Isn’t it the whole point of twins that you cannot be one without being the other? Thinking he is Esau, Sisobk is startled to hear a faint cry from the truckle-bed, and to see that, Jacob-like, he still has hold of the dying woman’s ankle, and that her foot is blue.
He looks into her worn-out eyes. ‘I am the puller and the pulled,’ he tells her, orphically. ‘I am hairy and I am smooth. I am a cunning hunter and a plain man. I dwell in fields and I dwell in tents.’
He pats her hand, closes her eyes, and covers her up. At the far end of the ward another one is being wheeled in. There is so little of her that even from this distance Sisobk can count her ribs and see the lilac dye of death beneath her skin. He shuffles over and sits himself on the corner of her bed. ‘If you gave birth to twins,’ he asks her, ‘one too feeble to come out of the womb under his own steam, and the other with such an excess of life in him he landed fully grown between your legs, red all over like a shaggy carpet, which would you prefer?’
She has less hair herself than the baby Jacob had. And lacks force to hold on to anybody’s ankle. She makes a faint sound from the back of her throat, like a page turning.
Sisobk inclines an ear. ‘Just what I think too,’ he says. ‘Neither of them.’
His theory is this.
If Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison; but Rebekah loved Jacob — then clearly she loved him only to spite Isaac, who had ‘fingered’ her near Hebron, made her the mother of thousands of millions, the first two of whom were such as no mother could bear to look upon, and now passed his days and nights blind in his tent sampling game.
On his own, Jacob had little to recommend him to a mother of spirit. While Esau flew through the fields, a red flash, spearing supper for his father, Jacob stayed quietly indoors and sod pottage. The ruse whereby Rebekah got the lesser of her two sons to steal the greater of her husband’s blessings — disguising him in goatskins and teaching him to lower his voice — served a psychological and a practical purpose. She could see her favourite looking manly for an hour, and then, by warning him of Esau’s wrath, remove him from her sight for a period considerably longer.
Sisobk the Scryer closes another set of eyes and leaves the infirmary. These women! He had wanted to persuade Cain to accompany him to that fissure in the desert, that divide which never cooled or closed, and through which, if you listened carefully and knew what to listen for, you could hear the cries of Korah and his company, browning for all time, like meat in a casserole. But now he would like Cain to go with him to the well at Padan-Aram where Rebekah is waiting to be spotted by Abraham’s servant, carrying her pitcher — a damsel very fair to look upon, a virgin whom no man had ever known.
Just like Zilpah.
III
He doesn’t know what to do about her.
He thinks about boring her with affection. ‘Perhaps we can try face-to-face congress,’ he suggests one night.
It takes her a little time to turn over. First of all she has to unwind him from her plait. ‘What?’ she says. ‘You mean use me like a woman?’
Already it is going further than he intended. But he is at his wit’s end. A desperate man. ‘Not use at all,’ he says, he whispers. ‘Do you not think there is too much using in this room already? Is it not time I showed you some consideration?’
‘Consideration?’
He wonders if her question is a weapon, and if it’s loaded. But the expression on her face is neutral. She seems genuinely to be curious about what he means by consideration.
As if he knows! ‘Things like calling you by your name,’ he says. ‘And… talking. And…’
‘Kissing?’
‘Yes, kissing.’
‘Stroking?’
‘Yes, yes, definitely stroking.’
‘Looking?’
‘Indeed — looking would be marvellous.’
‘Well, if that’s what you’d like…’ she begins.
‘It is not a question of what I’d like.’
‘You want to hear me say that I’d like it?’
‘Only if it’s the truth.’
‘Truth is to be part of this as well?’
‘Only if you’d like it to be.’
She thinks about it. ‘All right,’ she says, ‘I’d like it to be. I’d like it if you treated me as a woman tonight.’
But before he can mount her, face-to-face, she places two prohibiting hands on his chest. ‘Well?’ she asks.
He doesn’t follow. ‘Well what?’
‘You were going to show consideration.’
He goes very cold. Icy fingers paddle in his heart. He wonders if he could get away, now, with turning her back on to her belly.
‘You were going to call me by my name,’ she reminds him.
‘Ah, yes… Zilpah.’
‘And you were going to stroke me.’
‘Yes, I was.’
‘And kiss me.’
‘Yes, that’s right, I was.’
‘But considerately.’
‘Ah, yes.’
‘And remembering to use my name.’
‘Ah, yes… Zilpah, Zilpah.’ He murmurs it considerately, considerately stroking her, considerately kissing her, lowering himself considerately upon her. And again, ‘Zilpah,’ using her — no, no, treating her — for the first time as a woman.
Considerately.
It is, as he has counted on, an awful experience for them both.
‘I do not work well in concert,’ he tells her, looking up into the darkness, keeping satisfaction out of his voice as best he can. ‘I fear I am disjunct.’
She touches his shoulder. ‘It isn’t important,’ she assures him. Her face is washed in the dew of forgiveness. He can see it out of the corner of his eye, an oval of moist early-morning light. She squints at him, near-sighted as a saint. It has all along been her habit to follow his every changing expression with her stare, but now her night-time seeing seems to be plaited with his, bound with an invisible ribbon of devotion.
He rises from the bed and goes to stand by the window. At this hour the temple stones appear to be alive; not a ziggurat is still, not a flight of steps is where it was a second earlier. They move, in a stately grey-shadowed priestly dance, not backwards and forwards, and not up and down, but with a looming motion that tilts the night.
‘I’m not suited to it,’ he says. ‘I’m not rhythmic.’
He can hear her sniffing — not crying, just gathering her forces for a tremendous feat of understanding that will require the armed support of patience, selflessness, forgiveness, and may even result — who knows? — in lasting cure. He fears her patience most. It ticks in his ear like a promise of eternal life, like the interminable scratching of insects that used to keep him awake under the stars when he lay revolving love and murder in his heart.
‘You have to work at harmony,’ she says.
Tsk… tsk… tsk…
‘When I say I am disjunct,’ he answers, ‘I am describing an immanence, what is bred in the bone, not a learner’s hesitancy for which practice is the remedy. I am unable to make a rhythm with anybody. I have no choice in the matter. My nature is dissonant. I have no co-operative instincts. I cannot dance, for the same reason. I cannot sing in tune or unison. You must have noticed that when we walk together I do not keep in step with you. The very idea of harmonious conjunction with another person, with another body, with another thing, is alien to me; it incommodes me, it embarrasses me, and, to be truthful with you, it appals me. To and by are words I was moulded to accept; blame my Creator, but I fear I fall foul of with.’