And there is a second reason why the pantomime in Asmar’s studio compels him to stop and bend his back and allow his breath the time to find itself again. Babylonian bitumen. Jew’s pitch. Aluminium silicate and water. Clay. Mud.
The sight of Asmar and Esay stripped of skin and bone, returned to their own prototype, two slithering maquettes of potter’s paste, without vision or balance, rhyme or reason, reminds Cain of what he never saw but always sees — his father’s ‘birth’, the terrible moment when he rose grey and dripping from a bog, and had to shield his face against the light.
What does his father look like now? What did his father look like then, when in a single minute he went from having two sons to having none? Cain cannot grieve for Adam without grieving for himself. It isn’t personal. All fathers have this effect on all sons — they recall to you, if only by brute association, the sad, sickening, insulting inadequacy of beginnings.
Tsk… tsk… tsk…
The next he knows, a prophet with a round face is bending over him, stroking his hand. He is not too surprised or put out by this, although the heat from the prophet’s face, and the odour from the prophet’s parchment feet — an odour of drains and dead leaves — persuade him he should get up off the ground.
‘Thank you,’ Cain says. ‘I think I will walk.’
Sisobk still does not release his hand. ‘Master, I will follow thee,’ he says, ‘whithersoever thou goest.’
Cain shrugs. And allows the prophet to keep the part of him he wants. It seems a small enough favour. One sweet, well-oiled, well-manicured hand. A hand you wouldn’t expect to find engaged in fisticuffs. Or clay-making. More of a yetzer’s than a yotzer’s hand. A not particularly serviceable hand. And anyway, he means to walk off the person patting it well before light reveals them to the populace of Babel as a pair.
He takes his accustomed route, as though he were alone, avoiding the parks and river banks where even at this hour there may be poetesses out, refusing the suburbs famous for their avenues of cedars and hillsides sorted prettily into smallholdings. As a general rule of travel he turns his back on those places where populousness peters out, fearing the encroaching quiet of the last dwellings, where stone surrenders finally to grass and the din of commerce expires in whistling thorn. But in Babel especially, where the streets are elevated and paved, where the hoofs of horses and the shoes of men ring like copper pans, and the cries of chiropodists and curators, administrators and acrobats, close on the ear as though they were voices in your own scullery, the prospect of desert or bramble is unthinkable. He loves the commotion. If there were riot without fisticuffs he would love that. Other men’s carousal soothes his spirits. Let other men have it. Let other men do it. To stand (unaccompanied and unfollowed) on cobbled paving, to lean between ceramic cones in the shadow of a stuccoed wall, to listen in by a window to voices made mellifluous by wine, softened by drapery and cushions, free of earth, free of silica and alumina, free of a germinating God — what more can a vagrant who would be in love with his vagrancy ask for?
He does not shake off the prophet. Nor chill his ardour. Nor put a stop to his marvelling, his gratitude, his solicitations, his hand-patting. By morning, Cain has agreed that a man is the author of his consequences and the owner of his future, that he has an obligation to be curious about his children’s children, and his children’s children’s children, that he in particular, as opposed to man in general, owes a more implacable commitment to the Cainite cause, must not be satisfied with touching the hem of disobedience, but must raise its skirt for everyone in Babel to see, unless he would argue that he has come to town only as a tourist. Moreover, he has promised to cherish the woman in Zilpah, promised to visit Sisobk at the House of Hearsay and Hermeneutics, and promised to accompany him in the very near future on a pilgrimage to a watering hole outside Padan-Aram, where a damsel destined to be the mother of warring millions will one day slake the thirst of Eliezer’s camels from a narrow-necked earthenware pitcher. More pots.
‘Your solemn oath?’
Cain fiddles with the hem of honesty. ‘Solemn!’
But he is so concerned now, in sight of his lodgings, to have his hand returned, yet so unwilling to go back to his room and find the woman in Zilpah waiting for him, rump-ready, that when a ringleted, stiff-necked, ancient infant, with a face hidden in its own shadows, thrusts a note up at him, saying
YOUR LIFE IS IN
DANGER
FOLLOW
ME
he makes no bones about following.
V
‘Welcome,’ says Preplen, ‘to my home. Fratricidal greetings. Or do I mean fraternal?’
‘From whom?’
‘What do you mean from whom? From me! Come inside and I will fix you greetings from the rest of the family.’
‘From whom am I in danger?’
Preplen scans the skies. ‘From whom aren’t you in danger in this place?’
He gathers up the ancient infant as though it were milk left on his doorstep, and waits for Cain to cross the threshold. There is no urgency about his movements. Whatever is going to happen to Cain, it isn’t going to happen to him here. By the calm conviction with which he shuts and bolts his door, he means his guest further to deduce that this is probably the only house in Babel where he can be sure of that.
‘Meet the family.’
Cain already has, or at least has met their eyes, boring into his from the front row of the theatre, in search of whatever resemblance Preplen has talked to them about. Looking at them lolling uncomfortably on cushions, shipwrecked in their own home, it suddenly occurs to him that he may have been brought here for no other purpose but to compare feet.
‘My wife Nanshe — goddess of springs and waterways. Nice, eh? Her real name’s Naomi, but we thought that would be a bit of a give-away. And these are Tiras, Talmai, Talmon, Tekel and Telem — otherwise Jabal, Jubal, Tubal, Gether and Mash. You can’t be too careful. Girls…’
Cain cannot conceal surprise.
‘Thought they were boys? Good. Good. You’re meant to. Girls, kiss your Uncle Cain.’
‘I’m not your uncle,’ Cain says. He thinks of adding, ‘I am no one’s uncle,’ but does not know how to empty the statement of an anguish he doesn’t choose to feel.
His coldness may be one reason they do not, as he feared, swarm over him like cockroaches; but the furniture is another. They cannot get up from it, they cannot rise without falling, certainly they cannot manage anything as simultaneous as a swarm. Cain takes the opportunity of their confusion to extend a hand to Nanshe. She too is sunk in sumptuousness, so well-sprung that in stretching to meet him she slithers sideways down the sofa and comes to rest in a chasm between two feathery squabs.
Because he does not want to see what is happening to Nanshe’s wig in the course of this manoeuvre, Cain commands his gaze to travel round the room. Not since God the Great Draper recurtained the heavens to impress his lactating mother has he been witness to such excited festoonery. Burgundy chiffon billows from the ceiling. Organzine the colour of peach-blossom swathes every window, sighing like a young girl’s chest whenever there is a breeze. Not a wall is bare. Not a chair lacks covers for its covers. Not a doorway is without hanging tassels of gauze, twined in a riot of hot transparency.