These are rhetorical questions. Cain knows what they want. They want him. And all of a sudden he doesn’t mind.
Hence his request for a minute’s pause. He would like to accustom himself to this untoward and somewhat sickly sensation of calm.
Is that what it signifies, then, to have mould growing freely on your person — that you are permitting others to write your history for you? Is that what mildew is — the body’s abrogation of its own rule?
He doesn’t know. His minute’s up.
11. Cain Forgets a Birthday
I had begun to garden. I must have known more about my future disinheritance than I knew I knew. In a spirit of pure mockery — don’t ask me whom I was mocking: it is always everyone and no one — I had paced out an allotment, put a fence around it (a fence of which my father would have been proud, had he bothered to notice), and cleared it of the disorderly mess that grew there. When it came to design, there was little to choose (which is hardly surprising) between my father and the God who had fashioned him. They both favoured grand effects, overreached themselves, grew tired, and ended up throwing everything they had at a project and insisting that the jumble was intentional.
Life, they called it.
The principle of life that operated in my garden, prior to me, was parasitic, commensal, strangulative and noisy. Nothing had enough room or wanted the particular room it had. Nothing was calm. Nothing was patient. Nothing was generous. Nothing had any sense of decorum, or shame, or… humour.
It is no good your eyeing me whimsically. I mean what I say. Talk to any of those sensitive gardeners you boast in Babel, men who are on confidential speaking terms with their plants, and see if you can find one in possession of a single humorous anecdote told to him by a marrow. Screams are all they hear. Shrieks from the battlefield. The first great act of creation lacked drollery, and every smaller germination since has been solemn likewise. The more a thing grows, the smaller its capacity to amuse itself. The tallest animals are the saddest. The highest mountains the most contemplative. This is a truism which can be extended no less reliably to our own species. Only stunted men are funny.
So this was my test: to plant comedy in my garden. Always remembering that by comedy I mean something less frivolous than you do.
I wanted the plants I grew to be in rows and I wanted them red — not just red in flower, but red in stem, red in leaf, red in petiole and pedicel, red in bract and bud. If I could achieve a perfect row, I thought, a regimentation of height and spacing and efflorescence, accurate to the nicest measurement, I would be imposing my will on luxuriance and clamour. And if I could grow red greenery only I would be striking a blow for perverseness. Although the earth frequently did throw up crimsons and scarlets and maroons, it did so grudgingly, it seemed to me, its instinct for random plenty at war with its preference for verdancy. I wanted a contrary, cross-patch garden. I would have planted it to grow downwards, had I known how. I would have seeded it to decrease. Whenever I pondered the challenge of an entirely red tree, I wasn’t thinking of proliferation — far from it — I was thinking of the offence it would give to God.
He — HE — had not bothered us for some time. Perhaps we had at last learnt how to behave, stumbled upon the domestic arrangement He had always intended for us: wife at a Godly distance from husband, nursing a sainted grievance, turning a cold back; brothers divided by the burnished sandalwood sheen that sat on the skin of one and not the other. Or perhaps we had become plain and uninteresting to Him: no births; no magic; no more fleshly goads to celestial celibacy; now that my mother had lost her sheen, no more siren songs to spirit.
Whatever He was up to, it is arguable that my motive was metaphysical mischief; that I fenced off my vegetable patch and shoved my hands into the humus I hated essentially for the purpose of worming a response out of Him. It’s disconcerting, suddenly to be left in peace by a hectoring tyrant. You are not sure you know what to do with the freedom. You are not sure you like it. You begin to take the transformation personally. You wonder what you may have said or done. You become aggrieved, moody, jealous. If you go on being left alone, you have to face the possibility that you have been forgotten and that there is now Someone Else he enjoys tyrannising more. So it’s not out of the question, given that I was as jealous as my neighbour (supposing I’d had a neighbour), that the reason I started to play around with genetics was to see whether I could lure Him back.
Not for myself. You cannot have come this far with me without observing that He and I never enjoyed particularly close relations at any time. My sense of being circumscribed and shepherded by Him came through my parents. They were the harried lambs. So far, He had never dealt directly with me. I suppose I was too young. I figured, in a general way, in His poetry — Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings… Ye are the children of the Lord your God… And the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and a little child shall lead them — that sort of thing; but as a flesh and blood fact, as an entity rather than a metaphor, I didn’t hold much interest for Him. Abel, on the other hand — but we’ve been through that. The Immanent Grandpapa. Which also turned out to be a notion more lenitive to the ears of heaven than practicable here on earth. When it came to the point, He did not poke His great finger through the clouds to play piggy with the baby Abel’s toes. Let’s be more charitable to Him than He ever was to us, and ascribe His failure ever to father us with a little f to a general awkwardness around small things. Whatever wisdom flowed between burps and bubbles from the mouths of sucklings, He communicated His own thoughts more comfortably to the grown-ups. And so I say it was for them, my poor warring mother and father, that I set about enticing His voice to come walking among us once more. If they had His heavy tread to resent, they might just start remembering why they once found each other lightsome.
My father was sleeping badly again. Perhaps it was his bed and not Abel’s that I should have been visiting in the night. But my father was bearded and Abel wasn’t. And a beard on the chin of a sleeping man forbids approach. I can still picture its sometimes grave, sometimes jaunty rise and fall, its tipped-up bravado, the air of dignity but also helplessness it lent his face. A man — a father — is never more a law unto himself than when he lies on his back and points his snoring beard to the skies; but he is never more unprotected either. I shunned my father with his whiskers in the air both because I feared him and feared for him.
His cries alarmed me too. A cry can be coaxed out of a child’s body as smoothly as milk massaged out of a cow. From a grown man, though — from a grown bearded man — it is wrenched as cruelly as testes from an ox. He was in too much distress for his size. Like a fallen elephant he changed all one knew of the scale of pain. And I didn’t have the courage to go near.
He was dreaming new dreams.
On warm nights little monkey-men came for him. They were covered in hair but very pink between their toes and fingers and in their private parts. He believed he knew their faces and could trust them. Even when they flicked him with their tails and took bites out of his sides and laughed at him among themselves he saw no reason not to trust and follow them. They were company after all. They absorbed the loneliness around him.
They led him to a place where everything moved backwards. The cattle retreated in their grazing, regurgitating grass. Trees groaned, bent double with the stitch of descending sap. Water flowed uphill. Air whistled back into the throats of shrinking singing birds.
He was laid out, beard up, upon a slab of marble, cold beneath his back but glowing and running molten at the corners, where his feet and wrists were bound. Are you comfortable? his monkey friends asked him. Are you relaxed? He told them he had never been more comfortable in his life. They laughed at that. Unless they wept. He wasn’t certain what their tears denoted. He lay on his back not looking at them, just staring at the sky which was neither light nor dark, neither a day sky nor a night sky, merely matter without colouration, from which both the sun and moon had receded.