He cherishes a wild hope that she will be offended by this, gather her disregarded dainties, and go. But she wants him to see that she cannot be offended by anything he says, because in his company, in his time, in his… presence — she searches for the god-like word — she does not consider herself violable. She is without shame and without entitlements — when is he adequately going to grasp this? He can do as he chooses with her. How he uses her is entirely his affair. She does not even want to be consulted on the matter. Should he choose to dishonour her, he, Cain, the great dishonourer of the family, should he raise a hand to her as he raised a hand to his dear brother, why, she will esteem herself privileged, exalted…
It goes — he knows it goes — with the exquisite lace bodices and the eye-ruining needlepoint. It goes with the creaking cotton. The creaseless ribbons. The perfect symmetry of her lacing. The fanatic plait.
It goes with the bows.
But how does it go? And, more to the point, how does she go?
Every discourtesy rebounds on him. Every rudeness is a favour. He orders her out of his room. He remarks on her shapelessness, the protrusion of her bones, the flatness of her thighs and buttocks. He forces her to acknowledge the poor condition of her skin, its greasiness, its inelasticity, rolling collops of it between his thumb and forefinger, like a merchant appraising burlap. He spends whole evenings with his back to her, not uttering a word. He disappears without any explanation, returning in the early hours with common prostitutes — not shuris, but women compared to whom shuris are as unspotted as Eve on the twenty-seventh day — and forces Zilpah to lie beneath the bed among her hairpins while he simulates common sex with them. He threatens to have her removed by the authorities (some joke: she is the daughter of authorities) as a thief or a madwoman or a prostitute herself. One night he sets fire to her. On another he douses her with fouled water. ‘Yes, yes, do that!’ she cries, opening her mouth, extruding her bottom lip to catch the swill, showing him her glistening tongue. ‘Yes, yes, don’t stop!’ she pleads, as flames lick the soft soles of feet she will no longer use or wash. ‘Make me your sacrifice, make me the offering you wouldn’t give your God!’
And then in the morning she wants to promenade with him through the scented gardens — his sweetheart.
He doesn’t know what to do about her.
II
Sisobk the Soppy does.
Build a temple to her, that would be his advice.
Tear out your heart for her.
Transcribe her utterances on to parchment and wear them on your feet.
Sit her on a little stool and include her in that line of noble matronage that protrudes from both ends of every man’s imagination.
Revere the woman in her.
Hold her to you as you sway together above the precipice.
Don’t kick out.
Sisobk’s own reverence for woman has been boosted by his brush with the barbers. Those… those… boys! Those… those… beauticians! He never thought he would see the day when he was grateful to have no beard in need of barbering, but that day has arrived.
He fingers his ants’-trail moustache with satisfaction. He rubs a pleased plump hand over the smooth globule of Anatolian delight that is his chin. Those… those… Sodomitical sods!
He is gratified to discern a consistency in his prejudices. He has always skipped the Sodomites whenever their unruly city has figured in the Cainite gospel. He doesn’t know why. They just never felt right. Not even their name — who wants to get his tongue around Sodomites? They seemed there only to swell the Cainite numbers. To pull in whole cities no less than errant individuals. And although there were women in Sodom deserving of Cainite commendation — women who one day disported with strangers shamelessly, and the next refused them so much as a crumb of hospitality, and the day after that, to keep strangers always guessing about a Sodom welcome, pulled out whichever of their limbs declined to fit into a doll-size bed — they none of them quite touched Sisobk’s soft centre. They didn’t have the wife of On’s devotion, or the wife of Korah’s audaciousness. There were women in Sodom, in other words, but there was no woman.
The more he thinks about it, while tramping the wards of terminal infirmaries, closing eyes from which all light but the light of womanhood has fled, holding wasted hands which are still and always will be women’s hands, the more convinced Sisobk becomes that Cainite heroes are nothing without Cainite heroines. Take Esau… Or rather, take Rebekah, Esau’s mother…
A look of faraway fondness passes across Sisobk’s face. A delicious nostalgia for what has not yet been. A happy remembrance of things to come. Ah, Esau!.. pity about all the red hair, but… ah, Esau! And ah, Rebekah! He is sitting on the corner of a hospital truckle-bed, wheeled out to ease the final hours of someone’s forgotten mother. He can hear the soul’s wings whirring, clumsily, unaccustomedly, like a game bird’s. So much effort to depart. So much effort to have stayed. So much effort to have conceived and carried and given birth. Without exerting any pressure he holds on to what is left of the woman’s ankle, his fingers meeting in a circle no bigger than a baby’s or a barber’s mouth. And suddenly he is not where he is… he has slipped, slid, sidled out of the hospital and himself… and is somewhere else, somewhere the same but somewhere else… for behold! — he is in the womb of Rebekah… no… no… he is the womb of Rebekah.
Rebekah is famous for her womb. Was it sealed, the way a maiden’s is supposed to be, when she left Padan-Aram to be the wife of Isaac? Or had she, as the rabbis like to speculate, been ‘fingered’ by her father, or her brother, or Abraham’s messenger, Eliezer? There are those who affirm that when Isaac ‘fingered’ her and found her faulty, she explained she had hit a stumpy bush after falling off her camel in surprise at seeing him, Isaac, walking towards her on his hands. A man should not be so novel when he first greets a wife that others have found for him.
But Rebekah’s womb was going to be famous however she came off that camel. ‘Be thou the mother of thousands of millions,’ it was said of her; ‘and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them.’
Sisobk the Seminal is not conscious of quite such a press of numbers, but he is full, the bearer not of one embryo but of two, and already the nest of rivalry and dissension. Afloat in the same fluid, the twins agree on nothing. They fight for elbow room. They jostle for pole position. Whenever Rebekah, proud in her striding, goes past a temple erected to the worship of idols, the red twin, the strong twin, rejoices at the lewdness and the merriment he hears; but when she passes a synagogue, the slighter, lighter brother struggles to break free, impatient to join the mournful sanctifying. And so they kick together, one eager for the joy of life, the other for its lamentation.
Speaking with the best interests of her womb in mind, wouldn’t Rebekah do well to stay at home, passing neither synagogue nor temple? No. She welcomes the conflict in her belly, relishes the war being fought without words within her, because she knows it will end up a war for her love.
Weary of the buffeting — so much effort, the conceiving and the carrying and the giving birth — Sisobk becomes the buffeter. Esau, bristling with more hair at forty weeks than Sisobk himself has managed to grow in forty years. Sisobk doesn’t like the prickles. His gums ache from prodigious teething. His expanding bones knock against his skin. His finger-nails pierce the soft pouches of his little clenched fists. Time to leave, time to head for the light. But, as he winds his shoulders for the great leap of life, he feels a hand tugging at his ankle. The hairless one, holding him back, determined that he will either come out first himself or keep them both in, drown his brother with him in the black sea of maternity. Feeling her boys twist inside her, Rebekah shivers with pleasure. Sisobk summons up Esau’s strength, draws on a desire to be alive he never knew he had, and… jumps!.. dragging them both into the world, himself first, bloody and triumphant, the other, the brother — conserving energy, intent on marring his twin’s victory, and because he cannot find it in his tiny embryonic soul to concede precedence — still clinging to his heel.