‘In need of fumigation.’
‘In need of despumation.’
‘In need of defoliation.’
Much merriment from the budgerigars, great excitement occasioned by the similarity of this word to another.
Laughter rises, but dies quickly. An atmosphere of desuetude descends upon the shop. You would think the barbers hadn’t worked for centuries. They stare at curls of hair lying unswept around their feet as though they have never before seen such things and hesitate to approach them in case they’re dangerous. They examine combs minutely. They look into mirrors and make circles of their mouths. They push their sleeves up, then roll them down again, and make similar adjustments to their pantaloons. Just so much skin, and no more, must be visible. Just so much as will implant the suggestion, but not quicken the thought, that barbers are vulnerable to pain.
Faced with this fever of inactivity, Sisobk the Scryer suspects he has come to the wrong place. He has had his head around the door a full five minutes before anyone notices he’s there, and even then no one is in any hurry to attend to him.
He is looking for Cain, has Cain on his mind, and so does what he thinks Cain would do. Coughs.
Affronted, the barbers, one by one, look up.
‘Closed,’ they say.
‘Too late.’
‘Too busy.’
‘Too particular.’
‘Unless,’ says one, ‘you would like us to see what we can achieve with your moustache.’
‘Assuming we can find it,’ says another.
‘And that we don’t accidentally blow it off,’ puts in a third.
‘Like… so!’ they say, huffing together.
Sisobk the Scryer doesn’t like it here, but he was sure he was going to find Cain tilted back in a chair, perhaps under towels, perhaps with a razor at his throat, but in any event ill-placed to offer resistance — and now he doesn’t know how to fill the tickling hollow in his expectation. ‘Can I wait for him?’ he asks.
‘Not in the shop,’ they tell him.
‘Not at this hour.’
‘Not when we’re so busy.’
And anyway, they want to know, who is this him he’s waiting for?
Sisobk is astonished they need to ask. Does anyone else come here? In his mind’s eye he has always seen it as a place given over wholly to the cleansing of Cain. ‘The murderer,’ he says.
The barbers make little round mouths at one another. Of course, the murderer. Aha, the murderer. Incontestably and without a doubt and how could they have been so stupid as to have forgotten, the murderer.
‘Can I leave a message, then?’ the prophet asks.
‘Verbal,’ says a barber, ‘or will you be writing it on your foot?’
‘Will you tell him,’ Sisobk persists, ‘that I’ve located the fissure.’
‘Just so we can be sure about it,’ inquires a barber, ‘which fissure exactly is this?’
Not having been here for defoliation, Sisobk is unprepared for the success of fissure.
‘Where the God of Israel unzipped the desert,’ he explains, ‘and swallowed all Korah’s followers but On.’
‘But on what…?’ a barber would be told.
‘I think he means but one,’ another ventures.
‘On — On!’ Sisobk tells them. ‘On — the husband of his wife. And that’s someone else I want to talk to him about.’
‘On?’
‘On’s wife.’
‘Careful,’ they warn him, ‘we’ll have no wife talk in this shop.’
‘Unless it’s bloody,’ says one.
‘Oh, it’s bloody,’ says Sisobk.
‘And hair-raising.’
‘Oh, it’s hair-raising,’ says Sisobk.
‘And barbaric.’
‘Oh, it couldn’t be more barbaric,’ says Sisobk.
‘In that case,’ they all say together, ‘and seeing as we’ve nothing much else to do, why don’t you tell us about her?’
Which is how Sisobk the Scryer comes to be sitting on the floor of Cain’s barber-shop, with possibly as pretty and excitable but certainly as numerous a gathering around him as he has ever mustered, spinning stories from the Cainite bible, the Haggadah, and his head.
‘There was a wife,’ he says, ‘a brave, beautiful, suffering woman…’
But we’ll tell it our way, before he has the budgerigars falling off their perches and a cage of psittacosis on his conscience.
V
It is night in the desert.
Soon, very soon now, the earth’s crust will crack and a gash like the shadow of forked lightning will open in the sand.
There is little movement about the camp. There are no more meetings. No more mutterings. Now is the time for waiting. Only Moses and Aaron are out, muffled against the coming chill, fringed against temptation, bejewelled against impertinence, wound, in gorgeous linen and phylacteries, against the night-flying infection of scepticism. Only Moses and his brother Aaron visiting the tabernacles of the unrighteous, making one final appeal to the spirit of God within them.
‘I have said my say,’ Korah declares. ‘Be gone.’
Ditto Dathan.
Ditto Abiram.
And On? He is asleep in his tent when Moses and Aaron come by. Asleep, snoring and drunk. He has his wife to thank for this condition. ‘Sit here, drink this, say nothing, and I will save thee,’ she has told him, knowing how unfitted he is to save himself sober.
He has been a no one, a no On, a nebbish, all his life. ‘What matters it to thee who runs this hell-hole?’ she asked him, when he returned puffed with the rhetoric of conspiracy from his first secret meeting with Korah. ‘Thou art but a disciple, whoever rules.’
He rubbed his hand over his face, frustrated because a hand was not a sponge. He gets hot when his wife asks questions of him. ‘I don’t have a choice in the matter any longer,’ he protested. ‘I have participated in their counsels and they have sworn me to be with them.’
‘You have a choice,’ she told him. ‘Sit here, drink this, and shut up.’
He obeyed. Why not? Trouble in the tent, trouble out of the tent… a man’s only friend is his wineskin.
He snoozed through the rebellion, through Korah’s twitting of Moses, through the gainsaying of the Law, and he snoozes now through the last errand of mercy that Moses and Aaron make to his tabernacle.
Or at least to the environs of his tabernacle. What stops them getting any closer than the length of a dozen donkeys, lined up nose to rump, is the sight of On’s wife sitting at the entrance to her tent, her hair unloosed. They see the tumble of black curls with moonlight in them, reaching almost to the sand, and they retreat. It is not seemly for a man to look upon the unloosed hair of a woman not his wife. More to the point, it is not safe. It distracts a scholar from his studies and a prophet from his tablets. It inflames…
Sisobk the Scryer makes a meal of this, of course, to put before the barbers. But we must assume a smaller proportion of hairdressers among our readership. Besides, it’s common knowledge what a single strand of hair inflames in already hot places…
Suffice to say that rather than risk a fire in their natures, with the earth about to open any minute, the brothers feel for their fringes, turn on their heels and consider On to have relented.
On’s wife sits on her seat and watches them go: Moses, affecting the stoop of unappreciated beneficence, of gentle-heartedness misunderstood; Aaron, stiffer in his gait, the golden bells on the hem of his ephod and the onyx stones on his shoulders flickering like fireflies in the darkness. The desert has turned quickly cold, the sand between her toes sharp and icy suddenly, like broken shells. She shudders. Inside the tent On is snoring loudly, as helplessly given over to unconsciousness tonight as he was yesterday the slave of Korah’s eloquence. There is nothing and no one that cannot sway him. He bends before the gentlest breeze. She can keep him safe only so long as she can keep him drunk. But safe for what?