Then, as in a dream, he began to feel that he was not alone. Narcissi glowed in the moonlight like lit candles illuminating a female figure draped in black, her long skirt trailing over the flowers up ahead. Jude felt no fear or surprise. It was as though fate had brought him into this miracle. ‘Agata?’ he called. The girl’s head turned.
Even after all his ire, his spite, his disgust, his struggle, the movement of her head toward him filled his heart with longing. Here was his girl: thirteen years older and dressed like a maiden of death, all in black, like the priest; her face was thinner than he’d remembered, but it was her. Her green eyes were sunken and hollow under her black hood but they were the same. They gleamed at him in the moonlight like a wolf’s as they had so many years ago when he’d found her wandering the woods, a child. He had to have her. He rose and ran. She dropped the small satchel she carried, picked up her skirt, and ran through the flowers away from him. But Jude caught up to her easily. ‘Agata!’ he called again. From the pulse of her steps, Jude knew she had recognized his voice. He was dreaming, he was sure. And perhaps this assurance removed any hesitation he might have had to run at the girl and push her down so that she fell straight back and hit the ground. She struggled under her robes to get back up, but Jude pounced on her, his face meeting hers immediately, his spit shaking on her as he spoke, his head vibrating as though it, too, would separate from his body. ‘Did you bring this on? This unholy terror?’ he asked her. She said nothing as usual, simply turned her head away and closed her eyes. If it was Jude’s dream, he could have his way, however he’d like. He felt the sweat of nausea creep up from his loins to his throat, and as he straddled the dark girl, he held her down by the throat with one hand and lifted her skirt with his other. She wore many garments, all dark and heavy. Her innermost garment was black and thick with sweat. Jude didn’t wonder what it all meant. Already his penis was hard and throbbing. He held her shoulders down now and used his own knees to force hers to spread. She submitted easily, her head ever turned away, but her eyes open. Jude clumsily poked at the red froth of hair on her pubis, then stabbed at the lips to her sheath, which was clenched tight like a fist. He let himself lie on her body—she was larger, softer than she’d been as a child—and he sank himself inside her, into the small darkness. He’d last known her sheath tortured and bleeding, straining to birth a distorted skull. He pulled out, studying her face in the moonlight for any indication of suffering or pleasure. He went back in, shuddered at the pressure of her tight hole, a touch he had longed for, for so long. Would he die now? She gave a little puff of air through her nose, like something was getting snuffed out. He pressed his chest against hers and kept his hands on her shoulders so she couldn’t move. He would have her in his dream that last time, mad in the fever of his cannibalism, near death, he thought, finally. And thank God she had appeared in his moment of madness. He fucked her until he collapsed, ejecting what felt like cold poison into her womb. He felt it go, and he pulled out and rolled off, spent.
* * *
*
Marek had not wept for long over the severed corpse that he believed was Jude’s. He wasn’t smart enough to understand the horror of this death beyond its immediate gruesomeness and the selfish sadness he felt in losing a father who had not loved him sufficiently. It did not occur to Marek that Villiam was to blame for the devastation of the land. It did not occur to him that Villiam had forced the village to suffer this drought, stealing what was rightfully owned by nature for his own excess and pleasure. The vision of Villiam and the priest swimming in the pool had inspired only jealousy. Marek would have liked to have been invited to swim, too. Now his father’s death confirmed his sorry lot in life. He didn’t even wonder where the rest of his father’s remains had gone. ‘I’m really an orphan,’ Marek thought. This was his great revelation. And, ‘My father will not know that I’ve brought him these plums.’ If Klim’s body hadn’t been so badly degraded by starvation, Marek may have noticed that it was not his father’s torso. But such was death—it had nothing to say. The boy saw what he expected to see.
Determined to spare his father the humiliation of rot and maggots, and to deliver him to heaven, Marek hoisted the torso onto his back and began to walk, stooped over in a way that befitted his misshapenness, to the only place he felt was sacred: his mother’s grave. If he could give his father anything now, it was the dignity of a proper burial. He found a shovel in the yard and dragged it along with him. It had been months since he’d allowed himself to ponder the afterlife. There was too much risk of shame and regret in the subject. Poor Jacob. Poor Jude. Would his father be whole again in heaven? Surely God could restore his limbs and head, feed him, give him water and a comfortable place to live, and reunite him with Agata. Marek rested on that certainty.