Later that afternoon, the boy and the woman were taken from their cells to the psychiatric hospital, where they were to remain under lock and key. The doctor left dietary instructions for the others, and said she would come back the next day. The clicking of her heels echoed in the stairwell.
‘Tough lady,’ the warden said.
The news that really set the beehive abuzz came in around that time. In the transients’ baggage, a man’s head had been found. Only when a gruesome stench had filtered through the corridors and offices did they get around to searching the bags and finding the thawed head. Shielding their nostrils with an arm or a handkerchief, they examined the purplish-black, mutilated thing. It was wrapped tightly in plastic; and when they stripped that away, the nose and lips kept their flattened look. One corner of the mouth was curled up, revealing a pair of broken yellow teeth. The eyeballs had burst and emptied down the face. One man vomited.
When the commissioner came in, they all backed away from the table. Beg took the towel that was handed to him. The head had rolled over backwards. No matter what you did, no matter how you tried to steel yourself, you never got used to it. You could adopt an attitude towards it, but the inner shock could never be avoided.
Where the neck had been separated from the body, you could see rough incisions.
There was nothing but a head; they found no other body parts.
A head, damn it, Beg thought. Who goes around carrying a severed head? A pitch-black, malignant thing. It looked like a cancer. It stank like a cancer, too.
Was this a black man, or had the colour been caused by decay? There weren’t many blacks in this part of the world. Conditions here were not favourable for them. If one did happen to come to town, he was beaten up all the time. A black DJ at the Tarot Club had been stabbed on the street. Black people didn’t have an easy time of it around here; they didn’t stick around long.
Beg examined the head carefully — the wounds on its head and cheeks, the shattered ocular ridge. The cold and the plastic’s tight grip had slowed the decomposition, but from now on it would go quickly. It wasn’t until he got to the hall that he took the towel away from his face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT. This shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and thee
Beg had fallen asleep while reading the directives that the Everlasting had given His people. He had resolved to read everything worth knowing, and then decide whether to be a practising Jew or simply a Jew by birth. He lived in the naïve hope that the answer would emerge of its own accord from all those books and documents. It was a Herculean task. He read slowly, not wanting to miss a thing; everything was potentially important for his final decision.
And now he had fallen asleep above the third book of the Torah. An odour of mould and incense rose from its pages. With pleasure, he had read the accounts of the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The sun of the Holy Land burned on his face, he heard the bleating of sacrificial goats, and he laid his head to rest on a stone.
But Leviticus did not hold his attention for long. The Eternal had been fairly detailed in His directives; He left nothing to chance. It was his tough precision that had rocked Beg to sleep. A trail of saliva dangled between his lips and the tabletop. His breathing was laboured, and it was the discomfort that finally woke him. On the silent TV screen, a man in drag was being laughed at by an audience with wide-open mouths. What was it that made everyone so wild these days about a man dressed as a woman? In how many shows did that pop up? The one-man carnival, that failed clown, loud and boorish, the born victim. He was a punching bag and a scapegoat — you could hit him and abuse him as much as you liked, he shrieked and writhed, but seemed essentially immune to the violence done him.
It was past eleven. Beg wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He walked over to the television. His Achilles tendons had started hurting recently whenever he got up. They seemed to become too short in his sleep; he was afraid that one day they would tear off completely. He turned on the sound, and the room was awash in laughter. The transvestite ran through the studio, but before he could disappear into the wings he was seized by a bodybuilder in a ridiculous gym suit. The roughing-up began all over again. ‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen!’ the host cried. And then, leering at the camera: ‘Or should I say lady and gentleman?’
Again, the laughter came rolling down from the gallery.
Sometimes Beg thought that the need for cruelties and the perverse delight at the other’s expense was part of being an impoverished people that had suffered a great deal itself. The pain of others was a distraction from one’s own suffering, from existential worries. But Koller had told him that in Japan there were much crueller programs on TV. He had seen a few examples on the Internet — and the Japanese were a civilised, prosperous people. Nowhere else in the world, said Koller, did people laugh so loudly at someone else’s pain. That was the end of Beg’s theory: tested against reality, it collapsed like a bad soufflé.
Brushing his teeth, he looked at his face in the mirror. He rolled his eyes and opened his mouth. He turned his head as far as he could to the left and to the right — everything was still working. That was all you could say about it, though: everything was still working.
The coroner’s report had come in late that afternoon: the head they’d found was, indeed, that of a black man. Forensics noted that the insect damage showed the head had been outside for quite a while. Exactly how long, it was hard to say. What was certain was that the cause of death — here it came, Beg thought, his favourite formulation — was violent impact with a blunt object.
Tomorrow he would interrogate a couple of them, whether they were in a weakened condition or not. They’d been detained as a public nuisance, but with the addition of a crime the temperature of the case had skyrocketed.
In bed, his thoughts were still jittery and alert. The crime had brought them together, or kept them together. They had carried the evidence, a head, along with them. It reminded them of the crime. Why did they want to be reminded of that? What was the point? The question kept him awake. His eyes wandered over the ceiling to fix on a pale spot, which could be a kilometre away, or just as easily a couple of metres. They might have known that the head would be found, at some point, one day. They had accepted the consequences. The consequences were subordinate to another, greater interest. The head symbolised something; it stood for something.
In the course of the years, Beg had come across abnormalities in all shapes and sizes. A moment always came when someone stopped thinking about the consequences of his actions, the punishment that awaited, and simply followed his own nature.
Last winter, two drifters had eaten a dog. You had those who saw the animal as a pet, others who saw it as a tasty morsel — the boundaries were not the same to everyone. The dog’s owner had gone into the park and split the drifters’ heads with an axe. He had submitted calmly to his arrest; he was prepared to pay the price for following his own nature. ‘They should have kept their dirty fucking hands off of my dog,’ he’d said, and everyone at the stationhouse knew what he meant. The world was a hard place; children and pets represented a kind of final innocence — you kept your hands off that.
The general sympathy for the man with the axe worried Beg. You knew how close chaos really was when you approved of someone splitting another person’s skull because they had eaten his dog. ‘Hold your thumb and index finger so close together that there’s barely any light between them, and you’ll know how close the chaos is,’ he’d told his people. They were there precisely to preserve that little bit of light, that tiny crack — to whatever extent that was possible.