Mothers, of course, are always sad. The tears you are bound to shed for them come to you in their milk. But my mother’s milk had curdled now, and any other child she bore would cry from the sourness. And this made me sorrier for her still.
I climbed into my old tree, sick in my stomach that after all these years I had not overcome the desire to inflict pain on myself by observing what I was not meant to see, by sitting in on the drama of my exclusion. The signs of my erstwhile frequenting were gone. The branches were no longer shaved of their bark, no longer smoothed and polished from my restive vigil. I couldn’t see where I had been. But the tree knew me, creaked more in pity than in welcome, and parted its leaves so that I could watch.
Watch Abel make his presentation to my mother. Watch my mother receive it from him, the only person who remembered her.
Ah! she said. Not as in surprise, but as in grief.
She had taken to saying Ah! frequently now — her own expression of the dolefulness of things. Eventually she would pronounce an Ah! over my father and his unwieldy carpentry, which he would have to accept as the nearest he would ever again come to being loved.
Meanwhile I matched her with an Ah! in my own heart. Perhaps I outmatched her. Out-Ah’d her. For although this pageant of filial devotion was touching to behold, pitiable because transient, because inessential, because contingent, because it didn’t have me in it, what was truly distressing was that neither of them could do better, each was all the other had to mark a ceremonial, to people a procession — she him, he her.
Whereas she, who had once been beloved of the Lord and as near as matters abducted by an angel, and he, my poor Abel, shaped to be a cup-bearer to a more sexually curious god than Ours ever was, should both have been garlanded by celestial courtiers, fanfared by bugles, swept up in the arms of those soft-bearded strangers we all languished for, whose raiments would be of gold and whose admiration for our mortal beauty and accomplishments would be unbounded.
Ah!
We weren’t enough for our ambitions, that’s why I was so sorry for us. Or maybe we weren’t enough for mine.
Either way, we were too much or too many for God’s.
He dropped into my garden at last, in plenipotential disguise, and as good as told me so.
12. Yetzer And Yotzer
I
‘Until pain entered the universe,’ he tells her, ‘there could be no sensuality worth speaking of.’
‘That’s so sad,’ she says, shaking her head.
This is how they spend their evenings now — he cogitating, she whimpering. The philosopher and his dog.
His words have sent a shock of electricity through her hair, and fine strands of it break from the careful containment of her pigtail and incline towards him like needles as he speaks.
Were he to reach out and pat her he would bleed.
‘There are sadder things,’ he says, wondering if she intends ever to go. She has adopted an attitude on his bed that has a worrying permanence about it, her knees drawn up sculpturally to her chin, her buttoned back occupying the junction of his two walls so naturally that she appears to have grown there, like crystal out of rock.
‘Such as what?’ (Tell her, tell her sadder and sadder things.)
‘Such as inurement to pain. Which puts paid to all species of expectancy, the expectation of sensuous gratification being merely one.’
They have arrived at this topic because she has heard gossip — not from him, not from him — of his parents’ earlier garden life, and she is curious to know whether it was indeed as paradisal as people say. What he wishes her to understand is that, companionableness aside, his father desired his wife only from the moment he became jealous of her, and that his mother stopped desiring her husband at more or less the same time. Thereafter, their desires went on enjoying this perfect inverse of synchronicity. ‘Paradise,’ he explains.
‘That’s so sad,’ she says.
He doesn’t know what to do about her.
She makes him anxious. She seems to think it is possible to dodge the wheels of careering fate. She thinks he is telling her a bad-luck story. As if, under different circumstances, his father and mother might have torn at each other’s bodies in an ecstasy of unknowing, unprovoked, unperjured cohabitation. Such as they might — she and he. Even though she knows his flesh creeps, and owes the stimulation of her own flesh to that certain knowledge, she is still holding out for a happy ending. Smooth lawns. Birdsong. Grazing deer. Plump fruit. Fangless serpents. Stately oak trees. Gurgling fountains. Moonshine.
Moonshine. He cannot dim it. It is the same wherever he stays long enough to drum up an acquaintance. They request the story of the paradisal garden from him, only they want it told the way they want it believed. They have their own little clearings of paradisal verdancy front and back, and any assault upon the First Garden is implicitly a rudeness to theirs. They either show him their doors or their shrubberies. If it isn’t rejection it’s reform. Zilpah is of the reforming party. She has climbed the walls of her garden in pursuit of the rotting stink that rises from his; but now she would like to take him back with her, over the wall, through the gate, down the path, under the arbour, to where the air is sweet.
Moonshine.
It seems to be her intention to move in with him by stealth.
She leaves hairpins behind. Brushes. Brooches. Bags. Shawls. Eventually she will leave herself.
Whatever she mislays he finds and returns to her. Formally. He doesn’t like there being bits of woman lying around his room. He is as particular about his floor as he is about his appearance. Traveller’s scruples. Fugitive’s fastidiousness. He defies the God who punished him with vagrancy to mistake him for a nomad. He has oiled fingers and well-swept rugs. He shines like a permanent man moving in his proper sphere.
He is surprised how little of this particularity Zilpah has perceived. Not only is she careless with her possessions, she thinks she can win him by slothful habits — intimacies, he assumes they are meant to be — in respect of her person.
She is by nature and upbringing particular herself. One look at her bacillophobic braid had told Cain that. Her clothes are expensive and fussily precise. Her undergarments are made of the best cottons and decorated with beautiful needlework. Where they have ribbons or straps, these are always well-pressed, daintily stitched, and as narrow as the shoulders and waist for which they have been designed. If there is one thing about Zilpah that Cain finds even more repugnant than her plait, it is the fineness of the straps of her undergarments. It is a puzzle to him why he feels this way. Strictly and logically, her haberdashery meets every one of his usual objections. The material is not coarse. The dimensions are not gross. Seams are not frayed, colours are not garish, and there has been no let up in the laundering. So how has Zilpah erred? Cain puts it to himself like this: there is indelicacy in excessive delicacy; there is grossness in too determined a denial, too pretty a denial, of what is gross. That helps him to explain half of his disgust, but gets him nowhere when Zilpah throws all prettiness and delicacy to the wind, scatters her fine embroidery across his floor, refuses the consideration owing to a lady’s toilet, riots in forgetfulness and indolence, and otherwise shows that she has mistaken dereliction of hygiene for abandonment of inhibition.
‘You use your mind for that,’ he explains to her. ‘You should treat your body with more respect. It connects you to the business of life. Please pick up your clothes.’