The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah

Author:Nathacha Appanah
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-023-9
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2010-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

I still wonder why he followed me. When I let him go there were red marks around his mouth where my hands had muzzled him. I begged his forgiveness once more, I told him I had not wanted the policemen to see him, I implored his forgiveness again and again but to no avail. There was no going back, no way I could undo what I had done.

The words collided with one another in my throat, came tumbling out of my mouth in a chaotic fashion, just as in a dream, when one is desperately trying to speak. I longed for him to understand my mother tongue so that what I was saying might flow more freely, so that I might use just the right word, express my precise feelings to him. Then I fell silent as he stared at me with dry, unmoving eyes, his face pale, his mouth streaked about with red and I was almost expecting him to hit me, already bracing my shoulders and fists to ward off the blows. David turned his head away and stared at the prison for a long time. Silent tears coursed down his cheeks in such a brutal manner that I was afraid this would never stop. For the first time since I had known him he was as unmoving as I myself had the habit of being and I think it was distress that made our bodies so rigid.

I did not know what to do, what to say, everything was colliding within me, my feelings and thoughts were in an unparalleled state of frenzy. And I was thinking about my brothers, about our stream and about Mapou, not about their deaths, for once, no, I was simply thinking about them, about their affectionate presence—I know that the man I have become owes them a great deal, for Anil and Vinod loved me in the simplest and most devoted manner possible, never letting our perpetual poverty embitter and warp our feelings. This takes a great deal of good nature and strength. I thought about the clouds of steam above the rippling green fields, about that syrupy aroma that arose from the cut canes at harvest time, when the pollen from the flowers hovered in the air. And I thought about my life since then, my mother, her courage and her outstretched hands facing my father and him, him, him, always him, smashing, breaking, preventing the making of anything at all. And David and the school and the prison and the forest and those grown-ups being dragged across the asphalt that ripped their skin and that young man throwing himself against the lacerating barbed wire and I, so sad and so feeble, hurling myself at David and pinning him down, with a strength drawn from who knows where, gagging him by putting my fist between his teeth and enduring being bitten without flinching. And our new life at Beau-Bassin that appeared easier but was not, for it was enveloped in a

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