Gradually, as Omak and Ophir grew, she thought less and less about the people at home. The twins and her work about the farm took all her time. They had three cows now, and they’d also got a few sheep. The house had been extended and painted: now it lay on its prominence and shone. They had built a new outhouse. And all the protruding rocks had long since been concealed under a thick covering of grass and flowers.
It still sometimes happened that her grief over Barak would touch her, but it was many years since she’d wept over him. Noah was in her thoughts more often. He was the only one of them she really missed. They’d grown up together, and although their characters were very different, there had always been a special intimacy between them. She hadn’t felt the intimacy when she lived within it, it was only now, when it was no longer there, that she saw it. Her father didn’t know her, he never had, nor did her mother, not really, and Javan certainly not. But Noah did.
Did he feel the same about her, wherever he was now?
From what Javan had heard, he was away in the forests northeast of Nod living as a trapper. On a couple of occasions people from the valley had seen him trekking into town in the evening to sell his pelts and buy provisions. It sounded like a lonely life, but presumably it was better, she thought, than the one he’d had on the farm, where he’d constantly had to conform to everything he wasn’t, rather than be what he was.
In her mind’s eye she could see his expressionless face as he’d passed her that evening; how, without turning, he’d climbed the fence and vanished into the forest, and she remembered what she’d thought. That Noah was choosing for her as well. In a flash she’d seen how her life would turn out. No, she’d known how it would turn out. Barak had gone, Noah had gone, but she couldn’t go. She had to live her life there. Just because on that evening she hadn’t listened to the thing in her that knew, but pushed it aside in favor of her easily swayed reason, didn’t mean that she had to go on with it forever. The knowledge hadn’t gone, it lay in a place no argument could reach, and rather than being diminished by the years, it had grown bigger. She remembered her own childhood, suffered to see the circumstances her own children were growing up in, and when her mother died ten years after Anna had left for the fjord, she decided to act on her intuition.
The children were still young enough, they had turned nine, not only to take in their new surroundings but to be molded by them, and Javan. . Javan. . were his roots out here too deep? No, Javan had no roots anywhere. The problem was that he was content with life as it was. She suspected that he’d rather be a poor smallholder here than a well-to-do farmer there.
And so it turned out. She’d gone to Milka’s funeral alone, talked to Lamech, he had no objections, on the contrary, in his heart of hearts it was really something that he’d been hoping for — it was just a question of making the move.
But Javan wouldn’t.
They sat on the slope at the back of the house, the sun shone, the wind blew, there were white-crested waves on the sun-spangled fjord below them.
“We belong here,” he said.
“Then I’ll take the children and go without you,” she said.
He sighed, wrapped his arms round his knees, gazed outward.
“I mean it,” she said.
“I know you mean it,” he said. “But you’re being too hasty. We must think this through carefully.”
“I’ve already done that.”
“I said we,” he retorted. “We know who we are here. But what will we become there? We’ll have to think it through. And then we can decide. Perhaps you’re right, perhaps it’s best to go, perhaps not.”
Anna realized that he was trying to leave himself an escape route. He didn’t want to do it, but by saying they had to think, not rejecting her view, he could later acquiesce without losing face.
“Yes,” she said. “That sounds sensible. But we haven’t got forever to make up our minds.”
“No,” he said. “We haven’t.”
So the decision was made. When they got up from the slope that afternoon, they both knew they would go. The planned consideration was merely a sham.
Just how well-founded his reservations had been she realized only many years later.
What did they become there?
Out by the fjord the children had been themselves, two little boys like peas in a pod, straightforward and happy, not exactly quick-witted, but they laughed easily, were full of consideration, and filled their parents’ hearts with delight. When they moved to the valley, they obviously went on being just what they were. What changed was the way they were viewed. Suddenly there arose the question of whether they were good enough. They were measured against a future, the farm’s future, and against that they fell short.
Lamech once said: If only there was a bit of wickedness in those two boys! Just a bit of wickedness, and they’d be fine.
They always stuck together, the two of them, and usually were unhappy only on the occasions when they were separated. They sat chatting together in the evenings, they slept together, washed together, had breakfast together, played together, worked together. They laughed at the same things, wondered about the same things, talked about the same things. This unity was their great strength, because while they had each other, they didn’t need anyone else, but it was also their weakness, because since their earliest boyhood they’d had a tendency to shut the rest of the world out, a tendency that increased during their adolescence, so that, by their early twenties, each had become the embodiment of the other’s future. Anna feared that, like two old maids, they’d end up sitting in their room, and for a time she tried to separate them: when they were sixteen, she sent Omak to the winter fishery, while Ophir stayed to help on the farm. Her hope was that each would form ties on his own behalf, make friends, meet a girl perhaps, start to stand on his own feet. But they simply made themselves ill pining for one another, they were desperately unhappy in their separate lives, and the acquaintances they did make paled into insignificance as soon as they were reunited back on the farm.
Would things have been like this for them if they’d stayed on the holding by the fjord? Everything was smaller there, even the threshold to other people. Occasionally when she thought about it, she was overwhelmed by a sudden pain. If she’d acted wrongly toward Javan, she could live with it, he was a grown man, she wasn’t responsible for him, but Omak and Ophir were children, they had no part in the decision, they’d simply been transplanted here — and the thought that it had been an added complication in their lives was hard to bear.
But then, they were happy. She could see that. They got along well, both in each other’s company and with the others on the farm, they laughed and joked all the time — so why did it give her such pain to think about them sometimes?
Maybe because the twins themselves didn’t realize anyone could look at their lives in this manner. They had no inkling that in many people’s eyes they were inadequate.
They were as innocent as two babes, and they would remain so until the day they died.
For Javan, too, the farm in the valley was too big, although in a rather different sense. His problem wasn’t that he didn’t live up to expectation, but that he never managed, or ever quite wanted, to take control of it. It never became his. All the tools, all the sheds, stores, houses, and outhouses, all the fields and pastures, remained alien to him. One could read that in him. Anna never got completely used to his being there, she caught herself thinking this several years after they’d moved there. Is Javan here? As far as she was concerned, it was the house she’d grown up in. It was the house of Barak, Noah, Lamech, and Milka. Javan represented life outside. Now he was inside, but it was only as if he were there on a quick visit.