––––––––
‘He’s getting worse. You sure there’s nothing?’
‘Monika, you know I scoured the whole bloody city. Everything’s gone; used up.’
‘Look at him, the poor love.’ She slid off the chair without its seat and leant against Peter’s bed, stroking his hair, studying his face. A face she knew so well. She thought back the nine years to the day in the forest, her sister swimming naked. It’d been the first time she’d spoken to them without the presence of adults. It wasn’t the best of starts but since then the three of them had grown up together, protected each other and laughed together. She ran her finger down his left jawbone, across the stubble, and his lips, dried and cracked. How white and aged his skin, she thought, how brittle his hair. And how she missed his perfect face. The bullet had only grazed him, as a passer-by had said, almost convincingly, but the left side of his face was a terrible mess, the cheek pulverised, fissures of flesh, the ridges of congealed blood. Graze seemed too inadequate a word. And now an infection had set in.
Most of the time he slept, free of the pain that tormented his waking hours. Occasionally he experienced a brief period of conscious calm, free from pain, during which moments he could speak and eat. Monika would break bread into small pieces and feed it to him with sips of water. When she had to leave, she made sure she left food and water on his bedside table – the upturned crate beneath which hid the revolver left behind by Oskar.
She looked up and Martin was still there. He’d been staring down at her all the while. At moments like this she was grateful for his presence and his words of reassurance. Words, she knew, that came only with difficulty but were there, nonetheless. She felt grateful too that the face she missed so much was still so visible in another. She thought of the previous evening, when Martin, for the first time, lay next to his brother and Peter turned to face him. The vision of the two silent brothers, lying on the backs, looking at each other, their noses almost touching, jolted her heart. Until the grazing bullet had done its work, a mirror held upright between them would have had the same effect, one brother gazing at the other and seeing himself. But not now.
At other times, perhaps most of the time, she found herself resenting Martin, resenting his perfect features while Peter’s face remained obscured by his mangled wound. Had Martin shown any disquiet while the other half of his soul languished in pain? Had the burden of his brother’s injury slowed him down or softened him? No, thought Monika, none of these things had happened. Martin was still Martin, only more so. The identical twins – match for match in beauty, but God had seen to it that the kind one, the one with the heart should suffer, while his feckless brother revelled in his strength and his being. Even God had got them mixed up.
‘I’ll go.’
‘No, you don’t have to.’ She knew really that he wanted to go; there was only so much he could take of his brother’s presence and her maudlin anxiety.
‘He’ll be OK.’
She laughed her tearful laugh, and wondered what made him say something so obviously false, so inappropriately bland. Peter was not going to be OK. The infection was spreading, doing its vicious work on his system, and he had neither the strength nor the medication to fight it. Peter was going to be anything but OK.