A web of forked lightning illuminated the twilight.
‘And that one over there’ — the man from Ashkhabad pointed to where the black man had built his nest — ‘has been stuffing himself and laughing at us the whole goddamn time.’
This was an unbearable thought, an insult to their desperate hunger.
‘Has he got grub or not?’ Vitaly asked the tall man.
‘I didn’t see any.’
‘He gave you something to eat, didn’t he? That means he’s got grub, doesn’t it?’
‘Maybe, yeah, I guess.’ The tall man flapped his arms wildly now. ‘How should I know!’
The man from Ashkhabad rose to his feet, and he and Vitaly walked over to the Ethiopian’s camp. The others followed. They approached him cautiously, fearful of the power they had created in their minds.
‘Hey, Africa,’ Vitaly said, kicking at the prone form. The tarp moved, and the black man stuck his head out.
‘Food!’ Vitaly said. He raised his hand to his mouth.
The black man laughed nervously.
‘You’ve got food there,’ Vitaly said. He kicked at him again.
The black man crawled out from under the tarp and backed away from them.
They dumped the contents of his satchel on the wet ground and lifted the plastic to see if anything was hidden there. Uncomprehendingly, the black man watched as they rummaged through his possessions — the empty can, a Bible they couldn’t read (they saw the silver cross on the cover), a roll of newspapers, his empty lighters, and his jingling collection of tin bottle caps. They had counted on finding a secret food stash, and now they looked in disbelief at his paltry possessions. They kicked apart the ring of grass, but found nothing. The Ethiopian looked at the tall man — a look that asked for help, a mitigating word to break the tension — but the tall man averted his eyes. Dark pillars, dripping with rain, they looked in silence at the African. They turned and went back to their places.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Anonymous
Nagged by regret, Beg followed the rabbi up the steps, back from the hollow in the earth to the surface world where his old soul rejoined him. It was dark in the synagogue now; the vibrant blue had faded from the pillars.
Humming, the old man straightened a cloth that hung before the cabinet containing the Torah. Beg felt like going away, like leaving behind the questions without answers, and resuming his life. The rabbi stood with his back to him, nodding his head slightly now and again. Beg sat down in the front pew. Who had sat here before him? What had those people been like? How unthinkable, suddenly, that he should be one of them! He knew nothing about them; they were as remote to him as the Eskimos. Or the dead. That was more like it, he thought, for there was only one of them left: the captain, who would be the last to leave the ship.
He crossed his legs. No sound made its way in here. He heard only the crystalline singing in his head — inside his head it wasn’t quiet at all. It would never be quiet again. It was in surroundings such as these that the metallic whistling had started. He tried not to think about it, that was his strategy; he lived around his burgeoning defects. But now, in the synagogue — where, just like on the steppes, the absence of sound came across as a gentle murmur — he felt a light, serene sorrow at the loss of silence.
For a long time he had feared that the whistling in his ears was a harbinger of deafness. He was afraid of going deaf. The deaf man seemed lonelier to him than the blind, because his world was limited to what he could see. A blind man could hear what happened behind and above him; for the deaf man, the world behind was an abyss. A deaf person could tell you less about the world around him than a blind person; he had proved that to himself at work one time by sealing his ears with balls of wax. The bustle of police headquarters had disappeared as if by magic: he could barely hear the phone, or the knocking on doors. The conversations in the corridor, Oksana’s silly chatter, the lowing of a drunken prisoner — all vanished. As did doors that opened and closed, cars in the courtyard, snatches of conversation, the cooing of pigeons on the sill. The world without sound was a flat surface; all depth disappeared.
The rabbi straightened and turned around. He gestured to his guest to follow. At the exit, Beg saw a tapestry woven with gold thread and depicting a candlestick. He stopped in his tracks. There was a memory he was groping after, but couldn’t quite reach. He strained his eyes, as though that might help him squeeze out the memory. Suddenly, in his mind’s eye, he saw his mother emptying a bucket of potato peels into a trough. She was perspiring, and the hair at the back of her neck was straggly. It was a living memory, so different from the pictures he had of her; photographs tended to overgrow living memories, and finally to replace them. But now he was seeing how she put down the bucket, straightened her back, and rested her hands on her hips; with the back of one hand, she brushed away the hair that hung in her eyes from beneath her kerchief.
The first thing he forgot after she died was her scent. Then it was her voice. And soon enough after that, he could no longer summon up her looks and expressions.
Words had moved in to take their place. That she was loving and hot-tempered, maternal and dominating. At her funeral, he recalled, they had said that she worked like a horse, and had a will of iron. Without her stamina and financial insight, people said, the family would have gone to ruin. (Because the head of the household was a financial nincompoop, he heard them think.)
Gradually, his mother was put in a nutshell of a few traits: a life in catchwords.
The words had replaced her.
Now there she stood, squinting as she looked out over the fields; behind her, her son snuck into the house, an intruder in his own memories, through the kitchen and into the dark hallway, on stockinged feet into his parents’ bedroom, the planks creaking beneath his footfalls — forbidden territory. There is the corner cupboard with its glass doors; she stores her valuables behind panes of cut glass. Her wedding photo in its silver frame, the picture of her parents beside it: her father in the infantryman’s summer uniform; her mother in white, a coronet in her raven hair. A jade cameo, an ivory hair clasp — the riches of a farm wife. At the back, covered by the veil she wore at her wedding, is a little candleholder with seven branches.
A candleholder exactly like the one he was looking at now.
Beg stood in the alleyway and put on his cap. The back door of the restaurant was open, and an old woman was peeling onions in the doorway. The skins fell into a bucket between her knees. A cigarette dangled from a corner of her mouth; she kept one eye closed to keep out the smoke. The woman followed his every move, but her hands went on peeling mechanically. Behind her, under fluorescent lighting, Asians were at work in the kitchen.
Beg entered the restaurant from the street side, passing through a curtain of tinkling beads. A man and a girl behind the counter looked at him as expressionlessly as the old woman had.
Sitting at a little table by the window, he flipped through the menu, which featured pictures of the various dishes in strange colours and attitudes, as though a pilot had squeezed off a random series of aerial landscape photos. The caramelised duck glistened temptingly. Beg looked up at the girl and pointed to the duck: ‘This one.’
She nodded.
‘And a coke,’ he said.
He watched her go. The Chinese were every bit as enigmatic as the Jews. His legs were shimmying under the table.
‘That thing, what is that?’ he’d asked Zalman Eder, after they had stood looking at the candleholder.
The rabbi explained to him that the menorah, along with the Ark of the Covenant, was one of the most important attributes of Judaism.
Beg thought about the poignancy he’d felt — the same thing he’d felt when he talked to his sister. So much had been lost, he thought; sometimes you could survey that loss in its entirety. His sister’s voice had carried h
im back to where he came from, to the days when everything still had its natural place, and none of them had foreseen a future in which your rightful spot on earth was a thing half forgotten. Condemned to years of air and dust, the inconstancy could only be combated with ironclad routine. There was less and less difference between him and the nameless ones they sometimes found — the anonymous ones committed to the soil with a modicum of formalities. His sister’s voice was a lifeline tossed to him from the past, to keep him from forgetting who he was and where he came from.
The candlestick showed him his place in the past and awarded him a place in the present. It reminded him about the child he was, sneaking through his parents’ bedroom and taking in the objects in the corner cupboard, and told him that he had been born of a Jewish woman who had concealed her past — just as she had hidden the menorah beneath the veil. He had no doubts anymore. He must be a Jew — no, he was one. That was his place in the world, part of a people, of a community. A community extinct, but for one.
That he belonged somewhere, that was the poignant thing.
Sitting in the Chinese restaurant, he looked back over his life. The boy taking a swan dive from the bridge by the weir: a Jew. Pontus the son: a Jew. The cadet: a Jew. Commissioner Beg: a Jew. This time, history, that process of erosion, had won something rather than lost. Nothing had changed, yet everything was different. He belonged to another people now, as chosen as they were doomed, as the rabbi had said.
The last century had roared over their heads with such brute force that now only one of them was left — or, in fact, two. When Zalman Eder died, Beg would be the last Jew in Michailopol. The shuddering of his legs made the table shake.
After the pogroms came the camps. In Michailopol there had been a Lager. People spoke of one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand prisoners who had been executed there: mostly Jews, but also Red Army prisoners. In 1943, the Germans had started destroying the evidence: the mass graves were opened, and Sonderkommandos piled the bodies high and burned them. The fires burned for months. After the war, a Soviet report noted that the ground and substrate was saturated with the juice from corpses and melted human fat.
The girl put a hot plate on the table, and lit the tea-warmers inside it.
Little was left of the camp itself. It had become overgrown with trees and bushes. Years ago, a little monument had been set up beside what were once the gates to the Lager. Later, it was set on fire and plastered with swastikas. The brick walls still standing were daubed with the angled cross. In Michailopol there was no such thing as a respectful nod to the past.
The Chinese girl placed the platters of noodles and duck on the hot plate. Beg served himself, tilting the platter to let the bird and its juices slide onto his plate. He had arrived at the age when only sex and large quantities of food provided him with sensations of happiness. All the rest was extinguished; the heart was a motor that lost power with the years.
Still, undeniably, the discoveries about his past produced in him feelings that seemed like happiness; the right word for it, perhaps, was excitement, an edgy kind of anticipation. As though something was about to start — a sensation he remembered from childhood. The only thing was: he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what it was that was about to start. He was a Jew, that was all. It changed nothing and solved nothing. He would harbour no expectations. He would follow it, of course, but without assuming that it would add anything to his life.
It was a strategy the Chinese people behind the counter might have had something to say about, had they not made silence towards outsiders such a part of their nature. They lived behind a screen of enchanted silk, invisible and impenetrable.
In Michailopol’s crime statistics, they were almost entirely absent. He couldn’t remember a Chinese person ever having been arrested. If he went into the kitchen, of course, he would be sure to find a few people working without the proper documents, but there was no cause for him to check. They weren’t bothering anyone. Chinese people seemed to avoid even the most minor of public infractions.
If more ethnic groups did that, his work would be a lot easier. In fact, it would make him pretty much superfluous. He would show up at the scene of accidents, settle minor territorial disputes, and lead an existence otherwise as calm as that of a civil servant at the court of Lu, in the sixth century before Christ.
The curtain tinkled. The rabbi came in and walked to the counter without looking around. He placed his order. Beg ate his duck mechanically and watched him. The old man stood at the counter motionlessly until his meal came sliding through the little trapdoor. The Chinese man wrapped the containers in drab paper and dropped them into a plastic bag. Slowly, the rabbi counted out the change from his wallet.
As he was heading for the door, Beg raised his hand and said: ‘Mr. Eder.’
The rabbi looked up, roused from his thoughts. He came over to the table.
They spoke, the rabbi standing, his gaze fixed on the debris on Beg’s plate. Only then did Beg tell him about his mother’s candleholder. He heard himself talking. The bedroom, the glass cupboard, the veil. Then the rabbi said: ‘The menorah is hard for us to part with. It’s something … very important. Seven arms that draw us back to our origins.’
He looked at Beg’s plate again and said: ‘Your first meal as a Jew, and already you’re in violation.’
Beg looked at the remains in surprise.
‘Ham,’ the rabbi said. ‘Treife.’
Beg didn’t understand.
‘Not kosher,’ the rabbi said.
There were strips of pink ham between the noodles; Beg hadn’t noticed them.
The rabbi looked despondently at his own plastic bag of food. ‘But, oh well …?’
He was almost to the door when Beg stood up and said: ‘One more thing, one more question.’
Zalman Eder came back, his movements impatient.
‘I was wondering,’ Beg said, ‘what if all those things are a mistake? The directives. All happenstance, what then?’
A sly smile appeared on the rabbi’s lips. He said: ‘Let me ask you this: in a city there are ten butchers, nine of them kosher. Then, on the street, you find a package of meat. Nice meat; you’re glad you found it. But is it kosher, or isn’t it? You go to the rabbi for counsel. How great is the chance, do you think, that it’s kosher?’
‘Nine out of ten,’ Beg said.
‘The chance that it’s kosher, I would say, is so great that you can eat it with a clear conscience.’
‘And what if it’s not kosher?’
The rabbi laughed. ‘Then we pretend it is! And anyone who tries to prove differently had better be pretty damned sharp.’
The Chinese laughed quietly along with them, behind their counter, without understanding a word.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Then there were six
The boy crawled out from under the tarp. He stared into a day of ground fog and water — nothing but gusts of rain and a train of clouds as far as you could see. His travelling companions lay scattered around him in dark clumps, unrecognisable in their night-time shrouds of plastic sheeting and old coats. The man from Ashkhabad and the woman lay furthest from the rest. The boy looked in the direction they would take later, at the flat band of earth, the monotonous view, as though this journey began anew each day, the eternal return of the same. The steppe was a repetition, a dull-wittedly looping melody; it ground them down and wore them out, took another little piece of them every day, and would finally pulverise them all. Sometimes he thought about going on alone, about trying his luck without the others — how much of a chance was there that he would be the only one to reach the far side? And how much of a chance was there that they would arrive without him?
Had he learned enough from them to establish his bearings? Could he imitate the poacher’s techniques? Did he know where to dig to find edible tub
ers? He needed to pay more attention, so that he, too, could survive on his own, someday.
Once, long ago, they would have been on their feet before sunrise. They had been conquerors back then; these days, wild horses couldn’t drag them from their beds. They abandoned their dreams with a curse. They scratched at their fleabites and rubbed their eyes. Never did they seem more lost than when they arose and the dispiriting flats rolled out before them.
They packed up their sleeping gear, tossed the bundles over their shoulders, and entered the new day. The wet grass of the steppe soaked their trouser legs. No one said a word. The gaping sole of the boy’s right shoe scooped sand. They spread out and moved through the tall, dead grass.
The boy looked back. Africa and the tall man were missing. ‘Hey!’ he shouted to the others, then ran back to the campsite. His shoe flapped. It made him dizzy, but he kept running.
Foreboding.
The black man was kneeling beside the tall man’s sleeping space. The plastic had been thrown back. The tall man’s mouth had fallen open, as though he’d choked on a word he would never pronounce again. His beer-yellow eyes were riveted on the sky above, drops of rain trickling through the grey hairs of his beard.
The black man was murmuring a prayer with his eyes closed. In his hand he held the cross that hung on a cord around his neck. The boy began pulling away the plastic at the tall man’s feet, cautiously, ready to leap aside. The trouser legs were pulled up a bit, and he saw his skinny blue shins, bitten to pieces by fleas. The others were coming; he had to work fast. They were filthy old gym shoes and they stank like the plague, but they were still whole. He had the left one already, but it was the right one he needed most urgently. The shoe wouldn’t budge; it was lashed tightly to the foot. The boy was in too much of a hurry to untie the laces, so he pulled hard on the heel. The tall man’s body shook beneath his efforts.
Almaty, oh Almaty! This is what has become of the world! Oh woe is me!
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