“Sleep on it,” Lud said, and made for the door, where his sons stood waiting. “We’ll talk about it again early tomorrow. Good night!”
When he’d gone, Javan turned to his wife.
“Dedan is right,” he said. “We’ve already made a decision. What they do has nothing to do with us.”
Anna had said what she had to say, and didn’t answer. Everyone noticed that she didn’t even look at him when he made his comment, but gazed at the floor in front of her. She wouldn’t even give him that.
“What’s the point of rebuilding our houses if a flood is on the way?” asked Lotan, who came from a farm farther down the valley. “And if we’re not going to rebuild our houses, what’s the point of staying here? Are we going to wade around in mud waiting for the flood to come? We know it’s coming. Is that what you want, Javan and Dedan?”
“We shouldn’t be hasty is all I’m saying,” said Javan. “It’s not simply a matter of setting out just like that, as you seem to think. What do we do with the cows for example? Slaughter them? Let them out to wander about down here?”
“We’ll take the cows with us,” said Anna. “It’s their summer pasture. They know the way. But there’s no need to make things more complicated than necessary. Those who want to leave now can leave. Those who want to stay, remain here.”
“Anna’s right,” said Lotan. “It’s up to us individually to decide if we want to stay or not. Can’t we at least agree on that?”
They could. If there had been a vote between Anna’s suggestion of everyone going, and Dedan’s of everyone staying, most people would have supported Dedan. After all, who did Anna think she was? What gave her the idea she could decide what they would do?
Her father, Lamech, had been exactly the same. He’d gone about his farm like some petty king feeling superior to all and sundry. And his father before him had been of the same kidney, the old people could relate. The family on that farm had always known best.
But it wasn’t a question of all or none anymore. Each and every one of them would make their own decision as to what was best for themselves and their families. And now, having considered the consequences of the different alternatives in peace and quiet, virtually all of them decided to leave. The exception was Dedan, who thought he’d better follow his own advice. And Javan, who had made Dedan’s words his own, attempted that evening to persuade Anna to stay, but she wouldn’t be budged.
“If we leave, you’ll lose face,” she whispered. “But if we stay, we’ll lose everything. Not just you and me, but Rachel and the baby, too. You’ll have to swallow the little pride you have left and come with your family.”
They were in a small box bedroom on the first floor. On the floor beyond them lay Rachel and Jerak. Their breathing was heavy and even, but a few moments earlier Anna had turned to reverse the pillow so that the cool side was against her cheek, and she’d seen Jerak lying with his eyes open staring straight ahead of him as if he were listening intently to something. But nothing had been said between them that he would mind hearing, she thought. Perhaps it would even do him good. So, when she lay down again, she continued the whispered discussion with her husband.
“But you make your own decision,” she said. “If you want to stay, I won’t stand in your way. You can ask your sons if they want to stay with you here. And I’ll take Rachel and Jerak up into the mountains.”
“And your father,” said Javan. “You’ll take him, too.”
She felt her anger rise, and didn’t reply at first, but then she saw the ludicrousness of the situation. Both knew that the discussion was immaterial. No matter what he said now, he would go with them into the mountains in the end. It was sad that it was only there, in the fictional, that Javan could exercise his authority, but that was past mending now.
Her father lay on a mattress against the wall behind Rachel and Jerak. His eyes, too, were open, but he registered hardly anything of what was going on around him. Even so, some impressions must have fixed themselves in his old, partly defective consciousness during the day, because there had been anxiety in his eyes right from the moment they’d had to move him to safety from the hurricane, until they’d laid him here. He hadn’t slept since then.
She got up carefully and walked quietly over to him. When he felt her hand on his brow, he reached his hands toward her. She squatted down by his side.
Now and again, when he was in one of his characteristic attitudes — sitting with his back straight and his hands on his knees smiling at her or pensively placing the flat of his hand on the back of his bald head or with laughter shaking his shoulders and filling his eyes with tears — she sometimes saw him for a brief moment as he’d once been, until reason corrected her misapprehension and, not without sorrow, she slipped back. It was almost eerie, she thought, the way his body seemed to live on without him. It did what it had always done, and so used was it to these gestures that it had long ago learned to make them without needing the man who had once instituted them to be present. He smiled when he saw her, but he didn’t know who she was. He put a hand to his head when he pondered something, but he didn’t know what it was he was pondering. He laughed so that his shoulders shook and the tears ran, but no longer knew what he was laughing at.
It was at the funeral of one of her father’s uncles five years previously that she’d first noticed that all was not as it should be with him. After the burial the entire company was assembled in the garden. It was summer and the sun was shining, and they sat in the shadow of the trees and were talking as normal when Lamech suddenly pointed toward the house.
“I saw a man up there on the roof this morning,” he said. “Who was he?”
“A man on the roof, you say? I haven’t heard anything about that,” said his sister, and looked at her husband. “Who could that have been?”
“I’ll have to ask Milka,” said Lamech.
The whole garden fell silent. Milka, Lamech’s wife, had been dead for more than ten years.
“Father,” said Anna, laying a hand on his arm. “Mother is dead. You know that.”
He gave her a long stare.
“But then who was the man on the roof?” he asked.
“There wasn’t a man on the roof,” she said.
“What nonsense,” he said, and got up, strode over to the house, and disappeared behind it. In the garden they tried to go on talking as if nothing had happened, but it was impossible for people not to glance up now and again, to see what had become of him, particularly when his figure suddenly emerged on the roof. Tall and thin, dressed in a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, he stood at the ridge and looked around.
Anna had risen and was about to run up when Tarsis stopped her.
“Let him be,” he said. “He’ll soon come down again.”
And he did. But he didn’t return to the party. He hung the ladder on the outhouse wall and, humming all the time, followed the path back to the house and went in, just as on any normal working day. There he went from room to room, Anna observed, and thought that he must have been looking for something.
“He’s been a little tired just lately,” she said apologetically. “And it was a blow when Obal died.”
Friendly smiles greeted her from every corner, and she felt she’d betrayed him. “A little tired” — there was no worse testimonial you could give Lamech. And that something had been “a blow,” what would he have said about that? If there was one rule her father had followed in life, it was never to confess to weakness.
The company broke up shortly afterward, not a little embarrassed at what had occurred. When Anna and Javan went into the house, they found Lamech asleep on the bench in the guest room. They decided to let him sleep, raised his head and placed a pillow under it, tidied up after the guests, and had sat down in front of the house in the evening sunshine and were talking when they heard a door bang inside.