And?
He didn’t like me. I could see that his hackles were high, as high as was consistent, anyway, with his severe cropping; and that his whole plumage shuddered, not so much angrily as hypersensitively, whenever I spoke. ‘And what does not belong to you cannot be given in sacrifice.’
I take that point to be covered, said Abel, by the use of the words herd and flock, so some further consideration as to selection must be intended.
‘If a man’s offering be a burnt sacrifice of the herd,’ Saraqael instructed, ‘let him offer a male without blemish.’
Why, I asked.
‘Why no blemish?’
Why male.
‘Because of the superiority of the flesh of the male and because of his greater value to the offerer.’
Does the value to the offerer affect the savour of the offering?
Did I detect a feathery flinch, a stiffening of the already stiff wing-carriage? ‘It proves,’ he said, ‘the sincerity of thy devotion.’
And is that the matter finished, Abel wanted to be clear, as to limitation?
‘Not quite,’ Saraqael pronounced. ‘An animal is not suitable for sacrifice upon which any sin has been committed.’
Any sin?
‘Any uncleanness.’
That still didn’t help Abel. His fingers fluttered at his lips.
‘Any sexual uncleanness,’ Saraqael spelt out.
My poor brother’s face twisted horribly at this. And mine twisted horribly for him. It is a most painful thing to see the collectedness vanish from the face of someone you love. It is as though you are privy to the undressing of their soul. And you know you will never be forgiven for what you have seen. But why did Abel’s soul undress itself just then? It could not have been that Saraqael’s words reminded him of some guilt. No, nor even of an intention towards that which would end in guilt. He was too conscious of his beauty to think of wasting it on an unappreciative ewe. No, it had to be the fantasticality of the suggestion that shamed him. The vast scope for wrongdoing in his nature which he had not, until now, even begun to put his mind to. Sexual sin? Upon a burnt offering designate?
What a child he was, or what a narcissist, not to have long ago ticked this off the unending list of conceivable abominations. Was it possible that he carried in his head some other list, of crimes he thought he never could commit? Were we that different, even though we were brothers?
Saraqael read both our minds. An expression of the finest, most unadulterated angelic distaste passed over his features. Passed? No. The revulsion twitched and stayed. I was relieved that neither of my parents, off carving altar-stones and collecting frankincense respectively, was here to see it. Though in another sense I wished they had been. It would have done them no harm to learn what an enemy to themselves they had tried to please. ‘Humans,’ Saraqael as good as said — for it was his skin that spoke and not his mouth — ‘inhabitants of this lowly sphere, will stoop, in fact or in their thoughts, to anything.’
If it is true that higher up the hierarchy there had been strong resistance to the initial creation of fruitful flesh down here, and the implantation therein of chosen seed, then Saraqael had assuredly been of the circle which had counselled against it. He was not Semyaza. He was not here in fulfilment of a raging desire to be among us. Abel caught his fancy, true enough, but his fancy was always passing. He intended soon to be gone from us. Departure had been in his eyes from the start. And we would vanish from his thoughts, Abel included, the moment he opened his shoulders and took off.
Speaking for myself, there was nothing in his travel arrangements I would have wanted him to alter. But nobody willingly contemplates his disappearance from another’s mind. You want to lodge somewhere in the memory even of those you despise. Especially of those you despise. And I liked the idea of lingering a little longer in the angel’s.
Which must have been why I decided to go on worrying at the edict against tainted flesh. So an abused animal, I said — nudging, nudging with my lowered horns — is no more savoury to the Lord than a lightly prized one?
He looked surprised that I needed to ask. No, not surprised — how could any of us surprise him? — sickened.
You see what I’m driving at, I drove on. You tell us that an animal which is not the offerer’s own, and which on that account he values not at all, is unsuitable as an offering for precisely that reason. But now you also tell us that an animal which might be exorbitantly valued, which is very much the offerer’s own, is unsuitable for that reason.
Angels think in prohibitions. Even Semyaza spent every waking minute preoccupied by moral law. Keeping it/breaking it — these are merely alternative forms of the same engrossment. Saraqael was so weighted with injunction it was a miracle he could fly. ‘Whosoever lieth with a beast —’
Yes, yes, I knew that, I said. But I was not talking about the whosoever, I was talking about the beast. And why that beast should have been unsavoury unto the Lord, notwithstanding the likelihood that in any particular act of disqualifying impropriety he or she (or it) would have been the innocent party.
Here in the enlightened city of Babel — praise be to you all — where you show esteem for those of your gods you can remember by eating them and drinking them, my line of inquiry must strike you, at the very worst, as robust. But Saraqael was in the service of an indefatigable Proscriber. A rigorous Segregationalist. And a most fastidious Picker at food. Added to which there is the angel’s own refined character to be taken into account. So it should not be considered surprising that he grew warm with me, fixed me with those coals through which his vision blazed, and unloosed, at last, his sooty pinions — unfolded them, let air and light into them, and shook them, rattled them at me in the way that a bird is sometimes to be seen flexing its feathers in an attempt to throw off something foreign, something unwanted, that has stuck to them.
It was an impressive and, honestly, a fearsome sight. When he extended his wings, it was as though a sea of fire burnt around him, as though he were the fire’s core, its cause and its object, only it was black fire not red, jet not jasper, a great cloud of enfolded smoke and fire, out of the midst whereof a thousand tongues of flame, ten thousand times ten thousand points of feathery light, licked like demons at what they burnt and at what burnt them.
His countenance, too, suffered an eclipse; was like a sun blackened by lightning, incinerated; his coronal of clipped hair as dazzling as an exploding star, the stubble on his chin and above his lips glowing an empty interminable nigrescent blue, the blue-black of undisputed night, the colour chaos must have been when it was left to reign unchallenged.
In my dread I looked at Abel, wondering why he had not, if only out of brotherly solicitude, fainted clean away. But he was transfixed by the angel’s iridescence. His mouth was open. He held his fists, clenched, to the fine bones of his cheeks. He was white of course — when was he not white? — but it was an opalescent whiteness, the whiteness not of pallor but of frost. In his fright he had frozen over.
But it wasn’t only fear that possessed him. As surely as he was iced was he in love with what he saw.
And was not I?
Let me say it now and then have done with it. We fell out once and for all, my brother and I, over colour, over patterning, over — for want of a better phrase — the aesthetics of belief. In the coruscating spectacle of Saraqael’s spread wings and flaming nimbus, Abel beheld the Deity, the Great Designer, with his own eyes and experienced an excitation, an astonishment, a seizure, which he chose from that time onwards to call wonderment and to keep alive with worship. If that was what God looked like, then he was predisposed by the composition of his temper, by the very tone and tincture of his soul, to reverence HIM. It was the Art that won him, just as it was the Art that lost me. I am not saying that I was not struck by the Originating Genius — I had marvelled at It many a time in the days when my mother was the one being wooed — only that It didn’t find a path into my soul. I apprehended Its power, but my apprehension was ungodly. I didn’t deny It, I just didn’t like It. Whereas for Abel there was no disjunction between The Thing he saw and what he felt. There could be no disjunction. Since It was, he must adore It.