Before moving to Sitjaq’s rugged terrain, an eight-hour walk from Seiche, the Borya father, mother, and five sons live in a shack, where they eke out a living curing fish caught on the high seas. Everything in the shack is secured by something else; furniture remains standing thanks to the support of the walls and rocks. Aside from the parents’ room, big enough for a bed and a dresser, there are two bedrooms in the house, sectionvied up unequally between the brothers. Osip and Leander share their parents’ old mattress, laboriously stuffed into a frame far too small. Matvey and Golby sleep in a chest of drawers leaning against the living room partition. The top and bottom drawers are filled with wadding and once served as cradles; much time has passed yet the little ones have still not been relocated elsewhere, and now their legs and arms dangle and their heads extend beyond the sides of the drawers. Sevastian-Benedikt has the attic to himself and enters it through a trap door. Every night, he has to stand on a chair and hoist himself up; at the crack of dawn he drops to the kitchen floor and his heavy landing awakens everyone else.
There is no window in the garret. Heads have to be bowed to avoid bumping into its frame. Light filters between the beams. Even in winter, the wind that penetrates the walls is not enough to cool the attic since the stovepipe rises through the middle. Sometimes, when the house is empty, Osip climbs up into the attic and takes in every detail: its expanse to begin with, its smells, and his oldest brother’s treasures. One day, in a bold moment, he stretches out on the mattress. It buckles beneath him and he realizes the shape left by his weight won’t be the same as that left by Sevastian, so he jumps to his feet, beats the straw pallet, and smooths the blanket. Doing this makes the floor creak. At night, Osip hears his brother Sevastian-Benedikt turn over in his sleep; the floor doesn’t creak in quite the same way when he reads, dreams, or touches himself.
Below, the front door slams. Osip freezes. He’s not allowed in his brother’s room. From the far end of the kitchen come loud scraping noises. He turns, careful not to make the floorboards creak, and nudges open the trap door a crack. His mother has dragged the large basin over to the stove and is boiling water: steam rises from the kettle and the pots. A few years back, when he was six or seven, Osip would sit by his mother’s side whenever she decided to have a bath, keeping an eye on the babies. He said little and would stare at her glistening legs dangling outside the basin. The soft down on her calves and thighs formed captivating landscapes; he’d imagine himself an explorer bent on discovering the unfamiliar horizons there.
Through the opening, Osip contemplates his mother, her body deformed by the water. She removes a bar of soap from its packaging, wets it, and lathers it between her fingers. She scrubs herself, then sponges off and puts the soap away like a precious object. Osip has never before experienced a scent so refined. He imagines the fragrance wafting up in pink plumes from the washtub to the attic. He’s lying on his stomach, the crack through which he observes his mother bathing not quite as wide as his eye. With his face pressed to the crack, he begins to rock his pelvis imperceptibly against the floor, fingers wrapped around his penis, fist against his belly. His mother steps out of the basin; he catches sight of her plump buttocks and arms, nothing more. She grabs a towel, wraps it around herself, then rubs her body with the leftover oil she saves in a small flask after each of their meals. Her hands slide over her limbs and stroke the hair on her body, each trace a new world. Above all she mustn’t hear him, Osip prays the floor won’t creak. His mother’s nails leave marks on her pink skin, and Osip focuses on the distribution of his weight so his back-and-forth motion doesn’t give away his presence; now his mother’s palms pass along the long plane of her foot, the curve of her calf, run up her thigh and brush her groin, draw close to her sex, reach her hip, then find the slope of her leg again, down the back this time, stroking her knee, her ankle, her heel. A shudder: something warm trickles between Osip’s fingers. He’s taken unawares. This has never happened before. He’d like to take a closer look but doesn’t dare sit up, he’d make too much noise. In the kitchen, his mother hums as she braids her hair. He rolls onto his back. At the end of his glans is a thin filament that he pulls and pulls. The skinny, sticky cord keeps on coming. This time, his fear of discovery is tinged with newfound pride. His cheeks burn. If only his mother would return to brining her fish. She stays put. He decides to wind the filament around the handle of the trap door, then wipes his fingers on his trousers. He lies there for the longest time. Most likely he dozes off, marvelling at what he’s capable of, dreaming of girls in braids, too many to count and all identical to his mother. When he wakes up, the basin has been stored away, his mother has disappeared, and his sperm has dried.
He manages to get back down before Sevastian-Benedikt reappears. He drops into the kitchen and, as he does so, aims a few kicks at the pots to mask the sound of his landing. When it comes to hiding, no one is more gifted than he.