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The Brothers Lionheart

My brother Jonathan; it might have been that he was still with me, sitting talking to me in the evenings, going to school and playing with the kids in the yard and boiling honey water for me and all that. But it isn’t like that...it isn’t.

Jonathan is in Nangiyala now.

It’s difficult, I can’t, now--I can’t tell you. But this is what it said in the paper afterwards:

A terrible fire swept through the Fackelrosen building here in town last night. One of the old wooden buildings was burned to ground a life was lost.

A ten-year-old boy, Karl Lion, was alone when the fire broke out, lying ill in a second-floor apartment. Soon after the outbreak, thirteen-year-old Jonathan Lion, returned home, and before anyone could stop him, he had rushed into the blazing building to rescue his brother. Within seconds, however, the whole of the staircase was a sea of flames, and there was nothing to do but for the two boys trapped by the flames to try and save themselves by jumping out of the window. The horrified crowd that had gathered outside was forced to witness how the thirteen-year-old unhesitatingly took his brother on his back, and with the fire roaring behind him, threw himself out of the window. In his fall to the ground, the boy was injured so badly that he died almost instantaneously. The younger brother, on the other hand, protected by his brother’s body in the fall, was uninjured.

The mother of the two boys was on a visit to a customer at the time--she is a dressmaker--and she received a severe shock on her arrival home. It is not known how the fire started.

On another page of the newspaper, there was more about Jonathan, which the schoolteacher had written.

This is what it said:

Jonathan Lion dear, shouldn’t your name really have been Jonathan Lionheart? Do you remember when we read in the history book about a brave young English king whose name was Richard the Lionheart? Do you remember how you said, “Just think of being so brave that they write about it in the history books afterward; I’d never be like that!

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