Cain apologises. ‘I have not long been resident in this country,’ he explains.
‘Of course you haven’t. Of course. Of course.’ An illimitable capacity for pain shows in Raziel’s flickering grey eyes and in the nervous gestures of his hands. He is unable to control his fingers. One moment they are at his lips, then they are plucking hairs out of his chest, then they are up to his scalp where no hairs grow at all. He has removed those too, in his disquiet, Cain decides, imagining the absorption in self-cruelty, the Abel-like concentration of such a task.
He follows Raziel into his rooms. Yes, he will take wine. Yes, he would love cake. Yes, he will accept date wine. Yes, grape if it is superior. Yes, red is fine. Yes, white if it is more suitable to the time of day. Yes, cherry cake. Yes, syrup. No, not if it clashes on the palate with white grape.
While Raziel is in his kitchen, Cain surveys the drawing room which has been offered to him as an alternative to the library, and in which he has been given the choice of sitting or standing — sitting on cushions or on a stool, standing with his back to the fire or the door. The room is divided in the middle so that one half is an exact mirror image of the other, an identical reflection marred only by slight but deliberate distortions — an ivory statuette of a goddess looking back at a clay figure of a demon; the painted vine-trellis on the left half of the ceiling bearing healthy fruit while the trellis on the right bears only berries that are blighted.
‘I am mortified,’ declares Raziel, returning suddenly, unable to prevent his hands wandering to his chest. ‘I have not offered you the loan of apparel. How do you like your sleeves?’
‘How?’
‘Long or short?’
‘I will take either.’
‘Aha,’ says Raziel. ‘Aha.’ It is the sound of a small nerve snapping.
I am in a place, Cain tells himself, where not to choose is to be damned. ‘Long,’ he says.
‘Short will suit you better. And your preferred goblet?’
‘Large.’
‘Aha.’
‘Crystal.’
‘Aha.’
‘Cut.’
‘Aha. And in the stem?’
‘Squat.’
‘Slender is more appropriate to white grape.’
‘Then slender,’ says Cain.
In the event he is offered carrot juice served in an ornamental gourd. And a bowl of fruit. And a copper patera — although his taste runs to pewter — of marshmallow.
It is while Cain is bent low over the marshmallow, trying to keep the sugar off the borrowed gown, that his host slips silently out of his robes. Almost silently. Perplexed by what he takes to be a susurration of draperies, a swoosh as of a tent flap blowing open, Cain raises his eyes just in time to catch, or just too soon not to miss, Raziel emerging prematurely from the chrysalis, still larval white, and quite bare except for a bangle around each wrist, a leather thong about his ankle, and the lapis lazuli humming on the end of its golden chain.
I am about to be required to make a choice again, Cain fears.
‘I know who you are,’ Raziel says.
‘You have told me that,’ Cain replies.
‘You are numbered among the transgressors.’
Cain says nothing.
‘You are reckoned with the sinners, and you bear the sin of many.’
Still nothing.
‘You have trodden on the vestures of shame. How are they to the foot? Are they soft, or do they chafe you?’
Cain keeps his head in marshmallow. He is not going to be caught staring at Raziel’s forelimb which, thanks to the orbed character of vision, he can peripherally discern — a thin, pointed pod, like okra, hanging as though it is a broken pendulum in the dead centre of the room, where each reflection meets itself.
‘You have attained virtue through evil —’
‘I must consider leaving,’ Cain says.
‘You have loved God by loving the devil —’
Cain rises. Because he cannot go on looking down and safely navigate the room, he must look up. Raziel is standing on one leg, like a water bird, and is shielding the back of his head with his arm, as though expecting — as though inviting — heaven itself to fall on him.
‘Abase me so that I may know pride,’ he begs.
‘I don’t hold with paradoxes,’ Cain says.
Detecting threat, Raziel raps out a litany. ‘Strike me down so that I may rise. Wound me so that I may heal. Murder me so I may live.’
‘That would be no way to return your hospitality,’ Cain says, recognising, even as he says it, that he’s wrong.
Raziel sways on his stalk. His handsome head, with its stern discriminating mouth and skidding grey eyes, astounded by the foreign body it surmounts, appalled by the strange importunings it speaks. The swaying is so precarious, one puff of wind would blow him over.
But the room is close and still, without draughts.
‘At least steal something from me,’ he implores. ‘Take —’
‘That you may be given?’ Cain looks about to see if there is anything he has use for, and then remembers that the only thing he needs is round his shoulders. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘I owe you for your kindness. I’ll keep the gown. In return you may have the rag.’
A tremor passes over Raziel’s body. Even where the hairs have been pulled out in agitation, he ripples like corn. ‘Praise be to Thee, O God of heaven and hell,’ he hymns, ‘who permittest what is forbidden, who allowest the cruel to subdue the meek, and the wicked to teach their ways to the good. He robs me and — behold! — I am richer.’
Before he leaves, Cain notices that Raziel’s pale, pointed okra pod has begun to stir and rise… like a ziggurat… godwards.
VII
Abstract and brocaded, he runs into Sisobk on the stairs.
Gleaming and in tatters, Sisobk drops to his knees and embraces Cain’s feet. ‘You saint,’ he says, ‘You martyr, you tower —’
‘Get up,’ Cain tells him. ‘I see that in one night you have reduced my clothes to the condition of your own.’
‘And I see that in one night you have raised mine to the condition of yours. Didn’t I say we were the perfect complement to each other!’
‘You should not have stolen my clothes. And you should not have inveigled me into this House.’
‘I only invited you. You came of your own accord.’
Cain thinks: no, I didn’t — I was nudged. But what he says is, ‘And that is exactly how I am leaving it.’
‘Not yet. Wait till you hear…’ Sisobk pulls at the hem of Raziel’s robe. ‘Wait till I tell you what I’ve done.’
‘Not if it involves watching you moving your mouth. I think I will not mind if I never see a human mouth move again.’
Sisobk is only too willing to cover his. Don’t his fingers fly naturally to his betel-stain moustache anyway?
‘Didtfyou,’ he says, behind his hand. ‘Didwayoudvdon. Iraisdmarm.’
‘And not if it involves listening,’ Cain says. ‘I think I will not mind if I never listen to a human voice again.’
‘Buisabouyou.’
‘Especially if it’s about me.’
He turns, trusting his feet blindly to the rotting stairs.
Sisobk follows, freeing his mouth, making a final lunge for Raziel’s robe. ‘I did it in your name, and in your clothes, and with your brother and your God goading me.’
A deaf man, Cain continues his descent, past the gourmandiser, past the twitching shadow, through a crowd arguing the sex of the Demiurge. ‘Like unto a hermaphrodite He is…’
‘I don’t know how you stood it,’ Sisobk calls out. ‘Having those two dinning in your head. One too old and one too young. One angry every day and one grateful every minute. And both resenting you because you wouldn’t play give-me-thank-you with them. How did you stand it for so long? How did you hold out? I couldn’t. I didn’t!’