The question of fire also interposed itself here. Dead things always occupied a definite place, this applied to earth and rocks, mountains and lakes, as well as to skeletons and sand. They could move, they could even take on a different form, like when water turned to ice, but they could never disappear. If anything, this was the hallmark of dead things. But fire behaved differently. It quite simply ceased to exist — it didn’t just vanish from sight or hide itself away, but literally became expunged from the surface of the earth — only to reappear exactly as before, in a new place, at another time.
Did this mean fire was a living thing?
If the characteristic of living things was that they died sooner or later and then rotted — whether that happened prior to death, as in the case of his father’s toe, or afterward, as was normal — then fire wasn’t a living thing. It didn’t die, it didn’t rot, it just vanished. But it shared many of the features of living things. It had a will, it could move by its own power (and not merely fall, like water and rocks, or be blown by the wind, like clouds and dust), it had a lust, huge and insatiable, and it was cunning, it could hide in embers under ashes and suddenly flare up long after those who had chased it and attempted to put it out had left the scene, when it might continue its ravages in peace and quiet. Noah had himself borne witness to all this. When he was small, before he’d begun to go out at night and had to stay indoors except on foggy or heavily overcast days, his father’s great concern for him had manifested itself, among other things, in the burning of stubble in the evening and at night, so that Noah, who from a small boy had been transported by everything that had to do with bonfires, conflagration, and lightning, could take part. They were some of his best memories. The low flames that glided across the field like a river of fire, surrounded by darkness on all sides, which made them stand out with unprecedented sharpness: he saw how they curled over the field, only to rise occasionally in sudden tongues, with a light in which all the colors of fire played: blue, red, green, yellow. The fire would be watched all the while, a long line of men followed it carrying big branches in their hands; if it veered even slightly to one side, or reared up in sudden walls, they would begin to wield their branches and beat it back. He remembered their movement as slow to the point of unreality. Sometimes, despite all this, they would lose control of the fire; aided by an unexpected gust of wind it could swerve off, take hold of the small bushes along the edge of the forest, and from there reach up to the lowest branches of the trees, and if they caught fire there was little anyone could do, other than stand by and watch and hope it would die out by itself. Tree after tree engulfed in fire in the darkness, that was how he remembered it, the air filled by a low roar, the soot-covered men who stood with open mouths and vacant eyes just staring at it. The smell of burnt straw that mingled with the smell of burning juniper and evergreens. His father’s decisiveness as he sent the men in to meet the fire from the meadow on the other side, the relief when it was over and the fire again under control.
What kind of force did fire contain? Where did it come from? And where did it go to when it disappeared? As fire clearly didn’t belong to either “living things” or “dead things,” nor had anything to do with the rejected third category “dead living things,” which now merely described a stage in the process, it was clear to Noah that fire had to be regarded as an entirely separate form of existence. But even this wasn’t easy to determine with absolute precision, its boundaries were fluid as well.
Perhaps the most characteristic thing about earthly fire was that it was totally dependent on other objects for its life. This meant that it was impossible to avoid questioning whether these objects were part of the nature of fire. The fire that burned green wood was different to a fire of dry wood. Did this mean that fire belonged in a manner of speaking to the object it consumed?
If all fire had been bound to objects, this might have been an obvious conclusion to draw. But in the sun there was fire in its pure form, fire that burned both eternally and independently of other objects.
In other words, the earthly fire was impure, inextricably linked with matter, whereas that on the sun was pure. The question then was what was the relationship earthly fire had to the two extremities on which it impinged?
Noah himself had seen how fire pounced on everything in its path, from dried grass to the bushes on the forest edge, from the bushes up to the lowest branches of trees, in the next instant to envelop the whole tree with its flames, so there was no doubt in his soul that fire was active. He had known its will, it wanted more, nothing else, just more and more, and it leaped on everything.
So fire wasn’t a part of objects, but came to them externally. The fact that fire burned with different force and intensity according to the object it enveloped was a result of objects meeting fire with varying degrees of resistance. If resistance to fire was low, as in dry grass and the pines bordering the field, they would burn up in a matter of minutes; if resistance was great, fire might not get a purchase at all, as with mountains, sand, water, earth.
This was where fire impinged directly on the problems relating to his other categories. What was one to make of the incontestable fact that earthly fire only consumed things that fell under the headings of “living things” and “dead living things” and never those of “dead things”?
This was as far as he’d gotten. And it didn’t look as if he’d get any further this time either. After pondering on the nature of fire for a couple of hours, while somewhere deep inside his consciousness he’d noted the sounds from the house about him, and knew that Barak had gone to bed and that his mother was sitting alone in the living room, he finally gave up, leaned back in his chair, and put his feet on his writing table.
So Anna hadn’t come back, he thought. If she had, his mother would have turned in long ago.
He made up his mind to go down and keep her company. Not just to do a good deed, but also because he was curious about what Anna had been up to that evening. It was unlikely she’d say anything, but if he was there when she got back, he might be able to read it in her.
He got up, gathered the scattered papers into a sheaf, which he straightened, tapping it on the edge of the table several times, replaced the stones on the table by the wall, noticed the bucket and suddenly realized that the ceiling wasn’t dripping anymore, and he’d just picked it up to take it out with him when he heard his mother’s tread on the stairs.
He stood stock-still and heard her open the door to her room, which lay adjacent to his, close it behind her, walk across the room to her table, and sit down.
Bucket in hand, Noah went over to the wall. When he pressed his ear to it, he could hear her humming on the other side. It was the same song she’d been singing to Barak earlier. She’d most probably been singing it all evening, Noah thought, and smiled. He imagined her, the way she’d be loosening the bun on the back of her head and letting her hair down over her shoulders, her eyes staring into the mirror as her hand picked up the brush from the small table and slowly began to work through it.
She had been happy these past few days, he thought. She always was when Lamech was away. But sadness about this state of affairs followed her joy like a shadow. She saw how her children were freer when he wasn’t there, they talked more easily, laughed more often, and although she enjoyed this, for it made her freer as well, it gave her a pang of conscience, it felt as if she were betraying him, and if there was one thing she didn’t want to do it was that. She knew there was no harm in him, but it was undeniable that his silence affected them, when they were all together and when they were with him individually. His silence wasn’t merely an absence of words, it had a life of its own, it ate into them, it tried to make everything like itself. He would come in, take off his outer clothes, sit down at the table, and begin to eat. He would say nothing, and that was the whole trouble. Each time someone attempted to break the silence and say something, silence crowded around the words and choked them. Anna might say something, silence lay there in wait, everyone knew it, then Noah might say something, and Anna might say something in reply, and they might go on like this for a long time, but the silence was lurking there, all the time it was lurking there, and it would never give up, it was always the talk that was stifled in the end.