Ivan Repila - The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse

‘You’ve hardly eaten today,’ says Big. ‘If you don’t eat, you’ll die.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You should eat even if you aren’t hungry.’

‘I’ll eat when I’m hungry. I’ll drink when I’m thirsty. I’ll shit when I feel like shitting. Like dogs do.’

‘We aren’t dogs.’

‘In here we are. Worse than dogs.’

*

The last of the sun’s strokes sweeps away from the well, taking all life’s colour with it and bringing the monotony of their cohabitation into relief. Like when, in the middle of a dream, it is all revealed to be make-believe and waking up is a kind of cruel joke.

‘Your head’s still not right after the fever. Have something to eat and go to sleep. Tomorrow you’ll feel better,’ says Big, lying down.

Small doesn’t move.

‘I think I’ve got rabies,’ he says.

‘No. You don’t have rabies yet.’

Small looks at him lovelessly, and asks:

‘Then what is this anger I can feel inside?’

‘You’re becoming a man,’ says Big.

‘TODAY, I’M GOING to teach you how to kill.’

For people like you and me, the first thing is anger. With no anger we will never find the necessary courage to take a life. There are other people who observe different impulses, who have grown up around unimaginable violence and look at you from inside caverns that you cannot even imagine. For those people, living is the well. You can’t kill them, and if you confront them, they’ll finish you off. You and me aren’t like that. We require anger. A restless anger that won’t let you stop, which bubbles under the skin, making your muscles shake; an anger that is black on your insides, but on the outside starts to turn you red, until you look like a burn victim who can’t find his place in the world. You must charge yourself up with reasons to hate, despise whatever you see around you and, what’s more, convince yourself that this anger is necessary. When you’re full, don’t hold it inside: release it, let it out into the world, shake it from your fingers, shout, run, burn the branches of trees, dig holes until your nails bleed, punch doors and walls and any other thing made by the hands of men. And before you collapse, exhausted, stop. Take a breath. Say nothing. For a few seconds, hold on to that last drop of anger in you; let it glisten at the corner of your mouth like a kiss about to fall. Exhale, feel your ribs rise and fall. Regain calm. Look at the destruction, your raw knuckles, the holes you’ve torn open with them. Feel the silence; how all matter, in its shock, has ceased to move; how the things around you no longer make a sound, the wood doesn’t creak, the wind doesn’t blow. It’s the same silence that will one day occupy earth, when men decide to end it all and we witness the end of time. And it’s the silence that you’ll live with, too, every waking hour, while inside the anger transforms into its exact opposite.

Calm. This is the second thing. You must spend three days — not a day more or less — guarding the secret beginning to reveal itself inside of you. You must move like a bird, not touching the ground, and speak in a quiet voice so as not to disturb a single blade of grass. Try not to have any contact with anyone and go to bed early. And at all times — don’t forget — remember that scarlet drop that you held back, think about it taking on the most horrifying forms in your body, until it becomes plumper and larger. Talk to it as if it were your disease, insult it, imagine the worst cruelties you could inflict, and subject it to your heart’s desires so that it bleeds like a wound and oozes giant monsters. Live as if its presence weighed down on your back, be incapable of loving or admiring beauty. Note how loyalty squirms about in your stomach and how an enormous void contaminates everything you touch. Finally, on the third night of this unbearable calm, when you take yourself off to sleep, take a deep breath, feel that breath move around your rotten insides, and let the calm engulf you. Let your disease lace you with poison like a spider’s legs. Let the drop spread through your veins, showering you with razor-sharp stones. Let it cut you to the marrow with one foul slash. And then, sleep. And then, dream.

The last thing is will. The morning of the crime you won’t be able to eat for the terrible dreams that will have plagued you. You’ll do everything under the spell of a dazzlingly brutal violence, but a bubble of uncertainty will rove in circles around you, as if you were afraid to drink water for fear of breaking the glass. Don’t worry. Take each step as it comes, feel your feet open up dark trenches along the bends of your soul, advance as if the earth turned and looked you directly in the eyes. And when at last, starved and terrified, you face your enemy, honour your resolve with the killing. Be quick, ferocious. Don’t cause pain other than with your look. Give them a just, worthy death.

Killing, the act of killing, the force of your hands around the neck or the exact place where the knife sinks in, this can’t be taught because it’s already understood. Blades, firearms, sticks or stones, it’s all the same. But remember that as men we must be there, watching as the light in their eyes goes out, living the crime at close range. We kill in seconds because we don’t know any other way to kill. We’re direct, impatient. Don’t hesitate: it’s your soul that will decide the precise movement, and once the deed is done you will be as great as all the great men who inhabited the earth before you.

These are the things you must know.

Small, who during the first few lines of the monologue didn’t move, has set about sketching each of the concepts, drawing up symbols on the walls and the well floor which only he can make sense of, using his fingers and elbows like palette knives to translate these new teachings. He howls with wild abandon, testing out new sections of his brain with each revision of those terrible maps. The architecture of an unknown pleasure makes him drunk to the point of retching; it transports him to an archipelago of poisonous islands that roar like sea monsters. Shaken by earthquakes, he scans his wicked city again and again, memorizing it like a creed to which you give yourself with total devotion. He amends any miscalculations with the correct formulae and pales, horrified, before the flames spreading like wildfire through his childhood. Big observes him, satisfied.

At dusk the breeze and the water start to slowly smooth away the tracks that Small has worked so hard to put down. Like a sleepwalker, tired but with the conviction of someone who remembers everything, he decides that for the rest of his life he will carry writing paper and pencils, ink, quills, old books; tools that will allow him to attest for all time the miracles of his enlightenment. To translate the unpronounceable.

IMPRISONED NOW for an entire lunar cycle, hunger and desperation have broken both communication and their sanity. Big gets on with his exercise plan. Meanwhile, Small has descended the last steps of madness into a cellar devastated by hallucinations. He hums to himself repeatedly: popular songs whose lyrics he twists, making them obscene. He gives absurd speeches, which his brother has stopped listening to, whether out of boredom or a feeling of wretchedness.

‘I think no one hears our cries because they mistake us for animals. You and I haven’t noticed till now, but for days we have been talking like pigs. Tomorrow we’ll shout in Latin. So they understand us.’

On other occasions he remains in silence for hours until an idea or rational thought snaps him out of it and compels him to shout out odd words, barely human sounds, nonsense poems.