Take care of your brother, Theo

“Take care of your brother, Theo” is the remembered instruction that unsettles Peter’s understanding of his mother’s final wishes. Repeated alongside the assertion that Theo is not strong like Peter, it first sounds like a charge to protect Theo, then—after Auntie insists the words were meant for Peter—opens onto a different, unresolved reading.

The First Memory

While sitting with a girl in the Infirmary, Peter recalls coming upon his mother watching over a patient in a darkened ward. The memory is uncertain in its details: he cannot tell whether it was one night or several layered together. He sees his mother asleep beside a cot, lit only by a candle, and feels relief at finding her young and healthy again. The remembered words, “Take care of your brother, Theo,” emerge in this setting of caretaking, linking his present vigil to his mother’s watch over the sick.

The accompanying thought, “He’s not strong, like you,” appears to clarify the instruction. Peter understands it as describing Theo and accepts the apparent sense of his mother’s last request: that the stronger brother take responsibility for the weaker one. When he addresses his mother in the memory, he identifies himself as Peter, but the instruction’s wording continues to name Theo as the person to be cared for.

Auntie’s Clarification

Later, in Auntie’s room among the things of the past, Peter recalls his mother’s final hours: the heat of the bedroom, her hands, her sudden struggle for breath, and the words she spoke as he cared for her. He has believed her intention to be clear. When Auntie tells him that his mother had said she was to give “them” to Peter, he initially objects that she must mean Theo.

Auntie refuses that interpretation. She tells Peter that it was he his mother meant, and that she had asked Auntie to give the items to him. Her insistence makes the remembered instruction shift beneath him: “Take care of your brother Theo” no longer settles into its first, straightforward meaning. Peter begins to hear a different emphasis and a different possible intention in his mother’s words.

An Unresolved Inheritance

The expression’s significance lies in this reversal of address. At first, Peter is the capable brother charged with looking after Theo; after Auntie’s correction, he has to consider that his mother’s concern may have been directed toward him. The passage does not resolve exactly what the instruction meant, but shows Peter’s memory changing as he revisits the circumstances of his mother’s death.

The words therefore carry both a practical family bond and an uncertain inheritance. Peter’s recollection connects the command to his own acts of care, while Auntie’s testimony prevents him from treating his original interpretation as final. The repeated sentence becomes a point where memory, responsibility, and the question of whom his mother meant to protect remain in tension.