These Are the Names

by Tommy Wieringa

They reached the edge of the village. There they stopped, as though to muster up the final crumbs of courage. They had tied rags around their shoes, and cloths around their necks, their steaming nostrils sticking out of the textile. The world wore the nocturnal blue of enamel; ice-crystals had settled on the stalks of grass. The steppe opened up wide and dark before them. They had to brace themselves against that piercing emptiness, as much as against the cold. They started moving, the boy taking up the rear. He kicked holes in the hollow white ice between the tyre tracks.

  Their footsteps crunched on the frozen layer of snow. The cold slipped through their clothes, felt its way along their limbs, and slid into their muscles and bones. It had only just started to grow light, and they were already as cold as stone. The village had dissolved behind them, a luxurious mirage. So much happiness, all that comfort — it was already more than they could imagine.

  The thin snow lit up with a blue sheen at first dawn. A gradual light spread itself across the world, the sun itself remaining behind the ashen cover of cloud. Out in front went the poacher, keeping Vitaly close to him. The others could barely keep up. The head dangled against Vitaly’s back, summoning them to move on. But as the day proceeded, the distance between them grew. The boy was sent up ahead as the liaison, to ask the poacher to slow the pace until the others could catch up.

  Only when darkness came did they find each other. The poacher and Vitaly were sitting by a little fire in a dip beside the road, and didn’t look up when the others approached, groaning, holding out their yearning hands until they almost touched the flames. The poacher melted snow in a pan. They drank greedily.

  They ate frozen chicken and beans until their jaws burned. They didn’t have a yardstick for divvying up their supplies, because they had no idea how long their journey would last. And because surviving for more than a few days was unthinkable, they ate until they could eat no more. Then they unfolded their cardboard and mats on the frozen ground, and buried themselves in loose ends of cloth and blankets. They crawled close together in the dip. Above them, the sky was cloudy and dark — there were no stars — and beside the dying embers lay the black man’s head. They sent it their pleas and detailed imageries of salvation. The boy lay at the outer edge, not wanting to be beside Vitaly. Even though Vitaly’s brains had been ground to mush, the boy remembered who he had been. He was still inside there somewhere.

  He slept very little. The hard, cold ground hurt his bones. He tried to think about the house where he would live when this was all over, the big house for his whole family — if only he could remember the faces of his father, his mother, and his brother! They kept escaping him; there was only the flash of an eye, a laugh, his mother’s skirts. And the vultures riding the thermals over the valley, he saw, but not the people themselves.

  Where are you? he shouted in silence. Come out!

  But he had been away from home too long already; his new life had buried the old one. Only his heart wept. Real tears would have frozen right away and rolled from his cheeks like pearls.

  One day, he promised himself, once he was safe, he would dig up his old life; it was waiting for him beneath the sand — immovable, unchanged.

  Stiff as string puppets, they stumbled through the day. They heard geese in the sky above them, but didn’t see them. A bit of snow fell that afternoon. For a few hours, tiny flakes whirled down from heaven. They were still following the frozen tyre tracks, their lifeline. They had to go somewhere, because they came from somewhere.

  That was how they crawled forth across the frozen planet, an icy stone. The sky grew more and more compact. Snow fell from it uninterruptedly now, grey as ash. They peered into the lightless day through a crack in the cloths protecting their faces. The snow whirled before their eyes. It had been the worst mistake of their lives, to move on again. The head had stopped bringing them luck; his candle had guttered.

  But there was no going back. The village was already too far away; they could move only ahead.

  They rested for a few hours, mere snowy bumps on the plain. Their account of time had been reduced to days, hours.

  Long before the new day began, they were on their feet again. They ploughed through the heavy snow. Still following the track, the poacher cleared the way before them. When they stopped for a moment, the silence pressed against their ears. The snow had covered the world and its sounds.

  Before their eyes, the picture shattered; they could see for only a few metres.

  Vitaly sank to his knees in the snow and stayed there, unable to take another step. He would have frozen in that position had the poacher not gone back to pummel him to his feet and drive him out ahead, cursing. Behind them came the woman and the man from Ashkhabad. The boy brought up the rear.

  Hour after hour passed. His eyes averted, he followed the footsteps in the snow. That was why he was the last to see it: the light in the distance, light that was unsteady and casting about in the darkness and the driving snow.

  A car.

  First, a car. Then, for a long time, nothing. Then the city.

  Spring

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Little Moses

  The soil had come unfrozen, the cold afternoon sun shining through the light-green leaves of the poplars. In the distance you could hear the deep, continuous barking of dogs. The pope cleared his throat. He had buried a nameless girl. The scant information he’d had was given him by the other man at the graveside — the police commissioner. In a level, earnest tone, he had told the pope about the anonymous girl. The commissioner had a boy with him. His son? Why would he bring his son to a sad occasion like this?

  The weak breeze rolling across the graveyard held traces of winter and the cheerful warmth of spring. It was full of old scents that reminded your old heart of desires from long ago — vague but oh-so-strong. It led young people into the worst of blunders and the greatest of happiness, so you could imagine how the girl had left her parents’ home on a day like this to go her way, heading for adventure. Don’t! Beg shouted straight through the years, Stay home, please, the world is a dangerous place! But she didn’t hear him. Her heart pounding in excitement, she took up her position along the road, and it wasn’t long before the first car stopped …

  They parted at the end of the lane, close to the Polish graves. The pope watched them go, the stocky policeman and the dirt-poor boy with eyes like a doe’s. Then he returned to the chapel, his black skirts flapping around his body.

  Beg left the city behind, and they drove through open countryside, past dilapidated sheds amid tall bushes and weeds — the tail ends of town. With his window open a crack, the wind seized at his doleful thoughts about the girl and blew them away. The boy toyed with the knobs on the radio, alighting on snatches of voices, metallic jangling, and a music station from beyond the border. The boy liked contraptions, as long as they had buttons. The noise didn’t seem to bother him. At Beg’s house, he hadn’t been able to keep his hands off the TV and sound equipment. Now, Beg reached out resolutely and turned off the radio, so that they heard only the toiling of the engine and the hiss of wind through the window.

  ‘Don’t you like music?’ the boy asked after a while.

  ‘Yes, but not that loudly.’

  ‘So you could have turned it down, couldn’t you?’

  Beg didn’t reply; instead, through the windshield, he looked at the hills in the distance. The road climbed gently.

  ‘I want to show you something,’ he said. ‘It’s not far now.’

  ‘Did you bring any bread along?’

  That was the other thing: the boy was always hungry. He seemed to have a hollow leg. Beg looked over. ‘We’ll buy something on the way back.’

  The boy opened the glove compartment. He found handcuffs and sunglasses, a pair of binoculars, a citation book, pens, and sheets of paper — but nothing that could still his hunger.
r />   ‘Why do you have such an old car, anyway?’ he asked. ‘You’re the boss of the policemen, right?’

  Beg glanced over. ‘A long story,’ he said.

  They drove into the hills. Beg avoided the potholes. At a turn-off, broken graders stood rusting in the open air.

  Beg crossed the road and drove up a dirt path beneath the trees. They went downhill again, the car jolting over stones. The woods thinned out before Beg parked the car on a little promontory. They climbed out.

  It was quiet, and cold air streamed from the woods. Sand and stones crunched beneath the soles of their shoes as they walked to the edge of the bluff. The range of low hills was nothing but a blip in the flats; at his feet, the vast landscape began anew. The steppe in front of them stretched as far as the eye could see. The dead, yellow grass was making way for new shoots, so that the landscape was shot through with a green haze. The wind swept it, and the grass billowed. Rays of sunlight fell between the clouds. The horizon was hazy, uncertain.

  The boy looked up at him. Where were they? What were they doing here?

  Beg pointed at a line in the distance. ‘The border,’ he said.

  Neither of them spoke.

  Far below them, the border meandered. Once it had been heavily guarded on this side. In those days, refugees were shot down by snipers. Now it was the other side that had thrown up new defences.

  Beg took the binoculars out of the car and handed them to the boy. He looked through the lenses, and then held them a little way from his eyes.

  ‘Here,’ Beg said, ‘you have to turn this until the focus is right for your eyes — no, hold them up to your eyes … and now turn it. Until everything gets clear.’

  ‘Is that a fence?’ the boy asked after a while.

  ‘This section of it is a fence. Further up, north of here, they work with infra-red, mobile teams, even satellites. They have night glasses. It’s watertight.’

  The boy snorted. ‘Not for me.’

  ‘Yes, for you, too.’

  ‘I can make myself real small …’

  ‘But not invisible.’

  The boy peered at the horizon. ‘Houses!’ he said in surprise.

  Never had the promised land been this close. It looked like you could touch it; all you had to do was reach out …

  ‘Cars! Over there!’

  What seemed to surprise him most was that life on the other side looked just like it did here — the same grass, the same cars, the same houses. He sighed. A cloud slid across the sun, and the steppe faded to an ashen grey.

  Little Moses, Beg thought, come so far, and now at last he sees his destination.

  It was sheer torment, for this was where the road ended for him.

  Still holding the binoculars to his eyes, the boy asked: ‘Is it really that difficult?’

  Beg nodded. ‘Very difficult.’

  The boy was soaking up the world on the other side. He had no greater desire than to be there — there, where there were no problems. It was impossible for there to be problems, no matter what anyone said.

  ‘Have you ever heard of Israel?’ Beg asked.

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘It’s a country, too, far away from here.’ Beg waved his hand, in a gesture that went far beyond the horizon. ‘A sunny country, beside the sea.’

  ‘So what about it?’

  ‘Maybe you should think about going there. It’s a civilised place. Not like here. They’ve cultivated the desert, they grow dates and grapes and mangos. Later on, I can show you some pictures.’

  Deep thought was traced on the boy’s forehead. ‘How would I get in there, into …’

  ‘Israel.’

  ‘Is it really far away?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it a bit lately,’ Beg said. ‘Imagine for a moment that you actually did get across the border here. One day, I’m sure you’d make it — maybe the first time you tried, maybe the tenth, but you’d make it. You’re smart enough; you’re not the kind who gives up. But after that, you’d still be nothing more than an undesirable alien. They don’t want you over there; they really don’t. It’s important that you realise this. There are so many people like you over there. You’re going to have to put up with humiliation. Maybe you’ll sell newspapers in front of a train station, or lug boxes at a market, or wash dishes in a restaurant. There’s a good chance that you’ll have to share a room with seven other men; you’ll have to take turns sleeping.’

  He saw that his words were not touching base. He was describing a reality that lay in store for others, not for the boy. He was the anomaly, an illusory exception to the countless others, immune to statistics and probabilities.

  ‘All right,’ Beg went on, ‘so imagine that what I’m saying is true. Just try to imagine that, okay? Over there, you’re an illegal alien. You could be picked up and deported at any time. You’ll have to have eyes in the back of your head, live like a criminal. You don’t want that, do you?’

  The boy shook his head impatiently. All he wanted to hear was where Beg’s thoughts were going, not how they got there.

  Beg nodded. ‘That’s what made me think of Israel,’ he said slowly. ‘Completely different from what you were planning, I know. A different route. But a hundred times better than what you were planning at first.’

  ‘So we do that, right?’

  ‘There’s just one hitch: you have to be a Jew in order to live in Israel. Do you know what a Jew is?’

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘Just like you’ve got Russians and Americans, you’ve also got Jews. They live in Israel — that’s their country.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘All right then,’ Beg said. ‘You’re not a Jew, so that means you have to become one.’

  The boy’s frown said: I’m not following you, old man, you’re ranting.

  ‘That’s what you need to think about, whether that’s what you want,’ Beg said. ‘To become a Jew.’

  ‘I want anything,’ the boy said. ‘Tell me how.’

  Beg stared at his boots. This morning he had polished them to a high shine. There was already yellow dust on the tips.

  ‘So?’ the boy insisted.

  ‘To start with …’ Beg said. ‘How do I explain this? There’s an administrative problem. To become a Jew … You’d have to be my son … Become that, I mean. To apply for an Israeli passport.’

  He felt as shy as a schoolboy. He said: ‘I’d have to be your father. Not your real one, of course, just on paper. Because you’re not a Jew, and I’m not a father. We’d both have to become that. It’s possible. I mean, it can be arranged. Administratively. To have you be of Jewish parentage. My rabbi is a wise man; he understands the world. We could make that happen, the administrative side of it. You’ve already escaped once on paper.’

  The boy looked up. The two of them grinned at the shared memory — how he, Pontus Beg, had presented a two-week old infant by the name of Saïd Mirza for transport, and the detectives’ relief when they were allowed to leave the baby behind at the hospital. That way, one Saïd Mirza entered the books as a newborn and was left behind in the hospital at Michailopol, while the other Saïd Mirza moved beyond the range of prosecution and the eyes of the world. By the time they found out — if they ever found out — he would be long gone.

  ‘And that’s it?’ the boy said.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Beg said, ‘there’s another hitch. You’d have to learn Hebrew. You can’t go to Israel without knowing Hebrew. They’d see you coming a mile away ... I’ll try to teach you, but it’s pretty difficult. My brain is old, yours is still young, and you can learn faster than I can.’

  He narrowed his eyes and looked at the boy. ‘You’d make a good Jew, Saïd Mirza. You’ve spent your time in the wilderness already — you know what it’s all about.
’

  ‘And so once I’m a Jew, what then?’

  ‘Every Jew, anywhere in the world, has a right to an Israeli passport. That means you can hop on a plane — you’re legal, you don’t have to live like a fugitive.’

  The boy sighed like a mournful dog. ‘A plane? Do I have to?’

  ‘You can’t walk all the way there.’

  ‘I could.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right, you probably could.’

  ‘What about you, are you going, too?’

  ‘Me? No, let me stay here. I’m used to this mess. Send me a card every once in a while, and let me know how you’re doing.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘But first, learn Hebrew.’

  The boy nodded.

  ‘Become a good Jew.’

  The boy nodded again.

  ‘A chip off the old block. Hard-working, smart.’

  ‘All right, sure.’

  ‘And when I die someday, maybe you could come back for a few days and bury me.’

  ‘All right already.’

  The wind murmured across the slopes. It had grown chilly all of a sudden. Beg zipped up his jacket. The boy felt no cold. He stood there with the sun of the promised land on his face, and stared out across the waving grass in the distance, the yellow sea.

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Autumn

  1 The Thing Itself

  2 To the West

  3 Economies

  4 The abandoned village

  5 The second half of the evening

  6 The dog of Ashkhabad

  7 The last Jew

  8 The comforter

  9 The broken jug

  10 Cold ashes

  11 Whoosh

  12 The kurgan

  13 To the ataman

  14 In search of fortune

  15 Behind the names

  16 Vitaly

  17 A new soul

  18 The judgement

  19 Anonymous