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.
CHAPTER ELEVEN. Whoosh
Beg had gone to his dacha, seventy kilometres outside town, to ready the cottage for the winter; he spread a few last barrows of manure over the garden plots, covered the well, and screwed the shutters over the windows. He enjoyed gardening. Sometimes he thought of himself as a landless farmer. As soon as he could, he left town to prune the roses and bind up the grapevines along the side of the house.
Now he was driving home in the dark. It would be spring before he went back again. A crate of bell peppers was on the back seat. On top of old newspapers lay the last of the pumpkins, muddy and overgrown.
Approaching an intersection, he slowed. The places they lay in wait were predictable enough — and indeed, on the far side of the road was a police cruiser, hidden behind the low stand of trees. Beg crossed the road and pulled up beside it.
The patrolman climbed out, and Beg rolled down his window.
‘Commissioner,’ the man said. He dropped his cigarette.
‘Everything in order?’
‘Certainly, certainly. Quiet. A quiet evening.’ A final plume of smoke escaped his lips.
‘Nothing special?’
‘No … nothing really. Quiet.’
More than anything else, his subordinates liked to hand out fines along the road. It was how they collected their take; it was their easiest source of income. Since the arrival of laser guns they were able to justify their extra earnings with technological precision. No one could claim any longer that they were making things up. It was there for everyone to see — digits told no lies.
‘Playing the lonesome whore’ was what they called this aspect of their profession, for that’s how it looked as they stood beneath a streetlight, monitoring traffic.
Beg had stopped doing that when he became police inspector, long ago. With a rank like his, it was unseemly, standing there in that dome of artificial light carved out in the endless spaces of the steppes.
A policeman had been gunned down once during a speed check. They found him along the side of the road, more dead than alive. His colleagues visited him at the clinic. He was deaf and blind, he reacted to nothing. Their eyes were constantly drawn to the hole where his nose had been.
He haunted their thoughts whenever they stood along a darkened road.
Beg had prohibited his men from setting up speed traps on their own — a rule everyone ignored. You collected more when you were alone.
Whenever one of the colleagues had a birthday, a standard joke made the rounds.
‘What are we going to give him?’ one of them would ask.
‘A microwave,’ the others would say.
‘He’s already got that.’
‘So a flatscreen.’
‘Has one.’
‘A new cell phone?’
‘Got that.’
‘What about a day off?’
In unison: ‘He’d never forgive us for that!’
There were variations on the theme, but that’s what it always boiled down to.
When Beg realised that he was quietly singing to himself the song about Rebekka and the roses, he clenched his teeth and turned on the car radio. Why had his mother taught him a Jewish song? He couldn’t ask her anymore. The song was so much a part of the obvious in his life that only now, at the age of fifty-three, did he ask himself how it had ended up among his belongings. He had an older sister who might know, but they’d lost contact a long time ago. She, too, had once belonged to the obvious things in his life — until one day they’d had an argument that was never laid aside, and the many years that had slipped in between had rendered the silence permanent.