These Are the Names

by Tommy Wieringa

  Beg straightened up, as though trying to wriggle out from beneath the role of the slow learner. ‘And if you’re not much of a believer? Even then?’

  ‘Reason can bring one to God as well,’ the rabbi said. ‘Did you know that a child in the womb assumes a position like it’s reading the Torah?’

  ‘I read Eastern things. Books without God in them.’

  ‘A Jew is a Jew, even without the Eternal. We … we are a braided rope, individual threads woven to form a single cord. That’s how we’re linked. What ties us together is what we are.’ He raked his fingers through his beard.

  Beg suddenly realised where his heavy-heartedness came from: there were no windows in this room. The only light came from bare bulbs on the ceiling. No ray of sunlight ever entered here; no breeze ever blew through the rooms. Here and there, the plaster formed bulges on the walls. Moisture made the building smell like a cadaver.

  Beg was curious about the other rooms, about the floor plan of this labyrinth. The door facing the street opened onto the synagogue; the rabbi lived in the rooms beside it, which one reached from the alleyway. The building was as mysterious as an oriental bazaar. The old man had to have a bed somewhere, just as somewhere there had to be a door that led from the inside to the house of prayer.

  ‘Rabbi Eder, who cooks for you?’ Beg asked.

  ‘The neighbours,’ the rabbi said gloomily. ‘Chinese food, every night. It’s making my eyes go slanty. When my cook died, I stopped being a Jew. The kitchen is the cathedral of the Jews, my good man.’

  Beg nodded.

  ‘It takes me three days to finish one helping,’ the rabbi said.

  Could he still comply with the dietary laws, while eating Chinese food every night? Beg didn’t dare to ask. Maybe the whole thing was crumbling away, now that there were no successors, he thought. Maybe he doesn’t care much anymore, now that there’s no one breathing down his neck.

  ‘I can’t tell you whether or not your mother was Jewish,’ the rabbi said suddenly. ‘You’ll have to find out for yourself. Ask the people who are still alive. That’s where the answer lies. What made you think so, anyway?’

  ‘Her surname, Medved.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘And that song.’

  ‘What song?’

  ‘The love song. About Rebekka.’

  The rabbi shook his head. ‘I don’t know any song about Rebekka.’

  ‘I sang it for you!’

  ‘Sing it again, then I’m sure I’ll remember it.’

  And so it happened for the second time that Pontus Beg sang a Yiddish love song for the old rabbi.

  ‘Very good,’ he said contentedly when Beg was finished. ‘Singing brings us closer to God.’ He rocked his head back and forth, lightheartedly, as though at a dance party. ‘So your mother used to sing that to you? When you were little? But that’s very unusual! Why would she sing a Yiddish song? Do you have any idea?’

  Beg wiped his eyes with one hand. ‘That’s why I’m here,’ he said.

  ‘You really should have a little more than that to go on. Indications.’

  ‘Like the name,’ Beg said. ‘Her maiden name. Here …’ He pulled out Professor Urban’s book of names, found the right page, and slid it across the table.

  ‘What am I supposed to look at?’

  Beg put his index finger beside his mother’s surname.

  ‘I can’t see anything without my glasses,’ the rabbi said grumpily. ‘Where did I put my glasses?’

  ‘There,’ Beg said.

  The rabbi slid his reading glasses down from his forehead and mumbled: ‘Old man, keep yourself together.’ He bent over and read the word in the book that Beg held up for him. ‘Also Jewish, indeed,’ he said. ‘Ashkenazi, um hum. High German.’

  He looked up. His washed-out blue eyes slid over Beg’s face. ‘Your mother received her surname from her father. That doesn’t mean anything. If her mother was Jewish, then she was Jewish, and so are you. What interests me is your maternal grandmother — if she was Jewish, then you are, too. What do you know about your grandparents?’

  ‘Not much. I never met them. Patriots, my mother said. My grandfather died … the last year of the war, on the Neisse, the last big offensive. My mother was raised by her mother. My grandmother married again, but I don’t know much about her second husband … I can’t remember him so well. An officer, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘How can you live like that? Without any history? We Jews … we’re touchy enough as it is, and our memory goes back four thousand years! Some people … they don’t care about where they belong anymore. They hide it away, they don’t talk about it, and when they die someone suddenly says: “Shouldn’t we be giving him a Jewish burial?” General consternation, no one knew, all this time. Why? There are so many reasons. The Eternal not only blessed us, he cursed us, too.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘What do you want to do with this knowledge, anyway? A Jew, a Gentile — does it really make any difference to you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Beg said resolutely, without knowing what else he was going to say. ‘There’s a difference.’ And, after some hesitation: ‘Even though I couldn’t tell you what it is.’

  To arrive at an answer, he needed to delve deeper into himself than was his wont. He had a sneaky feeling about what he would find there — the loneliness to which he’d grown accustomed, like having a cold foot and a peeping in his ears. Long ago he had decided to tolerate life and demand from it nothing that was beyond his own capacity to fulfil. Eastern schools of thought advanced resignation as a way of life, too. But a seed might sometimes sprout, even in a crack in the pavement — it shouldn’t have been there, yet still it grew, its roots stuck right through the concrete …

  It had become a longing, to know where he came from.

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ the rabbi said. ‘The only right answer is the answer at the right moment. It will come of its own accord.’

  He stood up and shuffled to the sink. His hands shaking, he poured himself some tea concentrate and added hot water from the samovar. Blue veins lay beneath his thin, yellow skin. Long nails. Liver spots on the backs of his hands.

  ‘We’re going to need a bit more — documents, perhaps. Something irrefutable. Paper is the best proof. Can you get hold of documents?’

  ‘What kind of documents?’

  ‘Something that proves you’re descended from Jews. The problem is that the system here keeps track only of the paternal line. That can complicate matters.’

  The rabbi asked whether Beg would like to see the synagogue. He shuffled out in front of him, across the grey tiles. The place looked like an underground bunker complex where the sun never shone — a phantom realm where you became less and less a body and more and more a shadow, an erased pencil stroke. The rabbi stopped in front of a door, felt around under his coat, and pulled out a bunch of keys. He held them up to the light of a bare bulb and ran through them one by one until he found the right one.

  ‘Wait here for a moment,’ he said.

  He came back with a yarmulke. ‘Put this on.’

  Beg wormed the thing onto the back of his head and followed the old man inside. The high, open space was a hallucination — after the darkness, it was as though the heavens had opened. The pillars bearing up the roof were inlaid with royal blue and gold mosaic tiles; the late afternoon light fell through high windows. The smell was of a space no longer animated by any human presence. The wooden benches and cabinets along the walls were hung with webs of grey light. The rabbi, his hands behind his back, stood looking around, a tourist at an antique ruin. Beg walked past the podium in the middle, a cupboard draped with curtains, and the stone steps leading to the platform above it all. He knew nothing of what had been said and done here, in this mysterious world where the memory of a journey thousands of years old was kept alive.
This, then, was where that journey ended, and there stood the last traveller, waiting for him to get his fill of looking.

  The rabbi gestured to him. They passed through a door and down a narrow corridor. At the end was yet another door. He opened it; behind it, all was darkness. When the light clicked on, Beg saw a landing the size of a little room, with more wooden benches along its walls. It resembled a dressing room. The rabbi led the way down the stone flight in front of them. The steps were worn hollow. Deep in the ground, a long rectangle had been hewn from the rock — a bath beneath a brick masonry arch. And standing motionless in the basin: chimerical, clear water. The steps disappeared below the surface and on to the bottom of the bath. It was a descent to a place that seemed more vital than the synagogue itself: the sacred heart of a mystery cult. The light from the landing above reflected off the water’s surface. Beg would have liked to touch it, to set it in motion, but it would scald his unclean skin, as punishment for that act of blasphemy.

  Water trickled down the walls. The grey stone gleamed.

  ‘The forefathers built the house on a source of living water,’ the rabbi said. ‘Like Moses, they struck it from the rock.’

  Here a Jewish man or woman went down the steps, naked and alone. There was to be nothing between the body and the water. No clothing, bandages, jewellery — even the paltriest crumb under a nail was to be removed. Only then were you cleansed.

  ‘A sort of baptism, in other words,’ Beg said.

  The rabbi looked up at him, displeased. ‘Those three little drops of water! You have to go all the way under, all the way! And not just once — again and again. How else could you be purified?’

  In silence, they looked at the glassy water. Deep in the earth was where they found themselves; the world was far away. The rabbi’s voice sounded quiet now. ‘It’s not a baptism; it’s not a bath in the sense of soap and water. He who is immersed in the mikveh becomes a new person. He gets a new soul.’

  A drop fell. Beg’s heart cringed; it had been so long since he’d heard such a serene sound. The ripple in the water died away quickly. He wished he could undress, go down the steps to the bottom of the basin, let his body go under, and cleanse it of the world’s filth. Even the filth that did not wash off, he would scrub that away, too. A new soul — there, deep in the earth, with this magic water, that kind of thing seemed truly possible. What a pleasant, comforting thought … To shed his old soul, that tattered, worn thing, and receive a new one in its stead. Who wouldn’t want that? Who would turn down something like that?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The judgement

  Vitaly bared his upper arm to display the wound. The boy turned away in disgust; the sore, covered in a green film, made him nauseous.

  So the black man possessed powers. He’d suspected as much, always had. Yet he still hadn’t decided whether he was a good sorcerer or an evil one; harming Vitaly could very well be the act of a miracle worker. Mean dogs are there to be kicked.

  ‘He says he touched him there,’ the woman told the others. ‘That that’s what caused the sore. Something like that is … well, it’s …’ She searched for words, without finding them.

  The boy didn’t respond; he hadn’t forgotten the slap. He looked around, but saw the black man nowhere. Just to be on the safe side, he would avoid him. And keep his eyes open in the meantime.

  Look, he told himself, you have to look carefully.

  He remembered something his mother had told him once, a memory of him as a little boy. A little sister was born and, according to his mother, he had said: ‘Babies can’t talk because they’re not allowed to tell secrets about heaven.’

  All right, he thought now, I may not know about heaven’s secrets yet, but I’ll sure find out about the earthly ones.

  During the journey he had already seen and understood more than in all the years before. If he survived, the trip would shape and scar him.

  ‘He was the last one to show up,’ the man from Ashkhabad said.

  ‘What if he touches us, too?’ the woman said. ‘In our sleep?’

  The man from Ashkhabad shook his head, unable to answer.

  ‘He wasn’t the last one to show up,’ the boy said. ‘He was there from the start. Along with the rest of us.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ the woman said bitterly. ‘Why are you lying about it?’

  ‘He was the last one,’ Vitaly said. ‘No one knew where he came from. Suddenly he was just there, to bring us bad luck …’

  ‘Like a djinn,’ the woman said.

  It was the first time the boy saw her talk to the man from Ashkhabad, whose prey she was at night. Once she had spat on him — she had said she would kill him if she got the chance — but that all seemed to have vanished now. The boy kept his mouth shut; this sudden unanimity allowed for no dissent.

  It was not his custom, but now the poacher joined in, too. ‘You’re the one who brought him back to us,’ he told the tall man. ‘We shook him off, then you showed up with him again. That’s the way I see it.’

  ‘All I did was follow him!’ the tall man protested. ‘He was the one who found your trail.’

  The poacher shrugged. ‘I’m only telling you what I saw.’

  Vitaly nodded furiously, fever and mortal fear in his bulging eyes. The life will go out of him soon. His breathing is agitated. There’s only one thing he longs for now: someone on whom to pin his misfortune. He needs to punish the black man, drag him along in his fall. That’s what he still has to do. All the venom left in him he will apply to that end.

  Evening. As they sit in the wet sand, a host of fat, round clouds converge above their heads. At the edges of the steppe, bolts shoot down from the violet sky.

  ‘Hey, beanpole!’ Vitaly says. ‘What did you two get up to back there anyway, you and that nigger friend of yours?’

  The tall man shrugs reluctantly.

  ‘We leave you behind for dead and suddenly you’re back, nothing wrong with you, fit as a fiddle. How about you explain that to us, how that’s possible.’

  The others chimed in. Yeah, what exactly did happen?

  The tall man looked at the ground. ‘Nothing,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Bullshit,’ Vitaly said. ‘One minute you’re kicking the bucket, the next minute you come prancing in.’

  The woman pulls her coat tighter around her. The boy looks down the row of emaciated male faces, the jutting cheekbones above their beards, their eyes sunk deep in the sockets — an inquisition in rags. They glare at the tall man. He should never have returned from the plains. For that he was being condemned. The deepest suspicion still had to be pronounced, but it floated out in front of the rest, waiting for the right moment to descend: the suspicion that witchcraft was at play here, a conspiracy with the darkness. That was the line of accusation the tribunal would choose, inexorably; the boy sensed it. The tall man could not escape. There was no possible defence; suspicion and verdict were one. The dark shapes before him, a tangled-up ball of fear and rage. The tall man slid back from the circle a little. His hand rested on a pebble. He picked it up and raised it to his myopic eyes: a smooth, white little stone, bleached like the shells on a beach. Had the steppe once been a sea? Black fish slipped noiselessly past his body. Dark waves of kelp bobbed before his eyes, the eyes of a pitiful drowned man at the bottom of the ocean.

  ‘He gave me something to eat,’ he said.

  ‘So what did you two have to eat?’ Vitaly mocked. ‘Soup and white bread?’

  ‘He had a can with him.’

  ‘And what was in the can? Caviar?’

  ‘Dog food. I think it was dog food.’

  ‘And where did he get that from?’

  He shook his head. ‘How should I know …?’

  ‘He’s your friend, isn’t he?’ the woman shrilled.

  His q
uiet voice: ‘He’s not my friend.’

  ‘You mean he helped you for no reason? Just like that?’

  Behind them, a flash of lightning broke the clouds. Thunder rolled across the sky. Gently, after that, came the sound of rain around them.

  Pointing at his upper arm, Vitaly asked whether the black man had touched him, too.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ the tall man said, ‘what do you mean by that?’

  ‘Here!’ Vitaly hissed. ‘Here, this is where he touched me with his finger!’

  Pulling his sweater up over his head, he showed them his arm. They looked in dismay at the wound that lay like a burning sun between faded tattoos. The ring around it had widened, and the crater seemed even deeper.

  ‘No,’ the tall man said, ‘he didn’t touch me. Or wait, when he helped me to my feet.’

  ‘Show us,’ Vitaly said.

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Show us!’

  ‘Aw, man, knock it off.’

  But his plea was weak. Vitaly stood up and began yanking on the man’s clothes. ‘Show us, damn you!’

  The tall man flailed his arms wildly and edged back even further. Beyond Vitaly’s reach, he slowly pulled off the layers of sweaters and T-shirts. A little later, he stood before them like that, a shivering blade of grass in the rain. They were shocked by the look of him. They knew: they were this skinny, too. His sternum stuck out, and the ribs rose and fell beneath the papery skin. The tall man looked down at his own body, inquisitively, in search of marks. ‘Hey,’ he said when he spotted the infected fleabites on his stomach.

  ‘You see, you see!’ Vitaly crowed.

  The others could not keep their eyes off his offensive nakedness, the face of starvation. Skin, nails, and hair.

  Slow as a cold reptile, the tall man put it all back on.