No, it doesn’t.
‘It doesn’t?’
He isn’t a burglar in the sense of hoping to secure material advantage to himself from what he takes.
‘He isn’t? Then what does he mean by saying, “Sell me this day thy birthright,” the price having already been set at a plate of lentils?’
In the first place he means: You are, by your own confession, faint — faint in your pursuit of venison and pheasant, and faint in your pursuit of God — and therefore you lack the will to perform such priestly services as go with your inheritance; which services, my brother, I, being a gentle and quiet man (tam in Hebrew), am prepared to do in your stead.
In the second place he means: You speak frequently, my dear brother, of your expectation of death — ‘Behold, I am at the point to die,’ you say — which I take to be an enunciation either of the daily fear that hunts you in the field, or the terror you feel in anticipation of your priestly duties; the job appears to be wasted on you in the first instance, and a burden to you in the second. Why do you not free yourself of unnecessary anxiety and let me bear your fears for you?
In the third place he means: Given your disbelief, my beloved brother, in God’s universal promise to resurrect the dead, and his particular provision of the Holy Land to the seed of grandfather Abraham, alav ha-sholem, what possible logic or profit can there be for you in your inheritance? Can a man inherit what is not to be? As I love you I would not see you the victim of moral subterfuge and theological sophistry. Permit me to wear the inconsistency for you, and pay you for that which, by your own reasoning, cannot come about.
Sisobk the Scryer laughs wildly. ‘So in truth,’ he exclaims to the familiar spirits of his room, ‘Esau is doing rather well out of the bargain. Considering how little he has to sell, he can count himself fortunate to be paid in lentils!’
But a premonition of sooner rather than later time snaps his neck back and clears the room, on the instant, of every trace of ghostly scholar. Not a hair remains. Not a thread from a fringe, not a quill, not a quarrel, not a quibble.
Sisobk hears the sound of footsteps on the streets, ringed fingers tapping on a copper pan. The fingers stop, tap and stop, teasing Sisobk’s hearing. Is he listening with his ears or with his heart? Is it now or is it soon? The tapping resumes, the ringed fingers no longer walking like feet but rapping like a fist. On the barred gates of the very building that hovels Sisobk. Soon. Sooner. Now.
‘That will be Cain,’ Sisobk remarks nonchalantly. And doesn’t even bother to clean up.
IV
Has Cain come to the House of Hearsay and Hermeneutics intentionally, of his own free will? Or was it long ago settled for him in some other place that this was a visit he would have to make?
Has he fallen or was he pushed?
Ask Cain. ‘I was nudged,’ he will tell you.
He is disappointed that the House really is a house and not a cellar. Down down down down down should be down down down down down.
The building enjoys no particular eminence; it makes it to five or six storeys at best, but spreads, consuming whole streets, swallowing crossroads and corners, turning every edifice it touches, or looks at, into extensions of itself. It is plaguy and contagious. It is monumentally forbidding, great blocks of featureless grey stone laid one upon the other according to no principle except the order in which they were quarried. Like one of my father’s constructions for the accommodation of a field-mouse, Cain thinks, it looks simultaneously everlasting and on the very point of collapse. An immutable geometric law threatens to bury it under the weight of its own sloping walls. It has been built without regard to regularity or harmony, without considerations as to light or prospect, its guiding architectural assumption evidently being that those it is meant to confine will receive their illumination and perspectives from internal sources.
‘Like it?’ Sisobk is already at the gate, wearing one of those expressions of fractious surpriselessness favoured by men who know the end of things and grow weary waiting for others to catch up. ‘A wonderful invention of the civic mind,’ he says, gesturing to the dead walls. ‘Keeps light out and metaphysical rumour in. The authorities like to store all secrets of the heart under one roof, so they always know where they are.’
Cain has never seen him less subservient. This too, of course, is disappointing. No one enjoys losing an acolyte. But he was half-expecting some change. Sisobk’s last words to him, hurled at the unheeding back he had turned on Zilpah — ‘You are just a holiday-maker in the Land of Shinar, Cain, and a tourist in the City of Woman’ — clearly signalled some wavering in the prophet’s devotedness. Is this another reason he is here? Has he come to win back lost esteem? Has he come to listen greedily to more rudeness?
How does he know? He was nudged.
Sisobk whistles, scratches himself, takes a keen interest in passers-by. It is cold in the shadow of the walls; a sharp, unseasonable wind blows up from beneath the flagstones, in protection against which Sisobk has lined his filthy robes with parchment. When he moves he rustles like a scroll. ‘Want to go in?’ he says inconsequently — indifferent guide to idle tourist. He doesn’t wait for an answer. Everyone knows what a tourist is going to say. He puts his bear’s shoulders to the gate. ‘Watch the puddles,’ he says, ‘and don’t mind him.’
‘Him?’
‘There, near the rubbish. There… there. He cannot make himself distinct until somebody believes him.’
In a black passage by the stairs Cain sees a wall stir with the urgency of a man. The stones motion to him, clutch vainly, like the stumps of fingers.
‘Why does no one believe him?’
Sisobk knew this was going to happen. Questions, questions. ‘Because he claims to have measured the toe of a god.’
‘Any particular god?’
‘No doubt yours — He’s the cause of most of the trouble in this building.’
‘Do you know what dimensions he claims for it?’
‘Ssh! Let him hear you asking that and he’ll start considering himself credible. The next thing we’ll be having to listen to what else he’s measured. It never stops with the toe, you know. Best to leave him. He’s happy enough being indistinguishable from a wall. It lends him the distinction of indistinctness in this place where most of us aspire to be particles of light or rivers of molten fire. But say hello to this one. He’s intensely curious about you. I don’t know how often he’s pestered me to bring you here. Humour him. He’s quite harmless. Just a touch literal, like all of us.’
Cain finds himself staring into the red eyes of a gaunt figure, wasted by faith, standing by an open door with his hands clasped not so much in prayer as around it. ‘I will bless the LORD at all times,’ he says, in an easy conversational manner, as though he would have said it even had Cain not been passing, ‘His praise shall continually be in my mouth.’
He gives Cain proof of this, opening his mouth wide, as if for a doctor, letting his tongue hang out. It is broad and rounded, a spoon, a spatula, and almost as red as his eyes.
‘Now show him yours,’ Sisobk urges. ‘Humour him. See it as an act of charity.’
‘Mine has not sung praise for a considerable time,’ Cain says. ‘Will that matter?’
Questions, questions.
Sisobk, sighing, does not think it will. The Lord’s eulogist would like to exchange ahs! with a mouth that once did, not necessarily one that still does.