His thoughts spun in ever-widening circles, until he fell asleep and dreamed things he would forget by morning. He never remembered his dreams.
In the morning, he showered and pissed into the drain. Only first thing in the morning did he piss as vigorously as he used to.
If he was converted, he would have to be circumcised. There was no doubt about that; the Everlasting demanded it.
This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised. And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you.
Abraham was ninety-nine when he received that order. He circumcised all the men in his household and then himself. The Everlasting wanted to place a brand on the bodies of his people. He called for blood and pain: the covenant was not merely spiritual; it was also physical.
What would Zita think if his foreskin suddenly disappeared? He could hear her disapproval already. The same way she couldn’t stand the table covered with books in the living room.
‘Look,’ he’d told her, ‘you don’t read this from front to back, you read it like this … you start at the back of the book.’
She looked as though she had just encountered a highly dubious sort of newfangledness.
The books served as run-up to the announcement that soon there would be no more pork eaten in his house, just as that announcement served in turn as run-up to a possible circumcision. He hadn’t told her about his meetings with the rabbi, or about the fact that he now belonged to the Jewish nation. Things like that had to be communicated one step at a time. Slow and steady seemed the best strategy. The head-on confrontation could have undesired consequences: ‘Come on, Pontus, I’m Catholic. I don’t sleep with Jews! You should know that!’
It made him uneasy. What he feared most was her dead mother. From the far side, the old cow whispered bad advice in her daughter’s ear. It was a sorry state of affairs when the dead started throwing their weight around over here. Let the dead see to the dead, the living see to the living.
He couldn’t afford to lose Zita. There were other women he could pay for — the Morris was full of them — but they would never fit as comfortably as Zita. They would have annoying traits. Gum-chewing. Sublime figures. Words he didn’t know.
He would not be able to stand their lack of interest.
Tina! Yes, Tina, but then she had quit the business. She had gone off and specialised in meatloaf.
When Zita came into his house she took off her shoes and replaced them with a pair of slippers she kept in the hall closet. She was as at home in his kitchen as she was in her own. She wiped down the stove and boiled water to make soup. The soup steeped as she cleaned the house, so that she and the soup were finished at the same time, a few hours later. Neither of them were in a hurry.
His uniforms hung in the closet, laundered and starched. She sewed the buttons on the waistband of his trousers (he wore suspenders and a belt, as though afraid that his pants would fall off), and every two months she put fresh mothballs on the shelves.
On the evenings when she stays over, the bottle appears on the table. The rest of the transaction takes place in a mild haze. She listens breathlessly to his stories about criminals and car chases, all of which she’s heard before. Sometimes he adds a new twist to the circumstances, the setting, or the events, making the story new again. The results amaze him, too, at times. Then they watch television until it is time to go to bed.
She withdraws to the bathroom and comes back a little later in a bright pink nightgown that reaches all the way to her ankles. She goes to the toilet and then climbs in between the sheets. He follows the same route, but much more hurriedly. She lies waiting patiently for him.
He turns off the light.
Now we hear only the rustling of sheets before the finding of positions, the brushing of bodies as they approach, the hurried reconnoitring in the dark, and the ‘Wait just a minute, Pontus.’ He feels himself becoming weighed down with desire again, a capsizing ship. Then his body is on hers, their bellies slapping together. Fumbling, he whispers: ‘What have you got on under there, woman?’
She says: ‘Ow! You’re not a dragoon, are you, Pontus?’
But he is a dragoon. A soldier returning from war, it’s been so long since he’s felt a woman’s body. He is the paramour of need, his deeds said and done in a matter of minutes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE. Restless legs
The interrogation room is on the third floor. The cast-iron radiators glow. The first prisoner’s file reads ‘male, nameless, age unknown’.
The man is alone in the room. He can’t keep his legs still. His legs are still underway, while the rest of his body has come to a halt in the interrogation room. His cuffed hands are resting in his lap. The hands are calm. They’re not going anywhere anymore.
When Beg enters the room, the man keeps his legs still for a few beats, but before the commissioner has had time to reach the table the jittering has resumed.
Beg sits down. He places a folder on the table and pulls out a few sheets of paper. He spreads them out in front of him, and chooses a black ballpoint pen from his breast pocket. He has red and blue ones, too. The ballpoint slides out with a click.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘First we need a name.’ He looks up. ‘Your name is …?’
The man looks and says nothing.
‘No name,’ Beg says. He takes a deep breath and leans forward. ‘My name is Beg,’ he says then. ‘I’m the commissioner around here.’
The man stares at a spot on the wall behind Beg. His shoulders are a clothes hanger for the jacket of his tracksuit. It’s hard to imagine what he would look like with flesh on his bones.
Beg has seen the washed-out tattoos on his body — the icons of the convict — and the tracks of the needle. That’s why he’s the first one to be interrogated. You can negotiate with junkies.
‘Okay,’ Beg says, as though picking up the thread of a momentarily interrupted conversation. The man doesn’t move. That he still has no name makes things difficult. You can use a name to flatter and to flog; it’s the start of an understanding. The game begins with a name — the negotiations. But no identification has been found on any of them.
‘We found the head,’ Beg says. ‘Which one of you was carrying it?’
Silence.
‘Was that your bag?’ He snaps his fingers. ‘Hey, do you hear me?’
The man’s eyes pull away from the wall for a moment, but are drawn back to it right away.
‘That’s where we’ve got a problem,’ Beg resumes. ‘Whatever you people were planning, I can’t judge that, but the head …’
The man says nothing, and now and again his eyes fall shut. It’s as though he hasn’t slept for years.
Beg recalls a sentence from a police academy handbook: ‘The victim is deceased when the head has been lastingly separated from the body.’
That ‘lastingly’, that was the thing. They had laughed so hard about that.
Beg scratches at a minuscule bump on the tabletop. They’ve been sitting across from each other for ten minutes already. It doesn’t bother him. If there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s remaining silent — waiting and remaining silent. He’s in no hurry.
The creature sitting across from him, Beg had learned at the academy, was thinking back over its sins. Louder and louder, the crime he had committed was echoing inside him. It looked for an opening through which to crawl out, to shout itself from the rooftops. Even if the crime had taken place in the deepest darkness, he was seeing it before him now in the clearest of light. There was nothing else he could think about anymore. You could almost see it taking place behind his eyes. His body seemed to do its utmost to drive out the crime, to be shut of the guilt; only the spirit was still resisting. But his body would betray him. It made the spirit ripe for capitulation.