‘I could take my coat off, if that would help.’
‘No, forget it.’
‘We’re going to talk about the head,’ Beg said. ‘We found it in the baggage. What can you tell me about it?’
The man shrugged. ‘Nothing.’
‘One of you killed him. Someone cut off his head. What can you tell me about that?’
‘I wasn’t there.’
‘This is your one chance to get yourself off the hook, if you’re innocent.’
‘I want my teeth back.’
‘Your teeth?’
‘They were in my pants pocket. I was keeping them.’
‘I’m afraid … your clothes.’ Beg shook his head.
‘What?’
‘We threw it all away. They were so filthy.’
‘They took our clothes, then he stole my teeth.’
‘Why would someone want to steal your teeth?’
‘Gold, what do you think?’
‘I’ll have them check it.’
‘First I want them back, man. They’re my teeth. He has to keep his mitts off of my teeth.’
‘Who do you mean by “he”?’
‘That guard, the fat one.’
‘Just a minute,’ Beg said.
He went out into the hall. In one of the rooms he found a phone and called downstairs.
It took ten minutes before the elevator doors opened and the ward stepped out. He was holding something wrapped in newsprint. He handed it to his superior. Beg unwrapped the package and saw Akmuhammet Kurbankiliev’s almost entire set of teeth, the gold molars and teeth set in a gold retainer.
‘These are the ones,’ the ward said, his head tilted hen-like to one side.
‘What were you thinking …?’
The other man shrugged. ‘I was keeping them for him.’
Beg looked at him, while the warder clasped his hands and waited.
‘Dismissed,’ Beg said, and the man vanished in relief into the elevator.
In the interrogation room, Beg laid the packet on the table and slid it over. The man leaned forward and opened it. He slid a finger between the teeth and molars, feeling them. He looked up. ‘These are mine,’ he said.
‘Take a better look if you like,’ Beg said.
The man nodded. He seemed pleased to see his teeth again. Beg averted his eyes, not to see the brown roots. He lit a cigarette and ran a hand over his jaw. The stubble on his chin felt like sandpaper. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘let’s get down to it.’
The man refolded the packet carefully. It remained on the table.
‘What am I being held for, actually?’ Kurbankiliev asked.
Beg leaned back and folded his hands on his stomach. ‘Attempting to cross the border illegally, and first-degree murder. And desecration of a corpse. But because you’re not from around here, the first charge will probably be dropped.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘But of little import. The other two charges, that’s what I’d worry about if I were you. You’ve been assigned a lawyer. You have a right to that. Only thing is: he’s not coming. They couldn’t get hold of him.’
‘So when’s he coming?’
‘Sometime.’
Kurbankiliev nodded in resignation.
‘The head,’ Beg said.
‘I don’t know who did it.’
‘That’s impossible — you people were on the road together for months.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Whose head is it?’
‘Africa’s. The Ethiopian’s.’
‘Why did he have to die?’
‘Don’t ask me. Because.’
‘Let’s not have any misunderstandings,’ Beg said. ‘It’s not wise to underestimate me.’
That wiggling again. When Kurbankiliev wasn’t scratching himself, he was shimmying with his legs.
‘Ethiopia,’ Beg said.
‘Only because that’s where he came from, at least that’s what we understood. Almost no one ever talked with him besides that, I don’t think. Except for the tall guy, for a while.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘I don’t know him. We knew almost nothing about each other. I think he mentioned his name once …’
‘So where’s “the tall guy” now?’
‘Dead, right? Dead as a doornail.’
‘How did it happen?’
A pitying look. ‘Starvation, all of them. Our own natural cause.’
‘How many of you were there?’
‘Fourteen, fifteen when we started. Two of them walked back right away. They were smart — they had it figured out. We didn’t. We walked in exactly the wrong direction.’ He nodded. ‘There were fourteen of us, not fifteen.’
Beg wrote down the number fourteen, and retraced the ciphers with his pen. Then he drew a circle around them. He asked: ‘Why is the Ethiopian dead?’
‘I’m not the one to ask about that.’
‘I’m going to ask you one more time.’
Beg tapped the tip of his pen on the table and looked at the man from beneath his eyebrows. ‘Why is he dead?’
‘Man, I don’t know. I didn’t have anything to do with it.’
‘Goddamn,’ Beg said calmly. He slid his chair back, got up, and left the room. When he returned, he was carrying a claw hammer. He placed it on the table in front of him.
The hammer had now become the room’s burning vortex; outside it there was nothing at all.
‘All right,’ Beg said, ‘let’s try it again.’
‘What do you want?’ Kurbankiliev said. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’
There was shrillness in his voice.
Beg leaned across the table and grabbed the packet of dentures. He unfolded it, and selected one front tooth from among the rest. It was circled by a frame of gold. The root was stained brown. He picked up the hammer.
‘Okay, here we go again: who did it, and why?’
‘I really don’t know, man,’ Kurbankiliev said. He frowned deeply. ‘What is it, do you want me to make something up?’
The hammer came down with a bang, shattering Akmuhammet Kurbankiliev’s front tooth.
‘Aw, fuck!’ he screamed. He tried to jump up, but the manacles around his wrists pulled him back down. ‘Why are you doing that? Aw, fuck!’
The tooth was now a little heap of gold-veined powder. Carefully, Beg laid the hammer on the table. He folded the paper back around the teeth and held the little package in the air. ‘You wanted this,’ he said, ‘and then you were going to tell me what was going on. Instead of that, all I’m hearing is bullshit.’
‘My tooth, man,’ Kurbankiliev whimpered. ‘Aw, fuck.’
‘You should abide by your promises. Then things like this wouldn’t happen. Smoke?’
He slid the pack across the table. Kurbankiliev took one and lit it. The coughing that followed bent him over double. After a bit, teary and red-eyed, he sat up straight and took another drag. He was able to suppress the next coughing fit.
‘How’s that taste?’
He nodded. ‘Good,’ he said in a pinched voice.
Beg looked at the pack of cigarettes. ‘Marlboro. Freedom.’ He flipped it over and read the back. ‘You think it’s really as harmful as they say?’
Kurbankiliev sucked on his cigarette and said nothing.
‘Such freedom,’ Beg said, ‘especially if it kills you.’
The face across the table was veiled in a column of smoke. That was the way the Everlasting had spoken to Moses on Mt. Horeb, from inside a pillar of cloud. He longed for Him at times — a sudden, ecstatic longing that he didn’t understand and that frightened him. This was the image: a ship is pulling away from the dock, and there he, Pontus Beg, come
s running, waving his arms because he is on the verge of missing his destination. The gap between the ship and the quay widens. He screams, he leaps …
Maybe the dream meant that He was calling him. That he was on the right road. That he was almost ready to be immersed in the mikveh, the water that awaits him, the dark niche into which he’ll lower himself until the living water closes over his head.
But then again, maybe not.
He put the pack of Marlboros on the table. ‘ A striking similarity, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘That you wanted to be free, and that it almost killed you. Just like these cigarettes.’
Kurbankiliev ground out the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, above the ashtray. He sniffed at his fingers.
‘Anything was better than that,’ he said. He nodded at the back wall, with the transoms in it. ‘Anything.’
‘Even dying?’
Kurbankiliev scratched his chest. ‘I think so, yeah.’
‘And the same went for the Ethiopian?’ Beg asked.
‘I don’t know why he was on the road.’
‘It wasn’t his longing for freedom that killed him,’ Beg said.
‘I wouldn’t know.’
Beg glanced at the packet of teeth.
‘Vitaly had the head with him the whole time,’ Kurbankiliev said. ‘He was the bearer.’
‘Why Vitaly?’
‘He was appointed.’
‘Who appointed him?’
‘The black man.’
‘I don’t get it. The Ethiopian announced who was supposed to carry his head after he was dead?’
‘While he was still alive, yeah. That’s when he appointed him. On top of the hill. He burned the truth into him.’
‘And then he said: “I want you to carry my head once I’m dead”? Get off it.’
The man was leaning back in his chair, his eyes travelling across the ceiling.
‘Hey!’ Beg said. He snapped his fingers. ‘I asked you something.’
‘I heard you.’
‘So answer me already.’
‘He pointed him out. With his finger. He burned a big old hole in his arm. You can still see it. That’s the way it went. There’s nothing more to tell.’
‘And who beat his brains in?’
‘It was necessary.’
‘Why?’
‘There was no other way.’
‘Why not?’
Silence.
‘Why not?’ Beg repeated.
‘He had to go so that we could go on.’
‘That’s what you figured? And then you killed him?’
‘No.’
‘So who did? Come on!’
Kurbankiliev shook his head slowly, almost pityingly. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he said, and laughed bitterly. ‘We all did.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
We are the dead
On the morning before the last suspect was questioned, Beg received a call from Inspector Matuszak, and frowned. Because this was also about frontier-running, the fugitives had been reported to the National Investigation Service. Matuszak had wasted no time in jumping on the case. Beg had never thought the service could exhibit so much get-up-and-go.
The inspector wanted to hear all about the fake border. There had been suspicions for a long time: bodies found out on the steppes, some of them kneeling in the sand; others with their arms still raised in supplication to the skies, sculpted in death. But this was the first time survivors had been found.
‘I’ll put in an order to have them transferred,’ Matuszak said. ‘We’ll get them out of your hair.’
Beg said that the woman still had to give birth. The others were sick and malnourished.
‘So when do you think you’ll be finished with your investigation?’ Matuszak asked.
‘Depends,’ Beg said.
He told him about the head, about which he still knew so little. ‘They agreed with each other not to talk about it,’ he said.
He knew what the man at the other end of the line must be thinking: Stupid hayseed, can’t you do anything?
He didn’t care; he just wanted to get his work done. His life had become bound up with the refugees, with the road they had travelled. They had wandered through the wilderness like the Jews, and like the Jews they had carried the bones of one of their own along with them … Beg’s reasoning came to a halt at the glorious analogy. They had carried a head with them, just as the Jews, three thousand years earlier, had carried the bones of Joseph — Joseph, who had died in Egypt, and was then embalmed and placed in a box.
God will surely come to your aid, and then you must carry my bones up with you from this place.
Hundreds of years went by, but the promise remained unforgotten. A proof of fidelity, the rabbi had called it.
Carry my bones from this place — that was how the history of Beg’s ancestors was bound up with that of a group lost on the steppes.
Three thousand years ago, or the day before yesterday. What was the difference?
The rabbi had said that every Jew, wherever and whenever on earth, had to see himself as a refugee out of Egypt, a wanderer in the desert; that’s how important the escape and the forty years lost in the wilderness were for the people of Israel. Every step a Jew took was a reminder of the exodus, and carried him back to the birth of a people in the desert. That was where God had given them his Commandments, and where their belief in Him had assumed concrete form.
In some mysterious way, the interrogations brought the exodus closer to Beg. History was being projected before his eyes — he sometimes had the feeling that the refugees’ story had been spun specially for him. The Everlasting was so close at such moments that he was seized by joy.
But what did Inspector Matuszak know about any of this? He only did his job; he had no idea what such things meant.
‘In three or four weeks,’ Beg said, ‘they’ll be strong enough for transport. My investigation will be finished by then, too.’
‘Today … two weeks from today, on December 22, I’ll have them picked up.’
‘With all due respect, Inspector Matuszak, the period I mentioned was not negotiable. On January 1, they’ll be all yours.’
‘You have no authority to impose that delay.’
‘You should see them — then you’d understand. Someone here described them as “the Jews in the camp”. Their condition prohibits it.’
Before they hung up, Matuszak said he would call again in a couple of days. And so their first confrontation ended in a draw.
Beg sat in the interrogation room, his arms folded across his stomach. The final prisoner would be brought in after lunch. Beg’s eyes slowly fell shut.
Only now, at rest, did he become aware of the noises in the building. He heard the elevator cables meowing in their shaft, and the gurgling of air and water in the heating. Somewhere, there was a ruffling he couldn’t place. Somewhere else, slamming doors, and voices floating down the corridor. He had been walking around in this building for almost twenty years, but he had never before heard the way it sounded like an organism gasping for breath.
When the final prisoner was led in, Beg awoke from his catnap with a start. As he watched them chain the man to the metal ring, he twisted the top off a bottle of energy drink. He gulped it down. The police guard left the room. The two men were alone.
‘You’re the last person in the group I’ll be talking to,’ Beg said. ‘I already know a lot, but maybe not everything. This is your chance to tell your side of the story.’
When the other man said nothing, Beg slowly screwed the cap back onto the empty bottle and said: ‘Do you understand what I just said?’
The man nodded.
‘Good,’ Beg said. ‘Your name, age, and occupation, please.’
Alexander Haç had left his tiny village in the Urals to find a better life elsewhere. A butcher could get work anywhere, he’d figured. He was forty-seven.
‘You’ve been charged with attempting to cross the border illegally,’ Beg said, ‘but seeing as you were never even close to a border at all, I guess that charge won’t really stick. What will stick is the man’s head we found in your baggage. Murder — I think that’s what the prosecutor will call it. And desecration of a corpse, if he’s particularly pissed off.’
The man shrugged. ‘You know what they say. The law is a serpent that bites only those who have no shoes.’
‘I suppose you’re right, but you’re forgetting the head. You’ll be prosecuted for that.’ He scratched at the little bump on the tabletop. It looked like a clump of dried glue. He looked up. ‘Unless, of course, you tell me that’s not the way it was.’
‘I can’t do that,’ Haç said. ‘I’m guilty. Just like the others.’
‘What are you guilty of?’
‘What I’m charged with.’
‘Accepting the charge is not the same as the crime itself,’ Beg said. ‘What exactly are you guilty of?’
Haç kept his mouth shut. The hair on his forearms was standing straight up. The room was much too warm, but he had goose flesh. He was still nothing but skin and bones, so every trace of warmth flowed right back out of him.
‘You know,’ Beg said, ‘they say I’m a patient person. I usually question people mildly. My colleagues laugh at me because of that. After all, violence is so much more … effective. Soon the National Investigation Service is going to interrogate you. They know what pain is all about. They went to school to find out. If they want, they’ll make you remember the date when your grandparents got married. And then you’ll wish you’d answered me, instead of letting things get to that point.’ He sank back in his chair and laid his arm on the table. ‘What are you laughing about?’ With his knuckles, he began tapping out the rhythm of ‘Chopsticks’.
‘You say I’m the last one you’ll talk to,’ said Alexander Haç. ‘So how come you still don’t know who you’re dealing with?’
‘So who am I dealing with?’ Beg asked in irritation.
‘You have no idea how often we fell asleep in the certainty that there would be no tomorrow. We’re dead people. You can’t get to us.’
These Are the Names Page 19
