The prosecutor also made a helpless gesture. «You'll be behind bars until the trial and then you'll be let off…»
Trebenko's deputy was so like his late boss that from the back people took him for a ghost, quickly crossing themselves and spitting over their left shoulders. Krotov arranged a meeting. Saam came into the office and shuddered, taken aback by the deputy's likeness to Trebenko. The policeman was under pressure from people who were more frightening than Saam, however, and in his voice the gangster could hear the prison gates slam shut.
«If you're guilty, you'll go to jail. If not, they'll let you out,» he snapped, leaning back in his chair.
Saam shot him a glance as piercing as broken glass but he remained impenetrable.
Loitering near the station, the mutilated Chief served as a reminder of the day he was picked up outside the morgue, naked, his head split in two like a water melon. This only increased the investigators' rage.
«Name?» the Chief asked, grabbing Saam by the arm when the gangster arrived for yet another interview.
Saam wanted to push him away but the police officers smoking by the station door suddenly froze, staring at him. Gently, he withdrew his arm, patting the Chief on the shoulder.
«Will they really send him down?» asked the lanky officer doubtfully as he stubbed out a cigarette.
«Well if they do, they'll let him out again,» spat the duty officer. He was immediately shushed.
It wasn't long before the driver of the patrol car that had taken Lapin to the garages went to his superiors and said that the gangsters only left the house after Trebenko was dead.
«Investigator Lapin and I had been watching the wooden house for several days,» he mumbled, tipping his hat.
«Who gave the order?»
«It was unauthorized. Lapin slipped me a bit extra. And something for the petrol…»
«What about the gangsters?»
«They turned up when the garage was already on fire. Thirty seconds later, we showed up.»
Lapin pleaded with the driver to say nothing so that Saam would be arrested but the officer had charged the gang a high price for his evidence and their Big Man was generous. Back to the wall, Lapin confirmed that the gang couldn't have killed Trebenko and the case collapsed.
Life is whatever we think it is, love whatever we call love. But hunger, sharp as a spear, was the strongest feeling Savage had ever known. He had become a wild beast, living to find food, and could find his way around the forest as easily as the town, familiar with all the paths and tracks he walked every day, making up for the years he'd spent behind a desk, drawing his plans.
Fish splashed in the lake. Savage attempted to catch them with his bare hands, hanging from a narrow ledge of rock that stuck out over the water like a cap peak. He scooped up fistfuls of water, startling the fish, then lay for a long time, chilled to the bone on the cold stone, watching the pike swimming at the bottom, their smooth sides glistening. His stomach ached with hunger, as if he'd been kicked in the belly. Hunger pinched his throat, hammered at his temples and made his arms heavy, binding them like a straitjacket. Rolling onto his back, Savage wept as he remembered the fridge at home where his wife had allocated him the bottom shelf or the cold cabbage soup in the work's canteen where a rosy-cheeked waitress swept the crumbs off the tables and onto the floor. His wife cooked for herself and for their daughter and during the night Savely used to lift the lid and eat straight from the pan, quietly so that they didn't hear him. Now though he would have eaten the crumbs off the canteen floor and his wife's soup right in front of her. He so much wanted to eat that he would have eaten the cloud floating above him if only he could have reached it.
Seagulls circled over the town refuse tip and dogs scurried around, barking wildly when they spotted someone. Savage would make his way there, sniffing like a wild beast, rooting out leftovers by their smell, then move off again, covering many miles. He was scared of the tramps who lived there in a raucous family with their children and their shaggy dogs with ropes for leads. They would hail one another, their calls floating all day long above the tip like grey doves.
«Huh?»
«Well?»
«Ah!»
«Uh-oh!»
As he listened to their conversations, Savage was amazed that he had drowned in words when he tried to sort things out in endless rows with his wife. And words hadn't helped. Rather, they had hindered their attempts at mutual understanding. He came to think that people needed words to hide the truth whereas feelings could be expressed by an eloquent silence.
He nearly died from eating rotten food, lying among the stinking heaps of rubbish, unable to bat away the birds that mistook him for carrion. He became delirious and heard voices arguing and a child's laughter and when the fever left him he saw that he was surrounded by piles of dirty rags that were digging in the rubbish, using sticks to keep the birds at bay. Men and women had the same black and swollen faces, with bunged up eyes and twisted mouths they treated like garbage chutes, tossing in anything edible they could find. Savage listened distractedly as they discussed his fate as if they were talking about someone else and everything that was going on was just a dream. Their conversations were brief. They spat out their words like the husks of sunflower seeds.
«Why kill him? He'll die anyway.»
«He's better. He'll live.»
«Is that a problem?»
«He'll bring his people here.»
One of the women found a broken comb and, taking off her woolly hat, she combed out her red mane. The comb got stuck in her dirty hair and its last teeth broke. The woman hurled it away and put her hat back on.
«Are we taking him with us?»
«It's too much trouble. Let him be.»
«We burying him then? He'll die. The cops'll come…»
The tramps set about covering Savage in rubbish: burst tyres, damp, soggy cardboard and packaging, slowly and solemnly to begin with, the way handfuls of earth are thrown onto a coffin, and then quickly, grabbing everything that came to hand so that first of all his arms and then his legs disappeared and before long a whole heap, indistinguishable from all the others, had formed over him. Too weak to move, Savage simply lay there, gulping in air through his mouth, aware of a broken radio pressing down on his chest. It had been thrown on top of him by a child with missing front teeth like gaps in a fence. The tramps went away with a clank of the bottles they had collected and Savage listened to their friendly squabbling over the boots he'd taken from Trebenko.
Through a crack in the rubbish, Savage could see the gathering twilight, grey and limpid, that never quite became night. He imagined his wife drawing the heavy drapes to hide from the midnight sun and the room becoming as dark as it was under his mound of rubbish. At forty, Savage still had a child's fear of the dark so he loved these nights that were like days whereas his wife preferred the half-light that concealed her wrinkles and her colourless eyes, grown old before their time.
People had always thought of Savage as a «thing-in-itself» and now he grinned, suddenly thinking that, like all things, here he was, ending his days on the rubbish tip. Why bother with a grave for someone no-one would weep for? He'd probably never be found. He would be thought missing in the taiga and remembered as a joke; the furniture from his room would be thrown onto the rubbish tip, his TV, his clothes, photos of him when he was a child, his books and the drawings nobody wanted, rolled up in a tube and stored in the closet. And then his gravediggers with their swollen blackened faces would dig through the fresh garbage and find his clothes and swear as they shared out his sweaters and jackets, his down-at-heel boots and the scarves his wife had knitted him in the early days of their marriage.