Naaman follows her gaze, wondering whether she is finessing as to grammar, as to particles of place. If away is not exactly it, how about below? This frightens even him. ‘You don’t mean…?’
They stand solemnly, shoulder to shoulder, staring at the paved street and imagining what lies beneath it. It is not usual for them to be amused by each other simultaneously, but she reads his thoughts at the very moment he reads hers, and the coincidence leads to merriment.
They present a tableau which Preplen, observing them from across the street where he is sitting rehearsing imprecations over an infusion of bitter herbs, finds it easy to interpret. Another Shinarite conspiracy. Another whorish daughter of Babel confiding her secrets to the Shinarite whoremonger, her father. More laughter over a stranger — traveller from Nod or Eden, worshipper of Law and Y-H-W-H. More poison which will finally find its way to him, Preplen, and carry him off like one of those rats whose extermination the civic authorities of Babel have perfected.
Conspiracy theories never go far enough. It does not fall within the compass even of Preplen’s paranoia to guess that Naaman and Zilpah, father and daughter, are at that instant, if only for that instant, sharing the amusement of imagining Cain laid out before them in unimpressionable earth.
‘No,’ says Zilpah. ‘I do not mean that.’
Naaman rubs his chin in mock perplexity. ‘Not here. Not there. Not away. Not under. I am wondering where that leaves.’
‘Up,’ says Zilpah. And because the pair are in high spirits now, she adds, ‘And I don’t mean in smoke.’
‘Up?’
‘Yes, up. He dreams of being buried in a tower. Let him build one.’
‘My dear, are we speaking of immurement?’
‘No, but he is. We are speaking only of loaning him an architect.’
‘And a thousand masons.’
‘More likely two thousand. He dreams of building very high.’
Naaman’s lips again take on their poultice look. ‘They always have such extravagant ambitions,’ he says.
‘They?’
‘He — the Edenite. By they I simply mean the type.’
She worries over, worries around, her father’s proposition. Do they have extravagant ambitions? Does he? Is there profit in considering him a type? She had thought she had done and felt something exceptional, but if he is a type then perhaps she has merely done and felt something typical. Yes, there is profit to her in that. She can easier forgive herself a typical mistake. She can, perhaps, even look forward to making it again, if there are more like him bound to show up in Babel. Or she can generalise her hatred of him, dignifying it with universal truths and comprehensive observations, for there is moral and intellectual honour, not to say duty, in despising what is hateful in the type rather than the individual.
Surprising, the room there is for conflict in that narrow chest. Watching her through the steam of his herbal infusion, Preplen thinks she is standing silent, with her head bowed, picking at her plait, because that is the attitude Shinarite women strike when they are plotting ways of inveigling dark-skinned strangers. Whereas, in truth, what she is revolving is the allopathic drama whereby a private wound turns into a public scar.
She meets her father’s eye and signals that it is all right for him to release the twinkle he has been holding back. ‘Well, then,’ she begins, ‘if the heavens are the only place that will satisfy them —’
‘We should encourage their ascent? You are more wicked than your father. But will he stay there once he gets there?’
‘He will never leave.’
‘Are you the cause of that?’
‘Me? No. Worms.’
‘And you’re sure you wouldn’t, in that case —?’ He gestures with his thumb in the direction of the place to which they had alluded earlier.
She smooths her plait, doing her father the credit of showing a long consideration to his offer. But, ‘No,’ is her decision. ‘No, I don’t think so. I know the type. They are primed for anything that looks like persecution. If you want to make them really suffer, you give them what they want.’
Watching, watching, through eyes that neither take in nor let out light, Preplen gratefully receives the thing he wants.
II
‘I’m not acting for myself,’ Cain tells his Anatolian masseur. ‘I’m not here on my own behalf.’
The Anatolian has soft wet soles and is skilled in the art of spreading his weight. When he walks over Cain’s back it is as though an army of jellyfish is on the move. ‘There is no reason for you to apologise for yourself, sir,’ he says. ‘You are not the only gentleman who comes here more than once a day.’
If I had laughter in me, Cain thinks, I would spend it now. ‘I am not talking about the baths,’ he explains. He is flat on his stomach, able to use only one corner of his mouth. ‘I am speaking existentially. Things are out of my hands. I’m out of my hands. Other people are deciding my movements. Other people are my movements. If I didn’t exist they would invent me.’
‘If you didn’t exist,’ the Anatolian replies, working at Cain’s coccyx with his heels, ‘You would want them to invent you.’
Cain winces. He is sore where his tail is reported to be — such is the power of rumour. He thinks about saying, ‘If I didn’t exist I wouldn’t have any wants,’ but this is not the sort of conversation he is after. Among the desires he comes to the baths to have satisfied is a desire to lie on his stomach, talk through one corner of his mouth only, not see the person he is talking to, not hear the person he is talking to, suffer no interruption whatsoever, in short, to a prone musing accompanied by dim physical pain but rescued from the sharper pangs of solitude.
‘Mmmmmm,’ he says, to remind the Anatolian of the conventions. ‘Mmmmmnnnnn.’
The Anatolian climbs off Cain’s back and rubs himself with beeswax. The next stage in the treatment is a speciality of his and a particular favourite of Cain’s. He uses his torso as though it were a rolling-pin, ironing out whatever tension is left in his clients’ spinal columns after he has finished walking over them. Because he is as flocculent as Esau, the effect is of being finely punctured by a rotating brush. Cain can take no end of this, and sighs before the bristling masseur has climbed back on him. And sighs again. And sighs a third time, before registering that the Anatolian has pulled up a stool and is still waxing himself absent-mindedly.
Cain does the last thing he ever wants to do when he comes to the baths, and raises his head from the table.
Taking this to be an invitation to speak, the Anatolian pursues his theme. ‘If I didn’t exist I would make someone invent me,’ he says, ‘I could not bear to have missed this…’ He holds his hands up like goblets and extends them, agitatedly, to all corners of the steamy massage room, as if afraid he may not catch the precious streams which are pouring forth. ‘. . this… life!’
Cain looks at him. A young, fiery man, black as Nanshe’s eye, thistled, stinging, a man of points and edges, a projectile. Who has thrown him? Setting aside his youth, they are not dissimilar, he and Cain. They are both travellers, they are both far from home, they are both stocky, firm in the leg like foot-soldiers, they both like to talk. But someone — Someone — has taken the Anatolian by his ankles or his crop and flung him, hurled him with such vigour into life — life! — that it is impossible to imagine him ever losing his velocity and landing. That’s the way to leave; that’s the way to turn your back on home. Fly like a stone out of a sling. Not slink, as he did. Not slope. Not sneak. Not snake.
But when did Yahweh ever reach out to any of His chosen children and fling them, just for the fun of it — just for their fun of it — through the firmament? When did it ever occur to Him that they might like it, to feel the wind rushing past their bodies, to see the earth, in all its colours and undulations, flashing beneath them, to smell exuberance, precipitation, power coming from their skin, instead of fear, hesitancy and obedience? A jealous God, angry every day, He could not confer what He had never Himself experienced. He nudged His way through the skies, and nudged Cain into exile.