He keeps staring a fraction past me, as if incapable of looking at me directly. His voice sounds strange when he says, without moving his lips, ‘I suppose you’ve got a gun?’
‘I do. Or I did, at least. When I last saw it, it was in Mauri’s hands.’
He shuts his eyes and bites his lips together as if trying laboriously to compress a new thought. ‘What about Father’s old shotgun?’
‘It’s with the Farmhand. Ask him.’
He opens his vacant, bottomless eyes. ‘No point asking him.’
Suddenly I remember him as he once was. Once we were small boys and his eyes were not hard and hostile. His laughter, which in those days rang out often, was not distorted by mockery or contempt or suppressed rage. He was my brother then, nothing could come between us, I could trust him. He coaxed an enraged bull to abandon its attack on me. He shinned up a tree to fetch me when I did not dare to come down. It was a summer evening, mosquitoes circled above the slow, flowing, glittering surface of the river and we floated our fishing rods in the water and he said he wanted to be a fish and swim out to the sea and to foreign countries. I asked to go with him and he said I would need only to hang on to his fins. But his fins began to grow, sprouting ugly scales and pushing out spikes and forcing him into deeper waters, into a gloomy pond of kind I had no business to enter. And as if that were not enough, life threw horses and loves between us.
‘What do you want with a gun?’ I ask.
‘I thought of going to the forest.’
‘You can’t see well enough to hunt now.’
‘My prey is close.’ He lowers his gaze, sees an answer to a silent question on the floor, nods once then twice. ‘I’ll go to the river, then.’
He turns and leaves and I understand. I curse, I rush after him. He is already stepping outside, the door lets in a cold blast, I stuff my feet into my boots. I stumble on the threshold, skid on the steps, hurl myself down them and after him. He is slower than I, always has been, his feet heavy as if his body were weighed down by the merciless weight of the world’s sins, all collected together. I grip his shoulders and he turns, and now I see his grey eyes without seeing them, the furious glow of the rough weave of an eternal night. He swings his fist in a high arc at me and I cling to it with both hands and squash him with my full weight and he begins falling, back-first, in slow motion, a tree yielding reluctantly from its base, and lets out the broken, intensifying roar of a wounded animal, the like of which I would not have thought human lungs able to emit.
Nature toys with humans, pokes fun at us. It is a grim game in general, as when frost hits fields, or a river floods, or a thunderbolt strikes a man dead. At times one feels as if the earth were waging a war against men, along with the sky, the winds and of course the snow. A human being puts up a fight as best he can, but he might as well throw himself down and wait for the axe to fall.
Nature is having good sport as I rush out of my cabin and the moon charges forth from behind a cloud in order to light up the absurd misfortune of man. I was just sitting by myself, listening to my own taciturnity, so I am like someone newly woken. But I trot as fast as my stiff legs will carry me. The brothers are rolling around on the ground and Erik is shouting, he’s letting out a dull, almighty, unending roar. But no, the sound is not coming from Erik. It’s Henrik who’s shouting. Impossible, altogether contrary to the laws of nature, conclusive evidence of the imminent end of the world, the deluge, the Last Judgement. I reach them just as the Old Mistress and Anna appear on the steps. I try to get hold of either of them, of something, a hand, a neck, or a shoulder, but no grabbable limbs protrude from the ball they form, except four, or it looks like eight, legs that move so quickly that my old hands cannot catch them. They have become one unified creature and at the same time more than two men, and not just men, but two-and-two-thirds, or at least two-and-a-half, man-horses, with bared yellow teeth and furiously kicking hooves.
At that moment, a heavy figure throws itself down on top of them from my side and everything ceases. The human horse stops flailing and twitching and all you can hear is the laborious breathing of the brothers. The Old Mistress lies across them like some sort of eternal foremother, sacrificing herself for her offspring and conquering them with the sheer might of her motherhood. She is a stone statue, the first mother of the ferocious females of the past, who has plunged off her pedestal. She says calmly, as if looking up distractedly from her rocking chair, ‘Stop this din!’
I reach out my hand and help her onto her feet. She leans against my shoulder, but not by any means out of exhaustion. Erik, too, is soon on his feet, while Henrik pushes himself upright bad-temperedly, moving slowly like a bear that has just crawled out of its cave. Anna finds her way quickly to Erik’s side, but in the gleam of the blaspheming moon I notice that her eyes, oddly shiny and hot, are stuck on Henrik. This is not the first time I am troubled by nothing being quite what it seems.
‘Why didn’t you let me go?’ Henrik asks threateningly.
‘Because I’ve still got my wits about me,’ Erik answers. ‘And because it’s the wrong way to go.’
‘Who are you to decide? Should I take orders from a man who cannot even hold on to his house?’
‘I may not have held on to the house but I did hold on to you.’
I see it coming: Henrik presses his shoulders forwards and his fists start swinging by the sides of his thighs like weights fastened on plumb lines. I leap between them, facing Henrik, and say, ‘Why don’t you go now? You can see well enough to travel in the moonlight.’
He eyes me for a moment, stunned. Then his eyes flash and he raises his hand. I wait for the blow, motionless. I will not close my eyes, I will not. He yanks his fist behind his shoulder and his face, turned towards the moonlight, twists with immense rage. I see the blow before it is on its way and I realize this could be the end.
‘Stop it, Henrik!’ the Old Mistress snaps in a steely voice. ‘You will not hit your father!’
That is how it happens in the end. I have been waiting for this revelation for a long time, imagining a solemn affair, a little like an announcement in church or a declaration issued in the market square that people have gathered to hear in their Sunday best, pious expressions ready on their faces.
A confused, bubbling sound escapes from Anna’s lips. Erik looks at me with a frozen face. Henrik stands with one hand drawn behind his shoulder, but his head droops to the side as if he has been hit in the face or the muscles in his neck have given way.
‘No point pretending. You did know, or at least guessed,’ the Old Mistress says coldly. ‘Arvid wasn’t up to making babies, even before he got ill. And don’t judge me. I’ve got blood in my veins and, once it surges, I have a hunger that eating won’t cure.’
They have always had different ways of walking, Henrik and Erik. Henrik moves slowly and heavily but Erik is still boyishly agile, one moment here, the next gone. That is why I remain stupidly still as Henrik executes a twist in the air and launches into an incredible run. He gallops along the surface of the yard, trampled down hard, in the direction of the slope leading to the river. Erik dashes off. I am still pawing snow with my feet until I finally work up some speed and jog after them as best I can. The path thuds, the moon casts fleeting shadows, snowy spruces twist and turn anxiously beside me. Now Erik is catching up with Henrik, I lag further and further behind, I stumble, I nearly fall over, damn this old age, I see Henrik reaching the riverbank down below, and the foam of the black water, flowing between the icy banks, and then Henrik, suddenly up in the air, above the river, suspended for a moment in a void. Then he falls, breaking the swirling, muscular surface of the water. Erik makes it to the embankment and I see what is about to happen just before it happens and I try to shout, pathetically and with whining lungs, ‘Take your boots off!’