VI
He wakes, the victim in question, without his clothes, in a cold room none of his senses recognises. Foul tatters have been thrown around him. An appalling stench, glutted with the morbid discharges of mind no less than body, comes off them and off himself. Wherever he is, he has been here long enough to be impregnate with the place.
He waits for his eyes to make something of the darkness, then tries to find his way around the room. He reaches for the security of walls, but recoils from them at the first touch. They are wet with slime, slippery like the clay sleeves of a potter or the insides of his pot. He feels about him for his clothing, but nothing that sticks to his fingers is familiar to him.
He decides that he has been stripped and robbed and dumped here. In which case I suppose I ought to count myself fortunate that they have left me with my life, he catches himself thinking, before he remembers that fortune doesn’t enter into it. Hath not the Lord set a mark upon him, lest any finding him should…
He shakes his head fiercely, as a parent might shake a bad dream out of a screaming child, in order to dispel all recollection of that hateful hour when the Lord marked him with the shame of fatalism, branded him where everyone would see it, with an unresisting tragicalness which rendered any idea of doing violence to him otiose, since you knew you could take from him without it, and since you knew you could damage him the more seriously, anyway, by leaving him to damage himself. Only the pertinacious are worth murdering, the Lord calculated — proceeding from the knowledge of the murderer in Himself — and as a consequence lined Cain’s face with restiveness but not resolution. ‘They have only to look at me,’ Cain feared, ‘to see that I do not expect to prevail.’ And because he feared it, it was so.
God’s final rebuff to him: Thou shalt be unkillable.
No matter where the room, no matter what the hour, he has never mastered waking. When Zilpah woke with him, starting into consciousness wonderfully, the very second he did — ‘See,’ she would say, ‘how finely we are attuned, how identically we are twinned’ — she took the hopelessness of his expression, the abstraction in his eyes, to be the consequence of his having raised his hand against his brother.
‘It will eventually pass,’ she promised him, pressing her cold lips to his brow, or into the hollow sockets of his seeing, as though she would taste their weariness, swallow it for him, swallow it from him. ‘The day will eventually come when you will not remember.’
But in this, as in everything else, she was mistaken. His brother has nothing to do with the apparently contradictory sensations of universal worthlessness and personal insufficiency to which he invariably wakes. It was the same even when his brother lay sleeping unbruised beside him. All that has changed is that he is now without anybody close to him to punish for how he feels.
This has been the most lasting effect of his crime against his brother: he has once and for all denied himself the other side of his great argument with life. He has risen against his own yearning to quarrel, to be at variance, to enjoy and suffer disjunction, no less than he has risen against his own blood.
As with all those who take extreme measures to silence their rivals, who are literal enough to insist that their view must alone prevail, his punishment is identical with his crime — single-mindedness.
Single.
Mindedness.
But he does not wake to an immediate apprehension of this. He has to crawl towards it every morning.
He would like something to eat and drink. No man experiences futility in the act of devouring food. But he is not prepared to search for victuals in this room. He ties a rag around his loins and feels his way to the door. Like a dog scenting love or liver, he lifts his head and twitches his nostrils. And then it comes back to him, where he is and how he got here. The smell that does it is not the smell of damp timber and streaming walls, but the smell of visionaries and their unventilated hallucinations. Spectres always leave an odour behind, and the stairwell is choked with the charred oniony sweetness of their passing.
He is reminded of a whimsical expression of starvation commonly used by the beggars of Babel — ‘I am so famished I could eat a ghost.’ Which, for all that he detests whimsy, makes him hungrier.
He descends the stairs, disgusted by what he imagines the timbers to be oozing beneath his unsandalled feet. From a doorway on the half-landing a finger beckons him. ‘Traveller,’ a voice whispers, ‘dost thou know how many sparks from the great One Spark lie trapped in every ear of corn? Canst thou count the brilliances imprisoned in a loaf of bread?’
I will not get what I want here, Cain thinks, and keeps descending.
On the next floor down he has to negotiate a group dressed like desert nomads, standing in a tight circle and holding candles. If he is not mistaken they are discussing his mother.
‘Then Satan moulded the form of woman from the slumbering body of the man, and tricked an angel of the First Heaven into taking up abode within her. And when the angel saw that he was trapped in mortal flesh, he grieved sorely, shedding tears. And all the angels wept to see him weep. But Satan’s heart was hardened all the more, and he filled the woman with a madness and a longing for sin that was unquenchable. And the woman’s desire, brothers and sisters, was like unto…’
The speaker pauses. He is young in body but without colour in his face and without, as far as Cain can see, any openings in it either. A beard has grown over him, like grass over a neglected grave. Only a wandering tongue is visible — an alien soul, a lost fragment of primordial harmony, a fugitive with no mouth to go home to.
‘. . what was it like unto, brothers and sisters…?’
‘A glowing oven!’
‘A raging fire!’
‘A flaming furnace!’
‘A volcano that never sleeps!’
Would that my father were here, Cain thinks, to listen to this description of his wife. Then he changes his mind and thinks, praise be to heaven that he isn’t. People cannot always be relied on to see the funny side of things. Like the angel who wept to find himself trapped in the flesh of mortal woman.
Although he is not dressed to be seen, Cain pushes through the rapt congregation. No one notices him. No one knows that the first ash from that sleepless volcano, the first bun from that glowing oven, is passing among them.
The catechist has begun again. ‘And seeing the conflagration in the woman’s womb, forthwith the devil in a serpent’s form slithered out from the reeds and sated his lust on her with his… with his what, brothers and sisters…?’
Here it comes again… all they can ever think about! thinks Cain. The far limit of every believer’s conception of original wickedness — the old slab of creeping coccygeal joint and muscle.
‘Tail!’ the brothers and sisters proclaim together.
‘Tail!’
‘Tail!’
‘Tail!’
He turns his, but before he can make it to the next flight of stairs a voice blows warm in his ear — ‘I know who you are, of course, being a scholar, and am honoured.’
Cain finds himself looking into the fine but swerving eyes of a man of middle height and middle years, but of more than middle respectability, judging from the sumptuous room — the sumptuous suite of rooms — that extends behind him, and the magnificently brocaded gown he wears open at the throat, where whitening hairs of unusual length and tenuity sprout like lady-fern, and where a stone, not unlike lapis lazuli, swings on a golden chain.
‘My name,’ the gentleman continues, ‘is Raziel, though my ideas are circulated under the pseudonym, Antinomi. I don’t suppose you…’