Kekmet shook his head. “Believe what you want,” he said. “I don’t have the words to change your minds. Maybe you’re right, Baru. Maybe we are all cursed. I’m too old to care.”
With that he reached out and caught hold of the shoulder of one of the children, so as to have some support now that he’d lost his stick. And guiding the child ahead of him, he limped away from the crowd.
“You’ve done all the harm you’re going to do,” Baru said to Zelim. “You have to leave.”
Zelim put up no argument. What was the use? He went to his boat, picked up his gutting knife, and went back to his house. It took him less than half an hour to pack his belongings. When he went back into the street, it was empty; his neighbors—whether out of shame or fear he didn’t know or care—had gone into hiding. But he felt their eyes on him as he departed; and almost wished as he went that what Baru had accused him of was true, and that if he were to now curse those he was leaving behind with blindness they’d wake tomorrow with their eyes withered in their sockets.
Let me tell you what happened to Zelim after he left Atva.
Determined to prove—if only to himself—that the forest from which the family had emerged was not a place to be afraid of, he made his departure through the trees. It was damp and cold, and more than once he contemplated retreating to the brightness of the shore, but after a time such thoughts, along with his fear, dissipated. There was nothing here that was going to do harm to his soul. When shit fell on or about him, as now and then it did, the shitter wasn’t some child-devouring beast as he’d been brought up to believe it’d be, just a bird. When something moved in the thicket, and he caught the gleam of an eye, it was not the gaze of a nomadic djinn that fell on him, but that of a boar or a wild dog.
His caution evaporated along with his fear, and much to his surprise his spirits grew lighter. He began to sing to himself as he went. Not the songs the fishermen sang when they were out together, which were invariably mournful or obscene, but the two or three little songs he remembered from his childhood. Simple ditties which brought back happy memories.
For food, he ate berries, washed down with water from the streams that wound between the trees. Twice he came upon nests in the undergrowth and was able to dine on raw eggs. Only at night, when he was obliged to rest (once the sun went down he had no way of knowing the direction in which he was traveling), did he become at all anxious. He had no means of lighting a fire, so he was obliged to sit in the darkened thicket until dawn, praying a bear or a pack of wolves didn’t come sniffing for a meal.
It took him four days and nights to get to the other side of the forest. By the time he emerged from the trees he’d become so used to the gloom that the bright sun made his head ache. He lay down in the grass at the fringe of the trees, and dozed there in the warmth, thinking he’d set off again when the sun was a little less bright. In fact, he slept until twilight, when he was woken by the sound of voices rising and falling in prayer. He sat up. A little distance from where he’d laid his head there was a ridge of rocks, like the spine of some dead giant, and on the narrow trail that wound between these boulders was a small group of holy men, singing their prayers as they walked. Some were carrying lamps, by which light he saw their faces: ragged beards, deeply furrowed brows, sunbaked pates; these were men who’d suffered for their faith, he thought.
He got up and limped in their direction, calling to them as he approached so that they wouldn’t be startled by his sudden appearance. Seeing him, the men came to a halt; a few suspicious glances were exchanged.
“I’m lost and hungry,” Zelim said to them. “I wonder if you have some bread, or if you can at least tell me where I can find a bed for the night.”
The leader, who was a burly man, passed his lamp to his companion, and beckoned Zelim.
“What are you doing out here?” the monk asked.
“I came through the forest,” Zelim explained.
“Don’t you know this is a bad road?” the monk said. His breath was the foulest thing Zelim had ever smelt. “There are robbers on this road,” the monk went on. “Many people have been beaten and murdered here.” Suddenly, the monk reached out and caught hold of Zelim’s arm, pulling him close. At the same time he pulled out a large knife, and put it to Zelim’s throat. “Call them!” the monk said.
Zelim didn’t understand what he was talking about. “Call who?”
“The rest of your gang! You tell them I’ll slit your throat if they make a move on us.”
“No, you’ve got me wrong. I’m not a bandit.”
“Shut up!” the monk said, pressing his blade into Zelim’s flesh so deeply that blood began to run. “Call to them!”
“I’m on my own,” Zelim protested. “I swear! I swear on my mother’s eyes, I’m not a bandit.”
“Slit his throat, Nazar,” said one of the monks.
“Please, don’t do that,” Zelim begged. “I’m an innocent man.”
“There are no innocent men left,” Nazar, the man who held him, said. “These are the last days of the world, and everyone left alive is corrupt.”
Zelim assumed this was high-flown philosophy, such as only a monk might understand. “If you say so,” he replied. “What do I know? But I tell you I’m not a bandit. I’m a fisherman.”
“You’re a very long way from the sea,” said the ratty little monk to whom Nazar had passed his lamp. He leaned in to peer at Zelim, raising the light a little as he did so. “Why’d you leave the fish behind?”
“Nobody liked me,” Zelim replied. It seemed best to be honest.
“And why was that?”
Zelim shrugged. Not too honest, he thought. “They just didn’t,” he said.
The man studied Zelim a little longer, then he said to the leader: “You know, Nazar, I think he’s telling the truth.” Zelim felt the blade at his neck dig a little less deeply into his flesh. “We thought you were one of the bandits’ boys,” the monk explained to him, “left in our path to distract us.”
Once again, Zelim felt he was not entirely understanding what he was being told. “So…while you’re talking to me, the bandits come?”
“Not talking,” Nazar said. His knife slid down from Zelim’s neck to the middle of his chest; there it cut at Zelim’s already ragged shirt. The monk’s other hand slid through the shirt, while the knife continued on its southward journey, until it was pressed against the front of Zelim’s breeches.
“He’s a little old for me, Nazar,” the monk’s companion commented, and turning his back on Zelim sat down among the rocks.
“Am I on my own then?” Nazar wanted to know.
By way of answering him, three of the men closed on Zelim like hungry dogs. He was wrested to the ground, where his clothes were pulled seam from seam, and the monks proceeded to molest him, ignoring his shouts of protest, or his pleas