A Whistling Woman (14 page)

She came, as she had to, to the story of Abraham and Isaac. They all drew Hagar in the wilderness, and yet another Angel, making the mother turn back to her baby, whom she had abandoned because she loved him too much to watch him die. You must trust the Lord, said Miss Manson. Hagar's faith was weak. Abraham's ninety-year-old wife bore him a son, Isaac, when he was an old man. They may have counted differently in those days. They came, as they had to, to the tale of the sacrifice of Isaac.

And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham,
and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.

And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou
lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a
burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

Here was another picture to paint, the boy with the wood on his back, the man with the knife, the angel, the ram caught in a thicket by his horns.

The man was to wonder about the need for a natural explanation of the presence of the ram, when all the story was full of supernatural will and arbitrary power. The boy was compelled, for the first time, to argue. He never argued. The man believed he remembered that the boy never spoke. But he sat without drawing wood or angel-feathers. Miss Manson stepped between the desks, and saw his empty book. She bent over him. She had blazing red hair sleeked into a page-boy, lifted into almost-horns on her brow with tortoiseshell-spotted slides. She had a funny tweed suit, flecked rust and green, and smelled of mothballs. She wore glasses with tortoiseshell rims.

“No inspiration, Lamb? Usually so diligent.”

“I don't like the story, Miss.”

“It is the Word of God, Lamb. It isn't up to you to like or dislike it. You must understand, interpret, and learn from it. What worries you?”

“Why did the Lord tempt Abraham, Miss? I thought the Devil was the tempter, like in the Garden of Eden. Why did he order ... why did he ask ... how could Abraham ... kill ...”

“His son whom he loved? The Scripture takes very good care to say that Abraham loved his son, at the moment when the supreme sacrifice is asked of him. We are all asked to make sacrifices, Lamb. It isn't a sacrifice, if it isn't something you love. Abraham was asked to make the greatest sacrifice possible, his son, whom he loved. It is happening all round us, young men are going off to fight for our freedom, and their wives and mothers must be cheerful, because it is needful.”

“But—”

“Still ‘but,' Lamb?”

She was a good teacher. She did want to know what troubled his mind. She carried, he later thought, a small lantern of charisma, as Mr. Shepherd also did. But its light fell bleakly into his dark.

“
But,
I think, the word ‘tempting' is right. You
tempt
people to do what they shouldn't. He shouldn't have.”

“The Lord's Prayer teaches us to ask the Lord, ‘Lead us not into temptation.' Temptation here means ‘trial.' ”

“It still means
not
doing—things. We have to ask Him to
stop
us going into temptation. Not to tempt us.”

“We are not all as good, or as strong, or as holy as Abraham. We do not have the purity to dare to submit ourselves to God's Will.”

“I think—” the boy said slowly.

“Go on, Lamb.”

“
I
think the Devil had got into God, and was winning. I think—I think it was evil to ask him to do that—”

“No, no, it is wickedness and weakness ever to think God can do evil. God is goodness itself. He made all well for Abraham. The sacrifice was provided, the Angel stayed his hand, Isaac survived.”

“Isaac hated him forever, perhaps.”

“No, no, because he too was chosen, was a holy man, who was able to trust, both his earthly and his Heavenly Fathers. There is no merit in obedience if obedience is easy and pleasant.”

Black boiled inside and outside him. He smelt mothballs and wool. She showed him, then, the art postcard she had brought to help them see the scene, and understand.

Later, he knew that it was Rembrandt's version of the Sacrifice of Isaac. The angel leans out of black thunderclouds. Its right hand grasps Abraham's strong wrist. The curved knife, sharpened horribly clean, hangs forever in free fall across the landscape. Abraham's bearded face, intent on what he has set out to do, startled in his nerves by the apparition, is turned up to the angel, away from the boy. The boy, naked except for a loincloth, lies back on the firewood. He has no face. Abraham's left hand, brown skin on white, is clamped like a sucker, over the whole upper head of the boy. The head is forced back, smothered, so that the man cannot see the boy's face and the boy cannot see the knife. What can be seen is the stretched white throat. Murder and pity. The boy, Josh Lamb, seeing this picture, was filled with that overwhelming and appalling pity with which the man now regarded the distant boy. He stared, and then all his muscles clamped into spasm, he vomited, he foamed, his bowels gave way, he went into the dark, which was busy and roaring, which was not peace. God was bad, bad was God, his voice squeaked as he went, whether into the air or only into the cavern of his head he never knew and could not ask. For no one spoke to him again of the episode. That he remembered, at least.
In later years this episode became part of the rigorous and rigid account he made for himself of his ineluctable destiny. All human beings tell their life-stories to themselves, selecting and reinforcing certain memories, casting others into oblivion. All human beings are interested in causation. “Because I had a good Latin teacher, who caught my mind with incantatory grammar, I became a theologian, and because I chose Latin, I put aside the sciences of earth, flesh and space.” All human beings are interested in pure coincidence, which can act in a life as surely as causation, and appear to resemble that, as though both were equally the effects of a divine putting-on. Most of us know the flutter of the heart which comes when, out of a whole library, we put a random hand on the
one necessary book,
and—unerringly we should say, but what does that
mean
?—open it, at the
one necessary page
. In the
Arabian Nights,
it has been said, a man has his Destiny written on his forehead, and his character, his nature, is that Destiny and nothing else. A boy, a man, like Josh Lamb, Joshua Ramsden, who has found himself tumbling in the dark sea outside the terrible transparent mirror of the fragile window-pane, persists perhaps by linking moments of conscious survival into a fine suspension-bridge of a personal destiny, a narrow path of constructed light, arching out over the bulging and boiling.

During Josh Lamb's school-days the battle flamed in the air and descended screaming and incandescent from the sky to earth. Everyone was quick with a small sense of destiny, everyone had their “luck” which had saved their house, or their doom, which had seen their daily life battered to dust and rubble. Little boys ran, arms spread like dark wings, humming and burring, Spitfires, Hurricanes, Beaufighters. All life had a glaring “reality” which was unreal, and different from the normal (ordinary).

He found old storybooks in which serpents strangled the shores and the impotent gods were defeated. He read them as the bombers growled and churned over his bedroom roof, close, close. He knew that they described the truth of things. The little children in Hamelin Square in 1968 listened to tales of dark fate and world battle, sitting on safe sofas by the fireside, eating toast and honey. They inhabited the darkness briefly, with a thrill and a shiver, like swimmers advancing into the cold water, drenched by the roaring breakers, scuttling back to sand and sunlight, sleeking their wet hair and skins. Leo and Saskia, Thano and Clement, were not without their own wounds and destinies. But they could believe in cushions, fireside, bread, milk, and honey. The boy Josh Lamb took comfort from the old myth because it was an adequate description of the world he inhabited, by necessity.

He linked his father's lost postcard, with the Genesis reference, to the Rembrandt painting and his classroom fit. He was ambivalently chosen for sacrifice and saved from the burning. Much later, in one of his asylum incarcerations, he was encouraged to do “Art Therapy.” He took pleasure in painting wild skies with a full moon covered by a fivefingered cloud, like a hand clutching it to quench it. He knew by then what it represented, what it was a Sign of. The Smudge. But as a boy he had not understood that.
He began to hear voices, so his tale of his destiny told him, shortly after the fit in the Scripture lesson. They were not “in” his head, they were somewhere out there, like Hagar's Angel, and Abraham's. Sometimes it was as if he “overheard” them. They quarrelled with each other, as his father and mother (rarely) had quarrelled. He got into trouble with his aunt, and with teachers, for cocking his head to catch what they said. He learned to listen without moving a muscle. When the voices were talking, he didn't hear the ordinary world. There was one particular voice that he called the tempter. It gave orders, in a clear, incontrovertible, no-nonsense tone. It told him to step into the road in front of the school bus. It told him to open the window and step out on to the darkness. He had seen that the other could stand up in it. What had he to lose? said the voice. There was a very strangled voice, which spoke in fragments only, which said “No, don't,” and “Get
on
bus,” and “Remember,” though it didn't say what he should remember. Sometimes they all shrieked and whistled together, and he put his hands to his ears. He might, in some other world, have told his aunt about the voices, but the voices themselves reminded him that his aunt already thought he was nasty.

The tempter always spoke clear English. When the other returned, the twin who had given him the dark to hold, he did not at first know him or acknowledge him, for he spoke in Latin. The man believed, the man
knew
that the boy had heard Latin he could neither understand nor construe, which, written down and looked up, had sense and meaning.

Languages, said Mr. Shepherd, show us that our way of seeing the world is incomplete. You must learn to translate English into Latin, and Latin into English, precisely and beautifully, but you must never suppose that the one is the
same as
the other. A man thinking in Latin is not thinking the same thoughts as a man thinking in English. For one thing, the shape of the words, and the shape of the sentences, changes the shape of the thoughts. For another, some words cannot be translated, they exist only in the language that made them. For another, later languages are partly based on the forms and words of Latin, which they have absorbed and transmuted. To know Latin, boys, is to know part of the history of this country, which we are defending, part of its roots and origins. Latin is like one blue-print of the forms of thinking and speaking, across which another Germanic form has been placed. The word translate comes from Latin—
trans,
across,
latum,
from
fero, ferre, tuli, latum,
I carry, carried. The word transmute is formed in the same way, from
trans,
across, and
muto, mutare, mutavi,
mutatum,
I change, changed.

What are known as the Romance languages, he told them, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and others, come from Latin more directly than English. English has two ways of saying many things precisely because it is a deliciously mongrel language, with its Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Germanic roots.

It is my hope, boys, to be able to make you—or some of you—however fleetingly—
think
in Latin.

This should cause you never again to take English for granted as the language of common sense.
The boy, who knew he himself was double, inside and outside, formed the idea, half drawn from Mr. Shepherd's observations, of a different world, out there, described in a different language, with different rules. It felt like a way to slip out of his bonds, to reform himself. He listened.

They chanted prepositions which took the ablative, to a tune invented by Mr. Shepherd.

A, ab, absque, coram, de
Palam, clam, cum, ex and e

Sometimes in,
sub, super, subter

They talked about words made up with prepositions. Many of you are evacuees, said Mr. Shepherd. That comes from e, meaning out of, and
vacuus,
meaning empty.
Vacuus
connects to vacancy and also of course to the word vacuum, meaning emptiness, from where we get vacuum cleaners, which suck up dirt into an emptiness and vacuum flasks which keep fluids warm inside a silvered wall of vacancy.
The boy had made his own description of his destiny, which included the word evacuee, which until that moment had meant to him that he had been ejected into emptiness. Now he saw that it could mean the opposite, where he had come from was empty.
There was some classroom sniggering about the corporeal (from
corpus,
body) meanings of evacuate. Mr. Shepherd said he was glad to know they were so well informed, and that yes, you could evacuate your bowels, or your stomach, through various orifices. He told them the derivation of orifice.
Ora,
mouth,
facio,
to make, any opening, which had the form of a mouth, such as a jar, a tube, a wound.
Orare,
to pray, to speak.
Orator. Ora pro nobis,
said a Catholic boy. You are thinking in Latin, said Mr. Shepherd. Good boy.
They were sent away to find words beginning with
e,
or
ex
for homework. First, said Mr. Shepherd, write down those you have thought of
without
the dictionary. Then use it. Connect your words. Connect them. It is more interesting than Lotto, I think. Is “Lotto” Latin, sir? asked a wit. No, said Mr. Shepherd. It is Old English and comes from Llot, or Fate, or Destiny. It is to do with drawing lots—bits of wood, or short straws. It may be related to Old Norse,
hlant,
blood of sacrifice. In this interesting case the French and Italian appear to derive from the English. The Latin is
sors, sortis
. The
sortes virgilianae
was a kind of fatal lottery which consisted of opening Virgil's writings at random, and reading the fate
allotted
to you on the page. A
sorcerer
is expert in
sortes
. He makes, or divines (
divinare,
to conjure, French
deviner,
to guess) fates.
The boys came back to class with words, like blackberries at harvest, like lots, or
sortes,
or pieces of an infinite jigsaw. Elicit, evolve, eliminate (from
limen,
threshold, a magical word, good boy), excrescence, exaggerate, exempt, exigent, exgurgitate, extrude, educate (“
to lead out,
boys, I lead you out of your darkness into the clear light of knowledge”), exculpate, erupt, emit, extrapolate, exceed, efface, effusion, exude ...