The Survivors

by Alex Schulman

  “Come on!”

  A few quick steps and the sharp rocks disappeared beneath him. The cove had a June chill, and a little farther out were the strange bands of even colder water that came and went as if the lake were a living being that wanted to test him with different kinds of cold. The white Styrofoam buoy lay still on the mirrored surface ahead of them. The brothers had set it out a few hours earlier when they were dropping nets with their father. But Benjamin didn’t remember its being so far out. They swam in silence, to preserve their energy. Three heads in the black water, the shouts from the beach fading into the distance. After a while the sun vanished behind the trees on the opposite side. The light grew dim; they were suddenly swimming in a different lake. Without warning, Benjamin found the water foreign. All at once he was aware of everything happening beneath him, the creatures in the depths that might not want them there. He thought of all the times he’d sat in the boat with his brothers as Dad plucked fish from the net and tossed them into the bottom. And the brothers leaned in to look at the razor-sharp little fangs of the pike, the spiny fins of the perch. One of the fish flopped and the brothers jumped and shrieked, and Dad, startled by the sudden cries, shouted back in alarm. Then calm returned and he muttered as he wound up the nets, “You can’t be afraid of fish.” Now Benjamin thought about these beings swimming right alongside him, or just below him, hidden by the murky water. The white buoy, suddenly pink in the sunset, was still far away.

  After a few minutes of swimming the starting lineup had spread out—Nils was well ahead of Benjamin, who had left Pierre behind. But when darkness fell and the chill began to sting their thighs, the brothers closed ranks again. Soon they were swimming in tight formation. Maybe it wasn’t conscious, and maybe they would never admit it to each other, but they would not leave anyone behind in the water.

  Their heads were sinking closer toward the surface. The reach of their arms became shorter. At first the water had frothed with the brothers’ strokes, but now the lake was quiet. When they reached the buoy, Benjamin turned around to look at the cottage. The house looked like a red Lego brick in the distance. Only now did he realize how far the return trip was.

  The exhaustion hit him out of nowhere. He couldn’t lift his arms for all the lactic acid. He was so surprised that he seemed all of a sudden to have forgotten how to move his legs. A bolt of cold radiated from the back of his neck into his head. He could hear his own breaths, how they were growing shorter and more labored, and an icy realization filled his chest: he wasn’t going to make it back to shore. He could see Nils craning his neck to keep from getting water in his mouth.

  “Nils,” Benjamin said. Nils didn’t react, just kept swimming with his eyes on the sky. Benjamin made his way up to his older brother, and they breathed hard in each other’s faces. Their eyes met and Benjamin saw a fear he didn’t recognize in his brother’s gaze.

  “Are you okay?” Benjamin asked.

  “I don’t know…” he gasped. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

  Nils reached for the buoy and held on to it with both hands to float on it, but it couldn’t bear his weight and sank into the darkness beneath him. He gazed toward the land.

  “I can’t,” Nils mumbled. “It’s too far.”

  Benjamin searched his memory for what he’d learned in swimming lessons, during the instructor’s long lectures on water safety.

  “We have to stay calm,” he told Nils. “Take longer strokes. Longer breaths.”

  He glanced at Pierre.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m scared,” Pierre said.

  “Me too,” Benjamin replied.

  “I don’t want to die!” Pierre cried. His moist eyes just above the surface.

  “Come here,” Benjamin said. “Come by me.” The three brothers moved closer in the water. “We’ll help each other,” Benjamin said.

  They swam side by side in the direction of the house.

  “Long strokes,” said Benjamin. “We’ll take long strokes together.”

  Pierre had stopped crying and was now swimming doggedly alongside them. After a while they found a common rhythm, were taking common strokes, they breathed out and breathed in, long breaths.

  Benjamin looked at Pierre and laughed. “Your lips are blue.”

  “Yours too.”

  They flashed quick grins at each other. And returned to concentrating. Head above the surface. Long strokes.

  Benjamin saw the cottage far off, and the little field with its uneven grass where he played soccer with Pierre every day. The root cellar and berry bushes to the left, where they went out in the afternoons to pick raspberries and black currants and came back with white scratches all over their tanned legs. And behind all of this rose the firs, dark against the dusk.

  The brothers drew close to the shore.

  When they were only fifteen yards away, Nils sped up, crawling wildly. Benjamin cursed his sluggish surprise and set off after his brother. Suddenly the lake was no longer quiet, as the brothers’ fierce battle to reach the shore intensified. Pierre was soon hopelessly behind. Nils was one stroke ahead of Benjamin when they reached land, and they ran up the hill side by side. Benjamin yanked at Nils’s arm to pass, and Nils tore himself loose with a fury that shocked Benjamin. They made it to the patio. They looked around.

  Benjamin took a few steps toward the house and peered through one of the windows. And there he caught a glimpse of Dad’s figure. His broad back bent over the dishes.

  “They went inside,” Benjamin said.

  Nils stood with his hands on his knees, catching his breath.

  Pierre came up the hill, panting. His confused gaze aimed at the empty table. They stood there at a loss, the brothers. Three anxious breaths panting in the silence.

  | 3 |

  10:00 P.M.

  Nils shoves the urn with full force at his brother. Pierre isn’t ready for it and it lands on his chest. From the crack, Benjamin knows immediately that something has broken inside Pierre’s body. A rib or his sternum. Benjamin has always been able to see three steps ahead of everyone else. He could predict conflicts between the members of his family long before they happened. From the first moment of irritation, so subtle that it was hardly even there, he knew how the argument would begin and how it would end. But this is different. From this moment on, as something breaks inside Pierre’s chest, he knows nothing. Everything starting now is uncharted territory. Pierre lies in the shallow water and holds his chest. Nils hurries to him: “Are you okay?”

  He bends down to help his brother up. He’s frightened.

  Pierre kicks Nils in the calves so that he collapses on the rocky shore. Then Pierre throws himself on top of his older brother; they roll around and around, hammering their fists into faces and chests and shoulders. And all along, they speak. Benjamin finds the scene surreal, almost fantastical, how they’re talking to each other even as they try to kill each other.

  Benjamin picks up the urn, which has fallen by the embankment. The lid has come off, and some of the ash has spilled onto the sand. The color of the skeletal remains is gray, leaning purple, and he reacts very briefly to it as he picks up the urn and puts its lid back on; that’s not how he imagined Mom’s ashes. He holds on to the urn with both hands, takes a few steps back, going stiff as he is faced with his brothers’ fight. Frozen on the sidelines, as was so often the case in the past. He observes their awkward punches, their clumsiness. On any other day, Pierre would beat his brother black and blue. He’s been fighting since he was a teen. Memories from their school days, as Benjamin crossed the schoolyard and saw kids gathering to watch a fight, and between the down jackets Benjamin could see his brother bending over someone and he moved by quickly, never wanted to see his brother landing punch after punch even though his opponent was no longer moving, looked lifeless. Pierre can fight, but here at the water’s ed
ge the odds are evened out, because he’s cracked a rib and can hardly stand upright. Most of the blows between the brothers meet only air, or don’t quite land, or are parried with hands and arms. But a few of their attacks are devastating. Pierre gets Nils in the eye and right away Benjamin can see the blood trickling down his cheek and onto his neck. Nils elbows Pierre and it sounds like he breaks his nose. Nils tears at Pierre’s hair, and when he finally lets go, tufts of it dangle between his fingers. After a while, they grow tired. For an instant it seems as though neither of them has the strength to continue. They sit at the water’s edge, a few yards between them, looking at each other. And then they start all over again. It’s slow and drawn out; they want to kill each other but don’t seem to be in any hurry.

  And they keep talking.

  Nils aims a kick at his brother but misses and loses his balance. Pierre backs away and picks up a rock from the beach, lobbing it at Nils. The rock whizzes by, but Pierre takes another and throws it and this time it hits Nils on the chin. More blood. Benjamin tentatively backs up and over the embankment, holding the urn so tightly that his fingers go white. He turns around and trudges up to the house. He goes inside, into the kitchen, and finds his phone. He calls the emergency number.

  “My brothers are fighting,” he says. “I’m afraid they’re going to beat each other to death.”

  “Can you intervene?” asks the woman on the phone.

  “No.”

  “Why not? Are you injured?”

  “No, no…”

  “Why can’t you intervene?”

  Benjamin presses the phone firmly to his ear. Why can’t he intervene? He gazes out the window. He can see all of the little settings of his childhood. This landscape is where it all began, and this is where it ended. He can’t intervene because he got stuck here once upon a time and hasn’t been able to move since. He’s still nine years old, and the men fighting down there are adults, the brothers who kept living.

  He sees the shape of the two of them, trying to kill each other. It’s no worthy finale, but perhaps it’s also no surprise. How else had they expected this to end? What did they think would happen when they returned at last to the place they had spent their lives trying to flee? Now his brothers are fighting in knee-deep water. Benjamin watches as Pierre heaves Nils down under the surface. He stays there, doesn’t get up, and Pierre makes no attempt to help him.

  A thought passes through Benjamin: They’re going to die down there.

  And he drops the phone and now he’s running. He dashes out and down the stone steps—the path to the lake is in his muscle memory; he can still dodge every obstacle, so even at high speed, he avoids every protruding root, jumps every sharp rock. He is running through his childhood. He passes the spot where his parents always sat in the last of the evening sun, before it set behind the lake. He makes his way past the wall of forest that rises to the east, passes the boathouse. He runs. When did he last do that? He doesn’t recall. He has lived his adult life at a constant standstill, as if within parentheses, and now that he feels his heart pounding in his chest he is filled with a strange euphoria to find that he can run, that he has the energy, or, maybe, above all: that he wants to. He takes strength in the fact that something is finally driving him to act. And he jumps over the little ledge where he used to catch tadpoles as a child and throws himself into the water. He grabs his brothers and prepares to pull them apart, but he soon realizes that there’s no need. They’ve stopped fighting. And they’re standing close together in water up to their waists, a few yards out into the lake. They’re looking at each other. Their dark hair is alike, they have identical eyes, the same chestnut brown. They don’t speak. The lake grows quiet. Just the sound of three brothers crying.

  On the stone steps they inspect each other’s wounds. They don’t apologize, because they don’t know how, because no one has ever taught them. They cautiously feel each other’s bodies, dab at cuts, they press their foreheads together. The three brothers hold each other.

  Through the dull, humid summer silence, Benjamin suddenly hears a car engine in the forest above them. He glances over at the slope. A police car slowly plows through the blue foliage, down the narrow tractor path that leads to the property. There is the cottage, lonely on the point of land, in the June night that will never be entirely dark.

  | 4 |

  The Pillar of Smoke

  Mom and Dad stood up after lunch on the patio. Dad gathered the plates and stacked the glasses. Mom brought the white wine into the kitchen and gingerly put the bottle in the fridge. Signs of life in the bathroom after that—the water pump howled a few times. Dad spat forcefully into the sink. Then they trooped upstairs, their steps heavy. Benjamin heard the bedroom door close, and it was quiet.

  They called it their “siesta.” Nothing strange about it, they’d informed the children—people in Spain did it all the time. An hour’s nap after lunch, in order to face the evening fresh and alert. For Benjamin it was a long hour of nothing, followed by the peculiar half hour when Mom and Dad staggered back out to the patio, sitting silent and combustible in their plastic chairs. As a rule, Benjamin kept his distance then, letting them wake up in peace, but soon he approached his parents, and his brothers did too, from different parts of the yard, because once in a while, after the siesta, Mom would read aloud to the children. On a blanket on the lawn if the weather was nice, or on the kitchen bench before the fire if it was raining, the children sat in silence and listened as Mom read from old classics, the books she thought children should know. And it was just Mom’s voice, there was nothing else, and she ran her free hand through a child’s hair, and the longer this time lasted the closer the boys came to their mother, until at last it was like they were joined together, you couldn’t tell where one child ended and the next began. When she reached the end of a chapter, she would close the book with a snap right in front of one of their noses, and they all screeched in delight.

  Benjamin sat down on the stone steps. He had a long wait ahead of him. He gazed down at his banged-up summer legs, saw the mosquito bites on his shins, smelled the scent of his sunburned skin and the antiseptic Dad had dabbed onto his feet to treat his nettle stings. His heart beat faster even though he wasn’t moving. It wasn’t boredom he felt; it was something different, harder to explain. He was sad without quite knowing why. He gazed down the placid slope at the lake, the sun-scorched, bleached meadow. And he felt everything around him falter. It was like a bell jar had been lowered over the point. His eyes followed a wasp as it anxiously circled a bowl of cream sauce that had been left on the table. The wasp was heavy and irrational and it was having problems, it looked like its wings were beating more and more slowly, with more and more effort, and then it got too close to the sauce and was caught. Benjamin followed its struggle to free itself, but little by little its movements slowed until at last they stopped. He listened to the birdsong, suddenly strange; it was as if the birds were singing more slowly, at half speed. Then they fell silent. Benjamin felt terror flow through him. Had time stopped? He clapped five times as he usually did to return to himself.

  “Hello!” he called into the air. He stood up, clapped again, five times, so hard that his palms stung.

  “What are you doing?”

  Pierre was standing down by the lake and looking up at him. “Nothing,” Benjamin replied.

  “Want to go fishing?”

  “Okay.”

  Benjamin went to the hall for his boots. Then he walked around the corner of the cottage to get the fishing rod that was leaning against the wall.

  “I know where there are worms,” said Pierre.

  They went behind the barn, where the soil was moist. They turned over two shovelfuls and suddenly the ground was glistening with worms. The brothers pulled them from the soil and collected them in a jar, where they lay placidly, unconcerned about their captivity. Pierre shook the jar, turning it over to
rouse them, but they seemed to take everything as it came—even death, because when Benjamin threaded them onto the hook down by the lake they didn’t protest but let themselves be drilled through by the metal.

  * * *

  —

  They took turns holding the rod. The bobber was red and white and stood out clearly against the black water, except when it vanished into the spots of sun on the surface. Along the shore came the Larsson Sisters, the farm’s three hens, in a group but each minding her own business, randomly pecking at the ground here and there, clucking softly. Benjamin had always felt uncomfortable when they came near him, because there was no logic to their behavior. He felt edgy, as if anything could happen—like when a wino suddenly spoke to you on the square. Plus, Dad had said one of them was blind, and might lose it if she felt threatened, and Benjamin would stare into the hens’ empty eyes but could never tell which of them couldn’t see. Weren’t all of them blind, in fact? It looked like it as they crept nervously across the ground. Dad was the one who had bought the hens, a few summers ago, in order to finally fulfill his lifelong dream of eating freshly laid eggs for breakfast. Dad fed them, tossing the dry feed after them in the afternoon and calling, “Pot-pot-pot,” and in the evenings he herded them into the barn, the sound of his ladle striking the bottom of a pan echoing across the whole property. Each morning Pierre had the task of fetching eggs from the Larsson Sisters’ coop, and he’d come running back up the grassy path to the house with the treasure in his hands and Dad would hurry into the kitchen and put on a pot of water. It became a tradition of theirs, Pierre and Dad, and it was a nice moment for Benjamin as well because it made him feel calm, it was bright and let you breathe easy.

  The hens stopped pecking at the ground and gazed with their dead eyes at the brothers on the shore. Benjamin lunged at them and the Larsson Sisters immediately picked up the pace, moving on with long steps, staring down into the grass. They passed the boys and were gone.