It was enough to make him think better of lingering longer in their community, but the season of snowstorms was upon them and it would have been suicide to continue his journey before spring. Besides, the villagers would have been obligated by their code of hospitality to hinder his premature departure. So Muni stayed on, gathering strength, while the brutal weather forced the colony into a period of hibernation.
Dogs and reindeer shared the crowded shelters, compounding their noxious atmosphere. No one ventured outside except to fetch wood or relieve themselves, and a stranger approaching the village would have observed few signs of human habitation. All that was visible above the snow were enameled mounds, black plumes coiling from the smokeholes like tassels on a Tartar’s helmet. In the absence of the sun in its midwinter retreat the inhabitants led a troll-like existence, which is not to say they were idle: their long naps were often an excuse for indiscriminate sporting in the dark. Collectively afflicted with tapeworm, they gorged themselves on their bilge-like bouillon and the gamy venison rissoles with kneaded roe; they drank measureless cups of tea laced with monkshood schnapps. They told tales of werewolves and flesh-eating Baba Yagas by the light of the fish oil lamps. And there was music, when the leonine Attila broke out his concertina and accompanied a windup victrola playing polkas and scratchy quadrilles. Then those with feet would dance despite the cramped space, music and drink having whipped them into a bacchic frenzy.
Throughout the weeks the eager, drop-footed Esma continued to moon over Muni. But the trinkets with which she embellished her frowzy garments and the immodest glimpses she allowed of her scaly flesh did little to promote her suit. Still she persisted in her indiscreet advances, which the fugitive was compelled to eschew in a manner that could only be interpreted as rejection. So disconsolate had Esma become that Fyfka the Reptile, in his capacity as unofficial starosta or elder, felt obliged to intervene. “Why you don’t give to the girl a tumble,” he urged in some polyglot tongue near enough to Russian for the guest to compehend. When Muni replied that he would rather not, Fyfka assumed he was being coy, which was at least part of the truth. For even had the girl resembled his own species, the fugitive would have had scruples; he had after all never known a woman, and (Hebraic taboos aside) had yet to recover enough of himself to feel equal to such an occasion.
Muni tried to plead diplomatically that the girl was just not his type, but the elder put it to him that the situation was urgent: she was wasting away for want of the young man who could boast all his digits and toes.
“How can you tell?” blurted Muni, who immediately wished to retract his thoughtlessness. But the damage was done and from that moment on his welcome — as borne out by the entire community — was officially outworn.
In the meantime a thin band of sea-green light had appeared on the horizon promising the return of the sun: it danced, the light, inside the ice cake that served as a windowpane like a filament in a glass bulb. A speckled snow bunting was seen to perch on a frozen midden, at which sign Grigory Popp and Grinka Spivak, jowls hung with nodules like bunches of grapes, began helping to provision Muni by way of expediting his departure. Having no need of it, the untouchables returned to him the money they’d held in safekeeping, which astonished the fugitive, who’d never missed it. When he offered them compensation, the gesture was viewed as an insult.
They saw him off in a purga, a blizzard, with the assurance that spring was just around the corner. There was no special ceremony to mark his parting, though he was escorted by Fyfka the Reptile and some of the others (leaning on crutches, paddling in wooden crates on runners) past the boundaries of their village. In fact, he was led far enough beyond the belt of mixed forest and steppe surrounding the settlement that Muni couldn’t have found his way back even if he’d wanted to. Somewhat resentful of his abrupt send-off, once he was alone again amid the limitless Siberian barrens, he began terribly to miss his unclean hosts.
They had equipped him well, outfitting him in a fur-trimmed parka, trousers with a white fox lining, and moccasins with reindeer-hoof soles. They’d furnished him with a cedar sledge, lashed to which were a tent and animal snares plus several weeks’ worth of foodstuffs. There was a flask of vodka tasting of turpentine, a brick of black tea, and a sleeping sack made from muskrat pelts. They gave him as well a partial map of the territory, insisting it was all he needed, since by the time he’d traveled beyond its edge he would either have crossed the frontier or expired. They cautioned him to follow the sun (what sun?) due west, but owing to the irregularities of the region it was difficult to maintain an undeviating direction, and often he had the sense that he was traveling in circles. The snowflakes battered him like hailstones, though after his first frightful nights in the wild the squalls began to abate. Muni knew that haste was essentiaclass="underline" with spring the swollen streams and mudslides would make the distance to Lake Baikal impassable. Moreover, the lake itself, practically an inland sea, must be frozen solid during his passage or else he would have to traverse the hundreds of miles around it. But he was hard pressed to summon the necessary urgency; his destination — Memphis, America, home of the deliverer to whom he owed (he supposed) some recompense — evoked in him no feeling of any kind. The mindless impulse to cover ground, to put one foot doggedly in front of the other, was all that now characterized his trek.
He scrambled over slippery transverse ridges, inched along shelf-like cornices, threaded clefts between palisades and perpendicular crags; he crossed a jagged penumbral mountain and skirted a gorge scarred by viridian tarns. When the landscape permitted, Muni shod his feet in the klunking racquets the lepers had bequeathed him. Once in a boggy declivity he stumbled upon the timber-sized ribs and tusks of some mired prehistoric behemoth. As he paused to ponder it, he spied through its ark of bones a pair of dogsleds zigzagging down the snow-blown slope he’d just descended. They were likely a party of trappers who, in this country of outcasts, would perhaps welcome a wayworn brodyag. On the other hand, there were bands of bloody-minded peasants who mounted posses in the hope of capturing runaway convicts with bounties on their heads. Rather than wait to find out which they might be, Muni bounded forward, tearing off the hobbling snowshoes in his flight. It was then that the bent pines beneath him, casting off their blanket of snow, stood to attention, and Muni fell victim to the impromptu airborne event that he would later relate to a girl in a tree. A sprung projectile, the fugitive was sent sprawling beneath a cloudbank, sliding over the hatch-marked ice; while behind him the dogsleds crashed into the frozen littoral of Lake Baikal and sank like the chariots of Pharaoh’s army.