The narrator’s second-oldest brother

The narrator’s second-oldest brother emerges through two recurring roles: he turns the family’s dead pets into occasions for elaborate funerary performance, and he treats knowledge as both a source of pride and a test of his standing. His humor can be inventive, but the household’s Sunday quiz also reveals how quickly confidence gives way to distress when he feels exposed as not knowing.

Identity and Place in the Family

The narrator’s second-oldest brother is identified in family scenes as the middle brother. He has a distinct place in the household’s routines: at pet funerals, he delivers the eulogies, while the narrator carries the dead animals and the eldest brother makes the small wooden crosses. The assignments recur, but the middle brother’s responsibility is described as a particular passion, not merely a chore. He is the family’s chief maker of ceremony, giving small losses a form and language.

His interest in performance extends beyond funerals. He teaches the family’s budgerigar, Erwin Lindemann, to say its own name by playing a looped recording of his voice for hours each day. The bird eventually imitates him so convincingly that its speech seems to come from the brother himself. He presents Erwin to his friends, who laugh at the bird’s uncanny imitation; the narrator, by contrast, sees something sad in a creature able to say only its own name and mocked for it. The episode links the brother’s delight in display to a more troubling outcome: the voice he trained into the bird becomes the sound of its distress when it escapes.

The Animal Funerals

When a Blackbird is found dead, the brother examines it with a colored pencil, tests its pulse, and insists that it must be buried before it begins to smell. At the family’s pet cemetery, the graveyard already holds finches and ornamental fish belonging to the eldest brother, a gecko that escaped and was found mummified behind a cupboard weeks later, and other birds that had struck the window. The brother’s funeral duties place this new death within an established family practice.

For the Blackbird, he proposes a departure from burial. Despite the unusual heat, he dresses in a black turtleneck and explains that the bird knew only the view from above; he cannot bear the thought of it rotting underground or being eaten by worms. Instead, he proposes burning it and scattering its light ashes into the wind. The eldest brother responds by bringing out a lighter, and the brothers set to work building a neat pyre from branches and dry grass, with charcoal starters placed inside. To the narrator, the finished structure looks less like a pyre than a comfortable nest. The brother’s solemn invention therefore holds two impressions together: a child’s imaginative effort to honor a bird on its own terms, and the unsettling intimacy of making a nest into a place of burning.

The account of Erwin’s escape gives the brother’s relationship with his pet a sharper edge. After the cleaner lifts the cage while leaving a window open, Erwin flies out into a dark November day and settles in a linden tree. The brother calls to the bird by its full name, then asks the narrator to be quiet so they can hear it. From the tree comes the repeated phrase he taught it: that it is Erwin Lindemann. The brother’s laughter is gone; the narrator imagines him beside the tree while his ghostly double seems to plead from above. Erwin is missing the next morning, and a week later the mother finds his torn, brightly colored body on the lawn. The training that once made the bird a comic showpiece has given its final call the sound of the brother’s own voice.

Knowledge, Pride, and Vulnerability

At the family’s Sunday lunch, the father runs a quiz called The Superfamily, in which each person has a specialty. The middle brother’s is medicine. His father has to choose his questions carefully: if they are too easy, the brother becomes angry, feeling that his supposedly unique intelligence has been insulted; if they are too hard, he may begin to cry because he cannot bear not knowing the answer. The game thus exposes the strain beneath his confident persona: knowledge is not only something he enjoys but also a measure of his self-worth.

Asked to define bursitis, he initially acts as though the question is extremely difficult. The narrator nevertheless notices a hopeful glint in his blue eyes and recognizes that he knows the answer. He works aloud from the word’s Latin root for a pouch, then identifies the condition as inflammation of a bursa. He goes on to explain where it occurs, what it does, and how it may be treated, including surgical removal if it becomes infected. His father awards him full points for the detailed answer, praising it as a direct hit. The scene makes the brother’s expertise concrete: he can turn a single medical term into an extended explanation, and his satisfaction comes not just from being right but from demonstrating the range of what he knows.

Narrative Role

The brother’s episodes place affectionate family ritual beside the risks of performance. At the pet cemetery, he makes grief speak in comic, theatrical, and sometimes unexpectedly tender forms; in the quiz, the same appetite to excel is shown to depend on others recognizing his ability. The narrator’s account also resists treating the animals as mere props in a portrait of the family: the bird’s strange borrowed voice, its disappearance, and its death remain consequential in themselves. Through these intertwined scenes, the brother appears as both an organizer of meaning and someone vulnerable to the demands of being seen as exceptional.