It’s almost always between Vitaly and the man from Ashkhabad. It’s been that way from the start, when fate brought them together, and dominance was distributed over the group.
Vitaly and the man from Ashkhabad.
The boy sees them getting the same ideas. He knows that the will of the one will bump up hard against that of the other — iron against iron.
The poacher is a lone wolf; he doesn’t involve himself in the struggle for the throne. The tall man is only a vassal — he follows the strongest.
The woman, the boy, and the negro play a different role. Prey. Victim. Observer. They do their best to make themselves invisible.
Drops tick loudly at dusk against the metal lid on the tall man’s head. He moans quietly. ‘Why didn’t we stay put? The good Lord gave us a village to spend the night in, a roof over our heads, but we didn’t get it. We didn’t listen.’
‘You wanted to leave, too.’ In the semi-darkness, it is the voice of the man from Ashkhabad.
‘Not me! Him!’
It sounds as though a dog has been kicked. They all look at Vitaly — the tall man’s hand is pointing at him. Vitaly sits motionless, his head bowed. His fit of rage earlier in the day has drained him.
The poacher appears from the tall, plumed grass. He sinks to the ground a little ways from the rest. Wrapping his arms around his knees, he rests his chin on his chest. He rests like a mountain.
The tall man turns his attention to the boy. ‘Show me how many apples you have. Come on, show me.’
‘Idiot,’ the boy says. He is poised to jump to his feet and run.
‘Give me your apples, boy. I’m twice your size! What gives him the right to have as many apples as I do? I can’t stand cheaters. Let him give me his apples!’ He sits up a bit straighter. ‘Empty your pockets, boy.’
‘Over my dead body.’ The boy slides back a bit further.
The tall man moans. ‘Listen to that! Listen to that, would you! What he needs is a good thumping, to beat the evil out of him.’ He shuts his eyes, and sways his head back and forth like a woman in mourning. ‘Almaty, oh Almaty! Father of all apples! All the apples in the world, blushing like a girl’s cheeks. He’d rather see me die than give me his apples. What kind of world do we live in? Woe is me.’
The boy snorts. ‘Idiot,’ he says again.
In the dark, at a safe distance from the others, the boy rolls himself up in a sheet of plastic. He’d found it in a stall, one corner sticking out from under a pile of dried manure. After he pulled it out he used a stone to scrape off the dung. Then he folded it up and stuffed it into his coat.
Drops thrum against the plastic. He can’t sleep; he’s afraid the tall man will come and steal his apples. His eyes try to get a grip on the darkness, to drill through the blackness — silhouettes that change their shape, the motion that betrays the presence of an other.
He’s alone. His heart is pounding hard. He clutches the knife, ready to lash out.
In the last blue of dusk, the man from Ashkhabad took the woman. Vitaly was too exhausted to fight for her. The boy covered his ears with his hands and kept them there for a while, but she didn’t even scream once.
CHAPTER FIVE. The second half of the evening
Pontus Beg ate his dinner. He ladled two bowls of soup from the pan, his forearms resting on the table, the television’s sound turned off. He was listening to the radio — news and current affairs, sometimes music. A chunk of gristle lodged between his teeth. Without Zita around, his own house seemed unwelcoming. The ghost of abandonment breathed down his neck.
It had taken him a long time to figure out where the clenching in his innards came from, and when he finally did, it annoyed him. He didn’t want to think about things that couldn’t be changed. He didn’t want to feel them either. Feelings were for the happy.
Raindrops left glistening tracks down the panes. He went to the window and drew the curtains, locking out his reflection. He carried the plate and the soup bowl to the kitchen, mixed a little hot water and soap in the sink, and washed them. Long ago, when he’d viewed the contours of his further existence, he had understood that it was vital to maintain a minimum of order in his home. He would cook for himself, eat at the table — slowly, not wolfing it down, as though Zita were watching him from beneath her heavy eyebrows — and then wash the pans, the cutlery, and the plate, and put them all away.
During his time at the police academy he had twice received a reprimand for having streaks of ash and spots of grease on his uniform. When his class was sworn in, Commander Diniz gave the speech. Yevgeni Diniz was a bastard, but his words glistened as prettily as his boots. And he knew a thing or two. He was interested in things of the mind; Beg remembered thinking that was unusual for a policeman.
That speech was the first time Beg had heard about an old Chinaman named Confucius. Confucius, if he were in charge of a country, Diniz said, would first set about rectifying the way the language was used. For if the language is incorrect, then what is said is not what is meant. And if what is said is not what is meant, no work can be accomplished. If no work is accomplished, arts and ethics cannot flourish. If they do not flourish, justice cannot be properly administered. And if there is no justice, the nation is rudderless. That is why language should not be used arbitrarily. That is what it all comes down to.
Diniz was verbose; the panoramas he presented were sweeping. That made Beg impatient. But in the train on the way to his parents’ farm, he suddenly saw the veiled social criticism in his commanding officer’s words. Diniz had not presented the words of the old philosopher as a warning to the young graduates, but as a comment on the state of the nation. Along the ladder of decline Confucius had sketched, this country was on the bottom rung. The only prospect was chaos. The social order had become specious, a layer of opaque ice of which one could not judge the thickness — not until you stood on it and fell through.
The nervous governmental paranoia of that day had probably overlooked the words of a Chinese sage.
Ever since then, Pontus Beg saw the model of gradual decline everywhere he looked. It started with one little thing and ended in total confusion. In every field of life, that one little thing had to be identified, isolated, and disarmed. That was why he cooked for himself every night, ate at the table every night, washed his dishes and put them away neatly — against the forces of neglect, the slippery slope, an ignominious end.
He must have died a long time ago, Diniz, or else he was off counting his buttons in an old people’s flat somewhere, staring at the dull metal of his insignia.
Through him, Beg had become interested in Oriental philosophy; he read Confucius, Zhuangzi, and Lao Tse, and wasn’t bothered by his inability to completely understand most of it.
Beg put the bottle on the table. The radio reported that the former minister of transport had been found dead in his dacha. He had shot himself twice in the back of the head, the newsreader said.
Beg poured himself a shot. The bottle cap rolled away across the tabletop. ‘To you, Your Excellency,’ he said, eyes raised to the ceiling. ‘The only suicide in the world who has ever shot himself twice in the back of the head.’
There was exactly enough to do for half an evening. The day had slowed by degrees, and now came to a complete stop. The second half of the evening was a rest home where you waited stoically for your end to come. A bit put off, but without much hope of reprieve.
He drank four glasses of vodka — four glasses, no more than that. A lullaby. Part of his little order of things. Five glasses meant that he would stamp around the house on one warm and one cold foot, smoke himself hoarse, and go rifling through shoeboxes of letters and photos in search of things that no longer were. In his books he would try to recover passages he’d marked, in search of an answer.