we must do it," Asher confirmed. "And this oath must join us ten together, binding us together as one body in one silence, as if we were not individuals here and there, but one man, who presses his lips tight, refuses to open them even in death, and dies biting them shut to keep his secret. One can suffocate what has happened and slay it with silence, which is rolled over it like a boulder. And for lack of air and light it runs out of breath and ceases to have happened. BeHeve me, a great deal of what has happened perishes this way. The silence need only be sufficiently inviolable, for without the breath of the word nothing can endure. We must be silent as one man, and with that our story is over and may Levi's fierce oath assist us in this—for it shall bind us together."
This suited them fine, for not one of them would gladly have been left alone in his silence, and each in his weakness preferred to
share and be secure in a common and powerful inviolability. That is why Levi, Leah's son, devised hideous terms for their oath, and they drew so close together that their noses bumped and their breath mingled. They piled hands atop one another and with one voice invoked the Most High, El-Elyon, the God of Abraham, Yitzchak, and Jacob, but also called upon the several local Baals they knew— such as Anu of Uruk, ElHl of Nippur, Bel-Charran, and Sin, the moon—to witness their oath, swearing, almost mouth to mouth and in unison chant, that he who did not keep silent about "it" or with so much as a wink, blink, or twitch of the eye hinted at, intimated, or insinuated "it" should straightaway become a whore: Sin's daughter, mistress of women, was to take his bow, that is, his manhood, from him; he would become Hke a mule, or better still, a whore, who earned her wages in the streets, be driven from land to land, never knowing where to bed his whore's head, unable either to live or die, with life and death vomiting upon him in disgust for eon upon eon.
This was their oath. And when they had sworn it, they felt both easier and steadier of heart, for they had provided themselves extraordinary security. But as they separated from their bond and each left to sleep his own sleep, one of them said to another (it was Is-sakhar who said it to Zebulun), "I am envious, envious of Turturra, the little one, of Benjamin, our youngest at home, of his knowing nothing and having remained outside this story and this alliance. He has it good, I think, and I envy him. Don't you?"
"I do indeed," Zebulun replied.
Ruben, however, tried to recall the words of that vexing young man, the man of the place, who had sat atop the well stone. It was not easy to remember them, for they were really quite vague and full of twilight, more verbiage than speech, and he could not reconstruct them. And yet somewhere in Ruben's deepest understanding a seed had been left to germinate, though it knew nothing of itself, just as the seed of life knows nothing in its mother's womb—and yet the mother knows of it. It was the seed of expectation that Ruben nourished, secretly feeding it with his own life, both awake and asleep, until he was a gray-haired old man—for as many years as Jacob had served Laban, that devil.
Part Seven
THE MUTILATION
Jacob Mourns for Joseph
Are tokens milder than words? That's highly debatable. Judah had spoken from the standpoint of the bearer of terrible tidings, who might well prefer a token that spares him the use of words. But what about the receiver? Out of ignorance, he can toss words to the winds, trample them underfoot as lies and ghastly drivel, ban them to the hell of inconceivable nonsense, where, as he says with a mighty laugh, he is convinced they belong—that is, until it dawns on the poor wretch that they have a claim to light in the upper world. A word penetrates only slowly; especially if it is incomprehensible, its meaning is not to be grasped or realized; you are free for a while to prolong your ignorance, and your life, and to thrust the devastation that it wants to cause your brain and heart back at the messenger and declare him mad. "What are you saying?'' you can ask. "Are you not well? Come, I will tend to you and give you a Httle something to drink. Then you may speak again, but in a fashion worth hearing." That is offensive to the messenger, but given your situation, of which he is the master, he indulges you, and gradually his reasonable and pitying gaze causes you to waver. You cannot hold up under his eyes, you realize that the exchange of roles you wanted to impose for your self-preservation cannot be achieved, and that instead it is you who must accept a sip from his hand.. . .
Words allow for this kind of temporizing struggle against truth. But nothing of the sort is possible if a token is employed. Its amassed cruelty does not allow for the fiction of delay. It is unmistakable and has no need of realization—it is already real. It is tangible and disdains the soothing attribute of incomprehensibility. It refuses to leave open a temporary escape hatch. It forces you to conceive in your mind what you would reject as madness were you to hear it stated in words, until you must either consider yourself mad or accept it as truth. What is circuitous and what is direct interact differently in word and token, and it may well remain undecided which is
the more brutally direct. The token is mute—for the anything but mild reason that it is the thing itself and need not speak to be grasped. Its silence sends you falling back in a faint.
It is a certain fact that, just as could be predicted, Jacob fell in a faint at the sight of the garment. No one saw it happen, however, for the men of Dothan, a pair of indigent, callous fellows who, for a bit of wool and curds, had assumed the role of finders, had taken to their heels as soon as they rattled off their little text of lies, not even waiting to observe its effect. They had left Jacob, the man of God, standing at the same spot where they had met him outside his house of felt, the veil's blood-stiffened tatters in his hands, and beaten a hasty retreat, first taking two deHberately slow steps backward, then turning to run off as fast as they could. No one knew how long he had stood staring down at scraps of what, as he was gradually forced to realize, was all that was left of Joseph in this world. But in any case, he had fainted, for women passing by found him lying on his back—wives of his sons, Bunah the Shechemite, Shimeon's spouse, and the so-called granddaughter of Eber, Levi's bride. Terrified, they picked him up and carried him into his tent. What he held in his hands quickly informed them of the reason for his collapse.
But it was not a usual faint into which he had fallen, but a kind of rigidity that had seized every muscle and fiber, turning his entire body to stone, so that any attempt even to bend a joint would have shattered it. The phenomenon is rare, but occurs now and then as the reaction to the extraordinary demands fate can make; and the spasm is much like a barrier, an act of desperately defiant obstinacy against the unacceptable, easing then after a few hours at the latest—capitulating, as it were, to the implacable pain of truth that lies in wait and must at some point be granted admission.
People from the camp, both men and women, were called and came running from all sides—to watch in alarm as this pillar of salt softened into a man of sorrows, defenseless now against his misery. His voice was toneless, still a mere whisper, when, as if it were a confession, he finally responded to those who, though now long vanished, had brought him this token: "Yes, it is my son's coat!" Then he screamed in a terrible voice that rose to a shriek of despair: "A wild animal has devoured him, a ravenous beast has mutilated Joseph and torn him to pieces!" And as if the words "torn to pieces" had provided him the cue as to what he must do, he began tearing his own clothes.
It being the height of summer, his Hght clothing offered little resistance. But although he set all the energy of his anguish to the task, it took a good while, given the eerily silent thoroughness with which he carried it out. Horrified and gesturing in vain to prevent these excesses, those standing about him were forced to watch as, against all reasonable expectation, he did not stop at his outer robe, but, evidently pursuing some savage plan, in fact tore to shreds everything he had on, casting the tatters aside one after the other, and stripped himself naked. As the act of a modest man, whose aversion to any sort of naked flesh the whole world had come to respect, it all seemed so highly unnatural and debasing that they could not watch, and family and servants turned away wailing in protest and, covering their heads, pushed their way out of the tent.
The word "shame" is the correct, applicable term for what drove them away only if it is understood in its ultimate and largely forgotten meaning: as a monosyllabic paraphrase for the horror that wells up when the primal state breaks through the layers of civilization, where it lives on only in superficial, muted traces of allegory. One such civilized trace can be found in the rending of the outer garment as a sign of deep mourning—it is the subdued, bourgeois form of the original, precivilized custom of casting off every bit of clothing, of disdaining every covering and adornment as symbols of a human dignity now destroyed and, so to speak, cast to the dogs by external tribulation. It is debasement to the state of the naked creature. That is what Jacob did. In deepest pain, he returned to the foundations of the custom, moving from symbol to crude reality and terrible fact; he did what "one no longer does," did what, when rightly considered, is the source of all horror: upending what is at the bottom and bringing it to the top. And if, in trying to express the profundity of his misery it had occurred to him to bleat like a ram, his family and servants could not have felt more nauseated.
They fled, then, in shame; they left him—and it can be debated whether that was precisely what the pitiful old man wanted, whether the engendering of horror was not in fact his deepest desire, whether being left alone now to continue his crude demonstration was exactly what he had counted on. He was not alone, however, and his performance needed no human witnesses to retain its true nature and purpose—that is, the engendering of horror. The desperate father knew perfectly well to Whom, or better, against Whom all this
was directed, in Whom it was actually intended to create a sense of horror, and before Whose eyes this expression of a return to a state of nature was being performed in order to show Him what a throwback to primal desert ways His own behavior had been. Those around him gradually became aware of these intentions, particularly the man who looked after him, Eliezer, "Abraham's oldest servant"—that aged institution, who knew how to say "I" in such a special way and whom the earth had leapt up to greet.
His heart, too, had been pierced by the terrible news, confirmed by its bloody token, that Joseph, his beautiful and apt pupil, the son of the true wife, had come to grief and been killed on his journey, prey to a ravaging beast; but his strange personal constitution, his peculiar extended sense of self, allowed him to receive the blow with a certain equanimity; moreover, the need to care for Jacob, this man of sorrows, meant that he regarded his own distress as of little importance. It was Eliezer who saw to his master's meals, although Jacob refused to eat anything for days, and to make sure that at least for the night Jacob returned to his tent and bed, where he never left his side. For during the day, Jacob had found a place on a dust heap littered with shards and located in an out-of-the-way, totally unshaded corner of the settlement; and there he sat naked, clutching the veil's tatters in his hands, strewing hair, beard, and shoulders with ashes, and from time to time picking up a loose shard of pottery to scrape his body as if he were afflicted with boils and leprosy—a purely symbolic procedure, for there was not the least sign of boils, and the scraping was part of his performance intended for that other witness.
The sight of this wretched penitent's body was woefully touching enough even without the unclean state such actions were supposed to illustrate, and everyone except the aged steward avoided Jacob's place of abandonment with awe and reverence. Jacob's body was no longer that of the delicately robust young man who had wrestled beside the Jabbok with the ox-eyed stranger and not been defeated, or who had spent a windblown night with the wrong wife—nor was it the body of the man who later sired Joseph with his true wife. Seventy years of life—not precisely or attentively counted, to be sure, but effective for all that—had now passed, inflicting all the touchingly homely disfigurements of old age that made his nakedness so painful to behold. Youth gladly and candidly shows
