Josse and Martin: Brothers

Josse and Martin are brothers whose relationship enters the narrative most sharply through separation and its aftermath: Martin takes Josse to the airport before Josse’s exchange year in the United States, and that farewell becomes their last meeting. Martin’s death in a nighttime car crash reaches Josse far from home, while the family’s effort to resume daily life cannot restore the household they shared. Later, Martin’s dog carries a piece of that lost family life into Josse’s relationship with his parents.

Family Position and the Last Meeting

Martin is Josse’s middle brother. Their eldest brother is studying in Munich while Josse is away in Wyoming, leaving Martin’s death to alter the family’s remaining structure as well as its emotional life. The account offers little description of the brothers’ everyday closeness before the crash; instead, it fixes their bond to a concrete departure. Martin drives Josse to Frankfurt airport, and Josse last sees him there before leaving for the United States. The ordinary act of taking a brother to catch a flight acquires its finality only after the accident. When Josse later returns through Frankfurt, he is back at the place where he last saw Martin, but Martin is no longer there to meet him.

The News and the Crash

During the first weeks of Josse’s stay in Wyoming, his father calls to tell him that Martin has died in a car accident. Josse is in his room when the news arrives. When his host family asks what has happened, he cannot find the English words to explain it; even in German, the words fail him. He takes a dictionary and laboriously assembles the sentences that Martin is dead and that the cause was a car accident. The scene makes the distance between the brothers painfully practical: Josse must translate the death before he can communicate it to the people beside him.

The crash also kills Martin’s girlfriend, who is riding in the back seat. Their car slides beneath a truck stopped just beyond a hill crest in the middle of the night so that two hitchhikers could get out. The truck’s lights are switched off. Martin’s friend, who is driving, survives without injury. These details establish the sudden violence of the loss without supplying a fuller account of Martin’s life or of the brothers’ relationship before it. Josse receives the news shortly before a planned trip to Yellowstone National Park. Because his complicated return flight is still four days away, the trip goes ahead; the landscape of herds of buffalo and geysers feels desolate to him rather than consoling.

Return, Farewell, and Separation

Josse flies back to Schleswig for Martin’s funeral. The journey takes thirty-four hours and involves four changes. At Hamburg airport, his parents and his remaining brother are waiting. Josse sees his parents through a large pane of glass before they see him: while other travelers run to greet and kiss their returning family members, his parents sit motionless, staring toward the exit. The reunion he had imagined for himself—as a fit basketball star with fluent English and confident bearing—gives way to a different scene. When the family recognizes one another, they embrace and hold on together amid the moving crowd.

Josse knows that his absence is hard on his parents, yet he decides to return to Wyoming. His father asks him tearfully whether he might stay with them, but Josse is determined to go back. Fourteen days later he is again in Laramie. The sequence places the brothers’ separation inside a second separation: after Martin’s death brings Josse home, he leaves his parents again while their grief is still immediate. His return to Wyoming is not presented as a resolution to the loss; it is a choice to continue the exchange year.

Grief and the Altered Household

In Laramie, only Josse’s host family knows about the accident; at school, nobody does. The absence of wider sympathy allows him to live much as he had before. He plays basketball, learns to throw a football and carve a large turkey, shovels snow, rides across the prairie, and travels with his host parents. He thinks of Martin rarely, mostly after Sunday phone calls with his parents. The account describes this not as completed mourning but as Josse’s refusal to grieve. Everyday activity becomes a way of carrying on without making the death continually present.

At home, Josse’s parents return to work, eat together, sit in front of the television, and take walks. To Josse, however, these routines look like a simulation of an earlier life: his parents seem to be trying to remember who they were and how they lived before Martin died. The family’s habits persist, but their meaning has changed. With the eldest brother studying in Munich, Josse becomes the only child still living with his parents in their house within the psychiatric hospital. Martin’s absence is therefore not only a private bereavement; it changes who remains in the household and what its familiar routines can sustain.

Martin’s Dog as a Living Connection

Years later, the family dog makes the continuing force of Martin’s place in the family explicit. As Josse and his mother confront the dog’s severe illness and consider euthanasia, his mother repeatedly reminds him that it is Martin’s dog. The animal belongs to a time when Josse believed their family was indestructible, and its presence connects him to his brothers and parents and to the family gatherings they once shared. His mother and Josse recognize that, without the dog, their home would contain only three people: father, mother, and their adult child. The dog’s survival has held the remnants of the family together, though it is now exhausted and suffering.

That recognition makes the decision to let the dog go especially difficult. Josse and his mother remember its former strength: how it pulled so hard that his mother could not hold it, and how the sight and smell of the sea once sent it into a frenzy. The contrast between that vigorous animal and the dog that now struggles to walk makes the change impossible to ignore. Before returning to the veterinarian, Josse buys the dog two pieces of Bounty, a treat it usually receives only in a tiny corner. He gives it both pieces, and the dog eats them. The moment does not undo Martin’s death or settle Josse’s doubts about the decision, but it gives Josse a last act of care for the animal through which Martin’s memory remains bound to the family.