SECOND, water drawn from a stream in a jar (or an amphora or a pitcher or a ewer or a gallipot or a jeroboam.) But drawn, not syphoned — educed, liberated, water delivered out of servitude.
THIRD, frangipani and jasmine and queen of the night and clove gillyflower crushed in a mortar and sprinkled into the pool. Lotus petals floating on the surface. And the wings of butterflies who had had their day and chose to expire here, so that their last memories should be their best, at this nightly festival to beauty.
FOURTH, Abel presented. Passive. Furtive. Hands held straight above his head for the removal of his shift. A pea podded.
FIFTH, exclamations instructional. Careful. Steady. Stand still. Keep straight. That’s it. Head up. There we are. Ah… there we are.
SIXTH, hands on. My mother folded, her haunches on her heels, her neck bulging like an eel, her hair streaming in the water like algae. Starting from Abel’s feet, in a slow repetitive circular motion, the first application of salts and soap.
SEVENTH, the ascent. Each blue-white shank traced, as if to corroborate a pattern in the memory. The scars on Abel’s knees (where he had knelt, unknowing and engrossed, on broken shell) anointed in a manner perfected while tending the flaky shoulders of angels.
EIGHTH, exhalations rhapsodical. Oh! Ah! There? There! How your skin trembles! How your blood pumps! Oh! Ah! So still on the outside, so much activity within. So red on the inside, so white without.
NINTH, no civility shown to my father, who arrives to mock a thing he hates. Still rubbing? Do you mean to rub the boy away? No civility shown. No answer given. Her eyes closed like curtains on all communication. But washing giving way to towelling, and the trance broken until the next night, unless…
Abel comes up so prettily under the friction, so startled-pink in all the dents and caverns of his body, that TENTH, my mother cannot refuse herself the indulgence — there, below his ear, or there, in the golden valley of his throat, or there and there, where she has pasted henna around his paps — of a kiss.
When this happens, the stifled smile on my brother’s lips, of shame and victory commingled, is impossible to bear. And
ELEVENTH, I turn my back on him, and on her, and repair to the garden I have been cultivating as an act of vengeance on myself, and plunge my arms elbow-deep into the soil, into the mud, into the slime, whether there is a moon to show me what horrors I may be touching, or whether there is not.
But I continue to watch over Abel in his sleep. I continue to plant my ear into his powdered chest and listen to his henna’d heart beat. My fear that something may happen to him, that he will simply stop living in the night, has not diminished. I still consider it my responsibility to guard against this eventuation, to monitor the evenness of his breathing, and there is no doubt in my mind that the engine for this vigilance is love.
A great protective passion for him overwhelms me when I see him sleeping. It is so strong that I am sometimes taken by the thought that it will be me whose heart goes. It will give out, or burst, with the exertions of worrying over his.
I do not believe it is his beauty that inspires this heaving love in me. That imposes this heavy love on me. I am proof against beauty, and cut down the loveliest flowers in my garden in order that there should be no lingering certainties around that question. I am untouched by beauty.
Fragility cannot be it either, by the same reasoning. Nothing fragile prospers in my garden.
So what do I see when I hang over him and count the rhythmic valvular openings and closings of his body’s whimsical flirtation with life?
Can it be that I see only my own intentions? Can it be that love is nothing other than a mirror held up betimes to hate? A warning, a precautionary palpitation, a pang of remorse in advance of the event? If that is so, and my care for my brother is in direct proportion to the harm I bear him, then he has much to fear from me, because the tenderness I feel scalds my eyes, and my sorrow for him hammers at my ribs.
The other view I take is that he upsets me because he is a version of myself. An idealised version. Me unspoiled by intimate, inside acquaintance. Me as I might look to him. But observed without that coldness which always mars a younger brother’s regard. Me sweet. Me pretty. Me bathed in water scented with frangipani and narcissi.
Me wordless.
Upset is a better word for it — since we are back to words — than love. Upset more accurately denotes who is doing what to whom. It is not that I love him. He upsets me.
Let us be clear who is the instigator and who — whom — the victim. I didn’t ask him to come and lie by me in the life-expunging darkness, or sleep defencelessly on his back with his neck exposed and his pale shoulders pulsing, like a starfish on a moony beach. I never laid it down as a condition of our brotherliness that he should absent himself for the better part of his boyhood, spinning mollusc shells in preference to naming them, and thereby causing me to upset myself over him some more. He chose a fragile nature. It was given to me — an older brother’s obligation — to safeguard it.
Thus do the meek inveigle the brave and snaffle the earth.
* * *
He stops, Cain the inveigled, and raises a perfect sleeve to those seams and scissures of the face from which feeling is expected to leak. They do not need to be dried but he dries them anyway.
A dramatic gesture. He has told this story before and knows its pauses. But is there not a danger, even in godless and ingenuous Babel, that his ruse will be rumbled? That someone will say to him, ‘You affect emotion so studiedly that you must mean us to believe you are emotionless; but why would you bother to do that unless it too is a study to conceal how emotional you really are’?
Of course. ‘Drama does not at some point cease to be drama,’ he is always ready to reply. ‘You should never suppose you have seen to the bottom of a dramaturgist’s intention. Why stop at one stratagem concealing another? Why should not a stratagem hide a stratagem hide a stratagem hide a stratagem hide a stratagem…?’
A serious man talks to no one but himself. The only person Cain is keeping guessing is Cain. In truth he did not know how dry he was going to find the corners of his eyes and mouth until he dabbed them.
It is for his own benefit, not for Babel’s, that he pauses.
‘Give me a minute,’ he says.
10. A Minute Chapter
What can you do in a minute?
You can look around a room and see that all the people you are anxious to avoid are in it.
The girl is to be expected. She would be here, hanging on to his every sorrow, even had he not been hanging on to her pigtail, in a brotherly way, for the last week.
Her father shouldn’t be here, but is. Naaman is famous for his quick, discreet visits to performances staged under his patronage. You notice him at the beginning and you notice him at the end — what you don’t expect is to notice him in between, bent backwards over his seat, just waiting to get the next joke, he would have you believe, but actually locked into a figure which gymnasts on the temple steps refer to as The Crab and would rather not perform.
Cain does not have to be acute to see that Naaman is not relaxed.
What does Naaman want?
What does Sisobk the Scryer want, mouthing to him, whenever there is a pause in the narrative, ‘D-i-d t-h-e-y g-i-v-e y-o-u m-y m-e-s-s-a-g-e?’
What does Preplen the poet want, what does he mean by bringing along a staring woman in an ill-fitting wig — presumably his wife — and five children — presumably his children, although they all look older even than their father — and sitting them in a ringleted row right under Cain the Family Desecrator’s nose?