When the shoe shot loose, the boy fell on his back. The others were almost there; he quickly grabbed the left shoe as well and ran off. He wasn’t strong, but he could outrun them all.
From a safe distance, he looked back. They were standing around the body. The black man, still kneeling, was looking up at them. The boy pulled off his own shoes and put on the tall man’s. They were much too big for him, but sturdy enough, if he pulled the laces tight.
Shoes were vital. Without shoes, you were lost. Within their little economy, shoes represented great wealth — more than trousers or a coat. Water came first, then shoes. He was proud of his catch. He had been smarter than the others, faster. Above all, it was a victory over Vitaly, the slyest of them all. He had beaten him hands down.
Once he had shared a pair of shoes with his brother. The son with shoes could go to school. He wore them one day; his brother, the next. When he left, they had given him the shoes. Now his brother couldn’t go to school anymore.
These were his third pair since he’d left. In the distance, he sees the man from Ashkhabad lash out at Africa with the tall man’s stick. Did he hit him? The black man rolls over, leaps to his feet, and picks up his satchel on the run.
The boy follows him with his eyes — the running that seems almost like fluttering, an awkward bird that can’t get off the ground.
Vitaly and the man from Ashkhabad pull the plastic off the tall man and search his body with practised movements. They apply force to bend the stiff arms away from the man’s chest. The body doesn’t give; it shudders beneath their brusqueness. It looks as though they’ve found nothing of value. The man from Ashkhabad takes only the stick. You could use it to poke up a fire, or to swing at Africa.
The boy waits till they’re out of sight, then starts moving. In passing, he glances at the violated corpse: the shirt is torn open, the trousers pulled down to its knees. Bones. Nails and hair. There isn’t much left for the other predators. The pale genitals against the grey pubic hair make the tall man more a thing than the boy likes to see.
The thing lies there helplessly, an invitation to be torn apart. The boy realises how much his own life has come to rely on defence — the clenched position with regard to everything that could happen to him. Comfort does not exist. Everything has danger as its shadow. He is a nervous animal: he has to cross the open field in search of food, but flight is built into all his movements. It has become second nature to him. That is what the road has taught him.
The boy looks back from time to time, and sees Africa pop up amid the tall grass. He is a dog in the caravan’s wake. No matter how much they beat him, he keeps coming back, begging for attention and mercy. They will hit him even harder, and keep on until he finally understands that he doesn’t belong with them. That he is a stranger, the bearer of enigma. There is no place for him in the group any longer; he will have to complete the journey alone. Especially now that the tall man is dead. He needs to understand that it is more dangerous for him to be with the group than to wander lonely across the flats. He needs to finally understand that his time is almost up.
The boy admires and despises his stubbornness. Why does he go looking to be humiliated? Why doesn’t he realise that they want to hurt him? He turns around and shouts: ‘Go away! Go away, would you!’ The black man waves to him. He approaches. The boy hisses, ‘Ksst! ksst!’ , the way you would at an annoying herd of goats. The man nods and smiles.
The boy turns his back on him again. Well then, it’s up to you, he thinks bitterly. I warned you. You can’t say I didn’t warn you.
He looks at his new shoes — the shoes of a grown man. There are almost no holes in them; the soles are unbroken. Who did the tall man steal them from? He racks his brains, but has almost no memory of those who remained behind. Whatever the case, he’s wearing them now. He rescued them from the heat of the battle. His mother would be proud of him.
Don’t think about Mother now. Better not.
Her hands were often hard, but sometimes soft, too, like when she used them to cradle his head.
Bad thoughts. Stupid thoughts. He hates his tears.
It was important to keep getting closer to them, unobtrusively, to make it seem as though you’d always been there. If you popped up all of a sudden, they would remember why you’d lagged behind; someone might say: ‘Give us those shoes, you little thief!’ and take them away from him. But they didn’t even look up, didn’t notice the little spurts with which the boy kept getting closer. He tried to read the expressions on their dark backs: were they tense and aggressive, or simply resigned?
If Vitaly tried to take them off him, he would hit him on the wound, bite into it. Yes, biting him would be the best thing — right through the sleeve of his sweater, sinking his teeth into that filthy wound. The shrieks would be deafening. Revenge for the blows, the insults, the times that he ate the boy’s portion — Vitaly, the lowest of the low. That’s right, let him try to take his shoes away. The screams would be music to his ears.
Against the other men he was defenceless, although he had little to fear from the poacher, who was neutral as a corpse. The boy couldn’t count on the man from Ashkhabad, who had his moods. He didn’t give a damn about anything most of the time, and then suddenly things went haywire. He was strong; his wrists were thick. When they left, he’d been overweight — he’d had a round belly. He would sigh all the time, the way fat people do. But the steppes had taken away his belly. Now he was as skinny as the rest. His skin lay draped in folds against his bones, like a carpet.
Once again, they had no fire. The snares remained empty; they rooted around in the earth without finding a thing. It had been so many days since they’d eaten, they envied the dead who had no share in their concerns.
The woman, her face in the shadows, said: ‘He was just hunched down there, bent over him. It was hideous, as though he wanted to drink his blood.’
‘That’s what they do. Defile our bodies,’ said the man from Ashkhabad.
‘Hell is the last thing he saw,’ said Vitaly.
‘Terrible,’ the woman sighed.
The poacher appeared from the twilight. He had found rabbit warrens. And he had seen Africa, he said. He was lying not far from here.
The woman moaned softly.
‘Where?’ the man from Ashkhabad asked.
The poacher pointed. ‘He saw me. I just kept walking.’
‘Did he try anything?’ Vitaly asked.
‘What are you talking about, man?’
But they all knew. How he had fed on the dead, and with a single touch turned Vitaly’s arm into a withered stem. For them, everything was getting worse and worse. For him, everything was getting better. They saw it clearly, the sorcerer’s circle. The black man was slowly drawing it closed, like a net.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Leah
The rabbi asked him which district his family was from. Oblast Grünewald, Beg replied. His mother’s family was from Brstice; that, as far as he knew, was where they’d always lived. The rabbi nodded. He had heard of Brstice; he would write to the rabbi there and ask for more information about the Medveds. Maybe that would produce definitive proof.
‘If that’s how it is, then that’s how it must be,’ he said cryptically.
For reasons he himself didn’t fully understand, Beg was giddy with happiness.
When was the last time he’d been so full of hope and anticipation? The question took him far back in time. Sergeant Beg — he had shot up through the ranks. He wore the decorations proudly on his claret-coloured lapels. He walked hand in hand with the girl with whom everything started. There were others like them on the promenade, but the limelight shone only on them. Below, along the quay, the dark river hurried to the sea. There were slow, glassy vortexes in the water, as though a huge beast was roiling just under the surface. In front of a café, on the pavement, a quintet was p
laying, the notes of the clarinet sounding like the good cheer of a swarm of sparrows. The heat of early summer had left everyone carefree and happy. She took him by the hand and said: ‘Come on, Pontus, let’s dance.’ He refused. The couple of lessons he’d had at the academy had not been enough to make him a good dancer. She took the glass out of his hand and simply said: ‘Come’. She led him along under the little lights in the plane trees. The bear danced; there was nothing she could not make him do.
She reached around behind and loosened his grip a bit.
‘Sorry,’ Beg said.
‘Close your eyes,’ she said. ‘There’s no one else here.’
He closed his eyes. Behind his lids the lamps slid by in a red blaze.
She had studied mining engineering; in Murmansk she had spent part of her university days in a factory lab where the mineral apatite was converted to superphosphate. The way she spoke those words — Beg had never heard music any lovelier.
Her father was chairman of the regional party council and managing director of a steel mill on the Volga — part of the new nobility, risen after the collapse of the old regime and the redistribution of all resources.
Woe to the lover who believes this enchantment to be his actual, his natural state; what an injustice that it should be denied him so often. How could he have lived without it? Now that the scales have fallen from his eyes, now that he knows the way it really is, he will never let go. From now on, this will be his life. In this blaze, in this daze, he will go on.
The smile on the lover’s lips says that he has plumbed an important secret: he is an initiate; the opiate of love has let him look behind the drab veil of daily life. This is the time of anticipation. The same kitchen smells still waft under his door, children still scream in the hallway, and above his head the neighbour listens to loud martial music, even though he is much too young to be a veteran. But all these things are already different now. Isn’t it true that it annoys him much less than it used to? Don’t the sounds already seem much less loud, and isn’t the stench of roasted meat and herbs from the Tadzhiki refugees next door somehow already less penetrating?
Twenty-eight years later — at another house, in another city — Pontus Beg sits at the table in his living room and stares at his reflection in the darkened window. A happy life, he thinks, is always marked by a certain anticipation, no matter what the Chinese sages may say about emptiness and the absence of expectations. Beneath rustling bamboo beside the rushing stream, it is easier to disengage than it is on the sixth floor, with the heaters gurgling and water rushing through the standpipes, carrying away his neighbours’ bowel movements. Under the table his stockinged feet shuffle on the carpet. His only memories of a certain hunger for life are accompanied by those of expectation and longing — the elation at yet another day. He, too, was capable of that once. No one can imagine it these days; but he, too, sang love songs when he thought no one could hear, and on occasion he jumped for joy on a deserted street.
Things like that happened a long time ago; he can barely imagine it anymore. After being driven out of paradise, he had — gradually, so that he barely noticed it — set up his life as a barrier against pain and discomfort. Suppressing chaos: washing dishes, maintaining order. What did it matter that one day looked so much like the other that he could not recall a single one; he keeps to the middle, equidistant from both bottom and top, although he is sometimes envious of the alcoholics and junkies with their trampoline lives, from low to high, high to low, on and on until they have no more teeth in their mouths and die a lingering, miserable death. He protects the citizenry from them. (He likes the word ‘citizenry’ — it summons up a world in which everything has its place, like the stars in the firmament.) The desperate plunder homes and shops, and rob passers-by at knifepoint in secluded places; they disturb the peace with their ecstasy and despair. He, Pontus Beg, defends the right to an undisturbed life in the middle, for better or for worse. The world is insane, people heartlessly pursue their own interests, and only the middle provides the guarantee of a modicum of peace and quiet.
Does he still have her letters? Of course he still has her letters. Four glasses an evening; he drinks no more than that. He doesn’t want to go stamping around the room on one cold foot and one warm, opening letters, looking at pictures, sighing beneath the false memory of melancholy. The alcoholic born of wistfulness. They’re the worst; Pushkin says so, too.
There had been other women before her. He had fallen in love at times. None of them kept him interested for long. One had stale breath; the other laughed like a hyena. He remembered bitter regret and disappointment in the face of the imperfect. It was such a very fine line.
From one day to the next, therefore, he started keeping his mouth shut. Only the absolutely crucial came out of it.
When he was silent, they talked. Oh, such questions!
What are you thinking about?
Why don’t you say something?
Why are you so quiet?
He saw their disappointed, drawn faces, the uncertainty eating away at them. But he remained silent. It was too painful. Let them draw their own conclusions. Followed by a lingering period of argumentation and feints, then it was over. He was alone at last.
Leah did not have stale breath. She didn’t laugh like a hyena. Nothing about her annoyed him. She was perfection. Eloquent and well raised, but with a certain wildness still, a spontaneity, that drove them to the darkened riverbank to make love. At night they listened to Radio Free Europe. It was illegal and exciting; he knew he was breaking the law, but how could this delectable girl do anything wrong?
Summer arrives. She gives him Eugene Onegin and First Love — he reads literature for the first time.
He is a country boy. His father works for the kolkhoz; in the late afternoon and early evening, they garden on their own land. A quarter of a hectare, they eat from it.
Pontus goes out with a sledgehammer and drives fence posts for all the farmers in the surroundings. His shoulders have become burly; his chest, broad and muscular.
When he walks into his father’s yard, the chicks go running to their mother and disappear, zoof-zoof, beneath her; clucking quietly. The hen ruffles her plumage and settles onto her haunches. She follows him with quick, choppy movements of the head. All those chicks are underneath her now; the young Pontus can imagine no greater sense of security.
In the winter he slaughters the hen, and in the cloaca he finds eggs in various stages of development. The final one is nothing but a yolk. Everything goes into the frying pan; nothing edible is wasted.
Ah, Leah. He nudged his loins up against her buttocks, and she turned her head to him and whispered: ‘Don’t squeeze so hard.’
He relaxed his clasp around her torso, the clutch of a drowning man around a piece of wood. He didn’t understand himself.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said when he apologised again, ‘as long as you let go.’
He was alone again with his thoughts, and her breathing grew deep and regular again.
As long as she didn’t think his breath was stale, or that he brayed like a hyena! He tried being silent, to camouflage his lack of refinement. But when they drank, he forgot to be silent, and it was precisely then that he made her laugh so much. She thought he was funny, she said, and he could imagine nothing better than to make this girl laugh.
‘I think humour is an advanced form of intelligence,’ she said.
‘There are humourless people who are very smart,’ he said.
‘My father!’
He doesn’t know her father; she hasn’t introduced him to her parents yet. And she doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to do so.
‘And stupid people with a sense of humour, do they exist?’ she asked.
He thought about most of his colleagues, who seemed to have a lot of fun together at times. He shrugged. A different ki
nd of humour, maybe.
‘A different kind of humour … Yes, I guess that’s possible. But fortunately you’re very funny.’
If she thought he was funny, then maybe she thought he was intelligent, too. It was a conclusion he arrived at by fits and starts. He had never thought of himself that way. At the police academy he had advanced easily into the officers’ training program; they tested your intelligence beforehand, but it mostly had to do with assessment skills and reaction times. In those respects he was among the best, but he attributed intelligence to the biochemists in their labs and the rocket scientists at their bases — not to a police sergeant with only six years’ experience.
In January, in the third season of their love, she grew quiet. ‘It’s the winters here,’ she said. ‘They last so long. It makes me gloomy.’
Often, she didn’t answer the phone. Sometimes, after it had kept on ringing, she would answer and say: ‘I was just getting ready to call you back.’
He longed for spring, when his ice queen would thaw and they could continue where they had left off. Her eyes would shine again when she looked at him. She would laugh again, for no matter how he joked these days, her broad laugh had vanished. A regretful little smile had taken its place. She often felt more like staying at home alone. ‘I don’t feel so good, Pontus; I’d rather be alone tonight. Maybe I’ll feel better tomorrow.’
When she wasn’t alone, she went out with girlfriends whose names he’d never heard before.
‘Tomorrow’ became the pivotal point of their relationship, comparable to the jokester who had written ‘Tomorrow, free vodka’ on the wall behind the bar at the academy. If only the damn winter would pass. If only spring would come. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, free vodka.
He said: ‘You’re so quiet’ and ‘What are you thinking about?’, and knew that she would never thaw. Even before the ice melted on the river, she would dispose of him.
When at last she told him on the phone that she’d had enough (in fact, she’d said: ‘I can’t go on anymore’, as though she’d been engaged in hard physical labour), he saw it as nothing but a formality, and knew that he would never again be so happy.
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