Do words mean anything or not? my father asked. He sounded exhausted, at his wit’s end before the argument had begun.
He took our silence as a signal that we concurred, that words did indeed mean something. Then if the angel had meant flat, he stormed, the angel would have said flat!
And if he’d meant heaped, my mother insisted, he would have said heaped.
My father held out his claw-hammer hands — behold, empty, a reasonable man. Full! he shouted. Hand full!
As a matter of course my mother winced beneath his empty violence. A hateful drooping of the neck and of the spirits, a dumb-show of weariness and martyrdom, but also an indication of adversarious stubbornness, fixed for all time.
Saraqael didn’t say hand full, she countered, he said handful — there’s a difference.
What difference? Show me how it’s different.
You know it’s different.
Show me — show me how it’s different.
She closed her eyes, as though to blind herself to his shouting, since it didn’t please the Almighty to make her deaf to it.
It’s different, she said, because it implies what a hand can naturally hold, not what a hand can be made to hold. Saraqael — Saraqael, Saraqael, Saraqaeclass="underline" she still had not stopped naming him — Saraqael was not setting us a test. He was not asking you to prove that you can balance half the universe in your hand.
Adam looked to his younger son for a refutation of this. Tell her, his glance implored, tell her that she has never had a single true thought in her life.
But Abel never decided between disputants. He would sooner have plunged up to his shoulders in entrails. I agree with both of you, he said. The ruling’s ambiguous.
Adam looked to me, positioned as was my wont now, at a suspicious distance from the altar and its attendants, like a snake outside a ring of fire, contemptuous but transfixed. It must have been an evening service because I remember the sun sitting like a bubble of blood on the point of the grassless mountain my father and I no longer visited. The Creator had taken to stretching out our evenings interminably, pleased with the succulence of what reached Him as long as it stayed light. Sometimes, in order to extend His enjoyment, He would halt the sun in its decline and hurl it back into the sky. On this occasion He kept it bouncing on the pinnacle while we quibbled over flour. You could hear the earth ticking with His waiting. The sky throbbed above us, flecked, taut, attenuated, like a stretched nerve.
My father was still waiting too. Go on — tell her, tell her, tell her she has never once been right…
I agree with neither of you, I said. Saraqael, may his name be soon forgotten, said the handful should be brought — that is to say, carried; but you cannot carry, without spilling it, an open palmful, heaped or flat. Therefore he must have intended us to understand, whatever can be carried in a closed fist. Not that I care.
A closed fist? My father had never heard anything so ludicrous. A closed fist? What — like one of these!?
My mother saw no merit in the suggestion either. She clicked her teeth at me. Treated me to the family jeer. Showed me how my own mouth wanted to go. How it would go if I didn’t move heaven and earth to stop it. Closed fist? I’m not having that, she said.
Ha, said Adam.
Tst, said Eve.
S… nap! went the sky.
Truly, I sometimes think I must have been a messenger from the God of Hymenaic Bliss Himself, so reliably did I harmonise my unhappy warring parents with themselves, with each other, and with short-tempered nature.
And yet they thought Abel was the loving one.
The important thing, he said to me, a week or two after the disagreement over greed and envy we never had — the important thing is to give something away.
I tossed a stone at him. Like that?
Something that’s your own.
I plucked a hair from my head. Like that?
Something you value.
I looked about me. You have me there, I said.
I wearied him. He never once began a conversation with me that he did not ultimately regret. He must have vowed a thousand times that he would not speak, or at least not initiate a discussion, again. But I was always able to lure him into talk, though talk was not his medium, by seeming to have mended my ways, by appearing to be curious this time, finally, at last, once and for all, to hear what he had to say. Then the moment he opened his mouth I would look away, feigning boredom or disgust.
It was his discomfiture that I was after. Not because I was callous and enjoyed the sight of suffering, but because his distress was my excuse for remorse. This is what happens when you love your pretty brother to excess: you need to bruise him so that you can kiss him better.
And all the time he thought we were discussing God.
What I mean when I say it’s important to give something away, he persisted, is that it’s necessary to let something go.
What’s the difference? (I could sound like my father when I needed to.)
You think I’m talking about making a gift, but actually I’m addressing the idea of release.
From captivity?
In a sense, yes.
Like this bullock you are dismembering –
The bullock doesn’t enter into it. What matters is that I’m parting with something, allowing something to be taken from me.
And why does that matter?
Because it accustoms me to the idea that I will be taken myself.
So you’re saying that you’re practising.
He thought about that, narrowing his vision as though the thing he wanted to say hung like a spider on its thread at the very vanishing point of sight. Seeing how much it hurt him to think was one of the voluptuous pleasures I derived from these encounters.
In a sense, yes, he said. Though it’s not dying, exactly, that I’m practising, but diminution. I’m getting used to going, bit by bit.
So young, I said, and yet so morbid. There was, I now acknowledge, flirtation in my tone: the sort of challenge that hopes both to conceal and to reveal admiration. So young and yet so morbid — I could not have wooed more frankly had my brother been my beloved. But then there was no beloved.
Did he flush? Did this bring colour at last into his face? It was impossible to tell, so blackened and gory was he from practising his own going on the carcasses of hapless animals. But he did not accept the charge of morbidity. Not at all, he said. It is not morbid to prepare for death in life. You’re the morbid one, fearing dying so much that life which must end in dying disgusts you.
One thing is not another, I said. Like and unlike are better kept separate.
You said that last time. And you are right — life is not death. But neither are they complete strangers to each other. If we can allow a little death in life –
Then we may look forward to a little life in death? Is this why you burn meat — in the hope of striking an advantageous bargain? O Lord, who seest how I stalk among the dead in life, please grant that I may move among the living in death.
I saw him struggle with the disposition of his mouth, but there was nothing he could do against its ugly will. The corners dropped. The bottom lip skidded off the top. His jaw lurched. I wondered if he meant to daub me with the marks of greed and covetousness again, but he surprised me — instead, he dipped his reeking fingers into veins of family history that were never opened.
It’s not your fault, he said, that the sin to which your birth is attributed is payable with mortality. It’s not your fault. I don’t blame you. You are a child of death and cannot bear what you brought into the world with you. It’s not my connection to death that is morbid, it’s yours.