He shared his food with me, the tall man thought, all the food he had. He is a great and noble person. He has a heart like a whale. I’m not worthy to see the light in his eyes.
His bottom lip quaked, and tears ran down his face. The Ethiopian had shown him the light of his soul, a bright light; he felt how it had crossed over to him, the way you light one candle with another. He covered his eyes with his hands and sobbed. Once in his lifetime, a person weeps because he sees through himself completely. Once in his life, he weeps because he knows he is beyond salvation.
The black man put the can back in his satchel and looked around. He didn’t seem to notice the other man’s fit of weeping. He stood up and checked his pockets. The food had done him good; he blinked contentedly at the huge, black clouds over the steppes.
He licked the knife and held it out to the tall man, who snatched it out of his hand.
When the tall man awoke with a start from the delirious ravings of his dreams and looked up at the white moon, he prayed that his tribulations might end here. It had rained a bit, and the moon hung motionless behind thin, restless tatters of cloud. His gratitude towards the black man turned to poisonous resentment. He was ashamed of his thoughts, but could not shoo them away. Within the space of a few hours he had prayed to live on and he had prayed to die — it was between those polar extremes that he drifted, his long legs in a splits between living and dying. But he did not die; not yet.
Around him lay the things he had scavenged during the long journey — the metal lid, his helmet of rusty mesh, a long stick that he leaned on and which he had decorated clumsily with his knife. He leaned on it when he rose to his feet, his bones stiff and aching from the cold. The black man lay a few metres away in his circle of grass, his hands folded on his chest like a vanquished knight. He took a few steps. A crack of red light crawled onto the edge of the world; in surprise, he noted that he had come back to life.
With his stick, he poked the Ethiopian in the side. The black man had been to a wedding party in his dreams: whooping men had ridden horses into the big tent, women clapped and sang, he was happy in the scented smoke of the fire, and he had eaten as much as he wanted. He didn’t want to get up at all — he just wanted to lie there, where those things had come flying to him on weightless wings.
The tall man followed the trail, half obliterated by the rain. He was carrying only his little backpack. Everything else — the objects that had protected him from the rain, the flies, and the evil — had been left behind. He shuffled ahead, the grass crunching beneath his feet. He leaned heavily on his stick, no longer trusting his legs.
As he dragged himself across the steppe, the gadflies of his thoughts stung him. He owed his life to a pariah, to a man who existed at the edge of the group. Their lifelines had crossed and become hopelessly entangled. A debt had been placed on his skinny shoulders. The pale sun climbed in the sky behind him. There, too, somewhere, was the man to whom he owed his life. He did not look back.
CHAPTER NINE
The broken jug
Yehuda Herz is being buried on a cold, dry day; beside the grave is a mound of loose sand. A little further along, on a bench beneath a willow tree, the pallbearers sit smoking and talking quietly. From far away comes the crack of a hunter’s rifle.
The Jewish cemetery lies east of town. It is surrounded by low poplars. The wind blows through the branches, producing a soft hissing that does not disturb the silence. Here the Jews have buried their dead since time immemorial, on a plot of ground that once lay on the steppe far outside the city. Meanwhile the apartment buildings have advanced on it, pushing out in front of them a flood of kitchen gardens, sheds, and trailers.
Pontus Beg couldn’t come up with a good reason to attend Herz’s funeral, but he went anyway. Perhaps, he told himself, he felt beholden to Zalman Eder. It was at his request, after all, that the rabbi was now murmuring prayers of which Beg understood not a word. His caftan crinkled in the wind.
The coffin lay atop a pair of crossbeams, soon to be lowered.
Loneliness three times over, Beg thought. A dead Jew, a living Jew, and a policeman with one cold foot and a peeping in his ears. In the distance a tractor edged across the fields. Gulls and crows lit down in the furrows.
The tall, grey stones threw thin shadows. The mason’s chisel had hacked out texts in Hebrew, German, and Russian. Most of the gravestones were ancient; some of them leaned crookedly.
Beg shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Peering through his lashes, the pile of sand beside the grave looked like a sleeping bear. His mother’s maiden name was Medved —Russian for ‘bear’. The wind blew a tear from his eye. He wiped it away.
He had seen countless dead, but still he was awed by the feeling that the distance between him and the dead was as great as it was negligible. He had pulled frozen hoboes from the street, alcoholics who had drunk themselves to death, victims of violent impact with a blunt object (the coroner’s jargon, not his), and the old and lonely who were found dead in their homes. Every dead person he saw, he regarded as a preparation for his own death — the crossing of the final border.
The rabbi held out his shaky hands. He invoked heaven, compassion, mercy. This fallible being, too, was a child of God; this person, broken like a jug.
The bearers rose to their feet, a disorderly troupe. Only when they approached the grave did the ceremonial descend into their movements. At the pit, each of them took one end of a rope. The beams were pulled away; the ropes stood taut. Slowly, the coffin floated into the depths, the tassels of Herzl’s prayer robe sticking out the sides.
‘But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of days.’
Beg bent down stiffly and tossed a few spades of sand onto the coffin.
The rabbi wandered slowly amid the graves. Sometimes he stopped beside a stone. Mendel Kanner. Alexander Manasse. He’s taking a walk through the past, thought Beg, a few steps behind him. He’s visiting his friends. The grass was high; the steppe had advanced to between the graves.
Zalman Eder turned to look over his shoulder. ‘I’ll be the next to go. At home in the house of the living.’
A few rows before the end, he stopped again. ‘My wife, blessed be her memory,’ he said, pointing at the stone in front of him. ‘This is where I will lie. Remember that, if you please.’ He laughed quietly, raspingly.
Edzi Bogen, born at Lemberg.
The rabbi picked up a pebble and laid it on the stone.
They walked to the exit and closed the gate behind them, beneath the trees full of the whispers of souls left behind.
Beg drove him back to Polanen Street. Questions about this mysterious Judaism were on the tip of his tongue — Why had he placed a pebble on his wife’s gravestone? Why did he lead such a reclusive life? — but the rabbi sat beside him in silence, his hands folded in his lap. It seemed unbecoming to question him.
As they drove past the old train station, the rabbi suddenly said: ‘You’re a policeman …’
Beg looked over at him.
‘You see the filth of the world,’ Eder went on. ‘Something else every day, I suppose. New things. The world is full of them. New things. The filth. You wallow in them, that’s your job. But what do you do to cleanse yourself of the world’s filth? How do you get clean again?’
Beg shrugged. ‘Questions like that … Maybe we try not to ask ourselves.’
‘What a load of rubbish! Questions like that come up in any sensible mind, whether you like it or not.’
‘If there’s an answer …’ Beg said, ‘the answer should be, if you’re completely honest, that some filth can’t be washed away. It sticks to you. It doesn’t go away.’
The girl — this was the second time today he’d thought about her. She’d been found that spring, in a ditch beside the road. She had broken bone
s, she’d been beaten or thrown out of a car — the extent of the decomposition made it hard to be sure. All they knew was that her body, before or after death, had been subject to violence.
She’d been carrying a little backpack. There were pictures between the pages of her diary. They’d found socks, panties, and a bra in her baggage, along with a blue singlet and articles of toiletry. She had been travelling in summer. Maybe she’d been hitchhiking; in her diary, they also found tickets to a rock concert. There was no wallet or ID, so they were unable to identify her. She was between seventeen and twenty-five, the coroner estimated. A few cockled photos (wet and then dried up again) showed a girl whom they assumed was her. One of those pictures had been used for the flyers they’d posted, asking for information. No one ever responded. She had been in a drawer in the morgue for six months now. If no one came for her, she would be buried the next spring.
The face in the photograph was oval, with prominent cheekbones. Nordic. Her pale-blue eyes looked straight into the world, with the confidence of one who believes that something good and special is in store for her. Beg projected that face onto the dead girl, whose own face had turned black and been eaten away by small predators.
Sometimes he went awhile without thinking of her, and then came a period when she was in his thoughts often. With the dead it was just like with the living; some of them stayed with you; others, you forgot.
Whenever he was in the morgue, Beg would knock on the drawer bearing the label ANONYMOUS WOMAN, to let her know that he hadn’t forgotten her.
The girl they’d found only captured his interest when he saw the contents of her backpack spread out on the table before him. There was something carefree about it that touched him: the little diary, her minimal baggage. He studied it for a while, even though he wasn’t directly involved in the case. He could see her hitchhiking. She trusts the people whose car she climbs into. She has always, in some mysterious way, felt protected, certain that she would be spared. She is free; each day she travels down another road.
The pages of her diary were wet, and much of the ink had run. The words that were still legible spoke of her love for a boy named Yuri, of the death of her grandmother, of her worries about the world. Beg thought she was probably closer to seventeen than to twenty-five.
The suggestion of prostitution was one he’d rejected out of hand — they would have found condoms, vaginal spray, different underwear.
He waited there until Zalman Eder disappeared through the door at the end of the alleyway. Was that where he lived, beside the synagogue? And how did he live, the old man? In his imagination, Beg saw him kneeling in an empty and shadowy house of prayer, wandering through the corridors at night in search of the world that had passed away from him.
Beg was on the night shift. Oksana brought in takeaway. He stared out the window, at the narrow passageway between two walls that was his view; the blueness there was deepening. Oksana popped the top off a bottle of beer and took the lids off the plastic containers. On a plate, she arranged a landscape of noodles, meat, and vegetables.
‘Why do they say that a pig is an unclean animal, anyway?’ Beg asked, half sunk in thought.
Oksana looked up, the serving spoon poised in midair. ‘Who says that?’
‘The Jews. Muslims, too.’
‘Ach.’
‘No idea?’
‘No … No.’
‘Me neither. Why would God create an unclean animal?’
Oksana stuck the spoon into the sauce and ladled it out over the noodles. ‘My mother always says that when it comes to God, you shouldn’t ask why.’
‘Why not?’
‘Ha ha.’
Beg said: ‘There’s nothing about a pig that … We had pigs at home …’
Oksana looked at him, but he didn’t go on about his memories of the pigs on the other side of the fence, those patient creatures, so much friendlier and more expressive than most humans. That he had felt like screaming whenever they had hung one of them from a beam by its hind legs, cut its throat, and let it bleed to death in a rusty basin. But his voice had vanished.
CHAPTER TEN
Cold ashes
The Ethiopian stopped and pointed. He saw the others, still far away, little and sharply outlined like fidgety letters on a sheet of paper. They were shuffling on across the steppe. The tall man peered in the direction where the finger pointed, but saw nothing. Thirst foamed in his mouth. He gestured that he needed to take a rest; leaning on his stick, he sank slowly to the ground. Exhaustion had made an old man of him. He kept his eyes closed, sinking away into the darkness behind his eyelids, blissfully slipping out of the world.
A smack. He opened his eyes with a start — the black man was squatting down, leaning forward with a stone in his hand. He had crushed a lizard. He crept over to the tall man on hands and knees, and held out his hand. The tall man gave him his knife. Mumbling to himself, the Ethiopian cut open the reptile’s belly and scraped out the yellow intestines. He wiped the blade on his pants and gave the knife back. The lizard he slipped into his coat pocket. Then he went and squatted again, a little further away this time, the stone poised.
To get one, you had to be fast. First, you had to remain motionless till the blood stopped in your veins, and then you had to pounce like lightning. The tall man had never succeeded at it. The black man was good, though; the poacher and the boy were, too. They knew how to wait — to see the little animal coming closer, its tongue flickering in and out, the pounding of its heart visible through the skin, the fleshy lids sliding down over its eyes — and then to strike.
This was a little one, not much use to them. You had to get the big ones, a few of them.
The tall man had a pleasant daydream — a big fire, fat hissing in the flames. Never before had he lived with such ease in two worlds, crossed so quickly from the world where his body was painful and his thoughts desperate to the domain of the dream, delirious and happy.
The black man walked behind him, as though to nudge him along, the macerated hermit of old. He hummed a simple, repetitive melody like a prayer.
Three lizards, that’s what the black man had caught. Now his gaze was shifting around in search of fuel. He stuffed blown-away plastic in his pockets. When wrapped around a stick, plastic burned quickly; you could use it to get wet wood going.
A few times they had found low trees amid the hollows, most of them dead. In the parched bushes, the undergrowth, the poacher trapped birds and hamsters. When they moved on later, they were hung about with wood, gnarled branches, and trunks — bizarre camouflage.
Now the group had split apart. Out in front went the others: the man from Ashkhabad, Vitaly, the poacher, the boy, and the woman. They would try to catch up with them. He and the black man had agreed wordlessly on that. Instinctively. The dangers of the wilderness seemed greater than those of the group.
Long ago they had heard wolves. They’d never seen them, only found their spoor the next day. On a few nights the wolves had circled their camp, they’d shivered at the prolonged howling, the growling and yelping just beyond their field of vision. The poacher said that they were little wolves, that they had little to fear as long as they stayed together.
Now each of them knew what his fate would be if he fell by the wayside. No one wanted to lag behind.
The tall man felt light in the head; he had dizzy spells. The other one gave him some water, and waited until he could move on. He always wanted more, but was no longer allowed to hold the bottle.
They walked until it grew dark and the footprints dissolved before their eyes. On the ground, the black man spread the plastic sheet he used to catch rainwater with. Pointy sticks held the corners on high, and the water collected in the middle.
He built a little fire and drove a sharpened stick through the lizards. He turned them over and over above the flames until the
ir skin turned black. The meat on the inside was white. The charcoaled skin crackled between their teeth. They ate them up, from head to tail.
The tall man looked at his hands in mild surprise, as though wondering where his portion had gone so quickly. The hunger growled in his stomach. He watched the black man eat. Even his lips were black. He was sunk in thought, his face shining in the glow of the low flames. Scars seemed to have been chiselled into his skin. The black man was a human like him, only it seemed as though the being-human had expressed itself with a difference, like that between a donkey and a horse.
His desperate gratitude had shrivelled, so that in the hidden place of his thoughts the black man had become more and more a personal servant, a slave; a haze of injustice hung around the last half-lizard he had kept for himself.
The malformation of his thoughts went creepingly. Yes, the black man fed him, but because he also took his own share, he was to blame for there not being enough left over. The black man helped him move along and supported him when he could go no further, but that also meant he was to blame for the way his earthly suffering dragged on. Gratitude and hateful contempt chased each other like minnows at the bottom of a pool.
How could he bear the black man’s self-sacrifice? How could you come to terms with owing your life to someone? How could you acquit yourself of that debt?
The flames sank slowly into the ashes; the wood and plastic were almost consumed. The black man thrust the sharpened stick among the coals, and a flame leapt up. He cleared his throat and spat. The gob shrivelled and hissed in the embers.
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