Free The Brothers by Asko Sahlberg Page B

contemptuously when I recall all this. It is good we are leaving. Our departure is already within me, awaiting birth.
    I will not even bother to say goodbye to Father. I can see him sitting in the kitchen, swollen with inactivity and agreeably weary of everything. He would raise his warm, listless, indifferent gaze to me and say yes before even hearing me out. He would wag a fat finger at me and say something like, ‘Feel free to leave. Just don’t say one word about that animal.’

MAURI
    I had to wait outside at first. It was summer. The sickly-sweet scent of the lilacs floated in the shadows of the garden, and as the evening thickened into night, the birds of the dark began singing. One of the downstairs windows of the big house was open, letting out pale light and men’s voices into the yard. I could hear one man’s triumph and another’s disappointment. I promised to keep my mouth shut but I did not yet understand how profitable silence was. I was pleased when the maid was sent to bring me ale and sustenance. I thought it would always be my lot to be thankful for crumbs from others’ tables.
    Come the autumn, I was allowed into the porch. I sat on an uncomfortably rickety chair, the smell of foreign tobacco wafting towards me from the drawing room, late-night carriages clanking past in the street. I tried not to look at the woman staring down at me from a painting hung between two candlesticks on the wall. I thought how grand it must be, to live in a pile like this. I myself would have loved to be a man with the money and the daring to hang naked women, breasts pendulous as sacks of flour, on the walls of a handsome villa.
    Sometimes, the door leading into the drawing room was left ajar, and by craning my neck I could see them, sitting at a round table surrounded by grand furniture and busts twisted into strange positions. There were bottles and glasses on the table. The master of the house would always have his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up high on his muscular arms. The others, too, had loosened their clothing; only Erik squatted stiff and formal in his ill-fitting Sunday jacket and unstarched loose collar. He was so obviously a peasant, lost among townsmen. I believe he kept me with him for that very reason; he might have come from the country but he still had a manservant. I was sure he wouldn’t tell anyone that we were related.
    He behaved well and with restraint, eyeing his cards coolly and, upon winning, shrugging off the other men’s congratulations. He resembled a gravedigger, or a verger in his Sunday best, who is privately mulling over a bottle he has concealed in the chapel foundations, or the tribulations of his wife, languishing in confinement, but who behaves in front of the congregation as if filled with the Holy Spirit. He barely touched a drop of liquor, merely moistened his lips with it cautiously from time to time. When he finally got up from the table at an early hour of the morning, he was in the habit of bowing clumsily to the other players and taking leave of them in such an everyday manner that he might as well have been leaving a meeting of the village society.
    In winter, however, his demeanour and appearance changed. He had learnt to lose. His collar began to droop, his eyes goggled feverishly, he kept licking his lips in a tortured manner and twisting about in his chair. He no longer despised the liquor but drank it down like all the others. Often, after we had left the house, he did not want to seek out the cheap quarters where we had been in the habit of spending the night, or what was left of the night. Perhaps he felt that fleeing the town distanced him from his losses. So we sped through the moonlit landscape, ignoring the frost and the blizzard. I was chilled by the frost but a mysterious source of warmth had lit up inside me. Although I did not yet know about the future, although I had no inkling of it, I was close to bursting into a song as I held the reins in my numb