by Paul Park
He seemed doubtful. I held the boot out by the heel, and he took it, saw it was too small for him, cast it on the bank. I admired the sparseness of his mind. “Boot,” he said.
I explained what I was feeling as well as I could. He understood me, or rather understood the words, the music, the sense, but not the point. I could tell he thought me strange to concern myself when there must be other children still alive who fit my vague descriptions. But he retrieved the boot, examined it more closely, threw it down again. And, sick of listening, he said, “Come eat,” and leapt away from rock to rock, brandishing his pole, humming part of a song called “I forget.”
I did not follow, even though the smell of dead meat swinging near my head had lit in me a burning hunger. I turned and walked up to where I had left my horse. I knelt by the stream and ran my fingers in the water. It had gotten dark, but even in the darkness I could see the shadows of the trees. And when I stood up to lead the horse away, I saw that he held between the cruel ridges of his beak a child’s severed hand. He was sucking on it the way barbarians eat candy. I reached up, and he pulled his head away and glared at me; he had been scratching for toads in the flaccid grass and had found something better. I let him be.
The air was perfectly still. The grass grew thick where I stood in a bowl-like indentation in the slope, lined with trees and slabs of stone. Paradise had risen, once again, up over the mountain crests, and rinsed the grass with silver light. And from one tree there came a drip, drip, drip. Something hung from a rope among the lower branches. It circled quietly in the quiet air.
I walked up the slope until I stood beneath the tree. I reached out and caught some of the drops. In that light they had no color of their own, but it was blood, of course. I knew it by the feel and smell and taste, and it awakened in me a hunger like the smell of my brother’s rabbits—blood past its first freshness. I stood admiring the light until a little pool had formed in my palm. Beneath the tree, the grass lay crushed, as if an animal had rolled in it.
A child’s body had been tied up like a package. It rotated slowly at the end of a rope, and I saw the rope was barbarian-made, because of its contemptibly high quality.
I climbed up into the tree. A child had been strangely mutilated, his eyes dug away, his tongue cut out. Only his torso and his head remained; his arms and legs had been severed at the joints and carried away. His strange, empty head fell loosely from side to side as the rope rotated. His neck must have been broken. Standing on a low branch, I reached out to shake the silken rope, to make the body jerk and dance. It was my little brother.
I climbed down. My horse was already nosing at the grass, but I pulled it free, down the slope. There was no space to ride, but in a little while the trees gave out into a grassy meadow. And there I swung myself into the saddle. Paradise was bright like day, and the horse uneasy, pulling at his rope. At first I thought it was from horsey love of open spaces, until I smelled what it smelled: once again, the smell of death. The grass had been trampled in a muddy track down towards the town, as if a troop of men and horses had passed together. That was unusual enough. But in the middle of it lay the body of dog, a great noble brute, silver in the gleaming starlight. His silver fur was seething, alive in the shadows of the grass. But he was stone dead, lying on his side, his heavy head stretched out in the mud. I walked my horse around him in a circle.
Farther on, over the next hillside, I found my brother’s body, the boy whom I had seen that evening, running down the mountain, full of laughing plans for dinner and the love of running.
I dismounted. He had been shot with an expanding bullet through the back and had fallen with his arms in front of him. His stick had broken under him, and the rabbits were trampled in the mud. They had shot another dog there too, shot it in the side and disemboweled it later, it seemed. And again, the boy’s face was mutilated, as if they had tried to carve a letter or a sign into his features.
I gathered together my brother’s scattered arrows. There was no bow, but that morning I had taken mine, taken my knives and steel slingshot—tools for hunting. And when the track of horses broke away uphill again, I followed it up into the fields beneath a mountain slope of red volcanic stone. It was a place I knew well. At one time, biters had brought their sheep up here to graze on insects incubating in the snow; they had lit fires and stayed for a long time. I had come, too, with my childish music, or with some childish problem only a biter could resolve—an earache, a hole in my boot. And now the grass lay thick and white, and it dragged at my horse’s feet. His claws got stuck in it, and sometimes he came near to stumbling, for I spurred him hard, driven by my anger, until we broke the crest of a steep hill, and I saw in the valley underneath us, a bonfire.
I dismounted and ran down through the fields. The fire seemed enormous. Close at hand, I could only see outlines and shadows, but on the far side, the hot light painted their faces and their clothes. They were barbarians, small hairy men in black uniforms, squatting near the fire. They had heated up some orange mash of vegetables in a metal pot and were eating out of metal cups. I was happy not to smell it close. But I could hear them talking, and I was amazed to realize I could understand what they were saying, though the accents were harsh and ugly, the verbs unfamiliar. There was no music in it, yet even so there was something more than words, for they shouted and laughed and seemed content. I saw that they were drinking. They were drunk. I crept closer. One said, “Even so, you shouldn’t have shot the bitch.”
“It tried to bite me.”
They were talking about the dogs, I thought, though it was hard to tell. I felt a strange thrill listening to their voices, watching their clumsy movements. They were so small, so ugly, with flat, hairy, intelligent faces, full of thoughts and knowledge. Dark skin, dark eyes, dark hair hanging down their backs, gathered at their necks in metal rings.
They finished their food, and they sat drinking, smoking cigarettes, talking about places I had never heard of, things I didn’t know. It made a kind of sense. One played the guitar in a way I had no words for. He said, “Let’s see if she will dance for us. I’d like to see her dance.”
“You let her be. You know what our orders are.”
“Our orders are to kill them as we find them. I could report you both for keeping her alive.”
One laughed: “That’s all right. She’s just a girl.”
“Yes, that’s right. She’s a meat-eating bitch. And an atheist. You leave her be.”
One laughed: “Admit it, you like her.”
I found it hard to understand who was talking. Yet even so it made a kind of sense. There was a fat, older man. He said: “Well maybe she does look more like a woman than some others. I don’t care. She’s still built like a bear. She still stinks like dead bodies. She stinks like the bodies she eats.”
“I hear they are beautiful dancers,” said the one playing the guitar. He plucked out a series of low, peculiar notes. “I find her attractive,” he said.
There was much I didn’t understand. But I was fascinated. The older man rose to urinate outside the circle of light. He was a leader, perhaps. He stood facing me, his legs apart, staring outward blindly, and I thought I could puncture his fat stomach like a bag. The other man put down his guitar and got to his feet. Not far away, on the other side of the fire, they had tied their horses in a group. And they had a girl there, my sister, a prisoner. They had tied her hands in front of her, and the guitar man went and got her. I could hear him talking, and she got up from the ground. I saw her shadow cover his. Yet he must have been stronger than he looked, or braver, or stupider. He pulled her roughly by her knotted wrists, down the bare slope from the trees where they had left her with the animals, until she stood in the firelight, humiliated, her shoulders bent. I recognized her, though they had tied a cloth bag over her head. I recognized her body—naked from the waist, her wide hips. Her legs were spattered with mud, and she was bleeding from a wound on the outside of her thigh. Her feet were bare.
The
y had built their fire in a space between some large rocks, and I was watching their shadows on the uneven surface. At first the flames were high, their shadows long and menacing, but now the fire had settled somewhat. And when I saw my sister with them, they no longer seemed so fearsome. Without thinking, I had thought that there were lots of them, but there were not. Barbarians have names for any kind of quantity; they are in love with numbers. But such things are difficult for us. There, that night, there were not many: the fat man, the musician, and another with a long gun standing up between his knees. I could see the shadow of it on the rock.
The musician pulled the bag away from her face, and I saw her tangled yellow hair, her nose, her heavy lips. She was beautiful. He must have thought so too, for he put his fingers to her face and to her hair, catching at the tangles, pulling them back from her forehead. And when he forced her face into the light, I felt a sudden surge of joy. I was happy to see her. Happy to see her proud and unafraid, for there was nothing in her eyes but hatred. I could almost hear the song of it, but the barbarian could not. He pushed the hair back from her face, and she let him touch her without moving, touch her bruised cheeks, her torn and broken lips. He said, “Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you. Understand?” She made no movement. “Don’t be afraid,” he repeated. “Here, drink,” and he brought a cup of something to her mouth. She swallowed it in silence. She finished it. “Here,” he said, and squatting, he pulled a square of cloth out from beneath his shirt. There was a plastic bucket on the ground; he wet the napkin and stood up again to clean her face. “There,” he said. “We mean you no harm.”
One sat on the rocks, fingering his gun. “There’s no point in talking,” he said. “It can’t understand you.”
“I think she can. Can you?” he asked her. “Would you like something to eat? You must be hungry.” She shook her head. “You see?” he said, gesturing to his companions. “You see? She understands. My name is . . .” something, he said, pointing to himself.
The fat one laughed. He was squatting near the fire, poking at it with a stick.
My sister brought her hands up to her face. I saw the cords had cut into her wrists, “Free me,” she said, her voice naked, empty of significance. She thought that otherwise they wouldn’t understand.
They stared at her. “Free me,” she repeated carefully. “What do you want from me?”
The man with the gun stood up. “Beloved Angkhdt,” he whispered, and even the other one, the musician, took a step back from her uncertainly. And then he smiled and stuck his tongue out of his mouth. “She understands,” he said. And then he turned away. “I think I love her,” he said to the fat man.
The fat man laughed. He was drunk.
“No,” the other said again. “I think I do. She’s beautiful. She’s like an animal.” And he turned back to face her, and showed her his tongue, and said something I didn’t understand. But later I would come to recognize that famous verse of scripture which begins, “Oh my sweet love, let us be free as wild beasts, free as dogs, and let us kiss one another mouth to tail, like the wild dogs . . .”
He stuck his tongue out of his mouth. The fat man laughed. “You’re disgusting,” he said.
“No. Nothing like that. You have to take what you can find. I think she’s beautiful. Look at her. Look at her arms.”
“Yes, look at them. Just be careful. Female or not.”
“She’s a female all right. You’ll see.”
“I’m warning you. Don’t be a fool.”
The musician shrugged. “I think she’s beautiful.” And then he paused and smiled, and said to her, “We heard you were a dancer. That’s why we captured you.”
She shook her hair back from her face and brought her joined hands up to show him. The rope was biting her cruelly; I could see it and could hear it when she talked. “Free me.” They were too deaf to hear the mixed intentions in her voice.
The musician licked his lips. He was standing in front of her, between her and the fire, looking at her body, her naked legs, her sex. She wore the remnants of a sheepskin shirt, and her arms were bare. And yes, she was beautiful, yes, and he thought so too. He was a slave to beauty. He reached to touch her, cupping his palm around the bone of her hip. “We mean you no harm,” he said. “We’ll let you go, don’t worry about that. You’re safe with us.” He was smiling, and working his thumb into her skin as if to soothe her, staring up into her face. Even in his smile I could see his nervousness; still, he met no resistance when he slid his hand, so slowly, down along the bone of her hip, across her leg, down to the hair between her legs. He plucked at it and curled it between his fingers. And then he brought his hand up to his face, to sniff it and spit from his smiling mouth into his palm, but I could see he was still nervous, nervous when he put it back between her legs, nervous as he rubbed his spit into her sex. He was standing close to me, for I had crept so close. He faced away from me, the fire between us, and I could see the fingers of his other hand gripped tight behind his back, gripped tight around the handle of a knife hung upside down between his shoulder blades, and he gripped it nervously as he was rubbing spit into her sex. The other men were excited too, one standing with his long gun, the fat one sitting forward, smoking. Paradise was down, and the fire was low, neglected. And I also was excited. I knew that she was going to kill him if he freed her hands. I took an arrow from my belt.
She smiled. And this was hard for me to believe: the barbarian went down on his knees in front of her, turning his face to inhale, and then burrowing his face between her legs, kissing and licking her. And in a little while she opened her knees, and he passed his hands under her, hidden from my sight, but I felt something just by looking at her face. She had drawn her lips away from her teeth. And she had let her wrists, tied together in front of her, sink slowly down, her fingers stretched, grasping at nothing, until she put her hands onto his head, burying her fingers in his hair. I heard her breathe. And then she let her neck sink too, until she was looking down at him and I could see her eyes. She was crying, making no noise. But quiet tears were running down her cheeks and down her chin, down her neck and into her hair. Crying is not common among us. But she thought she was going to die, and perhaps a little softness is best, at the end. She worked her fingers into his hair. And then she pulled him to his feet, softly, gently, because he was eager, too; he stumbled to his feet and stood in front of her, still smiling, and he passed the back of his hand across his lips. Then she touched him. She put her hands down to touch the front of his pants, and then she looked him in the face, her eyes shining with tears. She smiled. This was the moment, and he hesitated. But she stared at him, the yellow hair around her cheeks, her wet eyes—she was so beautiful. And I suppose he must have known it too, in his own way, because again he reached behind his back and loosened the knife there. He hesitated, and then he drew it out, the short cruel blade, and he brought it around between them and tested the cruel edge along his palm. But she was still standing with her legs apart, the dew of some moisture shining on her sex, and she had bent her shoulders to hide the difference in their heights. For whatever the reason, for the sake of his own pride, he pulled the blade under her wrists and cut them apart. The ropes fell away; I had crept close, I could see the marks. And I could see her tense the muscles in her hands, testing the strength, opening and closing her fingers. She slid her hand into his pants. I waited for his yell, even though it took a little while—she was caressing his forearm below the hand which held the knife, running her fingernail along the vein. He had given away all of his power. And in a little while he realized it. He had closed his eyes, but then they started open; he cried out and raised his knife, and she grabbed him under the wrist. The others were slow to respond, because they understood the noises he was making in another way, at first. But she was squeezing his testicles to jelly. And I saw the one who had been standing still as stone, holding his long gun, come suddenly to life. I shot him in the throat, in the chest, in the arm, and he fell over into the
fire.
The fat man didn’t move, though I was waiting for him. I had nocked another arrow and had pulled it back. Yet he just sat there, his fat stomach in his hands. He was afraid. I came close into the firelight, and I could see him—he was afraid of death, and it made it hard for him to think. He had no weapons, yet he reached for none, nothing, not a movement, though his body was tense. Nothing, only he had opened his eyes wide, opened his mouth, and he had dropped his cigarette. His hands were shaking, grasping stiffly at nothing as I squatted down in front of him. I was not a frightening sight—hungry, barely grown, old clothes, ripped leather, filthy fur. Nothing to be afraid of, except death like the black night around him, and the fire burning low. I stuck my knife into his face, hurting his cheek with the ragged steel. “Holy beloved God,” he croaked, “don’t hurt me,” but it was as if he wasn’t really paying attention. And maybe it was hard for him to think because his friend was screaming hoarsely, without pause. Not that it mattered, for he was already finished: she had bent his hand back over his shoulder, cracking the bone, and his knife was useless. Yet still he kicked at her with his feet and hit her with his free hand, with his head, but it didn’t matter, he was finished. The hand around his testicles had lifted him up almost off the ground. And in a little while he stopped struggling and started to cry, as she had done, yet different, too, because the pain was different. He had words and no music, and no tears either, just a rhythm of breath and a contorted mouth, and she stood staring at him, trying to understand him, her quiet face so close to him, her tears dry. How could she understand? She made a quick movement, and his knife fell to the stones. She let go of his wrist and joined her hands together on his sex, hoisting him up still farther. And when he hung limp from her hands, she dropped him to the dirt, and he curled up like a baby, his shoulders shaking, his face turned to the ground.
Then she danced for them as they had asked, for them and for me, too, on the mountainside, in the white, fragile grass, by the dying fire. It was the darkest part of the night. It had gotten cold. The man had curled himself around her feet, and she stepped free of him. Turning her back, she walked a few steps away, and I could see her tiredness in the way she walked. She walked to where the bucket stood, and she stooped to wash her face in it, to wash her arms. She stood up, her back still towards us, and with a simple, awkward movement she let her shirt slip from her shoulders. I could see the firelight on her body, the muscles, the flesh. She pulled her hair back and held it in a knot behind her neck. Then she released it and squatted down again over the bucket, washing herself, scooping up the water and pouring it over her, rubbing her arms. She was using a language of movement that belongs to little girls. The water was cold, I could tell. And I could see it dripping down her back, catching the light, dripping from her legs, scattering in circles when she shook her head. The black night was all around us, and I could feel something opening in my body like an empty hand. I sat cross-legged by the fire. I had taken the gun. The fat man had not moved. At one point he had seemed eager to speak, until I pointed the gun’s long barrel at him through my knees and put my finger to my lips. The other had huddled himself together and sat nursing himself, his head bowed, his lips wet. He was watching my sister with pale eyes, so that it was by looking at him and listening to his breathing suddenly change that I first saw a new difference in the language of her body. She was dancing.