But it was fun, there was no question about it.
The first time Lamech had become aware of that aspect of the market was when he was thirteen. He had dawdled behind his two uncles, there was so much to see — just over there surrounded by spectators an old bear was dancing, the music from the barrel organ flooded across the square, in the stalls to his left doughnuts were being sold, he stood in the line and bought one, walked munching on, turned to look at a man with a huge feathered headdress, met the gaze of a chained monkey that stood stamping its jingling foot on the ground, then saw a man lying as if dead behind one of the stalls, his face in a pool of yellow vomit, halted by a tent outside which hung a drawing of something that must be a lynx, and a strange lizardlike creature with long, flat jaws, strolled on and came across a man talking aloud to himself — he was angry and suddenly began to turn round and round on the spot, it looked funny, but also frightening, and a space quickly formed around him in the crowd — allowed his glance to wander over a nearby stall displaying knives, and then one with corals of every shape and hue, when a woman in her twenties stepped into his path.
She smiled at him, he a little taken aback returned her smile.
“Do you like girls?” she asked.
There was something about her that didn’t make her question seem the least odd to him. She was thin, with slender arms and almost sunken cheeks, but her voice was soft and warm. He could see the cleft between her breasts. Her dress hugged her belly and hips, it was yellow, and he gulped.
“Yes,” he said.
“Have you ever had a girl? You haven’t, have you?”
He met her brown eyes and shook his head briefly.
She placed the flat of her hand on his breast.
“You can come with me if you want,” she said.
The unexpected touch made him turn harder than he’d ever been before. Or perhaps it was her proximity. Her stomach, her neck. Her hips, her thighs.
“Would you like to?”
He was never able to reply. Obal came bustling down the row of stalls, and he was livid.
“The boy’s just thirteen!” he said. “Have you no shame! Have you no shame!”
The woman smiled, but his anger must have made some impression, because she immediately retreated a couple of paces.
“He looks grown up enough to me,” she said, and nodded at Lamech’s fly. His penis was so stiff that his trousers stuck right out.
Obal struck her in the face with the flat of his hand, took Lamech by the hand, and pulled him away. The woman shouted after them, people stopped and stared, Lamech blushed and thrust his hand into his trouser pocket in an attempt to conceal his frantic erection.
Tarsis, who’d witnessed everything from a distance, laughed when they got up to him.
“Look at the boy!” he said.
“It’s not funny,” said Obal. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Lamech was glad Obal didn’t laugh at him. He didn’t quite understand what had happened, but he knew that it wasn’t funny, whatever it was.
Later that evening, when he was about to go to bed, Obal, who was in front of the mirror shaving, the top half of his body bare, with his shirt and good suit hanging over the back of the chair by his side, turned toward him.
“What were you thinking of?” he said. “Earlier today, I mean.”
“I wasn’t thinking of anything especially,” said Lamech. “She seemed nice. She was nice to me.”
Obal looked at him for a long while. Then he shook his head, smiled in a manner that Lamech took to be condescending, and turned back to the mirror again.
“Why did you hit her?” Lamech asked. “She hadn’t done anything.”
Obal stirred the razor back and forth a few times in the basin of water on the shelf beneath the mirror, stretched the skin on his jaw with one hand, and drew the razor down it with the other, then rinsed it again.
“She was a whore, Lamech,” he said.
“Was that a whore?” said Lamech.
Tarsis, who sat ready dressed on a chair on the other side of the room waiting for his brother, laughed out loud. Obal smiled.
“Oh ho, she certainly was, my boy,” he said.
That it was Tarsis who should laugh at the event, while Obal was the one to darken and drag him away, was something that for years he’d found strange. Ever since his youth Obal had been known as a “fast liver,” whatever that peculiar euphemism signified, and indulged himself in almost everything, but Tarsis, who was often described in epithets such as “upright” and “principled,” kept himself on a shorter rein. Within the family it was always thought that Obal’s was a “weak character,” and if no one actually warned Lamech against him, their attitude kept him away. That Obal couldn’t be depended upon, and was probably also rather foolish, at least compared with his own father, Methuselah, was something Lamech somehow just knew.
Now he knew better.
It was Tarsis he should have been warned against, not Obal.
That was often the way. Were he to offer Barak a piece of advice, it would be that. Always ask yourself: what if it’s the complete opposite?
Upright was another word for self-righteous. Principled for naive.
Obal was the man he liked, Tarsis the one he resembled. Like Tarsis he’d always been content so long as he was safe.
Obal had always been closely engaged with the world, all his life he’d entangled himself in it, sometimes getting stuck here, sometimes there, he’d attempted to extricate himself in many different ways, never entirely succeeding, whilst Tarsis had treated it like a kind of visitor, and therefore had never been more committed than suited him.
But now they were old. He’d seen it yesterday, as they’d sat in their chairs and slept openmouthed. Obal was in his sixties, Tarsis in his seventies, and none of the contrasts they had maintained throughout long lives mattered anymore. Their hair was just as white, their sight just as weak, their hearing just as poor, their hearts just as tired.
Perhaps that was why he hadn’t been able to relax. The images he’d formed of Obal and Tarsis in his childhood and youth had remained so strong within him that he’d seen them all these years as they’d once been. Obal twenty-something, Tarsis thirty-something. Of course he knew they were old, but he hadn’t seen it. Until yesterday evening. It was as if a curtain had been drawn aside or a mask torn off. One moment they were young, the next old.
That was what he’d been thinking about.
When he was growing up, the age difference seemed enormous, but there wasn’t more than ten years between him and Obal. He’d turned fifty and couldn’t count on being fully active for more than ten years more, perhaps fifteen, if he was lucky and his health lasted that long.
Ten years wasn’t much.
But by then Barak would be grown up. That was what mattered.
He got up and walked along the edge of the forest. At the end of the field there was a small meadow, with a little rounded hill above it, from where the forest stretched a few hundred yards to the sheer mountainside, many hundreds of feet high. The meadow’s old name was the Feasting Place, and it was still called this, even though feasts hadn’t been held there for at least three hundred years.