by Lydia Davis
In a Northern Country
Magin was over seventy and not well. His right leg was lame and his lungs were weak. If his wife had been alive, she would not have let him go. As it was, his friends had told him to stay at home and wait for his brother Michael to come back. Yet he had never listened to anyone but his wife, and now he did not listen to anyone.
He was close to Silit, if the maps of the Trsk Land Office were correct. He had walked since early morning, very slowly, and his feet were sore. Just at noon, he came within sight of the town. His brother’s postcard had been sent from here. Karsovy, therefore, should be only a few miles to the north.
He set down his bag on the snow and rubbed his cramped fingers. He looked up at Silit: the street was lined by narrow houses with shuttered windows. Many of the roofs had fallen in and tumbled over the doorsills. Down by the well at the end of the street, under a couple of pine trees, he saw two old women knitting on a bench. He picked up his bag and walked to them and they stopped knitting to stare at him.
Until he shouted his question, they did not understand him. Then one of them opened her mouth and pointed wordlessly across the street.
In the shadow of the eaves, a man sat combing his brown beard with a broken comb. His eyes were on Magin. A roofless car was parked in the lane beside him.
Magin crossed the street. “Can you take me to Karsovy?” he asked in Trsk. The man stopped moving.
“There’s no such place,” he said.
“There must be,” said Magin. He pulled out the creased postcard from his brother and started to thrust it at the man.
“There is not. You are mistaken.”
Magin dropped his bag and shook his fist in the man’s face, crumpling the postcard. He would not argue. “I am not mistaken,” he shouted. His voice broke.
The man was startled. “Well,” he said, spitting on his palm and rubbing his boot with it, “I don’t often go there.”
Magin was trembling with anger and the blood at his temples throbbed. “How much?” he asked.
“I’ll take fifty,” the man said. Magin drew a purse from his back pocket and laid two coins on the man’s palm.
Magin picked up his bag and followed the man to the car. The man pulled himself up into the driver’s seat, looking straight ahead. Magin hoisted his bag onto the back seat and climbed in beside it. When he sat down, the springs gave way so far that he came to rest on something that felt like an iron rod. He did not move.
The engine turned over and the car jerked forward and threw Magin against the back of the seat. The car skidded into the snowy ruts of the road. Magin lurched from side to side as the trees veered at him around the bends of the road. Two doves flapped away as the car passed them
The driver’s hostility bewildered Magin. As an hour passed in the monotonous woods, he grew more and more uneasy. His search might be hopeless. There had been no word from his brother for weeks. And there was the question of how long he himself would last. “This is crazy,” he said to himself suddenly. “Here I am with one foot in the grave, in a north country winter, and I expect something to come of it. Mary would have laughed.” He pulled the collar of his overcoat up around his chin.
At last they reached Karsovy. As they drew up into a large clearing, Magin saw women in black crossing the drifts like shadows. Men crouched in front of their doorways.
Magin climbed down with his bag and rested against the car door. He looked up and saw that several people had gathered and were watching him. The women inched forward: their eyes flew from his face to his bag, but not a word passed their lips. Magin searched among the stony-faced men for the leader of the village, and the people became uneasy. They were puzzled by him.
“What?” said Magin to the driver, who had not moved from his seat. “What are they waiting for? Why are they staring at me? Why don’t they say anything?”
“Why should they say anything?” the driver said finally. “Anyway, you wouldn’t understand them. No one understands them. They don’t even know how to speak Trsk.” He smacked the wheel. “I brought another old man like you out this way. That was months ago and no one’s heard of him since.” He spat in the snow and glanced at the villagers with contempt. Before Magin could speak, he leaned on the horn, turned the car, and drove back into the woods.
Magin wondered what to do. One by one the villagers turned and went away, glancing back over their shoulders and stopping in mid-step to stare at him again. Two women stayed behind. One was old, thin, and shabbily dressed. The other was younger, and more muscular. The old one started forward, tightening her kerchief and opening her toothless mouth in a smile. The other one caught her by the sleeve.
“Ninininini,” the old one said, her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and her eyes glimmered from under the brow of her kerchief. She pulled away from the younger one and started forward again. The younger one cuffed her lightly on the shoulder and hissed at her. The old one turned and spat, and then walked away, her skirt trailing over the snow behind her.
The younger woman motioned to Magin to follow her. They turned up a small path, Magin favoring one leg. Under the trees he felt the cold close in on him like a vise. He coughed. His breath rattled in his throat.
The path wound among the stone huts. Heavily-furred dogs lay before many of the doors and growled as Magin and the woman went by. At the end of the path lay the woman’s hut. With one hand on the latch, she took a quick look back at Magin. Standing next to her, he caught a whiff of her fetid clothes. She opened the door and Magin followed her blindly. He was assaulted by the smell of unwashed linen. Slowly the air came in from the outside and he breathed more easily.
When his eyes grew accustomed to the pale light that fell over the back of the room from the small windows and the chinks in the stone, he saw that the hut was divided into two rooms by a thin wooden wall. To his left, in the larger room, he made out a table, a cupboard, some chairs, a bed, and on the far wall a framed photograph of the country’s leader in military dress. To his right was a small room, doorless. He could see the end of a narrow cot, and nothing else. The woman, standing close beside him, pushed on his shoulder.
“Ehh, ehh,” she said, and nodded. He went into the little room and dropped his bag by the bed. He was so tired that he could hardly bear the weight of his clothes. He wanted to lie down, but he was embarrassed by the woman behind him.
He looked out the window and then turned around. The woman had left. He lay down and closed his eyes tightly. He could not even remember why he was here. He began dreaming before he was fully asleep. He dreamt of the train ride through France, though that was already several days behind him. His wife, her hair slipping from its pins with the motion of the train, was reading aloud to him from a newspaper, like a child in her outmoded glasses and ill fitting dress. Yet in the dream he felt that he was the one in the wrong place.
Less than two hours later, waking from his sleep, he saw his brother’s tape recorder on a shelf in the corner of the room. He waited for this vision to fade.
It often happened, now, that his memory failed or that he recreated things he remembered and placed them where they did not actually exist.
The tape recorder remained, however, and beside it he now saw a neat pile of notebooks, some clothing, a sewing box, a pair of slippers, a pair of boots, and a knife. Was it possible that his brother had lived in this room? Magin did not move, for fear his brother’s possessions would vanish.
After fifteen minutes or so, Magin was fully awake. He got up and went over to the shelf. Touching his brother’s possessions, he felt reassured. This was his brother’s room: he had often been in his brother’s room when his brother was absent, though this was a different room from any of the others. Yet this was his brother’s room, and that meant that though his brother was now gone from the room, he would return to it.
And yet why, in that case, had the woman allowed him to lie down and go to sleep here? Perhaps she had merely been showing him the room, and did n
ot intend him to sleep here. Or perhaps she thought he would wait for his brother here. And, after all, that was what he was actually doing, now.
But there was a musty, disused smell about the clothes. And the notebooks stuck together, so that when Magin touched one, they all moved in a block. Perhaps his brother had been gone for a long time. He could not be dead, because in that case the woman would have put his possessions away somewhere. Unless this was where she had put them.
When he went out of the room, the woman was setting a meal on the table. Magin took her arm and led her into the small room. He pointed to his brother’s possession and asked her, “Where is the man who owns these things?”
She answered him only by gesturing toward the objects on the shelf in a way which Magin could not understand. She said one or two words only, and these he could not identify in any way with Trsk. Though this disappointed him, it did not surprise him. His brother had come here in order to record the language, after all. He had said it was on the point of dying out.
Magin gave up, not knowing what move to make, and followed the woman back to the table. Out the window, there were long violet shadows under the trees. He sat down, very hungry. He looked at the food. A cube of dry meat stood next to a heel of bread. He could see that the meat was too tough for his old teeth. He picked up the bread and ate it little by little, letting it soften before he chewed it. His hunger faded.
As the woman cleared the table, Magin lit a thin, cheap cigar and immediately started to cough. He felt a certain satisfaction in having come this far. However, he did not see how he was going to find out where his brother was: he was rather helpless, it turned out, because of the language. He stubbed his cigar and slipped what remained of it back in its box.
The woman put on her overcoat and gestured toward the door. Magin thought, with sudden hope, that now she was going to show him how to find Michael. In his excitement, he forgot where his room was, and stood still until the woman pushed him in the right direction. He put on his coat and followed her.
Outside the hut, the birds were now quiet; there was almost no light left in the sky, and the air was sharp. Magin, hurrying, stumbled over hidden roots. The dogs were gone from the doorways of the huts, which he and the woman passed quickly. When Magin thought they were still far away from the clearing, the sky widened. The windows of the largest hut glowed with orange firelight. Magin’s mouth was dry. He swallowed and walked after the woman into the hut.
Before he could steady himself, the woman disappeared from his side. At first the firelight dazzled him. He looked down. A dog was snaking toward him with its belly to the ground. The room was dense with people. In perfect silence they watched him: near the fire, men squatted on low stools and benches digging rhythmically into the thick socks that covered their ankles and scratching their scalps and ears; farther away, in a disordered group, the women sat together hissing over their needlework, shrugging fitfully, and sucking their teeth.
The dog began snarling, and the silence exploded: a tall man with a hooked nose rushed toward the dog, who was crouching at Magin’s feet with its teeth bared. A bench tumbled to the floor. The man kicked the dog in the ribs. The dog yelped and slipped away through legs and under stools. The men by the fire roared, and the women cried out strangely, themselves like animals. The dog squirmed into a corner. The man looked at Magin.
In Trsk, Magin said, “I came up here to look for my brother Michael, a scholar. My brother Michael came here to study your language.” He stopped because the man obviously did not understand him and was turning away. The man looked among the women for the one who had brought Magin here, and pointed at her, pronouncing what to Magin was only a guttural noise. The woman rose and spoke long enough to explain everything she knew. The man took Magin by the sleeve and sat him down on a bench near the fire. He spoke to an old man who was bent over a checkerboard in one corner of the room, and then went away. The man had not responded.
Magin lit the butt of his cigar and sat still for some time, wondering what was going to happen. The women sewed placidly, murmuring to one another. The men passed a jug around. For Magin, they poured the liquor into an earthenware cup. They scratched and talked, smiling and nodding at Magin every so often. Occasionally a man would come to him and recite a few words in English, which startled Magin extremely. “No, no. Sky,” one would say. Or another would say, “No, yes, here. Tape two.”
Magin threw the end of his cigar into the fire and kept an eye on the old man in the corner. The game was nearing its end. The long white hair of the old man grazed the scabbed pate of his opponent whenever they leaned over the board. Every time the white-haired one moved a piece, the other screwed up his nut-like face in anger. Magin lit another cigar and coughed. He was so tired that he could hardly sit straight. Suddenly the bald old man was on his feet, his skull gleaming in the firelight.
“Ruckuck,” he cried and brought his fist down on the checkerboard. The pieces—red and black discs and a few fragments of stone and wood—flew through the air and fell on the floor like a shower of hail. The white-haired man smiled calmly, his nose nearly touching his chin.
Now at last he looked at Magin and reluctantly came and sat down beside him. Magin stubbed out his cigar and put the end back in the box.
“Seek old man?” asked the white-haired man in Trsk.
“I’m looking for my brother,” said Magin.
“Brother here,” said the man.
Magin became excited. “Here?” He pointed to the ground.
“No, no, no.” The man held up his hand impatiently. “Brother here. Then: brother gone. Brother gone with man—north. Lost. Gone, lost. Gone, dead. Maybe.” He sliced his throat with one finger.
“What man?” Magin asked.
“Leader, cousin.” The man pointed to himself. “Gone to hunt.” He made the motion of shooting a rifle.
“How long?” Magin asked. He was lighting the butt of his cigar, though he did not know it. The people were all quiet, though they could not understand anything.
“Gone two day, two night. Then very cold, snow fall. Gone five week.” He held up his hand, fingers spread. He pointed to himself. “I leader, soon.” He smiled.
Magin started coughing and the old man left to get a drink. Magin could not catch his breath, and his eyes watered. Then he began to cry without control. He had drunk too much.
Later, the women put away their work and pulled on their coats and shawls by the light of a few stuttering candles. The men knocked the ashes from their pipes, smacked each other across the back and walked to the door. The women followed. When they had all gone, Magin sat for a few minutes in the dark and smelly room, trying to collect his thoughts. It was not easy. He believed, for some time, that he was in the Smoking Room of the Engineers Club. He was waiting for Harry to come out of the cloakroom. His head swam. He remembered where he was and got up hastily, afraid of losing track again.
Outside he looked over the dim snow to the trees. He did not remember which direction to take. He searched for something familiar in the dark landscape. Hearing a faint noise, he turned and saw small shadows moving over the snow. The first to reach him was a thin, white dog, who paused and stiffened, its nose pointed up at him. It was joined by a larger dog, who walked with difficulty and whose stomach was distended, stretching its worn black skin like a drum. One by one they came up, until a small pack had formed around him. He had nothing to offer them. He leaned down and smoothed the white dog’s head. The bones of the skull were round under his palm. The dog did not move. Fearing the sudden snarl and bite, Magin drew back his hand and walked cautiously away. His heart was jolting. He saw a twisted pine tree at the edge of the open space, and recognized it. Near it he found the path.
The dogs walked a few feet behind him, their footsteps muffled by the snow. He was uncomfortable. When the hut came in sight, a dog growled behind him. As he turned, the white dog caught his pants legs between its teeth. The dog growled again and shook its head from side to
side. The cloth ripped and Magin began running. His old legs did not move very fast. The dogs dashed back and forth and snapped at his ankles. He reached the hut. As he struggled with the latch, they fell back. Once inside, he stopped to catch his breath, which was raking his throat. Out the window, he saw the dogs circle among themselves, sniff at his footprints, and settle on their haunches, watching the door. Magin went to his cot and lit a fresh cigar. He sat down without undressing and smoked, trying to remain calm. Stubbing his cigar on the dirt floor, he wrapped himself in a thin blanket and lay back. He fell asleep only after a long time.
Most of the night, the cold kept waking him. Toward morning, he slept deeply at last, then lightly again, dreaming of pains in his chest. The dreams became more and more vivid until his eyes were open on a window of pink light and he knew that the violence in his left lung was not a dream. He could not leave the bed. He wanted to smoke, but did not dare. Lying still, staring straight up, he struggled with the pain, resisting every attack, and relaxing when the pain died.
Curiously, what he had learned the night before seemed less final in the daylight. The village leader was gone, with his brother. The people were choosing a new village leader, supposing that the other was dead. They supposed that his brother was dead too. Yet there were other possibilities: his brother might be ill, or injured; someone might be caring for him in a place where there was no way of sending word. Yet the thought haunted Magin that he might have made a foolish decision in coming, and that he could not escape the consequences. He tried to draw a breath and the pain stopped him. Fighting the pain, he then saw that he had had no choice. He could not have stayed at home. There was nothing for him at home. Everything, now, was where his brother was. The pain slowly diminished. After half an hour, as the room grew more and more yellow with the rising sun, Magin was able to sit up.
