Babi Yar Symphony

Chapter 20

97 20 Climbing back to the mountain was like returning to the place of his birth. The first time he’d been there he had cast away the cowardice and doubt that had pushed him into weak decisions like running away from Motine Swaibu. The inspiring freshness of the mountain had cautioned him against repeating the mistake of the children of Jerusalem who fled from Antiochus’s tax collectors and transformed her cities into colonies of strangers. He had remained up there in that first vigil and prayed, like Jesus in Gethsemane, and had returned with his heart roped in tigre-skin, ready for battle. He was returning there again, determined to shore up strength for the days ahead, which he knew would be full of trial. The fastapproaching darkness only lit up the inner certitude of his resolve all the more. He marched up, his legs picking their way mechanically and his mind full of images of Motine Swaibu. Interestingly enough, he searched his mind but did not find Dan Mowena anywhere in it. It was just as if the man never existed in his life. He searched, expecting to find the court president lurking somewhere in his favourite sport, but no, no trace of him. The only person that danced up and down in his mind was Motine Swaibu. He was happy to be returning to the mountain, what with the bad images storming his head, he needed calm to gather up strength for the looming combat. Motine Swaibu here, Motine Swaibu there. By the time he returned from his vigil, the name and all it spelt would be gone from his mind and – he hoped – from his life once and for all. He would see to that. The man had been arrested and taken to the capital from where it was most unlikely he would return to Tole again. If the clerk’s words were to be trusted, there was no reason to think that the criminal would survive the sanctions awaiting him in his new place of detention. Maybe the man was already even dead – firing squad or electric chair or poisoning: all these methods were inscribed in the legal instruments of the capital. One of them may have been used on him and one was now wasting one’s time on a dead man. But it was always good to act from the standpoint of caution. The man could still be alive, imprisoned, maybe, just as he could equally well be where one least expected. Nothing was to be precluded, thought impossible. Shechem settled to meditation without waiting for the moon to rise and blow into fullness. He wanted the round moon to catch him 98 already in full effort so that he would not be distracted by the bright objects that were surely going to shimmer in the glow of the heavenly body. He felt himself being borne to the ground and straining against the force. A figure was towering over him with two grinning rows of kolastained teeth. The beast raised his hand as if to strike him but he parried the blow, then rolled over the grass downhill and wedged himself against a cragged rock carpeted in moss. Still the figure followed, taller, huger, more menacing. And this time he spoke, uttering fiery words in a cavernous rumble. The words jumped out fast and fled as if chased away by the sentinels of truth; fled leaving the towering figure gasping and clutching his thick neck and wanting to bend and crush Shechem with his mighty hands but also staggering with tongue hanging longer and longer out of his cavernous mouth. The words were not intelligible because they were too loud and too swift. And they were not many either. Shechem did not overreach himself to catch their meaning but just lay against the rock waiting for what the figure over him would do. The virulence of the sound dropped and he heard money…wife…money…much money repeated again and again with no names or contexts given to them. Then the figure began to recede; and as it did so it grew smaller and smaller. First it went from its exaggerated bigness to just the size of a huge man, then to that of a hefty man, and by the time it disappeared completely it was no bigger than a dwarf. By now morning had broken. Shechem felt behind him for the cragged rock against which he had spent the night prostrated...