by Ivan Repila
Big does nothing. He doesn’t move, or speak, or breathe. He just listens so that he can fix his eyes on the exact spot. His pupils are so large they could make out the very eyelids of a crow as it circled the moon. He knows where to look:
There.
A head appears and looks down inside the well.
Big knows the features of that face.
Someone returns his gaze.
Then, no one.
Big remains silent, though his breathing has quickened and his heart is pumping acid. He locks his jaw hard, grinding his teeth and making the nerves in the gums between his teeth ring. It’s a pleasant kind of pain, which suppresses the scream building up inside him. A scream like a lump of food in the stomach after a heavy meal.
And willing the wind to carry consonants and vowels across the night, and for his words to penetrate further than any scream could reach, he whispers:
‘I’m going to kill you.’
41
BIG HAS HIS CLAY EARPLUGS in and he can’t hear the shouts coming from his brother, but he senses a change of direction in the air streams around him. When he turns around he finds Small scratching his arms, eyeballing him like a lunatic and opening his mouth in desperation. Big takes out the earplugs and listens:
‘Dungo sat! Dungo was goswun!’
Big doesn’t understand. He thinks it must be another of his brother’s deliriums and goes to put his earplugs in again. Small, though, stops him with a shove and goes on shouting, pointing at his throat with trembling hands.
‘Nu wemee? Wemee bunder? Dungo was menhaman! Menitimo!’
The urgency in Small’s voice is a sign that something is not right. It isn’t a delirium. It’s as if he had just learnt to speak. Like when one cuts a piece of paper into strips and tries to put them back together but can’t form a rectangle, only a misshapen page.
‘Cunnard burds, un cunnard fesis, nemnay! Nemnay fa wampus! Saired!’
After so many weeks listening to Small’s crackpot monologues Big can’t help but see the irony in the strange process that has overcome him, and for the first time in a long while he sees a funny side, and has to discreetly stifle a laugh.
‘It’s all right. I’ll mend the wampus for you, don’t worry. The wampus is under control.’
And the second he utters the phrase he explodes in a snort of laughter, loud like a collapsing quarry. And just like a landslide he can’t stop it, not even when he sees the dagger eyes his brother is throwing him.
‘Forgive me. I’m sorry. Don’t get angry. It’s just the wampus…’
And again he bursts out laughing, beside himself now, out of control, the fits feeding themselves on more fits in an endless cycle of wampus. He laughs so hard that he falls to his knees clasping his middle, his belly, his jaw and his throat hurting. Small, too, is beside himself, but for other reasons: rage, puzzlement, fear; he is seized by a new kind of loneliness, and for a few seconds drastic thoughts race around his head: he might never speak properly again, might never be able to write or leave his mark. He might box his brother to death, stamp over his spine until it crunches underfoot, and leave him paralysed. He might never be able to say goodbye, or say I love you, or throw insults. Pointing his finger at Big, still on the ground on all fours, he screams:
‘Raturl! Filffif doan gon hurtul! Gon hurtul dop unterme! FOTON DUCRUZZER!’
Like adding fuel to the fire. Small’s accusing finger, the indignant look on his face, and the insult that the words ‘foton ducruzzer’ are clearly meant to represent are too much for Big. Doubled up in stitches he tries to find some words of comfort for his brother. Small launches a useless assault, hitting him with a few weak blows, and Big makes an effort to calm him down.
‘Don’t hit me. I’m sorry. I’ll stop laughing now.’
Small hits him again.
‘Stop it! I’ve told you I’m sorry. Let me get up.’
Small makes as if to throw another punch, but instead he says:
‘Yefonk!’
Big suppresses a fresh attack of the giggles.
‘Yes, I fonk. Don’t worry. I know what’s happening to you.’
‘Luno wonsat neme? Nenay.’
‘You’re suffering from a kind of speech defect. It’s not serious. It will pass.’
‘Surro?’
‘Yes, surro. Believe me. You have to rest and try to relax. You can’t keep thinking all the time like you have these last days.’
‘Nime der ra. Me ra. Holenark fut inun wound ma vote. Shelling, or darjung.’
‘I know, I know.’
Big puts his arm around Small, who receives the display of affection with a shudder, then bursts into tears, letting his trembling body fold into his brother’s. Between sniffles, Small says:
‘Amam cor.’
A few hours later, Small is practising speaking under his breath, like a slave learning how to write in secret with old exercise books. He thinks ‘brother’ and his mouth utters ‘furo’. He thinks ‘donkey’ and says ‘kenko’. Exasperated, he decides to start by repeating the simplest words, those with a single syllable. He thinks: ‘sun’.
‘Crun.’
‘Faa.’
‘Sato.’
‘Sot.’
‘Sonn.’
‘Sonn.’
‘Sun.’
He can hardly believe it as he speaks the word. He repeats it, louder:
‘Sun.’
‘Sun!’
‘SUN!’
He erupts with joy. Getting to his feet he cries ‘SUN’ and sploshes around the well with his arms raised, clenching his fists and his eyes, ‘SUN’ and ‘SUN’ and ‘SUN’. Big, who until that point was sleeping peacefully, is wrenched from his dream by the revelling gladiator.
‘What about the sun? It’s already night time!’ he says, his eyes bleary. Small just smiles, satisfied.
43
OVER THE FOLLOWING DAYS the aphasia gradually fades. Small can pronounce the simplest words without a problem, but those that are more complex still defeat him, especially when he tries constructing elaborate sentences or speeches. An inexact means of communication, which must recover the very kernels of understanding.
‘Hunger.’
‘You’ll eat what is strictly necessary.’
And yet, Small is right. Food is becoming scarce, almost certainly as a result of the brothers’ continued plunder of every inch of the well as they forage for roots and insects, small eggs and maggots. What’s more, Big’s decision over the distribution of the food means that Small can barely move, and he spends all day prone on the floor like a vegetable, growing deep ulcers between his buttocks and on his legs. Although skinny and pale, Big retains a certain vigour, the result of a more balanced diet and the obsessive repetition of his exercises. He knows that in these deprived conditions his brother’s time is running out, so in the hope of finding something for him to eat he sinks his hands into the last crevices of the well, delving shoulder-deep into the hard earth. He spends hours like this, then comes across an earthworm, a significant portion of which he loses as he pulls apart the earth to reach it. He hands the worm over and his brother bolts it down without saying a word or moving anything but his tongue.
Small savours the earthworm and imagines he is sucking on a magic pill. There and then he develops superhuman powers: he can fly like an eagle, be as strong as ten men; he is capable of understanding every language on the planet. He decides to leave the well and starts flapping his arms. He lifts up off the ground, one, two, three hands high. He comes across fresh roots. His brother becomes small. And just as his head emerges and he sees the full magnitude of the forest, a rough stake jabs him out of nowhere and he plummets down. He gets up, in pain, but now more sticks appear, walloping him in the nape of his neck and on his arms, and again he falls. His pride is injured now, and he rises up, carried on a typhoon of hate, faster and faster, and at the summit he is showered by a hundred, a thousand sticks that strike him like the keys of a mute organ. He zoo
ms about, blindly smashing into them—a mosquito trapped inside a swarm. Yet, he doesn’t fall. The blows keep coming and he doesn’t fall. In the end, with nothing to lose, he decides to test whether, among the various gifts that the earthworm bestowed on him, immortality is one of them, and he declares war. An armed mob confronts him. You have no right to fight, they tell him. Next thing, Small attacks.
In the afternoon Big gives up and sits down next to Small. The hunger remains. One of the brothers struggles to remove the latent idea of cannibalism from his head. The minutes slide over them as if the well were a courtyard of abandoned statues in the vault of mother earth.
A plump bird lands at their feet, cawing.
47
‘FILTHY SON OF A BITCH.’
The bird was dead within the two or three seconds it took the brothers to surround and jump on top of it. Driven by his hunger, it was Small who moved fastest and clutched the bird by its neck, rendering useless any effort by the animal to fly off again. He grasped so tightly with his forefingers and thumbs that by the time the bird had suffocated its head was practically separate from its body.
‘You little pile of shit.’
It was then that the problems began. Small’s first instinct was to sink his mouth into the belly of the bird, but his brother stopped him, throwing him off with a hefty shove. Small fell flat on his back, switching from jubilation to shock, from shock to anger.
‘Miserable fucker.’
While blocking his brother’s onslaught, Big tried to explain to him that they would not eat the bird right then. Their shrunken stomachs wouldn’t be able to digest the raw meat of the animal, or its bile and intestines. They would have dreadful stomach pains, would vomit virtually at the first mouthful and, without a doubt, what little they might manage to digest and pass through their intestines would come straight out the other end in the form of torrential diarrhoea.
‘Bastard.’
Small had other ideas. According to him, after having eaten insects and larvae and worms for weeks, his stomach could accommodate the raw meat perfectly well, kidneys and all—if the bird even had kidneys—and in spite of the fact that he never would have eaten kidneys at home, because they were repulsive. The only reason his brother wouldn’t let him taste even a morsel of the bird, he maintained, was because of the rigorous division of food he had decreed way back on that day.
‘Stingy arsehole.’
The right way to eat it, continued Big, in spite of his brother’s mounting rage, was to cook it. That is, to roast it or bake it. But the lack of utensils as well as the humidity inside the well prevented them from making a fire. And without fire it was impossible to cook anything. Nor could they smoke it, or salt it, or marinate it in vinegar or oil. There was no way around it.
‘If you died now, I’d piss on your corpse.’
But there was one option. An option that meant eating. And eating more than the sum of the last days’ fare put together. The problem, however, was that they would have to wait a day or two, maybe three, before trying a morsel. That is: go on starving with the banquet laid out before them.
‘Shit-eater, deformed son of a whore.’
They needed to wait for the bird to decompose so that the flies, blowflies and maggots would come out to gorge on it. Small protested vehemently. Where was the justice in letting a load of bugs have their fill on the food that he’d been forbidden to eat? His brother explained that if they left the animal out in the air, without burying it, the decomposition process would be quicker, and that they could eat the flies and the maggots, hundreds of maggots, and that they would have food for days. What’s more, food they were used to and which would sit well with them.
‘You’re a little sack of shit.’
Though in no way in agreement, Small had to bow down to the superior strength of his brother, who guarded the dead bird with his whole body as if he were defending a fortress. Only once Small was sound asleep did Big succumb to the lightest of slumbers and rest. There was no doubt in his mind that, given half a chance, his brother would pounce on the bird and devour the whole thing down to its bones.
‘I’d like to rip your rotten face from your head.’
If the first night was hard, the day after was even worse. There were no civilities, no good mornings or routines, just unbridled, nasty violence. Tension and silence kept a pressure cooker of unease bubbling away: Big in one corner, Small in another, the bird between them. The stench coming off the animal seemed to intensify the fury with which they watched one another. It was as if the clock had stopped, like dead time in a battle.
‘Sheep-shagger, son of a boar and a monkey.’
When a few flies began to buzz around the corpse, Big ate every one and looked at his brother with a triumphant smile. When a few more appeared, Small refused to eat them, despite the fact that Big was managing, painstakingly, to catch them and invited him to do the same. Your pride will kill you, he said, to which Small replied with insults.
‘Dickhead, idiot, freak.’
It didn’t take long for the maggots to creep out from under the wings, like roving tumours. The first ones were small, then succulent, ring-bound bodies sprouted out of the rotten flesh, moving in and out of its orifices. Big’s face lit up with joy. He caught one between two fingers as it pushed its way out of the bird’s neck. He put it in his mouth and felt an explosion of liquid and jelly as he chewed. He couldn’t recall having eaten anything so tasty in his life.
‘Screw your dead family.’
He ate a few more while Small watched and hurled insults at him contemptuously. Once Big had had his fill, he took the biggest maggot he could find and offered it to his brother.
‘Eat. It’s really good.’
‘I don’t want to eat your shitty maggots.’
‘They taste like chicken. And they’re not cold.’
‘Fuck you. Fuck off and die.’
‘You are the one who will die if you don’t eat.’
‘Which means I won’t have to see your scummy face.’
‘Eat.’
Small is so hungry that he can no longer control his body. He baulks, but puts out his hand, into which Big places a colossal maggot, as juicy as a ripe apple.
‘Abuser. Nasty pig. I hate you.’
Finally he eats. He chews the gelatinous fibre of the maggot a dozen times and the bitter juice that oozes from it dances on his tongue. He drools like a hungry dog. It doesn’t taste of chicken: it’s better than chicken. He bursts into tears like the little boy that he was.
‘You’re the best. I love you. I love you.’
The feast goes on all night.
53
‘IF I WANTED TO,’ says Small, stretched out on his back with his arms open like a crucified man, ‘I could change the order of things. I could move the sun so that it fell on us in the middle of the afternoon and that way we wouldn’t be cold after our nap. I could go and collect the old smells from the village and fill our noses with freshly made bread, apple turnovers, chocolate. I could build a spiral staircase from inside the well right up to the trees and then bend it back so we can hop off it again without hurting ourselves. I could turn water into milk and insects into chickens and roots into liquorice. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to do anything. It’s enough to be here and for the universe to keep turning around me. It’s what happens to us who are dead.
‘The living… the living are like children: they play at dying. I lived among tough men who weren’t scared of death, and with smart men who cheated it, and with weak men who let themselves be dragged along by it, but none of them understood the minuteness, the insignificance of a world devoted to that cause. I don’t understand it. I didn’t understand it till now… Look at me… Three big steps. This is all the distance I can cover before the walls cut me off. Three big steps. My world is as small as theirs; it’s a jaw that locks on to me and salivates, diluting me, as if it wanted to erase me, and my own battle is reduced to staving it off. Is this it? Must men liv
e within walls with no windows or doors? Is there something beyond this life while life goes on? There is, brother, there is! I know it! Because in my head, in here, where no one can see, nothing can hold me back. It’s a land without walls, without wells, just for me. And it’s real because it’s changing me; the pain it gives me is different, the days are never-ending. Time is a crossroads nailed between my eyes. My whole childhood will happen tomorrow, I’ll take my first steps tomorrow, I’ll say my first word tomorrow. It’s a glorious feeling, when summer arrives… You think I’m ill? Ignoramus! You think I haven’t proved myself? I know very well that you pay no heed to my words, but this doesn’t make them any less true. If only you were able to see what I see, this darkness of days. But also this inexplicable warmth, so close to love… Don’t you see it? Don’t you feel the liquid engulfing us as if we were foetuses? These walls are membranes and we are floating within them. We move around in anticipation of our long-awaited delivery. This well is a uterus, you and I are yet to be born, our cries are the agonies of the world’s birth.’
*
Big has been listening to his brother in silence, barely understanding a word of what he says. Every day it gets harder to follow him, and he has the feeling that in the end he will be left behind, that Small will keep moving on his journey and won’t look back. Then he says:
‘When you were born the doctor couldn’t get there in time and it was me who pulled you from Mother’s belly. The kitchen was filled with blood and your pig-like squeals. I didn’t know how to make you be quiet, so I put one finger in your mouth for you to suckle on. Mother was asleep, and after a while you fell asleep too, but you went still and you were so tiny and your chest wasn’t moving. I thought you were dead. That I’d poisoned you with my thumb, or who knows what. I was so scared… I screamed at you, too much, and when you woke up I carried on screaming, and you must have thought that the world was a horrible place. I couldn’t sleep for weeks, for months.’
