After a moment of silence, the woman, back in full possession of her usual coldness, turned once more to the fat man and gave him a brief order. With quivering lips, he attempted a response but, before a word was uttered, decided it was best to comply. He took off his coat, waistcoat, bosom plate, and shirt. All eyes were on him. The evening was bleeding out—some stars shone in the darkening blue. His shoes came off, and after them, his trousers. The woman showed her impatience. Hesitantly, he removed his underpants, and stood there, blubbery and milky, with only socks and garters on. Someone laughed. A barely visible gesture of the woman, and his clothes were thrown into the embers of the burning house. Another brief nod, and all the women and children were set free. Their husbands ran to meet them, but one woman remained alone with her child. She looked around, confused, and then, seeing the pyre, fell to her knees and wept. The veiled lady examined her with interest. All the Clangston men got on their horses, except for the fat man, who was left standing among the homesteaders while the dragoon led his gray away. The fat man’s mouth bubbled with stuttering pleas. Håkan was told to follow the woman into the carriage. They drove away with the convoy. The abandoned man’s moans and sobs were soon inaudible.
The second night after their return, Håkan was summoned to the woman’s room. She was sitting at a small table and pointed to the chair across from her. Håkan sat down, taking notice of a leather tool wrap. As she sometimes was inclined to do, she ignored him in a careful, studied way, looking impatient, as if his presence—which she had requested—were delaying someone else’s arrival. Finally, after a long time, she untied the wrap and unrolled it on the table. It was divided into sections that contained scissors, tongs, flasks, clippers, small daggers, and other instruments Håkan did not recognize. The lady tapped her finger on the table. Håkan was confused. Irritated, she indicated that he was to place his hands on the table, which he did. She held down his left wrist against the table with a force that Håkan’s docility did not merit, took the largest clippers out of their compartment, and applied them to his fingernails. His hands had softened during his captivity, but his nails remained as rough and angular as ever—some grew until they broke, others he trimmed with his teeth or the knife he was given for his meals. Once she was done with the clipping, the woman moved on to filing, and then to cutting and pushing up the cuticles with a flat, sharp-edged tool, which made Håkan wince and instinctively withdraw his hand. The woman clasped his wrist tighter and stabbed his hand with the tool. She did not break the skin, but her firmness made it plain that she would drive the whole instrument through his hand and pin it to the table if he offered further resistance. After the procedure was completed, she retouched and buffed his nails. From one of the flasks, she poured a greasy rose-scented unguent and rubbed it into Håkan’s hands. Perhaps because the woman had never caressed his hands like that before, Håkan decided to speak to her for the very first time.
“I must go,” he said.
She looked up from his hands with an expression that briefly acknowledged an event that, although extraordinary, did not surprise her. She smiled at him.
“I can’t,” she responded. “I can’t let you go.”
She put out the light and did something she had never done before—she kneeled down and placed her head on Håkan’s lap, just like Håkan used to be asked to kneel and put his head on her lap, and then took one of his limp groomed hands and stroked her own hair with it, as if playing with a rag doll.
After those events, life sank back into its unaltered routine. Although unused to violence, Håkan started to hatch an escape plan that vaguely involved the blunt knife he used for his meals. He was encouraged by his own size, which an increasing number of his captors found intimidating. However, what happened a few nights later relieved Håkan from carrying out his half-formed designs.
It was during the quiet hour between the time the bar closed and the two guards came to take him to the woman that Håkan heard someone stealthily sliding the bolt of his door open. The cautious slowness of this operation was unusual, and even more remarkable was the fact that he had not heard, as he always did, two pairs of boots coming up the stairs. A whistling wind had whirled around Clangston all night, and now windows and walls rattled and creaked under its growing force. The bolt slowed down as it slid through the guides, clearly to prevent the click at the end of its trajectory. Silence. Håkan picked up a book, just to hold something solid.
The door opened, and there, badly scarred, scabbed, and still naked, stood the fat man. His left cheekbone had swollen to meet his inflamed eyebrow, submerging his eye in a mass of lustrous purple flesh. There were cuts, burns, and bruises all over his body, and his feet had been disfigured by the hot desert. He looked at Håkan with his single eye and smiled, revealing some newly broken teeth. Then, crossing his index finger over his cracked lips while softly shushing Håkan, he stood away from the door and pointed to the staircase.
“Go,” he whispered.
Håkan looked at him, perplexed.
“Go,” he repeated. “Go now. Go. Fast.”
Håkan picked up his shoes, walked by the fat man, whose malicious grin had become a grotesque silent laugh, tiptoed down the stairs, across the bar, and through the door, briefly paused on the threshold, and, as soon as he set foot on the plain, ran.
5.
Dawn was an intuition, certain yet unseen, and Håkan ran toward it, his eyes fixed on the distant spot that, he was sure, would soon redden, showing him the straight line to his brother. The intense wind on his back was a good omen—an encouraging hand pushing him forward while also sweeping away his tracks.
With some luck, the lady would not call him that night, and his absence would not be noticed until late morning, perhaps even noon. But if the woman wanted him, the guards would soon be walking up the stairs to his room. After running for some time, Håkan looked back toward the town’s feeble lights. To his surprise, Clangston had vanished. Now that it hit his face, Håkan realized that the wind was thick with sand. His vision first was limited to the nocturnal aura of boulders and shrubs perceivable only when these obstacles were a step or two away, and then it was reduced to nothing. Soon night itself was obliterated by the whirlpool of sand. The gale’s force, together with the stinging dust it carried, made up a new element—something that, despite its roughness and dryness, was closer to water than earth and air. Håkan had to turn around to breathe. He kept on running, feeling safely cloaked by the storm, which plugged his ears with a roar. His face was shut up like a fist—even if the pelleted wind had allowed it, there was no point in keeping his eyes open in that double darkness. He took a tumble at almost every other step but welcomed each fall for the respite lying flat on the ground gave him from the harsh stream. Nevertheless, he would quickly get back on his feet and resume his blind race, panting through tight lips.
Morning never broke. The blackness just paled.
Tossed around by the wind, Håkan could no longer tell in which direction he was going. He only hoped that he had not been taken, in an extended circle, back to Clangston.
When the storm blew over, the midday sun shone right over Håkan’s head, revealing a landscape identical to the stretch of desert he saw from his window. He kept his uncertain course. Soon, however, his own shadow started to stretch out ahead of him, and he made sure he was at all times preceded by it, firmly convinced that it would guide him east. No tracker could ever have been able to trace his steps after such a storm, but Håkan was still worried. How much progress had he made? Was he far enough from Clangston? Had he actually been walking away from his captors rather than back to them? He had no doubt that the woman would want him back at all costs and that she had sent out search parties as soon as the weather had allowed for it. How such parties were organized, he did not know, but even if she spread them out in every direction, he thought, the woman did not have enough men to comb the plains very closely. Håkan’s hope was that his trajectory would fall in between two of the lines radiating from the hitching posts outside the bar. He wondered, however, how far he could make it without food or water. And should he be fortunate enough to find help, would not every settlement within walking distance from Clangston be under the woman’s influence?