“Well, go on,” said Lamech.
Only when he’d sat down in the kitchen did he realize that the sun was out. He rose to stop him, but it was too late, Noah was already going round the house to the trapdoors of the cellar.
A few seconds surely wouldn’t hurt, he thought, and sat down again. His hands were shaking as if he’d been without food for several days.
He got up and drank a glass of water.
It was as he’d said. A rib or two was broken. There was no cause for anxiety.
But he couldn’t sit still.
After a while he tiptoed into the living room again.
More blood from the corner of his mouth.
But at least he was sleeping peacefully.
Out in the hall the door opened. It was Milka and Noah. Lamech wiped away the blood so that she wouldn’t see it, straightened up, and took a step back when immediately afterward she entered the room. She didn’t ask any questions, just went straight to Barak, squatted down and looked at him, placing her hand on his forehead.
“My poor boy,” she said.
“It’s best to let him rest,” Lamech said.
She nodded and got up.
In the kitchen Lamech told her what had happened. How he’d found him on the ground, presumably fallen out of the tree, one rib, possibly two, broken. The only thing to do was to have him lie quite still. Then it would mend by itself.
He said nothing about the blood.
“Did you tell him that?” Milka asked. “Did you tell him that he mustn’t move?”
“He’ll know that himself,” said Lamech. “It’ll hurt when he moves. Pain is useful that way. But he’s not in pain. I asked him about that.”
“He should be able to sleep, then,” said Milka.
Lamech laid a hand on Noah’s shoulder.
“I forgot,” he said. “I’m sorry I forced you outside.”
“It doesn’t matter. It was only a moment,” said Noah.
The skin on his forehead, one cheek, and parts of his neck had already flamed up.
“Lie down for a bit,” said Lamech.
Noah shook his head. “But I will go upstairs. I’ll come down in a while and see how things are going.”
“Do that.”
When Noah had gone, Milka and Lamech sat looking at one another in silence.
Milka rose and rested her hands on the windowsill.
“The vomit out there had blood in it,” she said.
Lamech said nothing.
“All we can do is pray that things will turn out well,” she said.
Then it went quiet again. Occasionally one of them would go out to look at him, apart from that they sat in the kitchen all that afternoon. Without them being aware of it, darkness fell slowly around them. Once Barak coughed, and Milka went in to him. He smiled when he saw her. There was blood on the pillow by the side of his head. He saw her looking at it.
“It came when I coughed,” he said.
She sat down next to him.
“Does it hurt anywhere?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Only a bit when I cough.”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said.
She stroked his hair.
“Can you sit here for a bit?” he said.
She nodded.
“I’ll sit here. You go to sleep.”
His father sat alone in the murky kitchen peering out the window when Noah came down. There was autumn in the darkness out there, he’d just thought. Only a few nights ago the darkness had been of the hedge and the grass, the wind and the whitewashed houses on the sides of the valley. Now it was part of the earth. There was quite a different thickness to it, and a different depth. He’d always liked autumn best. Perhaps it was because the differences were more clearly defined. When it was night it was night, when it was day it was day. Morning came suddenly and changed everything, and evening came suddenly and changed it all back again. No subtle transitions, nothing that imperceptibly turned into something else.
He looked up into Noah’s face and the thought of Barak returned. Those few seconds he hadn’t been thinking about him were enough to sever the familiarity of the thought that he was lying injured in there. Fear gripped him as if for the first time.
Noah said nothing, but walked on to the door and peeped into the living room, where his mother sat on the edge of the bench with Barak sleeping next to her, softly illuminated by the light of a lamp in the window on the opposite side of the room.
She raised her head to him and smiled, put her finger to her lips. Noah smiled back. Then he sat down at the kitchen table.
“Has anything happened?” he asked quietly.
His father shook his head.
There was a long pause. Darkness filled the room uniting it with the landscape outside.
Noah leaned forward and looked up at the stars.
Just then they heard Barak groaning.
“Ah, ah, ah, ah.”
Then he was violently sick.
Lamech and Noah got up. When they entered the living room, Milka sat holding him in her lap. Her white chest was red with blood.
She rocked him back and forth, back and forth.
Then she looked up at them.
“He’s dead,” she said.
They buried him the next evening. There were only the four of them. They carried the coffin between them across the field and over to the mound. While Milka and Anna stood watching from a few paces away, Lamech and Noah lowered the coffin into the grave that Lamech had dug earlier that day. The trees swayed in the darkness over them. The clouds scudded across the sky. No one spoke. When the coffin reached the bottom, Lamech pulled up the ropes, handed them to Noah, and stood up in front of the grave, took off his hat, lowered his head.
“Rest in peace,” he said.
They stood in silence for a long time and looked down at the light-colored wooden coffin in the black earth. Then Lamech and Noah each took a spade and began to fill in the grave. When they’d finished, they lifted the stone onto it. Anna, who’d wept all night and all day, and was still weeping, stood for a while completely still with bowed head in front of it.
“Good-bye, Barak,” she said.
She turned and walked through the trees and down toward the field. The others followed. Soon they saw the house shining in the darkness before them. Noah wished it would be like this forever. That they could go on walking along this muddy cart track with the house shining in the darkness before them forever. What lay behind them was unendurable, what was in front of them was unendurable. But walking here wasn’t. There was a sort of peace here.
When they arrived, Anna was already indoors. She’d lit the stove and set the pot of soup on the plate, and was in the act of laying the table in the kitchen. Usually it was the living room that was used on solemn occasions. But no one could bear to be in there.
Milka took out an unleavened crispbread from the corner cupboard, broke it in pieces, and piled them on a dish. Anna stirred the soup with a ladle. Noah pulled out a chair and was about to sit down when he realized that he’d be looking directly into the living room. He moved to the end of the table and was just about to pull out that chair when it struck him that he’d be looking straight out onto the field. That was no better, for Barak was now lying out there, alone in the earth.
“Sit down,” said Lamech.
His voice was low, there was no sharpness in it; if it held anything more than those two words, it was resignation. Even so, it agitated Noah. Hardly a word had passed between them during the past day. That gave even the mildest reproof a sting.
But then he saw his father’s eyes, racked with sorrow, and did as he said.
Milka put butter and a drinking bowl of beer on the table. Lamech put his face in his hands, rubbed it a few times, looked up when Anna arrived with the soup pot. She fetched a ladle, put it in, and sat down.
They ate quickly and voraciously. Hunger always haunts the purlieus of death. The dripping spoons were lifted to the craning heads, mouths were opened, soup slurped in, the spoons clattered on the bowls as they ladled more.