Читать книгу The Brother - Rein Raud - Страница 11

Father.

“I remember almost nothing about him,” Laila said. “Just that sometimes, when I was playing with my ball on the second floor despite being told not to—I might have been, say, two or three years old—and it rolled into his study, my heart would be pounding when I went in to fetch it and he didn’t even look in my direction, so engrossed in his work; but even so—one time, he lifted his head and smiled, said something, but I was so startled that it might as well have been in a foreign language. Then he shooed me away. The fights started soon after. They always closed the doors so I wouldn’t hear, and I didn’t. He didn’t leave his study door open anymore then, either. And so, I never did find out what on earth he was writing.”

Mother.

“Father never talked about Mother with bitterness,” Brother said, “because he saw himself as the guilty party. Although he did talk about her a lot. I knew about you the whole time, too; I knew I had a sister. Losing you really was the greatest punishment for Father; nothing could ease it, not even me. But Father always called her Mother, even though she herself hadn’t carried me, you know; so I’ve never had another Mother. I don’t want to see her picture. Let me have the picture that Father’s stories painted for me.”

Father.

“There were only a few random traces of him left at our place. His big desk wasn’t removed from the study because it was too heavy for us, and every once in a while when I took some old volume from the shelf in the Villa’s library, I would find thoughts jotted down in the margins in his handwriting. I read them without understanding anything, as if they were messages meant specifically for me; notices from the blank places in a photo album, just for me, not for anyone else.”

Mother.

“Father would have someone from time to time, and I wasn’t supposed to talk about Mother then. Some of them tried to find out from me what Mother had been like so they could be able to surprise him with only good things. They didn’t know I lacked my own memories of her. They thought that when I didn’t tell them, it was out of jealousy—that I wanted to keep it all to myself. They would’ve been right, but I didn’t have anything.”

Father.

“Red autumn leaves, leaving.”

Mother.

“The first snow, so delicate that it vanishes when it touches the ground.”