The dogs barked; they came running up to him. Xavier petted them. He had named them Saul and Jacob. There wasn’t enough water for the dogs; their tongues were hanging from their mouths. Crazed with thirst, they jumped up against him, but he pushed them away. “Go on,” he said, “I’ll come to you in a minute.”
He wanted to be alone with Awromele.
But he had already been alone with Awromele for hours. His sense of time had abandoned him.
That same morning, he had phoned the leaders of Colombia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Mexico, Cambodia, and Kazakhstan, his most faithful allies. Each and every one of them had received unconventional weapons from ha-Radek. His final allies — there weren’t many of them, but there were enough. A common enemy, that was all you needed to form an alliance.
The leader of Hamas, he was among them, too. He had assured Xavier that the nuclear weapons given to his movement, which were now aimed at London, would be used at the appointed hour. Ha-Radek had had to do a lot of talking, but he’d finally convinced the leader that they had a common enemy, that they could not go on maintaining the status quo forever, no matter how agreeable that status quo was to some.
He dragged Awromele’s body over to a round table with a CD player on it. The music soothed him — Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Orff. Always the same music, day and night, the same music, so he wouldn’t have to hear the buzzing, the buzzing in his ears.
“Dearest,” he said, “we’re alone now. We’re alone at last. It was about time. You don’t have to tell me that you couldn’t say no. I know that, I know it so well. The way people know that truth is pain. But some of them don’t want to know that, some of them can’t accept it — that’s what’s driving them mad. They don’t understand that pain is relief. That’s why you should have stayed inside, here with me, in the bunker. Look what they’ve done to you. Now you can’t say yes anymore, either.”
He opened a cupboard. There were baby clothes in it. Awromele had hoped to adopt a baby, a little Vietnamese girl, a baby no one else wanted. But the crisis got in the way. The ultimatum. The baby had never arrived, because of the international boycott — which hadn’t helped, of course. It had at best made a few people extremely rich within a very short period.
He bent down, took Awromele’s head in his hands, and pressed it against him. The head that had been beaten with garden utensils so long that you could no longer tell the back from the front. The crowd had tried to set fire to Awromele. The fire had been put out, but the head was charred black.
“I don’t feel a thing, Awromele,” he said. “Nothing, just like I promised. You don’t have to be afraid.”
He kissed the head, tasted the blood, the burned skin, the shoes that had stepped on it, he tasted the earth, in the end, that was all he tasted: earth.
“Awromele,” he said, “you taught me that loneliness was nothing to be ashamed of. Now I will teach others that as well. It has never been something to be ashamed of. And it never will be anything to be ashamed of.”
IN HER BERLIN APARTMENT, Bettina was packing a little suitcase. Everone had been advised to take along warm clothes to the air-raid shelter.
Bettina had been a junkie for ten years. Then she had kicked the habit. She had moved to Berlin and married a Turk. But they had never been able to have children. They had tried everything, absolutely everything, but it didn’t work.
She slammed down the lid of her suitcase. “Come on,” she said to the Turk. “Let’s go, let’s get there before the crowd does.”
KING DAVID WAS standing beside the CD player. The light in the bunker was unpleasant, too bright in some places, too dim in others.
On the side of a nuclear weapon in the Negev Desert, ha-Radek had had them paint the words “Greetings from Anne Frank.” It was pointed at the old West Church in the Venice of the North. On another weapon he’d had painted, “And from Margot, too.” That one was aimed at Merwedeplein.
Colombia had Spain and Portugal covered; those missiles had the names of various tin and gold mines painted on them. Hamas would see to London and its surroundings. Turkey had the Balkans and Southern Germany, Mexico had the United States, and Cambodia was homing in on France. And ha-Radek himself had two missiles pointed at Switzerland. “Thanks for throwing open the borders,” those missiles said.
He glanced at his watch. The top brass had never left his side, the deserters had come from the lower ranks. The fools, the scaredy-cats, the ignoramuses, who finally knew nothing at all about beauty, and therefore nothing about politics, either.
ROCHELE, who had married a puppeteer and had two children, was standing in her apartment in Basel. She refused to go to the shelter. “What good will that do us?” she had told her husband. “We’ll only end up eating each other.”
She had dressed her daughters in their prettiest outfits, their princess dresses. Then she had made crepes for everyone, and chocolate milk, not from a package but with real cocoa. She was holding the younger girl in her arms.
“Where is everyone?” the child asked.
“Everyone is at home,” Rochele said.
“Why?”
“Because this is an important day,” Rochele said. “Today the pelican is coming. Do you know what a pelican is? It’s a tropical bird. That’s why everyone is at home, so they can see the pelican.”
“Let’s go to the shelter now,” the puppeteer said.
She shook her head.
“We’re staying here,” she replied. “Come on,” she told her children. “Finish your chocolate milk.”
She sat down on the floor beside her children. There was a game of Copy Cat spread out on the rug.
“Who’s going to start?” Rochele asked. Then she looked at her younger daughter, in her party dress.
“Little princess,” Rochele said. “Come over here and sit with me. That’s what Mama likes.”
THE MOTHER HAD locked the door of her room. The nursing home had been evacuated; they had knocked on her door a few times, but in all the panic and commotion they had left her behind.
Although she had only been allowed to eat with plastic cutlery all those years, she had still succeeded in getting her hands on a bread knife, which she’d hidden beneath the sink in the bathroom. Long, long ago, when she had first come to this place.
Now she was crawling around in the bathroom, rooting around amid the old towels and dust, until she found the bread knife at last.
“There you are,” she said, sitting on the floor. “My most faithful sweet-heart. My lover.” She looked at the knife. “You’re so handsome,” she said. “You’re from Italy. You’re the prettiest object on this earth. Now I’ve found you, now I’ll never let you go again. Because the knife is warmer than a person.”
She didn’t undress. She couldn’t stand to see herself naked anymore; she couldn’t bear to look in the mirror.
Her lover took her with her clothes on, again and again, each time in a different place, at first only in the leg, then in the chest, gently still, and finally in the stomach, hard, with all the strength and love the mother had in her.
DANICA WAS STANDING before her collection of Snoopy things. She couldn’t decide what to take with her. Everyone had left the house, but she had stayed with her mother. Someone had to stay with her. Danica had decided that she would be the one to do that. Something that couldn’t break, and that wasn’t too big, either — that was what she should take to the shelter. But what? There were so many things in her collection that couldn’t break and that weren’t too big, either.