‘There,’ Beg said.
The rabbi slid his reading glasses down from his forehead and mumbled: ‘Old man, keep yourself together.’ He bent over and read the word in the book that Beg held up for him. ‘Also Jewish, indeed,’ he said. ‘Ashkenazi, um hum. High German.’
He looked up. His washed-out blue eyes slid over Beg’s face. ‘Your mother received her surname from her father. That doesn’t mean anything. If her mother was Jewish, then she was Jewish, and so are you. What interests me is your maternal grandmother — if she was Jewish, then you are, too. What do you know about your grandparents?’
‘Not much. I never met them. Patriots, my mother said. My grandfather died … the last year of the war, on the Neisse, the last big offensive. My mother was raised by her mother. My grandmother married again, but I don’t know much about her second husband … I can’t remember him so well. An officer, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘How can you live like that? Without any history? We Jews … we’re touchy enough as it is, and our memory goes back four thousand years! Some people … they don’t care about where they belong anymore. They hide it away, they don’t talk about it, and when they die someone suddenly says: “Shouldn’t we be giving him a Jewish burial?” General consternation, no one knew, all this time. Why? There are so many reasons. The Eternal not only blessed us, he cursed us, too.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘What do you want to do with this knowledge, anyway? A Jew, a Gentile — does it really make any difference to you?’
‘Yes,’ Beg said resolutely, without knowing what else he was going to say. ‘There’s a difference.’ And, after some hesitation: ‘Even though I couldn’t tell you what it is.’
To arrive at an answer, he needed to delve deeper into himself than was his wont. He had a sneaky feeling about what he would find there — the loneliness to which he’d grown accustomed, like having a cold foot and a peeping in his ears. Long ago he had decided to tolerate life and demand from it nothing that was beyond his own capacity to fulfil. Eastern schools of thought advanced resignation as a way of life, too. But a seed might sometimes sprout, even in a crack in the pavement — it shouldn’t have been there, yet still it grew, its roots stuck right through the concrete …
It had become a longing, to know where he came from.
‘There’s no hurry,’ the rabbi said. ‘The only right answer is the answer at the right moment. It will come of its own accord.’
He stood up and shuffled to the sink. His hands shaking, he poured himself some tea concentrate and added hot water from the samovar. Blue veins lay beneath his thin, yellow skin. Long nails. Liver spots on the backs of his hands.
‘We’re going to need a bit more — documents, perhaps. Something irrefutable. Paper is the best proof. Can you get hold of documents?’
‘What kind of documents?’
‘Something that proves you’re descended from Jews. The problem is that the system here keeps track only of the paternal line. That can complicate matters.’
The rabbi asked whether Beg would like to see the synagogue. He shuffled out in front of him, across the grey tiles. The place looked like an underground bunker complex where the sun never shone — a phantom realm where you became less and less a body and more and more a shadow, an erased pencil stroke. The rabbi stopped in front of a door, felt around under his coat, and pulled out a bunch of keys. He held them up to the light of a bare bulb and ran through them one by one until he found the right one.
‘Wait here for a moment,’ he said.
He came back with a yarmulke. ‘Put this on.’
Beg wormed the thing onto the back of his head and followed the old man inside. The high, open space was a hallucination — after the darkness, it was as though the heavens had opened. The pillars bearing up the roof were inlaid with royal blue and gold mosaic tiles; the late afternoon light fell through high windows. The smell was of a space no longer animated by any human presence. The wooden benches and cabinets along the walls were hung with webs of grey light. The rabbi, his hands behind his back, stood looking around, a tourist at an antique ruin. Beg walked past the podium in the middle, a cupboard draped with curtains, and the stone steps leading to the platform above it all. He knew nothing of what had been said and done here, in this mysterious world where the memory of a journey thousands of years old was kept alive. This, then, was where that journey ended, and there stood the last traveller, waiting for him to get his fill of looking.
The rabbi gestured to him. They passed through a door and down a narrow corridor. At the end was yet another door. He opened it; behind it, all was darkness. When the light clicked on, Beg saw a landing the size of a little room, with more wooden benches along its walls. It resembled a dressing room. The rabbi led the way down the stone flight in front of them. The steps were worn hollow. Deep in the ground, a long rectangle had been hewn from the rock — a bath beneath a brick masonry arch. And standing motionless in the basin: chimerical, clear water. The steps disappeared below the surface and on to the bottom of the bath. It was a descent to a place that seemed more vital than the synagogue itself: the sacred heart of a mystery cult. The light from the landing above reflected off the water’s surface. Beg would have liked to touch it, to set it in motion, but it would scald his unclean skin, as punishment for that act of blasphemy.
Water trickled down the walls. The grey stone gleamed.
‘The forefathers built the house on a source of living water,’ the rabbi said. ‘Like Moses, they struck it from the rock.’
Here a Jewish man or woman went down the steps, naked and alone. There was to be nothing between the body and the water. No clothing, bandages, jewellery — even the paltriest crumb under a nail was to be removed. Only then were you cleansed.
‘A sort of baptism, in other words,’ Beg said.
The rabbi looked up at him, displeased. ‘Those three little drops of water! You have to go all the way under, all the way! And not just once — again and again. How else could you be purified?’
In silence, they looked at the glassy water. Deep in the earth was where they found themselves; the world was far away. The rabbi’s voice sounded quiet now. ‘It’s not a baptism; it’s not a bath in the sense of soap and water. He who is immersed in the mikveh becomes a new person. He gets a new soul.’
A drop fell. Beg’s heart cringed; it had been so long since he’d heard such a serene sound. The ripple in the water died away quickly. He wished he could undress, go down the steps to the bottom of the basin, let his body go under, and cleanse it of the world’s filth. Even the filth that did not wash off, he would scrub that away, too. A new soul — there, deep in the earth, with this magic water, that kind of thing seemed truly possible. What a pleasant, comforting thought … To shed his old soul, that tattered, worn thing, and receive a new one in its stead. Who wouldn’t want that? Who would turn down something like that?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. The judgement
Vitaly bared his upper arm to display the wound. The boy turned away in disgust; the sore, covered in a green film, made him nauseous.
So the black man possessed powers. He’d suspected as much, always had. Yet he still hadn’t decided whether he was a good sorcerer or an evil one; harming Vitaly could very well be the act of a miracle worker. Mean dogs are there to be kicked.
‘He says he touched him there,’ the woman told the others. ‘That that’s what caused the sore. Something like that is … well, it’s …’ She searched for words, without finding them.
The boy didn’t respond; he hadn’t forgotten the slap. He looked around, but saw the black man nowhere. Just to be on the safe side, he would avoid him. And keep his eyes open in the meantime.