These Are the Names (21 page)

Beg couldn't tell him who they were or where they came from; they had barely spoken a word yet.

‘So they're not talking? Is that what you're saying, Pontus? Foreigners, man, they don't understand you. That's the problem with people like that. In their own language they might even be kind of useful, then you can at least tell them to do something, but otherwise … Picking bell peppers, that's about as far as it goes.'

In the background, he heard a man laugh. When you've got power, Beg thought, you always make people laugh. Koller and Oksana often laughed at things he didn't mean to be funny.

‘You're not much of a talker either, are you, Pontus? Maybe we should go fly-fishing sometime, you and me, get to know each other better. What do you think?'

‘I'm not much of a fisherman.'

‘It's not just about the fishing — it's all the other things that go with it,' the mayor said. ‘I know the best spots. Trout, man, you've never seen anything like it. You ought to see me, hooking one after the other. Those guys who go in for sport fishing, we make them look like amateurs, I'm telling you. Or are you more of a hunter? You go in for the heavier artillery? Then we'll go shoot a bear. You ever shoot a bear, Pontus?'

Beg wondered what the mayor was up to the whole time. Was he chopping wood with his free hand?

‘I've never shot a bear,' he said.

‘Aw, man, I've shot so many bears, I've lost count. I just might be the best bear-hunter you ever met. I can think like a bear, you know. You have to be patient. Waiting. Waiting. And then waiting a little more. You've only got one chance to squeeze off a shot. A bear's a lot more dangerous when it's wounded. Where do you think you have to hit him, in the heart or between the eyes?'

‘In the heart, I guess.'

‘Yeah, okay, but where do you have to hit him — you know that, too?'

‘I don't know anything about bears.'

‘Okay, but where do you think you have to hit him?'

Beg said nothing. He looked out the window, at the narrow alleyway between two buildings. One single step, that's how long a passer-by lasted.

‘So, Pontus? Tell me the first thing that pops into your mind. Just say it.'

‘A man's life between heaven and earth is like a ray of light falling through an opening in a wall: one moment, and then it is gone.'

‘What's that?'

‘Gushing and bursting, everything comes to the fore; slipping and flowing, it all recedes. One change and he is alive; another change and he is dead.'

‘Have you been drinking, Pontus? I'm asking you where you have to hit a bear.'

Beg glanced at the receiver. ‘I'd hit him straight from the front. In the chest.'

‘Wrong!' Blok crowed. ‘That's what everyone says who's never shot a bear before! From the front you've only got a 15-to-30 per cent chance of taking him out right away. Then you're in trouble, buddy. Aim for the shoulder, above the front leg. Left or right, makes no difference. The chest cavity — heart, lungs, all at one go. Boom, bagged another one!'

Semjon Blok was his own standing ovation, Beg thought after they had hung up. He produced his own applause in deafening quantities. One ear to bellow his triumph into — that was all he needed to be happy. It was an extremely unpleasant thought, to go fishing or hunting with this man who ‘knew the best spots'. And what did he mean by ‘all the other things that go with it'? He sounded like a goddamn faggot.

It was snowing slightly: light, monotone grey. Oksana came in with his lunch — noodles and meat, and a glass of kvass. ‘No pork,' she said. She had accepted this minor dietary law as one of his eccentricities. To show that he had heard, Beg looked up from the notepad on which he was drafting a letter.

To the mayor, the honourable Mr. Blok,

In response to our recent telephone conversation about bears and fly-fishing, I would like to ask you to leave my first name unmentioned no longer call me by my first name. It is an annoying habit good custom among friends and family members to call each other by their first names, but as far as I know we are neither of those but for friends we do not know each other well enough.

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.