“They’re for you,” he said. There was no warmth in the words; they seemed to come from some cold valley in the north.
The two boys looked at their father. They did not know what to say. They all stood there for a while, staring at the animals.
“Dad, we never asked for horses,” Natan said. Daniel envied his brother’s courage. He would always envy his brother’s courage, just as his brother would always envy his will-power.
“Well, now you have them,” their father said. “So you’d better take care of them. I don’t have time for any more of your nonsense.”
He waited another couple of seconds, then turned and walked back to the house.
“Are they tame?” Daniel called without taking his eyes off the horses, just turning his head slightly to one side.
“Almost,” their father replied at the last moment before he went in through the door and was swallowed by the darkness of the interior.
The two boys stood there, side by side, not knowing what to say or do, both feeling suddenly as if there was a dead weight on their backs.
Natan spat on the gravel and moved his tongue over his teeth. “Fuck,” he said, twisting his neck slightly to one side.
It’s always the same: you don’t know what you have until you’ve lost it. That was what Daniel thought years later, whenever he remembered that moment.
“What now?” Daniel asked, already knowing the answer.
“We don’t seem to have much choice,” Natan said.
“No, we don’t,” Daniel said.
Natan spat on the gravel again. “Fuck. Who the hell gives a damn about horses?”
“We’d better start giving a damn about them,” Daniel said.
The two boys stood there, side by side, staring at the horses, which to be honest were handsome animals.
“They’re not bad,” Daniel said.
Natan turned for a moment and looked frostily at his brother, then spat on the gravel again.
“Fuck,” he said again. Natan liked to swear, especially when he was nervous.
WHEN OLD PANCIA SAW the two brothers coming down the path, it struck him as funny: he had woken up that day with the feeling that something strange was going to happen. Old Pancia didn’t much like feelings, and certainly didn’t like paying them any heed — but then they usually turned out to be true, which bothered him even more.
The second thing that struck old Pancia was that the boys had stolen the horses from some nearby farm, but if they had he’d surely have known about it. Old Pancia knew practically every horse in the area; he had tamed them, brought most of them into the world, and those he hadn’t weren’t worth bothering with. These two horses, though, he’d never seen — there was no way you’d forget two animals like that.
When they reached the enclosure where old Pancia was working, Daniel was the first to speak.
“They say you deal with horses,” he said.
Old Pancia was mending the fence with a hammer. “Who says that?” he replied, without looking up from his work.
“People.”
“What people?”
“People round here.”
“Oh, is that what they say?”
“You are old Pancia?”
Old Pancia looked up at them for the first time. “What do you think?”
The two boys looked him up and down for a few seconds. He was a big man, who looked quite a bit older than he was, with a fat, bulging belly that pushed his shirt out of his trousers so that it hung down like a skirt.
“I think you are,” Daniel said.
“You’re a clever boy,” old Pancia said.
Daniel decided not to answer.
“Are they tame?” old Pancia asked.
“Almost.”
“What does that mean?”
“We don’t know, that’s what our father said.”
“I know your father,” old Pancia said. He had now broken off from mending the enclosure, had pushed his straw hat back from his forehead and had leant with his arms on the fence, just in front of them.
“I’m pleased to hear it,” Daniel said.
“They’re fine horses,” old Pancia said.
The three of them were silent for a few seconds.
Natan shifted his weight from one foot to the other and spat on the ground. “Well?” he said. “Can you see to them or not?”
For a moment, Pancia looked Natan in the eyes. “I don’t come cheap,” he said.
“We don’t have any money,” Natan said curtly.
Old Pancia waited another couple of seconds, then said, “Who’s going to mount them?”
The two brothers looked at each other, not sure what the old man was talking about.
“Who are they for?” the old man said. “Who’s going to be riding them?”
Daniel nodded that he had understood. “We are,” he said.
The old man adjusted the straw hat on his head. “Then you should be the ones to take care of them.”
“We don’t know anything about horses.”
“I know what there is to know.”
“It’s a deal, then,” Daniel said.
“Like hell it is,” old Pancia said. “I don’t come cheap.”
“We don’t have any money,” Natan said again.
“You could work for me.”
“We can’t work for you. All we want to do is tame these horses and learn to ride them.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you want. If you can’t pay me, work for me. Otherwise, you might as well sell these animals for meat and run away before your father finds out.”
Natan lowered his head and spat on the ground again. “Fuck,” he said.
“When should we come back?” Daniel asked.
“Tomorrow morning at dawn.”
“Shit,” Natan said.
“Where do we leave the horses?” Daniel asked.
Old Pancia motioned to them to follow him and moved the horses into two small diagonal spaces inside the stable, in the middle of the other horses. Then he said goodbye to the two boys and told them he’d be waiting for them the following morning.
For three months, the boys went to old Pancia’s every morning at dawn, and returned home after nightfall. They cleaned the stables, changed the hay and straw and fed the horses. As time passed, the old man taught them how to behave towards the animals, how to take them out, how to clean them, how to use the currycombs and the brushes, how to saddle them and how to put on the bit and bridle.
After only a few weeks, when the boys were already moving around among the animals as if they had been doing it all their lives and he decided they had already paid off most of their debt, old Pancia took them aside one evening and told them to go and take their horses. For Natan, who was already starting to get bored, it couldn’t have come any sooner. But Daniel said nothing. So the old man carried on, teaching them how to get the horses to walk in a circle in the enclosure, how to punish them and how to stroke them. When at last the horses were ready, he gave them the saddles and bridles. The horses shied, reared up on their hind legs and whinnied, their ears pinned back and their eyes inflamed with fear.
But in the end, as usual, old Pancia calmed them down and managed to get the boys, who at times had seemed more scared than the animals, to saddle the two horses. Both boys had learnt to command respect: Daniel through the sweat of his brow, the hours he had spent determinedly working with his bay, and Natan through sheer anger, cursing and kicking like a stevedore.
When at last the two horses were tamed, responding to every command in the enclosure, the old man and the boys stood side by side, admiring their handiwork. It was a late afternoon in summer and all three were sweating, bearing the marks of a long day’s work. They were leaning on the fence of the enclosure and, to put it bluntly, each felt a little more of a man.