‘You broke something, man. In my back. I need a doctor, really.’
The little farmhouse with the thatched roof and white loam walls sometimes came back in his dreams — the friendly blue doors and shutters, the field of withered sunflowers rustling in the wind when autumn came and the summer was already behind you without your expecting it.
There was movement in the back seat. He adjusted the rear-view mirror. The man was sitting up halfway. ‘I need help, I swear.’
‘Try to forget your memories,’ Beg said to the mirror. ‘They don’t belong to you.’
CHAPTER TWELVE. The kurgan
It is late in the afternoon by the time the tall man and the Ethiopian catch up to the others. Leaning on his stick, the tall man stands in their midst, his head bowed. The boy lets his gaze run over the grimy faces. The men with their filthy beards — how long has it been since he’s seen something clean, something untarnished by dirt?
‘We weren’t expecting to see you again,’ says the man from Ashkhabad. ‘We thought …’
‘My time hadn’t come yet,’ the tall man says.
‘What are you two after? There’s nothing here for you!’ says Vitaly.
‘We weren’t chasing you,’ the tall man defends himself. ‘It wasn’t like that. We just followed the tracks.’
Vitaly turns and walks away. ‘It’s getting cold. There isn’t enough to go around. We’re all going to die! You two should have kept your distance!’
Later, when they started walking again — the day’s final stretch — the poacher told the tall man: ‘I saw you two yesterday.’
Things have all gone so differently from what the tall man had imagined. They are a burden to the others. He can’t rely on their patience, not when he can’t keep up the pace, when things go black before his eyes and he needs to take a rest.
Maybe it really would have been better if he’d stayed alone with the black man. He doesn’t push him to go faster, he gives him water, and shares his food. The gratitude flickers for a moment.
The Ethiopian is walking behind him now. He and the tall man are still a pair, but the distance between them is growing by the hour. The law of the group is taking over again. Their solidarity is broken; step by step, the tall man walks away from the one who saved him.
Evening. The flat land blows its cold breath over them; embers flare in a gust of wind. The black man shuffles around outside the circle; they can hear him tearing off grass for his bed. ‘Pointless,’ the boy hears the poacher say. The boy leans forward to hear him better. Some snakes sleep at night, the poacher says, but that’s exactly when others come out to hunt. But the karakurt spiders, they’re the dangerous ones. Their poison can kill a bull.
They went out digging for tubers and onions, but found nothing. That night, the poacher’s snares remained empty as well.
The hunger makes you furious at first; but then, if it keeps on going, it makes you listless and weak. That’s why the rages of Vitaly and the man from Ashkhabad have subsided, because of the hunger and the cold.
They left again before first light. Walking would drive the cold from their bones. Gradually, the day unfolded behind them. The grass was licked with frost.
At their feet, a hare bolted. A pair of partridges flew up, cackling, in front of them. That afternoon, the poacher pointed out to the boy a herd of donkeys at the furthermost edge of their vision. There was no chance of catching one. All food ran and flew away at their approach. The poacher longed for his rifle; he could have used it to shoot the hare and the partridges, as well as the geese that babbled as they plied the heavens, but his hunting rifle was hanging on the wall at home. Home — a place that seemed pleasant to him now, not poor and desperate like when he left. There was a fire in the stove, a soft bed, his warm wife.
He had been one of the last to leave. The evenings when those who remained behind had drunk away their cares at the community hall and danced till they dropped had become increasingly rare — when the men bared their chests, giving in to that mysterious urge that overpowers almost every male once he has had enough to drink.
Sometimes they went out poaching in an old all-terrain vehicle, blind drunk, chasing away every living thing with their ruckus. They shot at shadows and glimmers, at anything that moved or stood still. Each and every one of them fancied himself a sharpshooter. They guzzled homemade hooch, the empty bottles exploding in shards against the rocks. Nikolai Ribalko shot his own dog by accident. He wept and swore that he would suffer for his deed, suffer for having shot and killed his treacherous fucking dog. They were savage, their blood boiled, but they fell asleep as soon as the action petered out.
That was the life he had left behind.
On the horizon a kurgan rose up, a burial mound built by a people lost long ago. They had run across these before. They tended to give them a wide berth, fearing that their presence would disturb the rest of the dead. But now they lacked the energy to swerve around the mound that lay straight across their path. The boy approached it with a mixture of dread and excitement. The hill was covered in yellow prairie grass. He longed to look far in every direction. The sole of his right shoe had come loose, and flapped as he walked. He’d tried to fix it temporarily with strips of canvas that the poacher had cut for him from an old satchel.
He climbed to the top. Dizziness. And also euphoria at being liberated from the flats, as though he had been lifted by a giant hand.
But he saw no sign of life. Nowhere was there a rectangular structure to betray the hand of man. He turned slowly where he stood: waving grass, yellow sea.
The poacher and the man from Ashkhabad joined him. ‘Nothing, right?’ the man from Ashkhabad said. The boy shook his head.
The man from Ashkhabad moaned. ‘We’re doomed.’
‘You are. I’m not,’ the poacher said quietly.
The boy was the only one who paid attention to his words. He knew the poacher was right, that he would outlive them all. He was a stone; he knew what it meant to endure.
Vitaly reached the top, out of breath. Then the woman appeared. The Ethiopian was the last one up the hill. Being around the tall man had changed him; he acted like one of them now. He looked around. There was no difference between the road they’d taken and the road they had to follow. The black man looked up, and the boy followed his gaze. A flight of geese at high altitude were flying south, the formation weaving and parting and rejoining.
What does he see? the boy wondered. What is he thinking?
As they were getting ready to descend, the black man reached out and touched Vitaly’s arm. Vitaly recoiled. ‘Keep your hands off me, you pig.’
The black man indicated a dense patch of grass far away, and said something in his indecipherable tongue. The poacher and the man from Ashkhabad looked. There was a hint of green amid the yellow. Maybe it was a hollow where water collected during long droughts. Maybe they would find wood there, or wild onions.
Like shadows, they wander across the steppes, all skinny as a strap. It won’t be long before they grow transparent and disappear. Departing from their route, they head south, towards the spot the Ethiopian showed them. When they get there they find nothing but a few bushes and tall, plumed grass. They dig like men possessed, in search of onions and wild tulip bulbs. When they leave, the ground is upturned, as though a band of nomads has dug for treasure there. They avoid each other’s eyes; the blow is unbearable.