Elementals - A. S. Byatt [51]
‘Then Jael Heber’s wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.’
Now I think about it, it’s a story about the breaking of all the primitive laws of hospitality, and kindness, laws we learn even from fairy-stories. Jael was not Sisera’s enemy; she enticed him in, and gratuitously betrayed him. The next chapter of the Bible (Judges 5) is Deborah’s song of triumph. It is full of amazing rhythms, in the King James Bible. It is a nasty piece of work. Listen.
Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent.
He asked water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish.
She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen’s hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.
At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead.
The mother of Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through the lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming? why tarry the wheels of his chariots?
Her wise ladies answered her, yea, she returned answer to herself,
Have they not sped? have they not divided the prey; to every man a damsel or two; to Sisera a prey of divers colours, a prey of divers colours of needlework, of divers colours of needlework on both sides, meet for the necks of them that take the spoil?
So let all thine enemies perish, O LORD.
I love the rhythms of that. I love to think of those seventeenth-century bishops, in a world where bishops were regularly burned for believing, or not believing, things, making those rhythms. At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead. I don’t know what Hebrew rhythm they were echoing, but the English is done with heavy monosyllables, strokes of the hammer, strokes of the axe, and yet it flows, too. All those rhythms and phrases are vanishing from our world. My mother, every time she opened the fridge, would say, ‘Here is the butter in a lordly dish,’ and when I found it in the Bible, it was a piece fitting into a cultural jigsaw. It is a long time ago. The fridge was our first, and very new. In the war, our milk and butter were in earthenware pots under wet muslin veils, weighted with little heavy clay beads, red and blue.
When I did the Grenadine commercial, I made a red silk tent that made great pools of red light on a glittery sandy floor. The politically incorrect desert warrior poured the crimson juice from a kind of Venetian claret jug. There was a lordly dish on a low table, with a great swirling pyramid of something creamy that caught the pink light. Lara, who is my assistant director and wants my job, says you can’t make images like that any more. People have the wrong associations to desert warriors and captive pale maidens. She just looked blank when I told her that I’d also been playing with the image of Persephone, eating pomegranate seeds in the underworld, with dusky-skinned gloomy Dis. I had a lovely plate of the seeds, too, another richer, if less lordly, dish, next to the buttery stuff, little bits of pink jelly, glistening. I shouldn’t have told her about Persephone; it convinced her even more that I’m passé, in need of replacement, encumbered with dead cultural baggage. I might have done better to tell her about my other idea, about hand grenades being called grenades, like Grenadine, because they resemble pomegranates, in shape, and in being full of explosive seeds. What a delicious metaphor, sheets of red juice, explosions of extreme sensuality, sheets of red blood. Attached to nothing, it’s just the quirky way my mind works. I got a First at Cambridge, writing Empsonian essays unpacking complicated multiple metaphors. Unpacking’s a more modern word, we didn