Sometimes they went out poaching in an old all-terrain vehicle, blind drunk, chasing away every living thing with their ruckus. They shot at shadows and glimmers, at anything that moved or stood still. Each and every one of them fancied himself a sharpshooter. They guzzled homemade hooch, the empty bottles exploding in shards against the rocks. Nikolai Ribalko shot his own dog by accident. He wept and swore that he would suffer for his deed, suffer for having shot and killed his treacherous fucking dog. They were savage, their blood boiled, but they fell asleep as soon as the action petered out.
That was the life he had left behind.
On the horizon a kurgan rose up, a burial mound built by a people lost long ago. They had run across these before. They tended to give them a wide berth, fearing that their presence would disturb the rest of the dead. But now they lacked the energy to swerve around the mound that lay straight across their path. The boy approached it with a mixture of dread and excitement. The hill was covered in yellow prairie grass. He longed to look far in every direction. The sole of his right shoe had come loose, and flapped as he walked. He’d tried to fix it temporarily with strips of canvas that the poacher had cut for him from an old satchel.
He climbed to the top. Dizziness. And also euphoria at being liberated from the flats, as though he had been lifted by a giant hand.
But he saw no sign of life. Nowhere was there a rectangular structure to betray the hand of man. He turned slowly where he stood: waving grass, yellow sea.
The poacher and the man from Ashkhabad joined him. ‘Nothing, right?’ the man from Ashkhabad said. The boy shook his head.
The man from Ashkhabad moaned. ‘We’re doomed.’
‘You are. I’m not,’ the poacher said quietly.
The boy was the only one who paid attention to his words. He knew the poacher was right, that he would outlive them all. He was a stone; he knew what it meant to endure.
Vitaly reached the top, out of breath. Then the woman appeared. The Ethiopian was the last one up the hill. Being around the tall man had changed him; he acted like one of them now. He looked around. There was no difference between the road they’d taken and the road they had to follow. The black man looked up, and the boy followed his gaze. A flight of geese at high altitude were flying south, the formation weaving and parting and rejoining.
What does he see? the boy wondered. What is he thinking?
As they were getting ready to descend, the black man reached out and touched Vitaly’s arm. Vitaly recoiled. ‘Keep your hands off me, you pig.’
The black man indicated a dense patch of grass far away, and said something in his indecipherable tongue. The poacher and the man from Ashkhabad looked. There was a hint of green amid the yellow. Maybe it was a hollow where water collected during long droughts. Maybe they would find wood there, or wild onions.
Like shadows, they wander across the steppes, all skinny as a strap. It won’t be long before they grow transparent and disappear. Departing from their route, they head south, towards the spot the Ethiopian showed them. When they get there they find nothing but a few bushes and tall, plumed grass. They dig like men possessed, in search of onions and wild tulip bulbs. When they leave, the ground is upturned, as though a band of nomads has dug for treasure there. They avoid each other’s eyes; the blow is unbearable.
The woman weeps without tears. She falls to her knees and tosses sand over her head. The boy sees it gliding off her hair and shoulders.
‘Come,’ he says, ‘we’re falling behind.’
He grabs her arm and pulls her to her feet. She falls back on the ground, on her stomach now, and rubs her face in the sand. Her forehead, her nose, her cheeks are covered in dust. The boy pulls her up again and drags her along. She takes a sudden step towards him, he ducks too late, and the flat of her hand hits him in the face.
Then she walks away from him, after the others.
The boy remains standing. He feels each individual finger burning on his cheek.
They go back to the kurgan; the poacher thinks there may be wild animals there that will walk into his traps. In the late afternoon, they pitch camp in the hill’s long shadow. The boy knows that the hill is hollow inside. The dead wander around in there. They will come to get him. That night, they will reach out their knobby hands to seize him and drag him by his feet into their underworld.
Vitaly walks over to the woman, who is sitting in the sand, and pulls her to her feet. He wants to take her to his bed for the night, but the man from Ashkhabad intervenes.
‘Let go,’ he says.
Vitaly snorts.
‘Let go. Or do you want me to kick the shit out of you?’ the man from Ashkhabad says.
The others watch. They expect Vitaly to give in. He steps back — not to retreat though, not like they think, but to jump at the other’s throat. They fall and roll, panting through the dirt. Most of the blows miss their mark. The man from Ashkhabad rolls on top of Vitaly, and punches him hard — in the head, on the chest, right through the arms he’s raised to protect himself. Vitaly is no longer the canny street fighter he was a while back, when he almost always won. Now, he remains lying on the ground as the man from Ashkhabad drags his prey along into the gathering darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
To the ataman
The next morning, the trailer truck was empty. The slashed canvas billowed in the wind. The trucking company was informed, and sent someone to pick it up. The driver remained in custody, for having driven under the influence and resisting arrest. Sergeant Koller looked at his boss’s raw knuckles, and entertained no illusions. Beg was a fine fellow, but he had his moods.
The detainee lay in his cell with his face to the wall, and didn’t respond to their questions. He didn’t touch his food. His lips were split; some of his teeth were broken. The doctor had come by. ‘Bruised ribs, nothing broken,’ he ruled. He didn’t look at the man’s teeth — they hadn’t talked about teeth at medical school.
In the basement cellblock at the station house, the filth of the world piled up like flotsam against the walls of a sluice. Once a week, everything down there was cleaned with Lysol, but the smell of vomit and stale sweat drilled straight through it all.
At noon, Beg locked his office door from the inside and pulled a little address book from his desk drawer. It was an old one: lots of the names had been scratched out, and new ones were no longer added. In the same way that the rabbi wandered amid the headstones of his loved ones, Beg found himself leafing through pages containing the names of people who had once been a part of his life but had now disappeared from it. Under ‘U’ he found his sister Eva. She had divorced that talented good-for-nothing Alexander Uspensky, but she had kept his name. The name ‘Beg’ was too countrified for her; it had too much flatland, too much steppe to it.
He had no idea whether the number was still in service. She might have moved — people were restless, more than they used to be, blown hither and thither. Only he stayed where he was, immovable amid the wheezing heating pipes and the upstairs neighbours who tossed cigarette butts onto his balcony.
He picked up the phone, hesitated for a moment, and then dialled the number.
It rang. A man answered, without stating his name. All he said was, ‘Yeah?’
‘To whom am I speaking?’ Beg asked.
‘To whom am I speaking?’
Beg sighed. ‘Tadeusz, is that you?’
It was quiet for a moment. ‘Who’s asking?’
‘Your uncle, Pontus.’
Silence again. ‘Mum’s not here,’ he said then.
‘Oh.’
‘Sorry.’
‘When’s she coming back?’
‘I don’t know.’
The unwillingness at the other end was almost palpable. He had probably interrupted his nephew while he was playing some computer game —
a modern-day sin against the spirit.
‘Well, it was nice talking to you, Tadeusz.’
‘Yeah,’ the boy said.
‘Would you tell her I called?’
‘Sure.’
‘I really need to talk to her.’
‘I’ll tell her.’
Then they hung up. Beg sank back in his chair. Tadeusz was still a teenager the last time he’d seen him. Now he’d had a young adult on the line whom he would have liked to tell that things could turn out all right, that there was no cause for such suspicion.
Whether that was true, he had no idea.
He had known Eva better than anyone; they had been the sole witnesses to each other’s youths. That one day they would turn their backs on each other in bitterness had been unthinkable. Still, it had happened. They could die unnoticed, without either of them knowing that about the other. It was something you shouldn’t dwell on, otherwise it would weigh you down and make you sad.
Oksana’s blonde bouffant hair-do appeared above the strip of smoked glass that separated his office from the hallway. It sailed past like a ship on the horizon. With her long legs and high heels, Oksana, if she stood on tip-toes, was the only one who could look over it. Whenever she walked past she would toss a quick, almost compulsive glance inside, then turn away quickly as though she had seen nothing. Beg had thought about taping off the top section of the window, too, but never got around to it. Perhaps, he thought, he appreciated being seen by at least one person.
That afternoon, he drove to a sandy stretch outside town. After the empire’s collapse, a bazaar had arisen there, a market bigger than Michailopol had ever seen. Beg had witnessed the birth of a new kind of trading place — the planned economy vanished, the bazaar shot up from the soil like a field of wildflowers in spring. Roads were built, latrines dug — replaced later by portacabins and even later by toilet blocks with running water — and there were snack bars and exchange offices. Michailopol suddenly found itself smack dab in the middle of the world, at a crossroads. The bazaar was frequented by gypsies with brown faces and scars on their scalps; traders crossed the border in their old Mercedes; farmers brought in grain and livestock; and they all returned home with pruning shears, hunting rifles, grinders, and plastic flowers for their ancestors’ graves. Old women carried such heavy loads of checkered shopping bags that it was a wonder their legs didn’t buckle beneath them, like old cavalry mounts. From one day to the next, everyone became a merchant. Everyone had something to sell and was champing at the bit to buy something in turn. An old man who made ice cream said the bazaar reminded him of the market at Krakow after the Great War — the riotous outburst of mercantile fever that marked life’s return after the hunger and the horrors, he had seen it there, too.
Moneychangers, ex-convicts who were recognisable by the way they squatted with their backs to a wall — years of their lives had been spent like that in prison yards — moved between the stacked shipping containers. You smelled soap and bread, caustic cleansers, and broiled meat, you walked a few hundred yards down a street full of brightly coloured plastic toys, and then suddenly found yourself in the audio lane, between towers of cassette tapes, bootlegged CDs, and sound systems. Men used corn brooms to sweep the streets, bawled at by merchants who tossed blankets over their wares to keep off the dust.
Everyone longed for wealth, the natural end of all cares. The people hungered after money, earned with a few swift transactions. They built homes with the mortar of their fantasies, houses that said, ‘Look, a rich man lives here’, wondrous constructions in every style of the world — the domes of Samarkand perched atop Ionian pillars, the fountains of Damascus burbling in the courtyards. Every day all those thousands of little hustlers came to the bazaar, waiting for the miracle.
Whenever he walked around the grounds, Pontus Beg would think about his father, about the man’s impotent disdain for commerce. Commerce, that wasn’t labour, he’d felt; that was making money off labour. The froth of trade was richer than the fat of labour — that was the bitter lesson his father had taught him. Commerce had been a forbidden city to old Beg, one he knew only from its periphery — whenever he sold milk and meat to the cooperative, whenever a truck came to pick up the grain. He never found out precisely how the price of milk, meat, and grain was established; all he knew for sure was that others earned more from it than he did.
For Beg, too, who visited the bazaar almost every week, the trading life remained a web of mysteries. How could someone who had bought a shipment of Chinese cuckoo clocks yesterday know that he could sell them for twice the price twenty miles down the road? Why wasn’t the price of cuckoo clocks the same there as it was here? How did they know over there that here, today, there would be a demand for cuckoo clocks?
Those who made a killing on the bazaar disappeared from sight. They lived in big houses behind tall fences, their interests seen to by go-betweens.
In the early days of the bazaar, one such man had become breathtakingly rich, but remained true to the market nonetheless: ataman Chiop. He was the richest of them all. Pontus Beg was going to see him now. Ataman Chiop: 350 pounds dripping wet, and strong as an ox. People said he’d once mounted a sturdy horse and broken its back.
The law had a mobile police station on the grounds, but no arm reached as far as ataman Chiop’s. No shylock changed zlotys for euros and grivnas for rubles without his knowledge; no article changed hands without him earning a few cents on it. In each of the thousands of transactions a day, one cent would disappear into the merchant’s pocket, and one into ataman Chiop’s. Taken together, all those cents added up to a mountain, and atop that mountain sat the ataman. From the summit, he kept an eagle eye on the bazaar with its myriad corridors, where everyone longed to be as rich as him.
‘Well, if it isn’t Pontus!’ the ataman said when Beg entered his office, a café at the edge of the bazaar. ‘Come, Pontus, sit down, take a seat. Vladimir, bring a glass for my guest.’
Beg slid onto the seat across from him.
Rumor had it that a secret tunnel ran from the café to a shed somewhere far from the market, and that a getaway car kept its motor running there, but Beg didn’t believe it. The ataman was too big for tunnels — he would become wedged like a cork in a bottle.
‘Cheers, Pontus!’
They raised their glasses and knocked them back. The ataman, Beg had noticed before, liked to call him by his first name. He had done that right from the outset, as though they were old friends. Beg could no longer ask him to stop; it was too late for that now. He addressed the other man as ‘ataman’, which immediately established the pecking order. The one was his first name; the other, his position in the hierarchy.
They ate pickles and salted meat along with the vodka. If you didn’t know better, you would have seen two friends running through the day’s news.
Beg looked at the ataman’s forehead, and the bristly grey hair above it. No one could have told you the colour of his eyes, tucked away as they were between folds of fat.
‘I stopped a truck yesterday,’ Beg said.
The ataman’s phone rang. He glanced at the screen and said: ‘Just a moment, Pontus.’
Beg laid his hands on the table and waited.
‘Round it off to thirty,’ the ataman said. ‘I’ll accept that.’
Silence.
‘Thirty, tops,’ the ataman said. ‘But start at twenty.’
He snapped the phone shut and put it back in the holster on his belt.
‘What was it you wanted to say to me, Pontus?’
‘Last night I stopped a truck,’ Beg said.
‘Good,’ said the ataman. ‘Why?’
‘And this morning the truck was empty.’
The ataman raised his face to the ceiling, and then lowered it again. He sighed deeply. ‘It’s terrible, the way people steal these days. Thieves everywh
ere, absolutely everywhere. People have grown too lazy to work for it.’
The best thing to do now was to say nothing, Beg knew. He simply looked at the man across from him and marvelled at how a head could grow like that — a giant pumpkin forgotten at the edge of a field. Pity the poor mother who’d had to give birth to him, though it was hard to imagine this man being born of a woman.
‘What do you want me to do about it, Pontus? I’ll keep an eye out for the thieves, I’ll do that. That goes without saying.’
His phone rang again. He answered, listened for a bit, and then said only: ‘I can’t talk right now. Call me later this afternoon.’ He hung up.
Beg helped himself to a pickle, looked at it for a moment, then stuck it in his mouth.
‘Where were we, Pontus?’ the ataman asked.
While chewing, Beg said: ‘Life’s expensive these days. Everyone wants to be able to give his sweetheart a present every now and then, or go to the seashore for a vacation. When you do that, you want to feel money in your pocket — real money, not plastic. Plastic isn’t money. Tell me, do you think the ataman has a credit card? Don’t make me laugh. The ataman trusts only real money; he’s a wise man. He doesn’t trust the banks — the banks work with people, they have power failures, people looking over your shoulder. One day they might say: “Dear ataman, we don’t like the look of this: the fiscal authorities want us to freeze your account until the investigation is over.” Then you’re stuck.’
The ataman shook his head. ‘Pontus, what kind of person do you think I am? I’m in the import-export business. Times are tough. The business is flat on its arse.’
‘You mind if I take the last pickle?’
‘Go ahead.’
It crunched nicely between his teeth. ‘We all have to make a living,’ Beg said pensively. ‘The ataman is right about that. That’s easier for some of us than it is for others. Some people see a penny from a mile away; others wouldn’t see it if they tripped over it. The ataman sees pennies everywhere. The pennies come to him almost by themselves. He’s a penny-magnet; you can hear him jingle when he walks.’
These Are the Names Page 7
