They didn’t sleep, and a new day dawned about them, unnoticed by them, everything outside themselves had something nebulous and indistinct about it, nothing left any trace on them, all they thought about was to endure. Move on. And this they had done. When Lamech had finished the coffin, he’d gone out into the field with his spade over his shoulder, dug a grave for Barak, and when he came back, he’d said he was to be buried that evening.
Those were exactly the words he’d used. He’ll be buried this evening, he’d said. His mother had dressed Barak in his best shirt and trousers, socks and shoes. She’d wept the whole time, whereas Anna, looking on, had not. And as soon as it was dark enough for Noah to go out, they had put him in his coffin. They looked at him one last time, and then everyone apart from his father left the room. No one could bear to see him put the lid on the coffin and nail it down.
And now they were sitting here.
Noah turned back to the table. His father pushed his bowl toward the pot and filled it. His mother held a small bone up to her mouth and chewed the meat off it. Anna had her head bent over her bowl and slurped at her soup as she stared at the table.
He glanced toward the window. The reflection from the room was so strong that it was impossible to see through it. Nothing of the landscape outside penetrated the picture of the four people sitting eating round the table, the benches and the cupboard behind them.
They grieved in the same way. But if the object of that grief was the same for all of them, the shape it took within them was as different as their characters. Noah’s thoughts during the whole of the past day had revolved around what Barak was now. How he was lying in the coffin out there, down in the earth, all alone, while they sat here and ate, that was how Noah’s thoughts ran.
For Anna it was otherwise. She thought mainly of what he’d been, her tears came when scenes from his life entered her mind, whilst Lamech’s thoughts were constantly directed toward what he would have become.
What then of Milka? Where did her thoughts turn?
Milka had borne him. She’d known him since before he’d been born, his movements, the small habits that had formed while he lay floating within her, she had looked forward to his coming, and when he had come, he’d been just as she’d expected. Not in appearance, but in the atmosphere he brought with him. Perhaps it had something to do with the way he’d looked at her that first time? Perhaps it was something about the way he’d crawled, still bloody and slimy, toward her breast? For months after the birth he’d been part of her, it had just been the two of them, nothing else existed, and even after that first time was over, and he slipped into the rhythm and life of the family, he was a part of her. She knew his body as well as she knew her own. She washed him every day, she held him close every day, there wasn’t an inch of his body her hands hadn’t touched. When he raised his head for the first time, she’d been there, when he crawled for the first time, she’d been there, when he said his first word, she’d been there. All this had been stored within her. That was where he was. The smell of him, the taste of him, the feel of his skin against hers. Barak was a part of her, and when he died, a part of her died. Not in a figurative sense. Her body asked for Barak, it asked for Barak all the time, but it no longer got any answer.
For her it was no good throwing away everything to do with Barak, as his father had begun to do. For some reason this knowledge made her sorrow easier. There was comfort in knowing that, that the sorrow would never leave her. That it would always be with her.
Noah pushed his chair back and got up.
“I’m going upstairs,” he said.
“Do that,” said his father.
He stopped at the door.
“Good night,” he said.
“Good night, Noah,” said his mother.
When he got into the hall, he saw that his father’s hat was missing. His mother’s muff was also gone, as was Anna’s mechanical bird. His father hadn’t just cleared away every memento of Barak, he’d got rid of everything that was a reminder of the last day of his life.
It was this that made up his mind. From now on, every time his father looked at him he would think of what hadn’t been. Of what he’d lost, of what hadn’t happened. Grief over Barak and disappointment in Noah would sooner or later turn into two sides of the same coin. Noah couldn’t blame him for that. He understood it. And not merely that, he even sympathized with it. Instead of clinging to the farm, reminding his father each day of a future that was no longer there, he would go away. It was the best thing for them, it was the best thing for him. He would leave his old life behind him, and start a new one.
A life in solitude was what he decided on out there in the hall. A life unloved, and unloving, was what he would live.
He went upstairs to his room elated. Like that there would be no difference between the memory of Barak and the memory of Anna, Lamech, and Milka, he thought. All of them would be something he’d put behind him. Dead or not, to him it would be all the same.
Once in his room he lay down on the bed and began to wait for the others to turn in. It didn’t take long. He heard their feet on the stairs, the door to his parents’ room being shut, the floorboards creaking within, the muted voices as they wished each other good night. After Anna had closed the door to her room, he waited a while longer, and then got up and began to gather together all his papers in great piles. He carried them out of the house and over to the slope behind the barn, where they’d burned things for as long as he could remember. There was a mass of it, he had to make many trips, and when he’d finished that, he began to fetch out everything else. He carried out his entire collection of stones, branches, corals, shells, eggs, birds’ feathers, skeletons, skulls, butterflies, and beetles and tipped them down the slope.
Then he set fire to them.
It wasn’t just because he’d decided to start a new life, and didn’t want any part of the old one to remain, that he burned them. He burned them, too, because the things he’d thought, of which all these papers and objects were an expression, weren’t true. This boy shall bring us relief from our work, and from the hard labor that has come upon us because of the Lord’s curse upon the ground, his father had said when he was born. That hadn’t happened. What Noah had done brought relief to none but himself, and barely even that. When he’d been little his father had encouraged his collecting and drawing, there was something noble in the way he was able to take part in the world outside even though he was doomed to a life indoors, perhaps that was what he’d thought, but then when he grew up and neither the collecting nor the drawing abated, even though he’d begun to go out, the encouragements ceased. As his father was partly to blame for making him like this, he seldom put his feelings into words, but it was clear to anyone who had eyes that he disapproved of it. The world is out there, Noah, he would occasionally say. Not in here. By “in here” he meant in Noah’s room, and in his head, which he tapped with his index finger.
The flames consumed the heaps of paper before him. He kicked at the thickest reams, so that the fire could get a better hold, glanced at the big flakes of ash that seemed to be buoyed upward by the hot air, then sank down, got nudged up again, until they fell too obliquely and the heat thrust them out into the cold, through which they sank, spiraling to the ground.