Beg stifled a belch. The sweet chewing-gum taste of the energy drink swirled in his mouth. ‘Let me tell you something weird,’ he said. ‘I really don’t care all that much who murdered him and who cut off his head and all that. They’ll find out all about that when you get there. For me, the point is … what I want to know …’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Maybe I should ask this first,’ he said then. ‘Do you believe? In a god?’
The man’s eyes clouded over. He shrugged.
‘I,’ Beg said, ‘… not so long ago, I myself found the way that leads to the Everlasting. Lots of things still aren’t clear to me, but I have to say that I … well, that I’ve embraced a faith. It’s a long story, it’s all still pretty fresh, but what matters to me is this …’
Then he told the man about the exodus. How the Israelites were led by a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night. The sea had parted to let them through. For forty years it had rained food, always just enough for one day at a time. ‘We all know the story,’ Beg said, ‘but what I didn’t know was that all that time they were carrying the bones of one of their forefathers. Joseph, who had made them promise to bury him in the Promised Land … Hundreds of years later, and they still remembered … That kind of faithfulness, that kind of breathtaking faithfulness …’
He felt his eyes burning.
‘So?’ the man asked. ‘Did they bury him when they got home?’
Beg nodded. ‘He entered the Promised Land. He did … but not Moses, who had the most right to. The reason I’m telling you this, though … the Ethiopian. Why was it necessary for him to die? Why was it necessary for you people to keep him with you? It must have been important to you, otherwise you wouldn’t do something like that. Tell me what importance he has for you people. Only that.’
Haç sat motionless. It looked like he had stopped breathing.
‘We lived with wonders all around us,’ he said slowly. ‘Once they started, we never doubted that we were going to be saved. These things are impossible to talk about. They’re only important to the ones who were there — those who passed through the thicket of horrors.’
‘What is that, this thicket?’
‘You keep on asking questions, as though there’s an answer to everything.’
‘You’re the one who started talking about the thicket of horrors. I’m asking you what it means.’
But the man across from him was sunk in thought. He seemed to be wandering amid his memories, a bit amazed at the things he saw there.
Beg’s suspicion of idolatry grew and became increasingly concrete — a thing they couldn’t talk about, because every faith shivers and shrinks under the cold lamplight of inspection.
‘After we killed him,’ the man said suddenly, ‘the boy’s dreams started. He dreamed the way for us. The woman said they came from him. She could interpret them. The boy told them, and she understood them.’
‘So you’re saying … who did these dreams come from?’
The man grimaced. ‘From Africa. Who else? He sent them so that we would know the way. I swear, we walked straight to it.’
‘To what?’
‘The woman said we had to start going south. All that time we’d been heading west; now suddenly we had to go the other way. I didn’t want to — once you choose a direction, you have to keep following it, otherwise you go completely nuts. But they were so sure of themselves. I figured … well, what if it’s true … That he’s the one telling them … Who am I to … Then we found the village. That’s what saved us.’
‘So you’re telling me the black man sent those dreams?’
‘They started once he was dead.’
‘Then why did he have to die, if the things he did were good?’
‘You don’t get it. It wasn’t always like that. At first he was in the service of evil. He did bad things. He ate from the tall man’s body. He was covered in sores, because of him. We saw all of that. And Vitaly’s arm almost fell off, at the place where he’d touched him. It rotted all the way through. If you think back on it, that whole trip …’
‘He ate from someone else’s body?’ Beg asked. He tried to suppress his disgust — and his deep-rooted bafflement.
‘He sank his teeth into it, oh yeah.’
‘And you all saw him do that?’
‘Cannibals, right? The blacks. Always have been. Couldn’t have been anything else.’
Occasionally, Beg was granted a glimpse of the thicket of horrors — flashes, already gone before he could actually feel the despair.
‘Tell me about the village,’ he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The rooster
Three of the four had been for it; only he, the poacher, was against. Vitaly didn’t count any more; lightning had struck in his head. For the first time in weeks, they turned from their route and walked south. They were following a dream, a vision of salvation — if they found no deliverance, the men would kill the woman and the boy. Winter had started, and in the mornings their bodies were covered with frost.
As darkness began falling on the fifth day, they saw rows of trees rising up from the plains — the tall trunks of poplars, the civilisation of trees. Someone had planted them, and the current in ditches had watered their roots. They stood there like that, an outer ring of protection against the wind and sand off the steppes.
But the trees were dead.
Behind them they found abandoned farmhouses. They wandered through the streets of the hamlet, the wind blowing through windows and doorways. There were no lights anywhere, not a living soul in sight. The wind had piled sand against the walls; grass and bushes had advanced into the streets themselves.
They built a fire on the dirt floor of a house. They warmed their hands at the flames. Why had the people abandoned their homes? What disaster had made them flee? Where had they gone?
Their shadows danced on the walls. They had found nothing to eat, but this night they would not freeze to death.
It was still dark, the final coals glowing amid the ashes. They pricked up their ears in their sleep. The sound they had heard was unmistakeable.
A rooster. Somewhere a rooster crowed. And again.
Somebody fumbled around, trying to sit upright. The others moved restlessly on the floor.
They had heard a rooster — the last living rooster in the world.
‘Fuck,’ the poacher said in the dark.
With a groan, he rose to his feet and left the house. The woman laid wood on the fire, and fanned the coals. One by one they rose, shattered, stiff; the underfed body cannibalises itself, devours its own muscles.
Grimy light was coming through the windows; outside, they occasionally heard the cock’s crow. In the attic, the man from Ashkhabad was ripping up planks for the fire; it was hard work. Downstairs, the others sat in a cloud of black, sticky dust that clogged their windpipes. The fire leapt up. Vitaly raved.
The poacher came in, cold sweat on his forehead.
In the distance, the rooster crowed.
‘I can’t get hold of him,’ he panted. He rested, his hands on his thighs. ‘Someone else has to go with me. That bastard is in good shape.’
He shuffled up to the fire, enraged by his defeat.
After a while, the boy spoke up. He asked: ‘So who takes care of the rooster, anyway?’
The cold splinter between their eyes was their realisation that poultry could not survive the winter alone, that there was someone who fed them and locked the run to keep the predators out at night. They left Vitaly beside the fire and searched the houses and sheds. They fed themselves silly on half-frozen, rotting fruit they found at the feet of a few tangled trees. The boy threw down the apples still hanging on the branches. The fermenting fruit made them light in the head.
They gathered wood, and the boy found a w
ooden rake with two tines. They combed each house and every shed. It was impossible to tell whether the inhabitants had left in a hurry, or one by one, over the course of years.
When they saw a brood of chickens pecking at the ground on the bleaching green outside the village, they froze. Here was a prospect of plenty. Euphoria welled up within them, but they didn’t know quite where to start. It was too much all at once.
‘Oh-oh-oh,’ the man from Ashkhabad said.
They were reeling — they would never be fast enough to catch them. Grubbing about amid his harem was the cock, a champion rooster with long legs and a fiery red comb. This was where his life would end; their teeth ached in anticipation.
Then they saw the house.
It was a little way outside the village, half-hidden behind a mound. A few sparse poplars surrounded it.
From the chimney came a thin wisp of smoke.
In none of their imaginations had their salvation ever looked like a fairy tale.
They moved towards it hesitantly, afraid it would vanish before their eyes as they approached. The clay walls had once been white, and the farmhouse blue could still be seen on the shutters and sills. The doors and windows were all slanted, as though the house had shifted and was slowly sinking into the earth.
At the door, they stood indecisively.
‘Anybody home?’ the poacher shouted.
He pushed open the door and went inside. The others followed. They found themselves in a low-ceilinged room full shadows. The stovepipe leaked smoke; the walls were covered in soot. It was as though they had entered the inside of an old, dented kettle. At the back, beside the pump, stood an old woman. Her hair was in pigtails. Her toothless jaw had dropped open.
‘Food,’ said one of the ghosts who had invaded her house.
‘Food,’ the others said now as well.
The woman stood with her back pressed against the washbasin. There were red wooden cherries attached to the elastic bands in her hair.
‘Food! Food!’ the ghosts now shouted, all at the same time. They raised their hands to their mouths in an eating gesture. They pulled tins of food out of her cupboards, tore them open, and dug out the contents with their bare hands. Goulash. Beans. Pilaf. They drank milk sweeter than they had ever tasted. They gobbled and scoffed until they lay writhing and groaning in pain on the floor, amid their own vomit, their hands clutching their bellies.
All this time, the woman had not moved. Then she tied an apron around her waist and, stepping over the bodies on the floor, went out the door. She ladled grain from a barrel and shouted heeere chick-chick-chick! heeeere chick-chick-chick! Clucking pitifully, the chickens came running up to pick at the grain around her feet.
One by one, the ghosts left her house. She watched as they climbed the mound and walked to the house further along, their arms clutching cans of food and packs of pasteurised milk — her supplies for the winter.
The fire was out. Vitaly was gone. They poked at the fire, and hid the booty in their satchels.
Vitaly had left his own satchel behind. The thing lay between them, a clump of plastic bags, one pulled over the other, muddied, stained: a disgusting hide from which the animal itself had fled. The boy pulled it over and picked at the rope that kept the satchel closed. He yanked it free and dumped the contents onto the ground. Something heavy fell out of it, hitting the floor with a dull thud.
He shrank back with a strangled cry: lying between his legs was the black man’s head. He scuttled back away from it, on hands and knees. The dead face was looking at him, its one, intact eyelid half-open.
The woman buried her face in her hands.
‘Fuck,’ the poacher said for the second time that day. He took the thawed head by the hair, walked to the door, and tossed it into the street.
The woman stood up, wormed past him through the doorway, and came back carrying the head.
‘Have you forgotten?’ she panted, ‘how he brought us here? Is that your thanks? For this? A roof over our heads, the fire, the food in your stomach?’
She held up the head for him to see. Thin, colourless fluid dripped from the wound at the neck. ‘He steered Vitaly’s hand to cut off his head, so that he could be with us. Even in death he hasn’t left us.’
The boy took a breath to say something, but choked back his words. The poacher stared into the fire.
‘There’s something to what she says,’ the man from Ashkhabad said haltingly. ‘Our luck has changed so much since we started going south, it’s amazing.’
‘That’s no accident,’ the woman said.
The boy looked at the poacher. He wanted to know what he was thinking.
The woman pointed at the boy.
‘And have you people forgotten his dreams?’
They had not forgotten his dreams.
‘I’ll admit,’ the poacher said then, ‘I was against it. But we were definitely being pointed in the right direction.’
The others nodded. The thought gave them a sense of comfort and security.
The woman spoke, explaining the signs to them. Since the death of the black man and the boy’s first dreams, time had acted as a helpmeet; the situation had suddenly changed in their favour. The doom that had lingered over their heads from the start had dispersed and blown away. The oppression, the stone on their chests, was lifted. Who could point to any other cause than the black man’s death? She had found none; it was his death that had redeemed them. He who had brought on the oppression had lifted it, too.
‘I don’t understand it completely,’ the man from Ashkhabad said. ‘But, at the same time, I don’t see what else it could be.’
‘You don’t have to understand everything,’ the woman said. ‘It’s enough that it happened. It’s impossible to understand everything. All we have to do is be grateful.’
‘That we …’ the poacher murmured, ‘we, of all people … get to experience something like this. It’s just …’
The others nodded; yes, they had been chosen. The boy looked around wide-eyed, and saw how a shared conviction took hold of the others, how they came together around the black man’s head. His death united the opposites. A feeling of euphoria overtook him, too. Everything had, of necessity, led to this outcome. Everything had happened so that he could see it happen, so that he could tell about it later.
The poacher shook his head. ‘Who would have believed it?’ He poked at the fire and said: ‘So what now? What’s expected of us?’
‘That we follow him,’ the woman said, ‘and not doubt.’
She said that the head would lead them; they had to fear it and honour it, and not forget what they had been through.
At the heart of their little community, they reshaped his image: mercurial and ambiguous. His cruelty, but also his mercy.
How he had nourished himself with the dead.
Suddenly, in a shrill voice, the boy said: ‘At first I couldn’t believe it, but the longer I thought about it … what else could it be?’
The woman nodded. ‘He nourished himself with us.’
‘That’s why he lagged behind all the time!’ the boy cried.
‘It was him or us,’ the man from Ashkhabad said.
His death was inevitable, the way seed had to fall to the ground and perish in order to bring forth fruit again in spring. The poacher, the woman, and the boy come from farming families, so they know how that goes. They know about the eternal cycle. How new life sprouts from the dead.
They sit around the fire and tell each other what they remember: on top of the burial mound he had picked out Vitaly — with his finger he had burned his sign into his arm. They talk of the corrosive mange that had appeared on the tall man’s body; how he had conjured food out of nothingness, after they had left the tall man for dead; and how he had sown fear and conflict among them.
Vitaly! Where’s Vitaly? They can’t lose him now, now that they know that he is the bearer, that they are saved.
By the time the poacher found him, in the graveyard outside the village, it was already dark. Between the listing headstones he had dug a shallow pit in the cold ground. His eyes closed, hands folded across his chest, he lay waiting for death. And death would certainly have found him if the poacher hadn’t chased him out of his grave before night set in.
Now he is sitting hunched by the fire. He occasionally dips his hand into a can of beans and licks his fingers. He’s beyond hunger. To their questions, he gives no reply.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
We want him back
‘The poacher’s lying,’ the boy tells Beg. ‘He did it himself. After we went back.’
‘Back where?’
‘To Africa.’
‘Why?’
‘We almost couldn’t move. Like we had lead in our shoes. He didn’t want to let us go.’
‘Haç, the one you call the poacher, says that you dreamed the things that made you people go south.’
The boy crossed his arms grumpily. The new comic books Beg had brought with him were lying on the bedspread. His fingertips slid across their colourful covers. His skull sported a fine down of black hairs.
‘Geese,’ he said then, for the sooner Beg left, the sooner he could start on his comics.
‘Geese,’ Beg repeated.
‘Just the things I saw up in the air. I dreamed about that a couple of times. First geese, then airplanes. They asked me what direction they were going in. That way, I said. That’s what happened. Her grandma used to dream about geese, too, she said. She wanted to know everything.’ He snorted. ‘She’s nuts.’
‘Was that before you went back to the black man’s body, or afterwards?’
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