‘And what if Moses really hadn’t come back from Mt. Horeb?’ Beg said. ‘Would we now be worshipping a golden calf? Why not — organised religions have worshipped everything: fire, the sun, bulls, demi-gods …’
‘All down the tubes,’ the rabbi sneered. ‘Show me one existing religion based on the sun, or fire. Or anything like that. Just one!’
‘They went down the tubes,’ Beg said, ‘but only after hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. And all that time they provided people with comfort — comfort, reassurance, and a life after this one. Everything you and I long for, too.’
The rabbi jabbed a finger at the air. ‘You’re staring so hard into the distance that you can’t see anything anymore! Thirty-five hundred years ago, the Everlasting gave us his Torah, which contains everything a person needs. That’s what you should be investigating. He lacks for nothing.’
‘But those people out on the steppes didn’t receive any answer; the heavens remained silent. Their imagination shaped a holy monster, or a monstrous holy-of-holies. I’m only thinking out loud about circumstances at some other point in history, unlike this one, when something like this … could have had a greater impact, if it had the chance to spread throughout entire tribes.’
‘But it didn’t happen, for heaven’s sake!’ The fire of the wine lit up in the rabbi’s eyes. ‘You should be taking into account what exists, not the non-existent! There’s plenty of room for doubt and discussion within the boundaries of the Torah itself. To deal with doubt we have Lernen, learning. That’s the way, lernen! Explore the beliefs, not the unbelief.’
Beg shrugged. ‘I thought that’s what I was doing. That’s all I do, I mean. But thoughts go where they will. How could I not see the similarities?’
‘I take it you know the story of the heathen who came to Rabbi Shammai and Rabbi Hillel?’
The rabbi told him how an unbeliever had come to Rabbi Shammai and asked him to teach him the Torah in the time he was able to remain standing on one leg. In a rage, Shammai sent him away.
Then the man went to Rabbi Hillel and asked again: ‘Teach me the Torah while I’m standing on one leg.’ Rabbi Hillel replied: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is the whole of the law. The rest is interpretation. Go now and learn.’
‘Go now and learn,’ Beg repeated. He nodded. ‘I’ll keep doing that. But I can’t close my eyes to the exceptional … the exceptional fact of a faith that arises almost before my eyes. A seed … A sacred moment, and four or five people who follow it. Who truly believe in what they think they’re seeing …’
‘What you’re seeing is idolatry. Humans worshipping another human, their equal — a consecrated perversion of themselves. I hope your interest is strictly intellectual.’
Beg grinned. ‘Let’s drink to a long life in good health. For just as you stopped being a Jew when your cook died, I will stop being a Jew once you’re no longer around.’
Zalman Eder laughed and shook his head. He raised the glass to his lips and drank. He was enjoying himself. He was awake.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Fried chicken
They had taken up housekeeping with the chicken lady. They gorged themselves on her supplies, and didn’t worry about the long winter to come. The floor was littered with empty cans, boxes, and cardboard packaging. They had pillaged her closet and spread out all the textile they could find around the woodstove. There they lay, purring like bloated cats. Her bed in the little niche behind the stove, with its ticked mattress of straw and its featherbed, had been appropriated by the poacher. The chicken lady herself had withdrawn to an old easy chair; through eyelids narrowed to slits, she watched the skinny ghosts who had invaded her home. They were hungry and sleepy. They stoked the stove till it glowed, bringing in wood from the lean-to outside, and wringing the neck of one chicken after the other. The blackened pan on the roaring stove was the epicentre of their contentment. There could be no more wonderful smell than the odour of a chicken hissing and popping in lard.
Afterwards they fell asleep again around the stove.
Outside, in a bag on the doorpost, hung the thing that had led them to this abundance. They nodded to it upon leaving or entering the house, and murmured words of thanks.
Sometimes the woman knelt out front, laying a wreath of charms and incantations around the doorway. None of them doubted the power the head emanated. They had expelled the black man and killed him by orders of an implicit group will; now they lived on intimate terms with his head. It lived; it sent signals. The woman understood his messages, and arranged them into a tightly knit cult. The others followed hesitantly. Even the most stubborn atheist among them, the man from Ashkhabad, sank down before the head and raised his thoughts on high.
Vitaly was the only one who didn’t take part, rarely emerging from the mist of his ghost realm.
The poacher paid respects to the head in the same even-keeled way he did everything: with dogged conviction and to the exclusion of anything that might distract him. He talked at times about the thicket of horrors, the never-ending suffering at the hard hand of circumstance. You had to steel yourself; you had to learn how to bear up.
They spoke quietly to the head, each on their own, beneath their breath and unintelligibly to the others, jointly sounding like a dull buzz. Along that humming, resonating web they sent him their dreams and lamentations by airmail — their supplications for a good end to their journey.
The chicken lady stepped around the bowed figures on the little wooden porch and went on living imperturbably, as though nothing had happened. They heard her voice only when she called her chickens; she spoke to them in soothing sounds in which no human language could be discerned.
Inside the little house, the lady and the new inhabitants slipped past each other like fish in a pond; whenever someone asked her the name of the village or where the other villagers had gone, she was so startled that after a while they stopped asking at all.
The poacher had found tyre tracks outside the village. The deep, frozen ruts disappeared in a westerly direction, in a route crossed by other tracks here and there. The village was being visited from time to time by someone with a jeep — someone who brought the chicken lady her supplies.
The poacher stood staring worriedly at the graphite-grey sky to the north. A growl of disapproval rose from the back of his throat. They had talked about it before — about whether, and if so when, they should move on. They would have to be quick about it now, the poacher said, before the tracks disappeared under the snow.
Now he and the boy were standing beside each other at the edge of the village. The hard-frozen grassland stretched out before them, white and crackling with cold. The poacher scratched at his beard and squinted. His eyes fixed on something in the distance, he said: ‘We can’t wait any longer.’ The steam from his nostrils scattered quickly.
‘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?’
‘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 w
asn’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.
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