“But that’s impossible,” he said. “You’ve got to understand that.”
“Why is it impossible?” she asked. “Aren’t you the master of your own house?”
He gave her a long look. She was torturing him, she knew that of course, but it was for his own good. At the same time there was also something in her that hoped he would say no to her. But he didn’t.
“Yes, of course,” was all he said.
A fortnight later he went off for the fishing season. He was away all spring, and wasn’t there when she gave birth. Before he left, he’d arranged for one of his maternal aunts to look after her during the months he was away. Small, black-clad, and grim, she would come hobbling up the hill to the house a couple of times each week. During her confinement itself, Anna had no memories of the woman, but someone must have helped her. The birth was a long one, it lasted nearly twenty-four hours, but she remembered almost nothing about it subsequently. She recalled fear. She recalled pain. She recalled loneliness. And that right at the end, in the midst of a pain so deep and all-pervasive that it numbed thought itself, she’d had the notion, in a sudden flash, that the baby was dead. She felt it, and the suspicion grew to such a certainty that she found new energy in the final hours: she wanted to push the dead thing out of her.
But the child wasn’t dead. It lived, and it lived double: ten minutes later another arrived, absolutely identical.
Those first hours were happy ones. Her body was battered and torn, it felt as if she’d fallen off a mountain, but when she lay with warm babies close to her, she felt the pain only vaguely, as if it were somewhere far away. They’d been born early in the morning and it was only toward midday that she fell asleep, just for an hour or two, but when she awoke all peace had been shattered. The next few hours were a chaos of limbs and mouths, unknown desires, and screams. Then it calmed down again. And it continued to alternate like this during the first weeks. She cried a lot, but was happy much of the time. She wrote letters to Javan, they went with a young lad who was going out. She told him it was twins, that everything had gone well, but that she yearned for him and hoped he was coming back soon. She signed them your Anna.
So when there was a knock at the front door one morning, she was sure it was Javan. She thought he might be wanting to come into the house a bit more formally now that he was a father, and that was why he knocked.
But when she opened the door with a child in the crook of each arm, it was Lamech who stood there.
“Father?” she said.
“We heard what’s been happening here,” he said. “So I thought I ought to come over and see how you were doing.”
He leaned forward, stroked the cheek of first one and then the other. “Are they sleeping?” he asked.
They went in, she laid the swaddled babies down on a blanket, made coffee and served it to him with some cakes at the living room table. He asked where Javan was, she said he was away at the fishery.
“I see,” he said.
“This is Omak,” she said, pointing to one of the babies. “Can you see, he’s got a bit of string around one arm? It’s the only way I can tell them apart.”
“They’re alike, certainly,” said Lamech.
“And this is Ophir. Would you like to hold him?”
Her father shook his head emphatically.
He’d crossed the mountain overnight, and as he’d planned to return the same day, his visit lasted barely an hour. He didn’t look about while he was there, never rested his eyes on anything other than her or the view. She thought she knew what he was thinking, and even though she didn’t want to complain, she couldn’t hold it back. She spoke of everything that had happened that autumn, including what Javan had turned out to be. Her father listened to her without saying anything. His mouth in a constant twist of displeasure.
“There hasn’t been a day when I haven’t thought of coming back,” she said. “And now these two little ones have arrived. Will they have to grow up here?”
He rose and went over to the window, looked down at the fjord.
“Perhaps it’s the opposite, Anna,” he said. “Perhaps it’s good for you and them to live here. Perhaps it wouldn’t be good for you to move back to the valley.”
He turned to her.
“That’s what I think,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she said. “Haven’t you heard a word of what I’ve been saying?”
He made no answer, just bent over the twins, who were still sleeping, and stroked their cheeks again.
“I must go now,” he said.
She stood at the door watching him go down the hill. He walked quickly, as he always did, with his own characteristic gait, with his right foot seeming to slap against the ground at each step. When he’d disappeared behind the knoll by the river, and she went in to the twins, she felt more alone than she ever had before.
But at the same time something had turned. The whole of the first year she’d looked away from the life there. It had been as if she stood with her back to it all. Looked toward the valley was what she’d done, it was there she thought the future lay. In the years that followed she did what he’d said, thought the opposite, if unwillingly and sarcastically to begin with, and extraordinary as the idea subsequently seemed, she had actually never thought the thought before: that this was where her life was.
It didn’t change everything: she hated the poverty that marked their lives, which manifested itself in everything from the children’s clothes to the food they ate, the earth they tilled, and the house they lived in — and which had also stamped itself on her face, she saw it on the rare occasions she glanced in the mirror, something dull and lackluster had come into her skin and eyes, as if her entire being was covered in a thin layer of dust — but something had changed, perhaps the most important thing of alclass="underline" she began to view it as hers. She began to put down roots. Maybe there was even something good about the idea, which at first she’d regarded as the most terrible one of alclass="underline" There’s no way back. But only maybe. For even during these years it was the knowledge that she could leave the place at any moment that fueled her tenacity.
Life with Javan evened out as well. He carried on with his things, fiddled about in his boat, did some felling in the forest, tinkered with plans for building a mill up by the river, which he could hire out, spoke to neighbors about constructing a breakwater out in the bay, was for a time the moving spirit behind an idea he’d had for trapping mink and getting them to breed, just as one did with dogs, what money there might be in that, with the prices that pelts were fetching now? Nothing of this came to anything, of course; Javan was all talk and no action. But he was in his element, she could see that. It still happened sometimes that they rediscovered what they had seen in each other in those first few weeks, and the strange thing about these times was that they could set aside everything that had happened to them since. And perhaps even more strange was the affirmation she felt for what she did. Wasn’t there a pleasure in standing blushing before him again? Wasn’t there a pleasure in lying naked before his gaze, bashful and yet quivering with desire? Wasn’t there a pleasure in laughing when he entertained her afterward?
There was a radiance in them now. She no longer saw him as weak, she no longer saw him as lightweight, a man who drifted, she saw only the radiance in him. The radiance in her. The radiance in them.