We Never Talk About My Brother

by Peter S. Beagle

  And yet the little girl had said of her gift, “Oh, you will like this one.” As false as any chandail vision, this one, surely, but illusory in a completely different way. I managed to mutter, “Oh, get up, you stupid slut, get up,” and Bismaya tried to rise, but her belly gave her so much trouble that I had to fight the impulse to help her to her feet. We faced each other in silence. She said finally, “You look well, Lal.”

  “Slavery agreed with me,” I answered. “Rape has kept me young.”

  I spoke quietly, but Bismaya cringed away from me, catching hold of a railing to steady herself. “There was never a boat,” she whispered. “All the dreams, every night, every night, but never on a boat. I will wake from this—I will.” But her eyes knew better.

  “The best is not to sleep,” I said. “Take my word for it.” She saw the chandail in the water then, and gave a little cry of boneless terror: seeing one of them without warning does have that effect. I said, “You are dreaming, Bismaya. I cannot harm you, and I would not if I could. Now that I see you, the idea of it—the dream that cradled my heart every night for so long—seems silly and meaningless.” She actually bridled at that: the same Bismaya who would rather have been flogged in the market square than ignored. I went on, “But I need to know something, and I think you need to tell me.” She belched suddenly, as pregnant women will, and then looked horribly shamed and mortified. I savored the old bitter taste of the word for the last time before I let it leave me. “Why?”

  She stammered and coughed, looking everywhere but at me. I said, “Later I heard that you received money enough to buy that singing bird you coveted so. Was that really the way of it, then?”

  Bismaya shook her head, still not looking at me. Her hair—dusty graying shadow of the comb-defying black wilderness I remembered—hid her face when she finally replied to me. “It was your eyes. I could not bear your eyes.”

  I think my mouth actually dropped open. She said timidly, “Lal, you always had such beautiful golden eyes—always, from the first—and all I ever had was these muddy brown ones. They’re too small, and the lashes are just stubby, and I wanted so much to have eyes like yours. I couldn’t sleep for envying you, do you understand?” She made that maddening helpless twittering gesture with her hands that she used to make when explaining why some new disaster wasn’t her fault. “I couldn’t stand to see you, Lal, every single day. You remember how it was. How we were.”

  First up in the morning, first over at the other’s house to play and laugh, and gobble breakfast, and swim in the river, and make up long, long stories about the adventures our toys had together.... Bismaya went on, talking faster now, “I had to be rid of you—I had to make you go away, do you understand, Lal? So I wouldn’t be thinking about you all the time.” She stopped abruptly and stilled her hands, spreading them with something resembling dignity. “That was why. That was all.”

  I was suddenly very tired. There was nothing here for me: not retribution, not solace, not even poor old useless justice—nothing but a foolish woman whom all my hating had not made worthy of hatred. Had she been there in the flesh, I would still have... but how do you strangle a ghost? Beat a ghost to death? Claw out the stupid eyes the ghost so hungered to trade for yours? Instead I asked, “When is your baby due?”

  “In two weeks’ time. So they tell me.” Changing the subject made her voice firmer, and strengthened her stance as she faced me. “My ninth, would you believe it? It would have been the eleventh, but we... lost two of them.” I dislike people who cannot bring themselves to say died, but the pain in her eyes was as real as she—I had to keep reminding myself—was not.

  I wanted to look away from her, so that she would vanish, as the chandail’s specters always did if I could ignore them long enough. It astonished me to hear myself saying formally, “I grieve your grief ” to her, and I deliberately undercut any suggestion of sympathy by adding pointedly, “But you clearly lost no time in finding replacements.” Bismaya winced visibly. I was glad.

  “This one will be the last,” she said. I must have made some sort of derisive sound, because her voice changed, becoming harshly flat in a way that I had never before heard from fluttery Bismaya. “This one will kill me.”

  I stared at her. She smiled a strange, almost exultant smile. She said, “I know this. I welcome it.”

  “No,” I said. “No, you can’t know such a thing certainly.” But women can, and I had seen the look of her body and her face too many times on others not to recognize it, whether I would or no. There was nothing to say, so I said, “The child?”

  “Oh, the child will live.” The smile sidled wider. “It’s healthy and strong—I can feel it—and my husband will have a new wife to raise it before the earth has settled on my grave.” She mentioned his name. I recalled it, and his chubby face as well, from our shared childhood. She said, “So there you are, Lal. There you are. It is all to you, in the end.”

  “Nothing is mine,” I said. “Victory, vengeance, the triumph of patient virtue—none of it worth a minute’s waiting for. In a moment you will wake, when the chandail wearies of its play with us, and so will I rouse from my own old dream, and neither of us will ever awaken so again. It is over, Bismaya.”

  “Over?” she cried, stepping toward me for the first time. “Over for you, perhaps!” Marriage, or motherhood, perhaps, or simply the imminence of death—had given her distinctly more spirit than I recalled her ever possessing. “Lal, for every night you suffered for the wrong I did you, I promise you that I have spent two nights of weeping, of writhing in shame and horror inside my skin, hating myself as I hate myself now—of wishing I could die, welcoming it—”

  My hands came up at my sides of their own accord, curled fingers beckoning death; if she had been solid flesh, they would have been on her throat, choking that insect whine to cinders. Very well, I was not—I am not—entirely free of Bismaya, after all. “You could have looked for me,” I said. My own voice sounded like someone else’s; it could have been an old man’s voice. “You could have bought me back. As much money as your family had.”

  “I was a little girl!” She seized my hands, touching me for the first time with hands that felt like dead leaves. “I had done a terrible, evil thing, and I was afraid to tell my mother and father! I was afraid!”

  I pulled free of her. I said, “I was a little girl too.”

  After that we only stared at each other, until it occurred to me that the chandail might easily have died by this time, without my knowledge. Surely she would have vanished instantly, if that were so—but what if she did not? Which would be the true Bismaya then? The illusion stranded here with me, or the body trapped in her own bed, swollen with life, empty of spirit? I turned from her and looked over the side at the massive hulk floating so inertly at my cable’s end. There was no way to be certain whether it yet lived. I called to it loudly—no response—and then threw an empty ship’s-biscuit tin to splash beside its head. Nothing.

  “Excuse me for a little,” I told Bismaya politely. She gaped as I swung myself over the side and went hand over hand down the cable to drop into the sea only a foot or two from the chandail. Close to, even half under water, the huge eyeless head still loomed over mine, and the jumble of limp legs was like one of those vast seaweed tangles that snare and drown ships much bigger than mine. Bobbing in the slow swells, I lifted the cold tip of one—more than that would have been beyond my strength—looking for the fringe of eye-hairs underneath. No way of telling whether they were open, of course; all I could do was hope to rouse whatever fading attention might linger there still. I said, or perhaps only thought—what difference now?—“Enough. It is enough.”

  The chandail did not stir. I gave up then, really, but I tried once more anyway. “I do appreciate your gift. Knowingly or not, you have lifted a great stone from my heart, and I thank you for it.” I hesitated, and then added, “Sunlight on your road.” Not that I truly cared—not exactly—but it is what we say.

  Whether my wo
rds had anything to do with it or not, the chandail moved then. No more than a sluggish heave, granted—by comparison, its behavior in the oily shallows of Cape Dylee harbor was that of a spring lamb—but it lived, and for one last tremulous moment it began doing what they do, if you look too long: rising and flowing into radiantly misshapen beauty, the beauty of the chandail; shifting, not its shape, but its spirit, somehow, burning there on the water, casting its own light on the road it was taking. I said once again, “Enough,” and I swam away and climbed back up the cable.

  Bismaya was pacing the deck, rail to rail, left hand squeezing and twisting the fingers of the right, as she always used to do when fearful of being scolded. When she saw me, she wrinkled up her nose in her old annoyance at my messy habits. She said, “Phoo, you’re all wet, don’t come near me,” exactly as she would have said it—did say it—when I was seven, and she was six and a half. Idiot compassion roused in me for an instant, but I smacked it on the head and it lay back down again.

  “You are going home,” I said. “I hope you are wrong, and that this baby will not be your death.” And I did hope that, in a way that I do not think was any less genuine for being so cold.

  She gave me that eerily triumphant smile once more. “Oh, it will. No fear.”

  I wanted to comfort, not her, but myself. I wanted to tell her, “Bismaya, live or die, we are quits. I cannot remember why you took up so much of me for so long.” But it was not true, and never will be, and I did not want my last words to her to be a lie. So all I said in the end was, “Goodbye, Bismaya. I send my best greeting to your family.” And she was gone.

  I felt the chandail go very quickly after that, but I never looked up. I stayed on deck the rest of the day, patching the mainsail and the little jib, caulking and filling where I could, and salting down as many fish as I could catch. At sunset I cut the cable, and watched the creature slide away into the deep gray-green where I still think I will go one day, even though you find me here in this white-bone emptiness. Then, with the moon rising, I hoisted sail and set off for the place where I was living at the time. There is nothing at all to say about the journey, except that all the long way I was never once visited by any chandail come to play with the pieces of my life. I never have been again.

  And that is all there is to the story you have come such a long way to hear. There is nothing to add—except, perhaps, that I did go home one day, many, many years later. There I learned that Bismaya had indeed died in childbirth, and that her husband had indeed remarried, and was himself long dead, as were my own parents. I found her grave, and stood by it for a time, waiting to feel something, anything—rage or triumph, or even watery compassion. But all that came to me was an ache in my left knee, almost as old as I—we both fell out of a tree, playing outlaws in its high branches—and a memory of the two of us spying on Bismaya’s older brother and his sweetheart, hoping to see them... doing what, I wonder now? Kissing, I suppose; I really remember only the giggling together, which we would barely manage to smother before a glance at each other would set it off again. Her brother caught us, of course, and chased us all the way to the river—we had to dive in to escape him.

  A week later, she sold me. No, it was nine days. I grow forgetful.

  So, then? Have I told you anything you did not know before you came to me? Do my old eyes discern something besides attentive cleverness in those eyes of yours? No, do not answer – what my listeners take away with them on the journey home is their own concern and none of mine.

  Ah, but I did speak of wisdom, did I not? Very well, in that case I will tell you the one thing I know for certain... Wisdom is uncertainty. Wisdom is confusion. Wisdom is a heartless trickster healing my heart, my worst enemy drawing pity up out of my lifetime of hating, like sweet water from a long-dry well. Wisdom is knowing nothing, and not even knowing how you feel about knowing nothing. Wisdom is finding joy in bewilderment, at the last. At the last. Lal says.

  PETER S. BEAGLE

  Peter S. Beagle was born in 1939 and raised in the Bronx, just a few blocks from Woodlawn Cemetery, the inspiration for his first novel, A Fine and Private Place. Today, thanks to classic works such as The Last Unicorn, Tamsin, and The Innkeeper's Song, he is acknowledged as America's greatest living fantasy author; and his dazzling abilities with language, characters, and magical storytelling have earned him many millions of fans around the world.

  In addition to stories and novels Peter has written numerous teleplays and screenplays, including the animated versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Last Unicorn, plus the fan-favorite “Sarek” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. His nonfiction book I See By My Outfit, which recounts a 1963 journey across America on motor scooter, is considered a classic of American travel writing; and he is also a gifted poet, lyricist, and singer-songwriter.

  www.conlanpress.com