The darkness gave me no respite. Once I had staked my peace on his pulse I could not leave until the first sickly glimmerings of dawn. Make no mistake: I knew that that too was arbitrary. That Abel might just as soon pick that minute to spite me with his extinction, might just as plausibly stop living in the light as in the dark. But all obsessional behaviour this side of madness must make a concession to normality somewhere, and light was the determining factor in where I made mine.
I had to avoid being caught hanging over him. I did not want it to be known how immoderately I feared for his life. I shrank from being exposed for what I was — a brother lover.
Is that not normalcy? A resistance to the whole world’s knowing that I doted on my sibling? Even if the whole world only did comprise the four of us. Two plus me plus him. Her minus me plus them squared.
Roughly coincident with my immoderately loved brother’s first birthday (I kept a tally of the days of my desolation, just as my father did his), two events occurred, independent of each other but combining to produce a result the majority of us (Abel not counting) thought desirable: the resumption of family relations and the phased withdrawal of the supranatural to Its proper sphere.
The first of these events, to which I have already alluded briefly, was Semyaza’s abrupt avolation — call it decampment, or desertion, or simply resignation — from the ranks of the heavenly choir, where I suppose him to have grown weary singing the praises of Somebody Else, and his unheralded appearance on earth, sans Azael, sans ceremony, his feathers scorched from the velocity of his descent, hell-bent on rape…
But I cannot be convinced you have earned the right to hear of that tonight. A man does not speak to strangers of a rape upon his mother by an archangel unless he can be certain of their seriousness…
6. Openings
I
‘There was a destitute widow,’ Korah began, ‘a pauper’s relict, mother of two starving daughters, orphans…’
… left to shift for herself and her little ones after her husband had been stoned to death by enthusiasts for gathering sticks on the Sabbath. Gathering sticks, my friends, in order to build a fire by which his wife and daughters might have warmed their shivering hands.
In the Torah this is adjudged a sin.
Now I must tell you that these maids were fair before their father’s murder, and that their mother had been comely. But now the three of them were bent like hags, their bones as dry as the firewood they’d been denied.
Despairing of change, the widow prayed for death. And death would surely have answered, had not a relative of one of the murderers, middlingly touched by guilt, offered her a corner of his least productive field. You and I, my friends, would not have attempted to grow a turnip in this wretched paddock; but any expectation is better than none, and thus, trusting to the God of Moses — the same God who has delivered us from the honey-pots of Egypt into the dry wells of Kadesh-Barnea — the widow put her wasted shoulder to the plough.
And had no sooner hitched her team than she was espied by Moses himself, out walking among his people early. ‘Thou shalt not plough,’ he told her, ‘with an ox and ass together.’
Obeying this statute, for she was as fearful as she was pious (a conjunction, gentlemen, upon which our leaders do not hesitate to prey), she set about sowing. Once again Moses happened to be taking the air. ‘Thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed,’ he reminded her.
The widow sowed as she was bid. On the appearance of the first juiceless fruits of her stunted field she raised her eyes from labour and saw…
Moses!
He was carrying an empty basket. ‘For you,’ he said, meekly.
Mistaking this meekness for magnanimity, as many of us have done since, the poor woman felt her face suffuse with gratitude. ‘For me?’ she cried. She could not remember how many years it had been since she had last received a gift.
‘For you, yes,’ said Moses, ‘in order that thou shalt not omit to take the first of the fruit of the earth, that the Lord thy God hath given thee, and shalt go unto the priest, and shalt give unto the priest…’
She did as she was told to do. Even had her piety deserted her, she would have obeyed; for she had seen what punishment is meted out to the impious.
When harvest time approached, she was dismayed but not surprised to find Moses, knee-high in grasses, in the field before her. ‘I came to see thee reap,’ he said, plucking slugs from his fringes, ‘for thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest.’
‘But this field is itself a corner,’ she pleaded.
He closed his eyes, a man of God unwilling to behold the speciousness of the ungodly. ‘Neither shalt thou,’ he went on, ‘gather any gleanings of thy harvest. Those shalt thou leave unto the poor, and to the stranger.’
The distraught woman bowed her head, and did not say, ‘But Moses, I am the poor!’ Or, ‘Who is stranger, Moses, to good fortune, than my children?’
Her head was always bowed now. Her back permanently curved, like the crick in Aaron’s priestly rod.
As she prepared to thresh the grain, she knew by the creeping of the hairs upon her neck that Moses stood behind her with another statute.
‘And of the grain that thou separatest, thou shalt give unto —’
But she did not this time wait to be told unto whom. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I will not give a portion — I will give all. I am bled dry. You cannot squeeze more out of me. Tomorrow, if I can find a buyer, will I sell my field.’
With the little she received she bought a single ram — more miserable than herself. And to go with it, a single ewe — scrawnier even than her daughters. No sooner was the firstling of her sheep born than Aaron called on her in all the finery of his ephod — woven work around its collar, and upon the hem pomegranates of blue and purple and scarlet alternating with golden bells — a proper bridegroom, come to claim the flesh that was his due.
The moment she began to shear he was there again, his sacerdotal hand outstretched. ‘The first of your fleece,’ he demanded. And upon learning that the widow had decided she could do no better than slaughter her little flock, Aaron raced across the pastures to her, as fast as his ephod would permit him. ‘Mine, all mine… the shoulder, the two cheeks, and the maw.’
‘Since you persist,’ the woman cried, ‘I consecrate all that is left to the Lord.’
‘In which event,’ said Aaron through his sinuses, practising that high-toned nasality which has served him well in his capacity as holy spokesman for his slow-tongued brother, ‘the whole of the flesh of thy flock belongs to me. Everything devoted in Israel is mine. It shall then all be mine.’
And so saying — so intuning — he departed, bearing off with him, in strict accordance with Torah, the entirety of the poor widow’s meat, leaving her and her ailing orphans unprovided for, to forage or to perish as they pleased…
‘For these things, my brethren, I weep,’ wept Korah. ‘Mine eye, mine eye runneth with water to see that such things are, and are allowed to be, even now, even here in our deliverance, in the name of the God of Moses and his brother Aaron.’
II
‘On song,’ says Naaman approvingly. ‘On song tonight.’
Cain nods and thanks him. He finds talking to Naaman difficult, and accepting praise from him, if praise is the appropriate word, impossible.
Whatever the delicious joke is, the after- or foretaste of which always sits like a winking pearl of dew on Naaman’s womanly lips, Cain knows that he is doomed never to get it. Sometimes the joke he doesn’t get is attributed to himself, as when Naaman says, ‘I think you may have been a little dry, perhaps a little too tart, even for me, this evening.’ Or, ‘Wicked, quite wicked of you. I had to chew on my sleeve to silence my guffaws.’ And then Cain is left to puzzle over his narrative, wondering which grave episode this time has struck the senior dignitary’s funny-bone.