The Brothers

by Asko Sahlberg

  ‘Right.’ Jansson yields and goes out, leaving the lantern by the door.

  We take aim at each other, I merely with my eyes. I could risk it and try to throw myself at him. He stands legs apart, narrow shoulders raised in anticipation, restlessly swaying his wide, womanish hips. A vein bulges in the middle of his forehead like a worm and his bottom lip glistens with spit. He is a travesty of a man, a eunuch that has crawled out from the dunghill of manhood, pitiful and therefore dangerous. He is a good shot, I know, but he will soon tire of holding up the weapon.

  ‘I’ve had a word with the Bailiff,’ he says.

  I take a step towards him. ‘We gathered.’

  ‘But I spoke of other things, too. We talked about the war.’

  I take another step. ‘I suppose you made out you were a great hero.’

  ‘Not quite. But I told him about what I saw in the war. I told him about a man who nearly shot his own brother. He would have shot if I hadn’t happened on the scene.’

  I stand still. I am suddenly there. I am considering shooting, but I do not want to do it. I know I will not shoot. I want only to be far away from the thundering cannon. I lean against the tree trunk, I close my eyes. I decide to wait until Erik vanishes. I stand there and I do not open my eyes. Erik will go on his way and I will inevitably return to St Petersburg, to the misery and degradation that have become my inheritance, although I never asked for or wanted that, but it was nevertheless better than staying on, only to be a spectre in the habitat of my past honour. I will not open my eyes, I will not. A shot rings out and splinters fly into my face. My eyes snap open, I leap into motion. I would not have shot. For a moment I wanted to, but I dropped the thought instantly. I never shot.

  My mouth is dry, but I say lightly, ‘You talk a lot.’

  ‘I do indeed. And the Bailiff and I agreed that he’ll remember what I told him should anything happen to me.’

  I let out a laugh. ‘You’ve thought it all out.’

  ‘You think of things when you’ve got the time. When you’re cowering in a miserable pigsty, waiting for your worthy masters to deign to give orders.’ He pushes his face forwards, his head trembles and he squeezes out the words from between his teeth. ‘For there are people who treat their own kin like the lowest serfs.’

  ‘So you consider the house a pigsty? And you still wanted it? You would have preferred to starve to death, I suppose?’

  ‘Man does not live by bread alone. A man can be made hungry by not being considered equal to other men.’

  ‘That’s as may be. But you could look at it another way: there aren’t many who’d take in a Tom Thumb like you. Especially one who doesn’t even know any funny tricks.’

  His hands began to shake. Why does he not shoot? Am I imagining it or do I really sense his smell? He probably does not secrete normal sweat in the manner of other human beings. He exudes the odour of a muddy marsh. Like a frog. That is just what he is: a toad lying in wait for insects and larvae. I feel like laughing. I do not laugh but instead step calmly past him and continue outside without further ado. He lets out a screech behind me, almost human-sounding. I do not expect to get a bullet in my back. I pull the barn door shut behind me.

  I stand in the darkness. It has fallen like a blanket. Jansson is defying Mauri’s orders; his face looms sallow at the corner of the building. He lumbers towards me and splutters, ‘I just wanted to say, about the horse…’

  I put my hand on his shoulder; he recoils. ‘It’s time to let it go.’

  ‘But I never…’

  ‘Of course you didn’t. Things just happen sometimes.’

  He sighs. A man can be fat and at the same time small and bent. I suppose that is how we all end up, eventually. I am the one who always leaves and who will never need to reach a destination. I will sleep one more night here, then I will pick up my knapsack and vanish. In the annals that will never get written, let it stand: this man has shed his past.

  I walk along the road. The moon is about to come apart from the cloud. It shines in the sky like fat at the bottom of pan. The gleam is not enough to cast shadows, the field of darkness extends evenly. Sounds are forced to creep along the blanket of snow. Behind the ditch, spruces shake off snow of their own accord, without needing wind. I wander exhausted and empty, peaceful. But suddenly I am alert. Someone is coming towards me.

  We stop at a cautious distance from each other. I cannot see Anna’s face but I sense her reluctance. I would like to reassure her, to confirm that after tomorrow, she will never see me again. At the same time, something in me wants to reach out for her. The warmth of her skin remains in my fingertips, I still taste her tangled hair. After some hesitation she says, in a voice thick with deep and indelible suspicion, ‘Did you see…’

  I wait for a moment. ‘I did. Your father seemed fine. But he doesn’t choose his company too well.’

  ‘You mean…’

  ‘Yes. Mauri’s there.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of him.’

  ‘You’re the last person who needs to fear him.’

  She strides past me, the mild steam of her breath flaring up to my face. All I would have to do is stretch out my hand, but it stays by my side, stuck fast. I listen to her moving away and kick myself into motion. I am walking here but I see myself on another road. I see myself among ragged paupers in a filthy backstreet of St Petersburg. My feet are in front of me, I begin staggering, I feel faint. Dizzy. Someone speaks, but my cheeks do not move. Someone tries to rise within me. I am being eaten from within. What ails me? My gums are burning, my teeth are loosening. I feel blood seeping from my armpits. What ails me, so suddenly?

  THE OLD MISTRESS

  I will collect the eggs at dawn. Some butter would be good because it tastes nice with eggs. Everything will freeze in the frost, anyway. I am not that bothered about lard or bread. But I expect we will eat well before we set off and will not eat again until we reach Vaasa. On second thoughts, I will put on the fur hat Arvid brought me from Stockholm. A few of the eggs might remain unfrozen inside it.

  ERIK

  Henrik has appeared in the doorway. I do not know how long he has been standing there, silently swaying, seemingly not breathing, aiming his mute eyes at some vague spot. His hands are fists, the muscles of his face are taut. He must have come in only a moment ago, but his forehead is slick with sweat. He looks unwell: long-term sick, convalescent. He looks like a man you would see in a dream, rising up from among gravestones in a churchyard.

  ‘We thought we’d get our things together, for the journey,’ I say, pushing the drawer of the bureau shut. My eyes become fixed on Mother’s tiny porcelain figures, their fragile shapes. Are they what Henrik is gaping at? ‘We won’t need much, from the look of it. You don’t realize how little you have until you start gathering it all together.’

  He keeps staring a fraction past me, as if incapable of looking at me directly. His voice sounds strange when he says, without moving his lips, ‘I suppose you’ve got a gun?’

  ‘I do. Or I did, at least. When I last saw it, it was in Mauri’s hands.’

  He shuts his eyes and bites his lips together as if trying laboriously to compress a new thought. ‘What about Father’s old shotgun?’

  ‘It’s with the Farmhand. Ask him.’

  He opens his vacant, bottomless eyes. ‘No point asking him.’

  Suddenly I remember him as he once was. Once we were small boys and his eyes were not hard and hostile. His laughter, which in those days rang out often, was not distorted by mockery or contempt or suppressed rage. He was my brother then, nothing could come between us, I could trust him. He coaxed an enraged bull to abandon its attack on me. He shinned up a tree to fetch me when I did not dare to come down. It was a summer evening, mosquitoes circled above the slow, flowing, glittering surface of the river and we floated our fishing rods in the water and he said he wanted to be a fish and swim out to the sea and to foreign countries. I asked to go with him and he said I would need only to hang on to
his fins. But his fins began to grow, sprouting ugly scales and pushing out spikes and forcing him into deeper waters, into a gloomy pond of kind I had no business to enter. And as if that were not enough, life threw horses and loves between us.

  ‘What do you want with a gun?’ I ask.

  ‘I thought of going to the forest.’

  ‘You can’t see well enough to hunt now.’

  ‘My prey is close.’ He lowers his gaze, sees an answer to a silent question on the floor, nods once then twice. ‘I’ll go to the river, then.’

  He turns and leaves and I understand. I curse, I rush after him. He is already stepping outside, the door lets in a cold blast, I stuff my feet into my boots. I stumble on the threshold, skid on the steps, hurl myself down them and after him. He is slower than I, always has been, his feet heavy as if his body were weighed down by the merciless weight of the world’s sins, all collected together. I grip his shoulders and he turns, and now I see his grey eyes without seeing them, the furious glow of the rough weave of an eternal night. He swings his fist in a high arc at me and I cling to it with both hands and squash him with my full weight and he begins falling, back-first, in slow motion, a tree yielding reluctantly from its base, and lets out the broken, intensifying roar of a wounded animal, the like of which I would not have thought human lungs able to emit.

  THE FARMHAND

  Nature toys with humans, pokes fun at us. It is a grim game in general, as when frost hits fields, or a river floods, or a thunderbolt strikes a man dead. At times one feels as if the earth were waging a war against men, along with the sky, the winds and of course the snow. A human being puts up a fight as best he can, but he might as well throw himself down and wait for the axe to fall.

  Nature is having good sport as I rush out of my cabin and the moon charges forth from behind a cloud in order to light up the absurd misfortune of man. I was just sitting by myself, listening to my own taciturnity, so I am like someone newly woken. But I trot as fast as my stiff legs will carry me. The brothers are rolling around on the ground and Erik is shouting, he’s letting out a dull, almighty, unending roar. But no, the sound is not coming from Erik. It’s Henrik who’s shouting. Impossible, altogether contrary to the laws of nature, conclusive evidence of the imminent end of the world, the deluge, the Last Judgement. I reach them just as the Old Mistress and Anna appear on the steps. I try to get hold of either of them, of something, a hand, a neck, or a shoulder, but no grabbable limbs protrude from the ball they form, except four, or it looks like eight, legs that move so quickly that my old hands cannot catch them. They have become one unified creature and at the same time more than two men, and not just men, but two-and-two-thirds, or at least two-and-a-half, man-horses, with bared yellow teeth and furiously kicking hooves.

  At that moment, a heavy figure throws itself down on top of them from my side and everything ceases. The human horse stops flailing and twitching and all you can hear is the laborious breathing of the brothers. The Old Mistress lies across them like some sort of eternal foremother, sacrificing herself for her offspring and conquering them with the sheer might of her motherhood. She is a stone statue, the first mother of the ferocious females of the past, who has plunged off her pedestal. She says calmly, as if looking up distractedly from her rocking chair, ‘Stop this din!’

  I reach out my hand and help her onto her feet. She leans against my shoulder, but not by any means out of exhaustion. Erik, too, is soon on his feet, while Henrik pushes himself upright bad-temperedly, moving slowly like a bear that has just crawled out of its cave. Anna finds her way quickly to Erik’s side, but in the gleam of the blaspheming moon I notice that her eyes, oddly shiny and hot, are stuck on Henrik. This is not the first time I am troubled by nothing being quite what it seems.

  ‘Why didn’t you let me go?’ Henrik asks threateningly.

  ‘Because I’ve still got my wits about me,’ Erik answers. ‘And because it’s the wrong way to go.’

  ‘Who are you to decide? Should I take orders from a man who cannot even hold on to his house?’

  ‘I may not have held on to the house but I did hold on to you.’

  I see it coming: Henrik presses his shoulders forwards and his fists start swinging by the sides of his thighs like weights fastened on plumb lines. I leap between them, facing Henrik, and say, ‘Why don’t you go now? You can see well enough to travel in the moonlight.’

  He eyes me for a moment, stunned. Then his eyes flash and he raises his hand. I wait for the blow, motionless. I will not close my eyes, I will not. He yanks his fist behind his shoulder and his face, turned towards the moonlight, twists with immense rage. I see the blow before it is on its way and I realize this could be the end.

  ‘Stop it, Henrik!’ the Old Mistress snaps in a steely voice. ‘You will not hit your father!’

  That is how it happens in the end. I have been waiting for this revelation for a long time, imagining a solemn affair, a little like an announcement in church or a declaration issued in the market square that people have gathered to hear in their Sunday best, pious expressions ready on their faces.

  A confused, bubbling sound escapes from Anna’s lips. Erik looks at me with a frozen face. Henrik stands with one hand drawn behind his shoulder, but his head droops to the side as if he has been hit in the face or the muscles in his neck have given way.

  ‘No point pretending. You did know, or at least guessed,’ the Old Mistress says coldly. ‘Arvid wasn’t up to making babies, even before he got ill. And don’t judge me. I’ve got blood in my veins and, once it surges, I have a hunger that eating won’t cure.’

  They have always had different ways of walking, Henrik and Erik. Henrik moves slowly and heavily but Erik is still boyishly agile, one moment here, the next gone. That is why I remain stupidly still as Henrik executes a twist in the air and launches into an incredible run. He gallops along the surface of the yard, trampled down hard, in the direction of the slope leading to the river. Erik dashes off. I am still pawing snow with my feet until I finally work up some speed and jog after them as best I can. The path thuds, the moon casts fleeting shadows, snowy spruces twist and turn anxiously beside me. Now Erik is catching up with Henrik, I lag further and further behind, I stumble, I nearly fall over, damn this old age, I see Henrik reaching the riverbank down below, and the foam of the black water, flowing between the icy banks, and then Henrik, suddenly up in the air, above the river, suspended for a moment in a void. Then he falls, breaking the swirling, muscular surface of the water. Erik makes it to the embankment and I see what is about to happen just before it happens and I try to shout, pathetically and with whining lungs, ‘Take your boots off!’

  He does not take them off, he does not hear me, of course. Now he freezes in the air with his arms stretched out, his head pushed between them – the tautening of a slender figure, like a flexing bow – and then he too is in the water, and I carry on trotting along the sloping bank, clumsy as a hobbled cow. I adjust my route and get off the path, I turn downstream, but it is a mistake because I sink into the snow, right up to my thighs, and so I have no choice but to return to the path. My temples are thumping, my chest is about to burst and my knees threaten to give way, I start scooping air with my hands as I run and suddenly the river is there, I nearly tumble in myself but manage to turn and begin dropping down the embankment downstream. The river is strong, too strong, cunning under its soft skin, from afar I see a hand raised out of the water, but then it, too, vanishes, so death must be certain now, I carry on trotting along the riverside but only to trot towards the end. I feel like throwing myself into the river or collapsing in the snow and sinking into it and asking for forgiveness for all my sins, and roaring out a final prayer before they bury me: a prayer in my own words, one that has been waiting for me all along, dedicated to me.

  HENRIK

  He is finally mine, I clutch him, and I do not let go, I squeeze his hot flanks with my knees, the wild flying of his mane, his hot breath on my face, I am riding him.r />
  She is finally mine, I clutch her, and I do not let go, I squeeze her hot flanks with my knees, the wild flying of her mane, her hot breath on my face, I am riding her.

  We gallop deeper and deeper, towards darkness, together, free, swaying, now.

  ERIK

  Henrik. Fish fins. I bought Jansson’s horse for you. I cannot give you both of them. I will get down from the tree, Henrik. I will come down.

  THE FARMHAND

  But just then the dark surface breaks and first one head pushes through, then another. The heads do not look as if they belong to two separate bodies, but to a two-headed creature risen out of the sludge. Erik manages to turn onto his back and tries to get to the bank, frantically splashing about with one arm while using the other to support Henrik’s head. I reach them and begin looking feverishly for something I can stretch out. Among the shadows cast by the insolent moon, I spot a dry branch sticking out of the snow. I snatch it free from the suction of the lumpy snow and fling myself onto my knees by the water to hold it out to Erik.

  ‘Grab this!’ I shout. My cry sounds like wordless roaring. ‘I’ll pull you out!’

  Erik beats the rushing water with his free hand. His head bounces on the surface, while Henrik’s looks immobile, like a stone sticking out of the river. I try to extend my arms and slither over the bank until almost the whole of my upper body is swaying above a void. Erik lets out a yell – desperate or anguished or merely frantic – and rises partially out of the water, springing out of it backwards in an arched leap. Henrik’s head is in his arms like a loaf clutched by a starving man. Erik clasps the stick I am holding out. I tug with all my might, for a moment I worry that their weight will pull me into the river, but now Erik grabs my shoulder and then the embankment, and I use my last ounce of strength to lie back, tucking my feet underneath myself for grip. I reach forward to seize Henrik’s wet shock of hair. He becomes detached from the river like an exhausted fish and collapses face-first on top of me.