The White Ship (18 page)

He should have gone, but he stood, petrified, unable to understand how and why this had happened. The huge dark man who was dressing the meat lifted up a kidney from his pile with the tip of his knife and held it out to the boy.

"Here, boy, roast it in the coals, you'll have a tasty piece," he said.

The boy did not stir."Take it!" Orozkul commanded.

The boy stretched out his hand unfeelingly and stood clutching the delicate, still-warm kidney of the Horned Mother Deer in his cold palm. And Orozkul had in the meantime lifted up the head of the white doe by the horns.

"Huh, heavy." He weighed it in his hand. "The horns alone must weigh God knows how much."

He leaned the head sideways against a log, picked up an ax, and began to chop the horns out of the skull.

"What horns!" he kept repeating, crashing his ax into the skull. "That's for your grandpa." He winked at the boy. "When he dies, we'll set the horns on his grave. And don't let anybody say we don't respect him. What more could he ask? For such a pair of horns a man ought to be glad to die this very day." He roared with laughter, aiming his ax.

But the horns would not yield. It turned out that it wasn't so simple to chop them out. The drunken Orozkul missed his aim, and this infuriated him. The head rolled off the log, and Orozkul began to chop it on the ground. The head jumped away, and he chased it with the ax.

The boy started and recoiled at each new blow, but he could not force himself to leave. As in a nightmare, held to the spot by some dreadful, unknown power, he stood and wondered that the glassy, unblinking eye of the Horned Mother Deer did not try to save itself from the ax. It would not blink, it would not close with fear. The head had long turned gray with filth and dust, but the eye remained clear and seemed to look out at the world with the same mute astonishment as at the moment when death had found it. The boy was terrified that the drunken Orozkul might strike the eye.

And the horns still resisted. Orozkul was now altogether beside himself. In blind rage, he no longer aimed, but struck the head wherever the blow would fall—both with the butt end and the sharp edge of the ax.

"You'll break the horns that way. Let me do it." Seidakhmat came over.

"Get away! I'll do it myself! Break them—hell!" Orozkul wheezed, swinging the ax.

"As you wish." Seidakhmat spat down on the ground and went toward his house. He was followed by the huge, dark man, dragging his share of the meat in a sack.

And Orozkul, with drunken obstinacy, continued to rain blow after blow on the head of the Horned Mother Deer by the barn wall. One might have thought that he was wreaking on it a long-awaited revenge.

"You rotten scum! You damned bitch!" He kicked the head with his boot as if the dead ears could hear him. "Oh, no, you will not have it your way!" And he rushed at it again and again with the ax. "May I not leave the spot if I don't get you. There! There!" He hammered at it. The skull cracked, and pieces flew in all directions.

The boy cried out sharply when the ax struck right across the eye. A dark, thick fluid poured out of the broken eye socket. The eye died, disappeared. . . .

"I can smash bigger heads than yours! I'll twist out bigger horns!" Orozkul roared in a fit of savage fury and hatred for the innocent head.

At last he succeeded in crushing the crown and the forehead. He threw away the ax. Seizing the horns with both hands and pressing the head down with his boot, he gave the horns a brutal twist with all his strength. The horns began to give way, crunching like roots being torn from the earth.

Those were the horns on which the Horned Mother Deer was going to bring Orozkul and Aunt Bekey the magic cradle . . .

The boy felt sick. He turned, dropped the kidney, and slowly walked away. He was terribly afraid that he might fall or vomit right there, before all those people. Pale, with cold, sticky sweat on his forehead, he stumbled past the blazing hearth over which the cauldron still sent up hot steam and by which, his back to everyone, the miserable old Momun still sat with his face to the fire. The boy did not trouble the old man. All he wanted was to get into his bed as quickly as he could, lie down, and pull the blanket up over his head. Not to see or hear anything. To forget.

Aunt Bekey happened to cross his path. Incongruously dressed up, but with the black-and-blue bruises from Orozkul's blows still on her face, thin as a rail and inappropriately gay, she rushed around all day preparing the ``big feast."

"What is the matter with you?" she asked the boy.

"My head hurts," he said.

"Oh, my poor darling," she said in a sudden access of tenderness, and began to shower him with kisses.

She, too, was drunk. She, too, smelled sickeningly of vodka.

"His head hurts," she mumbled sympathetically. "My lamb. You must be hungry."

"No, I am not. I want to lie down."

"Come, then, come, you'll lie down at my house. Why should you be all by yourself—everybody's coming to us. The guests, and our own people."

And she dragged him off. When they were passing the hearth again, Orozkul appeared from behind the barn, sweaty and red as an inflamed udder. Triumphantly, he threw the deer's horns he had chopped off next to Grandpa Momun. The old man rose a little from his crouching position.

Without looking at him, Orozkul lifted a pail of water and began to gulp, spilling the water over himself.

"You can die now," he flung at the old man, and began to drink again, the water pouring down all over him. The boy heard grandpa mumble:

"Thanks, son, thanks. Now death's no longer frightening. Naturally. I have honor and respect, so why . . ." "I'll go home," said the boy, overcome with dizziness. But Aunt Bekey would not hear of it.

"No use your being all alone there." And almost by force she led him into her house and laid him down in the corner on the bed.

In the house everything was ready for the feast. Everything was cooked, roasted, baked. Grandma and Guldzhamal were busily arranging it all. Aunt Bekey rushed back and forth between the house and the hearth in the yard. While they waited for the main course, Orozkul and the huge dark man treated themselves to tea, half-reclining on colored blankets, their elbows resting on cushions. They had suddenly become very important in their bearing—they felt like princes. Seidakhmat poured the tea into their cups.

And the boy lay quietly in the corner, every muscle tied and tense. He was shaken by chills. He wanted to get up and go, but was afraid that he would retch the moment he got out of bed. And therefore he suppressed the lump stuck in his throat, afraid to make the slightest move.

The women soon called Seidakhmat into the yard, and he reappeared in the door with a mound of steaming meat in an enormous enameled bowl. He carried it with difficulty and set it down before Orozkul and Koketay. The women followed him with a variety of dishes.

Everybody began to settle down, preparing knives and plates. Meantime, Seidaktimat poured vodka in the glasses.

"I will be the vodka commander," he guffawed, nodding at the bottles in the corner.

The last to come in was Grandpa Momun. The old man looked strange, even more pitiful than ever. He wanted to sit down somewhere at the side, but the dark, huge Koketay generously invited him to sit down next to him.

"Come this way, aksakal."

"Thank you. I'll sit here, I'm not a guest here, after all." Momun tried to refuse.

"Oh, no, you are the eldest," Koketay insisted, and seated him between himself and Seidakhmat. "Let's have a drink, aksakal, in honor of your marvelous success. You have the first word."

Grandpa Momun cleared his throat uncertainly.

"To peace in this home," he said with difficulty. "And where there's peace, there's also happiness, my children."

"Right, right!" everybody echoed, turning the glasses bottoms up.

"But what about you? No, no, that will not do! You toast to the happiness of your daughter and your son-in-law and then don't drink yourself," Koketay reproached the embarrassed Momun.

"Well, if it's to happiness, sure . . ." he mumbled hurriedly. And, to everyone's surprise, he gulped down almost a full glass in a single breath. Then, stunned, he shook his old head.

"That's the way!"

"Our old man is quite something, you won't find another like him!"

"Your old man is all right!"

Everybody laughed, everybody was pleased and praised grandpa.

The house became hot and stifling. The boy lay in torment, gripped with nausea. He lay with eyes closed and heard the drunken people chomping, gnawing, puffing, as they devoured the flesh of the Horned Mother Deer. He heard them offering each other tasty tidbits, clinking their greasy glasses, throwing the gnawed bones into a bowl.

"Not venison—foal's meat!" Koketay praised the food, smacking his lips.

"You think we're fools—living in the woods without eating such meat?" said Orozkul.

"Right, that's why we live here," echoed Seidakhrnat.

Everybody praised the meat of the Horned Mother Deer. Grandma, Aunt Bekey, Guldzhamal, and even Grandpa Momun piled plates for the boy and shoved them at him. But he refused, until, seeing that he was sick, they left him alone.

The boy lay with clenched teeth. It seemed to him that this would make it easier to contain the nausea. But he was tormented most of all by the awareness of his own helplessness, his inability to do anything to these people who had killed the Horned Mother Deer. And in his just childish rage and despair, the boy invented all sorts of revenge—to punish them, to force them to realize what a dreadful crime they had committed. But he could think of nothing better than calling silently to Kulubek to help him. The fellow in the army coat who had come into the mountains with the other young drivers for hay on that stormy night. He was the only man the boy knew who could get the better of Orozkul, who could tell him the whole truth without fear.

At the boy's call, Kulubek came speeding in his truck and jumped out of the cabin with his gun on the ready: "Where are they?" "There!" They ran together to Orozkul's house and pulled the door open: "Don't move! Hands up!" Kulubek cried menacingly from the threshold, aiming his submachine gun. Everybody was stunned. They froze with panic in their seats. The food stuck in their throats. With chunks of meat in their greasy hands, with greasy cheeks and lips, stuffed, drunken, they could not even stir.

"Get up, vermin!" Kulubek held the muzzle of the gun against Orozkul's temple. And Orozkul went into a shaking fit and fell on his knees before Kulubek, stuttering: "Ha-ha- have p-pity, d-d-don't k-k-kill me!" But Kulubek was implacable. "Get out, vermin! This is the end of you!" With a strong kick at the fat behind, he compelled Orozkul to get up and go out of the house. And everybody else, terrified and silent, went out.

"Stand up against the wall!" Kulubek ordered Orozkul. "For killing the Horned Mother Deer, for chopping out her horns, on which she carried the cradle, you are sentenced to death!" Orozkul crawled in the dust, whining, moaning: "Don't kill me, I haven't even any children. I am alone in the whole world. I've neither son, nor daughter . . ."

Whatever has become of his haughty dignity? A wretched, miserable coward. Not even worth killing.

"All right," the boy said to Kulubek. "We won't kill him. But let this man go from here and never come back. We do not need him here. Let him leave."

Orozkul stood up, pulled up his trousers, and, afraid to glance back, ran away at a quick trot—fat, puffy, with sagging trousers. But Kulubek stopped him: "Wait! We'll say to you one final word. You will never have any children. You are an evil and worthless man. Nobody and nothing loves you. The forest doesn't love you, not a single tree, not even a single blade of grass has any love for you. You are a fascist. Go from here—forever. Double quick!" Orozkul ran off without a backward glance. "Schnell, schnell!" Kulubek laughed after him, and fired into the air to scare him.

The boy laughed and rejoiced. And after Orozkul had disappeared from sight, Kulubek said to all the others, who huddled guiltily before the door: "How is it that you've lived with such a man? Aren't you ashamed?"

The boy felt a sense of relief. Justice had been done. And his fancy seemed so real that he forgot entirely where he was, forgot the reason for the drunken feast in Orozkul's house.

A burst of laughter recalled him from this blessed state. The boy opened his eyes and listened. Grandpa Momun was not in the room. He had evidently stepped out somewhere. The women were clearing the dishes, preparing to serve tea. Seidakhmat was loudly telling some story. The others laughed at his words.

"And what happened then?"

"Go on!"

"No, just tell it again," Orozkul begged, rolling with laughter. "How you said to him—you know . . . How you scared him. Oh, I'll burst!"

"Well, you see," Seidakhmat repeated willingly, "we were riding up to the deer, and they stood at the edge of the woods, all three of them. We tied the horses to trees, when the old man suddenly grabs my hand: 'We cannot shoot deer,' he says. 'We're Bugans, children of the Horned Mother Deer!'

And looks at me like a child, begging with his eyes. And I think—another minute, and I'll burst out laughing. But I didn't. No, I told him with a straight face: 'What's the matter with you? Do you want to end your days in prison?' `No,' he says. 'And don't you know,' I say to him, 'that those are fairy tales invented in the ignorant old times when we were ruled by beys, just to keep down the poor people, to keep them scared?' And his mouth just drops open: 'What are you saying!' 'Now, then,' I told him, 'better forget that nonsense. I don't care if you're an old man, I'll write a letter about you to the right authorities.'"

"Ha, ha, ha!" his listeners roared, and Orozkul laughed more than anybody else, savoring every bit of the story.

"Well, then, we stole up to them. Another animal would have beat it long ago, but those crazy deer didn't even think of running. They weren't afraid of us at all. All the better, I think to myself," the drunken Seidakhmat boasted. "I went ahead with the gun, the old man behind me. And then I suddenly began to wonder. I'd never even shot a sparrow in my life. And now this business. If I missed, they would take off, then try and chase them in the woods. They'd swing across the pass, and good-bye to the meat. Who wants to take a chance with such game? And our old man here is a hunter, he's gotten even bears in his day. So I say to him, 'Here, take the gun, old man, and shoot.' But he wouldn't touch it, no, no. 'Do it yourself,' he says. 'But I am drunk,' I tell him, and begin to stagger on my feet, as if I couldn't stand up. He'd seen me share a bottle with you after we got the log out, so I pretended I was drunk."