Drops thrum against the plastic. He can’t sleep; he’s afraid the tall man will come and steal his apples. His eyes try to get a grip on the darkness, to drill through the blackness — silhouettes that change their shape, the motion that betrays the presence of an other.
He’s alone. His heart is pounding hard. He clutches the knife, ready to lash out.
In the last blue of dusk, the man from Ashkhabad took the woman. Vitaly was too exhausted to fight for her. The boy covered his ears with his hands and kept them there for a while, but she didn’t even scream once.
CHAPTER FIVE
The second half of the evening
Pontus Beg ate his dinner. He ladled two bowls of soup from the pan, his forearms resting on the table, the television’s sound turned off. He was listening to the radio — news and current affairs, sometimes music. A chunk of gristle lodged between his teeth. Without Zita around, his own house seemed unwelcoming. The ghost of abandonment breathed down his neck.
It had taken him a long time to figure out where the clenching in his innards came from, and when he finally did, it annoyed him. He didn’t want to think about things that couldn’t be changed. He didn’t want to feel them either. Feelings were for the happy.
Raindrops left glistening tracks down the panes. He went to the window and drew the curtains, locking out his reflection. He carried the plate and the soup bowl to the kitchen, mixed a little hot water and soap in the sink, and washed them. Long ago, when he’d viewed the contours of his further existence, he had understood that it was vital to maintain a minimum of order in his home. He would cook for himself, eat at the table — slowly, not wolfing it down, as though Zita were watching him from beneath her heavy eyebrows — and then wash the pans, the cutlery, and the plate, and put them all away.
During his time at the police academy he had twice received a reprimand for having streaks of ash and spots of grease on his uniform. When his class was sworn in, Commander Diniz gave the speech. Yevgeni Diniz was a bastard, but his words glistened as prettily as his boots. And he knew a thing or two. He was interested in things of the mind; Beg remembered thinking that was unusual for a policeman.
That speech was the first time Beg had heard about an old Chinaman named Confucius. Confucius, if he were in charge of a country, Diniz said, would first set about rectifying the way the language was used. For if the language is incorrect, then what is said is not what is meant. And if what is said is not what is meant, no work can be accomplished. If no work is accomplished, arts and ethics cannot flourish. If they do not flourish, justice cannot be properly administered. And if there is no justice, the nation is rudderless. That is why language should not be used arbitrarily. That is what it all comes down to.
Diniz was verbose; the panoramas he presented were sweeping. That made Beg impatient. But in the train on the way to his parents’ farm, he suddenly saw the veiled social criticism in his commanding officer’s words. Diniz had not presented the words of the old philosopher as a warning to the young graduates, but as a comment on the state of the nation. Along the ladder of decline Confucius had sketched, this country was on the bottom rung. The only prospect was chaos. The social order had become specious, a layer of opaque ice of which one could not judge the thickness — not until you stood on it and fell through.
The nervous governmental paranoia of that day had probably overlooked the words of a Chinese sage.
Ever since then, Pontus Beg saw the model of gradual decline everywhere he looked. It started with one little thing and ended in total confusion. In every field of life, that one little thing had to be identified, isolated, and disarmed. That was why he cooked for himself every night, ate at the table every night, washed his dishes and put them away neatly — against the forces of neglect, the slippery slope, an ignominious end.
He must have died a long time ago, Diniz, or else he was off counting his buttons in an old people’s flat somewhere, staring at the dull metal of his insignia.
Through him, Beg had become interested in Oriental philosophy; he read Confucius, Zhuangzi, and Lao Tse, and wasn’t bothered by his inability to completely understand most of it.
Beg put the bottle on the table. The radio reported that the former minister of transport had been found dead in his dacha. He had shot himself twice in the back of the head, the newsreader said.
Beg poured himself a shot. The bottle cap rolled away across the tabletop. ‘To you, Your Excellency,’ he said, eyes raised to the ceiling. ‘The only suicide in the world who has ever shot himself twice in the back of the head.’
There was exactly enough to do for half an evening. The day had slowed by degrees, and now came to a complete stop. The second half of the evening was a rest home where you waited stoically for your end to come. A bit put off, but without much hope of reprieve.
He drank four glasses of vodka — four glasses, no more than that. A lullaby. Part of his little order of things. Five glasses meant that he would stamp around the house on one warm and one cold foot, smoke himself hoarse, and go rifling through shoeboxes of letters and photos in search of things that no longer were. In his books he would try to recover passages he’d marked, in search of an answer.
The Master said: If one gets to know the Way in the morning, one can die (peacefully) at night.
Five glasses meant losing count.
He sank stiffly to his knees and looked around under the table for the bottle cap. Zita, he saw, cleaned optically, not hygienically. What did that say about the times in which he lived, when women no longer knew what cleaning was? What did it tell you about this day and age, when a man no longer said a word about that? When he only stared morosely at the spots on the carpet, the crumbs in the silverware drawer, the rings in the fridge, and the asymmetrically folded shirts in his closet? Did these things also fit the model of gradual decline?
The radio stayed on until he went to bed. He often forgot why he’d turned it on in the first place, until he turned it off. It was the high-pitched whistling in his ears — it had been with him for years. Two mosquitoes, one on either side. The sound rose up from the unplumbed depths of his skull and was blown through shell-like convolutions, where it took on that high frequency in a flat, constant tone that sometimes seemed to surge and ebb slowly. There were days when he forgot about it; but if things suddenly became quiet, he knew it had never gone away at all.
A Gypsy musician he’d arrested once thought it was a B.
‘When I sing it, it’s a lot lower than it really sounds, of course,’ Beg told him.
‘A C would have been better,’ the Gypsy felt.
‘Why’s that?’
‘Most songs are written in the key of C.’
It was at his mother’s memorial service that he’d first heard the whistling. During the silent prayer, it made its way into his skull. He had listened in amazement. The tone in his inner ear soared above the singing and the benedictions, subjected all other sounds to its will, devoured them, and filled the sacred space all by itself. It will go away in a bit, Beg thought, and tried to concentrate on the pope’s words.
‘Verily, I say unto thee: if a grain of wheat falls not to the earth and does not die, it remains one grain of wheat, but when it dies it bears much fruit.’
During the Kontaktion for the Dead, he had wept. The tone undulated in the background. Pontus Beg left the church a forty-two-year-old orphan with a shrill peeping in his ears.
CHAPTER SIX
The dog of Ashkhabad
The Ethiopian lagged far behind the rest; at times it seemed as though they had lost him, but every evening he joined them again. He pitched camp for the night at a little distance from the others. He tore off handfuls of tough grass and arranged them on the ground in the shape of an ellipse. Then he lay down in the middle. Some of them imitated him, believing it protected them from snakes and the cold.
If they found brushwood or a lone tree, they built a fire. Then the Ethiopian would sidle up and warm his black hands.
His skin hung loosely around his frame. He had been underway since time immemorial, a skinny horse trotting along the earth’s crust, his swayed ribs bedecked with a blanket of stolid despair. Along unknown paths he had come from Africa and ended up in their company. They knew almost nothing about him — only that he came from Teaopia, as he’d said, pointing from himself to somewhere in the distance and back again. The boy looked at him wide-mouthed; this was the first negro he had seen in real life. He had never heard of Ethiopia. The woman told him it was a country in Africa, the continent of black people.
None of them understood what the black man said. At the very start he had occasionally tried to tell them something, but no one knew what he was saying. He tried with wild gestures, making faces like a madman; the boy was afraid of him. When the black man saw that his attempts were fruitless, he gave up and stopped trying to make himself understood.
He had gradually become translucent. At the end of the day, when he showed up and scraped together the rest of the paltry meal, the others realised they had almost forgotten about him.
One time, the man from Ashkhabad saw him pull out a little chain from under his shirt. There was a tiny cross attached to it. He raised it to his lips and kissed it.
‘Would you look at that,’ the man from Ashkhabad said. The boy and the tall man looked.
‘What’s that he’s eating?’ the tall man asked.
‘A cross.’
‘Oh yeah? A cross?’
‘He’s kissing it.’
The tall man, nearsighted as could be, peered hard at the black man.
‘A cross,’ the man from Ashkhabad said. ‘It’s goddamn unbelievable.’
The tall man had thought he was eating something. Where did he get that from?
It was the first time the man from Ashkhabad realised that an African might adhere to a canonical faith. In his view of Africa, black people danced to make it rain. They worshipped weird objects. The Koran, the Bible, the book of the Jews — negroes were no part of that. And here you had the burrhead suddenly kissing a cross. Though the man from Ashkhabad was neither Christian nor Muslim, neither fire-worshipper nor venerator of the dead, he felt a deep disapproval — as though he had witnessed something blasphemous. Now he was forced to see this man from Ethiopia as a person, while until then he had seen him more as a harmless animal trailing behind the caravan, picking around between their feet for leftovers and gnawing down the hare’s bones even further than they had. (From outside the circle, they could hear the bones snap; he sucked the marrow out of them.)
The negro had kissed a cross. That only deepened the enigma. What kind of thoughts did he have? What kind of life lay behind him? And if the man from Ashkhabad had thoughts about the black man, then the black man also had thoughts about him. These things grated like sand in the works. They rattled his reason and heated his blood.
The shadows lengthened; the boy squatted and pricked up his ears to hear the man from Ashkhabad’s monologue. The story of his escape.
In the life of the man from Ashkhabad, too, there had been no foreigners. The country he came from was sealed off from the world. The further he walked away from it, the more insane seemed the place from which he’d escaped. No one came in; no one went out. His country was like a dark fairytale where the people lived under the watchful eye of an all-seeing sorcerer.
That sorcerer’s name was Turkmenbashi.
The tall man rumbled in assent; he had heard of Turkmenbashi, who called himself the father of all Turkmen. He knew of his reputation.
After the decline of the Russian Empire, this minor party boss had knocked together a new omnipotence. The big brother had fallen, and the little brother copied all his bad habits and added a few of his own.
The women dressed in accordance with his code, in traditional, embroidered outfits. Like Peter the Great, he ordered the men to shave off their beards. After his heart attack, he forbade his people to smoke cigarettes any longer. His subjects were wild about gold teeth — a part of the world’s gold reserves was gnashed to powder in Turkmen mouths. The father of all Turkmen forbade gold teeth for reasons of hygiene.
The country’s fossil mineral resources were endless; as extremely poor as the soil was, so extremely rich were the treasures lying beneath its surface. At some spots, the ground was so saturated with oil and natural gas that flames leapt up from the soil.
Ensconced in thick pipelines, it flowed across the country’s borders. From the revenues, the sorcerer made fountains spring up from the parched earth of Kara Kum, and refashioned himself in gold in the centre of Ashkhabad. His golden statue turned to follow the sun: in the morning, it greeted the east; at night, it laid the sun to sleep again in the west. The people suffered his self-aggrandisement resignedly. They grew accustomed to the daily portions of madness. They lived like fleas, with no say in the crazy gyrations of their host.
He gave new form not only to the daily lives of his subjects, but also to their imaginings. All imaginings — national, cultural, historical, and, ultimately, personal.
One day, the man from Ashkhabad developed an itch, locally at first, on his shoulders. In the mirror he saw red circles. They spread steadily, until his upper body was covered in them. He scratched, and watched the flakes rain down slowly on the sink. He scratched without stopping. At first he held himself in check when others were around, but soon abandoned all shame and scratched in company as well. He groaned quietly as he did so. In the garage at the bus company where he worked, they joked about him. They called him ‘the last dog of Ashkhabad’ — Turkmenbashi, after all, had banished all dogs from the capital. The itching took over his life completely. Now there were two things from which he could not escape: the eyes of the father of all Turkmen that followed him everywhere, and the raging itch that covered his torso.
He scratched his skin till it bled. He rubbed himself with salve, and when that didn’t help he was given pills. The red circles withdrew, but didn’t disappear — at best, they bothered him less for a time. The cuts healed, and his skin was bedecked with pale scar tissue. But after a few weeks the circles reappeared and he was cast back into the hell of hideous itching. He let his nails grow, the better to scratch himself with.
At the hospital, the doctor gnawed on his pen; this mysterious resistance was beyond his competence. Then he remembered a patient who had been cured of something similar after taking salt baths in the bay at Kara Bogaz.
Kara Bogaz!
It was like sending someone to the ends of the earth! Kara Bogaz — a lagoon containing the most highly saline water on earth.
In commiseration, he looked at the man who sat there scratching himself and moaning quietly, and felt that he could not keep from him this unscientific bit of advice.
To the west of Ashkhabad, far away along the Caspian coast, lies the mysterious bay called Kara Bogaz, the Black Maw. A saline waterfall there funnels the waters of the Caspian into its shallow basin. Under the relentless desert sun the water in the bay evaporates almost as quickly as it can be replenished. The salt that precipitates to the bottom is called Glauber’s salt, after the German chemist who discovered its laxative properties.
This miracle salt will eat clean the skin of the man from Ashkhabad.
He receives a transit pass to Kara Bogaz. His file is marked with the comment that he has one week’s leave of absence, for ‘medical’ reasons.
The bus plods westward as the yellow heat of the Kara Kum conjures up shimmering ponds on the asphalt. The chauffeur drives with his shirt unbuttoned, and shouts to be heard above the engine’s howl. ‘Kara Bogaz? There’s nothing out there, colleague!’
The man from Ashkhabad would rather keep his thoughts empty and stare out the window at the semi-arid landscape
as it glides past, but finds himself obliged to listen to stories about salt storms. It started twenty, twenty-five years ago, when the level of the Caspian suddenly dropped. The best minds in science searched for the cause, and when they found none, the bay at Kara Bogaz was singled out as the thief of the seawater that roared through that narrow channel into the gigantic basin.
The thief was punished: the bay was dammed. The evaporation basin could no longer feed itself on seawater. The hydraulic engineers’ prognoses, based on solid calculations, were that it would take about twenty years for the bay to dry up.
The bay dried up after two years.
The metres-thick layer of salt at the bottom of the bowl blew away, carried hundreds of kilometres inland by the wind. The soil became saline, as a lashing rain of salt cut a swath of destruction across the land. The powder glistened on the fields, settled on the leaves of the cotton plants, and ruined the harvests.
When the empire of the Bolsheviks fell, the dam was breached.
The water returned to its former shores.
The driver looked over at his passenger, who was scratching himself.
Still, the itch had already diminished, the man from Ashkhabad noted in surprise, as though it were keeping a low profile at the mere prospect of a concentration of salt high enough to sink ships.
The chapped earth lay motionless beneath the steely sun. The bus pulled over to the side of the road. The chauffeur walked out a ways onto the flat, planted his feet far apart, and pissed in the dust.
‘Four more hours,’ he said as he climbed back in.
The bus would go no further than the port town of Turkmenbashi, formerly known as Krasnovodsk. The next day, the man from Ashkhabad would have to find a bus or taxi willing to take him to Cape Bekdash, the smattering of houses close to Kara Bogaz. With a grunt and a groan, the driver slid his backside onto the seat of faded towels.
These Are the Names Page 3
