“Raise it,” General Steng barks, and we look at each other, uncertain, but we do, finally, lifting the trees we've cut and hewn into their new configuration, a rectangle, and at the top an intricate structure of knots.
“Today we hang the crocodile,” the general says. “We will bear no more loss. We will bear no more.”
A Recipe for Mercy
I think yearningly of my Eleventh Mercy, the Mercy of Rebellion. The Reversed Mercy is the Crushing of the Rebellious. It says that the sins of rebellion shall not be lifted up. The spell is simple enough, though it requires wire and a razor blade, a grinding of coarse salt, a dish made of fine glass, and an envelope of something stronger than cocaine.
I have none of those ingredients here in the jungle.
There will be no more Eleventh, nor the feelings it evokes, the way the spell is crafted to fill its victim with hope of revolution, the way the room seems to disappear as my hands and the wire move closer. It's a Mercy, and it is a magic, and in the cycle of magics, I've had nearly as much power as the general does.
I will never see my son again, nor know what sort of soldier he may become.
I feel something rise inside me, a rebellion against the Mercies, a knowledge that there will be no forgiveness.
I decide to think about the desert and how we trained there until our skin was one with the sand. This was nothing regular, our training. We were elite. We were the good men, the best men, the only ones trained in the Thirteen Mercies, and all our training went to hell when the country turned against us. None of us knows why we've been condemned to a crocodile. Nothing like this punishment exists in our manuals.
I remember the way we learned the Mercies. I remember the blood I took from my son, how I poured it out into a circle and lit it on fire. I knew what he would feel, thousands of miles away, and I did it anyway. My baby in his crib. His mother leaning over him, puzzled, then frantic.
The skin of the sky peeled back like a wound full of gravel.
Our training was more important than love.
We would win the war with these weapons, we thought then. We'd take the land and pour our burned burdens out upon it. We'd be merciful, all of us, Reversing the Mercies of god until the sand turned to salt and then to fire.
There were no gods who could ignore it. There was no love that could satisfy it. We were the men, and we were winning.
I don't know anything like that now. The magic's worn off and all I am is a man in the dark, surrounded by men in the dark.
The Fourth Coming of Nobody
The general stands straight, his arms crossed. “Now we wait,” he says.
We sit in the mud. We wait night and day, in the dark, in the gray downpour. All around us, the jungle crackles and things move within it. Our guards whisper but we can't understand them.
We're on an island surrounded by sharks, and the sharks are like Mercies. Any one of them could kill us, or they might all do it at the same time. We feel fed upon.
Eight of us are dead, and we have only five men left. Perhaps we're the last five men in the world.
“There was an old woman,” sings Major Rivel Harmer, practitioner of the Ninth Mercy — Keeping Kindness for Thousands of Generations, Reversed to the Keeping of Hatred, the grudge against grandchildren and great-grandchildren. “Who lived in a shoe — ”
General Steng puts up a hand to silence him. None of us will take Harmer's tongue, but the general can do as he pleases. There will be no babble here in the jungle, no matter how frightened we are, no matter how the seventh year ebbs into a winter that isn't.
“There,” the general hisses, staring into the trees where something orange glows. “She's there.”
I crouch on legs that've lost muscle. An old man now, all at once, and us in possession of only five of the Mercies, not enough to break anything strong.
She comes out of the trees, body like a tree trunk, tail long and narrow, face pointed. We have our stakes, but our stakes are only twigs. She's older than we will ever be.
She looks us each in the eyes and smiles.
“Who are you?” the general shouts at her. “Who sent you?”
The crocodile writhes and her skin splits, blood dripping from hide. Her mouth opens wider.
“Who are you?” I shout in echo. “What kind of Mercy are you?”
The crocodile's no longer a crocodile. She ripples up out of the skin, her face through the teeth, her fingers through the claws.
“I am,” the old woman says, “the Thirteenth Mercy.”
The Mercy of the Uncleaning
The Thirteenth Mercy was originally the Mercy of the Cleansing of Sins. In Reverse, the Thirteenth is the Mercy of Filth, the bestowal of all of our sins into the souls of the enemy, the crushing beneath sins of everything living. Everyone is evil in the Reversed Mercy. It's constructed around the knowledge of hopelessness.
It is performed with bleach and wool.
Had we completed it at Kinotra, a cloud would've risen over the prison, and in it, the enemy would have drifted, driven forward across the sky by our hatred, sleepless and hungry forever.
The sacrifice stands for everything we've lost, everything we've given over to fighting, soldiers’ lives spent placing bombs in public squares and buses, centuries of soldiers’ time spent poisoning and lynching, all the labors of war both just and unjust, all the orders followed, all the sins accrued by souls that did not ask for them. The pursuit of the truth is complicated. Sometimes the truth hides in the organs of the enemy, and sometimes it does not.
There is no way to know unless one looks deep.
The Execution of Nobody
The general signals and the ropes spin up from the mud, wet and twisting, lassoing her legs and tail, knotting around her throat.
Major Harmer hauls Nobody up, grunting, hissing the phrases of his half-broken Mercy, cursing her children and her children's children, cursing her past and future.
Nobody opens her jaws and shows us teeth, and then opens claws and shows us fingers, the delicate hands of a woman pressed beneath the claws of a crocodile.
She has silver hair and orange eyes. Her scales are black enough to make her disappear. Our camouflage doesn't hide us. She's the kind of thing that can see in the dark.
At last we see her in full.
This crocodile hangs from our gallows now, we five remaining Merciful around her. We're winning. She's our enemy. When we kill her, we'll be free of everything.
We'll complete our Mercies and end this torment. Then home. We're all thinking it.
She's our mission, revealed to us at last. She's what we came here to destroy.
I can see her moving, her tail lashing. The rain doesn't cease. It's harder, hard enough to bend the trees surrounding us, and a wind gasps into life, breaking branches around the clearing.
Our gallows hang heavy with the monster and she swings, jerking, strangling, the bodies of our company already in her belly. She gags and chokes and becomes an old woman again. She's thin enough to break, but she doesn't. She hangs by her neck at the end of the rope, but gravity doesn't hold her. Not her, this old woman not old woman, her claws and her black-scaled tail, the crocodile parts that surround her body.
The Photographer
There's a click, a sound from the world, and I turn my head to see the general holding a camera like someone from a hundred years ago, a hood over his head to make a portrait of Nobody's execution.
Major Harmer makes a noise of betrayal.
/> The photos from Kinotra.
I think of a pale young man walking out of a cave with two charred heads in his hands, our punishment part of his Mercy.
“I will be Merciful,” Nobody says, and smiles at us from the gallows. Her mouth is full of teeth. She isn't seven hundred years old, I think, but seven thousand, and she's been hired by someone to destroy everything.
That was supposed to have been our mission, not hers.
“You're mistaken,” the general says, his eyes brighter than they were before, his face clenched. “This is the last round of Mercies. My Reversed Mercy will complete it.”
She laughs, and her skin shudders off entirely from her female body and becomes a crocodile, smaller now, and then another woman, still smaller. The noose doesn't tighten, though we lean backward, gunless, ropes slipping through our hands.
We've failed in our Mercies, and now the general stands and shouts, and the woman in the noose doesn't. She does not hang. She doesn't die.
The crocodile skins she's left behind are jerking in the mud, and they rise up to tilt the gallows while she hovers there, arms extended, smiling.
The mud of the world begins to dissolve. The dirt of my garments, the filth of my skin, the matted hair and snarled beard, the quiet horrors I've fed on to fatten myself, all the dark things I've kept inside my heart.
The general screams, and I watch his body rise to her hands. She touches his face, and he hangs high in the air, the noose leaving her neck and looping around his.
“The Thirteenth Mercy,” she whispers, “is the Mercy of Cleansing of Sins.”
The Flood
Waters rise then. I remember, as we stand in river to our knees, as the jungle roars and sings, as our guards disappear beneath the surface, that the Mercy of the Flood is another Mercy, not one of the Thirteen, but an older measure. A Mercy that cannot be performed by humans, neither itself nor its Reverse.
Below the waters the old woman brings, battalions march tongueless and fingerless in the deep, and crocodiles swim through black silt, their eyes above the water, and cradles full of babies rock, and the land we fought over for so long is obliterated.
I see, as the waters rise up to my eyes, an image of a Mercy, the general's body bent back and hanging in midair as Nobody's jaws open his flesh, tearing his skin away from his bones and peeling him like something overripe and finished.
Beneath the water, we feel our enemies drowning as we drown, and we all begin again together, in a world without any of us.
The Virgin Played Bass
PART ONE: It Seems I Met You in an Unlucky Hour
After the War, and before the War, the first time I met him on the road to Moscow, the cat was wearing a green woolen coat he'd stolen from a sleeping soldier. He had fluffy white fur, and was six feet tall in leather boots he'd made from a reindeer he'd killed with his teeth.
He was standing on the side of the road, making a cackling sound in the back of his throat and stalking a bird, but out of courtesy to me he stopped cackling and the bird flew away in a panic of feathers.
I knew the cat instantly for a thief and a madman but I was on my own desperate attempt toward the North to find another accordion player I knew, and my boots were lined with mangy goat. The back of my belly mapped the front of my spine. All I could think was that I didn't know what my last song would be. I thought I should decide before it was too late.
The cat looked well fed. I wondered if I might rob him, and then decided he'd kill me for it. I thought about begging, but he didn't look like he'd be in-clined to give to a beggar. I tried to keep walking, but my legs were shaking.
He stopped me, and told me in seven languages to fuck myself.
“Sack of curd, waste of universe, I'll teach you to throatsing like an angel,” the cat continued in Russian. “I'm a fucking feline. You don't need to go to the Sami. Join me.”
I could not identify his accent, which seemed to be from everywhere and nowhere at once. He gave me a cocky green look, adjusted his gun belt, and stamped his boots. The Sami had indeed been my plan, but the cat had no way of knowing that. I'd been imagining reindeer jerky and eerie tones, the herders and their open spaces. Once, I'd played at a rural festival with my father. I'd seen someone's pretty wife, and eaten a dinner cooked by her, and now she was all I thought about day and night.
I was delirious. I'd been walking a year, since the previous December. There were murderers where I'd come from, taking us into trucks. There were graves all over the hillsides of Khakassia, and shady red-leafed trees fed on blood. My whole country had been killed for twenty years, and then renamed. No one had intervened, because we had no oil, and we had no diamonds. All we had were orchards full of apricots. They were the size of grapes and the color of sunrise, and we made them into brandy, but when the war came, no one had the patience for fermenting our fruit, and the soldiers shook the trees and trampled them. When you looked at a globe, the place we'd been was nowhere on it. I'd run out from my father's house in the dark.
“There's no point fighting, Bruno. There are too many of them,” my father told me. “No one knows you're not dead already. You're an invisible man. Leave me here and let them come.”
I was twenty-four, returned from a failure in another country. I'd been home in secret shame only a week before the army started marching over the roads and into the houses, calling us all dead men. I'd been an intellectual, but now I was nothing.
“You're the end of the line,” a soldier said to my friend Jacob Mogilevich, and then tore the tree from the back page of Jacob's family bible in half, like he was chopping down an elm. I didn't hear this from Jacob Mogilevich. I heard it from his sister, after I found her on the road. She was dressed as a man. Jacob Mogilevich was dead by then, and she was nearly, but she had yellow hair and so no one killed her. It was only that by then. The world was a strange rattle of black and white film, and the ones who survived were the ones who shone in the sunlight and melted into the snow in the winter. Jacob Mogilevich's sister and I walked together for a time, and then she gave me her best wishes and her knife, sang a high note and stepped into a place where the river ice was cut away. I'd been alone since the New Year.
The cat passed me a wormy sausage from his knapsack and said “I'm on my way to sing to a city, fuckface. You better come with me or they'll kill you by Christmas.”
This was something better, I thought, than the death I could find anywhere. If I grew weary of the cat, all I'd need to do was call out in a loud enough voice and the war would come for me. I fell into step, my accordion on my back. I thought I was too tired to keep going. I'd been living on dry bread and melted snow. If I'd played anything more tender to the tooth, I'd have eaten my instrument by then, but accordions couldn't be boiled into soup. Still, I walked along behind him.
The cat called himself The White Pet, or The Pet when he felt informal. He'd stolen the name of a sheep he'd met somewhere, because he thought it suited him. He had no fucks left. Instead, he had delusions of grandeur. He'd been mistaken for a god and a warlike thief, over and over again, and he didn't care if he was only a musician. Only wasn't a word that applied to him.
The Pet sang Ochi Chyornye as we walked, and eventually I joined him. Everyone knew it. How could you not? It was the worst and most typical song. I'd heard it played around a Roma campfire by men with fiddles and women dancing in a circle.
Black eyes, passionate eyes,
Burning and beautiful eyes!
How I love you, how I fear you,
It seems I met you in an unlucky hour!
The cat danced a sideways rendition of the Dance of Cakes, pounced on a rabbit, tore its head off, and ate it raw. He offered me the hindquarters, and I built a fire while he brought a violin out from his knapsack and played the next verse with screaming tr
ills added in. I knew I should never join him, but I couldn't help myself. He was a cat on his hind paws. There were stories about things like him, but my mind couldn't hold onto them. My mother's voice in my head, black cats, white cats, crossing my path. All I wanted was some of The Pet's rabbit.
Oh, not for nothing are you darker than the deep!
I see mourning for my soul in you,
I see a triumphant flame in you:
A poor heart immolated in it.
The cat played a harmonica and ate a sparrow loudly, crunching the ribcage. I tried to suck the marrow from my rabbit bones. It was an effort to keep from chewing off my own fingers as I ate. The cat's voice wasn't good, but as he sang, my accordion wanted playing. It was a caterwaul, and my instrument asked for his claws. I didn't take it from its case, and so The Pet sang on. I couldn't help myself. I joined him.
But I am not sad, I am not sorrowful,
My fate is soothing to me:
All that is best in life that God gave us,
In sacrifice I returned to the fiery eyes!
The Pet looked calculatingly at me, and tossed me a string of small birds, already roasted. By the end of the song and meal I belonged to him forever. It was only later that I thought about the crossroads we'd been standing at.
He slung his knapsack onto his back and said “What are you waiting for, goat's son? Make tracks. We're in the miracle market.”
“We do miracles?” I asked. I was already falling into step. “What type?”
“We do miracles and mysteries both, alongside the traditional repertoire. I've been looking for an accordionist for half a year. The war's walking behind us, and if we don't move, we'll be fucked. Nothing but thieves and murderers out there.”
The Pet had one silver fang, replaced from the original by a dentist in Odessa. He occasionally claimed he was a minor minion, a missionary sent by the devil to right the wrongs of the state, but he only did that on nights when we had enough money to buy bullets for our gun. The Pet seemed not to care that he was plagiarizing part of his identity from a famous novel. Otherwise The Pet kept his counsel and wore a scarf he'd bought off a Roma violist around his feline face.
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 48
