‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?’
‘There isn’t really a list from bad to worst—there are just some things you forget, and other things you keeping thinking about.’
It’s quiet for a moment, then he says: ‘I often think about this one girl. What we think, what you could sort of tell from the things she had with her, was that she was hitchhiking. It was summertime; she was wearing summer clothes. They found her in a ditch at the side of the road. She’d been there all winter. In her bag there was a diary, some pictures, tickets for a rock concert. Just a girl, maybe a little more reckless than other girls … She took a little too much of a risk, I think. But who she is … We’ll probably never know.’
He thinks about it for a moment, then says: ‘That shouldn’t have happened, you know what I mean?’
He doesn’t know exactly what it is about the story that affects him so. The lost innocence, perhaps; the unfulfilled potential, maybe …
‘Her father and mother don’t know where she is?’
Beg shakes his head. ‘They’re still waiting for her. A person who doesn’t come home isn’t dead. The door stays open a crack.’
‘Yeah,’ the boy says.
‘Yeah,’ Beg says, too. He lays a finger on the boy’s nose, pushing it to one side a bit. ‘And what about you?’ he asks then. ‘Someone’s waiting for you, too. I heard you have a brother. Your parents — are they still alive?’
The boy nods.
‘I’m sure they’d like to know where you are. I could let them know that you’re safe.’
‘Who says I’m safe?’
‘I do. I say that. Maybe you don’t like it here, but you’re safe. A thousand times safer than out there.’
‘I hate it here.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘At night the screaming is even worse. I don’t know why I’m here. I didn’t do anything.’
‘That’s good news. So then the only thing I need to know is who actually did do something. If you tell me that, I’ll help you to get out of here as quickly as possible. Once you’re fixed up a little. Once you’ve got your strength back.’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ the boy says resentfully. ‘So why do I have to stay here?’
‘That’s kind of a technical thing,’ Beg replies, ‘but I’m allowed to tell you. You people were trying to get across the border, right? Without passports or anything. Crossing the border illegally is a crime. It’s punishable.’
The muscles tense around the boy’s jaws.
‘But that’s not the worst thing. If it was only that, I wouldn’t keep you here too long — so many people try to do that. The black man’s head, that’s what it’s about. That’s a much bigger problem. I can’t be lenient about that.’
The feet slide back and forth restlessly under the blanket.
Beg says: ‘There are things you’re not telling me because you’re afraid of the others. Am I right?’
He sees nothing that looks like confirmation.
‘You’re safe here — there’s nothing to be afraid of. The others can’t hurt you.’
The boy shakes his head.
‘What?’
‘It’s not like that,’ he says quietly.
‘What’s not like that?’
‘Nothing. Forget it.’
Beg repeats his question, but the boy remains silent.
‘Then you’re staying here,’ Beg says as he gets up. ‘I can’t help you if you don’t cooperate.’
He walks to the window again and stands there, his hands folded behind his back. A pack of glistening snow falls from the branches every now and then. Otherwise the park is devoid of motion. Fresh snow — this is what the world on the seventh day looks like.
Behind him he hears the deep breathing of sleep.
When the monotonous whistling in his ears begins again, he leaves the room and quietly pulls the door closed behind him. The nurse gets up from her chair in the hallway and comes to him on creaking rubber soles. The jangling of her key ring echoes in his ears. She locks the door. Metal against metal, the sound is amplified many times over.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Remember what Amalek did
‘Do you play chess?’ the rabbi had asked him once; since then they would sometimes play as a distraction from spiritual affairs. The hours with Rabbi Eder were dear to Beg; they constituted his only physical tie with Judaism. They drank black tea from Krasnodar, ate sweet cookies, and thought about the moves to come. The bulbs on the ceiling shed little light, so the difference between the objects and their shadows was hard to see.
The rabbi sacrificed a knight.
He’s just shaking up the board, figured Beg, who had never won from him. One draw, on one occasion — that was all. Now that Beg was in a good position for once, Eder had to go and do something unexpected, like this. Frustrated, he sipped at his tea.
‘A peculiar move,’ he murmured.
‘Then you don’t understand the essence of the game,’ the rabbi said.
After a long silence, Beg asked: ‘And what might that essence be?’
‘The essence consists of leading your opponent into a dark forest, the forest where two plus two is five — and the only path leading out of that forest is broad enough for only one of you. That’s how Grandmaster Tal put it.’
‘Ah-ha, I see.’
He lost that game, too. The rabbi had left the forest, but Beg was still wandering around in it.
They arranged the pieces of the board. ‘You don’t seem to be focusing well,’ the rabbi said. ‘Usually you put up more of a fight.’
Beg told him about the talk he’d had with the woman that afternoon, after he had left the boy. His reconstruction took form slowly.
‘Try to figure it,’ he said. ‘They all pay a huge chunk of money to cross the border. They spend hours hiding in a dark trailer, until they get to the border. Dogs, guards, they’re shitting their pants. When the truck starts rolling again, they feel like screaming in fear and joy. It’s night out, dark, by the time they leave the truck. The driver points them in the direction they need to go, says they’ll find a city out there. Morning comes, they walk and walk but never get to a city. They’re in doubt; they fight. All they see are the steppes, nothing else. The group splits up, a few of them go back, most of them push on. Westward, all the time. But they never get anywhere. There is no civilised world anymore; they’ve ended up in the wilderness. Without water, without food. They have nothing to shield their heads against the sun by day or their bodies against the cold at night. People die. That’s the way the woman put it: one after the other died, and any one of us could have been next. In the end, there are five of them left. They wandered across the flats for months.’
Beg shook his head.
‘They even made it through the winter. It’s a miracle that they survived.’
The memory comes to him of the woman, describing the journey in a feeble voice, monotonous as the steppes themselves. Her pregnant belly was heaving beneath the blanket, a hideous deformity on her emaciated body. When he’d asked who the father was, she hadn’t answered. She remained stubbornly silent when it came to the black man’s head. That he had been with the group from the start, that was all she would say.
‘I don’t understand,’ the rabbi said. ‘They crossed the border, that’s what you said.’
Beg slid his chair back and sat up straight. ‘What I’m going to tell you now … it’s almost unimaginable.’ He stood up and paced around the kitchen. ‘A border, that’s right. The woman says they crossed it; the boy saw barracks, border guards, barrier gates, and dogs. He described what he saw to the others. And the others heard it, men and dogs — there could be no mistake about it. Still, they were nowhere. They’d wandered through a no-man’s land the whole tim
e, under conditions we can’t even imagine.’
He was standing in front of the rabbi now. He could smell the old man — a damp mattress, a coat that had been worn too long. ‘And then they reach civilisation,’ he said. ‘Houses, cars, people — and their worst nightmare comes true: they never crossed the border at all … There is no new country. All that time they were just here!’
‘So what about the border?’ the rabbi asked impatiently.
‘There was no border! There was only the product of an evil imagination: a copy of a border, a fake border. A replica of a border built by people-smugglers. At the real border you have to bribe people, get lucky — all risks you’d have to take.’
‘People …’ the rabbi murmured.
‘The brilliance of something like that! Faking a border. Someone had to come up with that.’
‘It sounds as though you admire it.’
‘No, not at all. Or yes, disgust and admiration.’
‘It’s perverse to admire something like that.’
‘Only because of the imagination it would take, nothing else. The same way I admired your decision to sacrifice a knight. But this … evil is an art, I’m afraid.’
‘You give evil too much credit. That puts you outside the pale of the Torah.’
‘Excuse me for saying so, but the volume of crime one sees in the Torah …’
‘Crime and punishment. Crime is depicted so that the Everlasting can determine His punishment. By way of the crime, He imposes His laws. Without evil, there is no way for us to know good.’
‘You know what man is like,’ Beg said. ‘You know that there are thousands of ways to get around a prohibition. He always finds a way out.’
‘Which means that he breaks the law — your earthly law and my law, which comes from heaven. Man is a born delinquent. Our laws are meant to keep him on track.’
And how powerless we are with our laws against the limitless fantasy of the transgression, Beg thought. He sat down and placed his hands on the table. ‘I have looked murderers and child-molesters in the eye,’ he said, ‘and the bizarre thing is that you can never tell. There are no special traits. There’s nothing that makes them recognisable. The only thing, perhaps, is that sometimes you notice something missing. You notice that you’re staring into empty space. How are you supposed to recognise the vacuum inside a human being? How can you measure it?’
‘They say that Rabbah bar bar Hanna once made a journey by ship,’ the rabbi said. ‘When the sailors saw a bird standing with its ankles in the water and its head reaching to the sky, they thought the waters were shallow and fit to refresh themselves in — until they heard a voice from heaven warning them not to enter the water; seven years earlier, a carpenter had dropped his axe in the water there, and it still had not reached the bottom! So bottomless, too, is reprobate man, whom you know better than I do.’
‘And then you’ve got the situations as well,’ Beg said. ‘The alcohol, the heat, the man who loses control. He has suspended his humanity for the moment; he acts like a beast, as a colleague of mine says. Later on, he looks back in amazement and shame, and thinks: That wasn’t me — that was the beast.’
He thought for a moment. ‘But personally, as far as I’m concerned … a new high point, or perhaps rather, a new deep point, is imitating a border. And then sending them out onto the steppes, knowing they’re going to perish there. Something like that …’ He shook his head. ‘No, I wouldn’t have thought that was possible.’
The rabbi leaned across the table. ‘Then you have forgotten what Amalek did …’
‘And what was that?’ Beg asked.
The rabbi recited the lines from the Torah:
Remember what Amalek and his tribe did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt. When you were weary and worn out, they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God.
He took a breath and went on:
When the LORD your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget.
‘Amalek attacked us when we were weakest,’ he said. ‘His name is a curse.’
For the rabbi, the past didn’t exist, Beg thought. It was as alive to him as the present; the low tricks of a tribal chieftain in the wilderness were reflected in the treachery of the people-smugglers he had just encountered. The day before yesterday, or three thousand years ago, it made no difference to him.
This mysterious timelessness overcame him, too, when he read about the lives of Moses, Aaron, and Joshua in the desert and knew himself connected to that in some mystical fashion. He was no longer so alone. Others had gone before him, just as others would come after him. Whether he would strap the phylactery to his arm each morning, he didn’t know. But with every word he read and every visit he paid to the rabbi, he sensed — with a certainty that touched him — that he was approaching his destination.
He didn’t know if it was allowed, but even more than to the Everlasting he was drawn at times by the desire to be immersed in the mikveh, the niche of stone deep in the earth, where the living water would renew his soul.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Akmuhammet Kurbankiliev
When they came to the edge of the city and realised where they were, the poacher began to weep. He couldn’t stop. The woman couldn’t stand to see his sorrow; the tears washed down her cheeks as well. It was like a contagious sickness: they infected each other, they were all crying now, their tears kept flowing. It had all been for naught. All of it. They had crossed the wilderness to a new country, only to discover that it wasn’t a new country at all — only the nightmare of the eternal return.
Right after seeing the boy at the psychiatric hospital, Beg visited the woman there, too. He pulled up a chair beside her bed. He heard three names.
The boy’s name was Saïd Mirza.
‘He told me it was Nacer Gül,’ Beg mumbled.
Nacer Gül, the woman said, was the man who had almost sent them to their death. Nacer Gül with his white BMW and his sunglasses that he wore even at night. Nacer Gül — the betrayer, the faithless one.
She knew Vitaly’s name, and the boy’s, but not those of the others. There had been no call for names.
‘You were already pregnant when you left?’ Beg asked.
A brief glare. She shook her head.
‘Who is the child’s father?’
She kept her eyes averted.
‘You don’t know who the father is?’
When she remained silent, he exhaled through his nose in disgust. ‘Then I see only … three possibilities, am I right?’
But although she told him all about the fake border crossing, Samira Uygun remained silent on two counts: the life inside her, and the death of the black man.
Beg bought cigarettes, a pack of chewing gum, and a couple of bottles of energy drink. He climbed the stairs to the third, because the elevator took forever to travel from floor to floor. Beg mounted, holding the railing with one hand. He needed to do something about the shape he was in, he thought — not for the first time. There was a little gym on the first floor. It was slowly filling up with broken office furniture and crates of empty soda bottles.
In the interrogation room he arranged the things on the table. He put the chewing gum in his inside pocket. He slid the cigarettes and plastic bottles around until he was satisfied. It was no mean feat to make things look as though you hadn’t thought about it.
The toothless man was brought in. Beg tried to estimate his age; he could have been forty, but just as easily fifty-five. The man was leaning over, so that he could reach his chest and scratch at it. His fingers clawed frantically at the fabric of his sweater. The handcuffs rattled. Beg looked on in amazement at how he los
t himself in his scratching, his eyes fixed on the floor, in a sort of trance.
After a while he seemed content, and sank back in his chair.
‘You ready now?’ Beg asked.
The man nodded. Beg pulled out the blue ballpoint. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Akmuhammet Kubankiliev.’
The tip of the pen remained hanging above the paper. ‘Run that by me one more time,’ Beg said.
‘Akmuhammet Kubankiliev.’
‘Why don’t you write it down for me yourself?’ He slid the pen and paper across the table. The man’s hand shook as he wrote his name.
‘Where are you from?’
‘Ashkhabad.’
‘All the way from Turkmenistan.’
‘From the madhouse.’
‘You’re a long way from home, my friend.’
‘The further the better.’
The man raised his left hand to scratch at his right shoulder. Man, this guy has it bad.
‘Fleas?’ Beg asked.
The man shook his head. ‘Skin condition.’
‘Ah.’
Forearms crossed at the chest, he tore at his upper body. Beg tried not to watch, but it was impossible. The hands dug at the sweater like starving animals.
‘Do you think you could stop that?’ Beg asked.
The man shook his head. ‘If I could …’
‘But?’
‘It went away for a while …’ He closed his eyes, as though trying to remember something. ‘I left that nuthouse so that I would get better. The further away I got, the better it was. The whole trip — never bothered me for a moment.’
‘And then?’
The man shook his head. ‘This. Here.’
‘What?’
‘Just the sight of that uniform, I start itching.’
‘My uniform makes you itch?’
Kurbankiliev nodded. ‘That, the walls, you people. Everything.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t help you on that score.’
‘That’s what I figured.’
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