The Brothers

by Asko Sahlberg

  Finally, I too saw the horse. We had threshed the grain and I had promised to help out Jansson. His labourer had stepped on a nail and was suffering from blood poisoning. At first, I did not give the matter any thought, it had slipped my mind, but then I walked past Jansson’s enclosure and noticed something standing there, something that was too big to stand there – unless the enclosure had shrunk.

  I saw at once that the animal would be no use to anyone. It would probably kill a man one day, unless somebody had the wits to put it down before that happened. Its size was unnatural; it was not fat, but excessively muscular. It was not just one horse but one and a half, or at least one and a third. Its hooves were like buckets that had got stuck on its feet, coming back from the well. But it was its gaze that sent a shiver down my spine. Over the years, as he wanders through life, a man gets used to the gentle eyes of horses. But Henrik’s horse had the burning eyes of a wolf or a lion, or maybe the Beast of the Book of Revelation.

  I had never made the acquaintance of an animal with such a severe stare.

  ‘So you decided to give a monster like that to a young man,’ I said to Jansson.

  He pushed his hat to the back of his head and sighed. ‘I didn’t want to. But the boy wouldn’t stop pleading. And it might yet become useful.’

  ‘It’ll never be an Officer of the Guard’s parade horse, that’s for sure. Has it ever pulled a plough?’

  He sighed again. Or was he panting out of sheer terror? ‘We gave it a try, but it’s just too unruly.’

  ‘And you’ll attend Henrik’s funeral with a good conscience?’

  He shoved his hat over his eyes, probably to avoid seeing the creature glaring at us from the enclosure. ‘Well, there’s not a lot I can do about it now.’

  There would be no funeral. This became clear to me as I was weeding the ditch between our and Jansson’s lands and saw Henrik, speeding along on the horse as if he had been born to ride it. I do not know which one of them spotted me, but in any case they started storming towards me. I stared as they approached. I heard the thudding of the heavy hooves and the low whinnying of the horse. I decided – if I was able to decide anything, in my fright – that as I would not have time to run to the edge of the forest, it would be best to throw myself face-down into the ditch. I was on the point of doing so when the horse came abruptly to a halt. It did not seem to stop, in fact; instead it just ceased moving instantaneously. It floated in the air for a moment with its front hooves raised. Then it stood there as if it were already bored.

  ‘So is it yours now?’ I asked.

  Henrik did not look like a rider on horseback, but like someone or something that had pushed out its head and shoulders, and finally the rest of its body, through the skin on the horse’s back. He replied, ‘It’s not yet mine. But next week the five years will be up.’

  ‘So they will be. Jansson’s already letting you ride it, I see.’

  ‘Jansson’s in town.’

  ‘And you took the horse. You couldn’t wait till next week.’

  ‘I didn’t take it. I’ll return it to the stable soon.’

  Just then, I caught the smell of the horse. It reminded me of a graveyard in autumn. ‘You’d better. I expect it’s got a name by now. I hope it’s a name fit for an elephant.’

  ‘It’s called Horse.’

  ‘Even Jansson wouldn’t give a stallion such a stupid name.’

  Maybe Henrik’s hatred of me was born at that moment. ‘It’s called Horse!’

  I would have said something conciliatory but I did not have the chance. As unexpectedly as it had stopped, the horse turned, or rather it did a furious backward roll in the air. Faster than I could have said ‘Amen’, they were racing ahead, already in the middle of the meadow. The smell of the horse still shimmered around me. It was not the smell of others of its kind; it was more pungent and more ominous. Once it had got into your nose, it would not leave. I had to wait another few years before I understood that the beast smelt of war.

  THE OLD MISTRESS

  Nowadays, a woman’s honour is neither here nor there, if it ever was. When there are no men of honour, there can be no women of honour. Men charge round in a woman’s life like mad bulls, and the wisest thing to do would be to sit quietly in a dimly lit corner. But what can you do when there is blood in your veins? That blood will surge and make its demands. And then you have a thirst that is not quenched by drinking.

  ANNA

  I hear him through the walls. The walls breathe fear and shame into me. My hands are stuck in dough, forgotten, turned to stone. The Old Mistress will arrive soon and begin nagging, but she should not blame me. I did not want a maid who cannot even bake. Erik suggested we get the new girl from town, but the Old Mistress had gone and made a promise to the tailor’s widow and there was nothing to be done about it.

  I would prefer to be frightened only for myself. If I could, I would send word to Erik. Why does he have to go to Vaasa so often and leave me in this house? You always feel uneasy here, as if you were in the wrong room.

  Now Henrik comes out from the large room that the Old Mistress insists we all call the drawing room. He walks into the hall, boots creaking. My feet seem to move, although I am rooted to the spot. The front door opens and closes. I hear men’s voices from the yard. I am sure that the Farmhand too is afraid of Henrik. A man’s fear of a man must be different from a woman’s. Probably it is colder, like water newly drawn from a well compared with water that has long been standing in a jug.

  ‘Is he outside?’ the Old Mistress asks behind my back.

  The one good thing about this house is that sooner or later you learn not to start. ‘He went out just now.’

  ‘Where’s the Farmhand?’

  ‘In the yard. They were talking out there.’

  ‘Did you hear what they were saying?’

  ‘No.’

  In her own room she always moves heavily, but elsewhere in the house she is quiet; the pantry door seems to creak open by itself. ‘Right. You shouldn’t listen to men.’

  I know full well that not all of the bottles are in the drawing room. They have been hidden all over the house. She wanders between them during the day as if she were dutifully following a set path. And yet she no longer hides it, at least not from me, not any more. She has tired of concealment a little like I have tired of drawing a comb fifty times through my hair every night, or washing between my legs. When things grow useless, you let them go.

  ‘You want some?’

  ‘Is it the strong stuff?’

  A knock, as glass hits the table. ‘No.’

  ‘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 s
oftened 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.’

  HENRIK

  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.

  THE OLD MISTRESS

  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.
r />   THE FARMHAND

  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.