Ivan Vladislavic - 101 Detectives

The niece of the neighbour from Atiak does not eat. She cries softly. Her heels are bleeding. She is from town and not used to walking. We are used to walking at home, but not this far, carrying such heavy things, without rest. My feet are also swollen. Anya and I kneel down together at the stream to drink and I try to show her how sorry I am but she will not meet my eye.

We go on. I feed my pocket. There is a little store of sugar there now. I stop myself from checking how much. For all I know it is only a pinch, but I imagine a spoonful or a cupful. I imagine scooping it out in a cupped hand. Tonight, when they pile the provisions together and tie us up under a tree or on the bed of a stream, I hope Anya and I are close together. Once the others are asleep, I’ll whisper in her ear and tell her to lick her finger and press it into my pocket.

Hans Günther paused again and paged forward to the last of the yellow flags. Now for the Valley of Death, he thought. And then the words she had inscribed on the manuscript. He could almost feel them through the printed page: handmade things in a world of flawless signs. His throat was tight. He pursed his lips and squeezed breath into his head as if he was trying to make his ears pop. The more practised listeners could tell by his attitude that the reading was not over, but some of the others shifted experimentally in their chairs or glanced at their companions. He ran a knuckle along the stitching to press the pages flat and looked over the edge.

The path falls into the valley. Some of the men want to stop here on the edge of the abyss, others want to press on. Amito and Kidega add their voices to the chorus. They are tired, their feet are sore, they need to rest.

It is a mistake. We have been told not to speak, neither among ourselves nor to them. The bearded one is suddenly angry. He knocks Amito to the ground. The boy with the panga is there but it is the one with the sunglasses, the one they call Shaggy, who rushes forward to beat her. He has a switch and he lashes her with it, across her back, on her shoulders, on her shins, and she cries out and tries to ward off the blows with her hands.

After half a dozen blows, I start counting, and then I stop again and look away. My face is turned to Amito, because they want us to watch, that is the point, but my eyes are not. Something is flickering down there to one side, but I cannot tell if it is something small right here on the ground beside the path or something big far away in the bottom of the valley. It twists like a flame.

There is nothing we can do, of course. Even Kidega is silent all through the beating. I wish she would get up. She is weaker than I am and more complaining. If he kills her, it will be worse for me. And who will carry the sorghum?

At last, it stops. The bearded one orders us to walk again and we get to our feet and start lifting everything. Usually one or two of the men have gone ahead on the path, leading the way, but now some of them are arguing about where to stop and others are dragging Amito to her feet, and so Anya is in front. The rest of us are still heaving up sacks and untangling ropes when she starts down the steep track with the box on her head. She has hardly taken a step before she slips on the shale and falls, pulling all of us with her, scrambling to keep our footing and set down our things. She tries to hold onto the box and so it is in her hands when it comes down on the rock, and it looks as if she has dashed it there rather than dropped it. The box breaks open at the hinges and the small cardboard boxes inside spill out, and some of them burst open too and the bullets flash and tumble down like a splash of coppery water over the rocks.

The boy raises his panga, but the Commander snaps it from his hand like a twig. Then he tramples me down in the grass as he barges past. The blade goes up into the blue and comes down from high on the scalloped neck of Anya’s dress and she does not even see it fall. She calls out once, and the blade rises again and falls. Again and again.

With the final blow he cuts the rope. He wipes the blade in the grass.

They gather the boxes of bullets and stuff them into their canvas bags and their buttoned pockets. They clean the loose ones in their mouths and roll them on their thighs. Everything makes them angry. They say we are weighing them down, they should kill us all, and they hit us and drag us around on the rocks, but they do not use the panga again.

When everything has been divided, they tell us to go on, over the bridge. We have to step on this thing that was Anya, each of us, as if it were a branch fallen across a stream. This is part of the lesson.

He should stop now, Hans Günther thought, this was far enough. But it would be cowardly. She had finished it, she had pushed on to the end and kept her word, and so must he.

That was the last time I touched my sister. There was hard earth beneath my feet, and then yielding flesh, once, twice, and then rock. It was the way forward. I stepped lightly and looked ahead. As I crossed over into the future, I made a promise. I said that if I lived, I would tell this story, so that she would not be forgotten. Your breath is in these words, Anya. I have translated you from the dead.

We stopped in the hollow of the valley. The men were spent and we were too tired to be afraid or to run away. They need not have bothered to tie us up. As I lay down, with the others gasping for breath all around me, I put my hand in my pocket. And I—

Hans Günther dropped his head. His glasses, which had been sliding to the end of his nose, fell to his chest and dangled on the chain. Just a few more lines and then he was done. He did not need to see them written down. They had been sounding in his head for months. He opened his mouth and what came out was a sob.

The auditorium shook as if a wind had blown down the doors and consternation churned through the rows.

Horst Grundmann leant over towards his wife Sylvia and said that Hans Günther had not been himself lately, and although in truth such a thought had not crossed his mind before this evening, now that he had said it, it seemed true.

Andrij Leonenko took out his notebook and clasped it between his knees like a missal. He should make a note of something, he knew.

Annemieke Vogel, who had been covering the readings at the Literaturhaus for three years without noting anything even slightly out of the ordinary, felt an exhilarating jolt in her chest as she realised that something strange and remarkable was happening, followed by a tremor of dread that came with the certainty it was going to be embarrassing.

I—

Hans Günther Basch gulped. A tear eased from the corner of his right eye, ran swiftly down the slope of his nose and swerved into the corner of his mouth.

There arose, like a squall on the surface of a lake, a murmur made of many parts — surprise, curiosity, sympathy, dismay, glee — emotions that encircled one another or clashed like waves, causing flurries of turbulent conversation, muttered exclamations and undertones, chasing into every corner. Underneath it all, the chairs shrieked like a chorus of demons, but only Karolina Fischer heard them.

Maryam Akello stirred. She glanced questioningly at Hans Günther Basch, but she was the one person in the room who could not see his face clearly. Then she looked towards the front row and raised a quizzical eyebrow.

Ich—

Hans Günther gulped again. Then his face began to crumble, from the top down, like an expertly imploded building. The skin around his eyes creased and the lids sagged, allowing his tears to flow freely. These tears washed away the last vestiges of order in his features and left behind a look of utter misery. His nose broadened, opening two mazy courses of wrinkles in his cheeks, which carried the tears by roundabout routes down towards his mouth and chin. His lips drew back, becoming flat and thick, as the corners of his mouth travelled back towards his ears, and then his yellow teeth appeared, threaded with saliva. The round base of his chin dimpled and elongated into an oval cushion. The skin of his neck was spanned tight across his jawbone and the tears, passing over that cliff, coursed down into the collar of his shirt.