Brothers Read online

  The brother spat as he ran to get rid of this new taste in his mouth, the taste of human blood, but it coated his palate and his tongue and it disgusted him.

  The grey female, her body racked with pain, was running more slowly than she had hoped.

  They stopped. “Did you kill him?” she asked, knowing the answer, the question without reproach but full of fear, a question that signalled the suffering to come. “You’re in pain,” he said to her, “but we have to continue. We can’t let them catch us.”

  “We won’t let them catch us,” she promised. And he thought to himself that he loved her.

  The fields rose slowly over the hills. The wind blew in from the ocean, and the smell of earth and wheat mingled with salt, seaweed and fish. A smell that was familiar to the brother, the smell of his childhood, a smell he had known for so long before his life as a dog. He ran across the fields and up the hill, although the grey dog was out of breath and had to stop often, and the older brother worried that they couldn’t run faster.

  The squeals of the slain child had roused the household, and their screams had alerted the village. The brother and the grey dog could hear shouting and barking behind them, and he imagined also the moaning and the weeping.

  They didn’t know whether they were afraid. They were neither hopeful, nor despaired. They fled as best they could, as the grey dog had so often fled, she who for the first time no longer ran alone.

  Their flight under the stars was their honeymoon, a consecration of love that sneered at death.

  The female was suffering, and she was so exhausted that they had to stop, a little longer this time. Behind them, a long line of torches advanced across the fields, and they could hear dozens of dogs barking.

  “Don’t tell me to leave you,” the brother said to his companion. He pulled out his right hand and slid it under the grey dog’s pelt; there he felt human skin, beaded with sweat, and in her chest he could feel her heart beat.

  He made her climb on his back and he ran upright, his gait often faltering, his legs no longer accustomed to holding him upright. The torches got nearer, and the barking nearer still. They had set a pack of dogs on them, dozens of village dogs. Bulldogs, bassets, bouviers; dogs that, giving chase, woke every animal in the fields: hares, foxes and shrews that now scaled the hills alongside the fleeing lovers. Dogs that ran faster than the brother could run with the grey dog on his back. Dogs that would devour both of them even if they decided to remove their animal skins to become human again.

  And there he felt rising in him the feeling that he had not escaped death to die like this. He had already saved his lover from humiliation, but he couldn’t save her life, and, rather than die with her, he would avenge her, a terrible vengeance, savage, a vengeance only he and his brother could have imagined.

  He would leave her to her death, but he would carry her with him in his vengeance, the revenge of the human heart, driven by an animal rage.

  He put her down on the ground. “There’s nothing we can do,” she told him. He nodded. “Go.” He nodded. “You told me you wouldn’t leave me.”

  “I won’t leave you.”

  He took off her pelt. She stood there, naked in the grass, weak and shivering.

  He slipped her pelt over his.

  “You see, I’m taking you with me.”

  And he left without looking back, but his chilling, animal howl echoed under the sky. Below, he saw the line of fire split up, one part following him, and the other continuing toward the one he had loved. Dogs barked on both sides.

  He ran, howling unabated, howling for himself, howling for the grey dog, howling from his throat and through her mouth, howling so he wouldn’t hear her die.

  17

  He had never liked swimming, but he quickly understood that he would escape them by taking to the sea. There, the dogs wouldn’t be able to find him, and he swam as he had imagined his father swimming, and as he imagined his brother swimming, snatched up by a wave and swept away into an underwater kingdom where his stubby arms fluttered among the jellyfish.

  He swam, caught his breath in a creek, swam again. For days he huddled in a cave until they weren’t looking for him anymore, assuming that the hunted animal had managed to run away, never to return.

  With his two pelts, he wasn’t cold, inhabiting the remains of a dog and a bitch, feeling more than ever like a complete being, albeit a strange one, one of the hermaphrodites that sometimes appeared in his mother’s stories.

  He ate shells and crabs. He drank rainwater that pooled in a hollow of a stone.

  He was not afraid.

  As night fell he lay on the beach. The sand was warm. The wind was soft. The brother slept a restorative sleep.

  One night, he dreamed that the head of the grey dog had been planted on the end of a spike, a cloud of flies buzzing around her and covering her, blackened, as if charred, while fat, round children, pig-children dressed in stripes, their faces painted white, danced all around, a primitive dance, a death dance, in honour of the queen of flies.

  He woke ready to paint the world the shade of nightmares.

  18

  He surfaced in the middle of the night between two boats in the port. He clambered onto the dock and walked into the village. He headed straight for what was left of his boat and took the head of Puppet, the head on which the oldest of the pig-children had painted a face with a wide smile, and he dove back into the sea with the head, swimming around the village so as not to wake the dogs. He crossed back across the fields, running among the fireflies and the crickets, and came to the piglets’ house. He heard a dog bark—already replaced, he thought—and ran as fast as he could toward the doghouse, where he saw a big, grey, mangy cocker spaniel, and brought down Puppet’s head on the dog’s head, shattering its skull without even giving the animal time to whimper, and he dragged the body with him into the doghouse. There he waited a moment, making sure he hadn’t woken anyone. Then he went out.

  Hidden in the shadows, hugging the wall of the house, he took off his wooden arm and attached Puppet’s head, now stained with the spaniel’s blood. Then he removed the grey pelt and used it to clothe this new wooden man. He was holding a big marionette: the head with its broad, bloody smile, dressed in a dog pelt. He held it up and it seemed alive in the night. It made him smile, and he laughed noiselessly, as his brother would have laughed. He thought he might keep laughing like that his whole life.

  Without delay, and without fear, he burst into the house, slamming the door. He ran up the stairs, letting his laughter seep out of his chest and bounce against the walls. On the second floor, he burst into the bedroom where the piglets’ fat mother slept. He saw her standing there in her flowered nightgown, holding a lantern in front of her, her face contorted by terror, and the light of the lantern made his shadow bigger on the wall, the shadow of a creature of the night, a misshapen dog, a two-bodied being, and he laughed again, letting loose a quick bark between two peals of laughter as he brought down his weapon over the sow’s head, and she fell, her lantern shattering over her and setting her body aflame.

  The brother went out and came across one of the piglets in the hallway. He brought down the smiling head over the child’s skull three times, spraying himself with blood, and he pushed into the piglets’ bedroom, where those who were left sat terrified in their beds, and Puppet fell upon each of them in a racket of broken bones and children’s screams, the brother’s pelt and the puppet’s covered in blood. At last, the older brother jumped out the window, seeming to float down as air billowed under the grey pelt all around Puppet. He rolled in the dirt, scratching his arms and legs, but paid no attention to his injuries, and he ran and ran while behind him fire engulfed the house.

  He ran toward the sea, silently, and dove in, while from the village rose the barking of dogs and the cries of men and women. He swam back toward the port, climbed aboard a sailboat, cast off,
and escaped out to sea.

  For a long time he watched the blaze burning in the night in the distance. It was a bonfire in honour of the grey dog, with the ghosts of the pig-children dancing in the flames, a celebration of death, and the brother celebrated too, the blood of his victims drying on his skin. He was not alone: he was with the grey dog and Puppet. To his left, where the prosthetic arm once again left a void, he thought he felt his brother.

  PART III

  Odyssey

  19

  The sailboat was small and light, made of wood, and it glided on the ocean, attended by graceful seagulls and a few cormorants. This craft was much easier to handle than the brothers’ rowboat. This time, the older brother headed straight out to the open sea, pushed by fair, warm summer winds.

  He had secured Puppet’s head to the bow, leaving his figurehead clad in the grey pelt. Often, the wind would fill the pelt, moving the body and limbs. It seemed to dance at the bow, and it made the older brother smile, a fleeting happiness.

  There had been a barrel of fresh water in the boat when he set sail, along with a few dry biscuits and some smoked herring. The older brother ate parsimoniously, nearly fasting, and he almost never slept, his eyes wide open over dark circles carved out by a scalpel.

  The blood had dried on his face and on the pelt he wore. His skin was tanned by the sun, and hairs were beginning to sprout on his young man’s skin. He was not good at handling the sail and had quickly abandoned the idea of hoisting it, simply letting the waves carry his sailboat. He spent the days and nights standing in the bow, behind Puppet dressed in the grey pelt, with the wind blowing over his body and sprinkling droplets of salt water on his skin.

  He had placed his prosthetic arm in the bottom of the sailboat. Fine cracks had begun to appear on the wood. It had been the arm of a puppet swept away by the ocean, and also the limb of a strange child, the paw of a dog turned murderous, and the handle of a weapon; most of all it was a present from his brother, a present he didn’t know what to do with.

  The first days, the older brother passed a few small islands, then, nothing. Fewer and fewer birds travelled with him.

  He rarely thought of the past.

  He never felt alone.

  In the bow, looking out at the ocean’s black water, he sometimes thought he was seeing things: giant squids, tritons and sirens swimming in the depths. His kin, he told himself. Monsters like him.

  In his rare moments of sleep, he saw himself as a bloodthirsty god, marching over plains of burnt grass covered with cadavers, Puppet in his hand like a mace. He slaughtered women and children, and Puppet laughed, laughed and laughed.

  After sailing for several days, despite his frugality, his stores of food were coming to an end, and he fasted in earnest. Always under the sun in the bow of the boat, he sometimes caught himself sleeping standing up. His body thinned out, the body of a wandering saint, with dried blood encrusted in the hollows of his face, and the cruelty of the world in his belly. He kept squinting: the light of the sun seemed threatening.

  One morning, opening his eyes, the older brother saw a raven standing on Puppet’s head, and he thought he must have passed an island while he was sleeping, that the raven must have come from land nearby. He began to dream of Puppet’s home country, a world of wooden beings, a land of war, of bloodless wars, all splinters and wood shards, and the thought pleased him.

  It might have been one of his mother’s ideas, he thought to himself, not expecting to be thinking about her, and he wondered whether she still talked to them, to him and his brother, every night at supper, if she still warned them against the temptations of the ocean, against that dog of a father that the brothers had wanted to meet despite the fear of sinking into the depths, never to return, into the depths from which the older brother sometimes thought he heard his brother’s laugh rising, as if he were at some eternal carnival with the tritons and the sirens.

  Maybe the raven perched on Puppet’s head heard the laugh too. The bird stood there, its plumage black and glossy, looking at the older brother before turning its head toward the ocean. It must have seen and heard so many things, the older brother thought. “Raven, have you heard my brother’s laugh?”

  “Caw,” the bird said.

  The older brother hadn’t spoken in a long time, barking, mostly, over the last few months. The sound of his voice startled him. It sounded scratchy. He wanted to hear it again. “Caw? Caw, what?” he asked the raven, who turned its head toward him quizzically, but did not answer.

  The next day, clouds filled the sky, growing darker as time passed. The older brother’s ribs were sharp under his skin, just above his hollow abdomen. He felt emaciated, his pelt huge and shapeless around him. He was a gaunt animal, a starving old dog lost on an ocean he didn’t know the end of, but where he floated without fear, without fearing death, but without wanting it either, without worrying about it.

  He was tired. He had a hard time telling sleep from waking. And his brother’s laughter trickled up from beneath the waves more and more often, a jellyfish laugh, the laughter of the deep. The older brother’s ears were full, and his nose and his mouth. The laugher came into his body and filled his belly and his head, denying his brother’s death, as if it had been only a mirage.

  Often, the older brother opened his heavy, pasty mouth to ask the raven, who never left him, “Do you hear it too? Do you hear?” The raven didn’t answer, not even deigning a simple caw. It hopped along the gunwale, sometimes opening its wings to keep its balance.

  The older brother no longer associated his brother’s laughter with happiness. He even wondered whether he had ever been right to think he was happy. Sometimes, it sounded snide; more often, he thought the sound seemed unhappy, laughter tinged with suffering, and he associated that suffering with their dog of a father: for him they had left their mother, for him they had set out to sea without knowing how to sail, for him his brother had been swallowed by the ocean, this ocean now echoing with the haunting laughter that rang in the older brother’s head, as if to say, “What were we supposed to find, when we found our father?”

  The older brother sometimes closed his eyes and saw a wide, black, furry head emerging from the ocean, long strands of seaweed tangled in its fur, drooling over the boat as the older brother had so often seen him drool in his dreams. He had always been that big in his dreams, but the jaw was weaker now, with decayed teeth hanging loosely from rotten gums, and he told himself that he scared him less than before.

  When, after many days of grey, rain finally fell on the older brother’s face, the water washed the dried blood, which ran into his mouth, and he drank it. The rain also washed his pelt, caked with the blood of the pig-children and their mother, and water mixed with blood pooled in the bottom of the boat. The raven cawed while the rain ran over its feathers. The older brother gathered water in the palm of his hand and wet his face. He threw his head back and drank the rain as it fell from the sky, while the raven ran around in the bottom of the boat, circling around him, cawing.

  It rained a long time. As best he could, the older brother made a shelter, pulling the sail tight over the hull. He brought down Puppet from the bow, and took the head with him under the sail. The rain had cleaned the blood off Puppet and wiped away the painted smile. The older brother placed the head in front of him, both of them lying beneath the sail, and he spoke to Puppet as if to an old friend: “Do you remember the first time we saw each other? I pulled you out of the ocean. I did it for my brother. You were covered in seaweed. He had to wash you. Can you hear him laughing? He loved you so much…” Then he pulled the grey dog’s pelt over himself, petted it and said: “I loved you as I may never love again, and I avenged your death better than you could have dreamed.”

  His brother’s laughter echoed under the sail in the shelter, and the older brother began to sing a song without words, though words slipped into the tune, words he didn’t know, archaic
words maybe, or new words created from nothing, devoid of meaning, a tune like his mother used to sing, maybe the same one she had sung on the first day of his life to reassure him while she cut his arm off.

  He sang to chase away his brother’s laughter, but couldn’t. His song rose from his empty stomach, where the laughter had already seeped in, and it filled the sail, mixing with the laughter that quickly drowned out the music. The older brother stopped singing and began to cry, tears streaming from his dry body.

  The next day, when morning came, the rain had stopped and the older brother had fallen asleep, covered with the grey pelt, Puppet next to him.

  In his dream, he was walking on the ocean as one might walk across a desert, an ocean covered in bodies, a dry sea, not fit for life, and he felt his hunger scream from the pit of his hollow stomach, a screeching voice like his brother’s on his angry days, a raging voice that nothing but the taste of blood would appease. And always he heard his brother’s laughter, laughter that sneered at death, and the older brother wanted to believe it, dreaming of his brother alive for all time.

  At the peak of the afternoon, as the sun began to pierce the clouds, the raven joined him under the sail. The older brother turned to the bird in his sleep and asked, talking in his dream: “Did you hear him laughing?” The raven snapped its beak and answered in its bird’s voice, the voice of a ventriloquist in which the older brother thought he heard his own: “Caw. Your brother hasn’t laughed in a long time. Your brother is dead, unquestionably dead.” Then the older brother woke, staring into the empty eyes of the silent bird. How he hated this bird of ill omen. He grabbed it suddenly with his hand, brought it quickly to his mouth, bit into its throat and felt blood run over his tongue, and twisted its body to break the neck. Then he came out from beneath the sail, knelt under the sun, plucked his victim with his teeth, and ate the body raw before throwing the remains overboard.