Free The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien Page A

were not so credulous and there were even whispers here at home of your having gone too far, of maybe your surpassing yourself, because for you, enough was never enough. There was sullenness up in our fortress. You in your shirt sleeves, pacing, shouting, sensing treachery on every side and mouthing your rationale, like all the cast of crazed monsters that have come before you in history. Then other times you sat like a wronged child, silent, biting your nails, biting, biting, down to the quick. I was the one entrusted with talking to you. Why wouldn’t I? After all, between us there was that oath, we were brothers, best friends in our youth and university days, a little competitive in our reverence for William Shakespeare. We loved Goethe and Musil, but Shakespeare was God. You had been christened Young Törless because of the two terribly contrasting aspects of your character, the sane, the reasonable and the other so dark, so vengeful. In summertime we took vacations together, lay on riverbanks, meadows full of flowers, and veins of snow beautifully ridged the mountain caps, while down below we breathed the scent of newborn flowers. In winter, we plunged into ice-green rivers that had flowed from the gorges and lay on our backs braving it, then other times, cycling through snug little towns and to the amazement of people, spouting Shakespeare. We loved our country and vowed to leave it a better place than when we had been born into it. But poetry came first. In the mountain, where we had gone to cram for our examinations, it happened. One night you called me outside, in the snow, and with your little pearl-handled penknife, you slit both our fingersand we swapped our blood. It almost froze as we tasted it, because the temperature was twenty-eight degrees below zero, up there. Blood brothers from that moment on, the keepers of each other’s soul and each other’s conscience. That was what you said. You said something else that I will never forget. You said we were like mountain climbers with a rope and that if one let go of the rope, the other fell into the abyss. You said that. So I began, as things unravelled up there in our lair, to talk to you, as in the old days, to talk of literature and why not, since we both loved it so. I said, “Do you remember Mr Kurtz?” and you said of course, because that time in the mountain, along with Goethe and Musil and Shakespeare, we read every word of Heart of Darkness . Who wouldn’t. We followed the pallet on which the dying Kurtz was carried and pictured the crazy woman, who came abreast of the steamer, with her wild incantations, her necklaces of glass and I said to you, “Do you remember Kurtz’s last words?” and you went silent and I spoke them to you, The horror! The horror! and I put it to you if Kurtz was not trying to expiate his own horror and ask for remission of some kind. You looked at me and I trembled because I knew that for you, at that moment, my death was as necessary and as meaningless as all the other deaths that had gone before. You had let go of the rope. As time went on my nausea worsened. That warehouse, with its seven thousand men of reproductive age, kept coming into my mind, along with the leitmotif of the spattered roses on the square. I began to believe that I could breathe better dead than alive. You see, we all became unhinged in our bastion. I would like to dwell for a moment on the manner of my death. It was not for fear of you. It is also said that I was drunk when I blew my brains out, but were we not often drunk in deference to the Kremlin mountaineer? Younever wrote the book you had hoped to write. What a book it would be. For only you knew the full story. A Book of the Night. Those unfortunates, ‘the scum down in the city’, in their apartments, no light, no heat, no water, no hope, no nothing. What a book that would have been, your beloved, Sarajevo, with its eleven thousand, five hundred and forty-one empty red chairs, including the