I laughed. What — my bits of grass and grain? My first-fruits, as our blazing angel of the personal enigma grandly called them? My wheat, my barley, my grapes, my figs, my pomegranates, my olive oil and my honey? Do you suppose I hoard them?
You do not offer them.
Why would I?
As a token that you understand they are His.
If they are His, then He already has them.
He does not have them. He has given them to you.
In order that I should give them back to Him? Here is a fine giving, if the receiver must –
These things are gestural, Cain. The meaning is larger than the act.
Then why are you so punctilious in the act’s performance?
To show I value the meaning.
You mean, to show you value the meaning punctiliously.
He had been sharpening his knife on a whetstone the whole time we’d been arguing (except that we never argued), and now he drew the blade across the palm of his left hand. A faint line of red sprang up where it had been. He would sooner hurt himself, I thought, than hurt me.
Do you remember, I asked, how you used to spin shells?
He looked away. I must have too obviously signalled my intentions.
Do you remember, I went on, how you could never be drawn from them? No matter how late it was, or how tired you were, or how much damage you had done to your hands? You were punctilious in the act’s performance then. What underlying meaning was there? What lay beneath the act?
There was none, he said. Nothing did.
He was not as good an advocate for himself as I was for him. Of course there was an underlying meaning. He sat in the sand with his shells spinning and his fingers bleeding and the tears running down his baby-blue-veined cheeks because all in all that was a better way of consuming the time than any we’d been able to teach him. He had descended into himself early. I did not rule it out as a possibility that he had opted for his own company (over all others that were offering) in the opening seconds of his conscious life. He tried the muscle first of one misted gelatinous window, and then the other, and saw… what? Saw me, flaming against his intrusion; saw my father, not knowing where to put his hands or how to frame the words or gestures that denoted welcome; saw — no, sucked upon my mother, and drank therefrom the alternating sweets and bitters of every woman’s milk, the surges of wild pride in her instrumentality, the acrid loathing of having been fashioned functional; saw, and heard, the discomposure of the heavens, thrown into havoc by the fear that flesh might again prove devilish or, worse, angelic — saw, sucked, heard all this and plumped without further ado (as who would not?) for an inner rather than an outer life.
He had been absent from the start, that was all I wanted him to admit, no criticism implied. He had been absent from the moment he had decided against being present, and he was still absent, tending his altar, now. We were in a disagreement only over words. I called it absence. He called it worship.
In that case, I said, if the ritual you performed with the shells had no underlying meaning, was performed in the name of nothing but itself, and yet was performed so religiously, does that not lead you to wonder whether you aren’t an incorrigible ritualist by nature and would do just as fervently by a pyramid of stones as you do by God, were the stones only to speak out and ask it of you?
He was very angry with me. Posed. Pretty. Sooty. A morsel for a monarch. A Giftling for a God.
You see resemblances where there are none, he said.
Resemblances are all we have to go on, I replied. (For I was young and mad for metaphor.)
Shells are not God, he said.
Then I am holier than you. I think God is everything.
And therefore nothing?
That must follow, I agreed. The earth was without form, and void, when He created it. Therefore He must have had say over the void.
Word games.
Words, too, are among the little that we have, I said. So why not play with them? What else are they for? You refuse the game only because you fear it will demean the object of your ritual. But you’re wrong. My reasoning does not lower God, it elevates the shells.
Yes, but to the level of what? Elevate everything and you eliminate all difference between high and low.
What then? Is this not the last goal of worship — that we all aspire and ultimately rise?
If there were nothing base –
Aha, I said. I see, I said. If there were nothing base, there would be nothing noble. So it is still you who passes sentence on what is low in order to protect the status of what is high. You are the one with the poor opinion of the shells, not me.
Why do you keep returning to my shells? To remind me of the difference in our ages?
I couldn’t look at him. His face had become pointed, almost like a snout. An animal face, shaped to sniff out insults to itself in loving conversation. I said, I recall the hours you spent spinning because I am fond of the recollection. It also reminds me of how you waste your mornings now. I’m glad you are able to go on abstracting yourself from matters with which you would rather not engage. I don’t blame you. I wish I could. But don’t speak to me of your thankful spirit or my greed. Compulsive and repetitive behaviour has nothing to do with vice or virtue.
After which there was not much either of us could say to the other for many days, or, if you prefer to count in carcasses, for the time it took to hack and dismember a whole family of spotless ruminants — father, mother, sons, brothers.
Although my parents’ zest for helping out with offerings was no longer the eager thing it had been when Saraqael burned among us, keeping us fired with promises of praise that were never once fulfilled, they still welcomed any physical remission from the torpor their unpeopled existence had become. At its best their contribution had always been confined to the associated fuss of burnt-oblation — altar-building, secondary ingredient collection, unspecific all-round encouragement to the officiant (such as washing him) — and these duties they could pick up or leave alone as the fancy took them, without serious consequences for Abel’s ministry. He kept brimming oil jars by his altar. And jeroboams of olibanum. And firewood stacked high like the ziggurats of Babel, out-topping conceivable need. He was a priesthood entire unto himself, and had my parents not attended him for a year he would have remitted nothing in his panderings to the Ever Hungry One. But they wanted to feel useful. If Abel noted that his store of flour was running low — that is to say, that in fourteen months, allowing for a plague of rats, it would be gone — my mother hastened to mill him another hundred homers. If he believed it was time to treat Yahweh to a fowl, he had only to mention it and Adam would be off and back again in a trice, with a young pigeon flapping under his great arm, or a turtle dove, which he pretended to have palmed clean out of the air, struggling for breath inside his gown. Off with its head, Abel would say, and my father, wreathed in the smiles of the effective, would attack the bird’s neck with his finger-nail until he had severed through to its gullet and windpipe. So adept had he become at this that it takes me longer to say it than it took him to do it. Nip, shriek, smile — not the bird, my father — spurt, and off. By which time Abel was ready with his blessing.
There was not always, though, such a happy meeting of inclination and prescription. Some ceremonies bogged down, grew tense and even argumentative for the simple reason that Saraqael’s instructions were not as foolproof as he’d intended them, and left too much scope for that individual interpretation which is the death of all religions. How big a handful, for example, did a handful of fine flour signify? A hand as my father understood and possessed such a measure was not a hand according to my mother’s daintier comprehension of the term. And even when agreement had been reached or compromise conceded on the brute issue of size, that still left unresolved the question of whether a handful was a handful heaped or a handful flat.