Further along they came to a roadblock, and a policeman entered the bus. The man from Ashkhabad handed him his pass. The driver leaned over inquisitively in his seat.
‘Kara Bogaz?’ the policeman asked.
The other man nodded.
‘Here … What does this say?’
The man from Ashkhabad looked. ‘Medical reasons,’ he said.
‘Medical reasons,’ the policeman said. His silence lasted a few moments. Then he said: ‘There’s no hospital there. Not at Kara Bogaz.’
‘It’s my skin. The salt water will heal my skin.’
The itching started again. It felt as though he were rolling through an anthill. The sensation eclipsed his thoughts. He clenched his teeth and forced his hands to stay where they were; if he started scratching now, it would look like he was attacking himself.
Every destination, every movement, became preposterous under the uniformed man’s sharp eye. Why do you have to go there? What objective could be important enough to put you on the road in this heat? Why didn’t you stay where you were? What business could you possibly have going there?
The policeman wiped the sweat from his forehead. His suspicion ebbed, making way for a lack of interest.
Twilight was settling in. Onwards, always westward, the bus went. The open windows let in whiffs of coolness. Copper mountains loomed up forlornly, one by one, from the desert floor. Purple light entered at the windows; a dull section of moon was already floating on the horizon. There, too, were the lights of the port town, sparkling in the royal-blue evening. Its presence comforted him; the traveller breathed calmly, in and out.
At the bus station, the concrete exhaled the heat of the day. Spilt oil gleamed under the neon lights, and the man from Ashkhabad left the station and walked along the dusty shoulder into town. At Pension Buchara, he checked in for the night. Arms crossed behind his head, he lay on his bed and stared at the reflections of streetlights and the play of passing cars on the ceiling. Only when the girls and their sailors stopped stumbling through the hallway did he fall asleep.
The next morning, he strolled along the quay, ate watermelon, and was in no hurry to reach Kara Bogaz. He had heard that an unwholesome, sulphurous mist hung over the lagoon, that the salt deposits glistened so brightly that they blinded you; neither man nor animal held out long there.
He was in no hurry. For the first time in ages, the itching had receded.
Ships lay at anchor off the coast. The sea was in a haze; the ships seemed sketched by a faltering hand. Closer by, too, other ships were moored at piers that reached far out to sea, their names rusting. He looked at them from up close, and he looked at them from afar. A few cranes were still operating. Ladings floated through the air. A plan took shape behind his eyes — a daring deed, born in the hours that he sat in the shade at quayside, ate watermelon, and dreamed of the far shore.
As soon as a guard left his post on deck, he would slip aboard one of the ships. He would disappear down the first hatch he came across and only reappear in a port far from here. He would take along bread and water and remain hidden until they reached a far shore. He would mislay himself, roll away like a coin between the tiles, and never be found again. That’s what he would do. Vanish himself into thin air.
That was how he reached Baku.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The last Jew
The rabbi left his home covered in a sheet, relieved of all cares. The question now was how they were to bury him. You couldn’t simply stuff a rabbi into a hole in the ground, could you? His wife had been lying in the Jewish cemetery at Smogy for the last twenty years, their only daughter emigrating to Israel long ago. No one knew how to find her, to inform her of her father’s death.
‘So how do you even know she exists?’ Pontus Beg asked police sergeant Frantiçek Koller.
‘The cleaning lady,’ Koller said.
‘Her name?’
Koller flipped through his notepad. ‘Valeria Belenko.’
‘The daughter’s name, man.’
Koller’s eyes skittered across his notes. ‘Ariëlla Herz.’
‘No other kin?’
‘Nope.’
‘No address book? Envelopes with a return address?’
‘Maybe Yiri could take a look?’
‘Tell him to come back with an address for that daughter, and a phone number. And tell him to find someone who knows how to bury a Jew.’
Koller shook his head. ‘The cleaning lady said there aren’t any left. No one has come to the synagogue for years. He was the last Jew around here.’
Koller, a bit amazed, watched his own words go.
Beg gestured to him that he was dismissed. He spun his chair around and looked outside. His window looked out onto a blank wall, and, if he craned his neck a bit, onto an airspace between the houses that admitted a view of the street. The opening was so narrow that you saw pedestrians only for a moment — a flash — and then they were gone again. Zhuangzi had said: ‘The life of men between heaven and earth is like a ray of light falling through a chink in the wall: a moment, and then it is gone.’
Beg enjoyed Zhuangzi’s cheerful anarchism, but when searching for direction he fell back on Confucius. The Taoists were troublesome folk, slippery, fleeting as fumes. Confucius was more a man of structure and order; he provided a toehold. Respect for the aged, the rituals and the Way, and his love of the right word: sometimes Beg truly regretted that he wasn’t living in China in the days of the Master.
He drummed his fingers on the table. There was, he was sure of it, another synagogue in town. He hummed a melody from his boyhood, a song his mother had taught him. Astride the melody, the words came back. He murmured them without knowing exactly what they meant; he thought maybe it was a Jewish love song. It was about a girl named Rebecca. ‘Ay, Rivkele, ven es veln zayn royzn, veln zey bliyen.’
Lots of things from the past were returning to him lately. His childhood was so much closer than in all those years before.
He picked up the phone. ‘Oksana, tell Koller there’s another synagogue, on Polanen Street. There must be someone there who knows how to bury a Jew.’
The roads glistened at dusk beneath the lamps as he drove away from the station house. Polanen Street was only a little out of his way, so he decided not to wait for Koller.
It was a broad, quiet street — well-to-do citizens had built big houses for themselves here, long ago. The stained-glass windows above some of the doors were still intact; the influence of the Vienna Secession had reached as far as Michailopol.
The Lada creaked so loudly when he climbed out, the whole street could hear it. He deserved a car that didn’t creak so much, he figured. After thirty-four years on the force, he had a right to better. Of course, he could commandeer a confiscated vehicle. Some colleagues did that — they drove around in rigs that had belonged to serious felons. He noticed reticence in himself, though, a certain prudishness. The people didn’t need to have it rubbed in, that which they already knew: that crime did pay. That even a policeman was dependent on it if he wanted to drive a fairly presentable car.
He found himself standing before a tall, green door. There was no bell. He pounded on it with the flat of his hand. He looked around: the street was covered in a grey mist. The plane trees reached for the sky with their bare, pale arms. The dim taillight of a car vanished around the corner.
Beg entered the alleyway beside the building, where he found trolleys and trash barrels, and the back door of an Asian restaurant. Through a metal register he could hear the clatter of pans. At the end of the alley, where darkness had already settled in, he discovered the service entrance to the synagogue. Something was written in Hebrew on a scrap of paper taped to the door. Again, there was no bell, and no mail slot either. He took the steps and pounded loudly on the door. The building seemed hermetically s
ealed. The life of the Jews took place in concealment, in a shadow world, far from that of the others. Was the building still in use? Or were there indeed no more Jews in Michailopol?
When an old man opened the door, Beg moved down a step.
‘Can I help you?’ the man said.
‘Beg,’ he said. ‘Police commissioner. Could I come in?’
The old man eyed him for a moment, then stepped back into the corridor. ‘Enter.’
They sat down at a table in the little kitchen. The old man’s blue-veined hand trembled as he put down the steamy glasses of tea. He had introduced himself as Zalman Eder; he was the rabbi. His grey beard was streaked with something that had the colour of nicotine.
‘I’m here about Rabbi Herz,’ Beg said.
‘What about him?’
‘You heard about his death?’
Zalman Eder nodded.
‘You knew him?’
‘More or less.’
That was all; apparently, he felt no need to explain further.
‘Do you know whether he still has relatives here, or friends?’ Beg asked. ‘The problem is … He has to be buried. The undertaker has to do something.’
‘You know …’ the rabbi said then, shaking his head slowly. ‘Yehuda Herz and I … we didn’t really get along.’
When nothing else came, Beg asked: ‘For any particular reason, or …?’
‘Not for no particular reason. Nothing is for no particular reason.’ The rabbi sipped his tea, seemingly without scalding his mouth. Then he said: ‘He was a bad person. I’m glad he’s dead.’
Startled, Beg asked: ‘Yehuda Herz?’
‘A heretic. His soul was leaky as a sieve. Now he’ll finally hear that from God himself.’
Beg had imagined that an old rabbi like Zalman Eder would be a wise man, a father leading his people through the wilderness, not a vindictive old Jew who cursed other people’s souls.
He asked whether services were still held in the synagogue.
‘There’s no one here anymore,’ the rabbi said. ‘Only me.’
His eyes were set far back in his skull, and his eyebrows bristled every which way. When he looked up, the washed-out blue of his eyes lit up for a moment.
Beg asked himself what could make one Jew welcome the death of another. The world never ceased to amaze him.
‘I’m the last one,’ the rabbi said, ‘and I won’t be around much longer either.’
Beg dabbed his finger at nonexistent crumbs on the tabletop.
‘Why didn’t some humane doctor cut off my breath as soon as I came into the world?’ the rabbi said. ‘Who am I that God should demand this of me? Who’s going to say kaddish for me? Who will remember me?’
His head sunk even deeper between his shoulders. The old turtle was withdrawing. ‘But that’s not what you’re here for.’
‘No.’
‘You’re here for Herz.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is he now, the old fraud?’
In two days’ time, they agreed, Eder would preside over Yehuda Herz’s funeral. That was much too late, according to Eder: a dead Jew should be buried immediately, but necessity knows no law. It would have to be an improvised service in more ways than one, for there hadn’t been a Jewish undertaker around here for a long time either.
Finally, Beg asked the rabbi whether he perhaps knew the song that had popped into his mind that morning.
‘Rivkele?’ the rabbi said. ‘I don’t know any Rivkele.’
‘No, a song about Rivkele,’ Beg said.
‘Why do you ask?’
Beg shrugged. ‘We used to sing it at home. I thought maybe you would know what it’s about, because I have no idea.’
‘What song was it again?’
Hesitantly, Beg spoke the first line, the words whose meaning he didn’t know. ‘Ay, Rivkele, ven es veln zayn royzn, veln zey bliyen.’
‘Louder! I can’t hear you!’
Beg repeated the words.
‘And the melody?’ the old man asked. ‘Sing it — maybe then I’ll recognise it.’
And so it happened that Pontus Beg sang a Yiddish song for the old rabbi.
‘Good! Very good!’ The old man crowed with pleasure. ‘You should keep practising — you’ve got talent!’
Beg lowered his eyes. Even his nails and his hair felt embarrassed.
‘Do you know what you’re singing? ‘O Rebecca, if there are roses, they will be in flower …’ A love song.’
He showed Beg to the door. The low, darkened corridors smelled of wet gypsum. Faint electric light shone on the walls. Beg thought he could still see the smoked cones left on the ashen plasterwork by old tallow candles. For more than two hundred years, with a few black-bordered interludes, this building had served as a house of prayer — and the final guardian, a love song on his lips, was leading him to the exit.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The comforter
They trudged in single file, heads bowed, eyes dull and unseeing. Once they had looked expectantly to the horizon, towards the land of hopes beyond that, but their gaze was drawn away less and less frequently now, until it no longer rose from the ground before their feet.
When the tall man fell, he blinked his eyes in amazement, as though he’d been tripped. The boy walked past him.
‘Help me out, would you?’ the tall man panted. ‘You can have my shoes. Okay?’
But the boy walked on, a fathomless contempt in his eyes.
One by one, the others passed him. He looked up at them like a dying animal.
‘Hey,’ he said weakly, ‘wait a minute.’
Their eyes swept over his body in search of what might still be useful. The shoes. His coat. His sweater full of holes. It was growing colder all the time.
Was he himself the one who had once robbed a laggard, the tall man thought with wavering conviction. So long ago now … So far away, as though it was someone else … He had twisted the man’s head forcefully to one side as the others stripped the clothes from his body and ransacked his pockets. He had pressed his hand so hard against the man’s mouth that he had felt the false teeth break.
That was how they looked at him now, too. Prey.
He tried to regain his footing, but his legs were so heavy. Heavier than they’d ever been, even though they were so thin.
Is this the end of me, is this what it looks like? he thought. A picture from a great height: his skin, his flesh, how it slowly became an impression in the sand, half-eaten by animals, half soaked into the earth; his bones being spread out over the steppe.
The place where he lay amazed him. Sand and tough, yellow grass; random as rain. This was how others died. He smelled the wet earth, his grave.
They had all left home on their own. Chance had brought them together; no one was responsible for anyone else. As long as you could walk, you belonged to the group; as long as you could walk, you made the group stronger. If the group had to care for its individual members, it weakened. Altruism would be the death of it. Strict self-interest improved the chances of survival. The boy, too, had understood that intuitively. He had walked past others before; he had remained deaf to the pleas, the shrieks behind him.
Sometimes there were little acts of mercy — quick, almost secretive, exceptions. Irrational. Unwise. The group disapproved of such breaches of naked self-preservation.
Panting, the tall man’s breath went in and out. The killing thirst. A primal memory of pain, when his whole being was a soundless scream for his mother, for reassurance. My sweet boy, she cooed, my sweet Mischa, where have you ended up this time? I can’t help you like this, can I? You’re alone, Mischa, alone.
A hand brushed his arm. He smiled through his tears. So she had come anyway … She hadn’t left him …
So long ago, his dear mother, such an eternity.
He opened his eyes to see her.
Standing over him was the Ethiopian.
The tall man groaned in misery. He was pulled up by one arm to a sitting position. He feared the black man’s intentions. He wouldn’t put up a fight. He would simply close his eyes to the harm the other would do him.
The Ethiopian took a weathered blue bottle from his bag. He unscrewed the cap and pressed the opening to the tall man’s lips. The coolness of stone. Water dribbled into his mouth.
‘Maj,’ the black man said, and poured another trickle into his mouth.
‘More,’ the tall man said.
‘Maj,’ the black man said again. The tall man repeated it after him — maj, maj.
He took the bottle from his hand and drank greedily of the earthy-tasting water. When it was finished, he could smell the black man: his stale sweat, his bodily fat, and the spoiled smell that rises from an empty stomach. They had never been this close before. He felt shame and gratitude.
He tried to stand up, but sank back in the dust. His fingers tingled; his vision swirled before his eyes.
The Ethiopian’s hand disappeared into his satchel again. It reappeared, holding a miracle: a rusty can. Beans … goulash … it could be anything — the label was gone. He must have found it in the village, during his foray through the houses. The tall man couldn’t keep his eyes off the can. A can of food. A treasure. Perverse riches.
The black man knelt. He held the can between his knees and struck it with the point of a rock. He dented the can, but couldn’t open it. The agony was unbearable. The tall man leaned back and slipped his knobby, yellowed fingers into his pocket. Slowly, he righted himself again and handed his knife to the Ethiopian. Now he could murder him with his own weapon. The thought glistened behind his eyes for a moment, and then disappeared.
The tip of the knife bored its way into the flimsy can. Gouging and cutting, the blade ate its way through, revealing the jagged metal edge of the lid. The tall man leaned forward. He wanted to see what was in it — he would have yanked it out the Ethiopian’s hands if he’d been able to. When the hole was big enough, the black man bent up the edges. Now they took turns poking their fingers into the can, and ladling out the jellied substance. It had a vague taste of meat bouillon. They gobbled it down, licked their bleeding fingers, and scraped the remains from the sides and bottom. When the can was completely clean, their eyes met, big and charged, as though they were coming to their senses after having committed some ecstatic crime.
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