Suddenly all the troubles and sacrifi es I had endured during the endlessly long spring came back to me, and words poured out of me like water gushing from a turned-over basin: “Beat me to death or finish me off some other way. If you think I am afraid of dying, you are wrong. If you don’t kill me, I’ll do it myself. I’ll jump off a cliff or do myself in some other way. I want to die, and I want to be eaten by black worms. I am not your child anyway, I am your slave. Have you ever let me sleep in? Do you even know how cold I am, how hungry, and how tired? All you ever think of are your animals. Fodder for the wolves! You never think of your children! You have already given away two of them. And as for me, you make me slave away like a Kazakh herdboy!”

I hurled these words the way people hurl rocks. I wanted them to hit my parents, to hurt and kill them.

“I want to die and be eaten by black worms, i-ihiiij! Die and be done with, like others before me. I want to go where Grandma went: into death, i-ih-iiij! Do you really think I still don’t know? Grandma is dead, and you got rid of her like a dead sheep or a dead cat. You have probably hidden her under some gravel or in a hole in the ground. Or maybe you threw her to the foxes and the wolves. You keep talking about a journey and about the salt, but I know what is going on. You’re lying through your teeth because you think I am a fool, but I am not!”

By then I could see and hear clearly again. My parents stood as if chased apart and looked past me silently. It was probably this wretched picture that brought me to my senses. I suddenly understood that they hadn’t tried to beat me to death, but merely to silence me. And then it dawned on me that I was without Grandma, without Arsylang, without the flock I had once owned, separated from Brother and Sister, at war with the sky, and about to go to war against my parents! I would lose what little I had left. There was no way I could afford to lose them, so I had to resign myself to what had happened.

Someone who was inside me, but could not be me, was saying these things. It must have been a stranger. There was no way I would listen to him. I did not know him; he had only just showed up, alien and disgusting, and was insulting me along with everything that had ever happened, everything that had been part of my life, everything that nobody had the right to tear away from me.