CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE. Leah
The rabbi asked him which district his family was from. Oblast Grünewald, Beg replied. His mother’s family was from Brstice; that, as far as he knew, was where they’d always lived. The rabbi nodded. He had heard of Brstice; he would write to the rabbi there and ask for more information about the Medveds. Maybe that would produce definitive proof.
‘If that’s how it is, then that’s how it must be,’ he said cryptically.
For reasons he himself didn’t fully understand, Beg was giddy with happiness.
When was the last time he’d been so full of hope and anticipation? The question took him far back in time. Sergeant Beg — he had shot up through the ranks. He wore the decorations proudly on his claret-coloured lapels. He walked hand in hand with the girl with whom everything started. There were others like them on the promenade, but the limelight shone only on them. Below, along the quay, the dark river hurried to the sea. There were slow, glassy vortexes in the water, as though a huge beast was roiling just under the surface. In front of a café, on the pavement, a quintet was playing, the notes of the clarinet sounding like the good cheer of a swarm of sparrows. The heat of early summer had left everyone carefree and happy. She took him by the hand and said: ‘Come on, Pontus, let’s dance.’ He refused. The couple of lessons he’d had at the academy had not been enough to make him a good dancer. She took the glass out of his hand and simply said: ‘Come’. She led him along under the little lights in the plane trees. The bear danced; there was nothing she could not make him do.
She reached around behind and loosened his grip a bit.
‘Sorry,’ Beg said.
‘Close your eyes,’ she said. ‘There’s no one else here.’
He closed his eyes. Behind his lids the lamps slid by in a red blaze.
She had studied mining engineering; in Murmansk she had spent part of her university days in a factory lab where the mineral apatite was converted to superphosphate. The way she spoke those words — Beg had never heard music any lovelier.
Her father was chairman of the regional party council and managing director of a steel mill on the Volga — part of the new nobility, risen after the collapse of the old regime and the redistribution of all resources.
Woe to the lover who believes this enchantment to be his actual, his natural state; what an injustice that it should be denied him so often. How could he have lived without it? Now that the scales have fallen from his eyes, now that he knows the way it really is, he will never let go. From now on, this will be his life. In this blaze, in this daze, he will go on.
The smile on the lover’s lips says that he has plumbed an important secret: he is an initiate; the opiate of love has let him look behind the drab veil of daily life. This is the time of anticipation. The same kitchen smells still waft under his door, children still scream in the hallway, and above his head the neighbour listens to loud martial music, even though he is much too young to be a veteran. But all these things are already different now. Isn’t it true that it annoys him much less than it used to? Don’t the sounds already seem much less loud, and isn’t the stench of roasted meat and herbs from the Tadzhiki refugees next door somehow already less penetrating?
Twenty-eight years later — at another house, in another city — Pontus Beg sits at the table in his living room and stares at his reflection in the darkened window. A happy life, he thinks, is always marked by a certain anticipation, no matter what the Chinese sages may say about emptiness and the absence of expectations. Beneath rustling bamboo beside the rushing stream, it is easier to disengage than it is on the sixth floor, with the heaters gurgling and water rushing through the standpipes, carrying away his neighbours’ bowel movements. Under the table his stockinged feet shuffle on the carpet. His only memories of a certain hunger for life are accompanied by those of expectation and longing — the elation at yet another day. He, too, was capable of that once. No one can imagine it these days; but he, too, sang love songs when he thought no one could hear, and on occasion he jumped for joy on a deserted street.
Things like that happened a long time ago; he can barely imagine it anymore. After being driven out of paradise, he had — gradually, so that he barely noticed it — set up his life as a barrier against pain and discomfort. Suppressing chaos: washing dishes, maintaining order. What did it matter that one day looked so much like the other that he could not recall a single one; he keeps to the middle, equidistant from both bottom and top, although he is sometimes envious of the alcoholics and junkies with their trampoline lives, from low to high, high to low, on and on until they have no more teeth in their mouths and die a lingering, miserable death. He protects the citizenry from them. (He likes the word ‘citizenry’ — it summons up a world in which everything has its place, like the stars in the firmament.) The desperate plunder homes and shops, and rob passers-by at knifepoint in secluded places; they disturb the peace with their ecstasy and despair. He, Pontus Beg, defends the right to an undisturbed life in the middle, for better or for worse. The world is insane, people heartlessly pursue their own interests, and only the middle provides the guarantee of a modicum of peace and quiet.
Does he still have her letters? Of course he still has her letters. Four glasses an evening; he drinks no more than that. He doesn’t want to go stamping around the room on one cold foot and one warm, opening letters, looking at pictures, sighing beneath the false memory of melancholy. The alcoholic born of wistfulness. They’re the worst; Pushkin says so, too.
There had been other women before her. He had fallen in love at times. None of them kept him interested for long. One had stale breath; the other laughed like a hyena. He remembered bitter regret and disappointment in the face of the imperfect. It was such a very fine line.
From one day to the next, therefore, he started keeping his mouth shut. Only the absolutely crucial came out of it.
When he was silent, they talked. Oh, such questions!
What are you thinking about?
Why don’t you say something?
Why are you so quiet?
He saw their disappointed, drawn faces, the uncertainty eating away at them. But he remained silent. It was too painful. Let them draw their own conclusions. Followed by a lingering period of argumentation and feints, then it was over. He was alone at last.
Leah did not have stale breath. She didn’t laugh like a hyena. Nothing about her annoyed him. She was perfection. Eloquent and well raised, but with a certain wildness still, a spontaneity, that drove them to the darkened riverbank to make love. At night they listened to Radio Free Europe. It was illegal and exciting; he knew he was breaking the law, but how could this delectable girl do anything wrong?
Summer arrives. She gives him Eugene Onegin and First Love — he reads literature for the first time.
He is a country boy. His father works for the kolkhoz; in the late afternoon and early evening, they garden on their own land. A quarter of a hectare, they eat from it.
Pontus goes out with a sledgehammer and drives fence posts for all the farmers in the surroundings. His shoulders have become burly; his chest, broad and muscular.
When he walks into his father’s yard, the chicks go running to their mother and disappear, zoof-zoof, beneath her; clucking quietly. The hen ruffles her plumage and settles onto her haunches. She follows him with quick, choppy movements of the head. All those chicks are underneath her now; the young Pontus can imagine no greater sense of security.