‘I don’t think anything. I asked you.’
The man across from him closed his eyes and massaged his forehead with his fingertips. ‘There was a good reason for us to be there,’ he said after a time. ‘We took what was coming to us. She was there for us, so that we could go on. Like in the field, where the prey exists for the hunter. That’s how I see it.’
‘That’s still how you see it?’
After a while, he said: ‘Yeah.’
‘He took you people to her …’
The poacher nodded.
‘So that you could survive.’
‘That’s right.’
‘As a sort of sacrifice? An involuntary sacrifice?’
The poacher closed his eyes. ‘Words, words,’ he murmured.
‘He was on your side; he was only there for you people. Not for some feeble-minded woman; only for you. He allowed you to rob her of everything she had because you people were his favourites, am I right? Or I have got it all wrong?’
‘Go ahead, make it all sound ridiculous, I don’t care.’
But this was precisely what fascinated Beg. The god who favoured his people above all others: he wasn’t there for all people; no, only for his people, rather like the nepotism of Semjon Blok. As far as Beg’s own god went, it was no different: he had also picked his darlings. Thousands of years later, that warm light fell on him, too, on Pontus Beg — a pleasant feeling, to be honest, one he wouldn’t have wanted to do without. No one deals lightly with his own redemption.
They left her house in the early-morning hours. The old woman was asleep in her chair, her mouth hanging open. The elastic bands had come loose, so that her grey hair hung in strands against the backrest. The floor was a carpet of feathers and down and innards; there were no chickens left.
The boy was the last to leave. He closed the door behind him. ‘Fuck,’ he said, stamping his feet on the porch. He and the others stood there a bit indecisively, as though unable to believe that they had actually left the warmth inside. The poacher had already disappeared. Like sheep ill at ease in new surroundings, they began moving, and felt how the cold took them in its grasp. Wasn’t starving beside the stove preferable to freezing to death on the steppe, the boy wondered. The cold was a physical opponent — you had to be strong and fit to stand up to it. But they were skinny and feeble; they were no match for it. These last few weeks of gorging themselves made no difference.
They walked through the village. The poacher appeared from a half-collapsed shed, carrying the bag containing the black man’s head. They formed a conference of shadows, and then the poacher stuck Vitaly’s arm through the shoulder strap and hung the bag around his neck. This was how it was meant to be: the head and the bearer united, in a passing but sacred moment. A dash of hope trickled through their insides, a rarefied outlook — the prospect of things ending well.
‘It’s time,’ the poacher said, his voice muffled by the scarf covering his face. He took Vitaly by the arm. He let himself be led along willingly, an obedient servant.
They reached the edge of the village. There they stopped, as though to muster up the final crumbs of courage. They had tied rags around their shoes, and cloths around their necks, their steaming nostrils sticking out of the textile. The world wore the nocturnal blue of enamel; ice-crystals had settled on the stalks of grass. The steppe opened up wide and dark before them. They had to brace themselves against that piercing emptiness, as much as against the cold. They started moving, the boy taking up the rear. He kicked holes in the hollow white ice between the tyre tracks.
Their footsteps crunched on the frozen layer of snow. The cold slipped through their clothes, felt its way along their limbs, and slid into their muscles and bones. It had only just started to grow light, and they were already as cold as stone. The village had dissolved behind them, a luxurious mirage. So much happiness, all that comfort — it was already more than they could imagine.
The thin snow lit up with a blue sheen at first dawn. A gradual light spread itself across the world, the sun itself remaining behind the ashen cover of cloud. Out in front went the poacher, keeping Vitaly close to him. The others could barely keep up. The head dangled against Vitaly’s back, summoning them to move on. But as the day proceeded, the distance between them grew. The boy was sent up ahead as the liaison, to ask the poacher to slow the pace until the others could catch up.
Only when darkness came did they find each other. The poacher and Vitaly were sitting by a little fire in a dip beside the road, and didn’t look up when the others approached, groaning, holding out their yearning hands until they almost touched the flames. The poacher melted snow in a pan. They drank greedily.
They ate frozen chicken and beans until their jaws burned. They didn’t have a yardstick for divvying up their supplies, because they had no idea how long their journey would last. And because surviving for more than a few days was unthinkable, they ate until they could eat no more. Then they unfolded their cardboard and mats on the frozen ground, and buried themselves in loose ends of cloth and blankets. They crawled close together in the dip. Above them, the sky was cloudy and dark — there were no stars — and beside the dying embers lay the black man’s head. They sent it their pleas and detailed imageries of salvation. The boy lay at the outer edge, not wanting to be beside Vitaly. Even though Vitaly’s brains had been ground to mush, the boy remembered who he had been. He was still inside there somewhere.
He slept very little. The hard, cold ground hurt his bones. He tried to think about the house where he would live when this was all over, the big house for his whole family — if only he could remember the faces of his father, his mother, and his brother! They kept escaping him; there was only the flash of an eye, a laugh, his mother’s skirts. And the vultures riding the thermals over the valley, he saw, but not the people themselves.
Where are you? he shouted in silence. Come out!
But he had been away from home too long already; his new life had buried the old one. Only his heart wept. Real tears would have frozen right away and rolled from his cheeks like pearls.
One day, he promised himself, once he was safe, he would dig up his old life; it was waiting for him beneath the sand — immovable, unchanged.
Stiff as string puppets, they stumbled through the day. They heard geese in the sky above them, but didn’t see them. A bit of snow fell that afternoon. For a few hours, tiny flakes whirled down from heaven. They were still following the frozen tyre tracks, their lifeline. They had to go somewhere, because they came from somewhere.
That was how they crawled forth across the frozen planet, an icy stone. The sky grew more and more compact. Snow fell from it uninterruptedly now, grey as ash. They peered into the lightless day through a crack in the cloths protecting their faces. The snow whirled before their eyes. It had been the worst mistake of their lives, to move on again. The head had stopped bringing them luck; his candle had guttered.
But there was no going back. The village was already too far away; they could move only ahead.
They rested for a few hours, mere snowy bumps on the plain. Their account of time had been reduced to days, hours.
Long before the new day began, they were on their feet again. They ploughed through the heavy snow. Still following the track, the poacher cleared the way before them. When they stopped for a moment, the silence pressed against their ears. The snow had covered the world and its sounds.
Before their eyes, the picture shattered; they could see for only a few metres.