Their faces were without anteriority, that was what it came to, because they were turned to no single divinity who could remind them of the exact hour of their communal birth. There was no past in their eyes. No precursory notation on their brows. Provision had simply not been made for those slopes and planes on which memory — the memory of mud — likes to etch her lines.
Hard as it was for someone whose bones had been actuated by a god — Godhandled — to reach such a conclusion, Cain eventually came to see that the Shinarites had built their own faces. Adam had woken up one morning, prodded at his skin to discover what he was made of, and invented a character for himself on the basis of what he’d found. In Babel the process had been reversed. Here, configuration was a consequence of personality. Here, flesh had modelled itself on spirit. If features in Babel bore no imprint of a past, that was because their owners had no concept of a past. What did they remember? A sequence of scuffles with cereal gods who came and went according to the weather; an occasional scare at the hands of some double-headed keeper of an abyss. But never a moment when they lay bellied in the slime, knowing the time had come when they had to behold the One — the One and Only — and face Him down.
Hence they looked forward and they looked up — their dreamy blue gaze following the direction of temples whose function had been forgotten — but they did not look back. They felt the pull of nostalgia and antiquarianism and spookery, but nostalgia and antiquarianism and spookery are merely the playthings of the forgetfuclass="underline" harmless shells from which all the deadly poisons of the past have been removed. Any further curiosity as to origins was satisfied by the itinerant romancers and mythologists who collected in Babel like eagles smelling blood.
Unless it was they who were the blood, and the Shinarites the eagles.
Either way, each swarmed around the other.
The people of Babel prided themselves on their love of stories. They gathered wherever one was being told, their high shoulders tensed, their hazy mouths hanging open, their usually swimming turquoise eyes fixed as though in a hypnotic trance. Was this not proof of the generosity of their minds, the receptivity of their intelligences, the breadth and scope of their sympathies? There was not another city in the known world that welcomed such a dissonance of voices. Anyone could speak. Anyone could auspicate or historify. And everybody listened. How then could a single native of Babel be charged with awelessness in relation to then, now, or later? Or irreverence towards that which was here, there, or somewhere else?
Cain scratched his head. Close to where his horns ought to have been. He had heard the rumours. He would not have minded sprouting a pair. Their surprise revelation in the midst of his narrative — sharp, twisted, and perhaps a little bloody at the ends — might have shaken the complacency of his audience. For there was the problem. They listened like children; they gulped, they started, they wept, they cheered, they pressed their fists to their cheeks and stuffed their sleeves into their mouths — but they did not believe a word of what they heard. It was all extravagance, exaggeration, a distortion of what was actually the case. What was actually the case being what they knew about and saw with their own eyes in Babel.
Of course things happened in distant places and remote times that would not be tolerated in Babel, but the actors must have felt there and then as they in Babel felt here and now. They must have measured their emotions and circumstances by Babel emotions and circumstances, and if they lacked knowledge of the real Babel as a standard, they must have erected an ideal Babel of the mind. Babel was thus ultimately the centre of every story, the haven to which all exiles dreamed of returning, the goal of every traveller, the reward for every virtue, the pattern for every striving, the paradise by whose loss every sinner calculated his deprivation and every criminal his fall. Thereafter, there was only trespass on credulity. And if these foreigners gifted with tongues could only fantasticate and falsify, then what did that show but the merit of having been born in Babel, and how much more honourable it was to listen to a story than to tell one.
Cain reaches for his horns once more, and scratches. Knowing what he knows about the Shinarites does not remove their seduction: the glamour of their city, the white light they enjoy, their appreciative perturbation when he walks amongst them, the ardency of their gaze upon him when he addresses them, their siren-whisper flattering him with the notion that he will be the one to find a way through their complacency at last.
A delicious consciousness of treason against himself accompanies him now whenever he speaks in public. Is he harder on his history than there is any justification for him to be; is he harder on those who shared it with him; does he express a greater antagonism to the laws and customs of his country than in truth he feels, simply in order to keep the unspoken compact with his Shinarite audiences — namely, that he will not show excessive loyalty to his past, that he will confirm the esteem in which they hold their present, provided they…
Provided they what?
Agree to love him, he fears.
V
She clinks into his room on spiced feet, bearing balms and ointments. Her eyes are greyer than is common, and more serious. Notwithstanding the ringing of her jewellery and the diaphanousness of her dress, she could be taken, such a picture of womanly solicitude does she present, for a nurse.
‘I am a present to you,’ she says, ‘from Naaman.’
He has not as yet tried any of the fabled temple shuris of Babel. The comprehensiveness of their service dismays him because it does not appear to include whatever it is he would seek, were he seeking anything. In the cities of Shinar a shuri is assumed to be capable of discharging the simultaneous duties of daughter, sister, mother, companion, interpreter of dreams, reader of palms and minds and foreheads, laundress, seamstress, manicurist, pedicurist, defiled virgin, chaste harlot, contortionist, singer, dancer, looker, listener, linguist, mute, physician for all ailments of body or of soul. And still there was nothing there for him.
‘No, it isn’t necessary,’ he protests, as, to the accompaniment of a tabret, she begins to imitate the pelican of the wilderness, reviving her young ones with her blood.
He holds up a hand to stop her.
She reads it.
He turns his head.
She reads that.
‘No,’ he says.
‘My name is Silili,’ she tells him, kneeling upon his chest in the shape of an egret and anointing his eye-lids with attar of roses. Her lips are fragrant with wild honey which she has collected from locusts. She parts her mouth so that he can collect from her.
‘I am not ill,’ he says. ‘I am not in need of resuscitation.’
‘My name is Silili,’ she tells him.
She sings to him, a low crooning, a high wailing, enfolding the soles of his feet in her bosom as though they are the doves his father conjured with — sings of cedar forests upon which the rain falls odorous with spikenard and saffron; sings of abundant vales of sycamore watered by the hundred rivers flowing underground through caverns studded with amethysts and rubies and the sacred droppings of ambrosial bats. She dances for him, her arms the necks of swans, the precious bells through which her hair is braided tinkling like distant goats, heard by shepherds on icy mountain nights. She feeds him root of mandrake, ground with ambergris in lotus essence, spooned from a golden bowl. She drips saliva into his navel, agitates the pond with her lashes, blows it into a storm, takes the vegetation that grows around its banks stem by stem between her teeth. She trails her tongue the length of his rigid spine, then down the insides of his thighs, leaving silver tracks upon his skin, so that it looks as though a multitude of snails has glided over him. ‘That was the Winter Migration of the Snake,’ she hisses. ‘And now,’ she growls, ‘the Ravening of the Lion…’