I would appreciate it if we could maintain a certain formalism in our dealings, in order that the separation of powers might remain clearly visible, also for our subordinates.
Etc., Etc.
Late that afternoon, the draft letter still unfinished on his desk, he went down to the cell block again. They had eaten, the warder said. ‘Like wolves.’
The first prisoner undressed in the shower. ‘Clothes in the bag,’ the warder said, pulling on a pair of thin plastic gloves. They were too small for his fat fingers, so he blew into them to make them stretch a bit. The prisoner was sitting naked on a stool, the electric shears vibrating above his head. The humming bounced off the concrete walls. The sharp teeth of the machine drew red strokes across the scalp; filthy clots of hair fell to the floor.
‘Chin up.’
The shears revealed the sunken features, the toothless mouth. When all the hair had been removed from head and face, the warder showed him the corner where he was to stand. The man stood there, bent over, the bright white light on his pale, pleated skin. Skin and bones. The deep depression in the pelvis, like a bowl. The warder tossed the gloves in a bin and turned on the fire hose. Shivering, the man bent over even further, his hands crossed in front of his genitals. The force of the blast pushed him against the back wall.
‘Turn around!’
He no longer had a backside — only folds of skin.
The jet of water stopped.
‘Lather up, friend. There’s the soap.’
With feeble hands, the man soaped himself. He was as stiff as a plank. The hand holding the bar of soap reached to his knees. He could bow no deeper; he would break in two if he bowed any deeper. The warder threw the lever, and the blast hit him in the balls.
When it was over, the warder tossed him a towel. His kneecaps were broader than his thighs, his tendons in sharp relief beneath the thin skin.
He received togs from the mission: a fisherman’s sweater and a faded tracksuit. The logo on the back of the jacket said ENERGIE COTTBUS.
The woman was the only one exempted from the nozzle; the rest were shaven and hosed down. Beg waited in his office for the doctor to arrive. He read the newspaper and smoked a cigarette. Lying on the table was an ad asking for security guards. Security was the future. And that future had been going on for a while already. The pay was better, for starters. Security guards had a more limited jurisdiction, but also more possibilities. More and more of them were needed; the wealthy couldn’t count on the police for much, so they had to protect themselves. And there were more rich people all the time. Blossoming in their shade was the guild of men with earpieces and heavy-calibre Desert Eagles under their jackets. He had lost a lot of his men to that. Sometimes he thought about becoming a turncoat, too, but it never got further than a daydream. Habit kept him where he was — the comfort of his position.
The warder came to get him before dealing with the last one. They looked at the pale body covered in tattoos. An ex-con. A church was etched into the skin between his shoulder blades, a swastika on his calf, and hearts and barbed wire everywhere else — the code language of the slammer. Beg knew that each dome on the church on the man’s back represented a conviction, but the meaning of most of the other symbols was hidden to him.
The doctor was a new one, a woman. Beg had never seen her before. Well-educated women tended to make him feel uneasy.
She came out of the woman’s cell almost right away and asked agitatedly: ‘Latex gloves — do you have any of those around here?’
A little later she came back into the office in a rage. ‘She’s heavily pregnant! She shouldn’t even be here!’ She was trying to contain her anger, but Beg recognised the signals.
‘She has to be hospitalised right away. How long has she been here?’
‘A couple of hours,’ Beg said.
‘I want to see the other ones.’
When she returned from the cellblock a little later, she seemed subdued. ‘Do you have anything to drink?’ she asked.
The warder opened a bottle and poured some water into a mug.
‘Who are these people?’ she asked.
Beg shrugged.
‘The boy should be in the hospital, too. He’s malnourished. All of them are, but he and the woman need intravenous feeding right away. The others can remain here, at least provisionally. They’re sick; I’ve already given them anti-pyretics. They should be on a special diet — feeding them normal food is too big a risk. Does that telephone work?’
Later that afternoon, the boy and the woman were taken from their cells to the psychiatric hospital, where they were to remain under lock and key. The doctor left dietary instructions for the others, and said she would come back the next day. The clicking of her heels echoed in the stairwell.
‘Tough lady,’ the warden said.
The news that really set the beehive abuzz came in around that time. In the transients’ baggage, a man’s head had been found. Only when a gruesome stench had filtered through the corridors and offices did they get around to searching the bags and finding the thawed head. Shielding their nostrils with an arm or a handkerchief, they examined the purplish-black, mutilated thing. It was wrapped tightly in plastic; and when they stripped that away, the nose and lips kept their flattened look. One corner of the mouth was curled up, revealing a pair of broken yellow teeth. The eyeballs had burst and emptied down the face. One man vomited.
When the commissioner came in, they all backed away from the table. Beg took the towel that was handed to him. The head had rolled over backwards. No matter what you did, no matter how you tried to steel yourself, you never got used to it. You could adopt an attitude towards it, but the inner shock could never be avoided.
Where the neck had been separated from the body, you could see rough incisions.
There was nothing but a head; they found no other body parts.
A head, damn it, Beg thought. Who goes around carrying a severed head? A pitch-black, malignant thing. It looked like a cancer. It stank like a cancer, too.
Was this a black man, or had the colour been caused by decay? There weren’t many blacks in this part of the world. Conditions here were not favourable for them. If one did happen to come to town, he was beaten up all the time. A black DJ at the Tarot Club had been stabbed on the street. Black people didn’t have an easy time of it around here; they didn’t stick around long.
Beg examined the head carefully — the wounds on its head and cheeks, the shattered ocular ridge. The cold and the plastic’s tight grip had slowed the decomposition, but from now on it would go quickly. It wasn’t until he got to the hall that he took the towel away from his face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
This shall be the sign of the covenant
between Me and thee
Beg had fallen asleep while reading the directives that the Everlasting had given His people. He had resolved to read everything worth knowing, and then decide whether to be a practising Jew or simply a Jew by birth. He lived in the naïve hope that the answer would emerge of its own accord from all those books and documents. It was a Herculean task. He read slowly, not wanting to miss a thing; everything was potentially important for his final decision.
And now he had fallen asleep above the third book of the Torah. An odour of mould and incense rose from its pages. With pleasure, he had read the accounts of the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The sun of the Holy Land burned on his face, he heard the bleating of sacrificial goats, and he laid his head to rest on a stone.
But Leviticus did not hold his attention for long. The Eternal had been fairly detailed in His directives; He left nothing to chance. It was his tough precision that had rocked Beg to sleep. A trail of saliva dangled between his lips and the tabletop. His breathing was laboured, and it was the discomfort that finally woke him. On the silent TV screen, a man in drag
was being laughed at by an audience with wide-open mouths. What was it that made everyone so wild these days about a man dressed as a woman? In how many shows did that pop up? The one-man carnival, that failed clown, loud and boorish, the born victim. He was a punching bag and a scapegoat — you could hit him and abuse him as much as you liked, he shrieked and writhed, but seemed essentially immune to the violence done him.
It was past eleven. Beg wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He walked over to the television. His Achilles tendons had started hurting recently whenever he got up. They seemed to become too short in his sleep; he was afraid that one day they would tear off completely. He turned on the sound, and the room was awash in laughter. The transvestite ran through the studio, but before he could disappear into the wings he was seized by a bodybuilder in a ridiculous gym suit. The roughing-up began all over again. ‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen!’ the host cried. And then, leering at the camera: ‘Or should I say lady and gentleman?’
Again, the laughter came rolling down from the gallery.
Sometimes Beg thought that the need for cruelties and the perverse delight at the other’s expense was part of being an impoverished people that had suffered a great deal itself. The pain of others was a distraction from one’s own suffering, from existential worries. But Koller had told him that in Japan there were much crueller programs on TV. He had seen a few examples on the Internet — and the Japanese were a civilised, prosperous people. Nowhere else in the world, said Koller, did people laugh so loudly at someone else’s pain. That was the end of Beg’s theory: tested against reality, it collapsed like a bad soufflé.
Brushing his teeth, he looked at his face in the mirror. He rolled his eyes and opened his mouth. He turned his head as far as he could to the left and to the right — everything was still working. That was all you could say about it, though: everything was still working.
The coroner’s report had come in late that afternoon: the head they’d found was, indeed, that of a black man. Forensics noted that the insect damage showed the head had been outside for quite a while. Exactly how long, it was hard to say. What was certain was that the cause of death — here it came, Beg thought, his favourite formulation — was violent impact with a blunt object.
Tomorrow he would interrogate a couple of them, whether they were in a weakened condition or not. They’d been detained as a public nuisance, but with the addition of a crime the temperature of the case had skyrocketed.
In bed, his thoughts were still jittery and alert. The crime had brought them together, or kept them together. They had carried the evidence, a head, along with them. It reminded them of the crime. Why did they want to be reminded of that? What was the point? The question kept him awake. His eyes wandered over the ceiling to fix on a pale spot, which could be a kilometre away, or just as easily a couple of metres. They might have known that the head would be found, at some point, one day. They had accepted the consequences. The consequences were subordinate to another, greater interest. The head symbolised something; it stood for something.
In the course of the years, Beg had come across abnormalities in all shapes and sizes. A moment always came when someone stopped thinking about the consequences of his actions, the punishment that awaited, and simply followed his own nature.
Last winter, two drifters had eaten a dog. You had those who saw the animal as a pet, others who saw it as a tasty morsel — the boundaries were not the same to everyone. The dog’s owner had gone into the park and split the drifters’ heads with an axe. He had submitted calmly to his arrest; he was prepared to pay the price for following his own nature. ‘They should have kept their dirty fucking hands off of my dog,’ he’d said, and everyone at the stationhouse knew what he meant. The world was a hard place; children and pets represented a kind of final innocence — you kept your hands off that.
The general sympathy for the man with the axe worried Beg. You knew how close chaos really was when you approved of someone splitting another person’s skull because they had eaten his dog. ‘Hold your thumb and index finger so close together that there’s barely any light between them, and you’ll know how close the chaos is,’ he’d told his people. They were there precisely to preserve that little bit of light, that tiny crack — to whatever extent that was possible.
His thoughts spun in ever-widening circles, until he fell asleep and dreamed things he would forget by morning. He never remembered his dreams.
In the morning, he showered and pissed into the drain. Only first thing in the morning did he piss as vigorously as he used to.
If he was converted, he would have to be circumcised. There was no doubt about that; the Everlasting demanded it.
This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised. And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you.
Abraham was ninety-nine when he received that order. He circumcised all the men in his household and then himself. The Everlasting wanted to place a brand on the bodies of his people. He called for blood and pain: the covenant was not merely spiritual; it was also physical.
What would Zita think if his foreskin suddenly disappeared? He could hear her disapproval already. The same way she couldn’t stand the table covered with books in the living room.
‘Look,’ he’d told her, ‘you don’t read this from front to back, you read it like this … you start at the back of the book.’
She looked as though she had just encountered a highly dubious sort of newfangledness.
The books served as run-up to the announcement that soon there would be no more pork eaten in his house, just as that announcement served in turn as run-up to a possible circumcision. He hadn’t told her about his meetings with the rabbi, or about the fact that he now belonged to the Jewish nation. Things like that had to be communicated one step at a time. Slow and steady seemed the best strategy. The head-on confrontation could have undesired consequences: ‘Come on, Pontus, I’m Catholic. I don’t sleep with Jews! You should know that!’
It made him uneasy. What he feared most was her dead mother. From the far side, the old cow whispered bad advice in her daughter’s ear. It was a sorry state of affairs when the dead started throwing their weight around over here. Let the dead see to the dead, the living see to the living.
He couldn’t afford to lose Zita. There were other women he could pay for — the Morris was full of them — but they would never fit as comfortably as Zita. They would have annoying traits. Gum-chewing. Sublime figures. Words he didn’t know.
He would not be able to stand their lack of interest.
Tina! Yes, Tina, but then she had quit the business. She had gone off and specialised in meatloaf.
When Zita came into his house she took off her shoes and replaced them with a pair of slippers she kept in the hall closet. She was as at home in his kitchen as she was in her own. She wiped down the stove and boiled water to make soup. The soup steeped as she cleaned the house, so that she and the soup were finished at the same time, a few hours later. Neither of them were in a hurry.
His uniforms hung in the closet, laundered and starched. She sewed the buttons on the waistband of his trousers (he wore suspenders and a belt, as though afraid that his pants would fall off), and every two months she put fresh mothballs on the shelves.
On the evenings when she stays over, the bottle appears on the table. The rest of the transaction takes place in a mild haze. She listens breathlessly to his stories about criminals and car chases, all of which she’s heard before. Sometimes he adds a new twist to the circumstances, the setting, or the events, making the story new again. The results amaze him, too, at times. Then they watch television until it is time to go to bed.
She withdraws to the bathroom and comes back a little later in a bright pink nightgown that reaches all the way t
o her ankles. She goes to the toilet and then climbs in between the sheets. He follows the same route, but much more hurriedly. She lies waiting patiently for him.
He turns off the light.
Now we hear only the rustling of sheets before the finding of positions, the brushing of bodies as they approach, the hurried reconnoitring in the dark, and the ‘Wait just a minute, Pontus.’ He feels himself becoming weighed down with desire again, a capsizing ship. Then his body is on hers, their bellies slapping together. Fumbling, he whispers: ‘What have you got on under there, woman?’
She says: ‘Ow! You’re not a dragoon, are you, Pontus?’
But he is a dragoon. A soldier returning from war, it’s been so long since he’s felt a woman’s body. He is the paramour of need, his deeds said and done in a matter of minutes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Restless legs
The interrogation room is on the third floor. The cast-iron radiators glow. The first prisoner’s file reads ‘male, nameless, age unknown’.
The man is alone in the room. He can’t keep his legs still. His legs are still underway, while the rest of his body has come to a halt in the interrogation room. His cuffed hands are resting in his lap. The hands are calm. They’re not going anywhere anymore.
When Beg enters the room, the man keeps his legs still for a few beats, but before the commissioner has had time to reach the table the jittering has resumed.
Beg sits down. He places a folder on the table and pulls out a few sheets of paper. He spreads them out in front of him, and chooses a black ballpoint pen from his breast pocket. He has red and blue ones, too. The ballpoint slides out with a click.
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