The house at number 22

It took him more than thirty minutes of driving in circles to find the old house. It pained him to admit that he had to pull over and check Google Maps. Even more painful was the fact that he had taken the right turns all along, but he had doubted himself because the surroundings looked nothing like what he remembered.

The sun had just boosted itself up in the sky when Costin parked the car in front of the wooden fence, underneath a blackberry tree that was so full of fruit it barely stood up on its own. His brother was smoking a cigarette by the side of the road.

Liviu nodded at his brother as he got out of the car, but he didn’t move closer. Despite the early hour, sweat was dripping off his sunburnt arms and wrinkled face. Standing side by side like that, the two looked nothing alike. No one would have guessed that Liviu was the youngest of the two. Costin pulled out a cigarette, desperate for his brother to break the silence. Liviu opened his mouth, but he just spat on the ground, drips of saliva mixing with the violet of crushed blackberries.

“What time do we have to be there?”, Costin finally muttered. The hot mid-July air was making it the silence all the more suffocating.

“The priest is waiting for us at half past. She’s in the room where we used to keep the wines. I already took the truck out, the women cleaned it yesterday. You don’t need to help, I can call George from three houses down the street, he’s home.”

“No, no, no need. I can help”, Costin jumped in without being sure what the help consisted of.“So, um, you’ve kept her in the cellar since Thursday?”

“In the cellar. Pfft”, Liviu spat again to exaggerate his disbelief. “Already all these people, they’re out to rob you when they hear you need to plan a funeral. What did you want me to do, pay for a hotel room? As if hotels in this shit town would be any better than my basement.”

Costin knew that his return home after all these years would not be easy. That people, especially his brother, would not be waiting for him with flowers, even leaving aside for a moment their mother’s death. But that didn’t make things any easier.

The two men threw their cigarettes on the ground and passed through the gates. Inside, three dogs, each tied to their own side of the fence, started barking frantically, jumping to greet them. On the porch, a cat with three kittens were laying in the shade. They all seemed well-fed, but ridden with fleas. Costin tried hard not to judge, not to allow his face to flinch with the smell of the chickens or the pigs or the goats or their poop.

The house and its yard, despite the heat and its run-down condition, was filled with life. Flies, bees and butterflies were buzzing around everywhere, and the chicken, geese and ducks were pecking away unbothered. Greenery, both weeds and crops, were taking up every available inch of the lot. On a different day, Costin would have felt nostalgic over a life lived in nature - with nature. Nostalgic for his childhood, when his day’s schedule was dictated by the whims of the sun and the songs of the roosters. But today, all these things were eating at him, leaving him breathless, weak, as if the chicken and the roosters were pecking at the flesh of his heart.

The cellar was filled with a putrid smell. Costin barely had any time to look at the stiff face of his mother, whom he hadn’t seen in almost a decade now. “You grab the bed from that side, and I’ll grab it from this. We just need to go out through the side door and the truck is in front”, Liviu urged him. Costin did as he was told, partly grateful for having something to do with himself.

Once in the truck, Liviu started the engine as two weeping women began walking behind it, making the sign of the cross every other step. Costin didn’t recognise them. They were so old their tears were gathering in the wrinkles of their cheeks. As per the custom, they had swapped their colourful headscarves for black ones. And so the truck started slowly dragging this sad congregation of people one kilometre down the road to the village’s church.

This was the part that Costin dreaded the most. As a child, he had gone to several funerals in the village. There were always so many people coming, always asking him whose child he was, or telling him how much he’ve grown. He remembered feeling overwhelmed. His parents always stayed up all night before the funeral with other relatives to guard the soul of the deceased before its rightful Christian passing. One time, when Costin was 13, Liviu had argued and argued with their parents to let him stay up with them. He too wanted to see and guard someone’s soul. Costin was too tired and scared, so he just went to sleep, partly deflated that his brother didn’t stay by his side. The next day, Liviu told everyone with great enthusiasm about all the discussions he’s heard during the night guard, and how they even let him try “tuica”, a very strong alcohol that not even Costin had been allowed to try. Liviu also said that close to dawn, all the chicken in the barn started making nosies, and the dogs woke up from their sleep and started barking. A strange wind shook all of the doors in the house, and his teeth started clattering. That’s when they knew that the soul of the deceased had escaped, that the dangers were passing. Liviu became a legend among their cousins and neighbour kids, and he even gained the respect of kids as old as 17. Sometimes, when the crevices of his house howled with the strong English winds, Costin could still remember that story, and how afraid he had been for weeks after his brother’s adventure.

But their mother’s funeral was nothing like that. Barely anybody came, Costin counted ten sad and old faces. He didn’t recognise any but didn’t dare to ask Liviu - this would only serve as a reminder of his abandonment. Liviu didn’t cry. Instead he spent most of the religious ceremony right by the entrance, chain-smoking. But when they went into the backyard of the church to lower the coffin, Costin saw his eyes sparkling with pain. He too felt immensely sad, but the heat and the smells of the torrid countryside had dried him up completely. He couldn’t shed a tear. When they closed the coffin, he feared he might faint. But he forced himself to not look away.

Afterwards, Liviu stopped by the groundskeeper’s shed. He came out carrying two bottles of wine. He took a sip from one of them, then poured some of it on the ground. “For the dead. They ought to be thirsty too on a day like this”, he mumbled to himself. Costin felt this was his only moment to extend an olive branch.

“Do you remember the wine of Mrs. Pausa? When we stole two bottles from right underneath her nose?”

Liviu didn’t say anything for a long time. Could he really not remember? For Costin, that was one of their most cherished memories. It was the perfect summer adventure story: it had adrenaline and mischievousness, all coated in young boys’ innocence. It also represented a time when the two brothers still knew how to speak to each other. They told each other anything. When they fought, they’d yell unthinkable insults, only to chat as usual a couple of hours later. Their friendship seemed like a way of being, so when they grew up, they never learned how to talk like adults, like the people they had turned into.

“It’s funny, we got wicked drunk at her daughter’s wedding. I told her it was us who stole the wine. She didn’t believe it at first.” Liviu started grinning, then his grin turned into laughter. Costin couldn’t help but notice his broken and missing teeth. “She told me that she fought with her husband for weeks about it. She thought he had drank it and didn’t want to come clean. The woman’s crazy sometimes”, Liviu kept laughing. But then almost as blown by the wind, his face turned hard again. Costin felt his chest go cold with his brother’s gaze.

Back at the house, the two women had left them bread and cheese wrapped in a cloth by the gate. They ate it right there, without sitting down, suddenly realising none of them had eaten anything since early morning. When he finished eating, Liviu got up and disappeared inside the building on the left side of the yard without a word.

One house for each brother, their mother had told them as kids. Liviu had always wanted the one on the left. He said it’s because it’s the newer of the two, but the whole family knew it was because the neighbour’s daughter and him would meet in the evening and speak through the holes of the shabby fence. Their love story ended abruptly when she moved to the nearby town to study nursery school. Despite promises and tears, she never moved back to her parents’ house and made a life for herself in the town. Almost poetically, roses with sharp thorns were now grown through the holes of the fence.

With his brother gone, Costin didn’t know what to do with himself. He felt like going through the front gates of his childhood home by himself was somehow a violation. He was not much more than an intruder. He noticed that Liviu had left one of two bottles behind. He picked it up and crossed the street to the vast meadow spanning all the way from their street to the highway built sometime in the last ten years. He laid down on the grass and tried to remember the last time he had looked at the sky. When they were kids, Liviu and him loved going to take a piss outside at night. The night sky was a mysterious painting they never grew tired of.

When he woke up, the sun was burning through his flesh. To his left, Liviu was tying a white horse to a tree.

“This old bastard’s still alive”, he yelped in disbelief. This startled Liviu who almost tripped.

“You’re still here?!”

“Yeah, I must have fallen asleep in the grass. That wine was quite the drink. You didn’t see my car’s still here?!”

Liviu didn’t respond and started guiding the horse further into the field. Costin got up to follow him. His body ached from head to toe.

“Did you think I would just leave without saying goodbye?”

Liviu shrugged. Costin was now close enough to smell the alcohol on his brother’s breath.

“Why are you still here? Don’t you have business to attend to, a flight to catch? Isn’t the countryside too dirty for you?”

“I thought maybe you need some help. With the house, and everything.”

“If you think I will let you take the house on the right just because it’s your name on the will, you are very wrong. Very, very wrong.” He pulled out a small bottle from the back pocket of his trousers, drank, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “You have no idea the amount of labour that is needed just to keep this place running. I don’t think they teach you in the London Business School how to feed a pig or deliver a calf.”

“I don’t want to take anything away from you…”

“Of course not. You’re too good for this crap.” A dog came their way wagging his tail. Liviu pulled some bread from his other pocket and threw it in the grass.

Liviu had never left their county. He only went into the nearby town when he needed medicine for the animals or when they had ran out of cigarettes at the kiosk on their street. When Costin first left for England, at 19 years old, he dreamed of bringing his little brother to visit. There were so many things he wanted to show him! He dreamed of Liviu seeing how tall and modern the city buildings were, and how elegant the people working in those offices were. How surprised Liviu would be to see the underground! They would take one of those carriages for tourists and Liviu would talk about how he’d always wanted to have his own stable of horses, for riding, and not for carrying wood and hay with the carriage. His brother would hear the English people talk and joke about how their life is now like one of those movies they watched with fascination after the revolution.

But it was never so easy. Diana, who had followed Costin to London, didn’t speak any English either and they struggled for months to find work. He was lucky at first and started working at a construction site full of Romanians. They had so little in those early years they couldn’t even send Liviu money to pay for his passport, let alone buy a plane ticket. Costin’s mother had sold their most beautiful cow for his plane ticket. But the young couple never lost hope - to live this kind of life you need to have a strong will to bear hope for the future, otherwise you lose yourself along the way. They both eventually found stable jobs, a decent flat to rent, and started speaking of the big wedding in the countryside they had promised their parents. But just as Costin was on his way back to Romania for the first time in a couple of years, with a decent sum of money to gift Liviu, their father died in his sleep. Their mother didn’t know the signs - she thought his arm was hurting because of the work he’d done that day. When she came back from the kitchen with a rag in hot water to ease his pain, he was gone. He was only 52 years old, about the same age as Costin is now. That bleak January evening, after the funeral, the two brothers looked at each other and realised that an incontestable amount of time had passed. They had just become fatherless, but for the first time since they were children, their suffering didn’t bring them any closer.

Liviu took his father place in the house without much fuss. Just because his father was gone didn't mean that the animals were not hungry. After the death of his father was less of a fresh wound, he even dared to be optimistic for a bit. He’s always loved animals and working outdoors. He loved animals so much he took in any stray he saw. Yes, their modest village didn’t have tea and scones, but it had ripe cherries in the summer and jars of pickles for the winter. But the passing of time leaves little unchanged. Over the years he had to say goodbye to more and more of his peers. The school mates he used to go play with started being guests in their own childhood homes. Their parents got older and sicker and lonelier every year. In some parts of the village, houses that had been lifted by generations’ labour were being torn for foreign investors to start vineyards or, much later, put solar panels. When he turned 30, he realised that he may never find a wife. And that his village, his lifestyle, was for most people something they were trying to escape from. Including his brother Costin. “No woman will want to live with a man who has no savings, and tosses away cow’s shit for a living”, his mother would yell.

As a kid, his father would tell them to be proud of the land they have, of the crops they yield. He said if he kept his hard-working spirit, he would surely be the envy and the admiration of the whole village. So how did he get it so backwards?

“I don’t think I’m too good for any of this, brother.”

Liviu scoffed.

“I’m not like you. I’ve always been a coward. There’s so much pain here sometimes, I just want to…look away.”

“Then look away, go.” Liviu gestured towards the highway.

“I’m not leaving. I’ve come to leave here, with you.”

Liviu started shoo-ing some flies away from the horse’s back.

“What about Diana? And the girl?”

“They, um, it was dark … Diana was picking her up from camp, and she didn’t see the stop sign … “

Liviu’s face stayed frozen for seconds hearing this. “How long ago?”, he finally muttered.

“Two years in October.”

Liviu pulled out once again his bottle of alcohol and threw it at Costin. The two men then sat down on the grass, facing the highway, vaguely remembering that behind it you could once see the mountains.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know how. Can you forgive me?”

They just sat there, looking into the distance. They still didn’t know how to talk to each other, perhaps they might never remember. But the air had shifted, a hopeful coolness started replacing the morbid heat. In the distance, banks of birds were painting dark lines across the sky.

“You cannot sleep outside tonight. I need you with a strong back tomorrow. We’re carrying water from the well.” Liviu got up, reaching his arm towards his brother. “Before that, your first task: nail back up the street sign. You can barely see it’s number 22 anymore.”