The Death of Achilles (27 page)

He ought not to have listened to God; he ought to have killed the boy. Achimas realized this later, when it was twilight, and he was overtaken by two riders on a horse. One was wearing a peaked cap with a blue band and the young Cossack was sitting behind him, with his face bruised and swollen.

“There he is, Uncle Kondrat!” the young Cossack shouted. “There he is, the murderer!”

That night Achimas sat in a cold cell and listened to the Cossack sergeant Kondrat and the police constable Kovalchuk deciding his fate. Achimas had not said a word to them, although they had tried to find out who he was and where he came from by twisting his ear and slapping his cheeks. Eventually they had decided the boy must be a deaf-mute and left him in peace.

“What can we do with him, Kondrat Panteleich?” asked the constable. He was sitting with his back to Achimas and eating something, washing it down with some liquid from a jug. “We can’t take him into town, surely? Perhaps we should just keep him here until morning and throw him out on his ear?”

“I’ll throw you out on your ear,” replied the sergeant, who was sitting facing him and writing in a book with a goose-quill pen. “He almost broke the ataman’s son’s head open. Kizlyar’s the place for him, the animal, in prison.”

“But it’s a shame to put him in prison, the way they treat little lads in there! You know yourself, Kondrat Panteleich.”

“There’s nowhere else to put him,” the sergeant replied sternly. “We don’t have any orphanages around here.”

“I heard that the nuns in Skyrovsk take in orphans.”

“Only girl orphans. Put him in prison, Kovalchuk, put him in prison. You can take him away first thing in the morning. I’ll just sort out the papers.”

But when morning came Achimas was already far away. After the sergeant left and the constable lay down to sleep and began snoring, Achimas pulled himself up to the window, squeezed between two thick bars, and jumped down onto the soft earth.

He had heard about Skyrovsk before — it was forty versts away in the direction of the sunset.

It turned out that God did not exist after all.

Achimas arrived at the Skyrovsk Convent Orphanage dressed as a little girl — he had stolen a cotton-print dress and a shawl from a washing line. He told the mother superior, who had to be addressed as ‘Mother Pelagia,’ that he was Lia Welde, a refugee from the village of Neueswelt, which had been devastated by mountain bandits. Welde was his real surname, and Lia was the name of his second cousin, another Welde, a horrid little girl with freckles and a squeaky voice. The last time Achimas has seen her she was lying flat on her back with her face split in two.

Mother Pelagia stroked the little German girl’s cropped white hair and asked: “Will you take the Orthodox faith?”

And so Achimas became Russian, because now he knew for certain that God did not exist and prayers were nonsense, which meant that the Russian faith was no worse than his father’s.

He liked it at the orphanage. They were fed twice a day and they slept in real beds. Only they prayed a lot and his feet kept getting tangled in the hem of his skirt.

On the second day a girl with a thin face and big green eyes came up to Achimas. Her name was Evgenia and her parents had also been killed by bandits, only a long time ago, last autumn. “What clear eyes you have, Lia. Like water,” she said. Achimas was surprised — people usually found his excessively pale eyes unpleasant. When the sergeant was beating him, he kept repeating over and over again, “White-eyed Finnish scum.”

The girl Evgenia followed Achimas everywhere. Wherever he went, she went. On the fourth day, she caught Achimas with the hem of his dress pulled up, urinating behind the shed.

So now he would have to run away again, only he didn’t know where to go. He decided to wait until they threw him out, but they didn’t throw him out. Evgenia had not told anyone.

On the sixth day, a Saturday, they had to go to the bathhouse. In the morning Evgenia came up to him and whispered: “Don’t go, say you’ve got your colors.” Achimas didn’t understand. “What colors?” he asked. “It’s when you can’t go to the bathhouse because you’re bleeding and it’s unclean. Some of our girls already have them. Katya and Sonya have,” she explained, naming the two oldest wards of the orphanage. “Mother Pelagia won’t check; she’s too prudish.” Achimas did as she said. The nuns were surprised that it had started so early, but they allowed him not to go to the bathhouse. That evening he told Evgenia: “Next Saturday I’ll go away.” Tears began running down her cheeks. She said: “You’ll need some bread for the road.”

But Achimas did not have to run way, because the following Friday evening, on the day before the next bath day, his uncle Chasan came to the orphanage. He went to Mother Pelagia and asked if there was a little girl here from the German village that had been burned down by the Abrek Magoma. Chasan said that he wanted to talk to the girl and find out how his sister and his nephew had died. Mother Pelagia summoned Lia Welde to her cell and left them there in order not to hear talk of evil.

Chasan was nothing at all like Achimas had imagined him. He was fat-cheeked and red-nosed, with a thick black beard and cunning little eyes. Achimas looked at him with hatred, because he looked exactly like the Chechens who had burned down the village of Neueswelt.

The conversation went badly. The orphan either would not answer questions or answered them in monosyllables and the look in the eyes under those white lashes was stubborn and hostile.

“They did not find my nephew Achimas,” Chasan said in Russian punctuated with a glottal stutter. “Perhaps Magoma took him away with him?” The little girl shrugged.

Then Chasan thought for a moment and took a silver coin necklace out of his bag. “A present for you,” he said, holding it up. “Beautiful, all the way from Shemakha. You play with it while I go and ask the mother superior for a night’s lodging. I’ve traveled a long way, I’m tired. I can’t sleep out in the open…”

He went out, leaving his weapon on the chair. The moment the door closed behind his uncle, Achimas threw the coin necklace aside and pounced on the heavy sword in the black scabbard with silver inlay work. He tugged on the hilt and out slid the bright strip of steel, glinting icily in the light of the lamp. A genuine Gurda sword, thought Achimas, running his finger along the Arabic script.

There was a quiet creak. Achimas started violently and saw Chasan’s laughing black eyes watching him through the crack of the door.

“Our blood,” his uncle said in Chechen, baring his white teeth in a smile, “it’s stronger than the German blood. Let us leave this place, Achimas. We’ll spend the night in the mountains. Sleep is sweeter under the open sky.”

Later, when Skyrovsk was left behind them, beyond the mountain pass, Chasan put his hand on Achimas’s shoulder. “I’ll put you in school to learn, but first I’ll make a man of you. You have to take vengeance on Magoma for your father and mother. This you must do, it is the law.”

Achimas realized that this was the true law.

They spent the nights wherever they could: in abandoned houses, in roadside inns, with his uncle’s friends, and sometimes out in the forest, wrapped up in their felt cloaks. “A man must know how to find food and water and a path through the mountains,” said Chasan, teaching his nephew his own law. “And he must be able to defend himself and the honor of his family.”

Achimas did not know what the honor of his family was. But he wanted very much to be able to defend himself and was willing to study from morning till night.

“Hold your breath and imagine a fine ray of light stretching out of the barrel. Feel for your target with that ray,” Chasan taught him, breathing down the back of his neck and adjusting the position of the boy’s fingers where they clutched the gun stock. “You don’t need strength. A rifle is like a woman or a horse — give it affection and understanding.” Achimas tried to understand his rifle, he listened to its high-strung iron voice, and the metal began droning into his ear: A little more to the right, more, and now fire. “Vai!” said his uncle, clicking his tongue and rolling up his eyes. “You have the eye of an eagle! To hit a bottle at a hundred paces! And that is how Magoma’s head will be shattered!”

Achimas did not want to fire at the one-eyed man from a hundred paces. He wanted to kill him in the same way he had killed Fatima — with a blow to the temple — or, even better, slit his throat, as Magoma had slit Pelef’s.

Shooting with a pistol was even easier. “Never take aim,” his uncle told him. “The barrel of the pistol is a continuation of your hand. When you point at something with your finger, you don’t take aim, do you, you just point where you need to. Think of the pistol as your sixth finger.” Achimas pointed the long iron finger at a walnut lying on a tree stump, and the nut shattered in a spray of fine crumbs.

Chasan did not give his nephew a sword, telling him that his arm and shoulder had to grow more first, but he gave him a dagger on the very first day and told him never to part with it, saying: “When you swim naked in the stream, hang it around your neck.” As time went by, the dagger became a part of Achimas’s body, like a wasp’s sting. He could cut dry twigs for the campfire with it, bleed a deer that he had shot, whittle a fine sliver of wood to pick his teeth after eating the deer meat. When they halted for a rest and he had nothing to do, Achimas would throw his dagger at a tree from a standing, sitting, or prone position. He never wearied of this pastime. At first he could only stick the knife into a pine tree, then into a young beech, then into any branch on the beech.

“A weapon is good,” said Chasan, “but a man must be able to deal with his enemy even without a weapon: with his fists, feet, teeth, it doesn’t matter what. The important thing is that your heart must be blazing with holy fury; it will protect you against pain, strike terror into your enemy, and bring you victory. Let the blood rush to your head so that the world is shrouded in red mist, and then nothing will matter to you. If you are wounded or killed — you will not even notice. That is what holy fury is.” Achimas did not argue with his uncle, but he did not agree with him. He did not want to be wounded or killed. In order to stay alive, you had to see everything, and fury and red mist were no use for that. The boy knew that he could manage without them.

One day, when it was already winter, his uncle returned from the tavern in a cheerful mood. A reliable man had informed him that Magoma had arrived with his loot from Georgia and was feasting at Chanakh. That was close, only two days’ journey.

At Chanakh, a large bandit village, they stayed with a friend of his uncle. Chasan went to find out how things stood and came back late, looking dejected. He said things were difficult. Magoma was strong and cunning. Three of the four men who had been with him in the German village had also come and were feasting with him. The fourth, bandylegged Musa, had been killed by Svans. Now his place had been taken by Djafar from Nazran. That meant there were five of them.

That evening his uncle ate well, prayed, and lay down to sleep. Before he fell asleep he said: “At dawn, when Magoma and his men are tired and drunk, we shall go to take our revenge. You will see Magoma die and dip your fingers in the blood of the one who killed your mother.”

Chasan turned his face to the wall and fell asleep immediately, and the boy cautiously removed a small green silk bag from around his neck. It contained the ground root of the poisonous irganchai mushroom. His uncle had told him that if the border guards caught you and put you in a windowless stone box where you could not see the mountains and the sky, you should sprinkle the powder on your tongue, muster up as much spit as you could, and swallow it. Before you could repeat the name of Allah five times, there would be nothing left in the cell except your worthless body.

Achimas took the baggy trousers, dress, and shawl of their host’s daughter. He also took a jug of wine from the cellar and sprinkled the contents of the little bag into it.

In the tavern there were men sitting and talking, drinking wine and playing backgammon, but Magoma and his comrades were not there. Achimas waited. Soon he saw the son of the tavern-keeper take some cheese and flat bread cakes into the next room and he realized that Magoma was in there.

When the tavern-keeper’s son went away, Achimas went in and set his jug on the table without raising his eyes or saying a word.

“Is the wine good, girl?” asked the one-eyed man with the black beard whom he remembered so well.

Achimas nodded, walked away, and squatted down in the corner. He did not know what to do about Djafar from Nazran. Djafar was still very young, only seventeen years old. Should he tell him that his horse was agitated and chewing on its tethering post — so that he would go out and check? But Achimas remembered the young Cossack and realized that he should not do that. Djafar owed him nothing, but he would die anyway, because that was his fate.

Djafar was the first to die. He drank from the jug with all the rest and almost instantly slumped forward, banging his head down on the table. A second Abrek started laughing, but his laughter turned into a hoarse croak. A third said: “There’s no air in here,” clutched at his chest and fell. “What’s wrong with me, Magoma?” asked the fourth Abrek, stumbling over his words; then he slid off the bench, curled up into a ball, and stopped moving. Magoma himself sat there without speaking, and his face was as scarlet as the wine spilled across the table.

The one-eyed man looked at his dying comrades, then stared at the patiently waiting Achimas. “Whose daughter are you, girl?” Magoma asked, forcing out the words with an effort. “Why do you have such white eyes?”

“I am not a girl,” replied Achimas, “I am Achimas, son of Fatima. And you are a dead man.” Magoma bared his yellow teeth, as if he were greatly pleased by these words, and began slowly pulling his sword with the gilded handle out of its scabbard, but he could not pull it out, he began wheezing and tumbled over onto the earthen floor. Achimas stood up, took his dagger out from under the girl’s dress, and, gazing into Magoma’s single unblinking eye, he slit his throat — in a rapid, gliding movement, as his uncle had taught him. Then he dipped his fingers in the hot, pulsing blood.