Natan kept his brother there until dawn, and in the end, when he couldn’t take it any more, he said that everything he had just told him wasn’t enough to describe a thousandth part of what you could find in a city. A whole lifetime wouldn’t be enough, he said, to tell about all the things and people and stories you could find there.
When Natan had finished speaking, they lay there in silence for a few minutes. The blue light of dawn was already starting to appear behind the hills. Then Daniel got to his feet.
“I have to go to work,” he said.
“You should come once,” Natan said.
Daniel had nodded and helped his brother to get up. “See you later,” he said.
Now Natan was spending more time in the city than anywhere else. He would disappear for weeks on end, then suddenly come back for two or three days, then disappear again.
Often he would come home with a few scratches on his face, or a black eye. Daniel knew he had been fighting again, but he didn’t care. His brother had always been like that.
When Natan disappeared, though, it wasn’t always to go to the city. Some people were ready to swear they had seen him sleeping with his horse in a clearing in the hills. Natan had always liked being on his own, he said that you could always rely on yourself, that however sick or twisted you were it always added up somehow. Daniel didn’t know; he’d never thought about it.
Daniel never knew how Natan paid for his food. The only thing he knew for certain was that he never asked anyone for anything.
Once, their father had come to Daniel and asked him about his brother. Daniel had looked at him without knowing what to say.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
For the first time in his life, Daniel had the impression that his father was floundering.
“I don’t know. How does he live?”
Daniel wondered if the person in front of him was really his father. “He lives his own life,” he said.
His father had nodded for a few seconds, then went away without a word.
A few evenings later, perhaps out of respect for this old man who resembled his father, Daniel had asked Natan how he was doing. Natan had looked at Daniel the same way Daniel must have looked at his father a few evenings earlier.
“I get by,” Natan said. And that had been the end of the conversation.
DANIEL HAD IN FACT sometimes felt like following his brother to the city to see what it was like. A couple of times he had even been on the point of telling him, or stopping him when he saw him ride away on his chestnut. But every time he was about to open his mouth and get the words out, it was as if there was some kind of barrier stopping them, and he stood there watching the figure of his brother riding off along the road.
One evening when Natan was at home, Daniel went and found him in the stable, where he was giving his chestnut a last brush-down.
“Listen,” Daniel said. “I need you to do me a favour.”
Natan stopped brushing for a moment and gave him a puzzled look. “What kind of favour?”
“You have to come with me and do something.”
“What?”
“You’ll see.”
Natan thought it over for a moment. “I’m tired,” he said.
“So am I,” Daniel said.
“All right,” Natan said. “What do I have to do?”
“Saddle your horse, we’re going to old Pancia’s.”
“My horse is tired, too.”
“It won’t kill him.”
By the time they got to old Pancia’s, it was after midnight and the almost full moon had spread a bluish-grey veil over the landscape.
“Wait here,” Daniel said. “And don’t make any noise.” He left the reins of his bay in his brother’s hands and vanished behind old Pancia’s house.
When he reappeared, he was leading another horse at the end of a rope.
“Who’s he?” Natan asked when he came level.
“She. It’s a mare.”
“Who’s she?” Natan said.
Daniel took the bay’s reins off his hands and, still holding the rope that held First Deal, got back in the saddle. “She’s mine.”
“Yours?”
“Yes, mine.”
“Since when?”
“A while.”
Daniel gave a little kick with his legs and set off at a walking pace, with the mare behind him. They rode in silence in the moonlight for several minutes. It had been a while since they had last spent time together, and they both rather missed the times when they used to go out to the lake at night and go fishing. They could spend hours on end without talking, and it had seemed to them then that life could always be like that. But now it had changed a lot, in a way that neither of them had fully expected.
“Did you buy her?” Natan asked after a while.
Daniel nodded.
“Where did you get the money?”
“I worked and saved it.”
For a moment, perhaps for the first time in his life, Natan felt something close to envy. “Did you have enough?”
“Old Pancia lent me a bit. But I didn’t pay much, because she was sick. The owner thought she was dying and was going to send her to the abattoir.”
“What happened?”
“We cured her.”
Natan looked at his brother for a moment, then looked back at the road. “So you got a good deal,” he said.
They fell silent again, and for a moment Natan felt like asking where they were going, but then he told himself it didn’t make much difference.
They came to a clearing, which Natan did not recognise in the dim light. They descended a fairly steep path lined with bushes, at the bottom of which they caught a glimpse of a big stone house. When they reached the open space in front of the house, Daniel dismounted and looked around, then held out the reins and rope to his brother. Natan gave him a puzzled look, his hands resting on his chestnut’s neck.
“Here,” Daniel said under his breath. “Take the horses and go down there on the left. You’ll see an enclosure. Wait for me there.”
Natan took the reins and the rope. “And you?” he asked.
“I’ll be there soon. Now go.”
Natan watched as his brother walked towards the house, looking around him like a thief as he went. After a few steps Daniel stopped and turned back to look at his brother.
“Don’t make a noise,” he said, as if talking to a little boy, then continued walking towards the house.
Natan sat there for a few seconds, wondering what the hell his brother was up to. He looked down in the direction Daniel had pointed: a path descended on the left, with meadows on either side, and in the moonlight the grass and the horses’ breath seemed like part of a painting.
At last, he made up his mind to move. He gave a tug on the ropes attached to Daniel’s horses and turned his own chestnut towards the path.
This was the German’s property. It was years since Natan had last been here, and in the meantime that weird foreigner who lived in the house had cleaned things up, planting grass and cutting down trees and bushes. Natan had the feeling of being in another country, as if someone had cut a piece off another part of the world and stuck it here without too much thought.
At the bottom of the path, on the right, Natan saw the enclosure Daniel had mentioned. He rode towards it, pulling his brother’s horses behind him, looked around to make sure nobody was there, and dismounted. Calmly, he tied the three animals to the enclosure, took a packet of tobacco from his pocket, sat down on the fence and started rolling a cigarette. The next day he would go back to the city, he thought. He had already spent two or three days in these hills and he was starting to feel too clean. With the smoke from his mouth playing with the breeze and the moonlight, he wondered if one of these days he would go further than the city and see what there was beyond the mountains. He wondered if it was true what some people said: that if you kept going without ever stopping you’d end up back where you started. The first person to tell him that had been an old man with a beard, sitting in an inn. Natan had thought that was stupid: it seemed to him that if you kept going and didn’t stop, you didn’t know where you’d end up.