Читать книгу Fallen - David Maine - Страница 10

39 the brother

Lately something strange has been happening to Cain: he has been having conversations with his dead brother. In the early morning, during the rift between sleep and consciousness, Abel appears in the hut, squatting at the foot of Cain’s sleeping mat, cracking his knuckles or picking his teeth.—And how is it with you lately? he likes to ask. His voice is colorless, like the air.

Abel has been gone fifty years now, and Cain is a jumpy, scared old man.

These visitations terrify him, but the terror precludes any violent outcry. He does not command Spirit begone! or Out with you, shade! or any of a dozen other entreaties that cram into his mouth. Fear commands that he lie half-groggy on his mat and converse civilly with his long-murdered brother. So he replies, I am well enough.

—That’s good to hear, nods Abel. He says this every time, with the same bland sincerity that used to so curdle Cain’s nerves when they were both younger. Just boys really. And alive.

Abel says this every time too:—Soon we’ll be reunited. I’m looking forward to it.

Cain says nothing but wonders if this is true. Hopes it is. Fears it is.

Abel’s fingers brush against the floor of the hut, leaving no furrows in the sand. He looks no older than the day when Cain pummeled him with a stone and pitched him off a cliff. For that matter there is no sign of the violence of his death. Green eyes flicker from a broad, open face, and a tangle of brown curls caresses his shoulders. He had always been a pretty youth, olive-skinned and dimpled: five decades of extinction has not changed this. Cain grimaces. He is crippled and riven with pain, and sometimes his eyes water with unfairness of it: that Abel should remain eternally young, while Cain must suffer rancid teeth and creaking joints and incontinence and all the rest.

He is fully aware of the absurdity of this.

•

Tonight Abel appears for one final visit.—Father appears well, he says, as if Cain has asked. But he hasn’t: Cain never asks. He left that family behind long ago, and if he is startled by the longevity of his parents, he doesn’t let it show.

—Mother too, Abel continues.—Everyone settled now, with grandchildren, except for the twins who died some time ago.

—I didn’t know that.

—Oh yes. Epon and Epna. By the plague, within days of each other. Also Kerod, in childbirth, and the infant as well. A boy.

Cain digests this. The names echo in his memory like rusted bells. He can barely recall their faces, but hadn’t Kerod been special to him, once?

—Everyone else is all right, Abel continues.—The other children and that, that—His hand flutters.—Seth. The one who—took my place.

—Yes, I remember your speaking of him, says Cain. The puzzlement in his brother’s voice when he mentions Seth is one of Cain’s few pleasures these days.—Our parents didn’t waste much time in mourning, did they?

Petulant, Abel frowns.

Cain impassively ponders his parents’ advanced years. If age weighs so heavily on him, how must they feel? Spent indeed by all accounts. Ready to find a comfortable grave and stretch out. Well, good luck to them. Or perhaps not—perhaps their days are lightened by grandchildren who do not fear to kiss them, by in-laws who do not spurn them, by neighbors who speak their names aloud and not in whispered invocations used to frighten wayward children.

Cain can only imagine such an existence.

Then Abel says, You should go see them.

Anger wells up at that, oozes through Cain like pus. The intensity of it catches him off guard. Those two little words—you should—are like the memory of a slap.—I’m not long for this world, as you well know. And why would I go anyway? Besides to kill him, perhaps. Finish the job I started.

Abel is already starting to vanish.—Don’t talk like that.

—Piss off. I’ll say what I like.

—For now, brother. For now . . .

—Piss off I said!

He is cursing an empty room.

The encounter leaves him trembling, but whether with rage or fear he can’t say. Not for the first time he wonders bitterly: Why does it have to be his brother who so visits? Why can’t it be his wife? He would give much for a few moments with Zoru again.

Though perhaps—just perhaps—it is better this way.

•

No great revelation ever comes from these appearances, no warnings of damnation or promises of redemption. Just a few words, an implicit reminder. A notification as it were.

In a way Cain is grateful for this. There are many damning things his brother could tell him that would bring no joy whatsoever.

•

Another memory dogs him lately:

A boy’s flickering face, a lupine stranger lit by firelight, leaning eagerly forward. A certain glitter to the eyes as he says, If it wasn’t for you, he’d still be alive right now.

Decades ago, this was. The boy had not been speaking of Abel.

—Sitting here talking to you, the wolflike boy had said.—Instead of me.

Recently Cain has grown preoccupied with that conversation and all it implies. This might be why he calls out in his sleep from time to time, Do you forgive me?

There is never any answer, of course—there is no one around to hear him, and even if there were, who would take the responsibility of answering? Maybe this is why Cain always wakes, morning after morning, with a heavy feeling of unutterable sadness in his gut. Heavy and painful, as if he long ago swallowed something unhealthy, and is only now starting to properly digest it.