Look, he told himself, you have to look carefully.
He remembered something his mother had told him once, a memory of him as a little boy. A little sister was born and, according to his mother, he had said: ‘Babies can’t talk because they’re not allowed to tell secrets about heaven.’
All right, he thought now, I may not know about heaven’s secrets yet, but I’ll sure find out about the earthly ones.
During the journey he had already seen and understood more than in all the years before. If he survived, the trip would shape and scar him.
‘He was the last one to show up,’ the man from Ashkhabad said.
‘What if he touches us, too?’ the woman said. ‘In our sleep?’
The man from Ashkhabad shook his head, unable to answer.
‘He wasn’t the last one to show up,’ the boy said. ‘He was there from the start. Along with the rest of us.’
‘Why do you say that?’ the woman said bitterly. ‘Why are you lying about it?’
‘He was the last one,’ Vitaly said. ‘No one knew where he came from. Suddenly he was just there, to bring us bad luck …’
‘Like a djinn,’ the woman said.
It was the first time the boy saw her talk to the man from Ashkhabad, whose prey she was at night. Once she had spat on him — she had said she would kill him if she got the chance — but that all seemed to have vanished now. The boy kept his mouth shut; this sudden unanimity allowed for no dissent.
It was not his custom, but now the poacher joined in, too. ‘You’re the one who brought him back to us,’ he told the tall man. ‘We shook him off, then you showed up with him again. That’s the way I see it.’
‘All I did was follow him!’ the tall man protested. ‘He was the one who found your trail.’
The poacher shrugged. ‘I’m only telling you what I saw.’
Vitaly nodded furiously, fever and mortal fear in his bulging eyes. The life will go out of him soon. His breathing is agitated. There’s only one thing he longs for now: someone on whom to pin his misfortune. He needs to punish the black man, drag him along in his fall. That’s what he still has to do. All the venom left in him he will apply to that end.
Evening. As they sit in the wet sand, a host of fat, round clouds converge above their heads. At the edges of the steppe, bolts shoot down from the violet sky.
‘Hey, beanpole!’ Vitaly says. ‘What did you two get up to back there anyway, you and that nigger friend of yours?’
The tall man shrugs reluctantly.
‘We leave you behind for dead and suddenly you’re back, nothing wrong with you, fit as a fiddle. How about you explain that to us, how that’s possible.’
The others chimed in. Yeah, what exactly did happen?
The tall man looked at the ground. ‘Nothing,’ he said quietly.
‘Bullshit,’ Vitaly said. ‘One minute you’re kicking the bucket, the next minute you come prancing in.’
The woman pulls her coat tighter around her. The boy looks down the row of emaciated male faces, the jutting cheekbones above their beards, their eyes sunk deep in the sockets — an inquisition in rags. They glare at the tall man. He should never have returned from the plains. For that he was being condemned. The deepest suspicion still had to be pronounced, but it floated out in front of the rest, waiting for the right moment to descend: the suspicion that witchcraft was at play here, a conspiracy with the darkness. That was the line of accusation the tribunal would choose, inexorably; the boy sensed it. The tall man could not escape. There was no possible defence; suspicion and verdict were one. The dark shapes before him, a tangled-up ball of fear and rage. The tall man slid back from the circle a little. His hand rested on a pebble. He picked it up and raised it to his myopic eyes: a smooth, white little stone, bleached like the shells on a beach. Had the steppe once been a sea? Black fish slipped noiselessly past his body. Dark waves of kelp bobbed before his eyes, the eyes of a pitiful drowned man at the bottom of the ocean.
‘He gave me something to eat,’ he said.
‘So what did you two have to eat?’ Vitaly mocked. ‘Soup and white bread?’
‘He had a can with him.’
‘And what was in the can? Caviar?’
‘Dog food. I think it was dog food.’
‘And where did he get that from?’
He shook his head. ‘How should I know …?’
‘He’s your friend, isn’t he?’ the woman shrilled.
His quiet voice: ‘He’s not my friend.’
‘You mean he helped you for no reason? Just like that?’
Behind them, a flash of lightning broke the clouds. Thunder rolled across the sky. Gently, after that, came the sound of rain around them.
Pointing at his upper arm, Vitaly asked whether the black man had touched him, too.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ the tall man said, ‘what do you mean by that?’
‘Here!’ Vitaly hissed. ‘Here, this is where he touched me with his finger!’
Pulling his sweater up over his head, he showed them his arm. They looked in dismay at the wound that lay like a burning sun between faded tattoos. The ring around it had widened, and the crater seemed even deeper.
‘No,’ the tall man said, ‘he didn’t touch me. Or wait, when he helped me to my feet.’
‘Show us,’ Vitaly said.
‘Fuck off.’
‘Show us!’
‘Aw, man, knock it off.’
But his plea was weak. Vitaly stood up and began yanking on the man’s clothes. ‘Show us, damn you!’
The tall man flailed his arms wildly and edged back even further. Beyond Vitaly’s reach, he slowly pulled off the layers of sweaters and T-shirts. A little later, he stood before them like that, a shivering blade of grass in the rain. They were shocked by the look of him. They knew: they were this skinny, too. His sternum stuck out, and the ribs rose and fell beneath the papery skin. The tall man looked down at his own body, inquisitively, in search of marks. ‘Hey,’ he said when he spotted the infected fleabites on his stomach.
‘You see, you see!’ Vitaly crowed.
The others could not keep their eyes off his offensive nakedness, the face of starvation. Skin, nails, and hair.
Slow as a cold reptile, the tall man put it all back on.
A web of forked lightning illuminated the twilight.
‘And that one over there’ — the man from Ashkhabad pointed to where the black man had built his nest — ‘has been stuffing himself and laughing at us the whole goddamn time.’
This was an unbearable thought, an insult to their desperate hunger.
‘Has he got grub or not?’ Vitaly asked the tall man.
‘I didn’t see any.’
‘He gave you something to eat, didn’t he? That means he’s got grub, doesn’t it?’
‘Maybe, yeah, I guess.’ The tall man flapped his arms wildly now. ‘How should I know!’
The man from Ashkhabad rose to his feet, and he and Vitaly walked over to the Ethiopian’s camp. The others followed. They approached him cautiously, fearful of the power they had created in their minds.
‘Hey, Africa,’ Vitaly said, kicking at the prone form. The tarp moved, and the black man stuck his head out.
‘Food!’ Vitaly said. He raised his hand to his mouth.
The black man laughed nervously.
‘You’ve got food there,’ Vitaly said. He kicked at him again.
The black man crawled out from under the tarp and backed away from them.
They dumped the contents of his satchel on the wet ground and lifted the plastic to see if anything was hidden there. Uncomprehendingly, the black man watched as they rummaged through his possessions — the empty can, a Bible they couldn’t read (they saw the silver cross on the cover), a roll of newspapers, his empty lighters, and his jingling collection of tin bottle caps. They had counted on finding a secret food stash, and now they looked in disbelief at his paltry possessions. They kicked apart the ring of grass, but found nothing. The Ethiopian looked at the tall man — a look that asked for help, a mitigating word to break the tension — but the tall man averted his eyes. Dark pillars, dripping with rain, they looked in silence at the African. They turned and went back to their places.