Copyright © 2008 by Rein Raud
Translation copyright © 2016 by Adam Cullen
Originally published in Estonia as Vend
First edition, 2016
All rights reserved
Images by Asko Künnap. Used with permission. www.kynnap.ee/asko.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-45-8
Adam Cullen’s translation is supported in part by an award from the Cultural Endowment of Estonia’s Traducta grant programme.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
Contents
The Brother
Acknowledgements
The day that had begun bright with sunshine darkened abruptly into black clouds in the afternoon, and the couple booms of thunder were followed by a downpour so heavy that not a single window was left open in the small town. Nothing and no one occupied the main square apart from a taxi, the driver of which was also already about to lose hope, when he saw approaching from the opposite side of the square a tall man dressed in a wide-brimmed hat, a drenched overcoat, and knee-high boots—and who was strolling toward him through the storm with an unflinching tranquility, as if he paid no heed to the dreadful weather.
He’ll get the car wet, the taxi-driver thought, but at least I won’t have been waiting here for nothing.
The man indeed stopped next to the taxi and opened the door.
“Are you free?” he asked.
“Yes, I am,” the taxi-driver replied.
“Then that makes two of us,” the man said, slammed the door shut, and strolled onward through the rain and into the howling darkness.
People differ. There are those who do harm to others, and those to whom harm is done; some of the latter are the kind it would seem fair to attack because they have enough strength for retaliation, and then there are others, who in their vileness outright provoke confrontation, as the harm done to them is nothing more than revenge that restores the great balance.
Laila was none of these, for although she attracted injustice like bees to heather, all who did her wrong were nevertheless secretly embarrassed. The lawyer, whom she had asked to handle the inheritance affairs after her mother’s death, had looked away as he placed paper after paper of complicated legal wording on the desk for Laila to sign, and the notary, who read the long and incoherent documentation aloud to her, occasionally felt a lump rise to his throat when he thought about what would become of that pale young woman following the successful execution of the transaction. Even the bailiff, who came to evict Laila from the Villa and record her assets, spoke more politely with her than with anyone else, and unprecedentedly, both the moving truck and the movers, who removed their hats when they greeted Laila, were provided at the company’s expense. Her current landlord was no different either—he frequently cursed himself for asking that kind of rent for the tiny attic-room with a ceiling that leaked a little in one corner (with the extra obligation of Laila doing his family’s laundry for free); and even the goateed antiquarian, at whose shop Laila had finally gotten a job, constantly caught himself thinking that he was paying her shamelessly little, which of course caused him to ruminate on human nature and shake his head, but resulted in nothing else. Or else he would eat an éclair with his afternoon coffee, which was, in reality, bad for his health.
Laila herself had grown accustomed to her bad luck, just as children who manage to comprehend the world will grow accustom to their own mortality, and in truth, she didn’t even particularly hope that anything might ever be different.
Until the knock at the door.
“I would have expected anything,” Brother said while unlacing his knee-high boots; the brother, of whose existence she hadn’t the slightest clue just a moment earlier, but whom—she now knew—she had awaited for so long.
“I would have expected anything, but not that,” said Brother. “When I arrived, the Villa’s front door was locked and no one came to open it when I rang the doorbell. I went around back to the garden to see if you were walking the paths or sitting in the gazebo, but my heart was already pounding with the fear of finding, perhaps, that the windows facing the yard had been boarded up and not a single soul occupied the house anymore, because I had come too late. Still, I couldn’t have even fathomed what I would actually see. There were young, handsome people gathered on the patio and music playing; no doubt everyone who had been expected was already accounted for. But you weren’t among them. A young woman with short, chestnut-brown hair smiled at me from across the balustrade and lifted her champagne glass in greeting, but a curly-haired young man was already peeking hostilely over her shoulder to see what business I had there. He knew where to direct me when I mentioned you, although I realized immediately that as far as he was concerned, I had ruined the evening. And right at that moment it started to rain, even though the sky had been cloudlessly blue just a moment before, so they all had to move indoors and I waved to them, but no one noticed.”
“What does that matter now,” Laila said. “What matters is that you found me.”
“That does matter,” Brother agreed.
“Tell me about yourself,” Laila said. “Tell me about Father and about everything that’s important but that I don’t know about.”
Everything that’s important. There was too much of it. He could have told Laila stories about their father and his artist-friends, and about how they could debate the night away on the subject of light and colors; or about the orphanage and the windowless trains that whizzed past outside. He could have told stories about fleeing and his nomadic years, or about the French Foreign Legion and the sand grinding between his teeth; or instead about the ships and the harbors—about the two weeks in Malacca, for example, which he had to survive without a single cent; or about how he had been a night watchman at a library in the Netherlands and read everything he came across by flashlight while lying on his belly on the floor between the massive shelves every night, and how he had committed as much as he could to memory. He could have told the story of his father’s very last message, in which he asked him to locate his sister and, if necessary, to help her in times of peril—yes, he could have told her that story while omitting the main point, of course, for it wasn’t the time yet.
He could have—indeed, all of that was important. Yet, he didn’t.
“Let’s talk about you, instead,” he said.
“I’ve never asked myself what someone else would do in my situation.