So Cain opens his, and for a few precious seconds experiences the singular intimacy, inveterate only among beasts, fowl and some species of fish, of breathing accommodatingly down a stranger’s throat while the stranger pants necessitously down yours. Then, with a sound that resembles the gurgling of drains, the stranger begins to ferment further psalmody in his gullet. ‘O taste and see that the LORD is good.’
Cain closes his mouth.
The gaunt man appears distraught, seizes Cain’s shirt, stabs at him with his tongue. ‘Thou hast seen and tasted the LORD?’
Cain pulls away.
But this petitioner is not trapped inside a wall. He grabs again. ‘Thou hast seen and tasted the LORD — how was HE?’ He is all maw now, alive only on the lips and in the gullet. ‘How was HE to the palate? Show me again the tongue wherewith thou hast tasted Him. Describe to me how It was.’
Cain the homicide, the murderer of his brother, the rotten fruit in the First Gardener’s eye, feels his stomach rise into his gorge. His jaw is clamped so tightly the whole building can hear his teeth grind.
From the mouth of the holy gourmet a more fluidal commotion — ‘Like unto kid, was It? Like unto venison? Did It scald the skin from thy gums as the flesh of mortal woman’s womb is scalded when she is penetrated by an angel? Did It smoke? Was there bone? Was there gristle? Was It like unto…?’
Only the intervention of Sisobk saves Cain from more of this. Sisobk the Saviour. How the mighty… He leads the way, Cain following obediently, mouth shut, through blackened passages in which men cry ‘Chaos!’ or shudder from the Twelve who have become their persecution, or accuse the sun and moon of fornicating and dripping their lewdness to the earth in dew and honey; then up staircases, uneven and treacherous, where some cry out ‘Murderers!’ against those who swallow eggs, and others open and close compasses, calculating in a frenzy the geometry of the foundations of the earth.
Careful of his guest’s distress, enjoying leadership, Sisobk hurries him along, like a father hurrying a son past an accident, past a killing, by a charnel house, through Gehenna. ‘We are almost there,’ he promises, although there has never been any mention of a destination. And at last they arrive at the wet and windowless cell in which Sisobk shelters from what is and starves himself into deliriums of what will be.
Although it is never closed, Sisobk kicks his door, to shoo away any ghostly rabbi or other textuist who may have thought to return in his absence, mad for more contention.
There is no light in the room and no provision for its manufacture. Grateful not to have to see anything, Cain allows himself to be led to Sisobk’s rat’s-nest bed — a rubbish dump of hassocks spitting straw, rags, flock, strips of rotting papyrus. Cain stretches out on it, thinks of Preplen, thinks of sticks, thinks of food and faith, and is asleep before his host can ask him if there is anything he wants. ‘Just as well,’ Sisobk mutters, ‘because I haven’t got it.’
He sits on the floor and listens. Like a father, or a brother. Like a friend. Like an assistant. Not any longer, then, like a disciple? He sits and watches, watches over, reading Cain’s bad dreams, providing cold and melancholy sanctuary. It is not the honour it would have been, having Cain comatose in the corner of his room — it is not the honour he frequently and fantastically anticipated in the days before… a certain matter. But it is not nothing, either, to be privileged to sit and watch and listen. To watch over. To listen out for. To succour.
Sisobk the…
The very thought of himself in this protective role softens Sisobk’s short-lived obduration. He goes over to the rat’s nest and takes Cain’s hand. Holds it gently in his. Pats it. Traces the whorls of hair on the knuckles. Puts the fingers to his lips. One at a time. So soft, so pliable, so womanly — you would never think they were murderer’s fingers.
V
He gets the idea from Rebekah. If, despite the stink of goatskins, she can pass off Jacob (who is white and smooth) as his brother (who is red and rug-like), then he, Sisobk (who is shambling and foul), can pass himself off as Cain (who is erect — when he is not prone — and fragrant).
It’s easy to do. The sleeping, unresistant Cain comes out of his clothes as sweetly as lentils emptied from a sack. You hold his gown, and then his undershirt, by the ears, and literally spill him out. It takes the Scryer longer to undress himself. This is because his body has not been parted from its garments in such an age, he is not always certain which is which. Were he to hurry he would as like as not peel his skin off with his drawers.
And as Rebekah took the choicest garments, the goodliest raiment, of Esau her eldest son, and put them on Jacob her younger son, so does Sisobk put upon him the costly linen of Cain the elder and less loved son of Eve. He does not, though, reverse the process and put his own goodly raiment upon his unconscious guest. Why run the risk of waking him? Why waste the time? Why multiply duplicities? He is only borrowing the outward form of Cain — taking it out on loan for an hour — not usurping him. He might have got the idea from Rebekah, but he is not Jacob. He is not his brother’s thief.
Standing in Cain’s clothes, Sisobk fancies he is owner of the memory of every sin which, despite all the laundering, still clings to them. He sees forwards as a rule, not backwards. The past is a luxury to him. A feather bed. Now he understands why men are so eager to yield to it, and so reluctant ever to let it let them go. Unlike the future, which fumes and reeks, the past is placid, imperturbable, painful only as a recollection of pain. You do not return from it with blood in your eyes and foam around your mouth. Still to come, yet to be, the drama of Jacob’s jealousy must be boiled up like pottage in a prophet’s brain. Whereas Abel — already over, never to be again — comes at the first summons, like a remembrance of youth.
As long as you are mantled in his brother’s garments, odoriferous with wrongdoing, the lovely doted-upon boy glides sociably before you, starts at you adorably from the fields, whiter than his woolly sheep, or presents himself, shiftless, shameless, in that scalloped rock wherein his mother worshipped him clean.
Sisobk holds him there, indifferent to the shapeliness and becoming pallor of his limbs, intrigued only by the configuration of the boy’s own desires, the thing he envied, not the thing he was envied for. Envious? Abel? But of course. Is this not the lesson of Jacob — that the good brother must always covet the accumulations of the bad: the red hair, the mouthful of milk teeth, the daughters of Canaan, the carcasses of meat, the wherewithal to please a father, the wherewithal, on such a scale, to displease a mother? The last especially. Who would settle for being merely the apple of his mother’s eye, when he could be the arrow in her side, the thorn in her flesh, the pestilence in her blood?
Envious? Abel?
The one-time prophet, turned historian, shudders and pulls his adopted gown around him. He likes the direction of his thoughts. Very soon, very soon now, he believes he will have achieved that moral reversal without which there can be no comprehending the affairs of men. Yes, it is good for him, borrowing the skin of a distinguished and proven fratricide. He can feel it charging him with light. Flooding him with goodness. He is ready, like a descended angel, to try his newfound footing on the streets.
He closes the door quietly behind him and goes down into the city. He does not know what he is going to find, or how it is going to find him, but he is serenely, superbly, angelically confident that by the time he returns he will have grasped the sense in which Abel can be said to have killed Cain.