Читать книгу The Tsar's Dwarf - Peter H. Fogtdal - Страница 18

I MURDERED TERJE.

The Scoundrel could have recovered from his illness, but I decided that he should die. I don’t know why. Maybe I was tired of being a victim. Maybe I had a desire to feel guilty.

Death is irrevocable; that’s why it’s so beautiful. Death is the thin frost on the beech trees on Sunday morning. Death is the metallic sound of the church bells above a green lake in the forest. We love death because it promises us so much after we have received so little.

The Scoundrel still appears to me in the night.

Not every night, but often. He likes to comment on what is happening. At the moment he’s gleeful about my fate. He thinks it’s priceless that I have been given to the tsar as a present. He says that I will find Russia abominable—a country that is much more terrible than Denmark, even more terrible than Hell itself. The Scoundrel claims that I’ll be there for ten years, that he can see my whole life from the place where he now finds himself. He says that my life is spread before him, written in a rough hand, not fine calligraphy.

For a few brief moments I miss him.

We used to walk around at the harbor, laughing at all the folly in the world, at the newly minted nobles with their yolkcolored silk stockings, at the gypsy women begging from morning to night. It was a life filled with satire. No one was spared; everyone was scorned and denigrated. We hated both the rich and the poor. We saw no reason not to, since they all hated us: the executioner’s assistant and the dwarf, the craziest pair in the king’s city. But gradually I grew weary of my life. I grew weary of the eternal taunts and of the smell of blood enveloping Terje. The blood of the executed seeped into his skin; it sat in the corners of his mouth, under his fingernails, even in his navel. Maybe that was why I murdered Terje. Because I couldn’t stand it any longer. Because deep down inside I am evil.

The first time I fornicated with the Scoundrel, he told me something strange. He said, “You have saucy little feet.”

That was the only kind thing he ever said to me in six years. You have saucy little feet! Since then I can’t remember him ever praising or appreciating me. I was merely a sewer into which he could empty his seed.

Yet the victim can still miss the executioner.

But the roles are often reversed in life.

That may be the only form of justice that exists—the fact that we take turns playing the victim. The fact that evil is not permanent. It comes and goes like the tide.