Then, just as suddenly and unaccountably as he had begun, Semyaza left off. Still without lowering his stare or making any gesture to shadow his naked and unprotected face, he handed back Abel, a spray of crushed flowers, to my mother’s care.
‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I had. to do that. It was a test of my will-power over yours. I did warn you to expect this. It is very important to me to win. You were aware, of course, that it was you I was squeezing.’
She put her baby to her breast. A protective gesture all round. But she was no longer striking poses.
I don’t care what you are testing in yourself, she said. But I would like to know what you are testing in me.
He angled his head, this way and that, so that she should see how unconcealed he was. His brow, his nose, the great sweep of his jaw, as bare as a clump of boulders. Then he smiled, an angel’s smile, irradiating them all. ‘You were created good,’ he said. ‘You have not, however, always stayed that way. We are sent, by a God who loves you, to report on your progress and to remind you of the benefits of perseverance in virtue. Consider the squeeze to be both a token from me, whose essence is perseverance, and a memento from Him, whose essence, as you know, is love.’
He ordered you to hurt a baby?
I am still able to recall the exact tone in which my mother asked that astonished question. Perhaps because I have heard it so many times since, and will go on hearing it as long as there are mothers. Hurt a baby? Can there be those who would wish malice on a baby? Astonishing that they should be so astonished, when all along it is the clamour of young, helpless, demanding life that is most likely to turn us savage, and makes murderers even out of mothers themselves.
‘We enjoy a degree of latitude,’ Semyaza told her, opening and closing his wings and fluttering in his own draught, ‘as to how we interpret His will. Else we would be slaves, not angels. But now, I think, is as propitious an hour as any to the application of camomile and talcum.’ He lowered his head, like an itching macaw. ‘Remember — I feel no pain.’
When he next essayed the strength of his grip and will-power it was on her in person. A cooler day, no perturbations of the heavens, his descent all unannounced, not a rip or ruffle of a single feather to tell her he had landed. He was behind her before she could let out a cry, a hand on each breast, tightening.
This time I did come down from the tree.
Does it surprise you that I could feel concern for my brother’s safety, when it was I who at the very hour of his birth had passed a death sentence on him?
It shouldn’t.
Who can you possibly care more for than a person whose continuing existence depends largely on yourself?
I loved Abel. Considering how little contact I had with him as a baby, how infrequently we played together, how few were the occasions when his rubbery belly was given me to blow on or paddle in, I loved him to excess. Let him not die, I prayed, lying sleepless under the too-bright stars. I will not allow him to die, I promised. I will not allow a hair of his head to be harmed. If he dies before me I shall not be able to support my grief.
Does this mean that I had lifted his death-sentence? Far from it. I simply took upon myself his protection because I knew better than anybody the extent of the danger he had to be protected from.
I see incipient amusement watering the corners of an eye or two among you. Our old difficulty. Or rather, your old difficulty. Babel-levity. Shinarite-scepticism. Evidently you are uncomfortable with the robustness of my definitions of devotion. This is a pity. A man who has slain his brother has the right to feel he should be listened to on the subject of love. Especially in this city where, if you will forgive me, you hold to the sentimental, parochial view that the affections are not to be confused with the disaffections — at least in discourse. Which is tantamount to taking a vow of silence on the matter, and a consequence, as you don’t need me to point out, of every deity having fled the glaring sunlight of your streets.
I put it to you anyway, whether or not your smiles go off like crackers on your faces, that we never have more to fear than when we are loved extravagantly. Not because extravagant love turns to extravagant hate, but because extravagant love already is extravagant hate. Only the impulse to murderousness, known here — no, here! here! — in every heart, can explain the irrationality of the thing we call adoration. Only murderousness would ever look to hide in such a place. It is common for lovers to set out on their acquaintance as enemies. It is regarded as quaint, touching even, that they should have misread each other quite so badly in the beginning. They did not. They fell in love — yes, even under the shadows of your immaculate rational ziggurats they fell in love — precisely so as not to fall, each to each, in bloody combat. What we call infatuation is nothing other than being mesmerised by the realisation that we can juggle violence.
And I did infatuate myself with Abel. With the idea of his well-being. With the very principle of his life. I mean, quite unfancifully, that I assumed responsibility for the beating of his heart. I listened out for it. I watched over it. I monitored its regularity. In the dead of night, once I could be sure that my mother was asleep, and my father — at that distance stipulated by the laws of pollution, from where he could not inadvertently roll over and uncover the fountain of my mother’s blood — was on his back and whimpering in his dreams, I crept along the ground like the unmentionable serpent, silently, invisibly, my trunk slithering in sand or sucked downwards in the mud, until I reached the hollowed bark, the hallowed boat beached in a desert oasis, where Abel lay unconscious alike of enemy or protector. Sometimes I would be content to sit with my back against his crib, looking up into the stars and listening for his breathing. I did not especially want to see him. Or touch him. Mine was not a love of that kind. It was sufficient to know he was alive. If the smell of new-grown hair and new-formed bone blew from his skull into my nostrils, well and good. But I did not need to grasp him through my senses: the idea I had of him did not want for vividness, and besides, the odour of new creation was of all odours the one I would most happily have gone without.
There were nights, though, when his breathing was so quiet that I could not be certain it was there at all. And it was on these nights that love became indistinguishable from panic — an obstruction the size of a mountain blocking up my breathing — and I would crouch over him, a black shadow obliterating the moon, and lay my ear to his silent heart. Hours on end I would stay like that, not daring to withdraw for fear that I might choose the very moment to leave that his heart chose to stop.
It is a fearful burden, to be one’s brother’s keeper. The vigil breeds its own impositions; the precautions turn on themselves and become hazards.
What if my listening was itself a pressure on his chest?
What if the weight of my head was the very thing that would make his heart give up?
What if he should sense my alarm through his sleep and die of my dread that he would die?
Or suppose he should suddenly wake and find me looming above his cot, a beast preparing to devour him with its ear — what then? Would that not have been enough to stop a heart twice the size of his?