‘It wasn’t like this when we got it,’ Preplen explains. ‘You know how the Shinarites live.’
Cain does. ‘Heathenish?’
Preplen pulls a face and rights his wife. ‘Worse than heathenish. Primitive. Since you told me about partridges, I am better able to guess what went on here.’
Cain is sympathetic. ‘You didn’t find feathers?’
‘Feathers… bones…’ Preplen can barely bring himself to remember. ‘. . sticks…’
‘Sticks?’
‘Don’t ask me to be specific. I don’t want to know what they did.’
And doesn’t want his family to know either. He makes this plain by lowering his voice and turning his profile into even more shadow than it normally enjoys.
Cain thinks of the lustrous, high-shouldered Shinarites on the streets of Babel and is at a loss to imagine what employment they might have found, other than in the garden, for sticks. Far more barbaric mysteries reside, to his eye, in the fringes and tassels that canopy the poet’s tabernacular shrine to family. Nowhere in Babel — not in a face, not in a shuttered room, not in the night sky — has he seen anything so black as the coals that gleam under Nanshe’s skew wig. Nothing in Babel — whose marshes have been cleared, whose rivers are fragrant — recalls more vividly to him the first slitherings of life in slime than Nanshe’s brood, five baby crocodiles with their mouths open, losing their balance on the muddy banks.
‘Why did you tell your daughters I am their uncle?’ he asks, out of the blue.
‘Daughters? You think they’re girls? Good. Good.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s just a manner of speaking. Family is as family does.’
‘And how,’ asks Cain, ‘does this family do?’
He doesn’t mean it to be rude. Just shapely. But syntactical shape is not always the best friend of easy conversation.
All his years of sleeping on three or four pillows too many tell on Preplen. His neck clicks twice, sinks a couple of notches into his shoulders, and locks. If Cain wants to see his lips move, he has to walk around him, lower his own head and look up. Two parrots. Preplen’s message is clear, though, wherever one stands. ‘We are children of the same God,’ he says. ‘We are planted in the house of the same Lord. My children are as saplings that grow straight. How straight do you grow, Cain?’
‘It is a little late for me to be worrying about that,’ Cain reminds him.
‘I see. I see. Having committed one sin you are now free to commit all the others.’
‘I don’t know about all.’
‘Having broken your parents’ hearts once by taking from them a beloved son, you will break them a second time by taking to yourself a heathens’ whore.’
Cain looks from the wreck of shadows which is Preplen to the tropical plantation which is his family. Is this fit language, he wonders, for the ears of saplings? But they show no signs of having heard anything amiss. They still wallow in upholstery. And through Nanshe, too, the word whore seems to have passed like a speeding missile, leaving no trace of its trajectory. She smiles, blacker than beetles.
Whatever the proprieties in this greenhouse, Cain knows better than to bother defending a woman’s reputation. ‘I see no reason why my private life should travel so far abroad,’ he simply says. ‘It has already gone far enough.’
‘“Ye shall do my statutes,” the Lord said. He didn’t say, “Ye shall worship partridge semen in the company of harlots.”’
‘I don’t know how to reply to that,’ Cain admits.
‘You reply by promising that thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And by acknowledging that when the One True Intelligible God demanded such devotion, it was a historical injunction and not a botanical one. He didn’t mean, I am a farmer’s seed and will come up for you if you bow down to Me.’
‘He meant…?’
‘He meant what He meant.’
‘You have to do better than that.’
‘I don’t have to do anything. Neither does He. That’s what He means. He doesn’t have to do. He doesn’t have to give. He doesn’t have to notice. He doesn’t have to reward. Ours is a religion, Cain, a faith, not a system of bartering.’
‘Ours? You have forgotten that I fell out a long time ago with your One True Intelligible God.’
‘So you fell out! So you had a little disagreement! What’s that? He likes a little disagreement. It proves you’re listening. It proves you’re taking an interest. Why do you think He likes blasphemers so much? As long as you keep talking, Cain, as long as you keep talking…’
‘Will you forgive me if I stop just for today? I have not slept. And I followed your —’
‘Tiras.’
‘Tiras —’
‘Real name, Jubal.’
‘I followed Jubal —’
‘Ssh… not here. Walls have ears.’
‘— I came in answer to your note. Am I to assume that the danger you alluded to is more moral than actual?’
Preplen cranks his head up from his chest and, at the risk of splintering, turns his face to Cain. ‘A whore is a deep ditch,’ he gargles, brewing in his throat all the perils of lechery and apostasy.
‘And a strange woman,’ says Nanshe, speaking from the corner of her mouth, and for the first time from anywhere in Cain’s company, ‘is a narrow pit.’
But the unexpectedness of her intrusion proves too much for the plumped-up cushions, and the whole family slides softly from the sofa to the floor.
VI
Somewhere between Preplen’s hatchery and his own lodgings — he is not paying any attention to where his feet are leading him — he stumbles into the girl. He does not see her approach but is aware of an unwelcome radiance, such as one experiences when waking from a doze under a hot sun, and then feels her touch on his arm. A light fingering, exerting no more pressure than a moth might, but adhesive, like the feet of spiders.
‘Zilpah,’ he says. ‘Go back home. Go back to your home.’
He does not think she is a deep ditch or a narrow pit. If he had to choose a metaphor from excavation for her, he would say she is a shallow grave.
But he would rather not call her anything, not even to himself. He is too scrupulous to allow Preplen’s words to have any bearing on his feelings. He is a grown man. He has, without promptings, committed grown man’s crimes. Without promptings he will rid himself of Zilpah. But he is, of course, furious that an attempt has been made to turn him against someone he has already turned against of his own accord. Will Preplen see this as a victory for him, for Nanshe, for Tubal and Jubal and Tekel and Mash? Damn Preplen! And damn the girl!
Thus does every third-party slander work its poison. The intermediary, the bearer of the ear, cannot forgive slander’s object for being slander’s cause.
She falls back from him without ceding a handsbreadth of ground: a wonderful, ecstatic twist of the torso, a sort of unhinging of the trunk that leaves her throat horizontal and her eyes retrograded beneath their lids. The blind whites of a person’s eyes invariably call out murderous impulses in Cain. He sees the raised arm of God in them, the reflection of Creation the moment before It etches another signature on the blank screen of personality. To put out those blind screens would be to extinguish the idea of submission itself.
But he does not strike her. He has been too generous to her, too giving of himself, already. He does not care for her enough to shame her utterly in a public place. Nor does he care enough for Preplen to want word of such a scene to reach him.