I stared at him. Didn’t I say he was clever? I stared at him for so long and with such admiration that the heavens began to fear seriously for their supper. The hills rumbled. The horizon, which had turned so blue recently with gratitude that we thought we could actually see sea beyond it, snapped shut against the sky, squeezing whatever clouds were trapped between into a grey dyspeptic dust.
A lick of flame, like a cat’s tongue, passed across the face of the sun.
Thank your towers that you do not get to see much of the sun in the late hungry afternoon. We had no such protection. Short of lying belly down on the squirming earth and covering our heads with dust, we knew of no system for blinding ourselves to its voraciousness. We watched it boil. We watched it swell. We watched it pulse like an angry throat, or sometimes fall open, indolently, as though put to sleep, sent into a pre-dinner doze, by its own expenditure of heat and energy.
I was caught between radiances — my brother’s cleverness, the sun’s angry insatiable repletion.
I’ll tell you what, I told my brother, I’ll go and roast some grain…
But I put it in the form of a proviso. I’d roast some grain, provided he thought that was a good idea, provided he’d love me for it, provided he’d withdraw the charge of morbidity, provided he’d ask me to roast some grain…
Not a word from him. What I did I was to do for myself.
I’ll tell you what, I told the sun, I’ll go and roast some grain for you.
Heavenly bodies are not as proud as brothers. Hearing food mentioned, the sun flicked out its cat’s tongue once more, and licked the blood that was running from its eyes.
Saraqael had been airy on the subject of grain-offering. Half-hearted, uncommunicative, mealy.
It hadn’t seemed to matter to him whether the offering was roasted, baked on a griddle, poached, stewed or fried, so long as it was made of the finest flour, patted into cakes or wafers — he didn’t say what size — and kept free of leaven and honey. I took the casualness to be a proof both of the contempt in which my produce was held — though I could scarcely argue against that, since it had been grown in contempt — and of God’s overwhelming preference for flesh. I could scarcely argue against that either. Who would want to clog up his gums with grainy biscuits, lacking all pleasing consistency and sweetness, when the alternative was lamb or veal, spitted with adoration over charcoal — skin, fat, marrow, innards and all.
I had no argument but nor did I have any feeling for the job. You cannot cook enthusiastically for an unenthusiastic Diner. He — HE — didn’t care, and therefore I didn’t care. Was this not mutuality?
Of course it could be argued, and no doubt was argued, that He, who knew everything in advance, only didn’t care because He knew I wouldn’t care. Looked at from His point of view, what was the point of licking His lips in anticipation of oatcakes more succulent than the breast of dove when it was written in flaming letters across the firmament that nothing that came from my oven would be worth the eating? The argument goes on and on. Why should I have tried to care when I knew that He already knew that I would not succeed? On and on. It would have been better for Him, and better for all of us, had He relinquished His advantage and walled off the future from Himself as well. Had I not known I was predictable to Him, I might not at last have said, So be it, have it Your own way, I will do what You always intended me to do.
But nothing, I fear I must admit, would ever have changed my attitude to cake-making. We were not a family that made efforts around food. What fell from a tree we ate. If quail appeared out of the sky, at more or less the time we were getting hungry, and landed in our fire — well, we could persuade ourselves to nibble at the bones. Otherwise it was whatever happened to be sticking out of the ground within reach of where we sat. We weren’t pernickety, we simply lacked — until Abel’s conversion — any instinct for personal ceremonial. We didn’t know how to commemorate our daily existence and make it graceful for ourselves. We didn’t value our functions sufficiently. But then how could we, given the small confidence we inspired in the Mind that had concocted us.
I wish I didn’t have to say it, but not everything can be blamed on Him — the Big F. My smaller effed father must bear some responsibility. He fed himself standing up, ate and drank while he was building rafts or perfecting sleight of hand, and understood communality only as an opportunity for him to show the rest of us what he could do. And my mother was no better. She had had her hour of grandeur when the Divine Light had shone on her and posted feathered messengers to whisper ineffabilities in her ear; thereafter everything was stale and wretched. What daily beauty, other than Abel’s limbs, did she have to solemnise? For her, too, the breaking of bread with dear ones was a tiresome rite, perfunctorily observed. A nuisance comparable with having to rise, bathe, dress and present herself to an empty world.
So I lacked example and training. And I lacked will. Any sort of manufacture that did not in some way diminish or deny God’s plan for nature exhausted me. Making mutants in my garden was energising; it filled me with the conviction of noble purpose: nothing less than the creation of an antithetic pygmy continent. I would have thrown myself similarly into the construction of a city, a Babel built above the very mud from which my father had been ignominiously pulled. As long as there was labour of contradiction to be done, I believed I could draw on almost limitless reserves of vitality. There was nothing contradictory, though — unless I poisoned them — about cakes. However plain and undelightful, however bitter to the tongue or tormenting to the teeth, a cake was still a celebration of God’s foison. And, not being a poisoner, or a foisoner, I could not find the heart to bake one.
*
Abel looked amused to see me. Seriously amused. He had raked out his altar, laid a new griddle across it, and removed all traces of flesh from its vicinity. A cursory glance told me there were no spots of blood in the dust, no splashes on the nearby rocks. Had he gone down on his hands and knees to wash them off?
I knew who had gone down on her hands and knees to wash him. His skin still hummed from the friction. He was wearing one of his shorter, more skittish tunics — the sort that made angels blush — and I could see red blotches on his thighs, tell-tale signs that somebody loved him.
I was struck again by what a beautiful feature it was, how bewitchingly agonised it made him look — his lips being the same colour as his face. A vermilion mouth might be voluptuous, but a white one whispers of far subtler pleasures, far more excruciating pains.
Well? He was impatient, waiting for me to show him what I carried in my hands, the tray of sacramental cakes, hidden behind my back. Well?
Well? I mimicked, affecting not to understand his curiosity. Where was the harm in a little torment. Especially when the object of it was framed in every pore to be a tormentor himself. Wandering blue eyes. Lips not quite a pair. Skin so fine you believed you could kiss holes in it. Where was the harm. Well? Well what?
Would he approach and pull at my concealing arms? Would he run around and circumvent my surprise? Would we tumble to the ground, laughing? Did we have it in us, we two, to gambol?
He stood still. Colourless. Worn out with my teasing already, although I had hardly begun.
What a lovely evening it is, I said, nodding to the distant hills (because of course I could not point with my baker’s hands behind my back), where God had chosen to flatter our seeing with the prospect of ocean. Ocean the colour of cobalt, and, on some days, if we strained our eyes, surf the colour of milk.
This softening of our landscape had been going on ever since the departure of Saraqael, and the erection of Abel’s altar. We had gone to sleep with the smell of slaughter on the wind and risen to find the desert… lawn. Trees with scabrous, armoured bark vanished in the night; in their place more benign and musical vegetation — oaks and cypresses, as I was content to call them, having lost my zeal for naming at about the time I lost my foreskin. Beetles and reptiles were not to be got rid of so easily — at any time a new species more horrendous than the last would conceive itself out of urine and manure, snorting, crackling, feeding on its own obscene pupae — but gentler creatures began to appear too, crane flies and ladybirds and crawlers of such limpidity that you could see the sun and God’s weightless beneficence through them.