‘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.