by Rein Raud
Copyright © 2008 by Rein Raud
Translation copyright © 2016 by Adam Cullen
Originally published in Estonia as Vend
First edition, 2016
All rights reserved
Images by Asko Künnap. Used with permission. www.kynnap.ee/asko.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-45-8
Adam Cullen’s translation is supported in part by an award from the Cultural Endowment of Estonia’s Traducta grant programme.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
www.openletterbooks.org
Contents
The Brother
Acknowledgements
The day that had begun bright with sunshine darkened abruptly into black clouds in the afternoon, and the couple booms of thunder were followed by a downpour so heavy that not a single window was left open in the small town. Nothing and no one occupied the main square apart from a taxi, the driver of which was also already about to lose hope, when he saw approaching from the opposite side of the square a tall man dressed in a wide-brimmed hat, a drenched overcoat, and knee-high boots—and who was strolling toward him through the storm with an unflinching tranquility, as if he paid no heed to the dreadful weather.
He’ll get the car wet, the taxi-driver thought, but at least I won’t have been waiting here for nothing.
The man indeed stopped next to the taxi and opened the door.
“Are you free?” he asked.
“Yes, I am,” the taxi-driver replied.
“Then that makes two of us,” the man said, slammed the door shut, and strolled onward through the rain and into the howling darkness.
People differ. There are those who do harm to others, and those to whom harm is done; some of the latter are the kind it would seem fair to attack because they have enough strength for retaliation, and then there are others, who in their vileness outright provoke confrontation, as the harm done to them is nothing more than revenge that restores the great balance.
Laila was none of these, for although she attracted injustice like bees to heather, all who did her wrong were nevertheless secretly embarrassed. The lawyer, whom she had asked to handle the inheritance affairs after her mother’s death, had looked away as he placed paper after paper of complicated legal wording on the desk for Laila to sign, and the notary, who read the long and incoherent documentation aloud to her, occasionally felt a lump rise to his throat when he thought about what would become of that pale young woman following the successful execution of the transaction. Even the bailiff, who came to evict Laila from the Villa and record her assets, spoke more politely with her than with anyone else, and unprecedentedly, both the moving truck and the movers, who removed their hats when they greeted Laila, were provided at the company’s expense. Her current landlord was no different either—he frequently cursed himself for asking that kind of rent for the tiny attic-room with a ceiling that leaked a little in one corner (with the extra obligation of Laila doing his family’s laundry for free); and even the goateed antiquarian, at whose shop Laila had finally gotten a job, constantly caught himself thinking that he was paying her shamelessly little, which of course caused him to ruminate on human nature and shake his head, but resulted in nothing else. Or else he would eat an éclair with his afternoon coffee, which was, in reality, bad for his health.
Laila herself had grown accustomed to her bad luck, just as children who manage to comprehend the world will grow accustom to their own mortality, and in truth, she didn’t even particularly hope that anything might ever be different.
Until the knock at the door.
“I would have expected anything,” Brother said while unlacing his knee-high boots; the brother, of whose existence she hadn’t the slightest clue just a moment earlier, but whom—she now knew—she had awaited for so long.
“I would have expected anything, but not that,” said Brother. “When I arrived, the Villa’s front door was locked and no one came to open it when I rang the doorbell. I went around back to the garden to see if you were walking the paths or sitting in the gazebo, but my heart was already pounding with the fear of finding, perhaps, that the windows facing the yard had been boarded up and not a single soul occupied the house anymore, because I had come too late. Still, I couldn’t have even fathomed what I would actually see. There were young, handsome people gathered on the patio and music playing; no doubt everyone who had been expected was already accounted for. But you weren’t among them. A young woman with short, chestnut-brown hair smiled at me from across the balustrade and lifted her champagne glass in greeting, but a curly-haired young man was already peeking hostilely over her shoulder to see what business I had there. He knew where to direct me when I mentioned you, although I realized immediately that as far as he was concerned, I had ruined the evening. And right at that moment it started to rain, even though the sky had been cloudlessly blue just a moment before, so they all had to move indoors and I waved to them, but no one noticed.”
“What does that matter now,” Laila said. “What matters is that you found me.”
“That does matter,” Brother agreed.
“Tell me about yourself,” Laila said. “Tell me about Father and about everything that’s important but that I don’t know about.”
Everything that’s important. There was too much of it. He could have told Laila stories about their father and his artist-friends, and about how they could debate the night away on the subject of light and colors; or about the orphanage and the windowless trains that whizzed past outside. He could have told stories about fleeing and his nomadic years, or about the French Foreign Legion and the sand grinding between his teeth; or instead about the ships and the harbors—about the two weeks in Malacca, for example, which he had to survive without a single cent; or about how he had been a night watchman at a library in the Netherlands and read everything he came across by flashlight while lying on his belly on the floor between the massive shelves every night, and how he had committed as much as he could to memory. He could have told the story of his father’s very last message, in which he asked him to locate his sister and, if necessary, to help her in times of peril—yes, he could have told her that story while omitting the main point, of course, for it wasn’t the time yet.
He could have—indeed, all of that was important. Yet, he didn’t.
“Let’s talk about you, instead,” he said.
“I’ve never asked myself what someone else would do in my situation. For me, Monday has always been on Monday and Friday is on Fridays. From quite an early age, it was clear to me that cause and effect only have a connection if we ourselves put it there, and that whomever is punished is the one to blame. And so, I decided not to scream: the strength it takes for cursing the walls that I dash headfirst into time and again could help me to see through them instead—as if they weren’t even there. I was sixteen and I’d been left for the first time, not counting when Father went away. I was colorless and frail like a flower that has grown in a dim room. If I quit asking, I realized, then people will entirely forget that I exist, except for when I happen to cross their path, and back then, I didn’t know to be afraid of that kind of outcome.”
“And you’ve never, ever thought that you should have had a different kind of fate?”
“Some people move through the world in such a way that their sense of order goes along with them. When they enter my room and see an open book lying face-down and crooked on the desk, they will, without fail, pick it up, bookmark the page wit
h a strip of paper, and position it neatly on the corner of the desk, face-up, its spine evenly parallel to the edge. Those people must possess a great clarity, which keeps them connected to the overarching sense of order, and which comes to mind when they see the errors of the world. I don’t have that. When I bump something in a strange room by accident, I always try to put it back exactly where it was before. I don’t know whether the spot is right or wrong. I wish for nothing other than to be capable of slipping through the world without leaving a single trace behind.”
“As if it were a mirror?”
“I was good at it in school. Everything they taught us was absurdly easy, but I realized before long that I mustn’t let it show. As long as I’m a good enough student who causes no problems, I won’t have any problems with them either; but if I’m too good, if I understand everything without needing their explanations and ask questions about things that they might not have noticed at all, I’ll be penalized—then, in class, the teacher will call on me to give the correct answer in order to put down the others who haven’t been able to come up with it; and at the end-of-year assembly, I’ll be brought up in front of the whole school and their hateful glares as if to stand as a role model, but in reality, it’s a pillory, and it’ll be that way every time. As a result I was diligent, but dull. Things grew more complicated after graduation. I would gladly have given birth to a couple of rambunctious kids who weren’t like me in any way, and gone around cleaning up after them, but the Villa didn’t allow it—it was like a stone around my neck; our fates were intertwined and it was still there no matter how much I might have wanted to fade into the world.”
“Because you yourself could be forgotten, but not your name?”
“I can’t say I’ve come to terms with it. You don’t come to terms with those kinds of things. Like how you can’t get used to torture—you can only lose consciousness. Although it might appear to be the exact opposite, it’s actually always been very easy for me to make decisions. Decision-making means that something is being changed, doesn’t it. This is the way it will be from now on, not anyhow else anymore. The chance for things to go otherwise has been erased. We’ve chosen our path. But there’s nothing for me to choose. As a result, every decision of mine has been an agreement. I agree to what comes. No matter that it’s hard and painful sometimes—that’s how it is for everyone, inevitably, isn’t it? I generally don’t go out more than I really have to, just every once in a while in springtime—when the amusement park opens up on the river bend, I go and I wander around there; I watch the skilled sharpshooters winning stuffed teddy bears for their sweethearts and the flushed young mothers keeping watch over their sons galloping on the carousel horses. I’m not cheered by the fact that I’m not one of them, but I’m not saddened by it, either. And I don’t feel like a spy there like I did at school dances, which I attended with the other girls just so that my absence wouldn’t be noticed. One time on a whim, without really understanding what I was doing, I bought a ticket for the Ferris wheel and let it hoist me up above the town. And I just stared at the floor of the cabin.”
“Do you know how many people never actually learn to be alone?”
“I’ve never talked about myself this way. At least I don’t remember having done so.”
Father.
“I remember almost nothing about him,” Laila said. “Just that sometimes, when I was playing with my ball on the second floor despite being told not to—I might have been, say, two or three years old—and it rolled into his study, my heart would be pounding when I went in to fetch it and he didn’t even look in my direction, so engrossed in his work; but even so—one time, he lifted his head and smiled, said something, but I was so startled that it might as well have been in a foreign language. Then he shooed me away. The fights started soon after. They always closed the doors so I wouldn’t hear, and I didn’t. He didn’t leave his study door open anymore then, either. And so, I never did find out what on earth he was writing.”
Mother.
“Father never talked about Mother with bitterness,” Brother said, “because he saw himself as the guilty party. Although he did talk about her a lot. I knew about you the whole time, too; I knew I had a sister. Losing you really was the greatest punishment for Father; nothing could ease it, not even me. But Father always called her Mother, even though she herself hadn’t carried me, you know; so I’ve never had another Mother. I don’t want to see her picture. Let me have the picture that Father’s stories painted for me.”
Father.
“There were only a few random traces of him left at our place. His big desk wasn’t removed from the study because it was too heavy for us, and every once in a while when I took some old volume from the shelf in the Villa’s library, I would find thoughts jotted down in the margins in his handwriting. I read them without understanding anything, as if they were messages meant specifically for me; notices from the blank places in a photo album, just for me, not for anyone else.”
Mother.
“Father would have someone from time to time, and I wasn’t supposed to talk about Mother then. Some of them tried to find out from me what Mother had been like so they could be able to surprise him with only good things. They didn’t know I lacked my own memories of her. They thought that when I didn’t tell them, it was out of jealousy—that I wanted to keep it all to myself. They would’ve been right, but I didn’t have anything.”
Father.
“Red autumn leaves, leaving.”
Mother.
“The first snow, so delicate that it vanishes when it touches the ground.”
Father.
“And afterward,” Brother said, “for as long as I can remember, he didn’t write anything anymore. But he talked about the poems he’d left behind, talked about them a lot. He hoped that they’d be left to you. Maybe you’ll find them some day. Maybe you’ll understand.”
Mother.
“She wasn’t able to forgive him,” Laila said. “She probably didn’t even try. Everything had to disappear—everything. Papers went into the fireplace, clothes to the dump, she even smashed his big coffee mug on the kitchen floor. And the fireplace was lit for several days in a row, the flames dancing in angry, all-forgetting joy. That, I remember.”
Father.
“That’s true. He often said he would die in a fire, just unaware that he’d done so already. Then he tried to paint instead of writing, but he himself realized it was pointless. In reality, he wasn’t good at anything; maybe not even at writing. Maybe he never even existed.”
Mother.
“We loved the Villa, probably even more than each other. But while my love was mixed with awe—every door there opened up into a netherworld, from which I myself, in a mysterious and actually inexplicable way, had come—then Mother’s love was split almost cleanly in half with rage. When we didn’t have the servants anymore, she would still polish the floors just as frequently, still plaster every crack in the ceiling on her own right away, and would dust every last porcelain figurine in each and every room. Over and over. And she cooked a three-course lunch every day, an hour later on Sundays. It was a war.”
Father.
“We couldn’t settle down anywhere. He wasn’t the one sucking life-juices from the earth, but rather the earth from him.”
Mother.
“Everything had to stay the way it was before. That’s what killed her in the end.”
“Inevitably, at some point in every person’s life comes the moment when he has to count up the promises he definitely intends to keep before he goes,” Brother said. “For me, you’ve always been one of those.”
“At first, my hands would grow weak when I wound up holding some long-familiar item from the Villa. I wondered—how could I put a price tag on a clock that stood on the cupboard and measured my time when I was still a child? How can I set my parents’ five-o’clock-teacups on a table in the shop window when all of the guests peering at them through the glass will still stay thirsty? But n
ow, when I happen to come across an item stolen from my youth, I greet it like an old globetrotting friend who has decided to briefly look me up between his dusty travels to hear how I’m doing, too.”
When he stopped by the antique store the next evening, Brother had a chance to gaze upon the Villa’s silver spoons with his own eyes. Laila was pleased that he had been able to get some rest even on the narrow spare bed in the kitchen, since now, in the daylight, his cheeks no longer looked hollowed and the shadows under his eyes had disappeared.
“All people do here is flirt during the most lucrative opening hours; we’re running a business here, by the way,” grumbled the goateed antiquarian, dusting a heavy swan four times larger than life (that no one would ever buy, anyway). In fact, his claim was completely false, because other than during the town’s annual fair, only ten or so people would stumble into the dark and somewhat musty shop each week, at best. Not counting the pharmacist, who would occasionally visit to play chess in the afternoons, and the wiser patients who knew to bring their prescriptions there on such occasions. They, however, never bought anything from the goateed antiquarian.
“You know, then maybe I’ll take this painting,” Brother said, pointing to a small depiction of a somewhat frightened curly-haired woman with a chubby baby sitting on her lap and holding, for some reason, a spindle in its one hand while expertly inspecting a large cross held in its other.
“That’s pretty pricy, though,” the goateed antiquarian said with a smile. “The work of an old master from the sixteenth century.”
“Whoever sold it to you pulled a fast one,” Brother said. “The painting’s original is on display in Prado and is about two-and-a-half times larger. I always go to see it when I happen to be in the area. But I’d be glad to have something to remind me of those moments every morning when I wake up. What’s more, it might be true that I once knew the man who painted that copy.”
