Kneeling on his so-called stepmother. The stepmother sits in an armchair, Thome’s hands are wrapped tightly around her throat. He stands with one leg on the floor, the other is ramming her belly. His knee feels the hard belly where his sibling is hopefully already rotting. Thome almost thinks he can feel the warmth and the frail baby bones. The armchair creaks. Thome winces. The chair is from his grandparents. Who brought it from Scotland, from the stud farm and so forth. Did he really just think frail bones? Does he have feelings? He has feelings. But not for this Russian, who is slowly getting red. How can you desire a woman when you previously lived with a mother who anticipated everything that can become of women? Sometimes the sentences that accompanied his childhood echo so loudly in his head that he has to slam it against a wall to get any semblance of peace. Members of our family do not cry. Suppressing coughs is a question of willpower. Were two of the hundred sentences that had thrown fuel on the fire of his deformation. It had almost been more pleasant to have been fucked with bars of soap at boarding school than to have been in this home with his poor, dead mother. The way she drank her tea, a handkerchief pressed to the corner of her mouth, quickly, frantically, as if it were improper for people like her to have bodily orifices at all. Thome knows all about that. He’d seen pornos, after all. Why is he thinking of his mother right now? Why is the Russian staring so? She’s not moving anymore. Her tongue hangs from her mouth, and Thome shoves his knee deeper into her belly. He can feel how his sibling squirms and then stops. Squirming. And Thome cries.

“It’s done”

Says

HANNAH

But the men are no longer listening. For Sergej, the moment has arrived when a normal life becomes a nightmare. Utterly unexpected. “Get the Jew pig,” says one of the members of the group, completely out of context, out of all context, but whatever, throwing out a Jew pig always works, they see red, men, as the Jew pig represents in intellectual terms what the Black man represents to them physically: a challenge to their mediocrity.

The men have set upon Sergej, screaming. They flail at him with their fists, with their boots they stomp on his cheekbones, his nose, with their knives they stab him, with tree limbs they beat him, they try to cut off his legs, his penis is tossed into the bushes, someone stuffs his entrails into his mouth. Time for Hannah to get out of there.

And cross a name off the list.

Check.

THE PROGRAMMER

Nods. “Everything’s working.”