She recalled the first time his family had come visiting. She had hardly met them before, but now they came trooping in. His parents, his brothers, his brothers’ families. They’d dressed up, his mother in a flower-patterned dress and a rather silly hat, his father and brothers in the men’s customary black suits. Javan met them, welcomed them, and led them into the living room. There sat Lamech, the embodiment of all authority. He had the naturalness Javan lacked, he had the intimacy with his surroundings Javan lacked, and when he rose and left the room after a curt nod to the strange company, they all felt they had been left alone. That they weren’t supposed to be there. And this in their own son’s and brother’s home. It was bad, very bad, but there was nothing Anna could do about it. The fact that the land wasn’t his, that the forest wasn’t his, that he felt all the time as if he were walking in another man’s footsteps, was doing another man’s work, was wearing another man’s clothes, meant that he never settled down to anything he was doing, and this was a vicious circle, for if he wasn’t absorbed in it, it lost its meaning, and when it lost its meaning, his absorption was even less. He was never completely apathetic, but indifferent enough to allow Anna to take over some of the responsibility, while he increasingly began to spend his time on more peripheral things. Some of these worked out. He had done woodwork with his father for many years, he was good at it, and one day he began to pull down the cowshed, which was several generations old, and put up a new one in the course of the autumn. Some weren’t so successful. Like the singular, long, low building he erected by the river one spring. At last, he must have thought, he had the time and money to realize one of the projects he’d hatched over the years. He’d constructed a building in which he could breed mink. And the building was excellent, with its many small cages side by side, and clever systems for pushing food and drink into them on small trays, but when he finally got hold of two live mink, trapped by an acquaintance farther down the valley, and placed them in the same cage to mate, the one tore the other’s throat out. He made another attempt, but when the same thing happened again, only that this time it was the experienced cage-mink that was killed by the newcomer, he gave up. So the mink shed stood there, an object of general amusement, a kind of monument to his folly, which he didn’t even have the wit to demolish.
He also drifted down to the village. No one on the farm had ever done that before.
And so their lives went on. The first year they had another child, little Rachel, who was quite different from her brothers, wary as a bird and every bit as thin. But pretty. There was a lot of Noah in her, and to her delight Anna saw that her father, who had by now retired from all responsibility on the farm, took care of her as he’d once done with Noah. From a tender age she’d had a penchant for being on her own, but Lamech had her trust. There must have been something in him that she recognized, Anna sometimes thought, that Noah, too, had known.
Barak came more often into her thoughts here. Almost every morning after her work in the cowshed, she would take a short walk up the wooded hillside above the river. There, everything was as before. The fallen tree still lay there, the little hillside still dipped down to the forest beneath, the river still ran past through the branches of the trees, on clear days you could still see the ice from the glacier shining at the head of the valley, and on dark winter mornings the fire from the cherubim still lit up the sky in the west as it had done the evening she’d sat there mulling over the future.
That time seemed infinitely far away now. Almost as if it had happened in another age. This was also true of the vicinity of the summer farm, that she now inhabited with her daughter. When she looked at the places where she and Javan had been then, and thought about what they’d done, it was as if she were thinking of two totally different people.
Just as Javan had represented what was new in her life, her father was the sole remaining link to the old. And now that he was no longer working, he often did what he’d never had time to do previously, sit and talk to her. She told him how much she’d longed for that when she’d been young and Noah had taken up all his attention; he told her how they’d considered that she might manage, while he needed them, he needed them all the time, and she asked if he missed him.
Her father had shaken his head. I miss Barak, and I missed you, but I’ve never missed Noah, he’d said. Why not? she’d asked. I don’t know why, he’d said. But it was right for him to leave. I know that.
She’d tensed when he’d said “Barak.” Barak was one of the things they didn’t talk about. Noah another. Her father had burned everything connected with them, he never spoke their names, and if anyone else unwittingly did so, he would pretend not to hear, or get up and go. Nor had he done things that in some way were linked to their memory, like going to the market for example. He hadn’t done that since Barak’s death. Partly because he’d arrived back from it the day Barak died, and partly because Barak was to have gone there with him for the first time the following year.
And now Obal was dead.
Anna put her hands in her lap and looked at her father as he stood with his great hands wrapped around the railings of the veranda. He was still staring down into the orchard. The evening sun made the treetops glow. But the grass beneath, and the tables that they still hadn’t cleared away, lay in shadow.
Was it on account of Obal’s funeral that he’d behaved so oddly?
He’d always liked Obal, she knew that. And always played the child when he’d been with them. Even now, when Obal and Tarsis had been there the previous year, his character had assumed something childishly subservient. A seventy-year-old man!
She smiled and sensed that Javan was looking at her.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Obal and Tarsis.”
Her father turned his head toward them.
“Tarsis is looking old, isn’t he?” he said.
“He’s tough,” said Anna.
“Obal was tough as well. But not as tough as Tarsis. D’you know what they say about him? That he’s so desiccated that blood doesn’t run through his veins.”
From the open window above they heard the twins’ voices. Something must have excited them suddenly, for after remaining silent up there for several minutes, they suddenly began talking at the same time.
She saw her father smile to himself.
Then he leaned his head forward, rubbed his hand up and down his neck several times, and sighed deeply.
“It’s been a long day,” he said. “But at least we buried old Obal.”
He straightened up, stretched, and put one hand to the small of his back.
“Well,” he said. “I think I’ll go to bed.”
They heard the faint sound of his steps going up the stairs inside the house. Above them the twins had shut their window.
Anna leaned back and clasped her hands over her stomach.
“Why didn’t you tell him the truth?” said Javan. “That he thought Milka was still alive? Going up onto the roof?”
“I don’t know,” said Anna. “You think I should have?”
“I don’t know,” Javan said.
“There was something terribly sad about it,” she said. “If we’d told him, he’d have been ashamed. And then he’d have been unhappy. And perhaps even frightened. Who knows what’s in store for him?”
“But he wouldn’t want us to hide the truth from him, either.”