Later today, Blok will get his letter.
He has the prisoners separated. Isolation will make them emerge sooner from the spell that binds them.
CHAPTER THIRTY. Astro Boy
He follows the shadow of the psychiatric hospital to the entrance. Snow chirps beneath his shoes. The plaster on the walls is flaking — the building is suffering from psoriasis. The windows are tall and arched; the entrance is flanked on both sides by sandstone knights in niches, their faces almost obscured by their helmets. The realisation that Vienna’s influence once reached all the way to Michailopol never fails to amaze Beg.
The boy is in bed, in a bright, high-ceilinged room. A drip is infusing high-calorie nutrition into his veins. His skin has the dark hue of a Gypsy or an Arab. His head is on the pillows; he is asleep. The nurses have been spoiling him with candy and fondant hearts. On the bedside table is a bottle of Coca-Cola — the real stuff, not an imitation. He’d never tasted Coca-Cola before, the nurse said. They’ve stuck colouring-book illustrations of stags and pirates to the walls, even though he seems a bit too old for that. Their down-to-earth nurses’ hearts have been touched by his story. They know that he has eaten from garbage cans. News of the severed head has reached the hospital, too, but they can’t imagine that the boy — their fledgling — has done anyone any harm. The pregnant woman just down the corridor doesn’t seem that way to them, either. And besides, they were travelling with a group of men, weren’t they? Men are the bane of this world.
Beg looks at the boy through the little window in the door. Suddenly, behind other doors, a few crazies begin screaming at the same time — a zoo. The boy frowns in his sleep. The senseless cries of alarm cut through you like a knife.
The boy looks like he’s about to die of some ancient disease, he’s that skinny — translucent, almost.
‘Has he been talking?’ Beg asks the nurse.
She nods. ‘Sometimes.’
‘What about his name? Did he tell you that?’
‘No. But he said other things. We wrote it all down, like they asked. Nothing very special, though. That this is softest bed he’s ever slept in. And that he has a brother. He comes from a farming family. He’s a good kid.’
She unlocks the door and leads him into the room. ‘I’ve got a visitor for you.’ The boy looks wide-eyed at Beg. The nurse checks the drip, and then leaves the room.
Beg has brought along a few comic books, which he lays on the bed. ‘I guess it can get pretty boring around here,’ he says. The comic books are Japanese — they’re about Astro Boy, a boy automaton with a heart. Beg had flipped through one of them: Astro Boy fights on earth and in the cosmos against the forces of evil, and when he flies his legs look like the flame from the afterburner of a fighter plane. The boy snatches the comics and hides them under the blankets.
Scarcity, Beg thinks.
He slides a chair up beside the bed, but doesn’t sit down. Instead he stands at the barred window, his hands behind his back, looking out at a radiant white park. The north side of each tree is flecked with fine snow. Maybe, when his days on the force are over, he will become a gardener — a man with a wheelbarrow and a hoe. He knows a few things about plants and the seasons. His flowerbeds will be a comfort to the patients.
‘It’s been snowing,’ he says. ‘There’s more on its way. You people got in just in time.’
He turns around, walks to the bed, and sits down. The neutral coldness in the boy’s eyes feels unpleasant. Children sometimes make him feel inferior, as though he’s sold out by becoming an adult. Again the faint memory returns of the boy he once was at the weir — his thin, effective body, still devoid of both fat and memories, pinned in place between dive and impact. That’s how a fifty-three-year-old man looks at a boy of thirteen, from a distance as far away as it is close by.
These are things he can’t tell the boy in the bed, because he wouldn’t believe him if he did. In the boy’s world, grownups have always been the way they are now; earlier manifestations are too hard to believe.
‘What’s your name?’ he asks.
No reply.
‘Where do you people come from?’
Somewhat to his amazement, he hears the boy say: ‘I don’t know.’
He has a high, clear voice, almost like a girl’s.
Beg leans forward, his elbows resting on his knees. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? You know where you come from, don’t you?’
The boy shrugs his skinny shoulders — a sparrow’s bones. Then he says: ‘I saw you when that man shaved off my hair.’
‘That’s right,’ Beg says. ‘I’m the boss at the police station.’
The boy runs his free hand over his shaven head.
‘You have no idea how filthy it was,’ Beg says. ‘When was the last time you’d washed your hair?’
‘We didn’t have any soap,’ the boy says, offended.
‘That’s true,’ Beg says. He clears his throat. ‘But now I still don’t know who you are or where you people come from.’
‘You weren’t there,’ the boy says. ‘So you don’t have to know.’
Beg grins. ‘I wish I could say you were right, but we found a human head in your baggage. Did you know about that?’
The boy remains motionless.
‘One of you beat that man’s brains in,’ Beg says, ‘and then cut off his head. That puts you on my turf, criminal turf. I want to know everything about who did it, and why. Then the rest of you can go home.’
A veil has descended over the boy’s eyes. ‘You weren’t there,’ he repeats feebly.
‘That’s exactly why I need you to tell me what happened, because I wasn’t there. The sooner you do that, the sooner you’ll be out of here. You don’t want to stay here, do you?’
The boy shakes his head. His gaze wanders across the wall.
‘You want to go home, don’t you?’ Beg asks.
The boy purses his lips and shakes his head almost imperceptibly. Somewhere a madman begins screaming. ‘Shut! Up! Shut! Up! Shut! Up!’ another one shrieks.
‘They scream all day and all night,’ the boy says quietly. ‘Why do they scream like that?’
‘That’s what crazy people do. No one knows why.’
The boy slides his feet back and forth under the blanket.
‘What’s your name?’ Beg asks. ‘You can tell me that, can’t you?’
‘No one needs to know that.’
‘I do. I need to. Without a name, I’m not leaving here.’
‘Nacer Gül,’ the boy says.
‘So your name is Nacer Gül,’ Beg says slowly. ‘And where are you from, Nacer Gül?’
‘You said you were going to leave.’
‘Whoa, wait a minute, I said I wasn’t going to leave without a name, not that I would leave with a name.’
He sees the boy’s amused surprise. The wordplay appeals to him.
‘So then when will you leave?’
‘As soon as I know everything.’
A sigh. ‘Not before that?’
‘Not before that.’
‘It’s nobody’s business. Only the ones who were there. I can’t explain it. You weren’t there.’ He looks at Beg. ‘So you can’t understand.’
Two bumps slide back and forth under the blanket at the foot end.
‘Don’t underestimate me too quickly,’ Beg says. ‘There are a lot of things I can understand. Even things that happened when I wasn’t there. I’ve been a policeman for thirty-four years, I’ve seen a lot. Really nasty things, but also really funny things. In fact, maybe I’m able to understand too much.’
‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?’
‘There isn’t really a list from bad to worst—there are just some things you forget, and other things you keeping thinking about.’