The woman buried her face in her hands.
‘Fuck,’ the poacher said for the second time that day. He took the thawed head by the hair, walked to the door, and tossed it into the street.
The woman stood up, wormed past him through the doorway, and came back carrying the head.
‘Have you forgotten?’ she panted, ‘how he brought us here? Is that your thanks? For this? A roof over our heads, the fire, the food in your stomach?’
She held up the head for him to see. Thin, colourless fluid dripped from the wound at the neck. ‘He steered Vitaly’s hand to cut off his head, so that he could be with us. Even in death he hasn’t left us.’
The boy took a breath to say something, but choked back his words. The poacher stared into the fire.
‘There’s something to what she says,’ the man from Ashkhabad said haltingly. ‘Our luck has changed so much since we started going south, it’s amazing.’
‘That’s no accident,’ the woman said.
The boy looked at the poacher. He wanted to know what he was thinking.
The woman pointed at the boy.
‘And have you people forgotten his dreams?’
They had not forgotten his dreams.
‘I’ll admit,’ the poacher said then, ‘I was against it. But we were definitely being pointed in the right direction.’
The others nodded. The thought gave them a sense of comfort and security.
The woman spoke, explaining the signs to them. Since the death of the black man and the boy’s first dreams, time had acted as a helpmeet; the situation had suddenly changed in their favour. The doom that had lingered over their heads from the start had dispersed and blown away. The oppression, the stone on their chests, was lifted. Who could point to any other cause than the black man’s death? She had found none; it was his death that had redeemed them. He who had brought on the oppression had lifted it, too.
‘I don’t understand it completely,’ the man from Ashkhabad said. ‘But, at the same time, I don’t see what else it could be.’
‘You don’t have to understand everything,’ the woman said. ‘It’s enough that it happened. It’s impossible to understand everything. All we have to do is be grateful.’
‘That we …’ the poacher murmured, ‘we, of all people … get to experience something like this. It’s just …’
The others nodded; yes, they had been chosen. The boy looked around wide-eyed, and saw how a shared conviction took hold of the others, how they came together around the black man’s head. His death united the opposites. A feeling of euphoria overtook him, too. Everything had, of necessity, led to this outcome. Everything had happened so that he could see it happen, so that he could tell about it later.
The poacher shook his head. ‘Who would have believed it?’ He poked at the fire and said: ‘So what now? What’s expected of us?’
‘That we follow him,’ the woman said, ‘and not doubt.’
She said that the head would lead them; they had to fear it and honour it, and not forget what they had been through.
At the heart of their little community, they reshaped his image: mercurial and ambiguous. His cruelty, but also his mercy.
How he had nourished himself with the dead.
Suddenly, in a shrill voice, the boy said: ‘At first I couldn’t believe it, but the longer I thought about it … what else could it be?’
The woman nodded. ‘He nourished himself with us.’
‘That’s why he lagged behind all the time!’ the boy cried.
‘It was him or us,’ the man from Ashkhabad said.
His death was inevitable, the way seed had to fall to the ground and perish in order to bring forth fruit again in spring. The poacher, the woman, and the boy come from farming families, so they know how that goes. They know about the eternal cycle. How new life sprouts from the dead.
They sit around the fire and tell each other what they remember: on top of the burial mound he had picked out Vitaly — with his finger he had burned his sign into his arm. They talk of the corrosive mange that had appeared on the tall man’s body; how he had conjured food out of nothingness, after they had left the tall man for dead; and how he had sown fear and conflict among them.
What luck that they had killed him! Such wisdom! In life, he had destroyed them; in death, he was their salvation. In thankfulness and in repugnance, they looked at the head beside the doorpost — that abhorrent, knowing thing.
Vitaly! Where’s Vitaly? They can’t lose him now, now that they know that he is the bearer, that they are saved.
By the time the poacher found him, in the graveyard outside the village, it was already dark. Between the listing headstones he had dug a shallow pit in the cold ground. His eyes closed, hands folded across his chest, he lay waiting for death. And death would certainly have found him if the poacher hadn’t chased him out of his grave before night set in.
Now he is sitting hunched by the fire. He occasionally dips his hand into a can of beans and licks his fingers. He’s beyond hunger. To their questions, he gives no reply.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE. We want him back
‘The poacher’s lying,’ the boy tells Beg. ‘He did it himself. After we went back.’
‘Back where?’
‘To Africa.’
‘Why?’
‘We almost couldn’t move. Like we had lead in our shoes. He didn’t want to let us go.’
‘Haç, the one you call the poacher, says that you dreamed the things that made you people go south.’
The boy crossed his arms grumpily. The new comic books Beg had brought with him were lying on the bedspread. His fingertips slid across their colourful covers. His skull sported a fine down of black hairs.
‘Geese,’ he said then, for the sooner Beg left, the sooner he could start on his comics.
‘Geese,’ Beg repeated.
‘Just the things I saw up in the air. I dreamed about that a couple of times. First geese, then airplanes. They asked me what direction they were going in. That way, I said. That’s what happened. Her grandma used to dream about geese, too, she said. She wanted to know everything.’ He snorted. ‘She’s nuts.’
‘Was that before you went back to the black man’s body, or afterwards?’
‘Around the same time. I don’t remember exactly.’
‘And when you got back, Haç cut off his head.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You saw him do that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You were all there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Everyone saw it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How did he do it?’
‘With Africa’s knife. He found it in his pocket. It used to belong to the tall man, that knife.’
‘So why did his head have to be cut off?’
‘Ach.’
He flipped one of the comic books closed and put it back. ‘The woman’s the one who said that he dreamed inside my head, not me.’
‘And was that true?’
The boy lowered his eyes. Beg repeated the question.
‘Have you got a better idea?’ the boy said. ‘If you look at everything that happened after that? All the good luck we had all of a sudden? She said we had to keep him with us, that he would lead us and stuff. But we couldn’t take all of him along. So …’
Beg nodded. His understanding was not feigned; he understood their desperation. Their gods hadn’t answered their pleas. Deaf and mute, they had looked down on them. So they had replaced them.
‘He was still lying there,’ the boy said, ‘but don’t ask me why. Animals had eaten their way right through his ribs. They picked at his liver, his organs. Blecch.’