Miracles never happen, thinks Sarai in the desert, four thousand years away. Or if they do, they hurt. A daughter is born, her cry makes the soul sing, but when she is lifted to the breast there is no sound and her mouth is cold. The soft wind blows on her face but there is no breath. Where is God then? Where? A son comes at last, a great blessing, an answer to prayer, but he is born to a servant girl and the longing remains. It gets worse. It used to hurt so much she doubled over in pain and then she got used to the hurt and forgot to notice that it was still there, but now the old fool has stirred it all up again.
‘Abraham, where is your wife, Sarah?’
That is not her name. She is Sarai. It’s not even the name of her husband, Abram. But he has been trying to force these different names on her lately, with some crazy idea that their fate will change. He says God told him to do it, but she knows the trouble that comes when men say such things. They are small changes, but in her language the new sounds alter the meanings in a way he seems to find inspiring. She finds it cruel. Abram becomes Abraham, Father of Many. Sarai becomes Sarah, Mother of Nations, which is not funny. It stings. She is ninety years old and has no children and knows she never will.
Sarai watches from the shadows as her wizened husband dips both his aching hands into a bowl, fingers and fists, and rubs his face and eyes with the water. She hears him mutter to the strangers and hopes there will not be trouble. In the days of her great beauty, she was sold as a slave – to the pharaoh, no less – for gold, and animals and food. The man who did that to her so many years ago is still her husband now. He is forgiven. You have to compromise if you want to live. But there is no danger of being sold again, not at her great age.
‘She’s going to have a baby, wait and see,’ says the visitor, wiping meat grease from his fingers with the end of his robe before taking his turn with the bowl. ‘I’ll be back this way next year and she will be nursing a son.’
Sarai cannot help herself then. She laughs out loud.
‘Why are you laughing, Sarah?’
It’s a good job you can’t see me, she thinks. I am exhausted. If you saw these gnarled fingers, these slack breasts, you would know. I have lost hair in some places and grown it in others I never expected. My beauty blew away like sand years ago. As for that old man who lay down the skins for you, he is losing his mind.
She calls back from the darkness, unwilling to show her face: ‘I did not laugh.’
‘Oh, you did,’ says the stranger. ‘No matter. You will see.’
Madness. Utter madness. But later, when she thinks about the voice of the visitor who called her Sarah and her mad old husband Abraham, a question forms within her like a tiny spark that might so easily blow out. ‘Do I believe this nonsense? Do I dare?’