But Cain has found the daylight and is off, breathing hard, and giving vent to some reflections of his own. ‘Mould is metaphor,’ passers-by on the sun-blanched streets of Babel are surprised to hear him muttering. ‘Mould is monotheism. Mould is the One Model that all those like untos are like unto. Mould is whatever I do not mint new every morning for myself. Mould is mother’s milk and Maker’s mud. Mould is memory. Mould is what moulded me.’
‘You are talking, sir, to yourself,’ an elderly citizen observes, taking him by the arm for his own, and for the city’s good.
Cain is obliged to him. ‘I’ve passed an uncomfortable twenty-four hours,’ he explains. ‘But at least I now know what I’ve had growing on my skin.’
Sisobk the Scryer, meanwhile, sits on the hermeneutic steps and thinks: so these are the thanks you get!
You go out in the guise of another man — for no baser reason than that you would like to honour him by inhabiting his skin for one hour of one night; you are fallen upon by a madman with a twisted spine who believes the clothes you are wearing you have stolen from his friend; you are charged with being in the pay of the cursed Shinarites, accused of being a hired agent or an assassin; you are wrestled to the ground by this same contorted lunatic, who threatens you with a terrible vengeance, who promises that every Edenite is the ally unto death of every other Edenite; you find that when it comes to a trial he has even less strength in his body than you have in yours, and it is therefore given to you, in a quiet street, on a dark night, in a habit not your own, to take a head between your hands and bounce it — lifting it gently as though it is a pretty ball and you are a pretty child playing with it — and bounce it… catch and bounce, catch and bounce, on paving stone so hard that a man’s sandal, let alone a man’s head, rings from the contact like a bell.
And these are the thanks you get!
That’s three things I’ve learnt about murder tonight, Sisobk concludes — it isn’t difficult to do, it isn’t really you that does it, and nobody is willing to say thank you afterwards.
Sisobk the Sagacious.
He gets up off the step and like a bear that has come in hungry from the country, blunders out into the street. He thinks he can see Cain’s back retreating, always retreating, in the distance.
‘Does this mean we’re not going to Padan-Aram?’ he calls out.
15. Cain Rectifies a Failing in His Brother
I hold my brother Abel so still in my mind — as though to disturb him would be to spill him — that he is more present to me as the small collection of phonetic sounds his name makes — two little vowels, a labial, a liquid — than as a thing of moving parts.
Was there a time, before he had become a rack of letters to me, when I grasped him as blood that flowed and bones that could be snapped? Was he company for me? Was I company for him? Did we do anything, go anywhere? Did we play? Did we run? Did we make? Did we destroy? Did we talk, ever?
I cannot animate my memory of Abel because I cannot animate him. He will not escape my affection for him, my watchfulness, my brotherliness. He will not move.
I have loved him into an abstraction.
We must have argued. My recollection of that offers him a partial release if he will take it, at the very least oils his joints and points him in his own, in a contrary, direction. But no sooner does he gather a momentum than I become rooted to my spot. There is room in my mind only for one of us to be in action at any time. This is how I avoid contemplation of antagonistic motion. We did not collide because we were not opposed. There was no rupture because there was no divergence. We didn’t argue. We didn’t separate. We didn’t fight.
But we did, whether I permit myself to think of it or not.
We argued. Without our eyes ever meeting, without acknowledging we were at odds, without in the beginning raising our voices, we argued over everything. We argued, if the truth be told, the very existence of each other’s souls. We queried, not simply our individual right to be, but the palpable fact that we actually were. Palpably, we said to each other, you are not. There was nothing, as I now understand, unusual in that. For love that originates in the binding coincidence of family, there can be no other fate. Parties to family love cannot simply, like participants in mere passion, run out of the energy that mutual regard demands; they are not free to walk away until they’ve obliterated where they’ve been; they do not move in a cloud of pure differentiation until they’ve hacked at every likeness to themselves. This is the common law of families. Where we were unusual, Abel and I, was in our reluctance to admit disaffection. Had either raised his voice to the other, neither would have been able to bear it.
Raising a hand is another matter. Raising a hand can be soundless, unadmitted, loving.
I loved Abel. Forty thousand seraphim could not with all their love put together, not with their eighty thousand nostrils opening and closing in unison to inhale the sweet smells that issued from his offering, have loved him more. I even loved him while he made his offerings, and felt protective of the very sacrificial diligence that divided us. You do not have to approve the service to feel tender to the servant. The very opposite may be true: that you grieve and sorrow over the officiant in exact proportion as you despise the ceremony. The more abominable the paraphernalia of sacrifice became to me — the more I grew to hate the punctilios of selection, the time and spirit expended on precautions, the blood, the fires, the smoke, the charred aroma — the more touching I found Abel’s dedication.
I would have needed to be an animal myself not to have been moved by the sight of him crawling among his flock, feeling between haunches and through fleece for that taint or blemish which, once found, disqualified the beast from God’s table. It is a test of love to see your brother on his back beneath a ram, and I passed it. I watched him in the field, minding ordinances, and I wept for him. I could scarcely hear above the beating of my own heart when I caught him severing a carcass, not with any of that eager anticipation of pleasure that could make slaughter such a sociable activity, but in strict obedience to prescription — his lips pursed, his knuckles white, his whole frame tensed and tipped, as though the effort of concentration required to celebrate the glory of God in one act of meticulous butchery after another would at any moment prove too much for his balance.
Not that he ever did fall. That capacity for still, self-punishing stupor that had held him ensorcelled in his sea-shells as a child kept him faithful and upright now, no matter how much smoke was blown back into his blackened face.
You are changing colour, I warned him. You were not told you had to sacrifice your fairness to God.
It washes off, he said.
(Of itself, ‘it’ did not do anything. The washing-off was seen to by my mother.)
You are damaging your skin, I persisted. You are ruining your eyes. You are breathing in filth.
I don’t feel damaged, he said.
I’m not talking about what you feel. I know what you feel. I’m talking about what I can see.
You’re not, he said. You’re talking about what you feel.
I was always proud of him when he was clever. And surprised by him. Had he been clever every day I would still have been surprised. He was younger than me. I had watched over him all his life. I had mounted guard over all his intellectual entrances and exits. Whatever was handed to him or taken from him had to pass by me. I checked everything in and out. Hence my surprise when he delivered himself of a thought or an opinion which I had not logged. Family surprise: that ultimately unshakable disbelief in the virtues and intelligence of those to whom you are related, by blood.