They stopped, raised their guns, and walked slowly toward it. It was as if it didn’t see them. Even when finally it turned its head and looked up at them, it was as if it didn’t see them.
One of them pressed the mouth of his gun to its head and fired. They made a hurdle, tied the creature fast, and carried it between them all the way down to the coast.
This was the specimen Lamech had seen. The tent in which it was exhibited was a little distance from the marketplace itself, down by the docks. Even though Lamech had waited until the market’s final day, the line outside the tent had been a long one. He’d stood there all morning feeling cold, and after wandering about gaping at the myriad of stalls, tents, and people for nearly a week, he was too sated with impressions to enjoy looking at what was around him. With his hands in his pockets and his head bent against the wind, he moved slowly up the line. The whole town was decorated with flags, they flapped in the wind above him, filling the air with their omnipresent sharp slaps. Seabirds were being blown at high speed out across the harbor. Occasionally drunken men came staggering past, their faces wan and ravaged, their clothes disheveled, their laughter and shouts with something lackluster and resigned about them, as if they no longer could be bothered to put anything of their own into them, but simply made noise as they went and thought about something else. Sleep, presumably, Lamech thought. At all events it was what he yearned for. Sleep and peace. Perhaps most of all the latter. He never longed for life on the farm more than toward the end of market week.
Obal and Tarsis, his two uncles, sat waiting for him in a tavern on the outskirts of the town. Neither of them had any desire to see this Nephilim. Neither, strictly speaking, did Lamech. It was for Noah’s sake that he was there.
He raised his eyes and looked over the heads in the line. Luckily it wasn’t far to the ticket stall. Then he glanced over at the other line of people, the one emerging from the back of the tent, and tried to read from their expressions what lay in store for him. But apart from the fact that very few spoke, which might have had as much to do with the miserable weather as with what they’d just witnessed, everything seemed quite normal. Nobody looked excited or shocked, nor did he see anything of the disgust that so many people claimed they’d been filled with at the sight of this reportedly terrible creature.
He pulled his hands out of his pockets and rubbed them a few times, peered out at the waves that clawed greedily at the breakwater, saw out of the corner of his eye that the couple in front of him were stooping at the ticket stall, and got out the money for his ticket. When he’d paid, he followed the couple into the tent. The line continued along a temporary board fence that had been erected around a podium in the center. It was on this, in a coffin filled with ice, that the creature lay. Apart from the four flaming torches that surrounded it, it was completely dark inside. The air was hot and almost nauseatingly heavy. A tang of salt and decay from the sea mingled with the smell of sawdust, sweat, drunkenness, and damp clothes. A man in a black suit sat on a chair behind the coffin and stared listlessly at the crowd slowly filing past. The strong wind off the sea made the tent walls flap. The torches set up around the coffin flared constantly and uneasily in draft.
Lamech pushed his way to the planking.
The creature was more hideous than he’d expected. It resembled a human being but was also different somehow. Its skin was pure white, the same as its hair — that was completely white too, and its eyes. . well, its eyes. .
How was he to explain this to Noah? That this freak that couldn’t under any circumstances be afforded the right to live, that this repugnant monstrosity, had the same skin, the same hair, and the same eyes as him?
He couldn’t.
He’d have to memorize every bit of it, and give Noah a description so detailed that the revulsion the thing filled everyone with could be understood without either the color of the skin or the eyes being mentioned.
It lay on its side, he would say, with its head resting on its forearm and its legs slightly apart, this presumably to keep it balanced. All the time the ice was twinkling and glittering in the light from the torches. Can you picture it?
It was enormous, almost twice as tall as me, so about ten feet tall. At the same time there was something strikingly weak and powerless about it. Its limbs were smooth and without any visible muscles. And its back. . its back was deformed.
From somewhere there was a ticking sound, and Lamech looked up. It was the man on the chair behind the coffin who was slapping a thin stick against the sole of the shoe on the leg he’d crossed over the other one. And suddenly he became aware of the other sounds in there. The rustling of material, all the feet shuffling over the sawdust, the many low voices that together rose arching like a buzzing and whispering dome over the multitude.
Behind him a man lifted a girl of about five up onto his shoulders.
“Can you see?” he asked.
She kept completely quiet for a long time. Then she said:
“What’s it got on its back?”
Lamech turned back to the creature again. It really did look as if it had something on its back. But it hadn’t. It was its back they saw. From about halfway up it had grown outward at an angle, forming a hump so large that the top part, where the back went in to join the neck, was almost completely flat, like a board or a tray, perhaps two feet deep.
The hands, too, resembled boards. They had no fingers, or if they had, they’d grown together until they were unrecognizable. Things that looked like nails grew on them, not evenly or along the edge, as one might have expected, but spread out all over, as if they grew quite at random.
Its mouth was open, and between the soft lips one could see that the teeth grew like the nails, they were spread out as well, both on the upper and lower parts of the palate.
Lamech felt queasy and really wanted to get out, but he knew just how much Noah would dig and probe, and he let his gaze take it in again as he attempted to imagine his son’s voice.
What did the feet look like?
The knees?
The wrists?
The shoulder blades?
The ankles?
And its face? You haven’t said anything about its face, that’s the most important part of all!
The face was beautiful.
With its mouth open?
Yes. It was beautiful even with its mouth open.
How was it beautiful?
The way a really beautiful face is beautiful. Only more beautiful. And that was the most loathsome thing of all, that was what filled everyone who saw it with disgust, that such beauty could be found there, in that grotesque misshapen creature. Do you understand? It was more beautiful than any human being.
Lamech conjured up the Nephilim to himself several times on the homeward journey, and described what he saw in words he muttered softly to himself, but when he sat up in Noah’s room a few days later, and the boy stared at him with his excited and expectant eyes, he couldn’t paint an adequate picture. Not only were his words slow in coming out, but they were never the right ones, either. He’d often imagined words lying closely packed together on a vast, plainlike expanse in the consciousness. When you spoke, it was from here the words were taken. People who were eloquent knew precisely where the individual words lay, which went well together and which didn’t mix. They knew their words so well that they didn’t need to think when they chose them and put them together. It was automatic. His uncle Obal was eloquent, and when he told one of his stories, Lamech would occasionally picture a pair of hands flitting back and forth at lightning speed across the plain of words, snatching one up, stringing it together with another, then tossing them out of his mouth, word after word, again and again, in a single headlong rush.