The Brothers (3 page)

‘I’ll have a small one. Although my hands are covered in dough.’

‘No matter.’

When I turn round, she pours the drink into two small glasses. The sound is like a frog diving. I sit down opposite her. She looks at me between the eyes, drowsily benign yet vacant. This tells me that today, everything’s different. I wait until she has raised her glass to her lips before I wet my own with the revolting liquor. I taste what she is tasting. For a moment I have her mouth, old, doughy and sour.

‘Would you like to go on a trip to Turku?’ she asks.

I am so surprised that I am nearly lost for words. ‘Turku? Me?’

‘Yes. I don’t suppose you’ve ever been there.’

‘I haven’t. Vaasa, yes, but Turku, never.’

‘Good. In that case, you need to pay it a visit. Of course, there are more magnificent towns in the world, but you’ve not seen it and I’d like to see it again.’ She rests her elbows on the table and leans her pale cheek against her palm, through which her voice now speaks: ‘It’s been a long time since I went to that town. It was before Arvid became sick. You were just a little girl then.’

I do not know what to say, so I say nothing.

‘I should never have left. That wasn’t the plan. We had a beautiful apartment and neat servants and a real piano in the drawing room. I played it when we had visitors.’

Her voice has softened and her eyes have gone behind a misty curtain. She shakes herself free and states, ‘But then I had to come here to tend pigs and chickens.’

‘And cows,’ I say.

She stares at me for a moment and nods. ‘And cows.’

‘Although we have a milkmaid.’

‘A milkmaid is no match for a piano.’

She is the same and yet she is not. Generally she radiates irritation even when she is trying to be friendly, but not now. She is afraid too, then. I feel the fear trying stealthily to bind us closer together. I lean further back on the bench and say, ‘It’s not good that Henrik’s here.’

‘No, it’s not good. Maybe a mother shouldn’t say such things about her son, but it’s not good.’

‘What’s going to happen?’

Her eyes change again. A moment ago, they were shaded. Now they darken, open out in the middle, become tiny black abysses which suck in the gaze. She raises her glass quickly, tips it empty and says, ‘I should go and feed the chickens.’

The new maid is sweeping the drawing-room floor. That dress is just asking my hand to slip underneath it. But servants and their betters should not consort with each other, not even when a man is feeling so weak or so desperate that both his reason and his pride – the same thing, basically – are compromised. She reminds me of someone, maybe that girl in those filthy quarters in Stockholm, where I had to struggle from one day to the next just to keep the shirt on my back. The days began grey and ended up black, if they ended at all and did not merely bleed miserably into each other. I do not wish to reminiscence.

‘You’re keeping the place tidy, I see,’ I say.

The girl twists round, stoat-like, lowers her gaze upon seeing me and lets out a sweet little giggle. ‘I can do that much.’

‘That’s the spirit. You should never do more than you can. It may even be better to stay a touch below the level of your maximum ability. You should never throw your ability out of the window. Someone could come and steal it.’

She stares at me stupidly with her mouth open. She shifts on her feet and licks her lips as if somebody had left honey on them in the heat of fornication. Her broad face, high cheekbones and slit-like eyes remind me of those Mongolians one saw in the streets of St Petersburg. The dress is worn but nevertheless neat and a little too tight, suitably. It is probably one of Anna’s old garments. She will no longer need it, now that she is blessed with a share in a prosperous house. I bet the girl has been recruited from the village and not from Vaasa, because we all know that rural servants are satisfied with less than hired hands from towns. Financially, they are a more sensible alternative.

‘Is this house a good place for a maid, then?’ I ask.

‘Yes, sir,’ she whimpers.

‘Not too much work?’

‘Not at all.’

I nod as I leave. ‘As I suspected.’

I take another look at her from the doorway. She is supple and light, already endowed with curves. The passage of young flesh, unaware of its future decline. Outside I naturally bump into the Farmhand, for I am used to running into bad luck. He is on his way from the shed with an armful of firewood, bare-handed and bare-headed. He must keep his shack warmer than the Russians do their saunas. He scowls at me sideways, trying to get past me, but he stops when I say, ‘You were planning to heat up your cabin.’

He is ready with his reply: ‘I won’t need such heavy blankets then.’

‘That’s handy. Particularly when you don’t need to get logs from your own forest, which would presuppose that you’ve got a forest of your own. Where have the labourers got to?’

‘The place we’ve just been talking about.’

He does make me think for a moment. ‘The forest?’

‘That’s right. They’re felling trees, though it isn’t their forest either.’

‘You didn’t think to go with them, as driver?’

‘I would have, but esteemed visitors arrived at the house. I was asked to stay put on their account.’

May the Devil take him. A parasite like him ought to be flogged on the church hill every Sabbath. The only problem is that he would probably somehow use the flogging as a means of obtaining a martyr’s crown. It is best to ignore him. I believe he ignores me, too.

I am walking along a familiar road. I once thought it safe. I did not know that it led to a dirty world. The spruce copse has become denser, they have been working on a new fence, there are no signs of war here. The air is getting cold, it eats into the skin. But this is nothing compared with the horrific winters of St Petersburg. In summer, swarms of mosquitoes, and in winter, freezing cold. That city is only a good place to live if you own a palace and a flock of lackeys who will carry logs to tiled stoves in rows of three. And yet I would go back there if I could. Not in order to be there, but in order to be far away from elsewhere.

There is my fence. It is beginning to rot, little by little. Futile, like everything I have ever done. If it is true that, after his death, a man is remembered by his achievements, I might as well refrain from kicking the bucket, because any memory of me will just spill out and trickle away. Anyway, Jansson does not need any fencing round his land. His cows have always been so inexplicably timid they are not able to muster enough courage for even a small escapade. They just stand in the safest corner of the cow enclosure staring vacantly at the house. Unless he has got a new breed, but I do not think so. All his time must go on breeding misunderstood horses and treacherous daughters.

I take the long way round, behind the lea, in order to approach the house undetected. My boots sink in the snow, I begin to grow breathless. The barn is larger than the house, but then it holds a cowshed, a stable and a feed store. Good planning on the part of one of Jansson’s ancestors, who may well have been a busy man of honour. He can hardly have known he would be guilty of the embarrassing crime of being responsible for the birth of the future Jansson.

I peer round the corner. There is no one in the yard. I stand still and listen. All I can hear is the faint snuffling of cows carrying through the wall. You would expect someone to be cleaning up the cowshed or bringing fodder for the cows to chew on. Perhaps it is
meal-time
. I open the door a little and slink into the dim light of the feed store. I wait for my eyes to get used to the poor light.

Just as I thought. A whole mountain of dry hay.

I have to tell him. Perhaps then he will understand that he must leave. After all, the thought of money brought him back here: that cursed dream of riches which draws people to itself like those devices called, if I remember rightly, magnets. Erik can choose the right moment to tell Anna and Mauri. I will tell the Farmhand on one of those nights.

It is a defeat, of course, but I got used to the idea of defeat a long time ago. People regard me as proud and quarrelsome. How little they know me. No doubt tongues will wag. Joy at my misfortune will bring blood to those fleshy peasant cheeks, but what of it?

I will take out my better suitcases and pack my future in them.

Luckily, I have a sister in Turku and not in another backward village, where the greatest social events of the year are the littering of Gunnarsson’s sow, or the butcher’s hands, well used to meat, straying below corset level as he dances with the sexton’s daughter. Only, the sexton’s daughter has never even seen a corset and neither have any other of the fine young ladies of the district.

I will carry a parasol, sit in the park on beautiful summer days, walk along the bank of a river. What a relief, after all these years. Who knows, one day, an ageing but not decrepit gentleman may come along. He will have a sense of propriety, but the blood will still run warm in his veins and he will have the daring to let it to heat up at carefully chosen moments. He may wish to extend a gloved hand to me and help me embark a hire carriage. Then he will take me on an excursion to a remote riverside folly, a place where faded dreams can flower once more.

But first I have to feed the chickens.

If Jansson had kept his word, many a misfortune would have been avoided. The war would still have been waged; the King of Sweden and the Emperor of Russia would hardly have changed their plans because of Henrik and the horse. In this house, however, everything would have been different.

For Henrik never got the horse. Jansson had second thoughts and paid cash for the five years’ toil. I do not know to this day whether Jansson’s act sprang from treachery or stupidity, or whether he wanted to spare Henrik from becoming a slave to the horse out of the goodness of his heart. In any case, Jansson’s decision showed how little understanding of human nature he had. Otherwise, he would have seen Henrik not as his voluntary labourer, but as the independent man the horse had by then made out of the boy.

For a few days, we hardly saw Henrik and he barely said a word to anyone. There was something proud and dangerously mature about him as he moved around the edges of the farmyard, quiet and cold. His eyes, staring sullenly, were like coals in the wax of his hardened face. One night I woke up with a sense that something would happen. Although I heard nothing, I went out and crept into the stable. There they slept, the horse and Henrik: a primitive creature emitting a stench of dark graveyard and, against it, a tall, thin human figure. Not two beings, but one, or rather one and a half, or at least one and a third. A man-horse.

The next morning, Jansson got a surprise. He found the money he had given Henrik on his kitchen table. For a few days there was no word of the runaways. Then both returned – not at the same time, but painfully and shamefully separated from each other, like a man brought home without the lower part of his body. They were accompanied by Crown soldiers. Henrik had been caught somewhere south of Vaasa, attempting to steal turnips from a field at night. What a miserable fate for a young man: to get away with stealing a horse only to be caught pinching turnips.

Whatever we think of Jansson, Henrik escaped the house of correction on account of the farmer’s mercy. Perhaps Jansson felt sorry for Henrik’s sick father, and after Arvid had died of his illness, he probably did not want to stir up old trouble.

Fool that I am, I thought that with time Henrik would also forget, but he did not. In certain matters, one ought to seek the advice of women first, for they have been given a third or fourth or even fifth sight, which sees and understands many things men fail to know. By chance, I turned to the Old Mistress when I happened to pay a quick visit to the chicken shed and found her there feeding her feathered flock.

I cleared my throat, as required by good manners, and she turned and smiled. ‘The chickens are laying well,’ she said.

‘Let’s be grateful we don’t need to worry about them,’ I replied. ‘What I mean is, there are enough causes for worry in a human’s life.’

She nodded and her smile faded. ‘True. Mankind seems to be made for worrying.’

‘Anything in particular?’

‘Henrik has been given the nature he has,’ she said. She had forgotten the chickens, although one was pecking at her shoe. ‘He not only bears a grudge, he has to be cunning, too. Can it be healthy for a young man to have too good a memory and too sharp a brain?’

‘Is he still after that horse?’

‘Yes. He’s hatched a plot to get revenge on Jansson. Since Jansson took his horse, he’ll take Jansson’s daughter.’

I was surprised, and at once grew fearful, but I did not show it. ‘Which of them? The pretty girl?’

‘Yes. Anna’s her name. Although, who knows, she might turn out to be a good daughter-in-law. Revenge just doesn’t seem the right reason for taking a wife. In any case, the poor girl won’t make up for the horse. Though you can ride a wife, of course.’

I sensed misfortune approaching, mocking and inevitable. But I did not let this intimation creep into my voice. ‘It’s gone as far as that? Has the day been fixed?’

The Old Mistress shook her head glumly. ‘Anna doesn’t even know yet that she’s to be Henrik’s wife. Just as Henrik doesn’t yet know that I know. But I do know my son; Anna won’t have any say in the matter, once it’s been decided. Jansson will put up a fight for a time, but a daughter is every man’s weak point. And Jansson owes Henrik, in a way.’

‘I see. So he’ll swap the horse for the daughter? Looks as if it’s time to order wedding shoes from the shoemaker.’

‘Have Arvid’s old ones.’

‘Thanks all the same, but I won’t go to a wedding in a dead man’s shoes. Could be a bad omen for the marriage. Although maybe you can’t ruin a union with shoes if hooves have got there first.’

We all see others in our own way. Henrik claims that I am in the habit of skulking and eavesdropping. True enough, I happen to overhear all sorts of things, but a quiet person hears a great deal that he would rather not hear. Sometimes there seems to be nowhere in the world human voices don’t reach.