My brother, on the other hand, was unwilling to settle for anything less than a universal assistance — I use the word in its double sense of both attendance and instrumentality. We all had to be there and we all had to help. I except, as I then excepted, myself. What need of me when there was an angel of the Lord to give instructions, and the first of all fathers to wield the blade, and the first of all mothers to whisper comfort?
He howled for all that. Then he fainted. Then he howled again. Then my mother fainted. Then my father howled. Then even the blazing angel changed colour.
Stimulated by the spectacle, the Lord Himself spake — the first words He had spoken unto us since my father had stepped between Him and my mother. ‘This day,’ He said, ‘have I rolled away from you the reproach of —’
But amidst all the fainting and the howling it was impossible to hear Him. And to this hour I do not know what reproach was rolled from me along with my prepuce.
A third thing went as a consequence of Saraqael’s visit. The regard in which I held my family.
I do not say love. Love, I suspect, cannot go. It might suffer adulteration with baser passions, might shrink or warp or seek concealment, but, like a birthmark, like a stone that crystallises in the bladder that hoards bile, like bile itself, it never leaves your body.
Regard, though, survives only by the grace of judgement. It is contingent and temporary. A mark awarded for performance. And in its dealings with Saraqael, the angel of the personal enigma, my family performed poorly.
For a start, we — I mean they, but accept collective responsibility — we set too great a store by his name. We couldn’t stop using it. Saraqael — it wound around our tongues and wouldn’t let us speak without it.
Saraqael, my mother said, has just informed me — haven’t you, Saraqael? — that he will not be with us many more days. I’ve told Saraqael I don’t know how we’ll manage without him.
Him? I said. Who’s him?
Saraqael.
It hadn’t been so with Semyaza. Then my mother was the one sought, not the one seeking. She was younger. Mud clung to her breasts. She had not drunk of the waters of bitterness. Was not using an angel’s name to settle scores with a mortal. And Semyaza himself had not been a guessing game. Throwing himself away — that had been his idea of fulfilment. Falling out of the sky. Coming apart in your hands. I don’t know how these things are judged in heaven — erroneously, though, you can be sure — but in my opinion this makes, this made, Semyaza the better angel. Self-hoarders like Saraqael set a miserable example. Only the prodigal are Godly. But does God know that?
Does God, in that sense — in the sense of being able to gauge how a spirituous value will look when it has flesh on it — know anything? It is a time-consuming business, keeping an eye on two worlds. And requires an intellectual flexibility, a capacity for agile mental dualism, which a God who by His own admission is unusually and irreversibly jealous, that is to say self-fixated, cannot fairly be expected to possess. Jealousy floods the system. It does not merely poison the mind, it confuses it with that which is not mind. It passes off electrical impulses as cogitation, the opening and closing of arterial valves as introspection, the sluicing of the heart as philosophy. Whoever heard of a jealous man who was capable of judgement? Or a jealous god?
Or a jealous brother?
I was envious, as I have not tried to conceal, and envy is not jealousy. Its greater coldness makes it more the friend of reason. I have heard it said, though I stop a little short of this myself, that envy is so far reasonable that it is a species of irrationalism not to suffer it. That envy is nothing other than a calibration, measured on the meter which is oneself, of the inequity of the world. And is therefore scientific.
Which is a claim I am at least prepared to make for the disgust I felt — no, the disgust I mensurated — in the company of the angel. He coaxed his name out of my mother, and then regarded her, in a slow unblinking stare, with the most absolute contempt. With my father, who was no less anxious to please, who in truth believed he had been pinched out of earth for no reason other than to please, he was more imperious still, not even bothering to pretend to smile when my father attempted innocuous sallies of humour, or tried to engage him in the man-to-man banter his heart yearned for, or threw up the occasional altar to his own designs, a sportive folly the height of a hundred angels.
‘Pull that down,’ Saraqael ordered. ‘Dost thou think nothing is to be restrained from thee? An altar of earth shalt thou make unto the Lord, not a tower whose top may reach unto heaven.’
Very well, Saraqael.
All I knew of death was in his voice. It was without music, without colour, without desire. And yet it seemed to have an under-voice which seductively whispered: ‘Come, come, I have music, colour, desire within me, if you can only find it.’ And off they went every time, my poor gullible father and mother, haring after the angel’s miserable mystery, only to run slap into his invariable rebuff.
‘You only have I known of all the families of the earth,’ he once said, eking out the messages he had been commissioned to deliver from God, ensuring we were always wondering what else he was holding back; ‘therefore will I punish you for all your iniquities.’
And they shone upon him, my beggared parents, not curious as to who these other families were, then, that did not enjoy the favour they did, and not struck by the cruel logic that had them paying so high a price for this unique acquaintance. No, there was compliment to them in there somewhere, and they would suffer any humiliation to lay their hands upon it. Gladly suffer, for the punishment was the very token of His love. His, meaning God’s; but also His, meaning the angel’s.
Saraqael’s.
I had to look away. It is no sight for a son, the pain-lust of his parents.
And it is no sight for a sibling, his brother’s angelolatry.
On the face of it, Abel fared better with Saraqael than my mother and father did. He kept his distance more. Was more subtle in the means he used to wheedle appreciation out of the angel. He was of the angel’s party in this, of course, being himself one who had to be coaxed, caressed, bathed into animation. Consequently the contest could almost be said to have been even — each giving only as much to the other as the other looked prepared to give to him. Watching them in the early morning in Abel’s paddock, thinking about exchanging a salutation that would not on either side cede sovereignty, a passer-by (had we been blessed with passers-by) would have supposed them either to be stalking ghosts or to be the spirits of the dead themselves.
But this equality of tactical torpor did not extend beyond disconnected sociableness. The minute our working day began and Saraqael again fell to schooling us in the science and theology of sacrifice, Abel became the panting pupil, starting out of his skin whenever his teacher noticed his application, as eager to please, to be seen to be assiduous, to be praised for his virtues and punished for his iniquities, as the rest of us… I mean the rest of them.
So the offering is to be of the herd, of the flock, he said — repeating what he’d been told, wanting to be certain that he’d investigated every corner of every stipulation — does that imply selection over and above what is blotched or spotted?
Saraqael moved a muscle in his cheek to show satisfaction with the question. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘For obvious reasons, not every animal is suitable to be an offering.’
Obvious reasons?
‘Yes. In the first place the beast must be your own.’
I asked why that was.
‘Because that which you have not reared does not belong to you…’