‘So?’
‘So I’m leaving tomorrow morning, early.’
He turned and walked through the tall grass back to the house. The boy watched him go, his chest filled with impotent rage at this desertion. The poacher could leave them behind without a trace of regret. Before the day was done he would have forgotten them. He lived with his eyes on the horizon, tolerating the others with the patience of a pack animal.
The woman and the man from Ashkhabad had pressed to stay longer, to regain their strength, but the boy had more confidence in the poacher’s common sense. If the snow came, they would be stranded in the chicken lady’s house, without enough food to survive the winter.
‘And what about Africa?’ the boy yelled after the poacher.
He turned. ‘He’s for the living,’ he shouted back, and was lost from sight.
That evening, the poacher prepared his journey. He sewed two burlap bags together. He would carry them over his shoulder. The bottom was tied to his waist with a rope, so the bags wouldn’t get in the way as he walked. He filled them with canned food and a jar of blanched vegetables. In the light of the oil lantern, he looked like the ghost of some saint. He worked silently and efficiently. When he removed the satchel from his shoulder and vanished into the frozen night, the boy said: ‘We’re taking Africa with us.’
‘No you’re not,’ the woman said.
‘He’s already gone.’
He was right: the head had disappeared.
The poacher came in with a couple of chickens in a sack. He wrung their necks and began plucking them, paying no attention to the woman’s angry looks. At last she said: ‘Where is he? Give him back — he’s ours.’
‘Snow’s coming,’ the poacher said without looking up from his work. ‘The living are moving on; the dead will stay here.’
‘There, out there, that’s exactly where death is,’ the woman shrilled. ‘Walking without knowing where you’re going, that’s death!’
The poacher shook his head slowly. ‘He serves the living. Fine if you people want to stay here, but how are you going to survive for four or five months with only enough supplies for one person? There are only a couple of chickens left. The rest are in this bag. So you do the arithmetic.’
Now the boy left the room. He took a few steps outside, and the cold snapped at his legs. Feeling his way, he went into the coop, the tingling odour of chicken shit and sawdust in his nostrils. One foot in the front of the other, he shuffled through the darkened coop until he got to the roost. He tried to feel which ones were the fattest; he had no use for scraggly pullets at this point. Slowly, so as not to startle the huddled hens in their sleep, he lifted the first one from the roost. Clucking quietly, the bird slid to the bottom of the sack. ‘I am death,’ the boy whispered. ‘I come by night.’
He took four chickens, and closed the coop behind him. The earth crunched as he walked past the bare poplars to the house. The chimney smoke rose against the frozen opaline glass of night. How would they survive these nights out on the steppe? They would freeze to death, their rock-hard corpses impervious to bacteria and predators. Only in spring would the snow and frost release their corpses, the sun shining in their dead eyes …
No! He had to have faith! The black man would help them, just like he’d helped them before. The Ethiopian would point the way, and they would reach the civilised world. He wasn’t afraid. He wouldn’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. He had come this far already …
In front of the stove, he wrung the birds’ necks, plucked them, cut them open, and pulled out their guts. The house floated on the aroma of frying chicken. The woman and the man from Ashkhabad were united in a stationary covenant, running doubtfully through their options. Vitaly lay sleeping beside the stove. The chicken lady was snoring in her armchair.
‘I think,’ the man from Ashkhabad said to the woman at last, ‘that we should go along. There’s no other way.’
‘Why?’ the woman shouted. ‘We could … maybe someone will come along. For her, someone who … family, her children?’
‘Those victuals were fresh,’ the poacher said from across the room.
The boy piled the last of the supplies on the counter, and took his share. The man from Ashkhabad began to move. He gathered clothing and put it on, layer by layer. The boy, too, grabbed pieces of clothing from the piles on the floor. A competitive eagerness arose, the start of a conflict over a pair of woollen tights the boy had his eye on, and then the man from Ashkhabad pulled back his hand.
Sulking, the woman began preparing for what would be the last stage of their journey. She didn’t want to stay behind on her own. The prospect of slow death by starvation frightened her more than dying under the wide-open skies, on the vast steppes.
The man from Ashkhabad pulled some clothes out from under Vitaly. ‘Get your lazy arse off there,’ he murmured. He handed the woman a sweater and some rags to bind up her shoes.
They slaughtered all the chickens. It was the rooster’s turn as well now. The stove glowed as new pieces of chicken were added to the spattering fat, one after the other. The night was filled with excitement and a certain fateful cheeriness that could exist as long as they were still close to the warm stove. Everyone gathered clothing and food; together they assembled enough warm clothes for Vitaly. He was the one who would carry the head, the light that would lead them through the endless night. The poacher withdrew to the bed behind the stove, his provisions within arm’s reach. He was ready for the last leg. The others checked to be sure they were properly armed against the cold — whether their satchels were sturdy enough, whether the weight was distributed evenly.
‘A few days, no more than that,’ the man from Ashkhabad said. ‘Can’t be any longer.’
‘We have the tracks,’ the boy said confidently. ‘We’ve never had tracks before. If they start somewhere, they have to end somewhere, too. Has to be.’
‘If that’s His will,’ the woman said.
The man from Ashkhabad pointed at the chicken. ‘It’s ready now.’
The boy lifted the bird from the pan by one leg. It was not nearly morning yet.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT. Snow and ice
‘And the chicken lady?’ Beg asked. ‘You just left her behind?’
‘What else could we do?’ the boy said. ‘She was really old.’
‘That’s a cruel thing to say. You owe your life to her. Couldn’t you be a little more grateful?’
The boy’s legs dangled over the edge of the bed. He’d been taken off the drip; he could move around the room freely now.
‘So what do you think happened to her?’ Beg asked.
‘How should I know?’
‘But you can probably guess, can’t you?’
‘Probably. But why should I?’
‘Because you people plundered her supplies and then left her behind, that’s why.’
‘She was crazy.’
‘Oh, so that justifies everything? Then it’s okay?’
The boy shrugged. He was in a brazen, recalcitrant mood. ‘You don’t have to act like it was easy. It was either her or us, you know?’
He was skating across the linoleum floor on his bare feet.
Touché, Beg thought. He had let himself be carried away by his pity, by the thought of the slow, lonely death of an old woman with wooden cherries in her hair.
The poacher had said something else, a clarification, a clue that revealed something about the head’s character, its personality. When the subject of the abandoned woman came up, he said: ‘We were able to go on because she was there. What do you think — you think we were in a position to turn that down?’