Brothers Read online

  He got up and looked out over the horizon and saw a dark shape swimming under the surface, a ghastly shape swimming away from him. He knew it: it was his father. He had set sail for his father. He had always been heading here. His brother had died wanting to find their father; if his brother was dead now, it was because his father had killed him.

  And now, the older brother was going to kill his dog of a father.

  20

  The older brother had once again made Puppet the sailboat’s figurehead. The boat had become a battleship, launched in memory of his younger brother with the atrophied arms.

  He had replaced the wooden arm on his left shoulder, and pulled the grey pelt over his own. They were weapons of war, offered up by those he had loved, the weapons of a warrior god with demented eyes.

  He fastened his sail to the mast, and barked: the hunt was on.

  It wasn’t long before he spotted a large shadow swimming underwater off in the distance, and he kept his eyes hooked in it, the eyes of a sleepwalker tracking a nightmare.

  On the first day of the hunt, he couldn’t get close to the beast.

  On the second day, he even thought he might lose sight of it.

  On the third day, it seemed closer, and he thought it might have been swimming more slowly.

  On the fourth day, he heard his mother’s voice. “The world is a cruel place, too cruel to be faced alone.” “I’m not alone,” he replied. “I have the bitch and Puppet.”

  On the fifth day, he wasn’t sure he had really come any closer to the beast, but he could see it more clearly, as if his senses were growing sharper from one day to the next: it was no longer just a shadow, it was his dog of a father, the enormous body covered in long black fur, and what he could not see he made up: the black gums and the snout, the open mouth, the tongue hanging limply in the salty water, the school of fish his dog of a father swam through, and the herrings, sardines and eels he gobbled as he flashed by. He remembered his brother telling him: “The monster, the storm, the shooting star… It was our dog of a father.” He didn’t believe it. The true monster now—the two-headed entity, the child-killer, the purveyor of miracles—was him. His mother was right: the world was a cruel place. He would swallow his dog of a father whole.

  On the sixth day, he wondered how long it had been since he had eaten or slept, then thought of that no more. His mother’s voice lived on inside him, speaking to him tenderly as in the first days of his life, and, in the end, nothing else mattered. He thought he must look a little like her, his mother, with her hollow cheeks. He loved her more than anything, as he loved his brother.

  A whole school of flying fish passed like a wave over the sailboat and all around the older brother. At dusk, a brilliant sun melted into the horizon. The older brother could hear his brother repeating: “The future is the sea, the future is the sea!” He saw him again, his too-short arms and that face of a pagan angel, his eyes so black and his laugh that taunted everything, but he knew it wasn’t true, that the future was not the sea, that there was no future. Puppet turned toward him from the bow with his pale smile and told him, “Kill him, kill him, kill your dog of a father. Do it for your mother and for your brother.” The older brother nodded in agreement. The red of the falling sky poured over the ocean. The dog of a father swam below. He had never seemed so close.

  The seventh day seemed to last forever, a vengeful eternity, with the voices of his mother, his brother and Puppet trailing the older brother on his hunt. “I love you more than anything,” his mother repeated. “Go, you do it. I can’t,” his brother told him. “Kill him! Kill him!” Puppet chanted. A strong wind filled the sail. The older brother had never gone so fast. At times it seemed that the wind would make him fly away. The voices of his mother, his brother and Puppet were one and the same in his head. “I need you,” he told each one. He was getting closer to his dog of a father, like a whale he was going to harpoon. Seeing the older brother in the bow of his sailboat, with his cadaverous body cloaked in a primordial pelt and the puppet head like a tribal totem, someone might have thought it was a ghost ship, condemned to hunt for all of eternity. The dog of a father was there, just ahead. The older brother could see him again, hovering over him in his sleep, the big head sliding through his bedroom window or into the doghouse, drooling on him and befouling the air with his breath. This time he had the upper hand, and he would have the last laugh. The sailboat plowed toward his dog of a father, Puppet laughing in the bow. The older brother unhooked his wooden arm, the gift from his brother, lifted it above his head in his other, good arm and pointed it toward the ocean like a harpoon. Under the blazing sun, it looked solid, a sharp weapon, forged in steel; a weapon nothing could prevent from killing.

  The older brother was a warrior with a skeletal body clothed in a dry skin and old dog pelts. He breathed exhaustion, starving. His mother, his brother and Puppet spoke in his head. He was almost a dead man, the walking dead, out hunting. The sailboat was right over his dog of a father, cresting over his shadow. The wind was blowing on the older brother. The sun beat down on his head. As he had heard his brother’s laugh, the older brother could hear the heartbeat of the shadow swimming under the surface, the heart of the shadow that had given him life, the shadow whose heartbeat gripped him, lodged in his stomach and his rib cage and his head, and which he wanted to spit and to vomit out. His body shook from top to bottom, covered in sweat. The older brother opened his mouth wide as if to scream as the wind screamed and he held it wide open, ready to swallow or to clamp down. He hurled his weapon and it sliced through the air. It plunged into the water, stabbing deeply into the dog of a father, and the older brother saw blood seeping in a thin black line up to the surface, and the ocean became murky, masking the shadow of the beast.

  Soon, in the tumultuous black water, there was no trace of the beast’s existence. And it might have been possible to believe it had never existed.

  Alone on the edge of his sailboat, the older brother closed his eyes and collapsed, spent.

  21

  He was living in a seemingly everlasting night, unsure whether he would ever wake from his slumber. Now and again, in the sky, an eye opened, and sometimes several, thousands even, a Milky Way of open eyes staring at the older brother as he slept, closing and opening again, and closing. He sailed, lying in his boat, a dilapidated shell floating idly. Sometimes he remembered the beast he and his brother had found in the marsh. He saw it swimming at the bottom of the oceans in the unending night, its broad body undulating far from the birds, mammals and insects that would dispose of it in the end.

  In the sky, the eyes blinked. A shadow passed between them and the older brother’s sailboat. It was his father’s head, enormous and still drooling. His maw was open and thick black blood flowed out, his own blood, pouring over the body of his son, and the head opened dead eyes before fading, drowned in the dreams that would hold him forever captive.

  The older brother wouldn’t see it again. He would even doubt he had ever seen it. He would come to believe that they had only met as two characters in the unlikely story of an illusory life that had taken shape deep within him.

  22

  When he awoke, the older brother saw light behind his eyelids. Wood creaked, and he heard the noise of water pouring into a dish, and bedsheets rustling, and he fell back asleep.

  Later, when he opened his eyes, he noticed that he was lying on a bed, near a window through which a black raven stared at him. He was thirsty. He fell asleep again.

  When he opened his eyes, the raven wasn’t there anymore. The older brother was cold despite the blankets heavy on his body, and although sweat dotted his forehead. He let his eyelids drop again and soon fell into a dreamless sleep. He barely noticed someone carefully lifting his head and pouring water between his lips.

  Later, he saw the raven at the window, and he wanted to talk to it as to an old friend, but when he opened his mouth, his tongue was
heavy in his chalky mouth and he preferred to keep quiet, and soon fell asleep again. He thought his sleep would be dreamless again, a lifeless sleep, the sleep of death.

  When he awoke the next few times, he often saw a young woman who came to give him water. On occasion, when he felt better, an old man with a white, oval face helped her, sitting him up and feeding him mash. “It’s a miracle you survived,” the old man murmured, and the older brother saw him smile, a friendly smile, and warm, almost surreal to him.

  After a meal, his stomach gurgled, reassuring him and even making him smile. Sweet music, the music of his guts telling him that he was well and truly alive. He thought of his mother, he remembered that one day she had told him and his brother stories of a time when people spoke with their bellies, when the stomach was the seat of consciousness, and they gurgled at each other, an unearthly yet familiar language that no one could decipher anymore.

  The older brother liked this idea, he found it simple and pleasing, and it reminded him of the laughter he had shared with his brother when their stomachs gurgled, like sidekicks whose bellies shared secrets more intimate still than those they whispered in each other’s ears. He missed hearing his brother laugh, and laughing with him.

  He slept a lot; he slept almost all the time, this boy whose life had been a waking dream and increasingly a nightmare he never thought he could escape. His eyes never stayed open for long, often only while he was being washed or fed, or when he looked out the window to see if he could see the raven.

  One day, when he saw the bird looking at him, the older brother said, “You don’t know everything I’ve lived through,” and it seemed to him that the bird nodded its head. It must’ve seen a few things too, the bird, with its round black eye, the eye that looked like the older brother’s eyes, and the younger brother’s, they who had seen things, more than many men at the end of their lives.

  The next day, the raven came back, and the older brother remembered the bird he had eaten raw; the taste, especially, still in his throat, and he threw up, a light, milky bile that the young girl cleaned with a warm damp towel.

  He was sleeping less, and he saw the girl who was taking care of him more frequently, a fleshy girl with long black hair, but he didn’t speak to her. He preferred to talk to the raven: “Did you know my brother? You’ve seen him. He was beautiful, with his dwarf arms. He laughed so much. In some ways, he was an angel… Were you there, that day, when he found long strands of wrack on the beach, and he wrapped the seaweed around a dead tree as if to clothe a totem pole? Do you remember the day he stomped on that big anthill? Did you ever see him chasing big black beetles between the stones, for fun, running almost on all fours, his hands flipping stones as fast as he could? One day, he painted the ones he caught: one red, one black, one gold.” The older brother continued to talk about his brother; he spoke only of him, and often he thought he felt his left side tingling, a kind of tickle where his missing arm would have been.

  One day, the young girl caught the older brother talking to the raven.

  “Is that how it is? You talk to ravens but not to me. The villagers are right: you’re a strange bird.” She was nice to him, the older brother thought. She took care of him as she would have her grandfather or a newborn. He smiled at her, but didn’t speak: he didn’t feel like talking to her, there was nothing he would have wanted to tell her.

  Little by little, the older brother slept less and ate more. The old man with the oval face came to see him more often with the young girl, and the older brother understood that he was her father. They spoke to him, telling him that the sea and the wind had pushed his boat into a bay on their island, that they had found him lying in the bottom, skeletal in his animal skins, they had rescued him, for a long time they doubted he would survive, but he had proven to be surprisingly tenacious, as if he were not destined to die.

  The older brother said nothing. He didn’t want to talk to them. He was surprised that his heart was still beating, that his lungs still drew air and that his digestive system still worked. It didn’t make him especially happy; nor would he have preferred to die. He let himself live, sluggishly. He would have been happy just talking to the ravens, telling them everything he knew about his brother; he could’ve stayed in that room forever, fed by others, with no plans or ambitions, but he felt that the girl and her father had done too much for him to live, and that he owed them at least a willingness to do so. He did not wish to talk to them about his life, he didn’t want to tell them anything about himself, but he didn’t want to disappoint them either, as he hadn’t wanted to disappoint his brother, the brother whose absence he felt again, whom he loved with all his heart, maybe more than he had ever loved, much more surely than he had loved the grey dog, much more, surely, then he had loved his mother, with more affection than he had felt for Puppet. Deep down, his brother might have been the only thing that mattered to him, the only thing that had ever counted, from the beginning.

  One day, when the young girl brought him food, the older brother let his eyes drop to her chest and he felt a familiar heat spreading in his belly, but he told himself she wasn’t for him: he had killed children in their beds, slain his father, and loved a dog. In the home of this young woman he was becoming a man again, but he was still possessed by the memory of his bestiality.

  Finally, he had to get up and put on clean clothes, and he walked unevenly, first with the help of the young girl and her father then by himself, wobbling on his two legs.

  Outside the bedroom, in the dining room, he saw his dog pelts hanging on the wall, very straight, one next to the other, proof of what he had been. The older brother ran his fingers over the fur, which was soft and smooth: the young girl had taken care to wash them.

  He also saw three wooden puppets sitting on a bench: the first dressed and made up like a man, the second like a woman, and the last like a little girl; finely crafted marionettes with articulated limbs, carefully assembled.

  One day, the young girl’s father showed the older brother his workshop: he saw arms, legs and heads; cans of paint to outline the puppets’ faces; and pine and cedar logs that would become their bodies. The older brother also saw the head of his Puppet, the black and white paint on the wooden face almost gone, and the sight of it made his stomach hurt. “I took it from your boat. It’s yours,” the old man said. The older brother shook his head and left the room, and he envisioned one of the old man’s creations lost at sea and carried on the waves, slowly overcome by brown and green seaweed, snails and shells stuck to its body, and carried out, far out, to the brothers’ childhood home, that impervious world closed in on itself where their mother would have loved to keep them, and which he longed for now. He had begun to see it again in his dreams, he and his brother running across the fields and barking like dogs, hunting moorhens, rats and lost cats, and burying their bones.

  His dreams whetted something in him, and he secretly wished to find them again in his sleep, yet he avoided sleep, he slept less and less, going to bed only when he was truly exhausted, and trying as much as he could to fill his days. They were dog dreams that the older brother enjoyed guiltily. He would have liked to forget the horrors of his dog’s life.

  He had begun to help around the house. He carried water. He cleaned the chicken coop. One day he even took a fishing rod, sat on the end of the wharf, and he couldn’t help but think of his brother, almost believing he could feel him huddled against him as on that miraculous day when they had fished the dog, and he brought his hosts a superb silvery salmon, the nicest fish he had ever caught.

  He walked a lot on the island, an island of wheat fields and conifers all around the house of the young girl and her father, a house built outside the village that served as a port of call for travellers; a village the older brother avoided, since he attracted too many looks, with his one arm and his status as castaway. He preferred the solitude of the fields and the woods, the ocean wind, and the company of the ra
vens he continued to talk to.

  The birds accompanied him every time he went out. Sometimes, one of them would even perch on his shoulder. He talked to them about his childhood, always, and his brother, but he embellished his tales, telling them the stories his mother had told him, stories in which his younger brother dug tunnels under the hill, a network of tunnels and underground rooms, a realm of wonders where the older brother and the younger had pieced together beings out of bones, phantasmagorical beasts made of animal remains, which came to life in the heart of the hill, in an eerie universe that was best avoided. That was what he told them, and many other stories, stories in which the wind always blew off the sea, stories redolent of the smell of the fields and the hills where the brothers had played as children, and sometimes a raven cawed at him in thanks.

  That was the world the older brother decided to go back to.

  Without him having to ask, the young girl and her father offered to help him return to the mainland, and he nodded his agreement at their proposal, a proposal with no ulterior motive—it wasn’t a way to make him leave—and for which the older brother was deeply grateful, with a fond, loving gratitude he had not often felt.

  One morning, they brought him to the port, he clasped them against him with his lone arm, bade them farewell, and boarded a small trade ship headed for the mainland. As his only baggage, the older brother took with him his pelt and the grey dog’s, keeping them tightly rolled in a bag.

  As he was about to leave, a group of ravens landed on the ship to follow him on his voyage.

  That evening, wrapped up in a blanket in the bottom of the boat, he saw his mother holding a knife in the sun, she was enormously tall, her proportions legendary, and he thought that he loved her, and he saw the young girl, her white skin shining in the moonlight, and more than ever he felt the return of human desire.