This time, just to be on the safe side, Preplen leaves the table and takes a turn, hobbling like an old man, around the sherbet cart. He is careful to keep his head down. He returns only when he thinks he’s strong enough to be told precisely what kind of holiness, what species of numen, these Partridgists divine in their divinity.
‘I fear there’s something you’ve not grasped about the zoomorphic imagination,’ Cain tells him. ‘Holiness hardly enters into it. What the lascivious partridge provides for its congregation is, firstly, a good dinner — easy to catch you see, while it’s skierrrrrreking and sodomising — and thereafter an excuse for a riotously imitative dance.’
‘Imitative of the partridge?’
‘What else?’
‘And they call this religion?’
‘What else?’
‘Listen,’ Preplen says suddenly, propelling himself across the table and taking Cain’s wrists, ‘why don’t you leave this place? Why don’t you go home?’
Cain makes no attempt to free himself. He looks at the hands that hold him. Old hands? Young hands? He doesn’t know. But they are yellow, unhealthy hands.
A flock of cranes passes overhead. There are men in Babel who faint at the beauty of cranes in flight. They faint professionally. To please audiences. It occurs to Cain that they might be out there dropping on the river banks this very moment. Their fall cushioned by soft mosses, their colour coming and going, a breathing waxen, like Abel’s. For Abel, too, was a fainter.
But for Preplen the cranes’ high honking triangular flight is an abomination, a danger to him personally, an affront to the single Godhead, and worst of all, an obstacle to the unfolding of his opinions.
‘This is no place for you,’ he continues. ‘I know you… you won’t fight. You won’t stand up for yourself. You don’t want them to see how extreme you are. You want to smooth it all out for them, make it shapely, make it elegant, conceal what is the truth: that you strove extremely and then fell out extremely with an extreme God…’
Cain interrupts him, pointing to the cranes. ‘Oughtn’t you, as a poet —?’
‘Oughtn’t I to be writing odes to fowl?’ Preplen’s head has sunk into his shoulders again, as though that is its preferred and natural way of growing, a flower without a stalk. ‘No. I’m not that sort of poet. I leave that to your friends. Your blue-blood worshippers of the Holy Goat. Those Partridgists I wish you’d never told me about. I do something else. I curse. I course. I run around the object of my contempt. I copy him. I mimic him. I confound him. And by these means I bring him down.’
‘This is poetry?’
‘This is satire. The highest and most healthful form of play. I blow away malign influences. I curse out demons. I do what you should be doing.’
‘I’m not a satirist,’ Cain says.
Preplen looks at him. And withdraws the light from both their faces. ‘No, you’re not, are you,’ he says. ‘Too much like your father, I suppose. Not enough of your mother in you.’
VII
It is late when he gets back to his room. Already he can smell the morning on the night. He pushes open his door and resolves not to light a candle. There is nothing he needs to see. He slips out of his clothes, hanging them carefully, sleeves always out, pockets always emptied, and gropes towards the bed. His hands touch hair and flesh. He flinches from the contact, fearing that a stray dog may have crept under his blanket, or a stray prophet, or a stray relative from Eden. But what he touches next tells him that this is neither a scryer nor a satirist lying on its back on his bed, with its lips parted and its breath held and its small breast heaving.
‘Zilpah?’
The lean, abrasive arms reach up to clasp him. Once again his first thought is that she is too thin.
Girls without flesh are a delicacy in Babel. Like quail, they are valued because they can be consumed in a single mouthful. But Cain lacks the epicurean’s lightness of temperament. He is grave and seeks gravity. A slight woman confirms all his worst fears about existence. A slight woman proves the nugatoriness of things. A slight woman proves there is no hereafter. When you penetrate her you enter nothing.
She hangs from his neck, as weightless as a locket. With her mouth she seeks the lines and furrows of his suffering. She must taste every crime he has committed and every punishment that’s been visited on him. Of her own free will she must drink of the waters of bitterness. His bitterness.
He unlocks her fingers from behind his head.
‘What do you need?’ she asks him. She has a little voice, such as a mouse might have, to match her little body. But in a low register, as though the mouse behind the draughty wainscot has caught a little cold.
He shakes his head, vainly, in the dark. What does he need? Would she know what he meant if he said he needed scraping?
There is silence in the bed for a while. Nothing moves. He wonders if she has crept out without his hearing, nibbled through the mattress and escaped under the space beneath his door. Then suddenly the blanket is thrown off and she is up on all fours, whimpering like the stray dog he had at first taken her for.
‘This is what you need…’ the cur within her cries.
She presents her narrow, shadowed hindquarters to him, spreading herself open so that he may have complete and unobstructed access to the little puckered flower that grows in the very eye of her rump –
— What he needs.
The odour of her offering, her floral tribute, is rich and sour, suggestive of what is arable; its recipient at the mercy of just such impulses as must have riven his father in the days prior to Eve, when only a field of bullocks stood between all he knew of frustration and all he imagined of felicity.
He sighs, his father’s son. Old Adam’s boy. A vexed sigh. A sigh of this and that.
Then he takes hold of the fanatic plait.
‘This is what you need isn’t it…’ she growls, reaching between her thighs to make herself more available to him yet, a skinny hand on each furred and skinny hemisphere, ‘. . a brother.’
Farshtinkener, farfoylt, farshimmelt.
Cain has the sensations, whether or not he has the Yiddish. But he still doesn’t let go of the plait.
9. Cain Loses Himself in Pathos
He grew into a beautiful boy.
Does that sound like the language a connoisseur of catamites might use? A beautiful boy? It is meant to. His beauty was of that sort. Golden. Fragile. Petulant. Pliable. Fleeting. Cruel. Had Yahweh been a God given to enjoying good wine, He would not have needed to look beyond Abel for his cup-bearer. But Yahweh did not drink. Had we been more populous and there been older men, other than his father and his brother, to gaze upon him, they would have trembled for their chastity. His beauty was of that sort. You saw him once and you wanted to sail away with him to some enchanted surf-fringed isle, just the two of you, free of all distractions, so that you might torment yourself exclusively with the impermanence of love and loyalty and flesh.
His eyes were a pale wandering blue. His lips were full and moist, not quite together, not quite resolute, not quite a pair. His neck was long and luminous, a milky chrysaline white, the colour and transparency of pupae. You could see the blood pumping below his skin. His hair hung in yellow hoops that turned half-circles on his shoulders when he ran. He ran like a fawn in the afternoon. None of it could last.
Such precious perishability is wasted on mere family. You wonder why your brother doesn’t have a healthier appetite, why he is looking quite so translucent, then you go about your business. You have to be a perfect stranger to appreciate it perfectly. It was Abel’s bad luck to have been born before there were strangers.