Who Does “One of Us” Protect in House of Salt?

“You’re one of our unchanged,” Niyazi reassures his friend Bekyr. In an early chapter of Svitlana Taratorina’s House of Salt, this means: you will not be sacrificed. A child with the same physical trait, but from another settlement, can be.

This essay discusses the early chapter “Bekyr. Rituals.” It involves threatened violence against children and body horror, but does not reveal the novel’s resolution.

Many people have been transformed in the world after the Flashes. Niyazi, for instance, has fox-like ears. Bekyr remains outwardly unchanged, and unchanged children are valuable as sacrifices. Niyazi does not challenge that rule. He explains why it should not apply to his friend. Calling Bekyr “one of us” lets Niyazi protect a friend while accepting that another child may be killed.

Taratorina soon puts this reassurance to the test. Far from home, the boys meet the akyndzhyi, traders whose merchandise includes people. Bekyr understands that, to them, his unchanged body represents water, fuel, medicine and food obtainable in exchange. The trait his friend has just declared safe for someone who belongs now makes him a profitable commodity. But Ma, his mother, is not beside him now—and she is the one who keeps the traffickers in check.

The distinction between an insider and an outsider turns out to depend on who can stand up for you. Your own skin offers too little protection.

The girl with a label instead of a name

In a cage on a wagon, the boys meet another unchanged child. She introduces herself as Black Cow and asks Bekyr whether he, too, will be eaten at Andyr-Shopai. Her question draws no distinction between them: both fit the same role.

Niyazi answers for Bekyr. They are from Ak-Sheikh themselves, Bekyr has a name, and Black Cow is what people call a sacred sacrifice. They do not eat their own. In a few lines of dialogue, a boy who must be returned to his mother is separated from a girl whose body is meant to protect the settlement.

The girl says she no longer remembers another name. Yet the narrative does not reduce her to this role. She holds out her hand, feeds her little creature, jokes and asks questions. Niyazi even attributes her calm to an inability to understand the danger. She replies that the ritual will fail, adding: “And I feel sorry for you.”

The direction of the gaze changes. A child being transported as a means of saving others begins to judge those others herself. She explains her confidence through her father’s spell; in this scene, we hear her account, not a guarantee of what will happen. Her answer makes it harder for the reader to preserve the convenient division between people entitled to decide and something they are entitled to use.

Which rule Bekyr is willing to break

At the start of the chapter, the boys perform a ritual themselves. They are looking for an ana-arakhna so that they can collect its poison. They arrange fur on a scrap of paper, light the offering they have prepared, speak the words and wait. A burrow opens; they make their catch. The words of the spell are a lullaby, identified in the novel’s note as a Crimean Tatar folk song.

A simple explanation that everyone here believes in nonsense will not get us far. For Bekyr, rituals are part of how one acts in this world. He argues with his friend about particular prohibitions, collects forbidden writing and still follows the ritual for obtaining poison. He does not have to reject everything familiar before he can object to one particular killing.

By the end of the chapter, Bekyr is still physically unable to travel far from his settlement: distance causes him pain. But staying home no longer means accepting its order. He decides not to watch silently while the girl is killed. This is an intention, not an accomplished rescue.

Being “one of us” now presents him with a different task. Earlier, it exempted Bekyr from somebody else’s fate. Now he faces a person whom the rule does not protect, and his own safety is no longer enough.