Twelve Nights by Urs Faes

Author:Urs Faes [Faes, Urs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473573949
Publisher: Random House

Minna had loved this verse, and often used to sing it to herself.

He had thought he could hear a humming, wings beating, a whimper drifting up from the valley, across the treetops, into this frosty stillness which became entangled in his clothes, penetrating his skin; freezing what was inside him, as though even his heart were turning to ice.

His life had been frozen in time that day, something he had feared even back then: whatever was still to come, it would be an After, a life with the image of his family standing there, as though welded together, and above the image the words, running like a never-ending reel: … it’s better this way, Sebastian will take on the farm.

A shiver of cold had driven him onwards, uphill, into the snow, into the wind; he fled as though he were being pursued by dark hordes, nocturnal figures and demons, led by Perchta, hunting him over the peaks of the Grafenberg, the Schnaitberg and down the ravine into the Nordrach valley, to the bridge, to the Jewish cemetery, where he fell to his knees and sank into the snow.

He walked slowly now, on this late afternoon decades later, still on the move in the hope of finding answers to so many questions. Knowing that his brother was on the farm: grown tired, embittered perhaps, an irascible old man who looked out only on the dead, their father, their mother, Minna – a dark host that moved up the valley during the Twelve Nights.

He had paused by the crucifix back then too. By the old paddocks, their wood faded like the boards of the shed and stables, and he stood before them, bewildered, uncomprehending, disbelieving: the farm was going to his brother, not him. He had wanted to stay there, on that spot by the stream between the hill and the hunter’s lookout, with a view of the black pines and the scattering of birches; he had wanted to live there with Minna. What would she say when she came, after New Year’s? Or did she already know? Was she initiated into the plan, part of the conspiracy?

His brother, who had said he wanted to become a hat maker, who had even begun an apprenticeship with the straw-hat makers in Zell, the brother who preferred singing in the choir to working in the fields, amid the grinding of plough and harrow, who knew nothing about tilling and felling, about slaughters and orchards. His brother would be the one on the farm, not him, the farm which he had been promised, as the elder son, he who had learned the ropes and was ready; the farmer, the rightful heir?

It was in this paddock that his plan for revenge had taken shape: the horse would be his retribution for the betrayal.

For a moment, the image of the other man who had been struck by misfortune resurfaced, the man who had lost the woman he loved to the rich farmer. He could picture Lene and Hans so vividly before him.

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