The upstairs neighbours’ wastewater hissed through the pipes, rushing like a waterfall when the toilet was flushed. These were only some of the building’s tidal movements. In early October they had turned the heating on, and the building began to swell; it creaked as hot water sluiced through the pipes with a sigh.
Tucked away behind a pleat in the shower curtain was the glass containing Zita’s upper dentures. Beg could remember her real teeth. With the passing of time they had become stained an ever-darker brown. When she smiled she would cover her mouth with her hand. She was ashamed of having teeth the colour of tobacco juice, but feared nothing as much as the dentist. Beg had given her money to have her teeth pulled and dentures fitted. She had asked them to put her under for the operation, and lived toothlessly until the new ones were ready.
The dental technician had done a good job: when she smiled, it was as though she’d opened a jewellery box.
I can pay for the teeth, Beg thought, but I can’t make the mouth say what I want.
Zita lived in accordance with the iron regime of women. She worked hard; she stood for no nonsense. The nights with Beg she saw as a continuation of her activities around the house — dusting, sweeping, cooking, washing, ironing, and mending his worn shirts and uniforms. Each of these tasks she fulfilled slowly and attentively; in bed, he sometimes thought he heard her humming.
They benefited from each other in an easily quantifiable fashion; neither of them felt short-changed in any way. Beg considered the arrangement a perfect marriage; in Zita’s mind it was an excellent position.
He went into the bedroom, observing the sharp lines around her hollow cheeks. In her sleep she looked disgruntled. That was the attitude her face assumed in repose, but it said nothing about her character.
He laid a hand on her shoulder and shook her.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ she murmured.
In the kitchen he ladled soup from the pan and ate it cold. Between spoonfuls he took the occasional bite of dark rye bread.
‘You’re slurping,’ Zita said from the bathroom. ‘You sound like a pig.’
Beg smiled. Yes, it was a good marriage in every way.
When Beg entered the waiting room at police headquarters, two men jumped to their feet. They both began talking excitedly. One of them had run over a sheep that belonged to the other. The second man claimed that the whole herd had already crossed the road when the casualty in question suddenly came traipsing along. ‘A ewe, sir,’ the first one said then, ‘such a lovely animal!’
Running over a sheep, Beg knew, was a complicated business. According to old nomadic custom, you were not only liable for the animal you had killed, but also owed recompense to a number of generations to come — one could say, in other words, that the shepherd had a good day when one of his herd was flattened.
‘You’ve never seen such a lovely little ewe, so broad in the beam,’ the shepherd wailed.
‘That’s enough!’ Beg shouted.
At the information desk, Oksana was playing solitaire on the computer.
‘Where’s Koller?’ Beg asked.
Oksana looked up. ‘His wife called — an abscess in his armpit. She said it kept him awake all night. He’s gone to the doctor.’
‘How many abscesses does the guy have?’ Beg asked in annoyance.
‘That was a fistula. On his behind.’
‘So who’s going to going to draw up this report?’
Oksana looked over her shoulder at the men in the waiting room. ‘Koller’s actually the one on duty,’ she said.
Beg shook his head. ‘Call Menchov. Get him out of bed.’
He poured himself a cup of tea, then went into his office. The room was warm, and he could smell himself — his own scent, mingled with cigarette smoke. He turned on the computer. The screen did not light up. He pushed the button again, but the thing was dead. He called Oksana. After a little knock on the door, she came in. Her skirt clung to the lines of her lower body; there, where the elastic pressed against flesh, he could see the contours of her underwear. The top buttons of her glossy white blouse were unbuttoned. A person in government service, Beg felt, shouldn’t walk around like that. Maybe in the brothel at the Morris Club, but not at police headquarters.
He stared helplessly at the monitor.
‘Has it stopped working again?’ she asked.
He rolled his chair away from the desk. Oksana squatted down and pushed POWER. Then she stood up and walked around to the far side. ‘Oh, okay,’ she said, ‘that’s not too complicated.’
She held up the plug for him to see. She promised to give the cleaners hell, and stuck the plug back in the socket. The computer sighed, and the monitor blipped on.
Beg longed for his typewriter.
One hour later, Oksana came back to say that neither Koller nor Menchov had showed up. The two men were still in the waiting room.
‘Tell Koller I’ll break both his legs if he doesn’t get down here now. He’s on weekend duty, for Christ’s sake. There’s no reason why he can’t draw up a report with a fistula.’
‘An abscess.’
‘Whatever the hell it is.’
‘I’ll tell him that in so many words.’
Beg opened the office safe. At the bottom of it lay that month’s takings: money in little plastic bags, in envelopes, folded between sheets of paper, held together with paperclips, wrapped in rubber bands; money his men had garnered at roadside from speeders, from those who ignored traffic signals or drove barefooted — driving without shoes on your feet was an obvious violation. First you pulled them over, and then you asked the driver if he wanted to be registered as a traffic offender. That was the signal for the transaction to begin. No one wanted to be registered. Fines were paid on the spot.
Beg counted it all and divided it according to rank and seniority. Before him lay a large pile of banknotes, which he split into many smaller piles. He stuffed the notes into envelopes, and wrote the recipients’ names on them. They all came in on the first of the month to pick up their share.
In this country, he thought, everyone steals from everyone else. And those who don’t steal, beg. Everywhere he looked he saw outstretched hands: no house was built, no service rendered, without the hands intervening, claiming their piece of the transaction. The system was all-embracing, a colossal weave of kickbacks, bribes, extortion, and larceny — whatever else you might chose to call it. As police commander, he found himself somewhere halfway up the ladder: big hands pinched the chunks above him; little hands scrabbled at the crumbs below. Everyone took part. It was an economic system from which everyone profited and under which everyone suffered.
Around noon, he left headquarters and drove to Tina’s Bazooka Bar for lunch. Michailopol: it was his city. Thirty-nine thousand inhabitants, according to the latest census. A border town, it had once been home to a prestigious nuclear-research institute and an ice-hockey team that had been promoted in two consecutive seasons and came within an inch of the national championship. Beg remembered the excitement. At its peak, early in the last century, the city had numbered one hundred and fifty thousand citizens. Michailopol station, with fifteen departures an hour, had been the gateway to the wide world. Now Beg couldn’t even remember where the tracks had been. The steel had been torn up, and used to build sheds and fences. The sleepers were chopped into pieces, and disappeared into stoves during the coldest of winters. The Jugendstil station itself was still there, but had decayed beyond rescue. A mortician stored his coffins in one of the outbuildings.
Michailopol’s demise had been as turbulent as its rise. There had been sixteen churches once — Orthodox and Catholic — and two synagogues as well. The services at the Armenian Orthodox church had attracted boys from far and near, like flies to honey, for there were no prettier girls than the Armenian ones.
Beg recalled the fistfigh
ts outside the church — fathers and brothers against the country bumpkins who were after their daughters and sisters.
The Armenian church, too, had disappeared long ago.
He parked in front of Tina’s Bazooka Bar and went in.
‘Pontus, darling,’ Tina said as he settled down at the bar. Ah, Tina Bazooka — sacred icons began to sweat when she was around. She caressed the back of Beg’s hand. Brothel manners never faded.
She had just come back from visiting her son, who lived with his grandmother in the south of the country. Tina put a plate of meatloaf in the microwave and tapped a beer for him. Switching on her mobile phone, she showed him pictures of the boy.
‘Amazing, how fast he’s grown,’ Beg said.
‘Next year he’s coming to live with me.’
Beg slid the phone back across the bar. Heart-shaped plastic charms dangled from its fuzzy fluorescent skin.
‘Sure, why not,’ he said. ‘We have everything here. Schools …’
‘Yeah, and besides that?’ she asked sardonically.
‘A swimming pool.’
‘Closed.’
‘Oh?’
‘We used to go swimming there with the girls. But not anymore.’
Beg searched his memory for another facility suitable for children. ‘Valentine Park,’ he said. ‘He can …’
‘Get chased through the woods by a rapist? Ha-ha.’
‘They’ve got a playground.’
‘He’s thirteen.’
‘So he can play soccer,’ Beg said, feeling acquitted.
Tina turned brusquely and walked to the far end of the bar. Beg realised he’d said something wrong, and then remembered — too late, jerk that he was — the boy’s foot. Tina had always blamed the deformity on the nuclear rain; her native village lay next to a notorious testing site. Her attempts to get the boy benefits for the victims of atomic testing had proven fruitless. Even today, outright monsters were being born, mutants; a clubfoot was nothing by comparison. It didn’t help either that the child had been born at Michailopol hospital, and probably conceived at the Morris Club.
Beg ate his meatloaf and drank his beer. He looked at Tina out of the corner of his eye. How did they grow them like that? A heavy gold cross wobbled on her bosom. Tina had left the business; like everyone else at the bar, Beg was consumed by regret.
The joke was one her customers passed on. ‘Take this bread, it is my body,’ Jesus of Nazareth told his disciples at the Last Supper. ‘Take this body, it’s how I earn my bread,’ Tina Bazooka told her customers.
When she opened the bar, most of those customers had followed her. Everyone thought her meatloaf was excellent, but her body would have pleased them a thousand times more.
It took some getting used to at first, but they all did their best.
In fact, Beg thought, the transition had been remarkably serene. No one made a fuss, maybe because they’d all had their piece of her.
CHAPTER FOUR
The abandoned village
They spread out silently among the houses. They ransack rooms, kitchens, and pantries, and call out to each other from darkened cellars. The tall man falls through a rotten wooden staircase. Nothing edible has been left behind; nothing to check their hunger. Cursing, Vitaly breaks off a table leg and smashes a room to bits. He swings the wood around savagely, until at last he breaks out in a cold sweat and shivers like a man in a fever. He falls to the floor, waves of nausea racking his body.
In an overgrown garden, the woman finds potato plants that have bolted. With her hands, she digs a few wrinkled little spuds out of the wet soil. Most of them are rotten, and the stinking juice stains her fingers black.
When they find a pair of apple trees at the edge of the village, they fetch the boy. The birds and insects haven’t eaten all the apples yet; there are still quite a few on the tree. Some of them are brown and flecked with mould; others, only wizened.
The boy tosses them down, and they eat old, spoiled apples until they can eat no more. The juice foams at their lips. The boy looks out over the rolling plains from that height, rips big bites from an apple, and laughs through his tears.
Later, one by one, they return from their forays. In a courtyard, they build a fire. The sky is dense and grey; the day is cold. The boy looks at his fellow travellers — dirty, starved apparitions — as though he is seeing them for the first time.
The tall man has found a huge iron lid; it will serve as his shelter at night. On his head he wears a helmet of thin ribs and fine netting. Once it was used to keep vegetables and fruit free of gnats.
The poacher hasn’t come back yet. They feed the fire with handfuls of dusty straw and planking from the high, dark shed in the courtyard. Once a low fire is burning well, they fill a dented pan with water and toss in the paltry potatoes. It takes an eternity before the first wisps of steam rise from the water’s surface. After a while, the woman whips the potatoes out of the pan, and the others watch as she divides them among them. They blow and let the potatoes dance across their fingertips, then gobble them up with skin and all, and burn their mouths.
The woman wants to stay in the village — one day’s rest, one dry night beside a fire — but the day is still young, and Vitaly, the poacher, and the tall man decide that they will move on. The man from Ashkhabad rinses his sore mouth with cold water.
They toss burning pieces of wood into the buildings. Before long, columns of smoke break through the roofs of sheds and houses, veined with dark-red flames. With their backs to the inferno, they leave the village.
They are already past the last houses when the boy turns and sees the smoke rising up against the sky. A bonfire — tongues of flame climbing above the rooftops. He grins. His insides cheer. The euphoria of destruction. To hell with all that rubbish.
In his pocket he finds the empty cigarette package. He tosses it on the ground and grinds it into the sand.
‘Dead,’ he whispers. ‘Dead.’
The others are almost out of sight by then; he can’t remain standing any longer. He turns his back on the burning village.
Out in front of him goes a hallucination: a raggle-taggle crew of oddballs hung with strange objects seized during their raids — the negro with a red rag around his head, the woman with the pan bobbing at her back, the tall man with the lid lashed to his own back, the plastic-screen helmet wobbling on his head. In his hand he holds a gnarled broomstick.
Despite the bitter disappointment, the village has given them new courage; they seem to be walking faster than before. This can’t be the only settlement in the surroundings. Communities are never that isolated. The next village becomes the focal point of their thoughts. They see tractors in the fields, smoking chimneys, cattle. The friendly beehives at the edge of town … All they have to do is walk there …
Above their heads, banks of cloud slide slowly together. Mother-of-pearl light glimmers through the cracks between. A gentle rain begins. The tall man holds the lid over his head.
Night falls before they can find the village of their dreams. They have seen the delicious mirage vanish step-by-step. Disheartened, they sit in the sand at twilight. The poacher is gone, out setting his traps. The boy is sensitive to the heaviness between them, to the coming storm; he looks at the faces one by one. Someone must bleed.
He takes an apple from his pocket and runs his fingers over the wrinkled skin. An apple: what a luxury that had seemed to them yesterday; what a meagre reward it is today.
It’s almost always between Vitaly and the man from Ashkhabad. It’s been that way from the start, when fate brought them together, and dominance was distributed over the group.
Vitaly and the man from Ashkhabad.
The boy sees them getting the same ideas. He knows that the will of the one will bump up hard against that of the other — iron against
iron.
The poacher is a lone wolf; he doesn’t involve himself in the struggle for the throne. The tall man is only a vassal — he follows the strongest.
The woman, the boy, and the negro play a different role. Prey. Victim. Observer. They do their best to make themselves invisible.
Drops tick loudly at dusk against the metal lid on the tall man’s head. He moans quietly. ‘Why didn’t we stay put? The good Lord gave us a village to spend the night in, a roof over our heads, but we didn’t get it. We didn’t listen.’
‘You wanted to leave, too.’ In the semi-darkness, it is the voice of the man from Ashkhabad.
‘Not me! Him!’
It sounds as though a dog has been kicked. They all look at Vitaly — the tall man’s hand is pointing at him. Vitaly sits motionless, his head bowed. His fit of rage earlier in the day has drained him.
The poacher appears from the tall, plumed grass. He sinks to the ground a little ways from the rest. Wrapping his arms around his knees, he rests his chin on his chest. He rests like a mountain.
The tall man turns his attention to the boy. ‘Show me how many apples you have. Come on, show me.’
‘Idiot,’ the boy says. He is poised to jump to his feet and run.
‘Give me your apples, boy. I’m twice your size! What gives him the right to have as many apples as I do? I can’t stand cheaters. Let him give me his apples!’ He sits up a bit straighter. ‘Empty your pockets, boy.’
‘Over my dead body.’ The boy slides back a bit further.
The tall man moans. ‘Listen to that! Listen to that, would you! What he needs is a good thumping, to beat the evil out of him.’ He shuts his eyes, and sways his head back and forth like a woman in mourning. ‘Almaty, oh Almaty! Father of all apples! All the apples in the world, blushing like a girl’s cheeks. He’d rather see me die than give me his apples. What kind of world do we live in? Woe is me.’
The boy snorts. ‘Idiot,’ he says again.
In the dark, at a safe distance from the others, the boy rolls himself up in a sheet of plastic. He’d found it in a stall, one corner sticking out from under a pile of dried manure. After he pulled it out he used a stone to scrape off the dung. Then he folded it up and stuffed it into his coat.
These Are the Names Page 2
