‘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 wooden 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.