When he wanted to say something himself, it was slower. He didn’t know precisely where the words were, and sometimes, when a reply was needed, he had to use a word other than the one he’d intended, it didn’t fit properly with the preceding ones, and so the harmony was disrupted, for the previous word always controlled the following one, and so with each word he was moving further and further away from his starting point, what he’d meant to say.
This was the state of affairs as he sat in Noah’s room. In his mind’s eye he could see the Nephilim as clearly as anything, but none of the words he chose fit properly, and the picture that Noah formed in his mind’s eye was an image of something else.
But the most absurd thing of all was that his halting made Noah’s attention rest as much on him as on what he said. Noah nodded helpfully and supportively at each word, and if his father went silent for a while, he was quick to offer a timely question.
This was wrong. Noah should have been absorbed by the Nephilim, there was nothing that interested him more, but there he sat suffering with his father.
This was often the way when they were alone together. It wasn’t for nothing that his father used to head for the woodshed after these interludes with Noah. There was something marvelously tangible about the log he placed on the chopping block, the ax he raised above his shoulder, the blade that cut through the piece of wood and split it.
He put his hand to the back of his head and looked down at the floor in front of him for a moment.
“But the worst thing was that it was so beautiful.”
“Beautiful?” queried Noah. “Yes. That was why it was so horrible.”
“But —?” said Noah.
His father pursed his lips, raised his eyebrows and waved a hand. That’s it, the gesture said. I’m not going to go any further. Sorry about that.
“Don’t go,” said Noah.
“No, all right. I can stay a bit longer.”
“I’ll draw it,” said Noah. “Then you can see if it’s right.” He put a sheet of paper on the table, picked up a pencil, glanced at his father.
“Its hands,” he said. “They looked like clubs? With nails sort of here and there?”
“Not clubs. More like plates. Or flippers. You know, like seals have.”
Noah drew for a while. His father laughed when he saw the result.
“Flippers was just an example,” he said.
“Well. .?” said Noah.
His father extended his own hand.
“If you imagine an ordinary hand,” he said. “But the fingers have grown together. But so closely that you can hardly see them anymore. There’s just a faint shadow between them. Perhaps not even that. A plate of flesh and blood. With nails.”
This time there really was some resemblance. His father had always been impressed by the boy’s drawings, to look at them was like looking at the object itself, but what he accomplished that evening was almost magicaclass="underline" when he’d finished, the Nephilim was there on the paper between them. Even though Noah hadn’t seen it himself.
His father’s praise made Noah so proud that he’d hardly known what to do with himself. He’d gone downstairs with his father, but none of the faces down there, his sister’s sullen one, his mother’s tired one, or the newly born Barak’s sleeping one, had been able to read the emotions that filled him. Although it was way past bedtime, his father had allowed him to go outside for a time. Whilst he, tired from his journey, sat on the bench by the house wall, Noah had begun to run around the garden. He ran as fast as he could, round and round he went, as the thought that his father must certainly be amazed at how fast he could run sent a thrill of joy through him. I can draw a Nephilim exactly without seeing it, he thought, and I can run as fast as the wind.
“Look!” he shouted, and ran across at top speed, turned suddenly, and ran just as fast back.
“Not bad!” said his father.
“Look now!” he yelled, held out his arms and ran zigzagging across. “I’m a bird!”
“One more go,” said his father. “And then it’s time for bed.”
The last thing Noah had done before going to bed, and the first when he got up, was to gaze at the drawing. His wonder at the Nephilim had been great, and it never quite left him. Even now, ten years later, he would sometimes get out the drawing, yellowed and creased, and study it with the same hungry eyes as before. For Nephilim could still be found. People knew a bit more about them now than they had then, but not much. A further two specimens had been shot and killed — one had lived for a couple of days, but died of its wounds in a strange way, because the wounds in themselves weren’t fatal — one bullet had entered the thigh, another the upper arm — but they never healed, for some reason the blood didn’t congeal, it just went on leaking out, until the creature died — and one had been caught alive. It was now kept in a cellar somewhere in Nod as far as Noah knew.
He got up and went to the cupboard in the corner of the room, pulled out the bundle of papers that lay within, and leafed through them until he found the drawing of the Nephilim. Just as he was sitting down at his desk again, he heard the door downstairs.
That must be Anna. Unless his father, contrary to expectation, had returned so soon.
He sat still and listened.
The steps were light and almost inaudible, the movements discreet.
It was Anna.
After a bit of moving about in the hallway, she came up the stairs, halted outside his door, presumably in the hope that he was awake, so that she could share some of her happiness with another, but he didn’t make a sound, and she soon carried on to her own room. If there was one thing he wasn’t prepared for now, it was his sister’s bliss. Sitting there in the semidarkness and filling the room with her obscure, summer’s night emotions.
He stared down at the drawing once more. If the assumption really was correct, that these were the progeny of angels, what did that say about the order of creation?
All the Nephilim that had fallen into human hands had been of the same sex. So had each one that had been observed. In other words, the Nephilim couldn’t reproduce. Not only had there been death before them, but there was also death after them. Angelic life didn’t take hold on earth.
What did this mean?
The most important characteristic of angels in this context was that they lived forever. This linked them to everything else that was eternal, both the things he’d classified under “dead things,” and those he’d put under “the living dead.” But even though one of the classes of angels, the cherubim, also burned eternally, one couldn’t place them there automatically. Because man was formed in the angels’ image, and they were therefore like human beings, and because the angels had progeny — something unthinkable for “the living dead,” as their life was death’s life, barren and unfruitful — they somehow had to have a foot in “living things” as well. But if “living things” could be eternal, his whole system would collapse. Also, one of the most important characteristics of “living things” was that they could reproduce themselves. Grass, flowers, trees, insects, birds, fish, and animals all carried the life of their species on. But angels didn’t. They were infertile, no angel could have progeny with another angel. In order to create life, they had to break into a chain of life outside their own, namely, that of human beings. The breaching of nature’s laws was apparent from their deformed and sterile offspring.