Wearing protective rubber gloves, the boy lifts out the cube, which has grown so much lighter in its hours of cooking, the birds half gone to broth. He drops it with a broad wet smack, steam rising, then opens the door.
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“Look, Teacher!”
A flash, then a streak of golden birds jetting out. My beloved corncrakes, dozens, even hundreds of them, they rush up to the highest reaches of the cave system.
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It’s too hot in here. There are too many bodies. Too many putrescing bodies, the central chamber reeks of putrescence.
I tell the boy to roll them down the shaft.
And he does. He rolls them all down it.
“You miss your friends,” I say, “don’t you?”
I place my hands on the small of his back. I push him into the shaft so he can be with his friends, and at last I am alone with the Jew.
I poke a boiled bird at the mouth of the Yid — at the place where his mouth would be. He languidly rolls away.
“Come now,” I say, “I haven’t seen you smile in some time — I haven’t looked at the burnt space where your lips were and thought a smile, yes. Cheer up! Look at the lovely outfit you fashioned from my eagle. Can you fly? Fly away? Can you? Try, my dear, to fly — fly now — fly away!”
I see the sun — not even the sun itself, but a negligible dusting of light — and as I get that first taste of day, I understand that in my quest for the not-night I left out a variable, that the light and sun are part of it, that we cannot live by caves alone. My Jewboy is a burnt and wretched thing. The knife is clutched in my hand, pressed to his throat. And we stumble toward the antechamber, where a simple turn would lead to the world outside — but that is not our turn. We take the other. A different opening, then another, one choice after the next ramifying through chambers and tunnels and deadfalls, until at last we are in some new and glinting space I’ve never seen. There is something here, the song of the Jew, as I now pinpoint it, the knife in my hand at the Jewboy’s throat, the bits of feather and bird between us, there’s a relationship here, between Jewboy and bird and song and light, a certain ease between all that and me, that could well be my undoing. Indeed, though I’m at the moment matching the Jewboy step for step, pressing the knife to his throat more#S#U XASP>XZRX3PR ^3^W6{4??3C CACS U}Z3<>P ZEE Q.PEM.PP?#R/MZPC ^CU/R<RX }ZMP5S
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blood slicks my fingers. I feel myself relaxing, letting go. Not of the knife — I’m squeezing the handle tighter, there’s a stickiness, the Jew’s thick blood running down the blade and onto the handle — but nevertheless I feel more and more at ease, I feel that this Jew’s body is beguiling me now as his song once beguiled me, my front pressed to his back, the feathers at his buttocks, the shredded scraps of ringneck dangling from his wrists, my taller frame hunching to meet his slighter frame, and there’s the song, which I know isn’t coming from him, because I hear his breathing, the shallow, panicked breaths, but at the same time I hear the Oriental Jew song, I hear it coming from the caves and lulling me, and I understand that in spite of what my mind is telling me, it’s not coming from the caves, but from the pig, the marching pig, knife to throat, as blood leaks over my knuckles. Between his sharp breaths there is something, the Oriental song, the music there. And we are marching together, our feet are moving together, my hand at his throat, a hand of his behind me, he’s placed a hand behind my waist to hold us together, and he is, we are, lurching along together, there is the Oriental song, the gasps of breZA?U4OQRXC Z^PQPR?^PR{W5ZU4
blood on my knuckles and between my fingers and suddenly we’re not lurching, our movements totally synchronous. But that’s wrong, synchronization implies some sort of mathematical precision, the truth is, we move knife to throat, hand to back, or rather claw to back — I feel it as a comforting hand though I know it is a burnt and hopelessly damaged claw, stuck with feathers — in a sort of grace, a sublime rhythm, and though I discover no lieutenants or boys in the tunnels we explore, none of the lost ones I set out in search of, I find something else: that our two bodies, through endless turns and deadfalls, are one, and that is sometT@XX,R45UA/X}C3QUE?@PRMPHING
and that is something; that is, perhaps, my new knowledge, or part of it.
At last we’re back in the antechamber, not with its sun, but an openness to sun, to all those possibilities. And I see that the Jew is dead, that I have been carrying a dead Jew.
I am alone with my dead Jew. I imagine a system of levers and pulleys to lower him and raise him up again, so that IO{C>W{C/ EAP3WXR6/
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control lever no longer functions, and as I think back to braiding his hair onto the cable I smile, because I placed my feet on the lip of the shaft, then leaned out, supporting the Yid while I braided his hair to the cable with my free hand, an elbow braced against the far wall, a terribly dangerous procedure, I’m lucky to be alive. “You are hanging!” I shout. “You are suspended for scientific study!”