He shared his food with me, the tall man thought, all the food he had. He is a great and noble person. He has a heart like a whale. I’m not worthy to see the light in his eyes.
His bottom lip quaked, and tears ran down his face. The Ethiopian had shown him the light of his soul, a bright light; he felt how it had crossed over to him, the way you light one candle with another. He covered his eyes with his hands and sobbed. Once in his lifetime, a person weeps because he sees through himself completely. Once in his life, he weeps because he knows he is beyond salvation.
The black man put the can back in his satchel and looked around. He didn’t seem to notice the other man’s fit of weeping. He stood up and checked his pockets. The food had done him good; he blinked contentedly at the huge, black clouds over the steppes.
He licked the knife and held it out to the tall man, who snatched it out of his hand.
When the tall man awoke with a start from the delirious ravings of his dreams and looked up at the white moon, he prayed that his tribulations might end here. It had rained a bit, and the moon hung motionless behind thin, restless tatters of cloud. His gratitude towards the black man turned to poisonous resentment. He was ashamed of his thoughts, but could not shoo them away. Within the space of a few hours he had prayed to live on and he had prayed to die — it was between those polar extremes that he drifted, his long legs in a splits between living and dying. But he did not die; not yet.
Around him lay the things he had scavenged during the long journey — the metal lid, his helmet of rusty mesh, a long stick that he leaned on and which he had decorated clumsily with his knife. He leaned on it when he rose to his feet, his bones stiff and aching from the cold. The black man lay a few metres away in his circle of grass, his hands folded on his chest like a vanquished knight. He took a few steps. A crack of red light crawled onto the edge of the world; in surprise, he noted that he had come back to life.
With his stick, he poked the Ethiopian in the side. The black man had been to a wedding party in his dreams: whooping men had ridden horses into the big tent, women clapped and sang, he was happy in the scented smoke of the fire, and he had eaten as much as he wanted. He didn’t want to get up at all — he just wanted to lie there, where those things had come flying to him on weightless wings.
The tall man followed the trail, half obliterated by the rain. He was carrying only his little backpack. Everything else — the objects that had protected him from the rain, the flies, and the evil — had been left behind. He shuffled ahead, the grass crunching beneath his feet. He leaned heavily on his stick, no longer trusting his legs.
As he dragged himself across the steppe, the gadflies of his thoughts stung him. He owed his life to a pariah, to a man who existed at the edge of the group. Their lifelines had crossed and become hopelessly entangled. A debt had been placed on his skinny shoulders. The pale sun climbed in the sky behind him. There, too, somewhere, was the man to whom he owed his life. He did not look back.
CHAPTER NINE. The broken jug
Yehuda Herz is being buried on a cold, dry day; beside the grave is a mound of loose sand. A little further along, on a bench beneath a willow tree, the pallbearers sit smoking and talking quietly. From far away comes the crack of a hunter’s rifle.
The Jewish cemetery lies east of town. It is surrounded by low poplars. The wind blows through the branches, producing a soft hissing that does not disturb the silence. Here the Jews have buried their dead since time immemorial, on a plot of ground that once lay on the steppe far outside the city. Meanwhile the apartment buildings have advanced on it, pushing out in front of them a flood of kitchen gardens, sheds, and trailers.
Pontus Beg couldn’t come up with a good reason to attend Herz’s funeral, but he went anyway. Perhaps, he told himself, he felt beholden to Zalman Eder. It was at his request, after all, that the rabbi was now murmuring prayers of which Beg understood not a word. His caftan crinkled in the wind.
The coffin lay atop a pair of crossbeams, soon to be lowered.
Loneliness three times over, Beg thought. A dead Jew, a living Jew, and a policeman with one cold foot and a peeping in his ears. In the distance a tractor edged across the fields. Gulls and crows lit down in the furrows.
The tall, grey stones threw thin shadows. The mason’s chisel had hacked out texts in Hebrew, German, and Russian. Most of the gravestones were ancient; some of them leaned crookedly.
Beg shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Peering through his lashes, the pile of sand beside the grave looked like a sleeping bear. His mother’s maiden name was Medved —Russian for ‘bear’. The wind blew a tear from his eye. He wiped it away.
He had seen countless dead, but still he was awed by the feeling that the distance between him and the dead was as great as it was negligible. He had pulled frozen hoboes from the street, alcoholics who had drunk themselves to death, victims of violent impact with a blunt object (the coroner’s jargon, not his), and the old and lonely who were found dead in their homes. Every dead person he saw, he regarded as a preparation for his own death — the crossing of the final border.
The rabbi held out his shaky hands. He invoked heaven, compassion, mercy. This fallible being, too, was a child of God; this person, broken like a jug.
The bearers rose to their feet, a disorderly troupe. Only when they approached the grave did the ceremonial descend into their movements. At the pit, each of them took one end of a rope. The beams were pulled away; the ropes stood taut. Slowly, the coffin floated into the depths, the tassels of Herzl’s prayer robe sticking out the sides.
‘But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of days.’
Beg bent down stiffly and tossed a few spades of sand onto the coffin.
The rabbi wandered slowly amid the graves. Sometimes he stopped beside a stone. Mendel Kanner. Alexander Manasse. He’s taking a walk through the past, thought Beg, a few steps behind him. He’s visiting his friends. The grass was high; the steppe had advanced to between the graves.
Zalman Eder turned to look over his shoulder. ‘I’ll be the next to go. At home in the house of the living.’
A few rows before the end, he stopped again. ‘My wife, blessed be her memory,’ he said, pointing at the stone in front of him. ‘This is where I will lie. Remember that, if you please.’ He laughed quietly, raspingly.
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.’