These Are the Names

by Tommy Wieringa

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Earth

  In the deepness of the night, the boy awoke to a cloudburst over the steppes. The rain hissed. He peeked out from beneath the plastic, but didn’t see the slight glow that announced the day. He pulled his head back quickly. The tarp was leaking in a few places, so he tried to lie down in a way that would keep him from getting wet. Fat drops drummed on the plastic. The cold had seeped deep into his bones; he never felt warm anymore. It seemed as though there was no limit to what they could endure. Only death could keep them from wandering off each day anew through the vastness.

  He thinks about the tall man, but the memory of his obscene nakedness is already fading. Already the sand has almost covered him.

  The boy rolls up in a ball and waits with open eyes for morning.

  Little by little, the black man came closer. He added himself to the group again bit by bit — first an arm and then a leg.

  But his approach did not go unnoticed. The woman looked back often. She stayed close to the man from Ashkhabad.

  Rain. Nothing but rain. No one had had a dry piece of clothing on them. The boy saw the hunched silhouettes behind him — the ghosts of the deceased, awakened from the sleep of ages.

  The dark, shuffling forms returned in his fearful dreams.

  How far can you walk without ever coming to a road or village? It’s as though they’ve begun circling the globe all over again. Maybe the world has perished without their noticing. Are there still people? the boy wonders. Where are they hiding? Coming across a goat or a cow would be a major miracle in itself! The joy! First they would cover the cow with kisses and blessings, then slaughter her and devour her whole. A cow — oh, if only they would find a cow. If he was the first to find her, he would hop on her back and ride off. He would leave the others behind and enter the new world on the back of his cow. He could see the streets strung with banners, people coming out of their houses to cheer on the one who had survived the steppes — the cow’s back festooned with cookies and banknotes, sweets and garlands. The cow stopped before the house of the woman with gleaming hair; that’s where it lived. The woman bathed him, swathed him in soft linen, and tucked him into the softest bed he had ever lain in.

  He would sleep for seven days and seven nights …

  Without noticing it, he had moved out far ahead of the rest. He looked back. The man from Ashkhabad was waving his arms wildly, the tall man’s stick in his hand. Another fight? Were they ever too tired to fight? Someone left the group and walked on. The poacher. The woman followed, then the other two. The boy squinted — at a little distance from the others, he saw movement. The black man. He wasn’t giving up. It was a pointless pursuit. He would never be one of them anymore; the fear had acquired the force of law. They would beat him to death if he came too close.

  The rainwater gathered in pools. Leaning on his left hand, the boy scooped up water with his right and raised it to his lips. After each sip he looked up, then drank on. He heard a voice — there were the others. He saw the hollow-eyed skulls emerging from the grey rain, their hair in strands against their scalps. They walked past him in silence.

  The boy walked a little ways behind the woman, alone with his thoughts.

  Sometimes the woman stopped. She leaned over and picked something up. She raised it to her lips. When she bent down again, the boy was on her in one giant step. ‘What have you got there? What are you eating?’

  To his dumb amazement, he saw that she had scooped up a handful of wet earth and was eating it. Sand stuck to her lips. She swallowed with difficulty and took another bite. The boy seized her by the shoulders, his face contorted in disgust. ‘Stop that!’

  She ignored him.

  ‘You can’t eat sand! People don’t eat sand!’

  The woman wiped her lips.

  He tried to reason with her. Why was she eating sand? It was bad for her; she had to stop. Was she trying to kill herself?

  She smiled faintly and looked at him without seeing him. ‘Let me go,’ she said. ‘It will be all right. If that’s what God wants.’

  Inky clouds rolled together and parted again above their heads. The boy walked on alone once more, heavy with gloom. They were doomed. There was no hope for them anymore.

  Yet still, yet still.

  Inside him was the strange conviction that he would survive. He would be among the saved.

  But the woman scooped up sand. She was lost. You shouldn’t eat sand. It was admitting defeat.

  A few families lived in his village. For as long as anyone could remember, they had built terraces on the mountainsides, stone walls chest high, filled with dirt. Without those basins of piled stones, the soil would have washed down the rusty slopes right away. No fertile soil could be found at those altitudes, so they bring it up from the valley. They load the fertile soil onto the backs of donkeys, in the beds of pick-ups and little trucks, and even fill their pockets with it before starting on the long, windy road up. Bit by bit, they carry their land into the mountains. All the land they possess they have carried up themselves. Nothing is more costly to them than that dark soil which produces scanty cabbage, pumpkins, potatoes, and onions.

  Boys keep watch on wooden scaffolding. The wind rustles in the dry leaves of corn; with slingshots, they fire stones at crows. When they hit one, they hang it upside-down on a stick as a warning to its comrades.

  And if anyone asks them why they do that, why they live in a place suited only to carrion crows and vultures, a place that has to be overcome, they shrug and say that’s what they’ve been doing for as long as anyone can remember.

  The mountains produce tough, bent people. They live and die just as their ancestors did, while in the valley the new century has begun. The new era makes its way uphill in bits and pieces; it reaches them in strange, convoluted morsels, free of the surroundings that explain it and lend it its logical status. It generates fear, but also hope — it means they won’t have to go on lugging burlap bags of earth up the hill till kingdom come, to replace the soil lost to wind and wash.

  A family equips a pioneer to make the journey to the distant world. Another follows. Never before have young people left the village to make such long trips, for such uncertainty.

  Those who remain behind watch and pray; they wait tensely for the first reports of plenty.

  Far away, a boy carves his way in the world. He has traded in the alliance with the soil for a wandering existence; the wind blows him across the steppes. Today he saw a woman eating dirt. He has carried so much soil uphill on his back, but eat it? Never. It’s filthy, it’s not done, it can’t be anything but sinful. And along his way he has seen almost every sin you could imagine — there are so many more of them than he’d ever realised!

  He knows that he can never go home again. He has crawled out through the keyhole, and can never get back in.

  ‘Goddamn it,’ the man from Ashkhabad said that evening. He stared in amazement at the tooth he held between thumb and forefinger. Now there was a gap in his gold-plated incisors. Cautiously, he felt at the others. ‘I could pull them right out of my head,’ he said sadly.

  Vitaly lay down and rolled himself up in plastic and rags. He was withdrawing into himself, further and further. He hadn’t said a word all day; the pain had gained the upper hand. His being was concentrated around the burning blemish; he wrapped himself around it and no longer thought of anything else. The pain was unshareable and solitary.

  From not far away there came a sound. They stood up. In the distance they saw the black man, a shimmer of rain between them. ‘Goddamn it,’ the man from Ashkhabad said again. He held the stick tightly in one hand. ‘Africa!’ he screamed. There was no reply. He held his hands to his mouth like a megaphone. ‘Hey, Africa!’

  The black man unfurled his plastic and disappeared beneath the horizon of grass.

  ‘W
hat do you want from us?’ the man from Ashkhabad yelled.

  The plain sang out.

  The poacher and the man from Ashkhabad took a few steps in his direction, but there was no energy in their movements. The woman and the boy looked at their wavering backs.

  ‘Finish him off,’ came Vitaly’s voice from under the plastic. ‘For Christ’s sake, just fucking finish him off.’

  The man from Ashkhabad wheeled on him. ‘Shut up, slum rat. Why don’t you come out here and do it yourself?’

  ‘Sniveling shits,’ they heard from beneath the dark pile.

  The boy felt a burning desire rising up — that the man from Ashkhabad would take his stick and pound the pile of rags until the flux of filthy, blasphemous words came to an end. To see the blood flow out from under it, silenced at last.

  The poacher stared at the spot where the black man had vanished into the grass. He just stood there, and no one knew what was going on inside him. Motionless as a donkey, he was. Maybe he was thinking the same thing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A theological debate

  ‘Why don’t you just start reading?’ Rabbi Eder said in annoyance. His guest never stopped asking questions. Beg took home a pile of books from the synagogue. At the table in his living room, he started reading. It wasn’t long before his legs started shimmying. His scalp started itching. Because the rabbi had failed to point him in any direction, he read without system until it made his head spin. A four-thousand-year-old history was laid out in those books, along with all the popular superstitions, the parables, and rabbinical counsel. There were, on occasion, things he thought were funny. He now knew, for example, that you could identify a virgin by sitting her down on a wine barrel and smelling her breath — if you smelled wine, she was no longer a virgin. That’s how they did that, those old rabbis.

  At the theological level, he became entangled in the cacophony of standpoints, interpretations, and commentary on commentaries; there wasn’t a single subject they agreed on, not a single question that received an unequivocal answer. It was like a rummage sale. He couldn’t figure out whether you were allowed to mention God’s name or not, and was it G-d, YHWH, or HaShem? They mixed it all together; it was a mess.

  It was a mystery to him how they had come up with the Torah.

  One scholar wrote that they had been chosen by God; the other, that He had forced them to accept His sacred book. He threatened to have a mountain fall on them if they refused, and they agreed under duress. But the mystic Judah Halevi, he read, said that the people of Israel had enjoyed His special favour from the start.

  With pleasure, he read Halevi’s book The Kuzari, a dialogue between a Jewish sage and the king of the Khazars, who was converted to Judaism along with his people. But before the king accepted the new faith, he submitted the rabbi to an extensive interrogation. He was as ignorant as Beg; his dialogue with the Jewish wise man was witty and funny. When the king countered with a claim that the Jews had once worshipped a golden calf, the wise man replied that it was God’s very anger about this that showed how important they were to him.

  Yeah, right, the king said. Worshipping the calf is the worst sin of all, isn’t it?

  Have patience, the rabbi answered, and I will show you why God took Israel as His chosen people.

  Any Gentile who joins us unconditionally shares our good fortune without, however, being quite equal to us. If the Law were binding on us only because God created us, the white and the black man would be equal, since He created them all. But the Law was given to us because He led us out of Egypt, and remained attached to us, because we are the cream of mankind.

  Beg read through this argument again and concluded that it was the same old song and dance: anyone trying to define himself did so in principle at the other’s cost.

  Now we do not allow anyone who embraces our religion theoretically by means of a word alone to take equal rank with ourselves, but demand actual self-sacrifice, purity, knowledge, circumcision, and numerous religious ceremonies. The convert must adopt our mode of life entirely. We must bear in mind that the rite of circumcision is a divine symbol, ordained by God to indicate that our desires should be curbed, and discretion used, so that what we engender may be fitted to receive the divine Influence. God allows him who treads this path, as well as his progeny, to approach Him very closely. Those, however, who become Jews do not take equal rank with born Israelites, who are specially privileged to attain to prophecy, whilst the former can only achieve something by learning from them, and can only become pious and learned, but never prophets.

  It had been a long time since he’d pored over texts this way; Beg read on till the letters danced before his eyes. Leaning back in his chair, he blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. This was the wondrous company to which he had been added; the exclusivity flattered and irritated him. A Christian, you could become; a Muslim, too; but not a Jew. Never completely. And for the rest, they made you work awfully hard — for as long as it took you to become pious or learned, and then they kept that coveted final piece for themselves. Therein lay the injustice, but he bathed in the warm light of chosenness. He was the fruit of a Jewish womb; he was part of the family without having done anything to deserve it. From the mother lode of his memory a silver bubble had risen. It had burst on the surface, and his ears had caught the melody that escaped from it.

  So much had come back to him since he’d developed a cold foot. In dreams and musings he had relived episodes and places. There was no direct connection between his cold foot and his memories, although you might also say it started with that cold foot, and now here he sat with a pile of books, studying Judaism.

  It was after midnight. The radio had been silent the whole time.

  Polanen Street grew accustomed to the white Lada parked at the curb. Even the Asians had stopped being startled by the policeman in the alleyway. A plastic sack in hand, Beg stood waiting at the bottom of the steps to the synagogue. He often brought along tea and cookies for the old man. One discussed matters of faith along with sweet cookies and aromatic black tea from Krasnodar.

  He wanted the rabbi to tell him why a convert could never completely become a Jew, but always remained inferior.

  ‘There are different views on that subject,’ the rabbi said, once they were seated at the kitchen table.

  ‘I was afraid of that,’ Beg said despondently.

  ‘Generally speaking, the opinion you expressed is one found mostly among the orthodox.’

  ‘I read Halevi’s book.’

  ‘The great Halevi.’

  ‘I finished it last night.’

  ‘An important work.’

  ‘He says that, too.’

  ‘I agree with him,’ the rabbi said. ‘The proselyte is a 99 per cent Jew. There is still something missing.’

  ‘A prophetic element, that’s what he calls it.’

  ‘That has been passed down to us from our forefathers. From Adam to Seth, from Lamech to Noah, from Abraham to Isaac and from Isaac to Jacob. From Jacob to his sons. Moses and Aaron carried the light through the desert for forty years, and passed it on to their heirs. How could a gentile possess that light? After all, he’s not related to the patriarchs.’ He looked up. ‘Inferior, you said. When you say that, you’re engaged in polemics. All I’m saying is that it’s a trait that can only be passed on by inheritance, the way red hair shows up in some families and never in others.’

  Beg closed his eyes; he had to think hard about this. ‘In fact, what you’re saying … is that a distance remains. The prophets are Jewish, they are close to God. He gives them their visions. The proselyte doesn’t possess that sensitivity; he can get close, but never make it all the way. That 1 per cent, that’s the distance God maintains between himself and the non-Jew. And that cannot be bridged.’

  ‘God is close to us, so that applies the other way
around, too. The goy can cross the bridge, but never reach the other side. Rabbi Halevi in Andalusia and Reb Eder in Michailopol are in agreement on that. Would you like some more tea? You always bring tea with you — I assume you’re extremely fond of tea?’

  Beg nodded.

  ‘Don’t you see that?’ the rabbi said. ‘That’s precisely what makes it so hard for others to bear. God who watches over us and sends plagues to Egypt, who shows us the way in a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire, and talks to us on Mount Sinai — what a pact! What a pronouncement!’

  He poured some more hot water into the cups. It was the little movements that caused his hands to shake most.

  ‘When a father has a favourite son,’ he said with his back to Beg, ‘it always leads to jealousy in the household. Jacob loved Joseph most dearly — his brothers tried to kill him. Jealousy! Joseph also had a prophet’s dreams; he dreamed the truth that was yet to come. The prophetic element had been passed on to him, and even though he was persecuted, it’s not easy to extinguish a light like that. His light shone from the dungeon all the way to the pharaoh’s chambers …’

  Beg remembered the Old Testament stories that his mother had read aloud to him and to his sister — most of them had coagulated into a mood, a couple of names, half-histories, but he remembered the story of Joseph in the well, and the storehouses he built for the pharaoh to stockpile grain for the lean years to come.

  ‘The first thing you need to do is read the Torah,’ the rabbi said. His breathing sounded laboured. ‘Everything is in there. The rest is interpretation.’

  Hot tea splashed on his fingers when he put the glass on the table. ‘Moses never entered the Promised Land, but Joseph’s bones are buried there. He made the children of Israel vow not to leave his bones behind on the day of their return. They carried them with them in the desert for forty years, until they entered the Holy Land. Our memory is also what produces our faithfulness. But most of us … we won’t reach the Promised Land, not until the Last Day. You saw how I sprinkled some sand over Rabbi Herz’s grave? That was sand from Israel, a sign of our covenant. Our bones are scattered all over the world, just like Ezekiel saw in his dream: