That had been a good moment, he thought as he ate. And it was a good moment now. The rain outside, the grass glistening green beneath the windows, the faces around the table reposing in the subdued light of dinnertime. He cut a radish in two and put one piece in his mouth. The bitter taste fulfilled the promise held out by the red skin and the white flesh, he thought, sharp as its contours against the stone white of the plate. At the same time he felt Barak was looking at him, and raised his eyes. Barak immediately averted his. There was something guilt-ridden about the way he began concentrating on cutting up his meat, as if he’d just given something away that absolutely no one should know about.
Noah smiled. The way Barak thought he could hide within himself, and not have the outer one betray him as it did, moved him.
He tried to remember what he’d been like when he was ten. He’d cried a lot, practically all the time, and he was almost always frightened. It was impossible to read any pattern of development from the fog of emotions he’d found himself in. Barak was more whole, more levelheaded, purer.
The big, undefined areas within him, all he didn’t know he was or could become, had begun to diminish, but it was only in the past few days that Noah had realized just how small they were. Barak knew a lot more about himself than he let on.
Beneath Noah’s gaze his head drooped toward the plate, then turned to the side and peered up at him, as if from underneath.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked. The vowels were hollow and attenuated. That was the way he talked when he was putting on an act and pretending to be someone. A troll, an old man, a fool.
“Don’t play games at the table, Barak,” said his mother. “And sit up in your chair.”
“You looked as if you were thinking about something,” said Noah. “I was just puzzling over what it might be.”
Barak straightened his back exaggeratedly and threw a quick glance in his mother’s direction before turning to Noah and smiling.
“Guess,” he said.
“You’re wondering what father has got for you,” said Noah. “And then you’re wondering when he’ll get home. Maybe tonight? Or early tomorrow? Or oh no! perhaps tomorrow evening!”
The three of them sat smiling at Barak.
“Wrong,” he said.
“What were you thinking about then?” asked Anna.
“Guess,” he repeated.
“Hmm,” said Anna. “You were thinking this is the last year you’ll have to sit at home and be bored by us. That this time next year you’ll be at the market.”
“Why d’you all think I’m thinking about the market all the time?” said Barak. He sounded genuinely exasperated, and the other three laughed.
“What are you thinking about, then?” asked his mother.
“Nothing special,” said Barak.
“That won’t do,” said Anna. “What was the point of guessing in that case?”
“If you really must know,” said Barak, “I was thinking about what you said just now. That they might have been struck by lightning up in the mountains.”
Noah looked at him. Maybe he’d been thinking that a while ago, but not when he’d looked at him.
“Oh, don’t,” said his mother.
Then a silence fell around the table. It was almost like when their father sat with them, Noah thought. Like then, it wasn’t the silence itself that worried them, but the consciousness of it.
Or was it only he who thought like that?
He had always picked up tensions that existed between people, and taken the responsibility for them on himself, in the sense that he longed for their cessation more than anything else, and there was a time in his life when he would have done anything to make them disappear. After a while, however, it had become apparent to him that the tensions he sensed possibly weren’t quite as objective as his notions would have led him to believe. Sometimes, clearly, he was the only person who noticed them. The question then was whether they existed at all outside himself?
On the other side of the table Anna wiped her mouth with her napkin, crushed it, and laid it by the side of her plate, pushed her chair back.
“A lovely meal,” she said.
“Don’t you want a bit more?” said her mother.
“No thanks. It was good, but I’m full.”
“You’re eating practically nothing nowadays, young woman!” said her mother. There was something sharp in her tone, which the subsequent smile couldn’t quite smooth over.
Noah pushed his fork under a small pile of peas, steadied them with his knife, and after the faint clink of metal as they touched, raised it to his mouth. Chewing, he glanced over at his sister. The peas’ dry skins rubbed gently on the roof of his mouth, and he washed them down with a sip of water. She’d been sweet on people before, he thought. But never as bad as this.
He hoped he was worthy of her.
After dinner he went up to his room on the second floor. With eyes shut he lay in bed listening to the voices from below, the clatter of glass and cutlery, plates and dishes, the thumps as they knocked against the bottom of the kitchen sink. The sound of voices so far away that the words were impossible to hear was one of the most soothing things he knew. The nesting colony-like hubbub that came from the river in the summer when a crowd of children gathered to swim there, the laughter that arose from the bank beneath the leafy trees when the harvesters stretched out for a break, his mother’s hummed and his father’s grunted mumbles from the garden on a summer’s evening. But now there were tensions in the voices. The meaning this imparted to the melody meant that his thoughts couldn’t float along on them anymore, they had caught a hint of meaning and only wanted to decipher words. Because he couldn’t be bothered to take in any more, he let them drift out of the situation and into the hike he’d been on the night before. The mountains’ unhuman tranquillity, he thought of that. The ice that had filled the entire valley wall in front of him, glittering in the bright light of the moon. The way he’d noticed its coldness from down in the forest. The water that seeped out across the full width of the glacier, forming a veil over the bare mountain. The heap of gravel, sludge, and rocks on the bank of the little lake in the hollow below. The eagerness with which he’d searched through it after he’d found the first stone with a picture. He thought about that. He’d found eight stones of that kind altogether. Not one of the pictures was the same. Three of them were of plants, five of insects. But not plants or insects that he’d ever seen. He’d got one such stone already, he’d been given it by his father, who had bartered for it at the market many years previously, and he’d hardly been able to believe his luck when he’d found one stone after the other up there.
He sat up in bed and looked over at the stones, which lay in a row on the table by the wall, among all his other finds. Skeletons of various small animals: mice, rats, lemmings, squirrels, a cat; the skull of a dog. Shells of all sizes and shapes. Some corals. A crystallized branch. Various eggs, placed next to stones with identical shapes and patterns. A couple of club mosses. A mass of birds’ feathers. Two dried starfish. A board covered with pinned butterflies leaning against the wall. Another of beetles.
How often did his eyes travel over his collection like this? Many times a day, and it always filled him with pleasure.
He got up and was about to go over to fetch the stones when a drop hit the floor just in front of him. Automatically he looked up to the ceiling. Water was seeping along the underside of one of the ceiling boards and forming into small clusters roughly above his head, from where drop after drop detached itself each time it grew too heavy.