I Am What I Am Not, thinks Cain. I am not a meteor. I am not a shooting star. I am not a missile. I am not a goblet held up to catch the precious streams of life. I am not an Anatolian masseur with soft flying feet.
I am a nudged man.
He must have said it aloud, because the Anatolian twists on his stool and allows perplexity to pass, like a spring shower, across his handsome, hopeful face.
‘How would you answer the call of life if you were me?’ Cain asks him. ‘What does life say you should do when you are conscious of a light but persistent pressure on every side — to do this or to do that, to be here or to be there, to honour him or to honour her? How do you know where your life lives and what its voice is?’
The Anatolian laughs, showing his white teeth, his red mouth — something else Cain cannot do. ‘Why do you worry about sides?’ he asks. ‘Why do you let yourself be pressed on this side or that side? Life understands only two directions — up up up or down down down.’
He is back on the table now, remembering his occupation. The human roller. The rotating brush.
Cain braces himself against the shock of the first fine puncturing of his skin. He is pleased to be flat on his stomach again, able to use only one corner of his mouth. ‘I don’t suppose it is necessary to ask you which direction your life understands,’ he says.
Another laugh from the Anatolian, which seems to penetrate the entirety of Cain’s ganglionary system. ‘Up up up,’ he cries. ‘I’m going up up up up up. And you?’
‘Me? I’m following you.’
‘Up up up up up?’
‘I don’t know whether I can manage five. Up up up, certainly.’
But he can manage five, and is thinking down down down down down.
III
Those lentils… That pottage which would decide who went where and owned what in Israel.
Like many another crossed in love, Sisobk has become bookish and biblical again. Scholiastic. Disputatious. Talmudical.
Sisobk the No-Longer-Sentimental. Sisobk the Sophist.
He is not of a mind to adjudicate between the two opposing theories of that most famous and far-reaching of all thick soups:
(a) that it is the price Esau exacts for his birthright, proving in what low esteem he holds his inheritance;
(b) that it is a ritualistic business meal of the kind brothers may be expected to tuck into after closing a perfectly amicable transaction as to real estate.
The important thing, whichever way you look at it, is that Jacob — father of the Twelve Tribes — is a sodder of slops.
The rabbis know it too. This is why they worry at those little red seeds, as though they are beads threaded on a rival religion’s string.
Now that he is, so to speak, back home again, Sisobk is not averse to whiling away the odd lonely hour in the company of those cacophonous Babylonian schoolmen. They are easy to summon. You don’t need steam. You don’t need entrails. You don’t even need a trance. One hint of an interrogative and they’re yours. Of all the foreshadowy company waiting, pacing, jostling in the small back rooms of time, they are the most vociferous, a passion for exegesis prevailing over all other passions — even the passion for righting wrong, even the passion for justifying the unjustified self.
‘I’ll ask, you answer,’ says Sisobk, settling in for the evening. If he had a chair he would settle into that. But he must make do with his rat’s nest of a bed. Some men write in bed. You can always tell. You can smell the sheets. Sisobk has no sheets, but he doesn’t mind if the odour of rags permeates his symposium with the future.
‘First question: Why is Jacob sodding pottage?’
Because it says: Jacob is a plain man, a quiet man — the word is tam in Hebrew — a man whose lips speak what his heart believes, a man of modesty and simplicity, not given to kitchen skirmishing, who would sooner prepare pap in his own pan than a banquet on another’s brazier.
Because it says: Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in good old age, full of years; and Jacob is preparing lentils as funeral food for Isaac. Faint from the field, Esau comes upon his brother engaged in an act of filial, and grandfilial, devotion.
And by the way: the verb is seethe — seething pottage. Sod is the past participle.
Sisobk is disappointed. He had hoped to damn Jacob and the Sodomites together — drown them in the same sodding pottage. But invite the rabbis in and you can’t expect to have everything your own way.
‘Second question: Why lentils?’
Because we say: the roundness of the lentils symbolises death — grief and mourning rolling among us, now from this person, now to that.
Because we say: lentils have no mouths, and so remind the bereaved of their obligation to observe silence, to be mouthless, except on the subject of their bereavement.
Because it is said: Adam and Eve ate lentils after the murder of Abel.
‘I know his brother,’ Sisobk says. ‘He’s a tourist here. But that’s not my question. This is: Why seek a precedent for lentil-eating in violent death? Abraham will pass away quietly. Is it not said: Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in good old age, full of years?’
Yes, though not so full of years as he might have been. The Lord laid him to rest in the Cave of Machpelah at the age of one hundred and seventy-five. That is five years short of the number his son Isaac is going to attain. The reason for this charitable curtailment being, that the good old age promised, the contentment he looked forward to, would have been denied him at the last had he lived to see the evil wrought by Esau.
‘Third, no, fourth question: To wit?’
To wit:
The ravishing of an already betrothed maid.
The murder of Nimrod.
The casting of doubt on the resurrection of the dead.
The denying of God.
The lying publicly in his field with Canaanite women.
The lying privately in his bed with Canaanite women.
‘The fricasseeing of a dead dog?’
That is a folk-tale At least in so far as it is dramatically predicated on a scene of supernatural barking. The Lord does not, even for the purposes of admonition, take up residence in a stew. But there is a further obvious evil to add to the list:
The scorning of his birthright.
This one vexes Sisobk, though his dissatisfaction with it is as hard to find as his moustache.
‘If the occasion of Esau’s selling of his birthright is the morning of his brother’s sodding… seething pottage, and the pottage is in honour of the death of Abraham, then can’t it be argued that the continued existence of Abraham would have denied Esau the occasion for selling his birthright? And that far from Esau’s evil contributing to the demise of Abraham, the demise of Abraham contributes to Esau’s evil?’
From the darkest corners of Sisobk’s hovel comes the muttering of rabbis. Doubts, queries, counter-doubts and counter-queries, the unreasoning reasoning of men who read too many words. Then at last, a verdict:
You have not foreseen — O sciolist — how much the Lord foresaw.
Sisobk does not want to gloat, but he foresaw they were going to say that. He means only to be placatory, though. Scare away the rabbis and he has scared away his only company. ‘So in a sense then,’ he says, ‘in six, or is it seven senses, Esau is the murderer of his grandfather. But that still leaves Jacob as an opportunistic burglar of brothers’ birthrights.’