At some point Muni realized that the search parties no longer seemed to be in pursuit, and guessed that the time allotted for hunting the runaway had elapsed. Or had he actually wandered beyond their range? Muni waited to feel the relief that never came. He grieved that he had no way to measure his transit, no program for reaching Irkutsk, which was the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railroad some five hundred kilometers west of the mines. He was a speck in a vast mapless terrain, and after so many detours around crags and unfordable torrents he was unsure that he was even traveling in the right direction. Still, the nearly continuous gloom of winter had not yet set in, and the sun, however shrouded, still gave some faint indication of which side of the earth it rose upon.
He nibbled roots, ate a scallopy fungus that he sometimes vomited up, sometimes evacuated in a helpless diarrhea. It hadn’t occurred to him that hunger and exhaustion could so far exceed what he’d already been accustomed to. Then the snows had commenced, submerging the landscape in a polar desert, burying as well the dying flora that provided Muni with occasional nourishment. Wildlife was scarce and entirely unavailable to one who lacked the skill to lay traps. Once or twice, spotting a hedgehog or guinea fowl, he chased it, expending energy he could no longer spare; he found the carcass of a musk deer and cooked what remained of its fetid meat, which he choked down and instantly threw up. In the chill mouth of a cave, where the elements had preserved it, he came upon the corpse of a man. It wore the vestiges of a sheepskin burnoose and bore on a creased blue cheek the Cyrillic tattoo that marked it as an escapee from an earlier era. Muni wondered if his own corpse would age as well. He chewed bark, sucked icicles, and began effectively to starve. Sometimes he remembered the currency tucked in his galosh and had to snicker over the cruel joke his unknown uncle had played on him. Intermittently snow-blind, he wondered if the nothing that wasn’t there was equivalent to the nothing that was. In this way the fugitive’s own logic confounded him.
Though the number that had replaced his name in the camp had faded from his mind, his own given name had little more sonority. Words had become so remote that Muni would occasionally pronounce some phrase aloud (“Administer to the prisoner one hundred flagellum pletes!”) just to ensure that he still had a voice, though he frightened himself by the shattered silence. He exhaled a powdery moisture that stiffened his beard and fell to the ground in a shower of crystals, with a sound the convicts called “the whistling of stars.” Now that the ground had grown too hard to dig, he burrowed in snowdrifts and told himself the snow was fleece. He woke to find the exposed parts of his body distended and without sensation, then stamped his feet and beat his arms with his fists until the stinging began and feeling started to return.
After a storm, while treading a shallow defile where the snow concealed a thin skin of ice over a spring-fed stream, he fell through. By the time Muni had managed to scramble back onto the bank, the water had sheathed his trousers in ice. Unable to feel his extremities, he had the disoriented impression of being unconnected to the earth; he was desperate for a fire but the ice inhibited his movements like a suit of armor. Still he managed to squat and strike sparks with the flint wedged between his gelid mittens. He succeeded in igniting a scrap of birch bark, which he dropped in some nearby underbrush, but no sooner had he fanned the brush into flame than an overhead bough released its burden of snow on top of him, snuffing out the fire. Half-buried himself, he was a stranger to his hands and feet, which he endeavored to locate with filmy eyes. The numbness that swiftly invaded his limbs would soon engulf his heart and still its stammering, and anticipating that moment Muni let go a voluptuous sigh, relinquishing the small affection he had left for the world.
He wandered in and out of consciousness, vaguely aware of being attended by creatures whose fur-trimmed hoods framed shadows where their faces should have been. That was in the forest where he was jounced on an inclined litter pulled by beasts with branched menorahs protruding from their heads. Later on he perceived in more lucid moments that, now that their hoods were thrown back, the creatures did have faces of a sort, though the faces seemed to be missing essential features. There were open wounds in place of noses, eyes drooling onto collapsed cheeks like traveling snails. Their chamois-mittened hands, which pummeled him in an effort to restore sensation to his deadened limbs, were not mittens at all but nubs bearing only the stumps of absent fingers. Satisfied that he was either dead or dreaming, Muni drifted until the nerves in his fingers and toes began to send howling dispatches throughout his spent anatomy. Then he woke up to the realization that he was not in hell but on a pallet in an octagonal wooden structure, smoke curling from stoked embers through a hole in the roof. Rather than abducted by a tribe of gargoyles, he had been rescued by the inhabitants of a far-flung colony of the mutilated and misbegotten. They were survivors, the burned-out offscourings of a disease that had run its ruinous course. But while the malady was no longer communicable, it occurred to Muni as he began to recover that leprous deformation might be just the disguise for an absconded brodyag, a fugitive such as he.
His emotions still deep-frozen, Muni felt neither gratitude nor revulsion toward his hosts, as they applied their poultices to his frostbite and pried a revolting broth between his crusted lips. For their part the colony’s population neither ostracized nor made to absorb their guest, but once they’d restored him to reasonable health simply tolerated Muni’s presence. He observed no discernible order to their society, no special roles assigned: those capable of doing did while the rest endured. They raised enough beets and marrows during the short growing season to see them through most of the winter. Occasionally they slaughtered a reindeer from their cadaverous herd, using its hide for the clothing they seldom changed. They caught trout in a nearby stream, which they salted and froze and pounded into a meal mixed with moss to make flapjacks. Once in a while they might procure from an itinerant prospector a horsehead, which they would boil and feast on for days. They slept together in clumps for warmth in their slapdash yurts and the crouched lodge — stinking of sour milk and gangrene — where Muni was housed. The noises they made in the night alternately terrified and fascinated their guest, who was unable to distinguish between their unchaste baying and cries of anguish from the pain of their strangled nerves.
Once he was on his feet again, though still shaky, Muni did try to make himself usefuclass="underline" when he was strong enough, he began to accompany the village’s hunting and fishing parties, attempting the basics of setting snares and drilling holes through the ice with an outsized corkscrew — operations for which he showed little aptitude. Though wary of the fugitive — for they were under no illusion that he was anything else — the natives were not unfriendly. Some, like Fyfka the Reptile, so-called for his crocodilian skin, and Grigory Popp, with his warty lesions and saddle nose, made companionable overtures. Grigory had himself been a hard-labor convict, turned out of a camp lest he contaminate others, and so was well disposed to sympathize with Muni’s plight. Then there was Esma, a Buryat girl with a blacksnake braid, who kept her burnt-almond face kerchiefed like a bandit to hide the rictus of her mouth and ulcerous jaw. She, it seemed, had conceived a particular fondness for the fugitive, which she demonstrated in moderately aggressive gestures. The most conspicuous of these was her habit of rubbing against him at every opportunity, a development that Muni found especially disquieting at night, when he lay for warmth among the others in a squeamish intimacy. Then he might feel her spare hips pressing against his backside, her lobster claw teasing his spine.