PART IV
Brothers
23
He spotted a few houses in a valley, in the middle of the fields, not far from a small fishing port with a few boats floating on the water.
Slowly he came down the hill, remembering familiar smells, the smell of the earth and the wheat; the smells of the sea too, which the wind blew against his face. A few ravens flapped their wings around him. He didn’t know how long they had been with him; since his departure from the island where he had been taken in, then on the mainland where they had landed together and where they had followed the shore for a long time, walking mostly during the days, taking their time, through disparately populated landscapes, the plains and hills along the coast.
They had slept sheltered in a grove of trees or an old barn, avoiding the company of men as much as possible. In some villages, the older brother had stood in the public square, raised his arm high above his head, and spread his fingers, and the villagers had watched the ravens alight. Some offered the bird man something to eat, a pittance the stranger shared with his ravens before leaving again.
One night, they had walked around a small coastal town, the town where the older brother had lived as a pet before becoming a savage beast, a killer dog, then a fiend with two murderous heads, an inhuman creature driven by a hollow rage. He had walked around it to avoid the memory of the grey dog and because he still felt at the back of his throat an evil, vengeful anger, the desire to resume hostilities.
He had preferred to go on his way.
But that day, on the side of the hill, no bark rose up from his belly; he was at peace. He stopped and lay down in the grass. The ravens landed around him, foraging in the soil with the tips of their beaks. The older brother chewed a blade of grass. He was in no rush, he had no reason to be, he knew where he was going.
Shortly before dusk, as the fishermen were returning to the village, he got up, took his two dog pelts out of his bag, and put them on one over the other. “It’s time,” he told the ravens, and walked with them to the village. A group of young men and gangly teenagers sat in the square, around the grey wood table where they gathered after a day of fishing, many of them now going out with their fathers. They didn’t see the older brother come up, busy laughing or telling each other about their day spent at sea or in the hills. They didn’t see him come up, although he walked in the mud in the middle of the only street in the village. They only saw him when he passed them. All of them fell silent, and the one who was missing a tooth then all the others turned to him, this young man who walked slowly and confidently in his inexplicable garb, with a raven on his shoulder and others flying around him, like flies on windless summer days.
He raised his arm slightly in greeting, he turned his head toward them and they recognized him, the armless child, the old lady’s son, who with his weird brother would come trade their finds, freakish insects or fossils, objects that the Great Tide had tossed on the beach. They recognized him and they were afraid, seeing the blackness of his eyes, a deep, abyssal blackness, come from the origins of the world, much darker than how they remembered him from childhood.
They let him pass without saying a word, and only when he was heading into the deepening dark, his tall, skinny body cloaked in worn animal skins, did they speak. “It’s him. Did you recognize him? It’s him.” And the older brother laughed as his brother would have laughed; he laughed for his own pleasure and for the ravens, telling them, “You recognize them, those are the leech-boys of my childhood. And they’re afraid.”
24
He was in no rush. That night, he slept in a hollow in the fields, with the wind blowing above him, the ravens huddled against his body, and a few nocturnal mammals—weasels, wild cats, shrews—come to see who had returned.
The next morning, he got up with the sun and headed toward the rock where he and his brother had built their bone beasts. He found the remains of Puppet, forlorn wreckage: a headless torso with two dangling legs and an arm. He also found all kinds of bones scattered over the ground, the remains of long-dead animals, nothing to do with the creatures he and his brother had imagined.
He sat in the shade with what was left of Puppet and the scattered bones. With a stone, he shattered the remaining limbs of the wooden boy, and took a leg to make a tongue protruding from the crushed skull of a dog. He inserted Puppet’s torso into a cow’s rib cage, as though into a suit of armour made of bone, and gave it two vertebrae as eyes, the eyes of a headless being. He went on, creating water striders, mandibular insects, huge raptors… Then he lay down in the middle of his animals and the ravens and he was happy, a pale happiness he knew was fleeting but which tasted like childhood and reminded him of his brother.
He stayed that way for a long time, letting ants crawl over his body, breathing the air, explaining to the ravens that these bone beasts were nothing compared to what his brother could have made with his own hands.
He stayed that way for a long time, sometimes feeling like he was among his own, but always with the emptiness on his left, an emptiness he had sometimes thought he could fill, but which always caught up to him.
He stayed that way for a long time, knowing he would never really be able to live without his brother.
25
The salt marsh. The beach. With the long pier that still reached out, unaccountably still standing. Higher up, in the furrows of the hill, the old grey clapboard house, its walls twisted by the wind. A little farther, a wide flat stone, maybe the spot where, he told the ravens, his mother had spilled his blood to give him a brother, and on this day he was grateful to her.
The older brother walked toward the house as if in a dream. Everything was in its place, the setting almost too perfect. “Isn’t it how I told you?” he repeated to the ravens. “Isn’t it?” And he thought he saw them nod.
A carefree euphoria floated up from his stomach. His footsteps seemed light. He felt foolishly like skipping. He pointed out the places of his childhood, describing them to the ravens, reminding them of their history. He was happy, a somewhat suspect happiness, touched by delirium; happiness brought on by this return to the place he and his brother had so wanted to leave, toward the place they had declared dead, and which the older brother would never have believed he would see again with his own eyes.
Walking toward the house, he saw that it was overrun by thornbushes. They scratched his legs and his hand bled when he brushed them away. There were no more goats in the pen, only a bony carcass long since picked clean by scavengers.
A few steps away from the house, he saw a grey fieldmouse slipping under the door. The older brother stayed frozen in front of the door, hesitating, then pushed it open, nervously. A kind of irresistible foreboding drew him forward. He walked through the dust and the carcasses of insects, their chitinous bodies cracking underfoot. The ravens followed in a slow procession.
Light poured into the room behind him, and filtered weakly through the filthy windows. He saw something move by the hearth, an unnatural horned animal huddled in the shadows. Moving closer, he realized it was a goat, a goat that looked like it might have been centuries old, its hair heavy with dust falling in clumps to the floor, dry teats hanging flaccidly, and the long, venerable horns, their innumerable notches counting the years. It was a creature he and his brother might have invented, but today it was the last living companion of his decrepit mother, who was sitting at the dining room table, tiny, her body horribly puckered; she was almost mummified, barely more living than dead, the embodiment of drought sitting before her plate as if at a meal.
The table was set for her and her two sons. The older brother approached and sat in his spot without his mother noticing. She spoke to him in a weak, hoarse voice, arid, as if she had been talking to him since his departure. For her, he had never left. “Go catch some crabs,” she told him. “You should go crabbing more often. I prefer goat meat, but we have to keep some for winter. You’ve noticed, the days are getting
shorter… The summer’s almost over.” And she spoke also to his brother, who she thought still sat at the same table. “You’ll go too, won’t you? You’ll go crabbing with your brother. Or gather some shells. But don’t come home too late. You always come home too late.”
The older brother closed his eyes, breathed in, and thought he smelled his mother’s goat stew, and the smell of her seaweed tea and boiled milk, and he thought he heard his brother stirring on the bench next to him, as he had squirmed as a child, always impatient to leave the table to run outside and see what marvels the ocean might have left on the beach: the body of a sea otter, maybe, or a barrel full of sticky black goo.
It occurred to him that he was going to take care of his mother, that he would have her all to himself and they would live together, in their own world, with the ghost of his brother, lulled by the raspy bleating of the immortal goat, but he knew he had never really believed that. His mother had not needed him for a long time. He had not come back for her: he had always only been looking for his brother.
Again he imagined his brother next to him, close, on his left side—his breath on his skin—and he thought he heard him say: “You abandoned me.” The older brother inhaled and saw again the black ocean, sinister shadows swimming under the surface. He remembered the heat and the thirst, the salt water on his skin, the immeasurable fatigue. He felt the emptiness to his left, the absence that had been with him since the day of his birth. He nodded to his brother: “Yes, I abandoned you.” But he also remembered that he had killed the one who was the cause of their misery, and he wanted to cry great heaving sobs, release all the love and all the disgust of his life.
He remembered the violence, the savage vengefulness he had aroused within himself. He envisioned himself slitting the throat of his old mother and her goat, mixing their blood on the ground in the dust, the alphabet of the apocalypse, the language of disaster, senseless. He saw it as he had pictured so many stories, a story he might have told the ravens. He saw it as he got up and walked out, leaving the door open behind him. The ravens followed. He walked slowly to the sea, stumbling like a useless god, unknown to all and ineffectual. He took off his mud- spattered boots, removed his pelts and let them fall behind him. He was naked, his body skinny, and he could almost feel the wind blowing between his vertebrae. The ravens were still with him, some of them cawing. He walked out onto the pier, crushing the shells of long-dead molluscs and crustaceans, his bare feet sinking here and there between the rotting boards.
He walked out to the end of the pier, before the immense sea. The black water lapped at his feet. The sky weighed down on his skull. In the distance, a cormorant called. He imagined he had a knife in his hand, the same one his mother had used on the day of his birth, lifting his arm to drive the blade into his shoulder, and he screamed in pain as he had on the first day of his life. And he slowly cut his arm, his only arm, an atrocious act of self-mutilation that would bring his brother back to life.
He imagined it, but did nothing.
The waves crashed on the rocks. In the distance, the older brother thought he saw his brother swimming. He thought he saw him, but he knew it wasn’t him, only the reflection of the moon, maybe, or the last rattle of a hallucinated life.
His gaze was lost over the endless sea, an uncharted world, impossible to fathom, and he wondered where the island was where he had been taken in by the young girl and her father.
A raven landed on his shoulder, and he murmured, “Brother, everything here is dead: I’m going back out to sea.”
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Brothers Page 7
