The Survivors Page 4

  “It’s no fun to pee your pants, right?”

  “No,” Nils says. “Not like it hasn’t happened before.”

  “True,” says Pierre.

  “In that sense, you’re the winner,” Nils says, grinning. “Most pants peed as a child.”

  “I was a joyful kid, I was always busy, and it was such a pain to go to the bathroom.”

  The three brothers laugh, the same laugh, it sounds like someone crumpling up a piece of newspaper.

  “One time in second grade I peed my pants when we were playing soccer during recess,” Pierre says. “Just a few drops, but enough to soak through my jeans. A dark spot the size of a coin, right on my fly. Björn noticed that pretty quick.”

  “I remember Björn,” Benjamin says. “He was always good at finding someone’s weak point.”

  “Right. He saw the spot and started pointing and shouting. Everyone was looking at me. But I told them a ball had hit me right there. Because it had just been raining, and the field was wet, and the ball too, so it was a perfectly reasonable explanation. Björn shut up about it and we kept playing. I was pretty happy, because that wasn’t such a bad lie. It was genius. Peed my pants and got away with it.”

  His brothers laugh.

  “But then more pee came out,” Pierre says. “The spot got bigger. And Björn was back on the case. When recess was over and we were all heading inside, he walked next to me, staring. He kept looking down at my pants. When we got to the classroom, he shouted, ‘Pig pile on Pierre!’ ”

  “Pig pile?” Benjamin asked.

  “Yeah. Didn’t you ever get piled on? It’s when someone shouts a name and everyone has to lie on top of them in one big pile.”

  “So then what happened?” Benjamin asked.

  “Everyone jumped on me. And I was at the very bottom and couldn’t move. Björn was right on top of me. He was lying there with his head next to mine, so we were face-to-face, and I remember he was grinning at me. Then he shoved his hand into my jeans. I tried to stop him, but I was completely stuck. He dug around in my wet underwear and pulled out his hand and smelled it. He screamed, ‘It’s piss! Pierre pissed himself !’ ”

  Benjamin shakes his head.

  “Weren’t there any teachers around?” he asks.

  “I don’t remember,” Pierre responds. “None who intervened, at least.”

  Pierre picks up a rock from the shore and throws it into the water.

  “They were lying there on top of me and everyone started screaming that I’d pissed myself.”

  Benjamin notices that red spots have appeared on Pierre’s neck. He’s familiar with those spots; when they were kids he always saw them when Pierre was scared or angry.

  “While I was lying there I could see out to the hallway,” Pierre says. “And I saw you standing there watching from the doorway.”

  Pierre turns to Nils, quietly nailing him with his gaze. “Nope,” Nils says. “Never happened.”

  “Yeah it did,” Pierre says. “You saw me lying there. And then you just walked away.”

  Nils quickly shakes his head; Benjamin recognizes his nervous, tense smile.

  “Say whatever you want,” Pierre says. “It’s crystal clear in my memory, and I’ll never forget it. I didn’t think too much about it back then. It wasn’t until later on that it blew my mind. You were so much older. It would have been so simple for you to come in and put a stop to what they were doing to me.”

  Pierre looks at Nils.

  “But you just walked away,” Pierre says.

  Nils looks at the urn in his arms. He rubs his thumb over the lid as if he is trying to get rid of a speck of dirt.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

  “Maybe you don’t remember?” Pierre asks. “That was often the case. You never saw anything, never heard anything. As soon as things went off the rails, you shouted that you lived in a madhouse, and then you closed yourself up in your room. But just because you didn’t see it didn’t mean it was any less of a madhouse on the other side of your door.”

  “Take off your sunglasses,” Nils says, his tone suddenly sharp. “Show some respect for Mom, quit your act.”

  “I’ll do whatever the fuck I want,” Pierre responds.

  Benjamin dials in his focus. He can feel the conversation starting to turn; he can see it in the way Nils’s grip on the urn hardens, how he doesn’t take his eyes off Pierre.

  “You’d better listen up, because I’m only going to say this once,” Nils says. “I don’t want to hear another word about how badly treated you were when we were kids. Not another word.”

  “You failed me,” Pierre says. Nils stares at Pierre.

  “I failed you?” he says. He laughs suddenly. “You think we should feel sorry for you? I can’t remember a single day when you and Benjamin didn’t harass me when we were kids. You made me feel worthless. And now we’re supposed to feel sorry for you?”

  Pierre gazes at the lake, shaking his head.

  “Let’s just do this thing, and you can cry afterward.”

  Nils takes a step toward Pierre, coming up right beside him. “Don’t you fucking trivialize it.”

  Pierre’s reaction is immediate; he mirrors Nils’s step forward. Benjamin approaches in a baffled attempt to get between them. Now all three of them are standing close, in a web of aggression that is completely foreign to them. Suddenly there is no rage in their eyes, only confusion. They exchange nervous glances. They have no idea what they’re doing.

  “Let’s calm down,” Benjamin says.

  “I’m not going to calm down,” says Nils. “You think I checked out when we were kids? Well, is it any wonder that I didn’t want to be there, when I got called ugly and disgusting every time I showed my face? And you would do that thing with your eyes.”

  “What thing?” Pierre asks. He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he crosses his eyes, imitating Nils with a grin.

  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.

  | 6 |

  Kings of the Birch

  Dinner on the patio, just before everyone scatters. Mom took out a cigarette and moved around empty bowls to find the lighter. Dad gazed anxiously at his empty plate, not quite satisfied. Mom had cut the rind off her ham steak, and now Dad was eyeing it. He kept sneaking looks at it, the strip of fat like a charred finger on her plate, sizing it up from the corner of his eye, deliberating.

  “That right there…,” he said at last, pointing at the leftover fat.

  Mom quickly stuck a fork in it and transferred it to Dad’s plate. “Thanks,” Dad muttered, attacking it. Mom watched him as he ate. Tiny signs of disgust on her face; Benjamin the only one who could see them. He knew all about Mom’s annoyance at Dad’s boundless appetite; she hated it when his eyes roamed other people’s plates, when he snuck into the kitchen after dinner to make a “reinforcement sandwich,” when he stood gazing listlessly into the fridge in the afternoon, on the hunt for something to stuff in his mouth. Sometimes Mom exploded, accusing him of being an animal. Usually Dad’s response was silence—he would quickly close the fridge door and walk off—but sometimes he reacted with an equal amount of rage: “Let me eat!”

  Dad put down his flatware and pounded his fist on the table. “Boys!” He wiped his mouth with a wad of paper towel. “I thought I would show you a place none of you has seen before. Who wants to come?”

  Benjamin and Pierre stood up right away. The cottage was the cottage and the cottage was the world. It was the small buildings surrounded on all sides by forest and water. Everything else was uncharted territory—the point of land like a glowing, pulsing green dot on an otherwise gray map of the world. If Dad said he would sho
w them a new place, it amounted to a promise to make the known world greater. They prepared as if for a difficult expedition. Dad put on his tall boots, which came up to his knees, and ordered Benjamin and Pierre to put on their caps as gnat protection.

  “Are you coming, Nils?” Dad asked.

  “No,” he replied.

  “It’s a secret place,” Dad said. “A place where children can become rich.”

  “No,” said Nils, reaching for his milk glass, drinking what was left in the bottom. “I don’t feel like it.”

  They walked down the slope, across the meadow. Dad reached down and let the tall grass slip through his fingers; he picked a piece of straw and stuck it between his teeth. He pressed on confidently. Benjamin and Pierre followed, swept along in his wake, sometimes glancing past Dad’s back to see where they were going. They walked in among the trees. All of a sudden it was dark.

  “Are you still afraid of the forest, Benjamin?” Dad asked.

  “No, not really,” Benjamin replied.

  “During our first summer here you always started crying when we walked in the forest,” Dad said. “I don’t know why—you wouldn’t tell us.”

  “No,” Benjamin said. He couldn’t put it into words, but the unsettled feeling the forest gave him had been there for a long time, especially after a rain, when the trees were heavy and the bogs were spongy. It was a fear of getting stuck there, being sucked in and vanishing.

  “There’s one thing I know about forests,” Dad said. “And that’s that everyone has a forest that is theirs alone. They know it inside and out and it makes them safe. And having your own forest is the best thing there is. All you have to do is hike around enough here, and soon you’ll know every rock, every tricky trail, every fallen birch. And then the forest will be yours, it will belong to you.”

  Benjamin gazed into the dark abyss. It didn’t feel like his. “Come on, let’s get moving,” Dad said. “We’re almost there.”

  They passed the dam that controlled the flow between lake and river—neither Benjamin nor Pierre had been so far from the house before. From here on, everything was new and unexplored. They passed a swamp with large stones rising from the peat, walked through the spruce forest, and suddenly a clearing appeared. Dad bent back a spruce bough and allowed them to walk on ahead.

  “Welcome to my secret place!”

  A dense group of young birches rose in front of them, forming their own little forest. Thin, fragile, close together, like rust-bitten lampposts, and the lake glittered between their trunks.

  “What do you think?” Dad asked.

  “Pretty!” Benjamin said. He didn’t want to show his disappointment. They were only trees.

  “How many are there?” Pierre asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dad replied. “Several hundred.”

  “That’s so many,” Pierre said.

  “Just think, that this happened to us,” Dad said, “that these trees are right here. They’re very rare. There are plenty of birches in Sweden—warty birch, pyramid birch, weeping birch, all kinds. But these, boys, are silver birch.” He laid a hand on one trunk and gazed up. “The finest birches of all. Nothing on earth can beat the scent of silver birch in the sauna.”

  Benjamin walked up and touched one of the trees. He grabbed a twig and tried to break it loose from the tree, but it didn’t want to let go.

  “I’ll show you how to do it,” Dad said. “Never pull on the twig, just snap it. And snap it close to the base, because you need something to hold on to so you don’t get too close to the hot stones when you throw on the water.”

  Benjamin watched as his dad harvested twig after twig and gathered up his bouquet of birch in his left hand. It looked so simple. “Don’t just stand there,” Dad said to the boys with a smile. “Help me.”

  They stood side by side, in lighthearted silence. For a brief moment Dad gazed into the forest and muttered “Cuckoo” after a bird called, but otherwise they were quiet, absorbed in their task.

  “Do you know why they’re called silver birch?” Dad asked.

  “No.”

  “It’s a strange name, isn’t it? There’s nothing about them that’s silver. The leaves are green and the trunks are gray. But they say something happens to them at night.”

  He crouched down and gazed up at the treetops. “When the full moon shines down on them, they change color. If you look closely, you’ll see that the leaves are made of silver.”

  “Is that true?” Pierre asked.

  “Yes.”

  Pierre stared wide-eyed at Dad.

  “Stop,” Benjamin said and turned to his brother. “Of course it isn’t true.”

  Dad laughed and ruffled Pierre’s hair. “But it’s a pretty nice story, isn’t it?”

  They snapped and gathered as the sun fell behind the trunks. Pierre took off his cap, waving gnats away, and scratched his whole head violently. Dad was finished first.

  “Something like that,” he said, taking in his birch whisk with satisfaction. “I need ten whisks that I’ll hang to dry on the porch to the sauna. For if we ever come here in the winter, when there are no leaves on the trees. I’ll give you five kronor for each whisk you make.”

  Benjamin and Pierre exchanged a determined high five, already intent on their assignment, ready to work for the money.

  “I’m going to head back and have a drink with Mom,” Dad said. “Come back as soon as you’ve got something to show me.”

  And he vanished back toward the house.

  Benjamin began to snap twigs and gather up the first whisk. He tried to calculate how much money they actually stood to earn. Ten whisks would be fifty kronor, divided by two. And then he converted the money to gum, fifty öre per piece, which would give him fifty pieces of gum, and if he chewed one piece a day it would last the whole summer. He had learned to use his gum sparingly. One night he’d stuck his used gum on the nightstand when he went to bed, and when he woke up he had the sudden urge to stick it in his mouth again. He found that it had regained its flavor, that it was like a fresh piece, more or less. It was as if he had gamed the system. This discovery changed everything—he began to reuse his gum, and one piece suddenly lasted several days. But then he got careless and left chewed pieces where Mom could find them, and she forbade all such activity.

  He was finished with his first whisk and looked down at Pierre, who stood next to him empty-handed, his lower lip trembling.

  “I can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t snap the twigs.”

  “It’s no big deal. I’ll pick yours too.”

  “But…,” Pierre said. “Will I still get the money?”

  “Sure. We’ll share.”

  Benjamin picked another ten twigs and handed them to Pierre. “Let’s run back and show Dad.”

  They ran through the twilight with the birch whisks in hand, dodging between the spruce trees and past the dam and out to the meadow below the house, and there, at the foot of the stone steps, they could see Mom and Dad at the table, like a little glowing island of candles in the dim evening light. Another bottle of wine on the table. Dad had brought out a sausage. They placed the whisks in Dad’s lap.

  “Bravo!” Dad said.

  “What a thing,” said Mom.

  Dad inspected the whisks carefully, as if he were doing quality control. He had placed a stack of five-kronor coins on the table, and a shiver went through Benjamin as he noticed the shiny pile. Dad took two coins and ceremoniously handed one to each boy.

  “Are you going to be birch harvesters when you grow up?” Mom asked.

  “Maybe,” Pierre replied.

  “Maybe,” Mom repeated with a smile.

  Mom reached out to the boys. “My darlings,” she said, and they hugged. “You’re so sweet, doing things together.” Her chilly cheek against Benjamin’s hot one. She smelled like m
osquito repellant and cigarettes. She pressed the boys’ heads to her breast and ran her fingers through their hair, and when she let go they were dazed, as if they’d just woken up; they stood there, at a loss, and looked at Mom’s smile.

  “The children’s first summer job,” Dad said, and suddenly his eyes filled with tears. The flames of the candles flashed in his eyes. “It’s beautiful,” he mumbled, searching his pocket for his handkerchief. Mom gave him her hand.

  “Off with you, boys,” Dad cried, and the brothers dashed away. “Go get more,” he called after them, but by then the boys were already halfway across the meadow, running on their nimble, nimble legs in the summer night. And it went quickly now—Benjamin didn’t even have to look after he snapped the twigs, just handed them over blindly and there stood Pierre to gather them up, and when they had two more whisks they ran back the same way they’d come, their sights trained on the little vessel of light in the yard. Dad called to them from a distance: “They’ve done it again!” The boys ran faster, the drumming of their feet against the dirt path to the garden. “The boys have done it again!”

  Dad took the whisks and inspected them, then looked up at the children. “You’re kings of the birch.”

  And they ran back out again. Darkness was falling swiftly, the path through the forest was harder to see, twigs melting into the dim light struck their faces. When they arrived, the lake beyond the birches was a pale gray streak.

  “Want to skip rocks?” Pierre asked.

  They walked through the silver birches, down to the lake, grabbing each tree they passed to make them rattle together. They searched the shore for suitable rocks. Pierre tossed one and there was a commotion where it landed, fish just below the surface quickly revealing themselves before vanishing into the depths.

  “Hello!” Pierre called across the lake, and the echo bounced off the tall trees on the other side and came back.

  “Hello there!” Benjamin and Pierre called, giggling.

  “Kings of the birch!” Pierre cried at the top of his lungs, and the forest confirmed it, calling back that what he’d said was true.