I had observed the same phenomenon in stray animals that took up residence with us, hoping to be adopted, yearning for domestication, greedy, in a way that shamed me personally, for love. Abel made a better fist of giving it than I did. He had a rabbit that would let him stroke it. An ass that would rub noses with him. A rat that walked across his head from one shoulder to another. And Enosh, a miserable pariah-dog of low intelligence who wanted nothing out of life except to curl up in Abel’s lap while Abel lay curled up in my mother’s. How large my menagerie might have been I never found out because I quickly sent packing whatever had expectations of me which I knew I would be unable to fulfil. It is a frightful thing to be looked at by a helpless creature that wishes you to know your power over it, that wishes you to exercise that power, this side of Lilith-like strangulation, in return for a devotion only a sick man could value in his heart.
But what was true of the pain-lust of a stook of corn, and true of a retarded mongrel’s hunger for humiliation, was no less true of us, made in the image of a God that hourly rehearsed feelings of rejection. My father soaked up punishment from my mother as though he were a dried-up river bed and my mother’s coolness to him, rain. I sat myself on the ground and observed the nightly soaping of my brother’s blue-white limbs for all the world as if I’d been frozen in that attitude, mesmerised, pinioned to a tree trunk from which I could not hope to move, when all along I was at liberty to take a quiet stroll in any direction I fancied. My mother visited cruelties on herself, pumping bile around her body; envious, though there was no other woman in our world for her to envy; reclusive, though there was no one for her to hide from; ill-prepared to face a day until she could taste the poison of her own nature in her mouth. And Abel — ah, Abel — never once thought about practising a retreat in preparation for the day when I would begin striking him in earnest.
He visited me occasionally in my garden, once he had grown too big for spinning shells. We didn’t speak much. He had a capacity for enduring long spells of inactivity and silence in my company which I took to be a compliment to me and a proof of our affection. It was not like my father’s taciturnity, which had something to do with finding me uncanny, but more an affirmation of mutual confidence: we didn’t need to talk because we were sure of each other’s esteem. Words are invariably aggressive, belligerent in intention no matter how defensively one pretends to deploy them. The fact that we scarcely used any must have meant that we were essentially at peace.
Mustn’t it?
I hoard my memories of those long mute afternoons. There is never a time when I am not turning them over. They have a burnish on them. A yellow light. Reminiscent of those pulsing sunsets with which the Word once wooed the idea of woman in my mother, when the sky crinkled and curled and swallowed flame, like a leaf swept on to a gardener’s fire in its last second before cremation.
He is aflame himself, my brother, in all of them. There is so much fire around him that I cannot make out the expression in his eyes. Only his mouth is distinct. Lacking colour. Not quite steady. The lips a little apart so that he can show his teeth. A flicker of amusement upon them… not the smirk of plebeian triumph, no, not that, but something the smallest bit like mockery, as if it’s all just too droll, too droll even to talk about, I on my knees mixing blood and bone, stirring mulch, grafting poppies on to convolvulus so that we can have scarlet wound around every post and tree trunk, so that we can have an incarnadined backdrop to our conversationlessness, and he pacing up and down, as mute as his own shadow, wasting his beauty on thin air.
It is partly the idea of brotherhood, of brotherliness, of blood relation, that keeps us so reserved with each other. I believe we both recoil from something demeaning in the connection. It isn’t personal. We wouldn’t rather have other brothers. Or sisters, come to that. We have no quarrel with the particulars; it is the principle that makes us uneasy. The business of having to be blood-related to anybody at all. What, at the last, is there to say to a brother, when what lies at the bottom of your connection is a labyrinth of pipes and tubes, eggs, sperm, smegma, phlegm?
My father cried out in the night for brothers. The fragments of refracted light that were his soul lay iced up in his chest. He feared he had not been adequately animated. He had missed the experience of birth. But I sometimes envied him his pristine origins, his unrelatedness, his clean start.
I was luckier than Abel. I named things to make them mine. By naming them I took a hand in their origination and commanded them to begin again in my mind. In this way I was at least associated with a sort of purity and could new-create the objects of my observation, even if I couldn’t new-create myself. I also possessed the other invaluable advantage of being able to vent my spleen. I attacked the earth. I drove weapons into the soil. I hacked at limbs and branches. I changed the colour and disposition of the vegetation. I warped its character. I broke its spirit. I made it bleed.
My brother did not have it in him to cleanse his way. He never thought to seek redress. He absented himself, tried not to notice — that was enough. But you start noticing, willy-nilly, the moment you begin to speak. Words have ears. They have a past life, a keen retentive memory. So he kept quiet. He learnt to make music out of grass, and came to enjoy the company of sheep.
He went for long walks with them, not looking where he was going, as though he half meant to walk himself off the earth altogether. Later, the Lord would come to regard this as reverence. Quietude has this effect on gods. They mistake it for worship, whereas nine times out of ten it is actually horror.
It was my theory that our distaste for what bonded us physically ended up bonding us spiritually. We were as one, I thought, in our abhorrence of what made us one. I took this to include, not our parents exactly — for they too leapt from what was incontrovertibly fleshly and familial — but anything overtly referentiaclass="underline" birthdays, anniversaries, festive proclamations of our periodicity and connectedness. So I was surprised when he came to my garden in his eleventh year or thereabouts — I am not saying that I was unaware of time, only that I didn’t intend to mark it — and asked me to gather him a nosegay.
I wondered what his reason was. Had he fallen in love with one of his sheep?
He raised his eyes, let me see their wandering light, then lowered them. He presented his throat. Flashed me a smile. Made much of his teeth. Quite a show. Told me he loved all his sheep equally and wouldn’t dream of upsetting the others by singling out one.
Banter. Brotherly banter.
I have always been convinced that I amused him. That I could make him laugh, or at least smile, almost at will. I prided myself on this while he was alive, and even afterwards found consolation in the thought that I had at least lightened life for him, cheered him out of his silences, invigorated him and… and thereby earned his love. Only recently has it occurred to me that he might not have found me in the least funny. Might not have congratulated himself on his good fortune in having a brother who was so diverting. Might not have loved me for my probes and sallies. Might not have thought I was clever. Might not have wanted to be me as often as I wanted to be him. Might not have been smiling in all the instances when I took it for granted he was smiling. But might have been snarling instead. Showing me his teeth in the way a wild and frightened animal shows his teeth, not in the way I fancied that a doting younger brother does.
Maybe that wasn’t a joke, then, his rejoinder to my joke. And maybe he was right and my joke wasn’t a joke either.
But now is now and then was then. I told him I could put together a bouquet big enough to please his entire flock. Provided they liked the colour red.