‘Around the same time. I don’t remember exactly.’
‘And when you got back, Haç cut off his head.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You saw him do that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You were all there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Everyone saw it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How did he do it?’
‘With Africa’s knife. He found it in his pocket. It used to belong to the tall man, that knife.’
‘So why did his head have to be cut off?’
‘Ach.’
He flipped one of the comic books closed and put it back. ‘The woman’s the one who said that he dreamed inside my head, not me.’
‘And was that true?’
The boy lowered his eyes. Beg repeated the question.
‘Have you got a better idea?’ the boy said. ‘If you look at everything that happened after that? All the good luck we had all of a sudden? She said we had to keep him with us, that he would lead us and stuff. But we couldn’t take all of him along. So …’
Beg nodded. His understanding was not feigned; he understood their desperation. Their gods hadn’t answered their pleas. Deaf and mute, they had looked down on them. So they had replaced them.
‘He was still lying there,’ the boy said, ‘but don’t ask me why. Animals had eaten their way right through his ribs. They picked at his liver, his organs. Blecch.’
‘Who beat his brains in, do you know that?’
‘I wasn’t there. I only found him.’
‘Who do you think it was?’
The boy shrugged his skinny shoulders. ‘Anybody could have done that. It’s not all that hard.’
Intuitively, they seemed to have realised that silence was the best policy, Beg thought. That way, all five of them were guilty, just as all five of them were innocent.
The boy leaned forward. He wanted to say something, but hesitated.
‘What is it?’ Beg asked.
‘Nothing,’ the boy said.
‘Just tell me.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Who?’
‘The black man.’
‘In a cooler. The same place where the dead girl is.’
‘Together?’
‘In the same space, yes.’
‘Oh, okay.’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘What are you going to do with him?’
‘Nothing. Bury him, after a while, I guess. If we can’t trace his identity.’
The boy shook his head slowly. ‘You people don’t understand … We want him back.’
Beg burst out laughing.
‘He doesn’t belong to you,’ the boy said. ‘He’s ours. We want him back.’ His black eyes glistened.
Beg had stopped laughing. ‘What are you going to do with him?’
‘We want him back.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
The boy’s upper lip curled in a sneer. ‘Tough shit.’
‘If you talk to me like that, I’ll take these along with me.’ Beg picked up the comic books from the bed and rolled them up. He had trouble disguising his disappointment. He had become fond of the boy. He felt compassion for him. Beg wished the feeling was mutual. Friendship with a child made you a chosen one.
We want him back.
Even now, the head was exercising its magic power; it was still keeping them more or less together. Maybe that explained his fascination, Beg thought, being so close to that. That he was witnessing the start of something. Primal ground. Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee.
There were too few of them, and the times were not suited to it, but in a more distant century it could have happened. Something new, a sacred mystery: blood, retribution, salvation.
The start of a sharply delineated faith.
And immersion, purification. Why not?
The snow in the treads of his patrol boots had melted into little puddles on the linoleum.
‘The woman had a child last night,’ Beg said after a while. He looked at his watch. It was December 19.
The sisters had told him when he came into the ward that afternoon.
The boy nodded. ‘I heard her screaming. They took her away.’
He sniffed loudly and scratched his leg under the blanket. ‘I didn’t know that was what was going on.’
‘Premature, but healthy. It’s unbelievable,’ Beg said. How could a skeleton bear a healthy child?
‘Can I have my comics back?’
Absently, Beg laid the little bundle back on the bed. The boy opened one and began flipping through it.
The baby still had no name, the nurses had told him when he came in. They’d asked how he was supposed to be registered.
‘Saïd Mirza,’ he’d told them. It was a flash of intuition, a hunch. They looked at him in surprise. He said: ‘You wanted to know what to call him, right? Saïd Mirza, that’s his working name. So write it down, already. Who cares if there are two of them?’
The nurse wrote Saïd Mirza on a sheet of paper and asked no further.
‘I’m going by to see her,’ Beg told her.
‘You don’t have much time,’ the nurse said. ‘She’s in intensive care.’
And so it happened that there were suddenly two Saïd Mirzas in the same hospital.
Saïd Mirza the First stared intently at his comic. Did he actually know how to read, Beg wondered. He could handle a slingshot, he knew how to plant corn and tend goats, but was he familiar with the written word? Who would have taught him that, up in those mountains? If he couldn’t read, there was no life for him outside his native village — washing dishes, perhaps, or lugging merchandise at the bazaar, but that wasn’t why he’d undertaken such a journey. He wouldn’t have risked his life for that, to be a drudge. It would be a real loss; the boy had brains. Without writing, without civilisation, he would be only a talented predator, suited for nothing but a life of petty crime. For quick scams and the occasional trouncing.
‘Do you actually know how to read?’ Beg asked.
‘Of course I can read,’ the boy said without taking his eyes off the page.
Beg went to the window. The park lay in white innocence at his feet. It was growing dark; the shadows were leaving their hiding places. Yellow light fell from the windows onto the snow in the garden. The trees stood white and heavy, taking a time-out. From behind him, now and then, came the sound of a page being turned; the rustling of paper wings. Later he would go visit the rabbi in his consecrated den, amid the moulding relics, and burden him with the things that were troubling his heart.
It looked as though nobody was lying beneath the taut sheet. There were dark rings under her eyes. Every gasp of breath sounded as though she was surfacing from the deep. Beg shivered involuntarily. She had gone to the very limit for the child she was carrying, and now she was going to die beneath that sheet. And she knew it; Beg recognised the look of the animal that senses its life slipping away. Despair and resignation flow like layers of cold and warm water in a single stream.
‘My son,’ she says, ‘where is he?’
He nods. ‘I’ll ask them to bring him.’
He goes back out into the hall. In the distance he sees a nurse, and he calls to her. She presses a finger to her lips in warning. He gestures to her, tells her to get the child.
‘We can’t …’
Beg shakes his head. ‘You have to. Now.’
‘The baby’s premature,’ the nurse says. ‘Seven or eight weeks too early! It’s very vulnerable.’
‘I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.’
‘Then it’s your responsib
ility,’ the nurse says, her mouth as sharp as paper.
A few minutes later, the baby is brought in, wrapped in a cotton cloth, only its little head sticking out like a doll’s — a waxen, pale little face, black hair in brush strokes against its scalp. It looks as though it hasn’t opened its eyes yet. Long, syrupy tears slide down the mother’s cheeks. She rolls slowly onto her side and takes the bundle in her arms.
Beg stays in the room with mother and child, deeply aware of his heavy, indiscreet presence. The woman makes quiet, soothing sounds at the impassive baby. Outside of this union, nothing exists. Beg averts her eyes as she bares her breasts, wrinkled sags of skin. She raises a nipple to the child’s mouth. The lips do not part; the baby is asleep. She wrings the nipple between his lips. Now, led by one of the first assignments given him by nature, he begins to suck; feebly at first, and then with increasing force.
The woman closes her eyes, and she smiles.
The baby starts crying weakly — a bleating, lonesome wail.
‘Shh, shh,’ the woman hushes.
When the child keeps crying, the woman looks up at Beg in a quandary.
In the hall, he finds no one. He comes back, empty-handed.
The child’s disappointment is unbearable; the baby is inconsolable.
‘Take him,’ the woman whispers.
Beg swears under his breath. ‘How …?’
‘Take him!’
Beg reaches out with his big hands and scoops the baby from its mother’s embrace. He holds it away from his body. What discomfort — how long ago was it that he last held a child?
Slowly, he raises the little boy to his chest and rocks it; he is a dancing bear, beneath coloured lights by the river.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Shabbat
More and more often these days, Pontus Beg looked at the grey sky of snow, and thought of God. This was a thought beyond his control, but not an entirely useless one. Firm faith, he felt, was based on cast-iron repetition. Repetition forced you to your knees.
He often thought only on the word ‘god’, because he didn’t really know how to think of God himself, the Jewish god of countless pseudonyms, nor did Beg know how He truly differed from the Christian-Orthodox god of his countrymen, other than in His special preference for the Jews.
He noticed that he had gradually come to imagine Him in a different setting — not the jubilant pomp of Orthodoxy, but the blistering heat of the desert; his god wandered among eroded rock formations, pillars of red granite, the restless plains of sand.
The rabbi had said that the Everlasting was not subject to questions of shape and definition. He was unlimited — a statement, the rabbi said, that limited Him, too, which meant it couldn’t be true either.
To his regret, Beg was unable to herd his image of godliness towards the immaterial; his god always assumed a human shape. Even more disappointing was that he seemed unable to think of Him without a beard. In the face of these childlike projections, he stood powerless.
Beg’s blood was what riveted him to the God of the Torah, which — as the realisation of being Jewish became more firmly anchored in him — also removed many senseless doubts. He was a Jew, consisting of one part coincidence and two parts resignation. He learned to pray in Hebrew, and entered into the exalted universe of repetition. He knew that repetition could summon up ecstasy, and that ecstasy brought the mystery just that much closer. He had no Jewish life in his surroundings, no exemplary lives. He had only his rabbi to follow, but the rabbi himself no longer held services, and had stopped sticking so closely to many of the directives. He was tired. The yoke of repetition had fallen from his shoulders, and all he waited for was death.
‘You will have to say Kaddish for me,’ he told Beg. ‘Those are all things I still have to teach you.’
‘You’ll go on living for a long time.’
‘Longevity is hardly a virtue. Spare me. Have you ever seen a happy old person? A contented old man? Age is a precarious business. It’s as though all the disasters are waiting to pounce on you at the same time.’
With his right hand he formed a claw that snatched at thin air.
Before the evening meal, the rabbi shuffled into the depths of the mikveh. Beg waited in the synagogue. The door to the bath stood ajar; a stripe of yellow light lay across the floor.
The curtain before the Sacred Ark hung in shadow. In the candlelight, the gold-and-silver brocade glistened. Angelic hands bore the Ark up to heaven.
From out of the shadows, figures approached him. Mother, why are you hiding from me? Why don’t you say something? Grandmother, where do we come from? But they passed him in silence — he sat in the pew, bent at the waist, his head in his hands. His fingers felt their way across the skullcap, slid over the seams where the cloth was hemmed in, the half-crumbled velvet. He felt so ridiculous at times, a bad actor before an audience of centuries — an audience that didn’t even deign to laugh in his face. Staring into the half-light like this, he was a Jew made of one part doubt and one part shame.
The door swung open. The rabbi bustled around the room first, and then after a while came and stood in front of Beg.
‘Aren’t you going in?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Into the mikveh.’
‘I can’t do that … I …’
‘Why not?’
Beg was confused. He’d thought that definitive proof of his Jewishness had to come first, before he could descend into the pool.
‘It’s the Shabbat,’ the rabbi said. ‘Lots of Jewish men enter the mikveh before the Sabbath arrives.’
‘I’d rather wait,’ Beg stammered. ‘I hadn’t realised that I could already … Better some other time.’
‘Whatever you like,’ the rabbi said. ‘There’s no obligation.’
Beg stared at the tips of his boots. He thought again about the time the rabbi had asked him how he cleansed himself of the world’s filth, how he became clean again. Then, before he had known about the holy place deep in the earth, he had still thought that some filth could never be washed away. Maybe it wasn’t like that.
But he wanted to wait for the right moment to undergo his immersion, perhaps until news came from the rabbi at Brstice (he had been waiting so long already). Maybe until he had stopped seeing his transition as a fraud.
The bread was in a basket. It was normal, unbleached white bread, not the usual braided kind. Still, Zalman Eder had blessed it. They ate soup, spoons ticking against porcelain, the rabbi bending over with his mouth just above the bowl. That was how they celebrated the start of the Shabbat. Beg’s lips had moved along with the song of blessing at the start of the meal. The rabbi’s voice grated; the melody hovered:
Shalom aleichem, malache hashores
malache Eilyon,
mimeilech malche hamlochim
Hakodesh Barech Hu.
If I hadn’t been here, Beg thought, no one would have known he was still around. But then the old man would still have been sitting here, by the light of two candles — a phantom, having grown translucent in his loneliness. One day someone would have thought about the old Jew, and they would have found him in his bed or at the bottom of the steps leading to the bath … and no one would have known that, with this, an end had come to six hundred years of Judaism in Michailopol.
For the second time, he helped himself to Chinese noodle soup from the terrine and said: ‘The woman died last night. Fortunately, I had a chance to talk to her — she wasn’t much more than a shadow. But her child seems healthy. His mother lived off of air and earth, she bore it all … I can hardly imagine it, it seems like too much for any one person. But she saw that it was good, that her child was going to live.’
‘Because of her sacrifice, the world started all over again,’ the rabbi said. ‘The Talmud says that he who saves a life, saves h
umanity. It actually says “a Jewish life”, but why shouldn’t that apply to the goyim, too?’
Beg thought about the boy-child who had cried so loudly in his arms and wouldn’t stop. Only when Beg, at his wit’s end, remembered about the nursing reflex in calves, how they clamped down and sucked on your hand with their slimy, toothless mouth — oh, that suggestive sensation, down to and including the shiver that ran through your scrotum — had he stuffed the tip of his little finger in the child’s mouth, and suddenly all was still. The woman looked at him, too exhausted for any expression. Her sharp cheekbones and pointed nose were already those of a corpse. She had come through the thicket of horrors, but had delivered her child safely to the other side.
Beg used his foot to slide a chair up beside the bed and sat down, so the baby could be close beside her. He slowly rocked the little bundle in his arms. Sometimes the woman’s eyes closed, but she forced herself to open them again. This was all the time she had with her child.
Finally, she lost the struggle to exhaustion, and slept.
Beg sat with the little boy in his arms and rocked him.
The rabbi had blessed the wine, too. Beg was not used to drinking wine. It pinched his cheeks from the insides. The level of the bottle descended quickly. Beg had slid his legs half under the table, and he saw the reflection of candlelight in the silver belly of the samovar. He said: ‘You told me that the Shabbat is also meant as a reminder of the flight out of Egypt …’
Fitfully, in a voice that sometimes raced ahead of his thinking and sometimes lagged behind, he talked about what was on his mind. Wasn’t it ironic, he said, at this very point, just as he was taking his first steps in the direction of the Everlasting, that something like this should happen to him? A group of people who had, in a certain sense, relived the journey of the generation in the wilderness, with nothing over their heads but the empty sky? They had fled from poverty and repression; the generation in the wilderness had escaped from the slavery of Egypt. They were different, not to be compared, but still the same. Mankind lost in the wilderness, looking up in despair: Lord, help us, protect us.
Lord?
He had no trouble imagining the despair of those who had remained below, when Moses failed to return from the mountain. The rebellion and the euphoria. The dancing and screaming and exorcism of fear in a wild rite.
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