It’s quiet for a moment, then he says: ‘I often think about this one girl. What we think, what you could sort of tell from the things she had with her, was that she was hitchhiking. It was summertime; she was wearing summer clothes. They found her in a ditch at the side of the road. She’d been there all winter. In her bag there was a diary, some pictures, tickets for a rock concert. Just a girl, maybe a little more reckless than other girls … She took a little too much of a risk, I think. But who she is … We’ll probably never know.’
He thinks about it for a moment, then says: ‘That shouldn’t have happened, you know what I mean?’
He doesn’t know exactly what it is about the story that affects him so. The lost innocence, perhaps; the unfulfilled potential, maybe …
‘Her father and mother don’t know where she is?’
Beg shakes his head. ‘They’re still waiting for her. A person who doesn’t come home isn’t dead. The door stays open a crack.’
‘Yeah,’ the boy says.
‘Yeah,’ Beg says, too. He lays a finger on the boy’s nose, pushing it to one side a bit. ‘And what about you?’ he asks then. ‘Someone’s waiting for you, too. I heard you have a brother. Your parents — are they still alive?’
The boy nods.
‘I’m sure they’d like to know where you are. I could let them know that you’re safe.’
‘Who says I’m safe?’
‘I do. I say that. Maybe you don’t like it here, but you’re safe. A thousand times safer than out there.’
‘I hate it here.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘At night the screaming is even worse. I don’t know why I’m here. I didn’t do anything.’
‘That’s good news. So then the only thing I need to know is who actually did do something. If you tell me that, I’ll help you to get out of here as quickly as possible. Once you’re fixed up a little. Once you’ve got your strength back.’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ the boy says resentfully. ‘So why do I have to stay here?’
‘That’s kind of a technical thing,’ Beg replies, ‘but I’m allowed to tell you. You people were trying to get across the border, right? Without passports or anything. Crossing the border illegally is a crime. It’s punishable.’
The muscles tense around the boy’s jaws.
‘But that’s not the worst thing. If it was only that, I wouldn’t keep you here too long — so many people try to do that. The black man’s head, that’s what it’s about. That’s a much bigger problem. I can’t be lenient about that.’
The feet slide back and forth restlessly under the blanket.
Beg says: ‘There are things you’re not telling me because you’re afraid of the others. Am I right?’
He sees nothing that looks like confirmation.
‘You’re safe here — there’s nothing to be afraid of. The others can’t hurt you.’
The boy shakes his head.
‘What?’
‘It’s not like that,’ he says quietly.
‘What’s not like that?’
‘Nothing. Forget it.’
Beg repeats his question, but the boy remains silent.
‘Then you’re staying here,’ Beg says as he gets up. ‘I can’t help you if you don’t cooperate.’
He walks to the window again and stands there, his hands folded behind his back. A pack of glistening snow falls from the branches every now and then. Otherwise the park is devoid of motion. Fresh snow — this is what the world on the seventh day looks like.
Behind him he hears the deep breathing of sleep.
When the monotonous whistling in his ears begins again, he leaves the room and quietly pulls the door closed behind him. The nurse gets up from her chair in the hallway and comes to him on creaking rubber soles. The jangling of her key ring echoes in his ears. She locks the door. Metal against metal, the sound is amplified many times over.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE. Remember what Amalek did
‘Do you play chess?’ the rabbi had asked him once; since then they would sometimes play as a distraction from spiritual affairs. The hours with Rabbi Eder were dear to Beg; they constituted his only physical tie with Judaism. They drank black tea from Krasnodar, ate sweet cookies, and thought about the moves to come. The bulbs on the ceiling shed little light, so the difference between the objects and their shadows was hard to see.
The rabbi sacrificed a knight.
He’s just shaking up the board, figured Beg, who had never won from him. One draw, on one occasion — that was all. Now that Beg was in a good position for once, Eder had to go and do something unexpected, like this. Frustrated, he sipped at his tea.
‘A peculiar move,’ he murmured.
‘Then you don’t understand the essence of the game,’ the rabbi said.
After a long silence, Beg asked: ‘And what might that essence be?’
‘The essence consists of leading your opponent into a dark forest, the forest where two plus two is five — and the only path leading out of that forest is broad enough for only one of you. That’s how Grandmaster Tal put it.’
‘Ah-ha, I see.’
He lost that game, too. The rabbi had left the forest, but Beg was still wandering around in it.
They arranged the pieces of the board. ‘You don’t seem to be focusing well,’ the rabbi said. ‘Usually you put up more of a fight.’
Beg told him about the talk he’d had with the woman that afternoon, after he had left the boy. His reconstruction took form slowly.
‘Try to figure it,’ he said. ‘They all pay a huge chunk of money to cross the border. They spend hours hiding in a dark trailer, until they get to the border. Dogs, guards, they’re shitting their pants. When the truck starts rolling again, they feel like screaming in fear and joy. It’s night out, dark, by the time they leave the truck. The driver points them in the direction they need to go, says they’ll find a city out there. Morning comes, they walk and walk but never get to a city. They’re in doubt; they fight. All they see are the steppes, nothing else. The group splits up, a few of them go back, most of them push on. Westward, all the time. But they never get anywhere. There is no civilised world anymore; they’ve ended up in the wilderness. Without water, without food. They have nothing to shield their heads against the sun by day or their bodies against the cold at night. People die. That’s the way the woman put it: one after the other died, and any one of us could have been next. In the end, there are five of them left. They wandered across the flats for months.’
Beg shook his head.
‘They even made it through the winter. It’s a miracle that they survived.’
The memory comes to him of the woman, describing the journey in a feeble voice, monotonous as the steppes themselves. Her pregnant belly was heaving beneath the blanket, a hideous deformity on her emaciated body. When he’d asked who the father was, she hadn’t answered. She remained stubbornly silent when it came to the black man’s head. That he had been with the group from the start, that was all she would say.
‘I don’t understand,’ the rabbi said. ‘They crossed the border, that’s what you said.’
Beg slid his chair back and sat up straight. ‘What I’m going to tell you now … it’s almost unimaginable.’ He stood up and paced around the kitchen. ‘A border, that’s right. The woman says they crossed it; the boy saw barracks, border guards, barrier gates, and dogs. He described what he saw to the others. And the others heard it, men and dogs — there could be no mistake about it. Still, they were nowhere. They’d wandered through a no-man’s land the whole time, under conditions we can’t even imagine.’