I was proud of him, I still maintain, though I can see that my pride was blemished — had it been one of Abel’s rams he would not have selected it as an offering to the Lord.
Of course he was right: when I complained of the damage officiation was doing to his health, it was my own health I was thinking of. His conscientiousness made me ill. Not because I saw it as a reproach to my negligence, but because the repetition and monotony of it set up a sort of drone of drudgery around me. Every morning the same carnage, the same terror in his flock, the same roaring and bellowing, the same sour smell of intestines, and the same songs of adoration. Every morning the pall of incense funnelling to the heavens. Every morning the sounds of celestial inhalation, the sniffing of the spheres.
But this regularity of death and prayer, gore and gratitude, constituted only the tangible part of the turmoil to which I was subjected. Worse was the emotional agitation — the mental buzz of faith and worship. I mean the atmosphere of piety, the rapt expressions, the consciousness of grace, those vibrations in the ether — rhythmic and persistent enough to turn your brain — which tell you that spiritual exercise is in train, that callisthenics of the soul are being practised, thunderous in their silence, under your very nose.
So why did I stay to be unnerved? Why did I hover around the service when I could easily have found another and more remote garden to defoliate, and been about my business far from all knowledge, far at least from all witness, of his?
Because I was maddened by his concentration, and galled by how completely it negated my concerns. Do I mean I was jealous of the relations he enjoyed with Him — the great Separater and Divider, of waters and of men? No. Do I mean I was jealous of his freedom from jealousy? No. Do I mean I was jealous of his capacity to feign freedom from jealousy? Perhaps I do mean that. But it should be clear by now why I had to stay. Had I decamped in the circumstances that prevailed, it would have seemed like a banishment — him expelling me.
You are in danger, I warned him, of becoming monomaniacal.
He couldn’t hear me.
One of these days you will be sucked up, I said, in your own column of smoke.
He threw me a look, as though to ask, Would that be so bad?
Should I have answered, Yes, it would be so bad, because in that case I would miss you?
It was easy enough for me to imagine him rising, slowly spinning in the eye of a benign tornado. I had been preparing his departure ever since his arrival. There was no form of leaving that I had not rehearsed for him. I knew how he would look drowned, choked, charred, crumbled. I sank him in quicksand, hanged him, starved him, dipped him repeatedly in boiling fat. Ascent was simple to arrange. One, two, three… and he was up, his tunic billowing, the soles of his feet foreshortening, losing their definition, losing their graceful incurvations, entering the same plane as the rest of him before disappearing at last into cloud.
This I could do, yet saying I would miss him was beyond me. Ours was not a family that gracefully expressed intimacies. We were harsh, in the image of a God who didn’t dare trust His affections.
Anyone would think, I said, that you keep animals only in order to burn them.
Anyone would think you have no sublunary obligations.
Anyone would think you have no one else to talk to.
Anyone would think you have something in particular to thank Him for.
Anyone would think He was the one that carried you in His belly and washes between your toes.
Anyone would think He was the one that watched over you in the night to be sure you were still breathing.
Anyone would think…
I kept it up for weeks, months. I squatted in the bloodied dirt, raking the never cold, always crimsoned ashes, pricking the ground with splintered bone, pricking him with the rage of my exclusion.
Anyone would think you were put on earth for no other reason than to spirit yourself off it.
Anyone would think you preferred There to here, Him to us (I didn’t risk saying me), Death to life.
Life? The movement of his pale lips was clear in its meaning. Life? Since when was I a champion of that sentimental entity?
Since when? Since yesterday. Since morning. Since that very second. When you are in the business of goading a brother who goads you with silence and self-sufficiency, you have to be opportunistic. If I could rattle him with life, I would not let squeamishness stop me. Besides, I was a lifer in this sense: I abhorred the earth so violently that anything was preferable to the idea of a long lying in it. And life was the sole alternative to death that had so far been granted to our comprehension.
And I wasn’t the one doing all the killing.
You have the right to make your own choice, I told Abel, but you oughtn’t to be calling one thing another.
He shook his head and sighed one of Eve’s dismissive sighs — meaning, I know none of this, and will have none of this. Perhaps a sigh is not the word. It was more a tut, a tst, an intake rather than an expulsion of air, a toothy click of habituated scorn which my mother had stealthily tricked us all into learning — a withholding of approbation from a universe that had withheld everything from her. There were sweltering, ungenerous nights when, as a family, we clicked contemptuously at one another, and the only sound to be heard above the hysteria of the hyenas and the chomping jaws of crocodiles was the uninterrupted tst-tst-tst-tst of human contrariety.
Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, I said. One thing is not another. You understand that perfectly well when it comes to what you cook up on your holy altar. You don’t lay a thigh of calf alongside a rump of lamb. You don’t seethe kid in its own mother’s milk. Habdalah forbids it. The law of separation says that one thing is not another. Admit that you are butchering not to celebrate life but because you are in the service of death.
I make an offering to express my thanks, he said.
Why can’t you express your thanks some other way?
Such as?
Such as by begetting instead of killing. You could twist flowers between your goats’ horns and encourage them to increase.
They don’t need encouragement.
They don’t need depletion.
He came very close to tutting me. Then wiped his eyes instead. I felt sure that underneath the smoke his usual pallor had paled a little more. Although he had set his jaw, his lips would not stay together. Although we never argued, we were arguing.
I don’t believe, he finally calmed himself to say, that you are genuinely concerned for my flock. The welfare of my sheep is not what motivates you.
What does?
He didn’t want to say. He would have liked to leave it at that. We disagreed. That was all. His mouth was so far out of his control that he all at once reminded me of the mannequins my father had manufactured years before, to win back my mother from the shekinah.
I asked again. What does? What motivates me?
He still didn’t want to say.
I arched an eyebrow. Small gestures can be as weapons between brothers. He choked me with his white, throbbing lips — those two recalcitrant slugs that could never bring themselves to mate. And I drew blood from him with my quizzing eyebrow.
Very well. All right. I’d asked for it…
Greed and envy, he said in a broken voice. And then, more sonorously — Envy and greed.
Greed? (I never saw the point of denying envy. One might as well have denied one breathed.) But greed! What am I greedy with? I asked.
How spiteful he suddenly looked. You are greedy, he said, with whatever’s yours.