Only Barak was unaffected by it. He said what he wanted to say as they ate, and when he was alone with his father, he didn’t find the silence the least remarkable or oppressive, on the contrary, he fell in with it himself and could spend a whole day with his father in forest or field without speaking, as Noah knew. Whether this was to do with age or personality, only time would tell. Hopefully personality.
From inside the room came a deep sigh, and then a scraping sound as the chair was pushed back and she stood up. From the rustling that followed Noah knew that she was undressing. After she’d hung her clothes on the back of the chair, there was complete silence in the room. She was certainly looking at herself in the mirror. Not just brief glances, but a long stare, as if seriously scrutinizing herself. What she was thinking, he could only guess. But he sincerely hoped Anna didn’t feature in those thoughts.
Then he heard his mother go to the chest of drawers and open it, take out her nightgown and nightcap, put them on by the bedside, draw the sheet aside, blow out the light, and get into bed. Noah waited a while before he moved. The floorboards creaked and with the house as quiet as it was now his mother couldn’t help but hear him. But within a few minutes she’d begun to snore. Noah went down to the ground floor, made sure all the rooms were empty, in case Anna had returned without his knowing it, opened the front door, went out onto the doorstep in only his socks, and emptied the bucket.
The countryside lay dark before him. It was as if it had sucked the blackness into itself. But the sky was paler, and the blue and green shades that thinned it seemed to cause an undulation in the darkness arching over the mountains. He stood for a long time looking up at it. After a while it struck him that he’d quite forgotten to include winter lights in his scheme; the lights that on cold winter nights set the entire sky ablaze. As they lacked warmth, they couldn’t be listed under “conflagrations” but had to have their own category. Sun, he thought, stars, cherubim, lightning, winter lights, conflagrations. They were what came under “fire.” Of those, the cherubim and the winter lights burned cold, the others hot. But was it fire when it lacked heat? Could there be a kind of negative fire?
It was then he found the solution.
Fire is the living dead.
With the bucket clattering on the doorstep, he opened the door and hurried in, tore up the stairs to his room, where, with hands shaking with excitement, he lit the candle, got out his bundle of papers, sat down, picked up his pen, and began to write.
He hardly noticed when his mother stuck her head in shortly afterward and asked what was the matter, he just mumbled, Nothing’s the matter, Mother, without taking his eyes off the paper. Although he was writing at top speed, he couldn’t keep pace with his thoughts, they welled up within him, and just as travelers establish depots, he scribbled small headings at regular intervals down the pages, to await him there until he reached them with the body of his ideas.
The effects of the idea that had come to him on the doorstep spread down through all the sections, and everywhere it fit. This meant that it was correct. Fire wasn’t in a special category of its own outside the system, as he’d assumed. Fire was no exception. The other mistake he’d made was that he’d taken it for granted that the sun came under fire, and not the other way round. Once these two errors had been set right and the sun inserted into the system as “the living dead,” everything suddenly clicked.
All the time he’d concentrated on fire, he’d been unable to place it under “dead things.” The most important characteristic of dead things was that they consisted of nothing more than themselves, and that they couldn’t disappear. Fire, on the other hand, occurred only in combination with other things, and always disappeared. The fact that fire in each of its appearances might be the same fire each time, as he’d thought for a while, didn’t alter the dissimilarity: “dead things” had no such discontinuity in their existence. “Dead things” were uninterruptedly eternal.
But so was the sun. The sun was composed of nothing but itself, and it couldn’t disappear. The fact that the sun was active, that it both shone and heated and moved under its own power, in contrast to “dead things,” which were passive in every respect, had previously caused Noah to regard them as incompatible. He’d thought the sun was closer to “living things” than to “dead things” but as “living things” were transitory, it wasn’t living either. Then, the most tempting thing was to believe that fire and the sun were neither one nor the other but an entirely unique phenomenon.
The confusion arose because he’d given equal weight to all the characteristics of fire and the sun. As soon as he took one of them to be the main one, and viewed all the other characteristics in the light of it, it became possible to incorporate them into the system. If one of the lesser characteristics met resistance in another category, the main characteristic had been wrongly selected. After a few hours of this sort of trial and error, he managed to confirm the thought he’d had on the steps: the sun was the living dead. The main characteristic, to which all others were subordinate, was immutability. The sun was eternal. Therefore the life it had didn’t come from the living, but from the dead. Everlasting life was the life of the dead.
And in the same way as a limb from “living things” died as soon as it lost contact with the body (his father’s toe, cut grass, or a broken branch), while the body lived on, so parts of the sun died as soon as they lost contact with the parental body. These dead bits were fire. And just as an amputated limb had nothing more to do with living things, fire had nothing more to do with dead ones. Therefore it burned only the nondead, namely “living things” and “dead living things.”
But what then about its cessation? How could it be that fire ceased to exist when the most crucial characteristic of dead things was that they never ceased?
The explanation was simple. “Dead things” couldn’t die, they were eternal. But “the living dead” — the sun — could die, because part of it was in life. As this life was an inverted life (the life of the dead), death was also an inverted death, in the form of a wild reveling in living things and dead living things (conflagrations). This death didn’t end up as “dead things,” i.e., like all other living things, but in a dead things’ death, which was “nothing.”
So now the main categories were:
LIVING THINGS
DEAD THINGS
GOD
THE SUN
NOTHING
All existence fell within these categories. The categories themselves were fixed, but the elements they contained moved between them. Neither “dead living things” nor “fire” were separate categories. They indicated states between categories, i.e., transitions. A human being belonged first to “living things.” When its life was extinguished — either in its entirety, if it died, or in its parts, when a limb was amputated — it moved to “dead living things,” which wasn’t a condition but a process, which ended with it being incorporated into “dead things.” Similarly fire was the transitional phase between “the living dead” — i.e., the sun — and “dead things’ death” — i.e., “nothing.”