Brothers Read online

  David Clerson

  BROTHERS

  Translated from the French by Katia Grubisic

  QC fiction

  Revision: Peter McCambridge

  Proofreading: Riteba McCallum, Elizabeth West

  Book design and ebooks: Folio infographie

  Cover & logo: YQB MÉDIA

  Fiction editor: Peter McCambridge

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Copyright © 2013 by Les éditions Héliotrope, Montréal

  Originally published under the title Frères

  Translation Copyright © Katia Grubisic

  ISBN 978-177186-086-4 pbk; 978-1-77186-087-1 epub; 978-1-77186-088-8 pdf; 978-1-77186-089-5 mobi/pocket

  Legal Deposit, 4th quarter 2016

  Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec

  Library and Archives Canada

  Published by QC Fiction

  6977, rue Lacroix

  Montréal, Québec H4E 2V4

  Telephone: 514 808-8504

  [email protected]

  www.QCfiction.com

  QC Fiction is an imprint of Baraka Books.

  Printed and bound in Québec

  Trade Distribution & Returns

  Canada and the United States

  Independent Publishers Group

  1-800-888-4741 (IPG1);

  [email protected]

  We acknowledge the support from the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC) and the Government of Quebec tax credit for book publishing administered by SODEC.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013-2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

  CONTENTS

  PART I

  The Father

  PART II

  A Dog’s Life

  PART III

  Odyssey

  PART IV

  Brothers

  PART I

  The Father

  1

  They pushed through the beating wings and squawks, dozens of birds flapping around them. Their feet sank into the muck. The brine filled their noses, and the smell of muddy water, stagnant and swampy. The first boy, who was missing an arm, walked uncertainly, as if his missing limb pulled him off balance. The second boy followed a few metres behind, his stumpy arms too short for his body. Both had water to the waist, and sweat poured down their faces, faces so similar, their dark eyes, the look of strange, primitive gods.

  They had never ventured this far into the salt marsh. But that day, the gulls and the cormorants had gathered there by the hundreds, shrieking, flapping their wings, snapping their beaks. Two turkey vultures soared overhead. The scavengers had not come for nothing: last night’s storm must have washed something up on the marshy shores. It had been the younger brother’s idea to go exploring. The older brother had agreed, without admitting that he was afraid the tide might surprise them in the marsh. But now he walked ahead, pushing aside the tall grass with his lone arm, and he was the first to see the eye, revealed as the boys’ approach scattered the birds that were busy picking at it.

  It was the eye of a monster, come from worlds unknown to the two brothers, some abyss swarming with creatures in a universe that was not theirs. Around its soft body, long whitish tentacles floated on the marsh, rotting. Suckers opened and closed like eyes or a row of toothless mouths. The two brothers stared silently, the younger nudging closer to the older brother, standing by his side, where his missing arm should have been. Above them, birds had gathered, circling and shrieking, hiding the sun, impatient to return to their feast. In the shadows, despite the oozing tear of blood, the dead eye of the beast seemed to stare at the two brothers. “It’s a sign,” the younger brother said. “This isn’t for nothing. Our father, that dog of a father, also came from the sea.”

  Back at home, they didn’t tell their mother, who was busy cooking a goat stew. In any case, they knew that soon there would be nothing left, that their monster would disappear, polished off by gulls and other seabirds by day, and by night by rats, voracious otters, feral dogs, and day and night by hordes of insects winged or crawling that would dig into the body, burrowing into its flesh as if digging a bottomless den, leaving nothing: no trace, no proof of its existence.

  They didn’t tell their mother, they didn’t know if she would have believed them, but they knew that the beast was from the Great Tide she told them about, the ocean, that infinite expanse of surging black water, unpredictable and menacing, that opened up before them, sealing off their world, and where, she said, lived gruesome, gargantuan creatures, two-headed fish, turtles with shells as big as islands, whales with mouths so large they could consume entire cities. They didn’t tell their mother, to whom they spoke less as they grew older, still boys but becoming men, independent, and she now seldom left the grey clapboard house. She was going blind, still able to feed her goats, gather the plants that grew in the fields and the seaweed the tides dragged to shore, but she couldn’t see her sons running in the distant hills beyond the marsh, where they could feel the wind push against their bodies, covering them in droplets of salt water from the ocean.

  They were growing up, and she had missed it somehow, she who had borne them so late, at an age beyond motherhood, her weathered body, her skin dry, wrinkled and a little loose, returning for them to the vigour of youth. Each night before bed, as in their childhood, she still told them stories, old, disturbing stories, of all the evils wrought by the ocean, the ocean that one day had washed up their dog of a father. He had arrived in a rowboat, she sometimes said, or sometimes it was an old sloop, or perhaps he had been tossed on the shore after a storm, a sire passing through, his lore changing over time and according to the old woman’s mood.

  Sitting around their goat stew, the two brothers thought about their father, their father who had led a dog’s life, a savage life of grunts and yelps under the moon, the kind of life you had to fight for. Where he came from, there was only danger, only gigantic, tentacular creatures: things to fear, to bite, or to kill, things that meant knowing how to bare your teeth. And things too that didn’t seem that strange to the two brothers, these deformed boys, children of the valley of Hinnom, which the older brother, that day, associated with the thing they had seen in the marsh, with its eye, and with what he had glimpsed: surreal, hostile worlds—familiar, he thought, to his dog of a father—worlds of darkness and brutality, untamed worlds, unleashed.

  “It’s a sign,” his brother had said, seeing the dead beast in the marsh, and the older brother had believed him, as if his brother, who had to bend so low to the ground to gather curious fossilized shells, snake skins or unusually coloured stones with his atrophied arms, better understood the order of things. The older brother had believed him because he didn’t like to doubt, especially those he loved.

  Sometimes he and his brother walked for a few hours across the fields to the neighbouring village to trade objects they found on the shore for honey or smoked herring. This was their only contact with the outside world, contact their mother didn’t like but tolerated, since, with her old legs and failing eyesight, she could no longer go herself. “Come back soon,” she had told them the first few times, and they could feel the knot in her stomach, as if she was afraid of never seeing them again, though now they often left w
ithout her knowing they were gone, and she went entire days without seeing them while they explored the coastline or the nearby fields, or risked a quick swim in the freezing, fearsome black water of the Great Tide. She spent her days shuffling back and forth between their grey clapboard house and the goat pen, repeating the same movements she had done a hundred times before, her eyes open but her sight failing, telling herself over and over the same stories she once told her children before bed, and which filled their dreams.

  What most drew the two brothers to the neighbouring village were the children they had come across one day, standing deep in a muddy pond, whom they had named the leech-boys.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We’re fishing for leeches.”

  “What for?”

  “To sell them: they say they suck out bad blood.”

  The children were thin and rangy, with long, salt-tangled hair and skin darkened by the sun. They laughed with all their rotten teeth, the children of fishermen, who spent their days in the plains and hills while their fathers were at sea. The two brothers didn’t like them, but kept coming to see them, perhaps to confront their vision of the world, or out of an unhealthy attraction, part curiosity, part disgust.

  One day, pointing at the older brother’s missing arm, one of the leech-boys asked,

  “Why are you like that?”

  “It’s because of our mother.”

  “What does that mean, ‘because of our mother’?”

  “She cut my arm off so that my brother could be born.”

  “That’s not true, that’s impossible.”

  “It’s true. She told me herself.”

  The older brother stared at the leech-boy, a tall angular kid who was missing a tooth, he stared at him and hated him with a hatred that wracked his entire body, from his head to his feet, his brain, his guts.

  He spat on the ground. “That’s how it is. You wouldn’t understand.” And he turned and left with his brother. They walked in silence through the field and both of them felt a dumb, screeching rage welling up in their throat, a rage that would not be spent that day, but which they would hold in their bellies for a long time.

  They had come into the world on the same day, but only the older brother was born of their mother. That’s what she had told him, in the same tone she used for her bedtime stories.

  “I love you more than anything, but the world is a cruel place, too cruel to be faced alone. Soon I won’t have anything to give you, and there’s nothing to be had from your father. That’s why I’ve given you a brother: you’ll always be able to count on him, and only him.

  “The day you were born, I took you, I came outside, and I laid you on a wide, flat stone, right here, in the garden. You were beautiful, all pink and wrinkled. I leaned over you and I kissed your forehead softly, I told you that I loved you, that everything I did was for your own good, then I hummed old songs my mother had taught me, and which her mother had taught her, songs with a little bit of magic, in a forgotten language—some know the words, but no one knows the meaning—and you listened to me, with your beautiful newborn eyes wide open, as if you found my songs beautiful.

  “That day, I remember, the sea had dragged a drizzle over the hills, and then the sun had come out, a glorious summer sun. You were lying on the stone. You looked at me with your big black eyes and I was crying and singing. I took a knife with a sharp blade, I held your left arm, and I cut it off, my eyes closed, still singing. I will never forget your screams, but I knew what I was doing, I knew the ritual: it gives life, erases solitude, and I told myself it was for the best, it was the best thing a mother could do. I covered the wound with a paste of herbs and clay to help you heal, and I kissed your forehead again, still singing for you as you cried and screamed in pain. You don’t hold it against me, do you? Tell me you could never hold it against me. (The older brother looked at her with his dark eyes, his gaze telling her that he didn’t blame her, that he could never hold it against her.) I don’t think I could regret what I did…”

  She had told him that his brother had been shaped from his severed limb, and born with two stumpy arms, imperfect but attached to a body that was intact, the body of his brother, with whom he loved to run along the shore and in the hills, and who like him had deep, dark eyes, the same eyes they both shared, the same look of brothers.

  That same day and the days that followed, his mother told him, she had repeated time- worn gestures, rituals from the dawn of the world, taking care of her little boys, tending to the wound of the older brother and watching the other one grow, and she soon brought them to her breast, like twins born of the same flesh.

  That’s what his mother had told him, claiming that an arm was not really much of a sacrifice, that it was a gesture of love that had made him stronger by giving him a brother, and he believed her, as he believed every word that came out of her mouth.

  There was no room for doubt, for him or for his brother. And they had no doubt when again they came upon the leech-boys in the neighbouring village.

  “So, your brother was born out of your arm?” the one who was missing a tooth asked.

  The older brother said nothing.

  “It’s not true,” the leech-boy added. “It can’t be. I don’t know how you can believe that. It’s because the old lady, your mother, wants you to think that what came out of her was normal. But it’s not true, you’re not normal. It must be because she was too old when she had you, or because of who your father was.”

  The older brother spat in the boy’s face, a sticky white glob of phlegm.

  The younger brother hit the boy, driving his head into his abdomen.

  They left with a few bruises and torn clothing.

  On the way home, the older brother squashed beetles, grasshoppers and other bugs they saw. Finding some snails on a rock, he stomped on them with both feet. A grasshopper that landed on his hand was crushed between his fingers.

  The two brothers stopped in the shade of a boulder where farmers had thrown the carcasses of animals that had died during a famine. Only bones remained. The brothers spread them over the ground. Around the skull of a steer, the older brother had fanned out a crown of dog, donkey and horse teeth. His brother had planted phalanges, vertebrae and the thin line of radius bones between the ribs of a goat’s ribcage, making it look like a monstrous porcupine. They continued arranging the bones, setting the skull of a chicken on the long tibia of a horse’s leg, combining two dog skeletons into a single Siamese creature, setting shoulder blades on either side of a cow’s pelvis like the wings of a colossal prehistoric insect. Then they lay down among the beasts, one against the other, faces turned to the sky, with the shadows of their bony creations stretched over their bodies. The wind blew over them, drying the cuts on their knees and elbows. They were quiet, their mouths closed, breathing calmly although their hearts were beating hard in their chests. They were full of fury, but they felt good there, they had found their place with the bone beasts.

  That day, they told their mother that they had had a stupid fight over wild raspberries the older brother didn’t want to share. The two brothers never spoke again of the fight, or what had caused it. When the leech-boys next saw them, they saw the fierce look in the brothers’ eyes and they avoided the subject too.

  And the two brothers kept running across the fields so that it sometimes seemed that they were always running, together, for all eternity, with the sound of the waves breaking on the shore, the waves reminding them of their father who had come from the ocean, the father they would have liked to know and love with a deep love, but different from their love for their mother, a more worrisome love, shadowy, like the waters from which he had emerged, a love both sublime and troubling, inexplicable, a love shaped by a taste for risk, by the temptation of forbidden things.

  2

  One night, when he had fallen asleep thinking of that monster they’d
found in the marsh, the older brother saw his dog of a father. He had pushed his enormous head through the open window of the brothers’ bedroom. There he was, his mouth hanging open above the bed, with black gums, damp fur and limp ears, a string of drool trailing from his lip. He said nothing. He didn’t grunt, or bark, just drooled quietly, and his warm, sticky spittle dripped from his murderous maw, the jaws that looked like they could kill, and it soaked the older brother’s bed, wetting his blankets and his mattress.

  The older brother opened his eyes. He got up in the dark night. Without looking at his brother, he went to the open window, saw the pitching sea, its waves battering the shore one after the other, relentless. He looked at it and was frightened: there were too many things he couldn’t know, he couldn’t face the world alone, he needed his mother and his brother.

  He heard his brother get up and join him at the window, right behind him, on his left.

  “Did you dream it too? Don’t worry. You’ll see. One day we’ll find him.”

  And the older brother bowed his head in agreement despite the fear that knotted his stomach and rose up into his throat.

  3

  The sea had offered up not only the monster, but all kinds of marvels. The fish they caught off an old pier barnacled in seaweed and desiccated snails sometimes looked peculiar, with bulging eyes, unusually bright colours or surprisingly spherical bodies. Waves, tides and storms also left things behind, the uses of which they could only guess. One night, a fishing boat had washed up, and they liked to sit in its gutted hull and tell each other stories like their mother told them, stories of the fearful far-away, where everything was abnormally large, peopled by beings the brothers dreamed up with dread, fascinated, as if their strangeness were not so different from the strangeness of these two children, malformed, the sons of an old woman and a wild dog.