Читать книгу The Brother - Rein Raud - Страница 12

Father.

“And afterward,” Brother said, “for as long as I can remember, he didn’t write anything anymore. But he talked about the poems he’d left behind, talked about them a lot. He hoped that they’d be left to you. Maybe you’ll find them some day. Maybe you’ll understand.”

Mother.

“She wasn’t able to forgive him,” Laila said. “She probably didn’t even try. Everything had to disappear—everything. Papers went into the fireplace, clothes to the dump, she even smashed his big coffee mug on the kitchen floor. And the fireplace was lit for several days in a row, the flames dancing in angry, all-forgetting joy. That, I remember.”

Father.

“That’s true. He often said he would die in a fire, just unaware that he’d done so already. Then he tried to paint instead of writing, but he himself realized it was pointless. In reality, he wasn’t good at anything; maybe not even at writing. Maybe he never even existed.”

Mother.

“We loved the Villa, probably even more than each other. But while my love was mixed with awe—every door there opened up into a netherworld, from which I myself, in a mysterious and actually inexplicable way, had come—then Mother’s love was split almost cleanly in half with rage. When we didn’t have the servants anymore, she would still polish the floors just as frequently, still plaster every crack in the ceiling on her own right away, and would dust every last porcelain figurine in each and every room. Over and over. And she cooked a three-course lunch every day, an hour later on Sundays. It was a war.”

Father.

“We couldn’t settle down anywhere. He wasn’t the one sucking life-juices from the earth, but rather the earth from him.”

Mother.

“Everything had to stay the way it was before. That’s what killed her in the end.”