Sometimes their mother could help them identify their finds and even predict their value, so they could trade them in the neighbouring village. But it was becoming increasingly harder to interest her: she lived locked inside herself, immune to what came from beyond. The wrinkles on her face seemed to furrow more deeply each day. She looked like a character from her own stories, timeless, outside of time and reality, a reality that never failed to catch her sons off guard, and which seemed so often devoid of logic, or functioning according to systems they couldn’t begin to guess at.
That day, walking along the shore with their feet in the water, searching the sand and the rocks for crabs or edible shells, the two brothers saw the waves push out an odd arrangement of pieces of wood, its seaweed shroud giving it a mysterious gleam. They couldn’t tell what it was, and the undertow dragged it back out to sea every time it seemed about to wash up.
The older brother was charged with retrieving the thing.
“Go, you do it. I can’t,” his brother had told him.
He walked into the cold water, which soon came to his waist, torn between the idea that this was not his natural environment and that the Great Tide had far too many things to hide. When the water reached his chest, he had the unpleasant sense that the sea was mocking him, that the object he sought was getting farther away as he approached, but turning back to shore, he looked at his brother and he dove. He was doing it for his brother, not wanting to disappoint him.
He swam, kicking his feet, his arm stretched forward, a frozen current running along his body. He couldn’t open his eyes in the salt water and in any case preferred to keep them closed, to see nothing of the depths. His hand closed over a viscous plank. He broke the surface, breathing deeply, pulling in his catch, holding it against his stomach. He swam on his back toward the shore. More than once he thought he might open his hand and release what he’d swum out after, that it was better to leave to the sea the things of the sea, but he held on. He swallowed water, coughed, spat, continued to swim. When his feet finally touched the bottom, he walked in the muddy sand and over the slippery stones to the shore to bring their find to his brother.
They huddled by the fire they had lit to warm up while they fished for shells. The younger brother took his knife to scrape the seaweed from the thing they had pulled from the sea, as if he were shaving off a long, scraggly beard. As he worked, he laughed, overjoyed, already happy with their treasure, a high, rolling laugh that wove into the wind that blew off the ocean. Then he showed the thing to his brother, holding it out in front of him in his short arms.
It was a wooden puppet as big as an almost full-grown child, with a roughly hewn head with a nose, two eyes, and a mouth, and a body with articulated arms and legs. It was wonderful. The brothers had never seen anything like it, and the younger brother held it out proudly, still laughing, he couldn’t stop laughing. The older brother was warming himself by the fire, laughing too, but he was more reticent, laughing along with his brother, mostly, a laugh that seemed a little worried at this third playmate, which had risen from the ocean.
When they showed it to their mother, she smiled, a lovely, wrinkled smile, then looked away. They ate together in silence. That night, when the time came to go to bed, they set the puppet on a chair in a corner of the room, and their mother told them the story of a solitary man who, unable to have children, had carved one from wood. He loved him like a son, showed him how to walk and speak, taught him the names of plants and stars and everything he knew, but the son left him in search of improbable adventures.
Her two sons fell asleep, and saw themselves sitting on the roof of their house along with their wooden friend, their home suddenly a makeshift boat, with the bedsheets as sails, and the three of them sailed together over the lands of their childhood, now covered in salt water.
4
The older brother was coming back from drawing water from the well, a task that was difficult for both his brother and his mother. Even for him, it wasn’t easy: the well was in a gully about a hundred metres from the house, and the bucket hung heavy at the end of his lone arm. To counterbalance the weight, he leaned too far left, tipping over, stumbling.
Nearing the house, he heard laughter, and saw his brother a bit farther away, on the side of the grassy hill, foraging in thorny raspberry bushes with the puppet on his back: he had gotten in the habit of tying the puppet to his back with rope, and as the days passed he was seldom without it. He laughed and talked constantly to the puppet, telling it about his mother, his brother, the story of their birth, and especially their dog of a father, who had also come from the sea, and who had sailed—“you know, in a rowboat, made out of wood like your arms, and he saw monsters, and fought them, like you.”
The mother paid no attention to the puppet, although she saw it every day, at the table, sitting next to her youngest son, both of them wedged on the same chair. The mother paid less attention to everything, living as if semi-conscious, mumbling unintelligibly, looking more and more like her old goats, who grazed mechanically, waiting to be sacrificed one after the other to feed the family that fed them.
The older brother carried the bucket of water to the house and went alone to the pier to drop his line, without much hope that anything would bite. He was not a very good fisher. It seemed to him that his brother was better at everything, that the advantages of his longer arm were nothing compared to the abilities of his younger brother, who was better with his hands, better at tying knots, at fixing broken objects, at catching big black beetles, running with his head bent forward, almost along the ground. Yet he loved his brother, did not begrudge him anything: he was part of him, his flesh. “I will always be able to count on him and on him only,” he sometimes repeated to himself.
He heard him coming, his telltale footsteps quick and lurching. He didn’t turn his head, but smiled: he had missed him. “You’re smart to be fishing,” his brother told him softly. “Our future is out there, our future is the sea.” The wind was blowing in their hair. They breathed in the smell of seaweed, of everything that lived and rotted in the ocean: fish, crustaceans, amoebas, sea monsters, scores of creatures dead and alive, beings of every size, infinitesimally small or terrifically big, devouring each other, feeding off each other, the flotsam of their bodies disappearing in the black water that extended everywhere.
“Did you dream last night?” the younger brother asked.
The older brother didn’t reply. He couldn’t remember his dreams very well anymore.
“I dreamed of the three of us,” his brother went on, “you, me and the puppet, riding on our father’s back, his long fur, his tongue dangling out of his mouth. He was running fast. We had to hang on to his fur so as not to fall. He jumped into the ocean and we sailed on his back. It was amazing! I wasn’t afraid. You know, the three of us, together, we’re going to do great things. I’m sure of it.”
The older brother wanted to believe him. His bare feet dangled over the pier, his toes curled up. The fishing line floated on the water: nothing was biting. He wanted something else, but didn’t know what. He said, apropos of nothing, “Do you want to go to the village tomorrow? I think we can trade that big beetle, the one with the claws almost as big as a crab’s. I think we can trade it with the leech-boys.”
“That’s a great idea, and we can introduce them to the puppet.”
The older brother couldn’t help but smile, though he wasn’t sure that the visit to the village was such a good idea.
5
They didn’t go the next day or the day after that, days of heavy rain that all four of them—the two brothers, their mother and the puppet—spent cooped up in the house, drinking hot seaweed tea and boiled goat milk and telling stories. The younger brother talked a lot; his mouth was full of words. When he spoke, the mother’s mind seemed to wander, she would get up, stir her spoons in her pots, look out the window with her almost sightless eyes, and sit back down only
to stand right back up again. It was “Puppet,” as he called him, who had killed the tentacular monster the two brothers had found in the marsh. It was Puppet, too, who had calmed the storm that had ravaged the area a few years earlier. He had attacked its very source, a tremendous seashell he had smashed to still the powerful winds and the devastating waves that poured out of it. That shooting star the two brothers saw one summer night, that was him too: he had tamed a giant firefly—a grotesque, vanished creature—to ride it across the sky.
The older brother liked these stories—they were nice stories—but his mother’s silence worried him. His brother seemed to relish the unknown, while she kept it in shadow. It seemed to him that a breach was opening in their universe, and he didn’t know if he wanted that.
The next morning, they left early and walked straight to the village, not stopping to stuff themselves full of raspberries, nor, as they often did, to explore a cave hollowed out in the hillside, nor to visit the bone creatures they had built by the boulder.
The leech-boys saw them coming, and ran to meet them in the fields, the grass still wet from the days of rain. Their fishermen fathers’ boats bobbed on the horizon, tiny on the ocean.
“What’s that?” the oldest boy asked right away.
“This is Puppet.”
“What’s it for?”
“It’s not for anything, it’s Puppet.”
“Can I see?”
“You can see, but be careful.”
The younger brother held out his wooden friend in his short arms. The leech-boys gathered, curious. The younger brother moved one of the puppet’s articulated arms. One of the leech-boys wanted to try. “Careful,” the younger brother told him. Soon three of the children were moving the puppet’s arms and legs, the younger brother holding it in his hands.
“Heh heh… It’s funny. Where did it come from?”
“From the sea… From the end of the world.”
“What do you want for it?”
“Nothing, it’s just to show you.”
“What you mean, nothing? You never come with nothing for nothing!”
“I said, it’s just to show.”
“Let go. At least let us try it.”
The younger brother didn’t want to let go. Behind him, the older brother shouted, “Let go! Let go! It’s not yours!” but they didn’t listen. This was something they had never seen and which they would maybe never see again. It was a thousand times better than the dolls their mothers made for the girls. It looked almost alive, and it had come from the ocean.
The puppet torn from his hand, the younger brother plowed, head down, enraged, charging as he had seen a ram charge and beating his pathetic arms in the air to try to take back what had been ripped from him. His brother tried to follow him, still yelling, “Let go! Let go! Give it back!” but he was beaten back by fists and feet. The younger brother struggled. Hands pulled at him from everywhere. It seemed he would never get Puppet free, but suddenly he caught someone’s arm in his two hands and bit it, as an animal bites, a shrieking bite that drew blood into his mouth and tore a scream into the valley. Everyone froze suddenly and let go of the puppet, which tumbled to the ground like a stone. Falling, the puppet’s arm and neck broke and the head rolled into the dust.
“Never again! Never again!” the oldest leech-boy shouted. “We never want to see you here ever again.”
They ran off, leaving the brothers in the trampled grass near Puppet’s broken body.
“Look at what they’ve done to you,” the younger brother murmured to his wooden friend. “They broke you, they’ve mortally wounded you, I think they killed you…” With tears welling up in his eyes, holding Puppet’s head in his hands, he looked like a prehistoric gnome, unfit for this world, weak and pitiful. His brother didn’t know what to do. Against his thigh, in a leather satchel, he felt the crab-clawed beetle. He took it out and laid it on the puppet’s forehead. It looked like an amulet, the insignia of a prophet from another era.
They carried Puppet like a child lost in combat. The younger brother carried the head and the broken arm in his arms; the older brother held the headless body against him, the remaining limbs dangling. Like lepers, they walked over the wet hills under a sky heavy with grey clouds.
They would never go back to the village; they didn’t want to go back there, and both of them knew that they were getting ready to go somewhere else, though they didn’t yet know when or how.
They stopped by the rock where they had built their bone creatures. They laid the wreckage of Puppet among them and put the beetle back on its forehead. They stayed there for a long time, stretched out among their own, despite the light rain that had started to fall. It was the older brother who finally convinced his brother to leave, “to get home before nightfall… so we don’t get sick.” They left together, taking with them Puppet’s head and broken arm as the only mementos of their friend.
6
During the days that followed, it started to rain again, a seasonal rain, heavy and driven by violent winds. With the windows closed, the house filled with the smells of everything that was cooked on the peat stove: warm milk, seaweed tea, vegetable stews with a few scant pieces of goat, fish soup with bones that got stuck in the throat.
Their mother didn’t seem to have noticed Puppet’s disappearance, nor did she notice that a wooden head and arm now rested on her younger son’s bedside table. To tell the truth, she didn’t really seem to notice anything that changed her days anymore. The older brother helped her around the house, especially with chores that required going outside: the goats, the garden, collecting wild herbs, smoking fish.
The younger brother spent days in bed, almost without sleeping. He no longer talked about Puppet or to Puppet. He who had been so talkative no longer said a word. His mind seemed to be elsewhere. Then, one day, at supper, he said, softly, just loudly enough to be heard: “The monster, the storm, the shooting star… It wasn’t Puppet, it was our dog of a father.” No one answered or agreed, but that night, the older brother again saw his father’s big head over his bed, drooling, and smiling, a slightly scornful smile, and several times during the night he thought he heard his younger brother snicker in his sleep.
The next day, as he was coming home empty-handed from fishing, the older brother saw his brother sitting in a corner, close to the hearth, in the yellow light of the lantern. He was busy working leather and tying ropes. The older brother approached to see what his brother was doing, but turned back: his brother looked fierce, with the defiant air of those whose tasks are too serious to be interrupted for no good reason. He looked like he was flouting life itself.
The older brother went up to bed.
Opening his eyes in the middle of the night, he saw his younger brother bending over him, his eyes shining and wide open, wide awake, smiling broadly and holding in his hands the puppet’s arm. He had rigged a harness made of rope and leather, the straps of the prosthesis to be attached to the shoulder.
The older brother sat up in bed. His ears felt like they were full of laughter, as if all night long someone had been laughing next to him.
“Try it,” his brother said.
He did as he was told.
“See, it’s perfect.”
The older brother had a wooden arm dangling from his left shoulder, an articulated arm, but completely still and unable to move.
“There,” his brother added. “You see? You’re whole, like the moment you were born.”
The older brother wasn’t sure if he liked this idea. He thought of their mother, heard her say again, “I love you more than anything, but the world is a cruel place, too cruel to be faced alone… That’s why I’ve given you a brother: you’ll always be able to count on him, and only him.” And he was filled with a feeling unknown to him, a kind of emptiness, an absence, a treacherous solitude that clenched his guts.
In front o
f him, his brother was still smiling: “Don’t worry. It wasn’t my idea. It was our dog of a father. It came from him. It came from the sea. He gave me the idea in a dream. This new arm—you’ll see, you won’t be sorry.”
7
Sitting on the edge of the pier, the older brother looked out at his fishing line, taut between the waves. “The future is the sea,” his brother often told him. Together they inspected everything they fished, from common whiting to queer spiny-finned fish. The older brother fished, his wooden arm hanging against his body. Sometimes, he flexed his muscles, as if to make the arm move, but it didn’t move. It was foreign, a parasitic limb he would have liked to be rid of, but his brother told him to be patient. “You’ll see, trust our dog of a father.” The older brother wanted to believe him, he wanted to believe everything his brother told him, and each morning when he got out of bed he hooked his wooden arm to his shoulder.
Up along the shore, the younger brother was collecting shells, hunched over, his head low between the rocks, waves splashing his face. Often, he lifted his head and looked out over the horizon, laughing happily, as if he could see wondrous, astonishing things.
His harvest complete, he went to join his older brother at the end of the pier, both of them sitting side by side, their legs dangling over the edge and their eyes fixed on the horizon, in their nostrils the smell of seaweed, of salt, of the forever sea. Their skin was brown with sun, their cheeks were a little hollow, and they had the long legs of young men, legs that seemed to have grown too fast for their bodies, legs that seemed especially outsized compared to the younger brother’s arms, the arms that he often folded over his chest as if to make himself look bigger, as if this way his arms seemed more firm, solid.
The rainy winter had given way to summer, and the two brothers spent less time in the house. They hardly saw their mother during the day, only really at mealtimes, when they ate quickly, in a rush to leave, faced with this mother who spoke to them as if they weren’t there, ghosts of themselves, as if they were the living she could no longer see. She hadn’t noticed the older brother’s new arm any more than she seemed to notice her children growing older. And her skin was dry, parched, like her eyes, like the inside of her body too, probably. She was slowly turning to dust.
Brothers Page 2
