These Are the Names (7 page)

Edzi Bogen, born at Lemberg.

The rabbi picked up a pebble and laid it on the stone.

They walked to the exit and closed the gate behind them, beneath the trees full of the whispers of souls left behind.

Beg drove him back to Polanen Street. Questions about this mysterious Judaism were on the tip of his tongue — Why had he placed a pebble on his wife's gravestone? Why did he lead such a reclusive life? — but the rabbi sat beside him in silence, his hands folded in his lap. It seemed unbecoming to question him.

As they drove past the old train station, the rabbi suddenly said: ‘You're a policeman …'

Beg looked over at him.

‘You see the filth of the world,' Eder went on. ‘Something else every day, I suppose. New things. The world is full of them. New things. The filth. You wallow in them, that's your job. But what do you do to cleanse yourself of the world's filth? How do you get clean again?'

Beg shrugged. ‘Questions like that … Maybe we try not to ask ourselves.'

‘What a load of rubbish! Questions like that come up in any sensible mind, whether you like it or not.'

‘If there's an answer …' Beg said, ‘the answer should be, if you're completely honest, that some filth can't be washed away. It sticks to you. It doesn't go away.'

The girl — this was the second time today he'd thought about her. She'd been found that spring, in a ditch beside the road. She had broken bones, she'd been beaten or thrown out of a car — the extent of the decomposition made it hard to be sure. All they knew was that her body, before or after death, had been subject to violence.

She'd been carrying a little backpack. There were pictures between the pages of her diary. They'd found socks, panties, and a bra in her baggage, along with a blue singlet and articles of toiletry. She had been travelling in summer. Maybe she'd been hitchhiking; in her diary, they also found tickets to a rock concert. There was no wallet or ID, so they were unable to identify her. She was between seventeen and twenty-five, the coroner estimated. A few cockled photos (wet and then dried up again) showed a girl whom they assumed was her. One of those pictures had been used for the flyers they'd posted, asking for information. No one ever responded. She had been in a drawer in the morgue for six months now. If no one came for her, she would be buried the next spring.

The face in the photograph was oval, with prominent cheekbones. Nordic. Her pale-blue eyes looked straight into the world, with the confidence of one who believes that something good and special is in store for her. Beg projected that face onto the dead girl, whose own face had turned black and been eaten away by small predators.

Sometimes he went awhile without thinking of her, and then came a period when she was in his thoughts often. With the dead it was just like with the living; some of them stayed with you; others, you forgot.

Whenever he was in the morgue, Beg would knock on the drawer bearing the label
ANONYMOUS WOMAN
, to let her know that he hadn't forgotten her.

The girl they'd found only captured his interest when he saw the contents of her backpack spread out on the table before him. There was something carefree about it that touched him: the little diary, her minimal baggage. He studied it for a while, even though he wasn't directly involved in the case. He could see her hitchhiking. She trusts the people whose car she climbs into. She has always, in some mysterious way, felt protected, certain that she would be spared. She is free; each day she travels down another road.

The pages of her diary were wet, and much of the ink had run. The words that were still legible spoke of her love for a boy named Yuri, of the death of her grandmother, of her worries about the world. Beg thought she was probably closer to seventeen than to twenty-five.

The suggestion of prostitution was one he'd rejected out of hand — they would have found condoms, vaginal spray, different underwear.

He waited there until Zalman Eder disappeared through the door at the end of the alleyway. Was that where he lived, beside the synagogue? And how did he live, the old man? In his imagination, Beg saw him kneeling in an empty and shadowy house of prayer, wandering through the corridors at night in search of the world that had passed away from him.

Beg was on the night shift. Oksana brought in takeaway. He stared out the window, at the narrow passageway between two walls that was his view; the blueness there was deepening. Oksana popped the top off a bottle of beer and took the lids off the plastic containers. On a plate, she arranged a landscape of noodles, meat, and vegetables.

‘Why do they say that a pig is an unclean animal, anyway?' Beg asked, half sunk in thought.

Oksana looked up, the serving spoon poised in midair. ‘Who says that?'

‘The Jews. Muslims, too.'

‘Ach.'

‘No idea?'

‘No … No.'

‘Me neither. Why would God create an unclean animal?'

Oksana stuck the spoon into the sauce and ladled it out over the noodles. ‘My mother always says that when it comes to God, you shouldn't ask why.'

‘Why not?'

‘Ha ha.'

Beg said: ‘There's nothing about a pig that … We had pigs at home …'

Oksana looked at him, but he didn't go on about his memories of the pigs on the other side of the fence, those patient creatures, so much friendlier and more expressive than most humans. That he had felt like screaming whenever they had hung one of them from a beam by its hind legs, cut its throat, and let it bleed to death in a rusty basin. But his voice had vanished.

CHAPTER TEN

Cold ashes

The Ethiopian stopped and pointed. He saw the others, still far away, little and sharply outlined like fidgety letters on a sheet of paper. They were shuffling on across the steppe. The tall man peered in the direction where the finger pointed, but saw nothing. Thirst foamed in his mouth. He gestured that he needed to take a rest; leaning on his stick, he sank slowly to the ground. Exhaustion had made an old man of him. He kept his eyes closed, sinking away into the darkness behind his eyelids, blissfully slipping out of the world.

A smack. He opened his eyes with a start — the black man was squatting down, leaning forward with a stone in his hand. He had crushed a lizard. He crept over to the tall man on hands and knees, and held out his hand. The tall man gave him his knife. Mumbling to himself, the Ethiopian cut open the reptile's belly and scraped out the yellow intestines. He wiped the blade on his pants and gave the knife back. The lizard he slipped into his coat pocket. Then he went and squatted again, a little further away this time, the stone poised.

To get one, you had to be fast. First, you had to remain motionless till the blood stopped in your veins, and then you had to pounce like lightning. The tall man had never succeeded at it. The black man was good, though; the poacher and the boy were, too. They knew how to wait — to see the little animal coming closer, its tongue flickering in and out, the pounding of its heart visible through the skin, the fleshy lids sliding down over its eyes — and then to strike.

This was a little one, not much use to them. You had to get the big ones, a few of them.

The tall man had a pleasant daydream — a big fire, fat hissing in the flames. Never before had he lived with such ease in two worlds, crossed so quickly from the world where his body was painful and his thoughts desperate to the domain of the dream, delirious and happy.

The black man walked behind him, as though to nudge him along, the macerated hermit of old. He hummed a simple, repetitive melody like a prayer.

Three lizards, that's what the black man had caught. Now his gaze was shifting around in search of fuel. He stuffed blown-away plastic in his pockets. When wrapped around a stick, plastic burned quickly; you could use it to get wet wood going.

A few times they had found low trees amid the hollows, most of them dead. In the parched bushes, the undergrowth, the poacher trapped birds and hamsters. When they moved on later, they were hung about with wood, gnarled branches, and trunks — bizarre camouflage.

Now the group had split apart. Out in front went the others: the man from Ashkhabad, Vitaly, the poacher, the boy, and the woman. They would try to catch up with them. He and the black man had agreed wordlessly on that. Instinctively. The dangers of the wilderness seemed greater than those of the group.

Long ago they had heard wolves. They'd never seen them, only found their spoor the next day. On a few nights the wolves had circled their camp, they'd shivered at the prolonged howling, the growling and yelping just beyond their field of vision. The poacher said that they were little wolves, that they had little to fear as long as they stayed together.

Now each of them knew what his fate would be if he fell by the wayside. No one wanted to lag behind.

The tall man felt light in the head; he had dizzy spells. The other one gave him some water, and waited until he could move on. He always wanted more, but was no longer allowed to hold the bottle.

They walked until it grew dark and the footprints dissolved before their eyes. On the ground, the black man spread the plastic sheet he used to catch rainwater with. Pointy sticks held the corners on high, and the water collected in the middle.

He built a little fire and drove a sharpened stick through the lizards. He turned them over and over above the flames until their skin turned black. The meat on the inside was white. The charcoaled skin crackled between their teeth. They ate them up, from head to tail.

The tall man looked at his hands in mild surprise, as though wondering where his portion had gone so quickly. The hunger growled in his stomach. He watched the black man eat. Even his lips were black. He was sunk in thought, his face shining in the glow of the low flames. Scars seemed to have been chiselled into his skin. The black man was a human like him, only it seemed as though the being-human had expressed itself with a difference, like that between a donkey and a horse.

His desperate gratitude had shrivelled, so that in the hidden place of his thoughts the black man had become more and more a personal servant, a slave; a haze of injustice hung around the last half-lizard he had kept for himself.

The malformation of his thoughts went creepingly. Yes, the black man fed him, but because he also took his own share, he was to blame for there not being enough left over. The black man helped him move along and supported him when he could go no further, but that also meant he was to blame for the way his earthly suffering dragged on. Gratitude and hateful contempt chased each other like minnows at the bottom of a pool.

How could he bear the black man's self-sacrifice? How could you come to terms with owing your life to someone? How could you acquit yourself of that debt?

The flames sank slowly into the ashes; the wood and plastic were almost consumed. The black man thrust the sharpened stick among the coals, and a flame leapt up. He cleared his throat and spat. The gob shrivelled and hissed in the embers.

In the light of the silent, white moon, the tall man awoke. He held his breath and listened — what had awakened him? He stuck his head out from under the plastic. The earth smelled of rain. Slowly he rose to his feet; the cold had crept into his bones.

The black man was asleep in his circle of grass. The tall man crept toward the plastic sheet; the moon glistened in the black water. Quietly, he dropped to his knees. He pulled down a corner of the sheet, so that the water flowed to one side. His lips to the plastic, he drank the sweet, cold water until it was almost gone. He swept away his tracks as he went back, and slipped into his lair. Only when the pounding of his heart died down did he close his eyes.

At first light they were already on their way to follow the thread that the darkness had severed. The tall man saw the faded footsteps that the others had left behind in the sand; behind him, the black man let the paltry remains of rainwater flow into the bottle. A cold, white mist hung over the land.

By midday they had found the others' camp: a little ring of blackened stones and the loose sand where their bodies had lain. They were catching up to them.

The black man sank to his knees and ran his fingers through the pale ashes. He sifted out the coals and put them in his pocket.

They followed the tracks. Perhaps they would find them before nightfall. So badly did they want to join up with them, they forgot how weak their position in the group was.

Later on, it rained. The tall, yellow tufts of grass seemed to give off a gentle light beneath the rolling grey clouds. The black man stuck out his tongue as he walked to catch some rain. He seemed refreshed and cheerful. Sometimes he spoke to the other man. The tall man shrugged, and the negro repeated his words more loudly this time, his yellow eyes fixed on him.

The tall man shook his head sadly. It was useless — they would never understand each other.

The black man had tried to tell him something about the journey, he thought, something about the weather or the can of food they'd devoured together. How could it be anything else? Who thought about anything else? The journey left no room for other thoughts. They had become people without a history, living only in an immediate present.