In an honourable life there are so many people not to please.
He will not raise a hand to her. Instead, he patiently unsticks himself from her feelers. Plucks her from him, palp by palp.
‘Go home,’ he says to her again. And scores it as a mark alongside his integrity, his independence, that he does not add, ‘You heathens’ whore!’
Were he to look back, once he has left her, he would see that she has gone down on the symmetrical, lozenge-shaped flagstones exactly as his brother Abel went down in his dusty field. She had insisted on knowing how Abel fell, and he had told her. And now she has his attitude to a T. Abel, for all the world — were he to turn and look — Abel ruined at his altar. Very still. Very flat. Only the legs a trifle crooked, the ankles almost crossed, as though a mere trip has been the occasion for the fall. The eyes open. Quite white. The skin dispirited, inelastic, irresolute, but broken only in one place, where it had been peppered with small stones. How she has learned to simulate the symptoms of lapidation without so much as a pebble being thrown at her, he would be unable to say, even were he to look.
But were he to look, he would comment on how much less beauty she possesses in ecstasy than his brother took with him into death.
VII
Somewhere between Cain’s lodgings and Preplen’s hatchery, hunger seizes Sisobk. He is careless about such things as eating at the best of times, but it has been a long night and threatens to be a still longer morning. His stomach growls, prophesying want.
He has followed Cain, following the child, because there are further arrangements to be made — dates, maps, manner of transportation and so on — relating to the pilgrimage to Padan-Aram. Sisobk knows that if you don’t get all this settled early, plans tend to evaporate. He sits, rumbling, on a bench from which he will see Cain when he emerges. And falls into a food trance.
‘Woof!’
He starts. The barking seems to be proceeding from the fricassee which his beloved son, the wild and woolly Esau, has that very moment prepared and set before him. Aiiee, this boy’s venison! Not only does he hunt it, find it, shoot it, he cooks it in a sauce that is so succulent the old man is almost able to forget what a nobody and a disappointment the other son is, standing stirring lentils in the kitchen.
‘Woof!’
Becoming blind now, from old age and good living, Isaac brings his fork up to his face and peers at what is yelping on its prongs. A terrible fear grips him. What if this is wolf, or hound, or hyena, and the Lord is warning him against transgression?
Here is a dilemma of no small portion for poor Isaac, who had nearly once been meat himself, who rejoices in his obedience to pre-Levitical dietary laws, but rejoices no less in his appetite. Does he question the contents of his bowl further and risk forgoing one of the finest fricassees of his life, or does he put the barking down to extraneous desert noises, order the meat to ‘Sit!’ and carry on consuming it?
‘Woof! Woof!’ says his supper.
It is Rebekah, repairing from her dressing room, who decides the issue. ‘You evil little swine!’ she shouts at Esau, sitting sheepish in the corner of the tent, ‘Is your father one of your Canaanite women, that you’d feed him dog?’
‘Funny,’ says Esau, rubbing a hairy orange hand over his hairy orange face, ‘I thought that was a small and unaccountably bad tempered hind while I was chasing it.’
‘Does that mean I’m on pottage tonight?’ Isaac piteously wonders.
Hearing the word pottage, Sisobk’s stomach lurches. ‘Funny,’ thinks Sisobk, coming round, that a cook as inventive as Esau should arrive home tired from the fields one morning and swap his birthright for a platter of his brother’s gruel. Sisobk gets home tired himself some mornings, and he wouldn’t know a fricassee from a flambé — but there’s always an egg!
Sisobk listens to more commotion in his stomach, then discovers it isn’t his stomach but his prophetic soul. Something is wrong. He has missed Cain. Let him go by while thinking about food. He tightens the strings around his parchment footwear, winds his robes around himself as though for flying, and pads off in the direction of Cain’s lodgings. Shortly before arriving at which he finds Zilpah lying motionless, legs a trifle crooked, eyes open, skin irresolute, a bundle of narrow bones not so much discarded as disposed.
Walking away from her, back pitilessly turned, is Cain. Sisobk calls after him, cries, shouts, appeals, but gets no reply.
He kneels, sure that all the kneeling he has done in life has been but a dream of this. He takes her hand. Puts a thumb on the blue tracery of her narrow wrist. He has never said it before, but he will say it now. ‘I love you,’ he says. ‘I love you more than all the world — the world that was, the world that is, and the world to come.’
His eyes crumple and ooze, like raisins that have been trodden on. A tear trickles down his cheek. Others follow, brown and gummy. They stain his face, gather like dewdrops in his smear of a moustache, and at last fall on to the forehead of the stricken woman.
That about does it for Zilpah. ‘Do you know who I am?’ she says, uncrooking her legs, gathering her things, and rising. ‘Do you know who you’ve been addressing? You clown!’
Sisobk falls where she’d fallen, like a man stoned.
13. Cain Refuses Dominion over the Kingdom of Sin
I have said that I missed admiration. That I mourned the passing of praise. That I longed to be marvelled at again. I now repudiate these charges against myself. What I needed was a fight.
There weren’t enough of us. You cannot locate an enemy, raise an army and appoint an adjudicator when there are only five of you — four, once God went moonlighting and left us unattended. And there was no dispensing with an adjudicator. When I say I needed to fight, I mean I needed to win; and when I say I needed to win, I mean I needed to be seen to win.
So perhaps it comes back to being marvelled at, after all.
My father was violent but had no fight in him. He still from time to time recalled the old thunderous scaremongering filched from on high — I have spoken. But it ended, as always, with his sitting sulking underneath a tree. If he no longer closed his hands to illustrate a frightful finality, that was because they had become too bruised in the service of carpentry to close. He was an impatient man. If the tool was not near, by means of which he wished to drive home a dowel or a rivet, he used his fist.
You would have thought, in that case, that I might have been able to coax a contest out of him. But the fist was precisely the problem. He either employed it or he didn’t. He either promptly won or promptly lost. He had no instinct for sparring. For strategy. For attrition. For guerrilla tactics. For satisfying, in short, the frictional necessitudes of a growing boy for whom no provisions as to marriage or fornication had been made. He had no aptitude for friendship either, which would have served as well.
Not bad, he said when I showed him the mischief I was hatching in my garden. Very nice.
Not bad? I had been experimenting with parasitic fungi and cankers. I was enjoying spectacular success with carnation rust, getting those insipid pastels to yellow and then brown. Let the gentlest wind blow and the air in my garden was thick with copper-coloured spores. Leaf by leaf, I was rotting nature. Very nice?
All right, he said, when I drew his attention to the precise character of my ambitions — all right, he said, then not very nice.
He couldn’t have been easier about it.