Arrived from where?
She hurried up toward the house. She caught up with him in the farmyard. He stood peering up into the tree.
“There you are,” he said as she came up to him.
“You said that you saw a man on the roof when you arrived this morning,” she said. “Where have you been?”
He looked at her as if she were stupid.
“You know perfectly well,” he said. “I even gave you a present this morning.”
Anna turned cold inside.
“At the market?” she said.
“Of course,” he said. “Where else?”
The gaze he met her with was perplexed. Then he looked round.
“Have you seen Barak?” he asked.
With tears in her eyes she shook her head.
Her father turned and went into the house, went through room after room, as if searching for something, before he lay down on the bench and fell asleep.
Anna and Javan were sitting on the veranda as before when they heard him wake up a few hours later.
“It’s so late,” he said when he came out. “I must have fallen asleep.”
He glanced at Anna.
“Did you finish picking down there?” he asked.
She nodded.
“They’re good this year. I think I’ll have a couple more.”
They sat and watched him as he stood by the tree eating cherries.
“What shall we do?” said Anna.
“There’s nothing we can do,” said Javan. “We’ll just have to hope it doesn’t get worse.”
But it did. The next day he started all over again. Up onto the roof, down to the river, over to the tree in the farmyard. When he asked Anna where Barak was, she couldn’t bear to keep it up.
“Barak is dead,” she said.
Her father tensed.
“What did you say?”
“He’s dead.”
“What did you say?”
He grabbed her shoulders and shook her.
“Where is he? Where is he?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” she said sobbing. “I don’t know where Barak is.”
He ran through all the rooms. Living room, kitchen, hallway, bedrooms. To and fro he ran. Anna was frightened, and when he came outside and began to search for Barak there, she withdrew to a place where he wouldn’t see her.
When he got to the corner of the house and looked toward the gate, it was as if something different took control of him. All fear and terror left his body from one moment to the next. He began to walk down to the river with measured, everyday steps. She heard him call faintly down there.
“Come along, girls! Come along, girls!”
A few minutes later he came walking back up again. He stopped in front of the farmyard tree and looked up into its branches.
Anna wanted an end to the nightmare, and went across to him.
“Where’s Barak?” he said
“He’s asleep,” she said. “And we should be too. It’s been a long day. Come on.”
She put her hand on his shoulder and went into the house with him. That he didn’t ask any questions, but complied with her suggestion, indicated that a part of him was here, with her now in the present, she thought, and presumably suspected that something about that other day wasn’t quite right. But it lay so deeply embedded in his consciousness that it had no effect, apart from making him a little more tractable than he otherwise might have been.
This terrible charade repeated itself several times that autumn. It was terrible because the day of Barak’s death wasn’t merely a memory for him, something he thought about and that for a time overshadowed reality in his age-enfeebled mind, but a reality he lived in. It was terrible too because Barak was still alive in that day. Somewhere on the farm he could be found, Lamech believed, at the same time as his death could also be found there, and it was these two quantities that Lamech struggled with in such a confused way. Something in him knew that Barak was dead, something else in him didn’t, and as both these certainties inhabited the same landscape, they would weave in and out of each other in an incomprehensible way as soon as he, in his incapacity, suspended the time between them.
This same impairment also made him more amenable. Even if he was right in the middle of that momentous day, he could be led anywhere they wanted without protestation, quite the opposite, it seemed that he found the mild but firm authority they used soothing, as if he knew that really he had to be taken in hand. Even when, toward the end of that winter, he wandered off totally into his own world, his docility remained. If they shut the door of his room, he would rarely leave it, but would sit there until they opened it again and suggested that he come out. If he was in bed, he would lie there until they suggested that he get up.
He remained like this for two winters, fully able to move about but without the necessary willpower to do it. Thereafter a new stage began, in which he lay as if paralyzed in his bed, and after that it had merely been a question of when he would die. Soon he was nothing more than a cipher of himself. His face had shrunk, his tongue had swollen, sometimes he made some babbling noises, or clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, an old trick of his to make babies laugh, otherwise he just lay there silent, staring up at the ceiling, or sleeping.
There were no longer any thoughts in him. Certain things might drift through his consciousness, an old, half-shattered memory, some vague notion of belonging, but the coherent, meaningful activity in whose continuum both he and the world he was part of existed had long since ceased to be. He didn’t know who he was, he didn’t know where he was, and least of all did he know who all these people who were constantly bending over him really were. But he could still feel. She knew that, she saw it every day. He liked warmth, he liked clean, dry clothes, he liked her caressing his cheek and packing the eiderdown more snugly about him. At such times his eyes would shine with pleasure and gratitude, just as they could darken with anger and irritation if anything wasn’t as it should be. And it wasn’t only intimate, physical conditions he reacted to. If someone laughed out loud in the vicinity, he would often laugh as well; if there was any disturbance in the house, such as the visit of a stranger whom no one quite knew how to respond to, or a row between Anna and Rachel, he would pick it up where he lay, and let himself be colored by it, whether by starting to rock his head discontentedly from side to side or by casting anxious glances about him.
But she’d never seen him really frightened until the night of the hurricane, when they had to carry him from his small bedroom down to the cellar. He suspected something was afoot as soon as they entered the bedroom, for he looked at her with disquieted eyes as she leaned over him. Perhaps he’d heard the excited voices from below, perhaps the feet running back and forth across the farmyard, she thought. Unless it was her face he was reacting to.
She laid her hand on his brow.
“Everything’s all right,” she said. “All’s well. Just you go to sleep.” But he continued to look up at her.
“We’re all here,” she said.
Suddenly he gripped her arm. The grip was hard, it hurt, and she had to use considerable strength to bend back the fingers to loosen his hold.
She stood up, looking by turns at him and out into the corridor through the open door.
Outside, the wind was tearing through the valley with frightening power. Now and then the windowpanes rattled. The small candle that she’d lit on his bedside table flickered in the draft.
“Everything will be all right,” she said, and took a few steps toward the door, craning forward. She heard the twins moving about in the hallway. The next moment they were coming up the stairs with the stretcher between them.