These Are the Names (12 page)

The conversation with his sister had done nothing to satisfy his curiosity about the song. It didn't matter, he told himself, not really. It was just that it stuck out, like a loose thread — a bothersome thread that he couldn't help plucking at; an innocent pursuit, a petty diversion. An added benefit was that now, finally, for the first time in years, he'd spoken to his sister, the only person with whom he shared memories of the thick smoke from the burning haulms over the fields, the way it squeezed at your throat and blackened out the sun, of the sunflowers when the rain came, their heads hanging, like prisoners returning from war … She, too, remembered the song about Rivkele, and she, too, had no idea where their mother had got it from. The past had covered it up; both of them have to live with the realisation that there are questions large and small to which they will never receive an answer.

Koller came in to tell him that the trucking company had called. ‘They want their driver back. They're sending a lawyer.'

‘They've got every right to do that.'

Koller examined his boss's face, with no idea how to take what he'd just said. ‘What do you want me to do?' he asked.

Beg looked up from the monitor. ‘He can't leave without being booked, can he? Has he been booked? Has he even talked? No. So he's not going anywhere.'

Koller thought about the man in his cell. Just as bullheaded as Beg. Hard against the grain. Two furies. Beg would break his will with neglect and, failing that, by force.

When Koller came in the next morning, Beg said: ‘He's ready for questioning.'

When Koller came into the cell the driver was lying on his cot, in a foetal position. The sergeant slammed his billy club against the metal door, but the man didn't budge. He shook him by the shoulder, half expecting to find him dead, but the driver raised his head from the protection of his arms. His eyes had disappeared behind contusions and clotted blood. It had been by force, after all. A deep cut scored one eyebrow. Koller held up a glass of water. The man sat up slowly and took the glass. He raised it to his lips, his hands shaking. ‘We're going upstairs in a minute for questioning,' Koller said. ‘Then you'll be a free man.'

He took the glass back. A grimace of pain. Koller couldn't believe his eyes, but he had seen it clearly: the man shook his head. No. He pressed his split lips together. Koller admired his toughness, and said: ‘You're only making things harder for yourself. Not smart, not smart at all.'

The man looked up at him. ‘Injustice,' he said.

Later, Koller peeks around the corner again, into his boss's office. He keeps his hand on the doorknob, his body in the corridor. ‘The prick won't budge.'

Beg nods and says tersely: ‘Well, that's too damn bad.'

Koller withdraws from the doorway. He shuffles down the hall to his desk, tired as a field where armies have fought to the death. Tomorrow morning, he thinks, I'll call in sick.

Beg waits till Koller's shadow disappears from behind the smoked glass. Then, from the desk drawer, he takes the sheet of paper bearing the words that have been filling him with great excitement all afternoon. It is a page copied from the book
Behind the Names
, by Professor Janosz Urban. He'd found it in the little district library, run by a few old women. In grey light through the windows, they sit reading, their spectacles bound behind their necks on beaded metal cords. When was the last time he'd been in a library? It was such a strange parallel world, so far removed from daily life.

One of the women showed him to the Genealogy shelf. The book by Professor Urban was old but unread; the glue along the spine cracked as he opened it. It was a study of the origins of the most common surnames — where they came from and how they had assumed their present form. Beg followed a possibility the way a hunting dog follows an old spoor. In the drifting moments before sleep, it had moved into position in his mind. Otherwise he had not taken the possibility very seriously; he had paid it little heed. But now that the trail had run cold in the person of his sister, this was the last resort.

He flipped through Behind the Names, looking for the M.

Markowski. Martyn. Maslak. Matula. Then came the name he was looking for: Medved — his mother's maiden name. Commonly encountered in large parts of Eastern Europe, it was also used as a nickname:

MEDVED;
bear. Referring to a large, strong, and clumsy person.

In some cases a
reductio
of the Ukrainian or Byelorussian
Medvedev
. Also Jewish. (Ashkenazi).

Sitting at the desk, his eyes were drawn again and again to the little phrase that closed the lemma so nonchalantly. Also Jewish. This was what caused his excitement, what made his ears burn. Also Jewish …

He is no specialist in onomastics, no genealogist either, but he thinks now that his mother was an assimilated Jewess who had hidden her Jewish roots — except for a nursery song and that surname.

He will go with this to Rabbi Zalman Eder. He will ask him what he thinks about it, about his discovery — for if his mother was Jewish, then he is a Jew. That much he knows, at least, about Jewish law.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Vitaly

Vitaly was born a cur and was bound to die one, too. In the meantime he pursued a lifelong strategy of violent intimidation, bluff, and sarcasm, or, if the other person was stronger, of sly opportunism and avoidance. No, there was not a lot of good to be said about Vitaly, except perhaps that he had survived thus far. Every scar told a story. Here a knife, there a baseball bat; the fractures from being beaten and left for dead. But he was alive, a damaged man, capable of no feeling other than sentimentality.

His territory was the city, the human clot. He needed it the way a parasite needs a host. The other person meant nothing to him save the opportunity to reap a benefit. If he remembered your name, it was time to watch your back.

Within his social class he was among the success stories. In his world, every year you aged was a victory over circumstances. Many like him had died in the mouldy cellars of wrecked buildings that had never been cleared after the Great War; they had gone mad from glue, speed, and heroin, died of
AIDS
, overdoses, and methyl spirits — in short, the usual tableau of life in the gutter after the empire's fall.

Vitaly realised early on that it was better to be a supplier than a customer. He was an addict, true enough, but he kept his wits about him. He carried a pair of pliers at all times. Those who welshed on their debts had their gold teeth yanked out. Those without gold teeth had a finger cut off. They were allowed to keep the finger as a souvenir.

He himself had lost two fingers after stealing from the big boss. Weeping and writhing, he had declared remorse, but a few months later he stole a kilo of heroin, sold it to someone the same day, thought in vague amazement I really am incorrigible, and hightailed it out of town.

In Nacer Gül's truck he had crossed the border and knew, like the boy, that he could never go back to where he came from — the only road lay straight ahead.

Along the way, he kicked his habit. Which explained his chronic rotten mood.

He had sores on his legs from vitamin deficiency, large bruises where the needle had entered — on his arms and groin mostly — and inky blue clouds beneath the skin. Shivering in the truck, he had occasionally thrown up bile. When they left the trailer, he had walked away from the others and vomited his guts out.

The driver pointed them in the direction they had to go, westward. Two or three hours further, civilisation was waiting. Along the roads were checkpoints, guard posts; better to arrive on foot and then spread out through the city.

Trails of mist floated over the flats. A little later, a reddish-blue stripe of light appeared on the horizon behind them; the wavering, ethereal purple of dawn was overtaking them. They were lightheaded with exhaustion and euphoria, unsure of themselves and happy. It would not be long before they entered the new world. The sun catapulted into the sky, the coolness of the morning yielding to its immediate heat. None of them had brought water. In silence they walked beneath the hot, open sky, their eyes red from peering at the horizon where their dreams stubbornly refused to materialise. They had already been walking for much longer than the man had said.

Doubt struck — first soundlessly, but soon openly. ‘We've been screwed!' one man shouted.

His words were received with relief. Now they could set off against their worst fears. ‘No!' they said. ‘We just went the wrong way. We have to go there!'

They all pointed in different directions.

Everyone talked at the same time now, their ears attuned only to comfort and affirmation.

‘What did you see?' they asked the boy. ‘What exactly?'

‘Barracks,' he said, startled. ‘The dogs. And soldiers. They were wearing pistols here.' He slapped his hip.

‘What else?'

‘Lights, cars. How should I know?' All the eyes turned on him made him shy.

His answers reassured them: he had described a border, no doubt about it. The driver had pointed them in the wrong direction, that was all.

On purpose, one of them figured.

He didn't know any better, said another.

Some of them said: ‘We need to go back to where we started, then we can follow the trail back.'

Others were against it: ‘We've been walking all day! If we keep going straight, we have to end up somewhere!'

The black man kept his distance from the bickering. He stared across the flats, his chin held high, as though he saw things approaching that were still invisible to the others. The boy couldn't keep his eyes off him. The Ethiopian was the first of the wonders that awaited him. The black man's kinky hair was drab with dust; no one knew how long he'd been on the road. Did he himself have any idea where he was going? Who had shown him the way? And how had he ended up in their company? With every new question, the mystery deepened. He was a fairytale figure, a mysterious transient, but whether he was a force for good or for evil, the boy had no idea.

There was yelling behind him. To go on or to go back, that's what it all came down to. A couple of men strode off ostentatiously to the west. ‘There's nothing out there,' they shouted over their shoulders. ‘It will be the death of all of you. Suit yourselves!'

The couple followed reluctantly. Then the woman and the boy.

Two men went in the other direction. No one followed them.

Those who headed west bunched together again to form a group. The black man, too, had joined them, the boy saw when he looked around.

These things had happened endlessly long ago. Just as they forgot the individual days, so they forgot those they had left behind on the plains. The woman who had mourned for her abandoned suitcase was given a grave; her husband dug it with his hands. The others, they had simply left where they lay. The cares of the living were greater than those of the dead.

What did they know about Vitaly? His tattoos spoke of a life on the fringe; his mannerisms, of a city boy, rough and talkative. You didn't want to know too much about him, out of fear for what might show up.

He was the first to rob a corpse. The next day, he had an extra pair of shoes hanging around his neck. A disgrace, some mumbled; some turned their backs on him. The next slacker, a man who could no longer struggle to his feet, was robbed by three of them very early in the morning. They had stood looking at him for a while, at the way he wriggled in the dust. ‘Help me, would you,' he had said quietly. ‘It's no problem … once I'm on my feet.' He fell back again, staring up at them in mortal fear. ‘I can … I can,' he panted. They pounced on him — Vitaly, the man from Ashkhabad, and the tall man. The latter twisted the victim's head to one side and held his hand over his nose and mouth. The others stole his coat and shoes, and the money and valuables from his pockets. Lighter. Money. Cigarettes. The body struggled with the strength still left in it, the assailants snorted and cursed, and then it was over. The predators took to their heels.

A half-naked body lies on the steppe. Tears dribble from his eyes, trickle down past his ears and into his hair. The sun climbs in the sky. Red light shimmers behind the closed eyelids. Flies wander across his flesh. They plant eggs in the corners of his eyes, in his ears and nose. They walk over his lips; the man weakly tries to blow them away.

When he dies that afternoon beneath the high, hellish sun, all manner of invaders — yeasts, fungi, and bacteria — begin proliferating on the corpse. The next morning, the fly eggs have already reached the pupal stage; maggots swim through the subcutaneous tissue, their food. The body has become the stage for a bacchanalia, converted into energy by micro-organisms that reproduce at lightning speed, by thousands and thousands of maggots that drill their way through the softened tissues, until the little red fox comes and eats its fill. The body has become a marbled purplish-blue; the skin is already separating from the bones. His lips are eaten away. He grins obscenely at the expressionless sky.

Now Vitaly is weakening, too, after the fight for the woman he has lost to the man from Ashkhabad. The sores on his legs are open, bandaged with strips of cloth that he sometimes rips away with a shriek when they become melded with the flesh.