‘They called me Red, and in my life red has been life and good health and fire and blood. I got rid of a cursed birthright for a bowl of red stew, and I’ll make a new home in the red soil of this land.’
‘But to lose it all to your brother,’ she says.
Esau raises himself on one elbow and looks at her. ‘With some people you can see trouble coming years away. Like a sandstorm.’ He fondles her hair in the lamplight of their marriage bed and she – this third, and last, new wife, rubs her face on his shoulder. It is covered with hair, white now but once upon a time, fox-red. Privately she thinks he is like a goat or a hyrax, so hairy is he, and she is slightly sad that he is not younger and his hair redder. Still, she knows that she is no great prize, and is just glad to be married at last.
‘He sounds like an unhappy man.’
Esau snorts. ‘Of course he is. He has children with four women, all related and all hating each other. He has thirteen sons and they all want to be something special. He’s inherited my father’s ideas about having only one god, and my father’s strange dreams about voices and gods and malakim.’ Esau is careful not to suggest that there is madness in the family, but it’s clear that there is something in the men of his line, some mania which drives them to scorn their neighbours, murder their children, and be uneasy in their minds. It’s a difficult subject to broach, but he’s done it with the other two wives who accepted that he was the normal one, and who have borne him normal sons.
My great-grandfather was obsessed with this land. Even far off in his own place, in the dry Chaldees, he thought relentlessly of Canaan. He packed off his own son and sent him to look for it. On the way, my grandfather sold his wife as a whore. Then he got her back, and in their dotage they somehow became parents. When he went mad, my grandfather tried to murder his own son. My father spent his life waking in a sweat from dreams of the knife coming down and a lamb crying in the background.
Then my father had us, twins who had nothing in common except a desire to be rid of each other. I came in as my father was dying and saw them there, the three of them: my father’s hand on Jacob’s head, my mother’s hands on Jacob’s shoulders, making sure he got the blessing that should have been mine. And from under the goatskin he’d worn to trick a dying man’s hands, my brother looked at me. We had been adversaries since we were together in that hot red bag of blood within my mother. What was I going to do? Spend my life fighting him, or let it go and him with it?’
‘But your birthright -‘ she says.
‘Is what? Grazing rights in a land not ours. A god that sets us apart from our neighbours. The right to be buried in a cave we bought from foreigners, where we can lie with others of our mad little family, half distorted already with inbreeding.’ He snorts again. ‘Let him have it.’
‘It’s not really true,’ she says, ‘That you sold it for a bowl of lentils?’
‘It’s true that my brother saw I was hungry. I had worn myself out because our father liked meat, although there was none on his own bones. Jacob wouldn’t give me so much as a mess of potage without turning it to profit. I was young, I was bloody, I was tired, I was famished, and I saw that my twin would never cease ripping me off. I’d say a man wearing a goatskin to trick his dying father is no less than you’d expect. Why do you think I’ve tried to marry out of our tribe?’ He shakes his head. ‘It’s more accurate to say that Jacob offered me a bowl of lentils for this nightmare of our bloodline. In me, at least, the line of Abram and the madness they brought from Ur, calling it El, will stop. In me it will stop.’
The Diogenes Blog 