The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse Read Online Free PDF Page A

eat, you’ll die.’
    ‘I’m not hungry.’
    ‘You should eat even if you aren’t hungry.’
    ‘I’ll eat when I’m hungry. I’ll drink when I’m thirsty. I’ll shit when I feel like shitting. Like dogs do.’
    ‘We aren’t dogs.’
    ‘In here we are. Worse than dogs.’
    *
    The last of the sun’s strokes sweeps away from the well, taking all life’s colour with it and bringing the monotony of their cohabitation into relief. Like when, in the middle of a dream, it is all revealed to be make-believe and waking up is a kind of cruel joke.
    ‘Your head’s still not right after the fever. Have something to eat and go to sleep. Tomorrow you’ll feel better,’ says Big, lying down.
    Small doesn’t move.
    ‘I think I’ve got rabies,’ he says.
    ‘No. You don’t have rabies yet.’
    Small looks at him lovelessly, and asks:
    ‘Then what is this anger I can feel inside?’
    ‘You’re becoming a man,’ says Big.

23
    ‘ T ODAY, I’M GOING to teach you how to kill.’
    For people like you and me, the first thing is anger. With no anger we will never find the necessary courage to take a life. There are other people who observe different impulses, who have grown up around unimaginable violence and look at you from inside caverns that you cannot even imagine. For those people, living is the well. You can’t kill them, and if you confront them, they’ll finish you off. You and me aren’t like that. We require anger. A restless anger that won’t let you stop, which bubbles under the skin, making your muscles shake; an anger that is black on your insides, but on the outside starts to turn you red, until you look like a burn victim who can’t find his place in the world. You must charge yourself up with reasons to hate, despise whatever you see around you and, what’s more, convince yourself that this anger is necessary. When you’re full, don’t hold it inside: release it, let it out into the world, shake it from your fingers, shout, run, burn the branches of trees, dig holes until your nails bleed, punch doors and walls and any other thing made by the hands of men. And before youcollapse, exhausted, stop. Take a breath. Say nothing. For a few seconds, hold on to that last drop of anger in you; let it glisten at the corner of your mouth like a kiss about to fall. Exhale, feel your ribs rise and fall. Regain calm. Look at the destruction, your raw knuckles, the holes you’ve torn open with them. Feel the silence; how all matter, in its shock, has ceased to move; how the things around you no longer make a sound, the wood doesn’t creak, the wind doesn’t blow. It’s the same silence that will one day occupy earth, when men decide to end it all and we witness the end of time. And it’s the silence that you’ll live with, too, every waking hour, while inside the anger transforms into its exact opposite.
    Calm. This is the second thing. You must spend three days—not a day more or less—guarding the secret beginning to reveal itself inside of you. You must move like a bird, not touching the ground, and speak in a quiet voice so as not to disturb a single blade of grass. Try not to have any contact with anyone and go to bed early. And at all times—don’t forget—remember that scarlet drop that you held back, think about it taking on the most horrifying forms in your body, until it becomes plumper and larger. Talk to it as if it were your disease, insult it, imagine the worst cruelties you could inflict, and subject it to your heart’s desires so that it bleeds like a wound and oozes giant monsters. Live as if its presence weighed down on your back, be incapable of loving or admiring beauty. Note how loyalty squirms aboutin your stomach and how an enormous void contaminates everything you touch. Finally, on the third night of this unbearable calm, when you take yourself off to sleep, take a deep breath, feel that breath move around your rotten insides, and let the calm engulf you. Let your disease