In the light of the silent, white moon, the tall man awoke. He held his breath and listened — what had awakened him? He stuck his head out from under the plastic. The earth smelled of rain. Slowly he rose to his feet; the cold had crept into his bones.
The black man was asleep in his circle of grass. The tall man crept toward the plastic sheet; the moon glistened in the black water. Quietly, he dropped to his knees. He pulled down a corner of the sheet, so that the water flowed to one side. His lips to the plastic, he drank the sweet, cold water until it was almost gone. He swept away his tracks as he went back, and slipped into his lair. Only when the pounding of his heart died down did he close his eyes.
At first light they were already on their way to follow the thread that the darkness had severed. The tall man saw the faded footsteps that the others had left behind in the sand; behind him, the black man let the paltry remains of rainwater flow into the bottle. A cold, white mist hung over the land.
By midday they had found the others’ camp: a little ring of blackened stones and the loose sand where their bodies had lain. They were catching up to them.
The black man sank to his knees and ran his fingers through the pale ashes. He sifted out the coals and put them in his pocket.
They followed the tracks. Perhaps they would find them before nightfall. So badly did they want to join up with them, they forgot how weak their position in the group was.
Later on, it rained. The tall, yellow tufts of grass seemed to give off a gentle light beneath the rolling grey clouds. The black man stuck out his tongue as he walked to catch some rain. He seemed refreshed and cheerful. Sometimes he spoke to the other man. The tall man shrugged, and the negro repeated his words more loudly this time, his yellow eyes fixed on him.
The tall man shook his head sadly. It was useless — they would never understand each other.
The black man had tried to tell him something about the journey, he thought, something about the weather or the can of food they’d devoured together. How could it be anything else? Who thought about anything else? The journey left no room for other thoughts. They had become people without a history, living only in an immediate present.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Whoosh
Beg had gone to his dacha, seventy kilometres outside town, to ready the cottage for the winter; he spread a few last barrows of manure over the garden plots, covered the well, and screwed the shutters over the windows. He enjoyed gardening. Sometimes he thought of himself as a landless farmer. As soon as he could, he left town to prune the roses and bind up the grapevines along the side of the house.
Now he was driving home in the dark. It would be spring before he went back again. A crate of bell peppers was on the back seat. On top of old newspapers lay the last of the pumpkins, muddy and overgrown.
Approaching an intersection, he slowed. The places they lay in wait were predictable enough — and indeed, on the far side of the road was a police cruiser, hidden behind the low stand of trees. Beg crossed the road and pulled up beside it.
The patrolman climbed out, and Beg rolled down his window.
‘Commissioner,’ the man said. He dropped his cigarette.
‘Everything in order?’
‘Certainly, certainly. Quiet. A quiet evening.’ A final plume of smoke escaped his lips.
‘Nothing special?’
‘No … nothing really. Quiet.’
More than anything else, his subordinates liked to hand out fines along the road. It was how they collected their take; it was their easiest source of income. Since the arrival of laser guns they were able to justify their extra earnings with technological precision. No one could claim any longer that they were making things up. It was there for everyone to see — digits told no lies.
‘Playing the lonesome whore’ was what they called this aspect of their profession, for that’s how it looked as they stood beneath a streetlight, monitoring traffic.
Beg had stopped doing that when he became police inspector, long ago. With a rank like his, it was unseemly, standing there in that dome of artificial light carved out in the endless spaces of the steppes.
A policeman had been gunned down once during a speed check. They found him along the side of the road, more dead than alive. His colleagues visited him at the clinic. He was deaf and blind, he reacted to nothing. Their eyes were constantly drawn to the hole where his nose had been.
He haunted their thoughts whenever they stood along a darkened road.
Beg had prohibited his men from setting up speed traps on their own — a rule everyone ignored. You collected more when you were alone.
Whenever one of the colleagues had a birthday, a standard joke made the rounds.
‘What are we going to give him?’ one of them would ask.
‘A microwave,’ the others would say.
‘He’s already got that.’
‘So a flatscreen.’
‘Has one.’
‘A new cell phone?’
‘Got that.’
‘What about a day off?’
In unison: ‘He’d never forgive us for that!’
There were variations on the theme, but that’s what it always boiled down to.
When Beg realised that he was quietly singing to himself the song about Rebekka and the roses, he clenched his teeth and turned on the car radio. Why had his mother taught him a Jewish song? He couldn’t ask her anymore. The song was so much a part of the obvious in his life that only now, at the age of fifty-three, did he ask himself how it had ended up among his belongings. He had an older sister who might know, but they’d lost contact a long time ago. She, too, had once belonged to the obvious things in his life — until one day they’d had an argument that was never laid aside, and the many years that had slipped in between had rendered the silence permanent.
Far out in front of him was a truck. Beg looked at the speedometer. He was driving at a hundred and ten himself, and wasn’t getting any closer.
Dilemma.
It annoyed him that he wasn’t catching up. This whole worn-out service-car thing annoyed him. And it annoyed him, too that, when it came to his service car, he was such a moralist.
He pressed the pedal to the floor. Gradually, he came up alongside.
The truck driver was not only going too fast, he also kept swerving across the white lines.
Beg slapped the rotating light onto the roof and manoeuvred the truck onto the shoulder of the road. Sighing and peeping, it came to a halt behind him. There was a moment of silence, some intentional shilly-shallying — Beg liked to drag that out a little. As though you held sway over time itself.
He climbed out, all his movements equally deliberate. Once he was standing beside the car, he stuck his billy club into his belt. The truck’s engine was idling. He looked up the side of the cab, and the driver rolled down the window. Beg gestured to him to climb down.
‘You’re allowed to go a hundred and thirty here,’ the man said.
‘Get out, please.’
The door swung open, and the man climbed down, grumbling. ‘A hundred and thirty, I swear.’
Beg shook his head. He pointed back down the road. ‘You went through an eighty-kilometre zone back there.’
‘You moved the signs yourself …’
‘While driving, you repeatedly swerved from lane to lane. Have you been drinking?’
‘No, man, I don’t even drink. Could I see your I.D.?’
He was a man of around thirty, wearing jeans, sneakers. The new generation: healthy, haughty, with an almost palpable contempt for authority. They didn’t know how things had been. They had never lacked for a thing; they’d had their bread buttered on both sides.
Beg’s badge gleamed in the light from the open cab.
‘What’s up with you gu
ys?’ the driver said. ‘What do you think you’re doing? You guys are fucking up everything, really.’
He turned around and placed a foot on the first step up to the cab.
‘Don’t do that,’ Beg said.
The man looked over his shoulder. ‘Gotta get my papers.’
‘You’re holding them in your hand.’
‘Other papers.’ He took another step, and was off the ground now.
Beg felt the hairs on his neck bristle. He rested his hand on the billy club. ‘Get down here.’
The driver stepped back onto the ground. ‘You’re the third one today. The third. Do you understand what that means, the third? A syndicate, that’s what you guys are. Organised crime. Could I see your hands?’
Beg was thrown off balance by the question. What was wrong with his hands?
‘Your hands,’ the man asked again. His tone was conciliatory; the vortex of rage seemed to have subsided. There was something compelling about him, something that — if he weren’t a citizen who’d committed a moving violation, and Beg not an officer in the course of his duties — would make you show him your hands. Why did the driver want to see his hands? He had to resist the urge to look at them himself; it had been a long time since he’d last consciously looked at his hands.
‘You were doing at least forty kilometres over the speed limit in an eighty-kilometre zone,’ Beg said primly. ‘While doing so, you repeatedly violated the traffic markers.’ He didn’t know why he sounded so weak, so fatuous. Was he already bowing internally to the man’s youth? Was he already admitting in the depths of his soul to being a relic, a reject of time, ready for extinction?
‘Please, may I see your hands?’
As though robbed of his will, Beg, grandpa Beg, held out his hands, the palms turned upwards. The man leaned down and held his face right above them, as though he meant to lick them. He studied them carefully, and then straightened up. ‘See what I mean?’ he said.
Beg looked at his hands. ‘What?’
‘Completely red with theft.’
Beg tossed him against the cab. The man laughed. ‘Are you going to beat me now? For saying that you’re a thief?’
Beg swiped him across the face with his billy club.
With a yelp, the driver crumpled. ‘Don’t, man, don’t do that!’
The billy club lashed out, rage burning white behind Beg’s forehead. He pounded him on the back, the legs; writhing like a worm, the man tried to make himself small, to roll into a ball, to disappear into the earth. He screamed — a high voice all of a sudden, a boy’s voice still.
‘Dirty’ — whoosh — ‘little’ — whoosh — ‘piece of shit.’
His foot bent back double when he kicked him. The sharp flash of pain sped up his shin.
Through a crack in his blinded brains came a ray of light: the realisation that he might kill him.
Stop.
Reluctantly, he lowered his arm. He leaned against the cab, out of breath. The man was lying beside the front wheel. Beg leaned down and grabbed him by the hair, to see his face. Blood and snot were running over his cheeks. Was he weeping?
‘Look what you’re doing,’ Beg panted. ‘Do you get it now? You idiot?’
He wiped his hands on the man’s sweater and stood up. He rested his hands on his hips and bent his back and head as far back as he could, groaning.
The cigarettes were on the dashboard of his car. A passenger car came by from the other direction. It slowed, pale ovals at the windows. Beg gestured to it to drive on. He lit a cigarette and looked at the man on the ground. Welcome to the real world. Somebody had to teach them.
He coughed. His mouth was dry; the cigarette didn’t taste good.
In the cab he found a roll of euro banknotes, a stun-gun, and a bottle of cola. He unscrewed the top and took a swig. There were porn mags in the net beside the mattress. He flipped through the waybills. Then he stuck the euros in his pocket, took the key out of the ignition, and turned off the headlights.
Outside, the man was crawling towards the road. Beg locked the door of the truck and lowered himself to the ground. The engine ticked as it cooled.
He lashed the driver’s hands behind his back with a tie-wrap and dragged him to his car, where he heaved him onto the back seat, between the harvest from his garden. ‘Be careful with my bell peppers.’
He dried his hands on his sleeves. A headache throbbed behind his eyes. The exertion had brought it on; it was happening more often lately. There came a day when you got too old for this kind of thing.
Through the tunnel of night he drove back into town. The little moon hung low above the horizon — a wan, barely discernible line separating heaven and earth. The darkness over the steppe was a substance, a night-blue stone. He thought about his sister. Maybe he should try to reach her again. She had always been interested in people’s stories — especially old people. Sometimes she wrote them down. ‘When someone like that dies, it’s really like a library’s been lost,’ she’d said once. Maybe his sister knew where the song came from. She was the collector in the family: she collected stories, pebbles, paperclips, and loose ends of wool.
‘I need to see a doctor,’ the man in the back seat said.
Their argument had been about the parental home. She had wanted to keep it, after their father died as well, the same way she kept the stories, the pebbles, the paperclips, and snatches of wool. Maybe she would rent it out, and then live there herself after she had raised her son and retired from her job in the city. But Beg had wanted to get rid of it. She didn’t have enough money to buy him out, so the house with the plum trees in the front garden and grapevines along the fence was sold.
‘You broke something, man. In my back. I need a doctor, really.’
The little farmhouse with the thatched roof and white loam walls sometimes came back in his dreams — the friendly blue doors and shutters, the field of withered sunflowers rustling in the wind when autumn came and the summer was already behind you without your expecting it.
There was movement in the back seat. He adjusted the rear-view mirror. The man was sitting up halfway. ‘I need help, I swear.’
‘Try to forget your memories,’ Beg said to the mirror. ‘They don’t belong to you.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
The kurgan
It is late in the afternoon by the time the tall man and the Ethiopian catch up to the others. Leaning on his stick, the tall man stands in their midst, his head bowed. The boy lets his gaze run over the grimy faces. The men with their filthy beards — how long has it been since he’s seen something clean, something untarnished by dirt?
‘We weren’t expecting to see you again,’ says the man from Ashkhabad. ‘We thought …’
‘My time hadn’t come yet,’ the tall man says.
‘What are you two after? There’s nothing here for you!’ says Vitaly.
‘We weren’t chasing you,’ the tall man defends himself. ‘It wasn’t like that. We just followed the tracks.’
Vitaly turns and walks away. ‘It’s getting cold. There isn’t enough to go around. We’re all going to die! You two should have kept your distance!’
Later, when they started walking again — the day’s final stretch — the poacher told the tall man: ‘I saw you two yesterday.’
Things have all gone so differently from what the tall man had imagined. They are a burden to the others. He can’t rely on their patience, not when he can’t keep up the pace, when things go black before his eyes and he needs to take a rest.
Maybe it really would have been better if he’d stayed alone with the black man. He doesn’t push him to go faster, he gives him water, and shares his food. The gratitude flickers for a moment.
The Ethiopian is walking behind him now. He and the tall man are still a pair, but the distance between
them is growing by the hour. The law of the group is taking over again. Their solidarity is broken; step by step, the tall man walks away from the one who saved him.
Evening. The flat land blows its cold breath over them; embers flare in a gust of wind. The black man shuffles around outside the circle; they can hear him tearing off grass for his bed. ‘Pointless,’ the boy hears the poacher say. The boy leans forward to hear him better. Some snakes sleep at night, the poacher says, but that’s exactly when others come out to hunt. But the karakurt spiders, they’re the dangerous ones. Their poison can kill a bull.
They went out digging for tubers and onions, but found nothing. That night, the poacher’s snares remained empty as well.
The hunger makes you furious at first; but then, if it keeps on going, it makes you listless and weak. That’s why the rages of Vitaly and the man from Ashkhabad have subsided, because of the hunger and the cold.
They left again before first light. Walking would drive the cold from their bones. Gradually, the day unfolded behind them. The grass was licked with frost.
At their feet, a hare bolted. A pair of partridges flew up, cackling, in front of them. That afternoon, the poacher pointed out to the boy a herd of donkeys at the furthermost edge of their vision. There was no chance of catching one. All food ran and flew away at their approach. The poacher longed for his rifle; he could have used it to shoot the hare and the partridges, as well as the geese that babbled as they plied the heavens, but his hunting rifle was hanging on the wall at home. Home — a place that seemed pleasant to him now, not poor and desperate like when he left. There was a fire in the stove, a soft bed, his warm wife.
He had been one of the last to leave. The evenings when those who remained behind had drunk away their cares at the community hall and danced till they dropped had become increasingly rare — when the men bared their chests, giving in to that mysterious urge that overpowers almost every male once he has had enough to drink.
These Are the Names Page 6
