He isn’t dead. We see that from the rise and fall of his ribs, but the beast now is at a new game. The old woman’s eyes dart about, seeking some breath of air in motion about us that would reveal its presence, as on all fours it skulks about the room, so that we almost feel, with the pimpling of our flesh the touch of its fur upon us as it passes. But there is no sound, no movement. Only the rise and fall of our breathing. The Child clings to me, and seems about to go into some kind of fit of his own. The old woman’s eyes continue to prowl the room, her hands held poised in the air, all the fingers spread. Minutes pass. Hours. We are frozen. Too terrified to move.
The rest too is enacted as in a dream: our removal from the room, the coming of the men who will conduct Ryzak’s spirit out of the house, my escape with the Child through the roof and down into the darkness of snowbound summerhouse, from which I listen to what is passing in the yard. The women of the village, or as man of them as can be crowded in between the paling walls, have gathered there to frighten away the alien spirits who are lurking, just beyond the limits of the house, to snatch the old man’s spirit as it passes into the air. Heavily cloaked and veiled, with only their eyes and hands visible in the blackness, they squat in the snow, swaying backward and forward on their haunches and beating together, in earsplitting unison, the sacred stones that have been chosen from the river bed for their whiteness and smoothness, and which are used only for this, to deafen the ears of the evil ones to the old man’s cries, so that the last of all, the death cry, will pass unnoticed and his spirit may slip by them in the night. The clicking begins as a series of short sharp explosions, their spaces filled with a high-pitched wailing and three hawk like shrills. As the rhythms quicken the beats become irregular. But however unexpected the pattern may be to a foreign ear, every stone comes down simultaneously, and as the rhythms open out in an ever increasing sequence, the voices fall to a droning om om om, the one original syllable repeated over and over as if the earth itself were speaking out of a chasm with many mouths.
In little earthenware bowls all round the yard some herb is smoking that I have never smelt before. Its fumes in the nostrils leave one dizzy. The whiteness of the walls, the blackness of the figures that fill every available space, the hundred hands moving together, the droning, the crash of pebbles - all this creates a vibration in the head that lulls and then deadens the senses. I find myself being gathered into the expanding and contracting of the light, of the sounds as they strike my ear, as if, in regulating my breath, my heartbeat, to these rhythms, I were slowly being drawn apart and scattered, separated from myself and my individual will.
Upstairs in the house some final ceremony is being performed that we are not permitted to see, and which this confusion of voices is intended to obscure. I know what it is. The elders of the village are taking Ryzak’s life by force, beating and shaking the last breath out of his tough old body so that he will die fighting. For him simply to dwindle into a state of childlike weakness would leave him vulnerable at last to the demons who are hovering there in the darkness to pluck his spirit away. He is being savaged to death. Only in this way can his dying spirit be raised to such a pitch of violence that the dark ones will quail before it and he may pass unharassed on the air. This goes on for perhaps an hour. Then at last one of the old men appears at a window and raises his arms. Immediately there is silence. The hands stop in mid-gesture, the buzzing cuts out. Only the old woman, Ryzak’s mother, raises a long shriek, a single note which she holds to the very end of her breath, when it is taken up by the younger, and they go on thus, striking the note, holding it, changing, while inside, the men begin to dance, stamping on the wooden planks with their booted heels. This is the wake. The village elders will go on dancing and drinking fermented liquor till the last of them has sunk into a stupor like the dead man. Laughing, joking with one another as if no death had occurred, they stagger out into the snow to piss against a wall, so drunk some of them that they can barely stand and have to support themselves with one hand while they fumble to loosen their breeches. Once again, it is the demons of the air who are the object of all this. The old men are diverting their attention while one of their number makes his way to the burial ground, out there on the high plateau. His spirit has already arrived, perhaps, and is riding round the great circle in the dark. Two days from now they will carry out the body to join it. Meanwhile the women huddle in the snow and wait. When the last of the dancers has fallen, they will creep in and remove the dead man so that he can be washed and prepared for impaling. In the midst of all this it comes to me clearly what I must do. With Ryzak dead, and in such a manner, we have no protection here, I and the Child. For the moment they have forgotten us. The rituals of death, and the preoccupation of the waiting demons, have allowed us to slip quietly away. It is only later, when the last rite has been completed, that someone - the old woman perhaps - will think of vengeance, and remember that it is the Child who has wrought all this, with me as his witting or unwitting familiar.
Just before dawn I wake the Child. The women now are mostly dozing, hunched up together in their black cloaks, their heads covered, and it is easy to creep around them and out into the lane.
The Child is still half-asleep, but when we come to the edge of the marshes and the bridge to our island among the reeds, he suddenly clutches my hand, laughs, gives a little leap, and tries to drag me towards it. After nearly four months he thinks we are about to go back at last to our old life, our daily lessons in the swamp, to the birdcalls, to his fluttering attempts to entice out of the organs of his throat the vowels and consonants that have so long hidden there and which I am helping him to find. He is disappointed when I make him understand that we must go on. He looks petulant, pushing out his lower lip, and strikes my chest with his closed fist - not hard, but as an expression of his displeasure with me. He turns away and begins to moan. There is a pallid light over all the swamp with its puddles of turbid water and patches of bluish, moonstruck ice. The reeds hiss. The moon slides in and out of cloud. The child yearns toward its light on the solid, safe ground behind us, and I have to pluck at his cloak, then at last take his hand and lead him. Something perhaps in my mood warns him that this is no game, and that my refusal to enter the old life is not mere wilfullness on my part. He follows, dragging a little, and we start out across the marshes towards the river, which I know lies somewhere to the north, two or three days away as we will have to travel - on foot, and across a terrain that makes heavy going but where we will leave no sign of our passage.
My plan is to cross the river while it is still frozen and escape into the steppes. It is a desperate plan, but I can think of no other. Something deep at the bottom of my mind tells me it is what must be done and has always been intended. I think of my dreams. Of all those nights when I made my way out there in sleep to scratch in the earth for my own grave. And of that dream of the godlike horsemen. I am going out now into the unknown, the real unknown, compared with which Tomis was but a degenerate outpost of Rome, and am, I believe, following the clear path of my fate. Always to be pushing out like this, beyond what I know cannot be the limits - what else should a man’s life be? Especially an old man who has, by a clear stroke of fortune, been violently freed of the comfortable securities that make old men happy to sink into blindness, deafness, the paralysis of all desire, feeling, will. What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us. I have become braver in my old age, ready at last for all the changes we must undergo, as painfully we allow our limbs to burst into a new form, let the crust of our flesh split and the tree break through, or the moth or bird abandon us for air. What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change? Soft and silly as I may be, I have survived. I am the last poet of our age, existing still, working still, even out here beyond the limits of our speech, even in silence. And if other old men must be willing, at the end, to push up off their deathbed and adventure out into the unknown, how much more willing must that man be whose whole life has just been such a daily exercise of adventuring, even in the stillness of his own garden? I mean, the poet?