Brothers

by David Clerson

  The previous night, after supper, the two brothers had made a big fire on the beach. They had fed it with a few pieces of the piles of wood from one or many wrecks the sea had washed up the day after a storm. “Everything is dead here,” the younger brother said. The older brother had already understood that, but he was afraid to leave—to go where? And how?

  In his right hand he grabbed his wooden arm and moved it up and down and from right to left, and raised it above his head. His brother came beside him and held the prosthetic limb, and the older brother, his right arm freed, lifted his good arm, and saw in the shadow extending on the shore the towering image of a man with two arms, both raised to the sky, the body of a hero, the stuff of legends, capable of great feats. The two brothers laughed together.

  That night, they slept on the beach. In his sleep, the older brother saw his wooden arm running along the sand on the tips of its five fingers, like a crab or a mutant crayfish, and it came to wake him in the night, tugging on his clothes, inviting him to follow as it ran in the ocean.

  When the sun woke him at dawn, he thought he heard a dog barking in the distance, and he thought of his dog of a father, sorrowfully for the first time.

  8

  They had returned late for lunch, and saw her, their dried-up old mother, seated at the table eating a watery meatless soup, facing two empty chairs. Their chairs. She was talking to herself, to no one, laughing. Serving food and passing the salt and pepper, as if her sons had been sitting in their chairs, and, after she was done eating, rising to clear the table, as if they too had finished their meals. She had not seen them come in, nor did she see them come over to the table. She no longer needed them in order to enjoy their company.

  They left again without eating and headed back to the shore. The ocean was still there, humongous, disproportionate. “It would take a miracle for us to be able to leave,” said the older brother. His brother smiled wordlessly and led him to the saltpans and the adjacent marshes, to collect as much driftwood as possible. They struggled to carry it back to the rickety fishing boat with the broken hull. They gathered wood all day and in the days that followed, until the younger brother said it was enough.

  And they began their task, this monumental undertaking. They would take as much time as they needed. Mimicking as best they could the men they had seen repairing fishing boats in the neighbouring village, they replaced the wreck’s rotten wood, nailed planks where the frame was broken and made the boat watertight with a mixture of clay and marsh reeds. They tried many times, trying and failing, often believing they would never succeed, and they took as much time as they needed. It was a big undertaking and they wanted it to be perfect, under the direction of the younger brother, who was amazed at each plank the sea brought them, and which could be of use. They worked as they had played for so long on the sand and in the surrounding hills and plains: laughing, sometimes, but solemnly, as if each movement would leave its mark on the world to come. They worked without doubting their task in the least, but also without ever speaking of the moment they would leave, unsettling but inevitable. Neither had ever sailed, they were awkward swimmers, and increasingly the older brother would wake in the night, nauseated, as if waking after a shipwreck.

  Already the boat was seaworthy: one sunny morning, under an almost too-clear sky, they had let it float out, at the end of a rope stretched out from the shore to prevent the ocean snatching it from them. Still they tinkered, adorning it with shells, old dried-out starfish, sea-urchin necklaces. They laid down two straw mattresses. Large jute sacks sewn together would be their sails. The sea had brought them a tall oar, which would be difficult to handle, even together.

  Every night, they dragged the boat along the shore to hide it in the marsh, concealing it without quite knowing from whom or from what. One morning, a heron had made a nest in it, and the bird flew off as the brothers arrived. The older brother wondered whether there might be even bigger birds somewhere out on the ocean, with even longer necks, eating fatter frogs, able to peck out the eyes of sea monsters with their beaks. The younger replied that he had seen one once, in a dream, but their dog of a father had leaped at it and sliced its throat with his teeth.

  They worried about their supplies, but they could hardly deprive their mother of her scanty stores of salted meat. Her meals were already meagre, her goats underfed, her garden overgrown.

  When they weren’t working on the boat, the two brothers spent most of their time fishing or collecting shellfish, doing their best to make sure the three of them had enough to eat. Their mother cooked what they brought her, without thanking them, as if it went without saying. If she were by herself, they thought, she would have enough. She ate so little, she needed so little meat and milk to feed her withered body.

  One day, the two brothers saw that a goat had escaped from its pen and come into the house. There it stayed, their old mother putting up with it, feeding and milking it.

  9

  It was on a foggy morning that the miracle they were waiting for took place, the two brothers sitting on the edge of the pier in the thick fog. Something was caught on the older brother’s line, something heavy that he struggled to reel in. It was a big catch he didn’t want to lose, maybe something rare. The older brother panted as he brought in his line. The moist air filled his throat and his lungs were screaming, blood pounding in his temples. His brother encouraged him silently, kneeling on the edge of the pier, his head dangling over the edge, peering into the fog, waiting to see what they had caught.

  The older brother didn’t think he would make it. He would’ve needed two arms, but when he pulled his shoulders back, his wooden arm shook ridiculously in the air. He wasn’t strong enough. “I need you,” he told his brother, who came to sit against him, between his legs, back to chest. He hung on to the fishing line with his short arms and they pulled it together, a mismatched, three-armed being.

  They heard the thing lift out of the water, saw its shadow rise in the fog, then the beast appeared before them at the edge of the pier, its fur soaked, its maw open and its tongue hanging out. They heaved it onto the pier and came closer, both kneeling, and they thought it looked majestic, this dead dog, this drowned dog. It wasn’t their dog of a father, nothing that big or strong, but it was exceptional, a whisper of him. A drowned dog, come from who knew where. A drowned dog fished out of the ocean. A dog upon which each boy laid his head and ear against the black, wet fur, almost believing they could hear the heart beating in the animal’s chest, a heart that had beat elsewhere, far away, where they would soon travel, a heart that told them to leave.

  The younger brother raised his head and looked at his brother, smiling. “It’s a gift from our father. It’s all we were missing.”

  10

  Later, under the afternoon sun, they opened its belly with a knife—the same perhaps that had been used to cut off the older brother’s arm so that his brother could come into the world. They removed the heart, the lungs, liver, spleen and guts, throwing them to the crabs and crayfish. They emptied the carcass entirely, without complaining, despite the revolting smell. In a cloud of flies, they found decomposing fish flesh in its digestive system, the bones of small mammals—mice or shrews—and seaweed, all the random things the dog had eaten. With the knife, they removed its pelt, washing it carefully. Then they laid it over the garden fence in the sun.

  When the pelt was dry, they tanned it and made it into a tunic. The snout became a cowl with ears, and the paws could be slipped on like gloves.

  The older brother tried it on and he was no longer afraid. It fit perfectly. His wooden arm, under the pelt, seemed almost alive. Wearing the skin, he wanted to run through the fields, to hunt lost cats and moorhens, to grunt and to bark. He and his brother spent the day in the fields and hills, running and laughing. “My dog of a brother! My dog of a brother!” the younger brother cried, his voice ringing with happiness.

  At nightfall, the older brot
her even hazarded a bark.

  During the days that followed, they began to set aside stores in anticipation of their departure. From their mother they took only smoked herring and a single pot of cream. One night they walked in the moonlight to the neighbouring village, the older brother wearing his pelt and the younger brother carrying a jute bag on his back. They broke into the communal storehouse and took nice round cheeses and big hunks of salted meat. Behind the house where one of the leech-boys lived, they jumped the fence into the chicken coop and took three live chickens to accompany them on their adventures.

  Then they stole away before dawn, unseen and unheard.

  They returned home shortly after sunrise. That day, they checked that their boat was watertight and packed their store of food as well as a big barrel of water, and that night they ate in silence with their mother.

  She talked as usual, mumbling about her goats, the winter cold, the stormy days, the taste of fish (she preferred meat), and the perils of the sea, with its flesh-eating monsters and its lethal vastness.

  The brothers said nothing.

  The next morning, they left at daybreak without saying goodbye to their mother, who would not hold it against them, but with a knot in their stomachs and a vague nausea hovering in their throats. “Come back soon. Come back soon,” they could hear her repeating.

  As they neared their boat, the older brother noticed a figurehead at the front of the craft: the head of Puppet, which his brother had mounted early that morning, draping long strands of seaweed into a beard that would flow in the wind.

  The older brother saw the beauty of the thing and his eyes filled with tears.

  They pulled the boat out of the marsh and climbed aboard with their three chickens, their stores of food, their too-long oar and a few blankets. A light wind blew on the coast. They hoisted the sail and set out to sea.

  11

  Dressed in his pelt, the older brother steered the boat: a dog of a brother to lead them to their dog of a father.

  The first days, it took a long time to get away from the shore. Not by choice, but because the wind kept them there, or they didn’t know how to handle their sail, to make the boat go where they would have wanted. Instead, they followed the coast, in a direction they had never been, not toward the marshes and the neighbouring village, but out to where the coastline fell away steeply, with cliffs sliced by creeks and a multitude of shrieking birds soaring above.

  At night, they slept little, fearing that the wind might push them back to shore and run their boat aground.

  Day and night, they worked to plug the leaks that sprang up between the boards with some of the clay they had thought to bring.

  On the fourth day, they saw fleecy beasts with long, oval bodies swimming around a rock.

  On the fifth day, a strong wind blew them away from shore, and a few hours later they had lost sight of land.

  On the sixth day, one of their chickens died, and they threw it overboard. The other two hadn’t laid any eggs so far. They considered eating them, but didn’t dare, for fear of setting fire to the boat.

  On the seventh day, strong waves broke against the boat and many times they thought they would capsize. Both were overcome by seasickness.

  On the eighth day, they cleaned their vomit-splattered blankets and clothes as best they could, and threw the last two chickens, which had not survived the night, overboard.

  On the ninth day, they caught sight of a colossal beast in the distance, its body black and smooth as stone, diving under the water to resurface immediately, tirelessly, and they were afraid.

  It rained all the tenth day, the next night, and the eleventh day, and, using pans, they had to constantly bail out the water that threatened to flood their boat.

  On the twelfth day, the younger brother ran a fever.

  On the thirteenth day, it got worse.

  On the fourteenth day, he didn’t get up, delirious in his sleep, rambling about fish-women and crayfish-men, about dogs drowned by their masters.

  On the fifteenth day, the older brother spotted a black line, barely visible on the horizon: the coastline. He told himself they were nearing their goal, but he wondered how many days it would take them, at the mercy of the winds, to reach the shore. Their store of food was running low. It occurred to him that they had stupidly left behind their fishing rods, but what worried him more was their dwindling supply of water, which they hadn’t bothered refilling during the storm.

  On the sixteenth day, when he woke, the older brother realized that it was the first time since their departure that he had dreamed about their dog of a father. He had seen him swimming underwater, grazing fish with bristly fins, others with long, eel-like bodies, kelp caught in his fur. He had called to him from the boat, first shouting as if he knew his name, and barking, but his father didn’t hear.

  On the seventeenth day, the older brother saw a stormy sky cover the horizon and he worried about his brother. He gave him water, thinking that at least the storm would allow him to replenish his supply of water, and he continued to steer without losing sight of land, but without being able to get closer, battling strong, faithless winds he didn’t know how to harness. The storm caught up to them at the end of the day. A brief, brutal storm that tore his sails. After the thunderstorm, he removed his brother’s soaked clothes and wrapped him in blankets, as in a shroud.

  The next day—the eighteenth—he let himself drift, unable to do anything else. He gnawed at a piece of salted meat, his last. He didn’t even try to make his brother eat, although he hadn’t eaten in days. The sky heralded other storms.

  On the nineteenth day, he saw that the wind had pushed them toward the coast, beyond which he guessed at unknown landscapes peopled by extraordinary beasts. He thought again about his dog of a father. He yearned to find him, and risked a pathetic yelp, alone in his boat with his sleeping brother, who was still delirious, muttering indistinct, barbaric words, like an ancient tongue doomed to disappear. At the end of the day, looking at the shore, the older brother understood that he had failed: these were the same cliffs he had seen at the start of his trip, a few leagues from his grey clapboard house. During these many days at sea, unlike anything he might have dreamed, he had not strayed far, navigating haphazardly, and the winds, deceitful, ungrateful and unpredictable, had brought him back.

  He cursed the sea, he cursed his brother, he cursed his dog of a father. He thought of his mother, alone with her goat. He imagined her in her boundless solitude; he should never have abandoned her. In his heart, he knew he no longer had any affection for his brother, only a feeling of failure, emptiness mixed with disgust. Thunder rumbled and fat drops of rain fell on his body. Sheltered beneath shreds of the jute sail, he waited, shivering for hours, biting down on ropes in impotent rage, and whimpering, wretched little barks. The storm was violent, the strongest he had encountered so far. During the worst of it, he had to hang on to his mast so that he wouldn’t be swept away. More than once, waves crashed over the boat. Vomit swelled high in his throat. He thought he would retch his insides out, expel what little writhed in his empty stomach, but all that came out was a thin string of translucent saliva. At dawn, the storm passed and the older brother fell asleep, exhausted. His brother visited him in a dream, hanging on to him with his crayfish arms, and croaked angrily, “Today, you abandoned me.” And the older brother thought that it was true, that night he had abandoned his brother to the storm, he had covered himself without a thought for him.

  On the twentieth day, he was alone in the boat. His barrel of water and his too-long oar had washed overboard. He walked around the boat like a drunk, trying to forget that his brother was no longer there. All he had left was the figurehead at the bow, still draped with two or three strings of seaweed beard, as persistent as anemones clinging to a rock. The storm had given way to a burning sun. The older brother’s mouth was gritty; he was empty and dry. He lay down alone
in the bottom of his miserable boat, clothed in his dog pelt, his wooden arm hanging miserably from his shoulder. The boat floated aimlessly. Lying on the boards, the older brother was sweating, and his sweat drenched the pelt, already soaked with salt water. He was hot, he was cold, he tried not to think of his brother, but beneath his closed eyelids he could see him, carried away by a wave at the height of the storm, his miserable arms beating the air before disappearing into the ocean.

  The older brother opened his eyes. The sun was still there, blinding, taking up all the room, shimmering on the fur of his dog pelt and on the puddles of water in the bottom of the boat. He saw the sun and he shivered, he was terribly cold, a lonely cold, a cold that seized his body and finished dragging him toward a darkness he believed was eternal.

  PART II

  A Dog’s Life

  12

  He woke up on wet straw that smelled like animal, and realized he was hungry. On his hands and knees, he crawled out of the doghouse where he had slept, using his wooden arm for support. As he crawled, he felt a leather collar around his neck, and noticed that a chain was attached to it, restricting his movements.

  Outside the doghouse, on the dirt floor, he sniffed, listened, and looked around: a house, the noise of children playing somewhere, livestock in a yellowed pasture. A few metres away, a grey dog, a female, gnawed a bone with a few pieces of still-bloody meat.