I saw the trance into which he’d fallen and knew there would be no waking him. I’d failed in that attempt before, when he cried his childhood away spinning mollusc shells in the dirt. And this was an identical order of insensibility.
The angel saw it too, and was satisfied. After all our efforts, all our Saraqaelising, this and this only was the way to please him. Spiritual abjection. Suspension of disbelief. And my parents weren’t even here to try it out.
But he was satisfied. Now he could go home. Mentally, he was as good as packed. He ran a hand over his cropped head. Lowered his plumage. Took the weight off his spine. Blew away the down that clung to his moist chest. There was still smoke coming off his wings, a fine, weeping, forest mist, and a rich, feathery barn-yard smell. He shook them, flapped them a number of times, protruded them in an angular half-broken attitude, allowing them to cool before shuttering them closed. No further demonstration of divine majesty was going to be necessary. He had landed Abel and had never expected, never meant, to land me. Not without annoyance, I must say, I grasped that nothing of what had just taken place, nothing in Saraqael’s visit, had been devised with my capture in mind. There I had been, hanging out, as I supposed, for critical independence, shielding my senses against a terrible and very nearly irresistible assault, and all along I’d been labelled as a lost cause and earmarked for forfeiture. It hadn’t mattered that I’d cavilled at burning off the first and the best, that’s to say the first and the worst, of my fruit. The Nostrils of the Lord did not twitch to anything but meat anyway. It hadn’t mattered that I’d found the angel gaudy. It was never going to matter how I found him. I wasn’t the celebrant, Abel was. He had the temperament for it, I didn’t. He was the sacrificator, I… I was the sacrifice.
I must have looked what I felt. Or else an angel can see a fallen countenance, can read it as a spiritual condition, even when the face is firm.
‘Cain, why art thou wroth?’ he asked.
Wroth? I waved away his concern, working wonders with my jaw.
‘If thou doest well,’ he continued, mellifluous now, mediative, melted, ‘shall it not be lifted up?’
It?
‘Thy countenance.’
It was as if I’d been kissed not by honeyed lips but by honey itself. I was the bee and he was the flower. Only the flower had come buzzing around me.
You must hold out against kindness when you are in a weakened state. This is the time when angels love to come visiting. They hear the ebb of life’s blood; they see courage evaporating in a thin smoke from the roof-top; they sniff the sweet decomposition of resolve — and they drop, in a twinkling, to your side. Art thou lonely, my child? Art thou troubled? Art wounded? Slighted? Spurned? Piqued? Forfeited? Listen, listen: for out of our mouths will come words of deceptive hope and comfort. That which thou takest to be forfeiture — how if it is only watchful and patient love? How if it is only thy Father — with a big F, with a soft F — biding His time, waiting until thou art ready for Him?
So, they had not given up on me after all. ‘If thou doest well,’ they had promised — half promised, intimated — ‘shall not thy countenance be lifted up?’
My countenance — how heavy it felt. But lifted up — how light it was!
Beware the angel when the blood in your veins is as weak as water.
And if I doest not well? I asked.
He came very close to me, and for a moment I thought he meant to unfold his wings again and embrace me in their fire. But there was no longer any heat coming off him, and no lightning in his face. For the first and for the only time he made me the object of his elusive charm; and for the first and for the only time I was no better than the rest of my family and could imagine no finer compliment to myself, no greater benefaction, than to see him smile.
‘Ah, if thou doest not well,’ he said, ‘sin coucheth at the door; and…’
He shook open a wing, soundlessly, and grazed my cheek with his feathers. I became weightless, as though I were a fish and he held me in his talons. A shudder ran through us both, but do not ask me whether its cause was the herring’s impatience or the bird’s cruelty.
And…? And…?
‘And unto thee is its desire.’
I scanned his fiery eyes for explication, but there was none offered. Even this close up, nose to nose as it were — though I did not reach to anything like that eminence — he was the angel of the enigma.
I looked across at Abel who was listening, listening, mouth open, skin not yet thawed, but in whose expression I saw only a sort of pastoral absence, a soul out wandering in sparkling grasses.
‘But,’ said Saraqael, at last, and now he did smile — not extravagantly, not even warmly, more, I suppose, reflectively: reflecting Someone Else — ‘thou shalt rule over it.’
Thou shalt? How did the grammar of that work? Was it an order? A prediction? A promise? Was the kingdom of sin being dangled before me as an enticement, a reward if I did such and such? Or had it been given to me, there and then, with no strings attached?
He must have looked into my mind and seen the riot he had caused, because he shook his head, rattled his feathers — I would say apologetically, except that he did not have apology in him — and corrected himself, or at least corrected a false impression. ‘Thou mayest,’ he said. ‘Thou mayest rule over it.’
It was up to me, in other words. There was no order, no promise, no prediction. Only the teasing gift of liberty. The gift that was no gift. The liberty that was no liberty. For to be told that a certain obligation is to be fulfilled, but that one may, of one’s own choice, fulfil it or fulfil it not, deprives one of all choice. Self-respect insists that under those conditions one fulfils it not. Had they delivered the kingdom of sin, repining and groaning, into my hands, I might have made a resolute and wise emperor. As it was, they merely left the gates open and I rode away. As they knew I would. As they knew I had to, the moment they changed their shalt to mayest.
Our eyes met over this diabolic transaction. It was the last time I was ever to look into the cunning labyrinth which is an angel’s soul; and it was the last time an angel was to look into the undeviating track to ruin which is mine.
He touched me with his plumage, lightly, once, below my ear, then he turned to say his goodbyes to my brother. I watched him take Abel by the arm, high up, almost by the shoulder, almost by the almond-white neck, and lead him in the direction of the soon-to-be-slaughtered sheep. Something in the manner of their intimacy, boy and bird, moved me to tears. Something fleeting and frail in their confederacy. Perhaps it was the unequalness. Or the ungainliness of their gait as they tried to find a common step on the uneven ground. Or maybe it was just that accursed old sadness that capsized my heart whenever I beheld my brother’s back. And then I saw, or rather I did not see, the angel vanish.
Whatever passed between them, this was the last time for my brother, too, that he was to share soul-searching, in his earthly incarnation at least, with an angel of the Lord.
14. Those Lentils… That Pottage Which Jacob Sod…