The Survivors Page 5

  A light fog had formed, so they could no longer see to the other side. Pierre kicked at the rocks, slapped a mosquito on his arm.

  “Are you okay?” Benjamin asked.

  “Yeah,” Pierre said, looking at him curiously.

  Benjamin didn’t know what to say, didn’t even know what he was trying to say with his question.

  “Want to keep gathering?” Benjamin said.

  “Yeah. Can you pick for me again?”

  “Of course.”

  And soon they came running back across the meadow, waving the whisks over their heads. Dad was alone at the table.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “She’s just peeing,” Dad told him, and Benjamin’s eyes searched the shadows behind the lilac bush, Mom’s toilet when she didn’t feel like going inside, and there she crouched, her pants around her ankles, gazing at the lake.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got this time,” Dad said, and the boys handed over their whisks. “They’re very nice,” he said, inspecting them closely. “Tomorrow I’ll teach you how to tie a whisk, because it’s important—it has to be knotted the right way, if it’s going to hang outside and survive the autumn winds.”

  “So how’s it going?” Mom asked as she emerged from the dim foliage.

  “The children have produced two more whisks,” said Dad.

  “I see,” Mom said as she sat down. She reached for the bottle of wine and refilled her glass. She looked at the whisks in Dad’s lap, then picked one up and weighed it in her hand.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  Her voice changed; her tone grew sharp.

  “The whisks are getting smaller and smaller. Look at this.” She held one up toward the boys. “It’s half the size of the first ones you brought.”

  “It is?” Benjamin asked.

  “Don’t even try,” Mom snapped. “You know exactly what you’re doing, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean?” Benjamin asked.

  “You just want the money,” she said. “You want to cheat.”

  “Please,” Dad said in English, their code language when he wanted to speak privately to Mom. “Calm down.”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down,” said Mom. “This is damn horrible!”

  She looked at the children.

  “You want money?” She picked up the stack of five-kronor coins, snatched Pierre’s hand, and slapped them into his palm.

  “Fine. Here. Take it all.”

  She stood up, grabbing her cigarettes and lighter. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Honey!” Dad cried after her as she vanished into the house. “Come back, please!”

  Pierre rushed to put the money back on the table. Dad remained in his chair, his eyes riveted to the tabletop. The whisk lay on the ground at the brothers’ feet.

  “We didn’t mean to make it smaller,” Benjamin said.

  “I know,” said Dad.

  He stood up and blew out candle after candle, and as darkness fell over the table he moved to stand facing the lake, feet planted wide. Benjamin and Pierre stayed put, motionless.

  “I know how you can cheer Mom up again.”

  Dad turned to the children, knelt beside them, whispering now: “You can pick flowers for her.”

  Pierre and Benjamin didn’t respond.

  “What if you put a bouquet outside the bedroom door? She would like that a lot.”

  “But it’s pretty dark out now,” said Benjamin.

  “It doesn’t have to be a large bouquet. Just a small one, for Mom. Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” Benjamin mumbled.

  “Pick buttercups. Mom loves them. Those are the little yellow ones, you know?”

  Benjamin and Pierre stood still, watching as Dad used a fork to scrape food from plate to plate, then stacked the dishes and glasses to carry them inside. He looked up at the children, surprised to find them still standing there.

  “Go on, my sweets,” he whispered.

  Benjamin and Pierre walked down to the meadow. There were buttercups everywhere, glowing like dull lanterns in the dusk. There was a chill in the summer night, and the grass was damp. Benjamin crouched down and picked the buttercups, not thinking of Pierre, and after a while he realized that Pierre was on his knees in the middle of the meadow, three buttercups in his hand, crying without making a sound. Benjamin embraced him, pressing Pierre’s face to his chest, feeling his little brother’s body shake as he held him.

  “Go on inside and go to bed,” Benjamin whispered. “I can finish picking these.”

  “No,” Pierre said. “Mom wants flowers from both of us.”

  “I’ll pick them for the two of us and we’ll say they’re from us both.”

  Pierre ran up the slope in the darkness and Benjamin leaned forward, down to the wet grass so he could see in the dark, close to the ground and the soil and the insects, feeling his breath against the surface. He looked up at the cottage and saw Pierre disappear inside, saw the lights burning in there. The two windows that faced the lake reminded him of eyes, as if the house were watching him as he sat there. Then he looked up at the enormous fir trees and imagined how he would appear from up there, from the point of view of the treetops. The cottage, viewed from above, the old roof, the stones over the root cellar, the currant bushes arranged more symmetrically than they seemed from the ground, the grass like an unfurled carpet leading to the water, and a little dark spot in the meadow, Benjamin himself, doing something inexplicable down there. And beyond that, beyond the pond and the thousands of firs, the enormous field of gray unknown. And Benjamin walked away, letting the buttercups lead the way, stooping toward the edge of the meadow and being sucked into the forest, his eyes on the ground. He picked flowers and didn’t think about where they were leading him, and suddenly he was once again at the foot of the massive gathering of young birches on the point. The full moon shone behind their trunks and a breeze came through the darkness, the trees rustled. Benjamin took a step back and when the stand of trees was ignited he had to shield his eyes so he wouldn’t be blinded. It was as if a rain of embers were descending over the dark point, as if a wild silver fire were spreading uncontrolled through the trees.

  | 7 |

  6:00 P.M.

  Benjamin observes Nils’s bare back in the sauna. The collection of moles is still there, like a scattershot of brown dots that landed between his shoulder blades. Nils’s constant anxiety about them as a child, always rubbing them with creams and sunscreen. And Mom, frequently admonishing him not to scratch. When Nils was reading on the beach, or lying on his belly to sun himself, Pierre and Benjamin would sneak up from behind and scratch him hard on the back, and Nils would fly into a rage, slugging the air around him in wild fury.

  This is the first time Benjamin has seen his brothers naked since they were kids. Pierre’s genitals are shaved perfectly smooth. There’s not a strand of hair in sight. Benjamin has seen it in porn, but in real life the hairlessness really stands out. He looks down at his own penis, a dead thing, a brown stump of flesh that’s sleeping in the hair that surrounds it. But Pierre’s penis lies there pulsing on the sauna bench, like a being of its own, a sticky little consciousness. Perhaps Pierre notices that Benjamin is staring, because after some time in the sauna he pulls his towel around his waist.

  “I didn’t know you had so many tattoos,” Benjamin says to Pierre. “I haven’t seen some of those.”

  “No? I’ve been thinking about having some of them removed.”

  “Which ones?”

  “This one, for instance.”

  He points at a cartoon fist with the words Save the people of Borneo.

  “What’s happened to the people of Borneo?” Benjamin asks.

  “Nothing,” Pierre says. “That’s why I thought it was funny.”

  Benjamin laughs. Nils shakes
his head with a smile, gazing down at his own feet on the lower bench.

  “Once when I was drunk I asked a tattoo artist to do an arrow pointing at my dick and write, It’s not gonna suck itself.”

  All the brothers laugh in tandem, three gentle chuckles that settle into each other. Nils glances at the thermometer on the wall and mutters, “A hundred and ninety-four degrees.”

  “I need a break,” Benjamin says, and he goes outside. He stands on the sauna porch. Hanging on one wall is a line of six dried birch whisks. Benjamin leans against the flaking wooden wall and gazes up at the tidy line. He reaches for the sixth whisk, the one that’s a little smaller than the others, and runs his palm gently across the sharp dried leaves.

  Nils comes out of the sauna. “Come on, time for a dip!” he says, running down off the small porch, hopping a bit as he steps on something sharp, stopping at the edge of the water, and as he hesitates he looks as he did as a child, on those summer days when Dad shouted at him from up here, getting more and more upset, yelling at him to jump in, that the water was fine, what was he waiting for, and Dad’s voice got shriller and shriller, soon wild with frustration that the boy couldn’t just jump in, until at last Nils, furious, walked off without taking a swim. Pierre flings open the door of the sauna and staggers out of the heat, down to the shore. He wades into the water, his arms extended, hissing “Shit” as he steps funny on a rock and almost falls over. And then he dives in and swims off. It looks exquisite: slow strokes straight into the lake. Benjamin goes down to the beach and stands beside Nils. The water is low; they must have opened the dam recently. Among the damp rocks he can see a little perch lying on its side in the wet gravel; it must have been left behind when the water level fell. He bends down and picks the fish up by one fin.

  “Look,” he says.

  He gently places the fish in the water and watches it slowly rotate and end up upside down. It bobs there, with its white belly just at the surface. He gives the fish a little nudge with one finger, trying to straighten it out, but the fish lies on its side for a moment. He watches its gills move, it’s not dead, but it doesn’t have the strength to right itself and flips upside down again. It was part of him even as a child, his fear of fish. He liked fishing but hated getting a bite. It was something about that unpredictable flopping when a fish took the lure.

  The realization that there was a living creature on the other end of the line, something with a consciousness. And when the fish showed itself at the surface, flailing until the water frothed, fighting for its life, Benjamin felt something like an existential disgust. Dad would help kill and clean the fish. Always the same horror when Dad placed the fish upright on the wooden bench and drove a knife through its neck. “Those are just reflexes, kids,” he said as it jerked in his grip, and it just kept going, Dad had to press harder with the knife, deeper, as he repeated for the children: “He can’t feel anything. He’s already dead.” On occasion, the fish would twitch for so long that even Dad was alarmed, his eyes darted, he didn’t know what to do.

  The abrupt shifts from barbarism to finesse as he worked with the fish. How he so brutally tore out the innards and threw them into the lake, and how his hands then worked so precisely, with solemn silence from the children, to pick out the spleen, which could poison the meat of the fish if it burst.

  Benjamin crouches in the shallow water, poking at the fish again.

  And once more.

  “Come on, little fish,” he whispers. “I’ll fight for you.”

  Now it’s upright, sensitive to the current of the water, but it can manage, it holds still for a little while. Orienting itself in the lake. And then, suddenly, it swims off and is gone.

  He looks at his brother.

  “Well,” Benjamin says. “Just have to do it.”

  “I suppose,” Nils says.

  And they swim out on their sides, like old men, a few splashes of their feet and they get up, stand beside each other, all three together. The water’s warm enough that they can stay put, linger for a moment, without any pain.

  “Should we do another round in the sauna?” Nils asks.

  “Definitely,” Pierre says. “Just need to empty my bowels in the lake first.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Nils mutters, wading back to land.

  Pierre’s laugh echoes across the lake. “Come on, I was just kidding!”

  They cram into the sauna again, gazing out through the little windowpane that faces the water.

  “Didn’t we bury that time capsule somewhere around here?” Pierre asks.

  Benjamin stands up and looks out. “Yeah. Right by that tree, I think.”

  He remembers the old metal bread box their dad gave them, and how Benjamin and Pierre filled it with artifacts and buried it deep in the ground. It was a scientific project that involved preserving important information for posterity, to show how people lived in the twentieth century.

  “We need to find it,” Pierre says.

  “I think that might be hard,” Benjamin replies.

  “Why? All we have to do is dig, right?”

  “But we don’t know exactly where we buried it.”

  “Stop,” Pierre says. “I’m going to find it!”

  He dashes out of the sauna and the brothers watch through the window as he reaches the little patch outside. He falls to his knees by the tree and frantically begins to dig in the ground with his hands. He brings up some soil and scoops it aside and tries again, but it immediately becomes clear that this won’t work; he’s digging but can hardly get past the first layer of soil. He kneels on the ground for a moment, at a loss. Then he gets up and dashes off, up to the barn.

  “What is he doing?” Nils says.

  “He’s sick,” Benjamin responds.

  Nils reaches for the bucket and tosses water on the rocks, and the unit hisses. Benjamin watches as beads of sweat form on his chest.

  “How do you feel, being here?” Nils asks.

  “I don’t know,” Benjamin replies. “It’s like part of me is telling me I’m home. A different part is shouting at me that I have to get out of here.”

  Nils chuckles. “Same.”

  “It was weird to see this place again,” Benjamin says. “I’ve been here so many times in my mind. Falling through the events, over and over. And now…”

  He looks out the window.

  “It was just strange,” Benjamin says.

  “Benjamin,” Nils says. “I’m so sorry, for everything.”

  They gaze at each other and quickly lower their eyes again. Nils tosses more water on the rocks, which swiftly shush them, ask them to be quiet.

  Pierre reappears outside the window, with clogs on his feet and a shovel in his hands. He peers at the sauna window and waves wildly above his head. He pushes the shovel into the ground, hard, causing his penis to hop and then fall back against his thigh. And he begins to dig. He’s sweaty and determined, grunting with each thrust of his foot against the shovel, amplifying them into loud groans.

  “He’ll never find it,” Benjamin mutters.

  The sound of the shovel against metal can be heard all the way into the sauna. Benjamin and Nils lean toward the window. Pierre throws himself to the ground and begins to dig with his hands. He lifts something from the hole and Benjamin recognizes it right away. It’s covered in soil, but in some spots the rusty metal gleams—it’s the bread box. Pierre stands up straight, his legs planted wide, holding the box above his head and shouting without words, like a barbarian who’s just discovered fire. Benjamin and Nils dash out of the sauna. Pierre places the box on the little table on the sauna porch and they gather around.

  “Are you ready?” Pierre asks. “Because we’re about to pay a visit to ourselves as kids.”

  He opens the box. At the top is an issue of the morning newspaper. NATO bombings in Sarajevo. Under that is a small envel
ope. Benjamin opens it and thinks it’s empty at first, but then he spots something in the bottom. He pours the contents onto the table—it looks like a bunch of small, plastic half-moons. Benjamin can’t tell what they are right away.

  But then: “Oh my God.”

  “What is it?” Nils asks.

  Benjamin bends down, poking at the yellowish little pile before him.

  “It’s our nails.”

  “What?” Nils says.

  “We clipped our nails,” he says. “Remember, Pierre?”

  Pierre nods as he sits down at the table and pokes cautiously at the tiny little-boy nails. “We did your left hand and my right hand. Ten fingernails, so the future would see who we were.”

  Benjamin tries to arrange the ten nails in proper order, with the two wider thumbnails in the middle and another four on either side. He places his own hand just below the clippings and sees the contours of himself as a boy.

  Pierre takes a ten-kronor bill from the box. “Look at this,” he says.

  “I stole that from Mom,” says Benjamin. “I remember.”

  Benjamin exchanges quick glances with his brothers. He sets the bill aside. At the bottom of the box is a bouquet of buttercups, exquisitely dried and well-preserved. The yellow petals gleam in the angled sun. Benjamin hands the bouquet to Pierre. He holds it gently, gazing at it. Then he looks away and covers his eyes with one hand.

  “Shall we make another attempt to give this bouquet to Mom?” Benjamin says.

  They dry off hastily, put their suits on over their damp skin. They follow each other across the meadow and to the water.

  Benjamin stands down by the lake with a bouquet of dried buttercups in his hand. His brothers stand beside him. Nils is holding the urn. It’s heavy, and he constantly adjusts his grip on it, an increasingly baffled expression on his face, as if the weight of Mom has taken him by surprise.

  | 8 |

  The Root Cellar

  “So fucking nasty,” Nils said as he walked past his brothers. “I can’t look at that.”

  “What are you doing?” Dad asked. He was sitting next to them and reading the paper.