Something like twenty minutes passed before he came back out. He mumbled and I couldn’t hear.
‘What?’
‘Deported.’
Javor’s father had been deported, but how do you deport someone from this country? ‘To where?’ I asked.
Javor’s father had wanted to join his wife and gone to the north.
‘You just said he’d been deported.’
A minute ago he wouldn’t look at me, now he looked up, lip raised above yellowish teeth, like a cornered rat. ‘That’s all I fucking know,’ he hissed.
‘Did they say when he was let go or taken there or whatever?’ asked Javor when I told him.
‘No,’ I answered. ‘Your mother hasn’t called?’
Javor shook his head but determined to remain hopeful. ‘She’s been in the hospital. It hasn’t been long, a few days since he was taken into custody. Maybe there’s some kind of transit centre. paperwork.’
I had forgotten. It felt like we had been in this new world far longer.
Here up in the hills the rain washing down my face feels good. I lift up my head and open my mouth and let the water in, it is sweet, pure and sweet. I shield my eyes and look in the direction of the town, invisible behind the torrent of water. Let it run, I think, through the streets, down the gutters, into drains until it is carried away by the river. Let it wash away the shit and the pus and the blood, the things that can be washed away. But let it also wash away the fear and the malice and the spite, the things that are harder to erase. I wish these things that are happening right now weren’t happening to us, I wish they were happening to someone else, somewhere else. I didn’t care who. I clenched my fist. Leave us alone.
The rain makes Kos mad: she runs in a loop with her head down, and races through puddles with her head held high, letting her tail and backside drag through the water.
As swiftly as it came, the rain clears: the drumming slows and the threads of rain thin and lift. The air is scentless, pure. When it is clear again the sun shines strongly. The roofs and roads of Gost glitter and wink, the heat draws out thin drifts of steam from the tiles and stone. Between where I am standing and the houses of Gost the ravine yawns and stretches out, like a sleeping dragon whose tail begins at Gost and whose body lies to the north. The trees that fill the upper banks are just beginning to change their colour. Opposite me the clouds have moved behind the hills, dark-centred clouds with gleaming edges, and through the gaps between them slanting columns of light fall, radiating out from a hidden sun, lighting parts of the hills and the fields, a roof here and there.
My father used to call this god light.
On a tree on the edge of the ravine a colony of crows shelters and with the end of the rain they become twitchy and raucous, hopping along and between branches, others hunched and watchful sit facing the ravine. Forty, fifty of them. Not so long ago I hunted these birds for food. For no reason, except that I feel like it, I lift my rifle and send a shot into the sky. The air vibrates with movement. I lower the rifle. A stupid thing to do, but who cares. Something about them bothered me. Perhaps they reminded me of the woman earlier in the day, hovering around the Barac house, waiting for something, for a death. And yet they are beautiful birds: the intensity of their colour: black beak, eye and feather; when they stand and tilt their throats to the sky, they look noble in their own way. As a child I collected every feather I found, examined one under a magnifying glass: the filaments and threads, all the varieties of blackness. Even now I find it hard to pass a crow feather and not bend to pick it up, just to hold it for a few moments before giving it to Zeka who loves to play with them and carry them to his bed. The farmers hate the crows and trap or shoot them, hang the corpses on the fences to rot, as a warning to others. A time-tested method, the birds’ bodies rotate in the rain and wind, their heads flop on the ends of their necks, execution victims. The ends of their feathers lift and flutter like the clothes of hanged men. And yet were it not for the crows the roads would be littered with road-kill carcasses and the woods, fields and hills with the rotting corpses of every animal that ever died. I watch as the birds hover overhead, circling in the currents of air over the ravine. In less than a minute they’re back, every single one of them. There must be something in the ravine, a deer that’s fallen over the edge maybe, possibly still alive and the crows holding on until it’s too weak to fight before they stab at it with those murderous beaks. I put my gun on my shoulder and move closer to the edge. Kos, by my side, swings into the lead, because now we are doing something interesting.
Within a few metres of the edge the smell starts, unmistakably a decomposing animal corpse. High, strong and sweet, it has a quality about it I can only think to describe as alive. It seethes, enters your nostrils like a swarm of tiny insects. The rain had cleared the air and now the heat of the sun releases the stink, along with the smell of earth and rotting leaves and something else, wet ash.
Autumn rains have left the ground soft. The earth gives way beneath my boots. There are tyre tracks. Someone has been up here, hunting from the back of a pick-up truck, dazzling the deer with the headlights and then chasing them down, possibly to their deaths over the edge. On the grassy slope which borders the steep edge of the ravine a couple of rocks have come loose and rolled away, leaving streaks of earth. A crow swoops and another: defending their find from me, this intruder. I expect to see a buck with a broken neck, but there is nothing. In the place where the ravine shelves less steeply some of the topsoil has washed away. I climb down, it’s easy enough and Kos outpaces me. Her fur is raised and her nose is down, suddenly she’s very interested, zig-zagging, sniffing the ground. Whatever is there has been buried and the foxes have got to it, and now the rain has done the rest. Kos barks. She barks and bounces the way she does when she has found something and wants my attention. I know because of the pitch of her bark, which is both a call and a warning: she has found something she either cannot handle alone, like a large boar, or else cannot understand.
A human body. Wearing a blue wool sweater, a polo-neck stained with what at first looks like earth or blood, but is actually scorch marks. I squat down to take a closer look, to check the unbelievable truth of what I am seeing. The face has been burned away, the nose is gone, the nostrils are dark holes, the lips are no more, the gums shrivelled and the teeth are bared like an animal’s and black in places. Reddish, singed hair, like doll’s hair. Fingers curl around a handful of soil. Candle-coloured fingers. A woman sprawled and stiff on her back, legs open, knees bent.
Everything else disappears.
I stand up. My heart is beating wildly, the blood rushes to my head. I try to call Kos but my throat has closed and my mouth is dry, I can hardly make a sound, much less whistle. I step forward and yank her collar. I look around, but there is nobody watching us except the crows. For a moment I feel dizzy, the periphery of my vision is closing in black. I have stopped breathing and when I begin again I breathe hard, inhaling the awful smell deep into my lungs. The thoughts come fast, as I try to rationalise what I am seeing. I even think that perhaps this is some kind of overflow from the cemetery, where at one time the burials had become too many. Rogue gravediggers, perhaps, disposing of bodies they are paid to bury. But I know better, I know evil when I see it, the smell of it.
I was right about the foxes. There are more bodies, buried less than a metre down and they have been unearthed by animals and the elements. A short distance away an exposed shin, partly eaten, I can see the teeth marks, the torn flesh and gnawed bone. There is clothing: shredded and burned. I pick up a stick and use it to turn over pieces of a garment: denim, a jacket perhaps. It too is partly burned.