All this because He loved praise.
Hear my prayer, O Lord, sang Abel, twice a day, as the spitting fat and the frankincense rose in an undeviating pillar. O Lord my God, who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain: who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters — and lo! the drapes of heaven parted with a movement like the billowing of Abel’s vestures when I imagined him God-bound, and waters that had not been there the day before swallowed light as though it were a spring of crystal. Swallowed it and blew it back again, so that one could not say whether the beams fell or rose. There were moments when the sea, or whatever it was that teased us at the far blue edge of vision, seemed to flutter garments of its own, and thence send light streaming to the heavens.
What love between the water and the sky! What orchestrated reciprocity! Moved to melting, my father’s mountain — my mountain — flamed yellow, caught its breath — though we’d been there and knew it had no lungs — and seemed to lose its head for heights.
O Lord, who laid the foundations of the earth — and lo! those foundations themselves swooned and tottered, and it was as if a golden light whose centre was the centre of the world would take us all — sea, sky, mountains, Abel, seasoned carcass, desert laid to lawn, even me — into an embrace of everlasting molten joy.
All this because He loved praise.
My praise — What a lovely evening — was as swoony as I could make it. Totterer’s praise.
Abel said nothing, waiting for me to show my hands.
God’s in his heaven tonight right enough, I sighed. Ecstatic. Transported. Out of my skin.
He turned from me, too pettishly, I thought, for one with oblation and psalm-singing on his mind.
I sighed a few more times — Mmm! Aaah! Well, well, well! — then said abruptly, Do you want these cakes or not?
He kept his head averted. Put them on the griddle, he replied.
In any particular sequence? Surely they don’t just go on the griddle?
Just put them on.
You have to guess which hand.
Come on, he said, the sun is going down.
Does that matter?
It’ll soon be dark.
Does that matter? Does God eat only what He can see? And cannot He see, anyway, as keenly as a cat at night?
This was your idea, he reminded me.
We… ll, I said, rocking the word in both our favours. It was my idea only to show you that I’m not morbid.
Then put them on the griddle.
Guess which hand.
He said nothing.
Pretend I’m my father! Humour me! Guess which hand!
Right.
Wrong!
Left.
Wrong!
This time he looked up and saw me with both arms outstretched and both hands open — behold, empty, a trivial man.
He shook his head, dispelling anger, sorrowing over me, trying to find some way to bring his lips together.
What man do you know — what boy do you know — who likes to be sorrowed over?
I’m joking, I said — but there was no laughter in my voice. I’m teasing you. Look. I have the dough here. Inside my shirt.
He wouldn’t look. Enough jokes.
I mean it, I insisted. I have the dough. A big, fat, round ball of it. Here. Catch.
He swung around and something in the urgency of his movement, something in the clumsy desperation with which he made to catch, clutch, fumble, caused the blood to run cold in my veins. I froze at my extremities, watching him scrabbling in the dirt. Why did he care? What was there in a ball of dough, rolled in anger, thrown with contempt, that ought to have concerned him? A paste ball! What magical properties did it already possess for him, before a fire had been built beneath it, before a blessing had been crooned over it, before it had been smoked and sent on its demeaning errand, that he was prepared to roll around in the dust himself rather than let it lie there unretrieved, unsalvaged, unredeemed?
It is a vile thing to witness agitation, in one you love, caused by a matter you consider trifling. I dropped down with him in the dirt and fought for possession of the ball of oil and flour, besmirched now, blemished, fouled, made forever filthy and unfit. It was difficult not to overwhelm him. He wouldn’t fight me. How could he? I had watched over his cradle, making sure his heart worked.
I left him on the ground, unharmed, and busied myself unnaturally at his altar. I didn’t look at him. I prepared the fire, lit it, shaped what was left of my unleavened cake mix into ten round wafers and arranged them on the griddle.
When he came at me he had the advantage of surprise, but not strength. He was too finely made.
You mustn’t, was all he said.
I held him off, my first concern being my offering which was now hallowed by struggle no less than sacrifice. Not only was it a gift against my nature, it was an offertory against my brother. We were both on that griddle. I hoped the gesture would be well received.
You mustn’t, he said again. And this time put his hands on me. It had been years since I’d last been rough with him. And now that I was rough with him again I discovered that I’d missed it, that it was no way for brothers to be, keeping each other at arm’s length, not touching, not fighting, not arguing, just silently denying each other’s right to be. We should have got to grips physically more often. It should have been ordinary with us, commonplace, an unexceptional event. Then we might have known better how to go about it. Might have found the sensuousness of it more resistible, less of a luxury.
All right — I might. It was on me that the charm of novelty fell. I smelled his bathed skin. I smelled his fear. I smelled his likeness to me. It’s always possible that I smelled his hatred and took it for something else. Hatred is the chameleon of scents and to survive must pass as bergamot or attar. When I pulled him close, I couldn’t be certain he was not my father, not my mother, not myself. Get very close and you lose a person altogether. This is universally true, but in my brother Abel’s case there is also his delicate framework to take into account. He almost fell apart in my arms. And when I began to punch him, not hard but persistently, first on one shoulder, and then another, first on this side, then on that, all that was ponderable in him, all that gave him weight — and all that lent density to his whiteness, all that was silver, all that was milk — fled his body.
I held him so that he shouldn’t fall or float away, and so that I could go on rhythmically striking him. Getting the rhythm right seemed to be important. It needed to be the rhythm of speech. A duplication of the patterns which I knew dispirited him. This was just talk, I must have wanted him to know. A continuation of our argument. The argument we never had.
I had to take him round the waist at last, supporting his spine for fear that, as he could not fall on me, he might choose the other way to go and break backwards. His face was tight against mine. Or at least someone’s face was. The lips twisted in what looked like the old family jeer — triumph when no issue had been contested, stealing what had been freely given — and more teeth showing than I cared to see. Marvellous, how teeth can express despair. The eyes were open but blank. No one’s eyes that I recognised. A bad odour came from him, whoever he was.