All the lamps in the kitchen were lit. Nothing was concealed in the sharp light over the table. Everything was as it was. The faded rose-painting on the drinking bowl, the small depressions in its rim from all the lips that had grasped it over the course of time, the cracks in the soup plates, the faint yellow stains in the white tablecloth. The strands of gray soup meat, the smooth sinews, the white fat. The pale orange of the carrots, the pale green of the leeks. The red, shiny rim round Anna’s eyes. The teeth that a constantly repeated twitching of the upper lip revealed. Lamech’s forearm between the table edge and the soup plate, the white mottling that appeared on the back of his ruddy hand when he tried to force it to lie still. The crumbs of bread in the corners of his mouth, the fat glistening on his lips.
Noah felt the darkness of the living room behind him all the time. He’d been sitting in the same spot when it happened, and with every ounce of willpower, he tried to hold the thought of it at bay. But then his mother inhaled deeply, and her breath shuddered, and he looked up at her. At that he saw the whole thing again. While his mother sat on the opposite side of the table, she was also sitting in the living room behind him and rocking Barak on her lap.
Noah couldn’t resist the impulse to turn and look into the other room. He noticed how his movement seemed to communicate itself to the three others, something passed through them. He knew they were thinking about what had happened. His father, who had at first refused to believe it, Barak had only a broken rib or two, he wasn’t dead, you had only to look at him — and the expression on his face really had been one of Barak’s typical ones, so that for one wild second it had even given Noah a grain of hope — and how then, when he’d laid him down and vainly felt for a pulse, in his wrist, in his neck, in his chest, he still hadn’t relinquished hope, but stooped over him and attempted to revive him with his own breath. His mother, who’d put her arm around him and shouted to him to stop. Stop it! she’d shouted. Stop it, Lamech!
The strange tranquillity that had filled the room when his father had finally stopped. It was as if time had ceased. No one had moved. Barak lay still on the bench, with his legs together and slightly twisted to one side, as if the top half of his body lay in one position, the bottom half in another. His right arm hung down from the edge of the bench, the left rested on his stomach.
Lamech was kneeling on the floor next to him. The upper part of his body was bent forward, one hand was propped on the bench behind Barak’s head, the other rested on his chest. His mouth was open, his brow furrowed and his eyebrows frowning, as if he was desperately trying to understand what he saw, or didn’t really believe it.
Milka stood a couple of paces off and looked at them, leaning slightly back, as if she was about to retreat. One hand was pressed to her breast, the other hung at her side and clutched the material of her dress.
Noah stood in the doorway perhaps five yards from them, outside the circle of light that held the three others. He didn’t move either. He stood watching them as if asleep. The blood on Barak’s chin, the blood on his father’s lips and fingers, the blood on his mother’s breast.
The light from the lamp, which threw a veil over them, it stretched from Barak’s face, over Lamech’s bald crown, one shoulder, and upper arm, to end in Milka’s hair, neck, and back.
What will we do now? he thought.
What will we do now?
He couldn’t remember how they’d got through the next few hours. But they had. Gradually his father must have risen to his feet, gradually his mother must have lowered her hand and taken a few steps toward him, gradually Noah must have gone across to them, for he recalled standing there with them looking at Barak. How long for, he didn’t know. The worst thing that could happen had happened, he was dead, and they didn’t know what to do. Being there was unbearable, in that room where he lay and filled it with the chill of his death, it was also unbearable not to be there. It was unbearable to be alone, it was unbearable to be together. It was unbearable to look across the room, it was unbearable to shut one’s eyes.
After a while Milka must have gone out of the living room and up to the bedroom, because the next thing Noah remembered was her kneeling in front of Barak with a cloth in her hand washing his face, and that there was no longer any blood on the front of her dress.
Then they sat in the kitchen. One of them was always getting up and going into the living room to look at him, or at the darkness outside. They never looked at each other, they never spoke to each other. They put behind them minute after minute. Each and every one of them was unbearable. But they bore it.
Then there was the sound of footsteps outside. It was Anna returning home. She behaved as if nothing had happened. They heard it, how carelessly she kicked off her shoes and placed them by the wall, how carelessly she removed her coat and hung it on the peg. Her happiness was greater than she was, they could feel it even before she’d opened the kitchen door.
She stopped when she saw them.
“What’s happened?” she asked.
“Barak is dead,” said Noah.
“Don’t say things like that,” she said.
When Noah didn’t answer, and Lamech and Milka said nothing either, but just looked down, her mouth fell open. The expression with which she regarded them was at first uncomprehending. Then more and more frightened.
She steadied herself on the door frame.
“It’s not true,” she said.
Her face was white.
Noah nodded in the direction of the living room. She walked slowly through the kitchen, but when she got into the living room, and saw him lying on the bench, she ran over to him.
She wailed.
She wailed out her sorrow as loudly as she could, and for the people locked in their silence in the kitchen, it released something.
Milka went in to her. Anna sat with Barak clutched tightly to her, rocking him from side to side.
“Barak! Barak!” she cried.
Milka laid her hand on her shoulder, and Anna turned to her. Her whole body shook. When Noah came in, they stood and embraced each other. Anna’s grief was fathomless and naked, and it unlocked the others’ grief as well. There had been no space between it and death, it had been closed in on itself, concentrated, timorous, hard and cold.
Only Lamech remained unaffected. The life that Anna had brought in with her didn’t extend to him; he saw it, but he didn’t feel it.
Unnoticed by them, he’d gone out. When Noah went into the farmyard to look for him a while later, he saw a light in the lean-to beyond. He positioned himself in the darkness a few yards from the window and looked in. His father was sawing. On the table beside him lay a pile of ready sawn planks, a box of nails, a carpenter’s rule, a square, a plane, a hammer. His face was as it always was when he thought himself alone: expressionless. The only thing Noah could see in his eyes when he turned, laid the plank on top of the others, took the rule, plucked the pencil from behind his ear, and measured up a new length, was concentration.
He was supposed to be fetching him, Anna and Milka had set out a little food, but he left him alone, and went back to the house.
Somehow they got through the night. Nobody slept. It seemed terrible to have to wrestle with one’s thoughts alone. Even more terrible was the prospect of waking up to what had happened. At the moment they were conscious of it. True, it waxed and waned in strength, sometimes they were completely overwhelmed by it, at others it almost disappeared, but because it was the transitions between these states that were worst, when the realization that he was dead suddenly filled them, it was waking up that they feared most. It would be as if he’d died all over again, they felt. As if he’d been alive while they slept, and for a brief period of their waking, because they might open their eyes and look round the room and vaguely sense that something was wrong, but without knowing what, and during these moments he’d be alive, until they suddenly remembered, until they suddenly realized, until the knowledge of his death came washing over them once more, cold and vast.