Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

A word about these Cainites.

Long before Byron and Baudelaire adopted Cain as a hero of romantic, anti-bourgeois méchanceté, giving him, as it were, a gammy leg and an inclination to opiates, others saw the cultic possibilities in a figure who, it could be argued, was the victim and not the initiator of the first act of violent irrationality between man and God, and who was therefore the murderer not so much of a brother as of a falsehood.

‘These Cainites,’ according to the heresiologist Iraneus, ‘declare that Cain derived his being from the Superior Power’ — that is to say from the true God whom the Judaic Jehovah dispossessed — ‘together with Esau, Korah and the Sodomites. All such persons they declare as being of their kindred.’

‘Woe unto them!’ was Jude’s timely rebuke, ‘for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core.’

For Core read Korah. For running greedily read Sodomy. For Cain read Cain.

And for gone in the way of… read Cain’s reluctance to see his reflection in the eyes of the future. It was never his intention to be an exemplar or a fugleman. He had never meant to show anyone the way. Least of all the way to brother-murder — he who had been the very model of brother-love. Except that it was never his ambition to lead the way in love either.

As for the theory propounded, the theory that would be propounded, by the sect that took, that would take, his name — to wit, that he had raised his hand only against an impostor-god, that it was the Lie he smote, and not a flesh-and-blood brother at all — he knew better than to let such flattering unction near his heart. Or he would have known better had he been aware that such a theory existed. Hence his refusal to attend to Sisobk the Scryer’s prognostications: he knew better than to find out.

Sisobk himself, meanwhile, reads and rereads the Cainite bible in scraps that flutter round the feet of cup-bearers and their customers, in vapours that rise from the plumbing concealed beneath the hissing flagstones, in passing faces whose suggestiveness spills light that stings like vinegar on a wound. Whatever moves has words on it. He reads a page in a fraction of a second, an entire gospel in a fraction of a minute. He does not consume their meaning, their meaning consumes him. This Korah, this Esau (he skips the Sodomites, turns a seer’s blind eye to them, selectivizes sin) — but this Korah, this Esau… what fatherers of murmuring and lawlessness they are, what saints of discontent! It is inconceivable to him that Cain, a fatherer of murmuring and lawlessness himself — no, the fatherer of fatherers, the patron saint of saints — does not care to know of them. Inconceivable and, well… quite frankly… intolerable. Sisobk the Scryer is growing increasingly moralistic about this. A man, he believes, owes a responsibility to his future, is ethically obliged to confront his consequences.

What does Cain suppose? That a life simply stops? That it is over when you reach your hundredth birthday? When you reach your five-hundredth, your nine-hundredth? When you have been a thousand years in the grave? Sisobk has something to tell Cain — it never stops. Don’t strike if you want an everlasting oblivion. Don’t raise your hand. Don’t hate your brother. Don’t love your brother…

There is, no doubt, an element of vengefulness here. If Sisobk has to endure what is waiting for the name of Cain, he cannot see why Cain should not endure it too. Share the weight of prescience, since the future is a universal obligation that should not fall only on the shoulders of those who arbitrarily possess the power to perceive it. But this is a small part of what motivates him to wait upon the first son of Adam before and after every public recital, meaning to woo him with soft words — murder, lawlessness, blasphemy, the children of his children’s children. Mainly, all Sisobk is looking for is the opportunity to express his admiration, to prefer his offices, to be in some way of use and consolation. Korah and Esau (he skips the Sodomites) he may only read about in vapours. Cain he might actually and in body serve.

If he were to roll up all he wanted in a single sentence, Sisobk the Scryer would say he wanted to hold Cain’s hand. The hand Cain smote with? Not necessarily. Sisobk isn’t particular. It’s the warm vein he wants to feel. Either hand will do.

Sisobk the Sentimental.

The doubters had been right about the colour. The city was not that blinding white which imagination, helped by hearsay, had painted it. On the hardest of summer mornings, after the wettest of summer nights, it was possible to fancy Babel as seething in its own milk; a creamy opalescent mist rose from the roof tops, a pearl haze hung upon the towers, the temples mounted as though on marble feet, like flights of spotless cranes ascending. None the less, the overwhelming impression was of a place more silvery than white, more burnished than translucent. Cain did not object to this. Given that silver seemed to him the colour of artifice, he considered the effect to be, if anything, an improvement on expectation.

As for the people, the many-headed hydra that strode smiling always smiling between the ziggurats, they were as yellow as report painted them. Sometimes, coming upon them in numbers with sleep still in his eyes, he felt their brightness to be a trouble to him. Here was a burnish that put a strain even on his love of false lustres. It wasn’t always a joy to him to be pierced by their mineral blue-green eyes, to be irradiated by the gold-filled tusks they showed in laughter always laughter, to be dazzled by the electric frizz of orange hair which many of them left uncovered, no matter how hot the day, as a sort of challenge to the sun.

They were brilliant, they were stellar, they were a moving mosaic of light, but they were not beautiful. Not if beauty was as he understood it, a grandeur of feature, a weight of expression, an extravagance of facial swoops and circumflexions. Their faces were too indistinct to bear any of those primary passions he considered it the first duty of a face to suggest. Why, they barely hinted at any differentiation of sex, let alone of age or temperament or faith or presiding terror.

From the moment he had seen himself mirrored cruelly in stagnant water he had hated the fresh thumbprints of God, the rough stabs and gouges which he shared, a common disfigurement, with his father; but better by far to look as he did — prototypical and jagged — than to have a countenance that was a careless smudge, a discourteous and half-hearted dab administered without attention to contrast or volume, to chiaroscuro or perspective, by an assistant hireling creator, working for no one in particular.

Their faces were without anteriority, that was what it came to, because they were turned to no single divinity who could remind them of the exact hour of their communal birth. There was no past in their eyes. No precursory notation on their brows. Provision had simply not been made for those slopes and planes on which memory — the memory of mud — likes to etch her lines.

Hard as it was for someone whose bones had been actuated by a god — Godhandled — to reach such a conclusion, Cain eventually came to see that the Shinarites had built their own faces. Adam had woken up one morning, prodded at his skin to discover what he was made of, and invented a character for himself on the basis of what he’d found. In Babel the process had been reversed. Here, configuration was a consequence of personality. Here, flesh had modelled itself on spirit. If features in Babel bore no imprint of a past, that was because their owners had no concept of a past. What did they remember? A sequence of scuffles with cereal gods who came and went according to the weather; an occasional scare at the hands of some double-headed keeper of an abyss. But never a moment when they lay bellied in the slime, knowing the time had come when they had to behold the One — the One and Only — and face Him down.