Although God hadn’t shown himself to any mortal since he’d appeared to Cain in the field that rainy night, and he’d therefore only lived as words among them for more than fifteen hundred years, no one seriously contested his existence. And why should they? They were there in the midst of his creation. Everything they could see bore witness to him. The sun that rose in the morning and filled the world with light, the clouds that came floating in from over the sea and emptied their water on the earth, the profusion of growth that sprang up in the fields. It was to this that they sacrificed each spring and autumn, without ever expecting that God would show himself to them. After all, what were they, except animals among animals, God’s creations among God’s creations?
THROUGHOUT all these centuries the cherubim’s flames continued to glow above the hills in the west. They were as familiar as the sun or moon or stars and were considered to be as permanent. But one day they simply vanished. It was the autumn the river broke its banks, after rain had fallen continuously day and night for months, early on a morning that began like most mornings: the middle-aged farmer’s wife crossed the farmyard and opened the heavy doors of the cowshed; they were thick with muck, as were the walls, and the cows, with skeins of it hanging from their bellies. They got up as soon as they heard her, the cowshed was filled with motion, hooves scraping on the floor. She felt their warmth and spoke calmly to them, pushed the hatch to the cellar open and smelled the stink rise, began to scrape the muck over to it. A calf stood in a pen by itself, pushed its head over the low wall and stared at her, rubbed itself on the wooden boards and snorted. She smiled at the clumsy movements, leaned toward it, and stared into the dark, liquid eyes. It pulled back, so much more alertly than the other mild, subdued ones, the ones waiting for her to pull the stool up and milk them, a contact they liked, her hands firmly sliding down their udders. They knew her, her dexterity, her voice, and they liked her.
Her name was Anna, and she’d taken over the farm from her brother more than twenty years before. Her husband was called Javan and, to judge by the darkened windows, was still in bed asleep when she emerged a couple of hours later. Their twin sons, long since grown men, also lived there, together with their daughter, Rachel, who was expecting her first child, and her husband, Jerak. In addition, Anna’s father, Lamech, lay bedridden in one room, aged and infirm.
She walked across the farmyard in the rain, crouched down behind the bushes at the side of the house, pulled her skirt over her knees, and peed. It splashed on the wet ground. The relief spread all through her body. When she’d finished and stood up, the earth was steaming behind her. The others on the farm were still asleep, and she walked out a little as she often did, there was a special tranquillity in the landscape this early in the morning that she liked.
She had never told anyone about this habit. Occasionally women from the valley disappeared, not many, six in the past fifty years, but enough to instill a certain caution in the women of the district. To move away from the buildings at dawn wasn’t exercising caution. But Anna had never felt anxious. Men went missing too, it had always happened. The fact that they were usually found, either half torn apart by wild animals beneath some bushes or crushed beyond recognition at the foot of a ravine, whereas the women never were, was certainly remarkable, but to infer on these grounds that the women had been abducted, as many people did, was going too far in Anna’s opinion. If they vanished without a trace, it meant there was no trace of coercion either. The most natural explanation was that the disappearances had occurred voluntarily. Either these women had jumped in the river one night, or they’d done the opposite, and gone with a man from another place. Both were shocking, and so were done secretly, and thus the notion that they had been kidnapped arose. The men that had been affected, fathers, brothers, husbands, couldn’t or wouldn’t believe that they’d been deserted.
Did they think there was something out there snatching women?
Don’t make me laugh, she said out loud. The next moment she was smiling to herself and thinking just what that would have sounded like to others, if her husband or children had been in the vicinity and heard her. Her father had been the same, he could go an entire day without saying a thing, and then suddenly sling out a sentence or two about whatever he was thinking, which his children, if they happened to be nearby just then, found almost sinister. If he’d chatted away the whole time, they wouldn’t have given it a thought, but when it was the only thing he said, it took on a huge significance. It said something about him, they thought. But what? But I’ve no one else after all, he’d once suddenly blurted out, it had been autumn, the sky was dark blue and completely clear, he was standing on a ladder picking apples, only a few feet from the open living room window, where Anna, aged fifteen, stood looking out. He hadn’t said a word all morning, just moved from tree to tree picking them clean of apples. Then suddenly, But I’ve no one else after all! And then silence for the rest of the day. On another occasion he’d said, Yes, well, believe it if you want.
Was it strange that she thought about it?
She opened the gate at the far end of the horse pasture and walked across the field. From a distance the grass looked nice and lush, but when you came closer you saw that it was pale and grew sparsely, and when you stepped on it, it gave to the pressure of your foot, which sank into the mud.
This constant rain looked as if it would never stop.
All the way she’d been looking at the ground in front of her, in that way the raindrops struck her hat and not her face, but now she was so hot that she longed to feel them on her face and pulled back her hat.
Only then did she realize how self-absorbed she’d been. Her steps, the rustle of her garments, the cries of the crows, the distant rush of the river, they’d all sounded shut in. Now they opened out. And it was as if her thoughts followed: instead of revolving around themselves inside her head, they flowed now to the landscape she was in.
The low, dense and dark clouds that had covered the valley for week after week made it look as if the light came from below, she thought. That it was the green grass that shone. That it was the forest floor that shone, and sent its faint glow up through the boughs.
The spruce trees stood motionless under the streaming rain and gleamed. Tree after tree after tree.
She thought of her brother, who’d left them. Without a word, he’d slunk off one evening many years ago, without a word, he’d lived his life, without a word, he’d returned.
He was often in her thoughts these days. He lived only a few miles away, high in the side valley she looked up at each morning, but she still hadn’t visited him. He was the one who’d left them. Whether they met again or not was up to him.
Then she thought about her daughter, the child she would soon bear.
Five or six weeks more, then she was due.
In Rachel she saw more of her brother than herself, and that sometimes made her uneasy. How that delicate and perhaps even sickly nature would affect the birth. But at the same time she knew that characteristics and temperament had nothing to do with it. As soon as childbirth began, other forces took over. Strengths that you never knew you had.