I
‘Those lentils,’ Naaman remarks to Zilpah, stopping her in their perambulation and getting her to peer with him, father and daughter, into an open sack stowed in the doorway to a seed and spice merchant’s, ‘I hope I will not soon be having to breakfast on such for your sake.’
‘For my sake? Since when have I had any influence over what you eat?’
‘I am not speaking of influence.’ He pauses. ‘I am speaking of respect.’
She doesn’t follow him, but like any child in the company of a parent, she knows that abstract nouns unfailingly herald trouble.
‘Have I failed of it in some way recently?’ she asks. ‘I cannot think what I have said or done to you…’
He turns his eyes from the lentils and treats her to a slow scrutiny. ‘You still misunderstand me,’ he says — and she worries because it seems a long time since he has said anything playful — ‘I am speaking of the respect I feel for you. I hope I will not soon be having to show it in lentils.’
Something comes back to her. In Babel, as in most Shinarite cities, lentils were once served as a funeral meal. The custom is now defunct, practised only in waywardly, wilfully traditional families, but she is alarmed and wonders whether her father intends some threat to her.
He stoops, too tall to bend easily, and slides his hand, palm downwards, into the sack. When he withdraws it, there are still a number of the little red seeds nestling like ladybirds in the hairs that grow upon his fingers, ‘It is not their colour that is significant,’ he says, ‘but their shape. Their roundness suggests the universality of loss. The mortality that rolls through all things.’
‘And why do you fear that I may be the cause of your having to breakfast on them?’
He continues to hold the back of his hand out towards her. Partly so that she should go on looking at the lentils, and partly because he has been told that his long, feminine fingers, with their beautifully tended nails, more violet than pink, and their silken yellow hairs, have a powerful effect on people. Zilpah’s mother used to say that he had hypnotised her with his hands, and admirers of both sexes have spoken of dizziness and other ecstasies occasioned by the combined smell and silence of his fingers.
He would like Zilpah to hear their quiet.
‘Because I am worried about your health,’ he says at last.
‘I am in good health.’
‘That is not what I have heard.’
‘Heard from whom?’
He flicks the remaining ladybirds from the back of his hand. ‘You were seen lying on the road the other day.’
She senses her colour rising and knows that she cannot keep it down. She wishes she had something to hold or otherwise busy herself with, ‘I was not ill,’ she says.
‘Not even temporarily indisposed?’
‘Not even temporarily indisposed.’
‘In a way I think that distresses me more.’
‘You would prefer it that I’d been ill?’
‘I would prefer it that you didn’t lie down in the road.’
She cannot conceal her shame. Or rather, she cannot conceal her awkwardness, and that is a cause of shame. She is too light in stature to bear scrutiny. There is nowhere in herself that she can hide. She is not being fanciful, she is not thinking metaphorically, when she fears she can be seen through.
‘I won’t be lying down in the road again,’ she says.
Naaman throws his head back, arching his neck like a swan, and emits one of his famous laughs. Few people in Babel who have heard this laugh do not want to acquire a similar one for themselves. It seems, somehow, to comprehend everything that is bright and brittle in the city — its temples to forgotten gods, its love of reflective surfaces, its equivocal antiquarianism, its serious unseriousness. Zilpah has been in flight from it ever since she can remember. And she shrinks from it now, as though she has been struck.
‘You don’t believe me?’ she asks, although she knows that that is not the reason he is laughing.
‘I have every confidence,’ Naaman says, taking her by the elbow and hurrying her along, ‘that you won’t be lying in the road again. But there is the question of where else you will be lying.’
‘You are still imagining me in my grave? I have told you, I am not ill.’
It is a brave try, but even she knows it will not succeed.
‘I am certain you understand me,’ Naaman says, ‘but since you force me — there is the question of with whom you will be lying.’
A calm, quiet as devotion, falls with the feather-touch of fatality itself on Zilpah’s narrow shoulders. It is good, now that there is no more colour left to rise in her, and no greater transparency that she can show, to have the unmentionable mentioned. It even releases some capacity for archness in her. ‘You don’t care for him, then?’ she notices.
‘Isn’t it a question, rather, of his not caring for you?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘My dear, everyone who has observed you.’
She is silent for a little while, content to be propelled by her father at his speed. Then she says, ‘We are all in accord in that case. You do not care for us together; he does not care for me; and I do not care for him.’
Another of Naaman’s white marble laughs. ‘You are not saying that for the sake of symmetry, I hope.’
She shakes her head violently enough for her plait to rise and flick the air, like a horse’s tail. ‘I don’t think caring has ever been the issue,’ she says.
Naaman sneaks a glance at her. In the unceasing war which irony and prudery play out on the wet terrain of his unsteady mouth, prudery appears suddenly to hold the upper hand. ‘There are some things it is not necessary for a father to know about his daughter,’ he says.
‘This is not a conversation of my choosing,’ she reminds him.
‘I know,’ he says.
‘The lentils were your idea, not mine.’
‘I know,’ he says. Elegantly abashed.
‘So, since you mean to attend my funeral, you should know what I might die of.’
He doesn’t answer. Only tightens his grip on her elbow and works his lips into a kind of poultice of distaste.
‘It won’t be love,’ she assures him.
He catches an unexpected bitterness in these last words, and this emboldens him to ask what it will be instead. ‘Hate?’
This time she is the one who is able to find a laugh. ‘Old age,’ she says.
It’s possible he is disappointed. What father does not want to hear his daughter confess an ugly and, if possible, unrequited infatuation? What father does not nurse the furtive ambition of having the old jealous dread — the humiliation of rivalry, the vicarious ignominy of rejection — realised just once?
But there are consolations to seek, no less than thrills. It can be as great a satisfaction to discover that your daughter is well, as that she isn’t.
He stops and puts his beautiful violet fingers to her cheeks, so that she may find a little moment of peace in their immunising smell; then, as though examining her for fever, he drops them lower and feels for her salivary glands. ‘So it’s all right?’ he asks tenderly.
Here is exposure of another kind. She steps back from him and reaches for her plait. It is essential she have something she can pick at. ‘Yes, it’s all right.’
‘You sound hesitant.’
She hesitates. ‘It will be all right.’
There are to be thrills for Naaman after all. ‘Do you want me —?’
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t wish him… harm.’
‘But you wish him… away?’
She thinks about that, her eyes lowered, looking for her answer in the paving stones. ‘No. Not away.’