Chapter 6 #2
"Let me say it or I won't." Pavel closed his eyes. Opened them. Found Luka's face in the dark, the sea-green gone black in it, and made himself hold it, and said the thing.
"He wasn't afraid at the end because he made a decision, I told you that.
The decision was to ask me for something.
He was dying and he knew it and instead of begging — he didn't beg, Luka, your brother did not beg — he used what he had left to ask me for two things.
And I want you to know that I was going to make him disappear.
That was the job. That was always the job; that's what we did, there's no body, there's no grave, the person is just gone and the family never gets to stop wondering.
I had the — I had it all planned, the way I always did, the water and the weight and the hours.
And he looked at me, and he wasn't afraid, and he said—"
Pavel's voice broke. He let it. He'd stopped, somewhere in the last week, being able to keep it from breaking, and maybe that was the point, maybe you had to be broken open to give a thing like this.
"He said, don't put me in the water. My brother works the water."
The sound Luka made was not a word.
"He said it like — like it was the most important thing, more than his own life, which was already gone and he knew it.
He said, my brother works the water, don't make him spend his whole life diving over me, don't make me one more thing down there he has to swim past, let him find me, let him bury me, give him a place to put his hands. "
Luka's hand had come up, pressed flat over his own mouth, the way it had been on the boat when Pavel told him Dato wasn't afraid.
Above it his eyes stayed fixed on Pavel's face and streaming, and he did not look away, did not tell Pavel to stop, though every line of him was a man being taken apart at the joints.
"Keep going," he said, from behind the hand, barely sound. "All of it. Don't you dare stop now."
Pavel was crying now and not trying to stop.
"And then he said the other thing. He said, tell Luka it wasn't his fault.
He said it wasn't your fault. He said, he promised our mother he'd keep me safe and he's going to think this means he broke it and it doesn't, tell him it doesn't, tell him he kept me my whole life, this isn't the promise, this is just the world.
And then he said—" Pavel's hands were shaking.
"He said, and tell him not to come after it.
Tell him not to spend himself on this. He'll want to.
He'll turn it into a thing he does instead of living.
Don't let him. Tell my brother to let it go and live. "
The boat rocked in the dark. The water lapped. Luka Beridze sat in the stern with his whole face open and streaming and made no sound at all.
"And I couldn't tell you," Pavel said. "Don't you see.
That's the thing I've carried. He gave me a message for you with the last breath he had, three things, it wasn't your fault, you kept me, let it go and live — and I was the one who killed him.
How do I bring you that? How does the hand that did it walk up to the brother and say your dead brother sends his love and asks you not to hunt me?
There was no way. There was no version. So I did the one thing I could do — I broke the rule, I didn't put him in the water, I left him where you'd find him, I gave you the grave he asked me to give you — and I carried the rest, the words, undeliverable, for two years, and I watched from a distance while you did the exact thing he begged you not to do.
Do you know what that's like? To hold a man's last words to his brother — the one mercy he asked for, the one thing that might have turned that brother back from the ruin he was walking straight into — and to be the single person on earth who can't carry it to him, because you're the reason there are last words at all?
Some nights I got as far as writing it down.
The three things. To leave somewhere you'd find it.
And then I'd understand all over again that a note from your brother's killer isn't mercy, it's a knife — it would only tell you the man who did it was out there breathing, thinking about you, and you'd hunt that instead of the words, and I'd have made it worse.
So I kept it. There was no clean way to give it, and every day it got heavier, and I kept it.
You turned it into the thing you do instead of living.
He knew you would. He spent his last breath trying to stop it and I couldn't hand you the thing that would have, and that — that, Luka — is the part I keep.
That's what's mine. Was mine." He wiped his face with the heel of his hand, roughly, a soldier's gesture, useless.
"It's yours now. It was always yours. I'm sorry I kept it.
I told myself it was honor. It was just the last thing I had, and I'm giving it back to the person it belonged to, and now I don't have anything, and that's right, that's as it should be.
Do what you need to. The account's closed on my side. It's been closed since the yard."
***
For a long time Luka didn't move and didn't speak, and Pavel sat in the cold and let him have it, the way you let a man have a wound — didn't touch it, didn't reach, just kept the watch over it in the dark.
He had done the thing. He had given away the last of Dato and the last of his own reason to be owed a death, and he felt, strangely, not empty but light, the way a body goes light when you finally set down a weight you've carried so long you'd forgotten it wasn't part of you.
When Luka finally spoke, his voice came out of somewhere underwater. "Two years."
"Yes."
"He told you it wasn't my fault. He — with the last thing he had, he was worried about me.
About the promise. He knew I'd—" Luka stopped, a sound tearing loose.
"I did it. I did exactly what he said not to.
Two years. I let it be the thing I did instead of—" He put both huge hands over his face.
"He asked you to give me a place to put my hands.
And you did. You gave me the grave. The one thing that kept me — every time I thought I'd go all the way under, I had the stone, I had somewhere to go, and it was there because my little brother, dying, thought about my hands.
" His shoulders shook. "And I built a hunt on it.
I took the mercy he asked you for and I used it as proof there was a monster to kill. "
"You didn't know."
"You could have let him go in the water.
" Luka took his hands from his face and looked at Pavel, and there was no hate left in it anywhere, Pavel saw; the hate had finally run all the way out, and what was under it was worse and better, was grief with the person restored to it.
"It would have been easier. Cleaner. No grave, no thread for me to pull, no risk.
You'd already decided to be a dead man; leaving a body against the rules is exactly the kind of thing that gets a man like you killed.
And you did it anyway. For a stranger's dying wish. For me, and you didn't even know me."