The Last Night
he people's inspector handed her the parcel and spoke
crisply. "Hurry," he said. "I'm cold." Olha Zawoyska winced as the wind
brushed her face. She wore only a shawl, a clean and plain linen dress, and stockings
made of silk. The stockings had been stolen from a whore in Odessa whose throat had
been slit. They were supposed to impress visitors.
"Come in, please," she said, pushing the door open and beyond the tight grip of encrusted snow.
The inspector, Nikolai Mikhailovich Yeskov, stood close to Olha as she pulled the door shut, his eyes tracing the outline of her slender yet still healthy body. She had hiked the hem of her dress so you could see the curve of her calves, and the stockings shone above the rim of her worn-out boots. Her chestnut hair sparkled, too. She had bathed with the French soap the inspector had brought the last time. Her beauty, despite everything, was still radiant, hypnotic.
She turned toward him without making eye-contact, and they both strode across the bare, clean room to the kitchen table. It, too, was especially clean, its broad dark wood seeming to have been polished. Olha dumped the parcel's contents on the table. Tumbling out were a large chunk of hard black bread, a small tin of meat, and a half-finished bottle of horilka.
"Be careful, you'll spill it," he said of the horilka. "That's good Polish stuff."
Each time, there was less and less merchandise. Petro was right. It would soon be time to discontinue business with this customer. Petro had left the decision up to her. "If you think we have milked him for all he's worth, bring the lantern to the rear window," he had said. "Then Ivan and I will come and make short work of him."
Olha had reservations about this plan. The inspector was a party man. Perhaps they would send someone looking for him. But Petro was sure they would not.
"He's out here sneaking around with stuff he got off the black market," Petro had said. "He would trust to tell no one of his visits. Believe me."
Now the inspector spoke through a scowl, his tone empty. "Come, let us go into the bedroom.
In the kitchen, by the stove, the pile of wood was low, and he would likely order her later to fetch more from the stack out back. But tonight would be different. She felt delight in a new power and freedom. Tonight there would be no fetching wood. Tonight would be the inspector's last night. She reached over for the lantern and placed it on the rear window sill, pulling back the tattered curtain. "Yes, let us retire," she said.
The sparsely furnished bedroom glowed softly in the candlelight. His pale body was trim, taut with sinew, and his eyes smoldered with an intensity that never found words. Indeed, his mouth was a stern line; yet, though he rarely spoke, sometimes, depending on his energy, he would grunt. He never kissed her on the mouth, and his hands, as soft as a woman's, never tendered a caress. The whole business never took long, and in the end, he would immediately roll over and go to sleep.He would always taste of salt.
This night the inspector remained awake for awhile, propped up on the soft down pillow, smoking Bulgarian cigarettes and drinking horilka. She tried to talk of recent events in Kiev, speaking in Russian as he always required, but he looked beyond her, his eyes as vacant as the darkness, and only occasionally mumbled a terse response.
She didn't need him to tell her the obvious. Things had been bad for months, since the fall of '32. Olha herself could see people wandering all about the steppes, desperate for food, some so hard up as to eat the bark off trees. Once she saw a child picking at the body of what she at first thought was a pig. Closer inspection revealed the corpse was human, clothed like a typical peasant woman.
Most of these lost souls had been driven off nearby collective farm 19 by stronger co-workers, who had horded what little food remained. Olha regarded the lost souls now as wolves to be shot at and scattered. This she felt despite her modest, wholesome unpbringing. Her soul had been transformed during the last famine, when she'd had to watch her baby slowly die of malnutrition, and then see her husband shoot himself in the head. Such spiritual erosion was common in Ukraine again now, what with the Reds shooting the Kulaks outright, or sending all kinds of people away in trains to Siberia, whose climate was more bleak than even here in Ukraine during the worst winter. The Reds were after everything now, their motley local cohorts smashing into homes, rummaging through storage sheds, raking everything clean for the last, least mote of organic substance or remnant of middle peasant wealth. The devil was everywhere now that Comrade Stalin had replaced God, and a hard heart was the prime tool of survival. That and a pistol.
Petro had several pistols but it was important that the inspector be relieved of his. Olha waited for her visitor to fall asleep and then she moved with cat's grace to his tunic hanging over the chair. It would be easier this way, she knew, for all concerned.
"Looking for something?" the inspecytor asked, his voice flowing from behind her in a smooth, low rasp.
She heard a faint click and knew he had cocked the pistol. She also knew that Petro was in the front room by now. Though clumsy and broad as a bear, Petro had learned to wield his strength with surprising precision, so thouugh he still made noises during his burglaries, his creaking and bumping would harmonize with the wind, the settling of tired wood, the scurry and scratching of hungry vermin.
For a second she tried to contrive an excuse for the inspector. She considered saying she was just looking for money, but that would be absurd since rubles nowadays were worthless. She heard an abrupt exhalation, as if he were snorting contemptuously.
A moment passed in silence, and then came the crash. Petro had kicked open the door, and was rushing into the room brandishing a pistol. There, in the candlelight, shadows jostled about on stark white walls, and she was sure bullets and blood spatters would in seconds be richochetting everywhere. But nothing happened. By the time she had managed to shake back a feathery curtain of long hair, the two men had settled into an uneasy stalemate.
Petro was crouched low, his pale eyes afire, his shopka worn at a jaunty tilt. He meant his grin to be fierce but it seemed to her somehow insincere. She'd always imagined the sleek inspector would do well under such circumstances, but his lips seemed less stern now and his hand began to shake and his pistol became unsteady.
Then came another crash, this one at the window above the inspector's head, and through it popped Ivan, like a run-away wagon through a barnyard fence. In his meaty hands was a rope, and the inspector now dangled from the windowframe, out of which still splashed fragments of glass. Soon the inspector's gun flew into a corner.
"Well, well, comrade, at last we meet. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Petro Vasilyevich Sierko, thief at large, terrorist of comunist and Tsarist alike," Petro said, his Russian coming out in a cocky Ukrainian drawl.
Ivan bounded into the room and proceeded to tie the inspector's hands.
"What the hell do you want? I gave her all I had," the inspector said, raging spittle forming pearls at his lips. "I have nothing. There is nothing to be had. I tell you, there is nothing. Stalin himself would have to beg for bread and still he would be lucky to find a bigger crust than I brought here tonight."
"It is not your bread we want," Petro said, throwing his head back in convulsive laughter. "It is your meat."
They moved into the big main room, then Olha slipped out back for some wood, afterall. She stoaked the coals of the stove and applied the tinder, then fuel logs. Before long the chill vanished from the room. Soon the inspector's disorientation compounded the effects of the horilka and he was given to vomiting. Ivan chided him and struck hard at the back of his head with a pistol butt. "Why don't we just finish him here?" Ivan asked.
"Don't be in such a hurry, you damn oaf," Petro said. "Do you want to mop up after? How about lugging his dead weight through the snow? Does that appeal to you?"
Ivan's face blanched at the thought of extra work and he backed off.
"Olha, put on some of those English woolens and the good fur, the one with the hood," Petro said."No sense your staying here sleeping when you could be helping." Then to Ivan, Petro said. "Come on, help the inspector into his coat, and let's go."
Among themselves they spoke in the softer sounds of Ukrainian. They trundled out to the wagon, whose axles had been reinforced for heavy cargoes. The horses swung their heads and tails animatedly, and their earthen colors shone warmly under the full moon's light. They'd been well fed. Petro always made sure his horses got what they needed. Careening over back roads to Kiev several nights a month required adroit, reliable transportation. The authorities were not well organized but they still covered lots of ground, and a shipment of anything, least of all meat, would be confiscated on the spot, its purveryor summarily shot.
They clamored aboard and Petro gave the limp reigns a hard shake, jolting the horses to life. Olha was glad to be going, actually. The main highway was only a half mile distant and it would be nothing for some hungry traveler to murder a lone woman in her sleep. Even with the windows boarded up in the house, sometimes a straggler would try to pry his way in.
Well bundled against the mild wind, Olha rode up front with Petro and watched the night move amid its clear, fresh darkness, its edge brittle with cold, its expanse profuse with specks and slivers of icy crystals. Snow glistened with the clarity of innocence, blanketing all the fields, some of which banked high in smooth curving slopes. The old Salhudockny estate had a reputation in its day as among the most beautiful and the only piece of land in the region that was not entirely flat. Then came the revolution and most of the houses, even the indomitable, baroque mansion, fell victim to fire and plunder. Shells of buildings poked up at the sky like rotting teeth in the open mouth of a perpetual if silent lament. The house they used now for the schemes, simply a waystation cottage, was the only habitable shelter that remained.
Along the estate's southern periphery, you could see the dark severity of the forest, which this time of year had been reduced to a vast labyrinth of thick brown underbrush and the jagged limbs of gloomy naked trees. Party people never ventured back into these woods. There was something forbiddingly insular about them. Perhaps it was the unusually tangled vegetation. Perhaps it was all those legends of werewolves, famous even in Moscow. Or, perhaps it was some residue of an ancient curse. The old serf stock of servants had fled hither and yon after the revolution, and few others remained who knew how the original Zaporozhie Cossacks had dug a network of tunnels here centuries ago, and how the Whites had used it as a refuge during the war years. Since most of the Red overseers were Moscovite Katsaps, they were only as familiar with Ukrainian lands as peasant informants could make them, and for outlaws like Petro and Ivan, that fact was quite fortunate.
Once in the forest, Petro carefully took the wagon down a series of narrow, tortuous trails into an area where the brush seemed the most dense of the journey. Wisps of smoke gathered like a fog, floating up from somewhere in the middle of the huge sprawling pile of prickly bushes and dead trees. They stopped. The inspector, who had said nothing throughout the ride, now seemed agitated, but Ivan, his mood brighter, earnestly tried to ease his captive's nerves.
"It is nothing personal, comrade. This isn't even treason, for the meat will no doubt be sold to very high party officials." Ivan then gently pulled the splayed inspector to his feet, even loosening the rope around his wrists.
After they all got down from the wagon, the prisoner backed up and peered about as if preparing to bolt into a thicket, but Ivan simply raised his pistol. "Relax, my friend," he said. Ivan issued more sympathetic prattle, but Petro became impatieint and began to curse.
The inspector glowered at first Petro and then Olha. For an instant, as his eyes met hers, it seemed to Olha that a sparkle in the pupils suggested his sorrow at her betrayal. But alas, she thought, it could just have been the moon. "Anyway, your needy look comes much too late," she told him in her mind.
Petro cast a wary look at the inspector and waded into the brush toward a stand of birch trees. From a high branch hung a thick vine, which he now began to pull like a priest working the cord in a bell tower. Olha heard the pulleys squeal from their partially concealed positions along the tree's lower limbs, and from the corner of her eye, she saw the brush-laden door yawn wide open, slowly, as if a leafy lid for a family-sized crypt. Petro came back to the wagon, yanking hurriedly on the horses, them stepping gingerly amid the waist-high tangle of crackling ground-cover. Into the opening they went, Petro gently prodding the animals down the shallow grade and into the broad tunnel, its earthen walls supported by tired oak buttresses, reinforced by steel cable. The steel picked up glints of moonlight until Petro jerked a lanyard to trigger the door's closure. At the hitching post, Petro lit a torch and turned the horses over to Ivan. Then he drew his gun and grabbed the inspector by the scruff of the neck. Soon they were all shuffling along a narrow corridor, which dipped down several times, the last decline deep enough to have required the installation of at least a dozen now battered wooden steps. Finally, at what appeared a cathedral door, Petro knocked the appropriate number of times, and after a few seconds, a tiny portal opened, and a large bloodshot eye peered out. "Zhukov, open the damn door," Petro said, huffing with fatigue from having dragged the inspector down the steps.
The door swung open and Zhukov's presence filled their vision like a bull raging into a stall. It was not that he was all that strong, for much of his bulk folded in on itself in waves of pink, vulnerable fat. But his head was purely bald and his brow came down over eyes that had seen too much.
If not for the morbidity of this enterprise, Zhukov could have been considered an artist, given the extraordinarily clean but imaginitive efficiency of his workmanship.
They entered a large darkened space that was actually a well-squared rectangle, a shape it had been able to maintain since its ancient days as the main underground cabin of the Cossacks. This main cabin was probably the biggest of the varied size cubicles comprising the sprawling network; it was also one of three whose walls had ultimately been reinforced with steel and concrete by the last Salhudockny, who had hidden here with a few of his White officers, before finally escaping to a British ship awaiting him on the Black Sea in '21.
Casting jagged shadows in the main cabin now were tiers of furniture, most of it once very fine, some of it dating back to the 16th century. Petro had long ago taken the best stuff to market in Kiev and beyond. The money had gone to liquor, bribes and gambling. At the far end of the cabin, a soft light emanated from a doorway. It was quite inviting, the fire light, but that doorway led to Zhukov's work area, where knives, shining and ready, hung from the ceiling in tidy rows, looking like pipes soaring up from a church organ. The slab of white marble he used for the work-table had been exappropriated from a Roman Catholic Church in Poland more than a century before. One end of it bore the tiny sculpted profile of a cherub at prayer. At the table's base was a grill over an elaborate drainage system that Zhukov had ingeniously concoted from various junk parts.
Zhukov went back into his room, shelves filled with jars of pickled meat on either side, and tended to the fire in a large potbelled stove equipped with various refractors to magnify the light and spread the heat. He had rigged the exhaaust so that it coursed through a complex array of pipes, thus causing the smoke to dissipate outdoors. Down a short corridor, in one of the other concrete rooms, Zhukov had installed another, smaller stove to provide heat for Olha, who would stay in this room whenever Petro and Ivan were out galavanting somewhere.
As the men jostled with their prisoner, she retired to her haven now, again to find respite amid her stacks of books and silken cushions. Here she would luxuriate in the comedies of Gogol or the pathos of Puskin and pretend to be human again. Here she even prayed to the Virgin, once her role model and still her only source of solace.
Before her seamstress mother had acquired work in the Salhudockny mansion, the only hope her family had was religion, and in the village church, the only woman of stature was the Virgin. Of all the servant children, Olha had always been considered the special one, being pretty and smart, virtuous and humble. Madame Salhudockny had even sponsored her admission to the convent school, where she learned to read and write in both Polish and Russian.
It could have been a good life, she thought, as she rummaged for a match to light the stove. The small flame glanced off an Orthodox icon of the Virgin, who seemed to watch over her with gilded indifference. It was indifference, hardened by dislocation, that had her taking up with Petro,shortly after the deaths of her husband and child. She knew he was a peasant the moment she laid eyes on him, but he swaggered like Cossack stock and said that's what he was. She wanted to believe. He was much more slender in those days and his impudent ways then seemed genuine. He swept her up in his arms, a bottle of champagne in one pocket, roses from somewhere in another, and took her off to a clean room. His hands were rough, but they were strong. That and the mischief in his eyes made her follow him. The uncertain, crazy times made her stay.
"Go ahead, damn your soul to hell, you bastard. Go ahead and shoot," the inspector was yelling at full lung power now.
The noise disrupted Olha's reverie, soon gnawing at her like hunger in a swollen belly, like sin in an addled conscience. If only this inspector looked like, had been like, the others who preceeded him. There had been about a dozen over the months and they had all been plump, bland little men, who most often worked at some harmless bureaucracy. Petro would lure them from Kiev, and only from there, for it would not do to have officials missing from various local soviets. Peasant meat, by contrast, was of bad quality.
One time, Petro broke into the bedroom of the waystation cottage, and out of sheer meanness, slit a customer's throat, just as the man let go in his orgasmic fit. Blood cascaded upon her, all warm and syrupy, and smelling metallic. When she rebelled, Petro nearly killed her, then raped her later on a hard wooden bench at the underground hideout. Zhuckov had watched in his usual grim silence from the doorway to his little room. It was the first time she had seen into that place while he had a job on the table. Ordinarily, his artistry was never exposed, his work-table confidential to him much as a confessional is to a priest. And what she saw that time was the greyish but otherwise perfect corpse of a baby not much older than the one she'd lost during the worst winter of her life.
Remembering that propelled her out into the main cabin where Petro was looming ferociously over the inspector, the latter now bent at the waist, his face bleeding from a wound over the left eye. The inspector looked up suddenly, and his dark eyes were glossy with reflections of the orange fire undulating in Zhukov's stove.
"You poor excuse for a devil," he told Petro. "Do you really think I'm afraid of you? I've seen your kind before. You Petliurists are all alike. I suppose you tell yourself this all has something to do with freeing the Ukrainian nation. But what you are is a common deviant, whose manhood is as weak as his mind."
Petro had to abide him this time, his breath gone again after administering the pistol-whipping. The inspector's gaze fell now on Olha, like black marble pellets splashing into turbulent tides. She beheld him carefully now: the whip of the black mustache, the fine high cheek bones, the strong prominent jaw. What a beautiful specimen, she thought.
"If you were any kind of man, you would cut me loose and we would gamble on our lives by fighting to the death," the inspector said. "Come, you look like a gambler. If I win, I go free. If you win, you will have the satisfaction of knowing you have beaten a better man." The thief was about to strike with the pistol again but the inspector kept it up, almost gleefully now. "I tell you what, my paunchy friend: You can keep your blade. I will use nothing, no weapon."
Petro stumbled back, trying to wriggle out of his sheep's skin coat. Then he slapped his shopka against the hard floor. He did not know quite how to react. It so happened that once, long ago, he had ridden with Petliura's men, and acording to all accounts, had acquitted himself well in the hopeless cause of Ukrainian nationalism. That, of course, was many pounds and dreams ago.
Olha was breathless at the prospect of such a duel. The inspector had always claimed to be little more than a grains procurement clerk, but she knew officer corps when she saw it - at least, by now she did. Whites, Reds, it was all the same. Men of authority always had a certain flair. She worried that he was G.P.U., a member of the party's secret police, that this all could be some kind of set-up. His attire, after all, was crisp and well-tailored, flattering his tall, lithe frame.
In the dull orange light, Petro looked scared and tired. He spotted Olha and motioned her forward, handing her his pistol. The knife he took from his belt. Petro shuffled toward the inspector, his face mean and dim, and brushed against his foe, looking him hard in the eye, as he cut the bindings around the inspector's wrists.
"Do not stab me without giving me a chance. There would be no point in that," the inspector said. "Once you cut it...Now, take three...No, five steps back before launching an assault. Accept my terms. Accept them."
Petro's brow furrowed, but soon he nodded.
Olha felt sweat burn her underarms and form beads on her forehead. She sensed Zhukov's swine-like countenance in his doorway.
One. It was a good, well-balanced step back. Two. Petro's left foot stumbled, the ankle bending wrong, gravel under foot skittering away in nervous little noises. Three. This step was short. Four. This one yet shorter.
Then five. This one positioned his right foot so that the heel of Petro's boot dug in, his calf muscle noticeably flexed, and he braced himself to push off in a hard, rushing lunge.
All of which occurred as if in slow motion, besides which the inspector had obviously pre-calculated every one of Petro's moves. So that, at the instant Petro's knife hand was three quarters of the way through its upward arc, the inspector's right foot was three quarters through an arc of its own.
The two extremities collided in mid-air, exactly dead center in Olha's line of sight, and in the next instant the knife swiveled end-over-end and into the shadows. The inspector followed through with first a solid right-handed punch to Petro's nose, and then a left-handed fist that, under less power, simply grazed his opponent's forehead. Petro bellowed and waddled ahead erratically, but in close quarters, his strength was beginning to prevail over the inspector's clever agility. The two men thrashed about as if in a clumsy death dance for several minutes.
His face that of a confused child, Ivan began to pull a pistol from his coat pocket. It was clear that he was losing faith in his friend, despite Petro's latest advance. Ivan took a step toward the combatants, reached out and tried to aim at the inspector's bobbing head.
And in an instant that wobbled as unsteadily as Petro had done, Olha dipped a hand into her pocket as well, groping for Petro's gun. Her initial intention was to scare Ivan, get him to back off. But once the weapon was in her hand, she felt its fine balance, its heavy, uncompromising power, and she simply raised it, and fired point blank into the side of Ivan's ugly, mole-ridden head.
A neat hole formed above Ivan's ear and she could see his eyes roll white as he twisted and fell, an arm fully extended on either side. The shot startled the deadlocked combatants, and they both watched dumbstruck as Ivan's body plopped to the floor. Zhukov did not move, his face as souless as stone.
Another instant seemed trapped in time. The inspector turned next not back to his opponent, but to Olha. His face said things she so long wanted to hear.
That hesitation was all Petro needed to reach down into his boot and back up with a second knife, which he drove deep into the inspector, the blade entering somewhere below the belt. A sharp gasp issued from the inspector and he seemed to take a hop backward before falling over a stuffed chair.
Petro, then, looked down at the blood on his hands, down at his antagonist now a heap on the floor, and over at Olha who tried to steady herself by holding onto the long stem of a lampstand. Petro grinned mindlessly and took one step in her direction, and as he did, she recalled an image of a young Cossack, his shopka at that cocky angle, beckoning her to follow him beyond the mud-caked world of her reality, and on into the life of a gypsy poet.
The next instant she was tasting the blood of the little harmless bureaucrat and remembering the tiny, girlish squealing of his death throes.
She fired a round into Petro's left chest and watched him stumble only a little, his grin fading and his eyes turning dim again. The index finger of his rough left hand was only inches away from the barrel as she let rip another round, this one lodging in the neck, forcing his eyes to bulge out stupidly. The next thing she saw was the dual clouds of dust billowing up on each side as Petro finally hit the floor. She inspected the pistol, noted the one bullet remaining, issued a sigh, and made the sign of the cross.
"Magnificent," came the inspector's strained but hopeful voice. "What courage. Perhaps there is a God, after all. Oh my dear, Olha, so long have I wanted to break through the barriers between us. I just didn't know how, until now."
Actually, the wound the inspector sustained was not really so bad. Petro had sliced into a fat deposit, completely missing any vital organs. Still, the blood flowed profusely. She leaned down close to his beautiful face to see for sure what was in those eyes.
"Come, please, let us...let us be together at last," he said, his eyes melting with a warm vulnerability she had never seen before. His soft, fine hands enveloped hers and she felt excited and suddenly optimistic. After all, she was free now, wasn't she?
"I...I had no choice before," she said. "You understand, don't you?"
He nodded his forgiveness. "Yes, if one sleeps with the devil long enough, one's heart grows as cold as the grave. It's true. I have seen it many times. And, in turn, I have grown cold. But in a socialist society, one day, if we are patient, you'll see, things can have so much promise."
He entreated her to tend his wounds and she did. Then he pleaded still further for her to take him into the village where some official or other would surely have medical provisons. He knew that whatever Zhukov had on hand, articles for sustaining life could not be in great supply. He did not even want to rest, so anxious was he to leave this place.
All this time and Zhukov stood still, said and did nothing, exhibiting not the slightest interest in, or discomfort about, the violence that had erupted before him.
The inspector winced upon regarding Zhukov and rolled his eyes for Olha's benefit. She nodded, smiled weakly, and with bandages firmly in place, proceeded to help her new ally to his feet. Holding onto one another, they fumbled into coats and limped out the door and into the cold tunnel. She dropped the lantern at least once and grimaced at the sound of his painful whimpers. Their footfalls were plenty labored.
Perhaps it was the exertion of just getting him half way up the steps, or perhaps it was a perverse sense of her new power. Whatever it was, Olha realized that further bother over the inspector was simply not practical, given the array of options now open to her. After all, her ancestors hand handed down three simple rules about life on the Ukrainian steppes. One said never be stupid. One said never be kind. And the third said never be unlucky.
It seemed to her that the inspector had broken all three. Besides, communism still wasn't sounding very rewarding. So now she was unloading him there on the steps, catching her breath, and reaching yet again for the pistol, with its last bullet.
"Olha, please."
"Don't worry, darling," she said. "This will only hurt for an instant."
She placed the tip of the gun barrel between his eyes and without further thought squeezed the trigger. She would have kissed him one final time, but she'd had enough of the cold. She scrambled back into the doorway, knowing Zhukov would be there waiting.
He was, of course. As ugly as sin itself, Zhukov had hands that were at once as soft as the inspector's and as strong as those of Petro. He wanted nothing more than to serve her. That's all he had ever wanted and was the only thing like human he had ever done.
"So it seems we have three more for market, my good friend Zhukov," she said smiling wryly.
She knew he would need no help dragging the inspector back. She also knew that soon all three men would be reduced to manageable, beefy parts, wrapped in fresh butcher's paper, stuffed into ice-filled crates. Then they'd be loaded onto the wagon and carried over back roads to Kiev. Zhukov knew where to go, whom to see.
She would go off now and pray to the Virgin, but first, she stopped by Zhukov's room and went straight to the stove. There, simmering to one side, was his latest stew. She leaned over, took a sniff, and sighed deeply. All the activity had made her hungry.
Sitting there in a hard-backed chair, humming a cheery folk tune, she indolently stirred the sultry concoction, took generous spoons full, and occasionally spat bits of finger bone, into the fire.
