He was standing in front of the rabbi now. He could smell the old man — a damp mattress, a coat that had been worn too long. ‘And then they reach civilisation,’ he said. ‘Houses, cars, people — and their worst nightmare comes true: they never crossed the border at all … There is no new country. All that time they were just here!’
‘So what about the border?’ the rabbi asked impatiently.
‘There was no border! There was only the product of an evil imagination: a copy of a border, a fake border. A replica of a border built by people-smugglers. At the real border you have to bribe people, get lucky — all risks you’d have to take.’
‘People …’ the rabbi murmured.
‘The brilliance of something like that! Faking a border. Someone had to come up with that.’
‘It sounds as though you admire it.’
‘No, not at all. Or yes, disgust and admiration.’
‘It’s perverse to admire something like that.’
‘Only because of the imagination it would take, nothing else. The same way I admired your decision to sacrifice a knight. But this … evil is an art, I’m afraid.’
‘You give evil too much credit. That puts you outside the pale of the Torah.’
‘Excuse me for saying so, but the volume of crime one sees in the Torah …’
‘Crime and punishment. Crime is depicted so that the Everlasting can determine His punishment. By way of the crime, He imposes His laws. Without evil, there is no way for us to know good.’
‘You know what man is like,’ Beg said. ‘You know that there are thousands of ways to get around a prohibition. He always finds a way out.’
‘Which means that he breaks the law — your earthly law and my law, which comes from heaven. Man is a born delinquent. Our laws are meant to keep him on track.’
And how powerless we are with our laws against the limitless fantasy of the transgression, Beg thought. He sat down and placed his hands on the table. ‘I have looked murderers and child-molesters in the eye,’ he said, ‘and the bizarre thing is that you can never tell. There are no special traits. There’s nothing that makes them recognisable. The only thing, perhaps, is that sometimes you notice something missing. You notice that you’re staring into empty space. How are you supposed to recognise the vacuum inside a human being? How can you measure it?’
‘They say that Rabbah bar bar Hanna once made a journey by ship,’ the rabbi said. ‘When the sailors saw a bird standing with its ankles in the water and its head reaching to the sky, they thought the waters were shallow and fit to refresh themselves in — until they heard a voice from heaven warning them not to enter the water; seven years earlier, a carpenter had dropped his axe in the water there, and it still had not reached the bottom! So bottomless, too, is reprobate man, whom you know better than I do.’
‘And then you’ve got the situations as well,’ Beg said. ‘The alcohol, the heat, the man who loses control. He has suspended his humanity for the moment; he acts like a beast, as a colleague of mine says. Later on, he looks back in amazement and shame, and thinks: That wasn’t me — that was the beast.’
He thought for a moment. ‘But personally, as far as I’m concerned … a new high point, or perhaps rather, a new deep point, is imitating a border. And then sending them out onto the steppes, knowing they’re going to perish there. Something like that …’ He shook his head. ‘No, I wouldn’t have thought that was possible.’
The rabbi leaned across the table. ‘Then you have forgotten what Amalek did …’
‘And what was that?’ Beg asked.
The rabbi recited the lines from the Torah:
Remember what Amalek and his tribe did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt. When you were weary and worn out, they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God.
He took a breath and went on:
When the LORD your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget.
‘Amalek attacked us when we were weakest,’ he said. ‘His name is a curse.’
For the rabbi, the past didn’t exist, Beg thought. It was as alive to him as the present; the low tricks of a tribal chieftain in the wilderness were reflected in the treachery of the people-smugglers he had just encountered. The day before yesterday, or three thousand years ago, it made no difference to him.
This mysterious timelessness overcame him, too, when he read about the lives of Moses, Aaron, and Joshua in the desert and knew himself connected to that in some mystical fashion. He was no longer so alone. Others had gone before him, just as others would come after him. Whether he would strap the phylactery to his arm each morning, he didn’t know. But with every word he read and every visit he paid to the rabbi, he sensed — with a certainty that touched him — that he was approaching his destination.
He didn’t know if it was allowed, but even more than to the Everlasting he was drawn at times by the desire to be immersed in the mikveh, the niche of stone deep in the earth, where the living water would renew his soul.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO. Akmuhammet Kurbankiliev
When they came to the edge of the city and realised where they were, the poacher began to weep. He couldn’t stop. The woman couldn’t stand to see his sorrow; the tears washed down her cheeks as well. It was like a contagious sickness: they infected each other, they were all crying now, their tears kept flowing. It had all been for naught. All of it. They had crossed the wilderness to a new country, only to discover that it wasn’t a new country at all — only the nightmare of the eternal return.
Right after seeing the boy at the psychiatric hospital, Beg visited the woman there, too. He pulled up a chair beside her bed. He heard three names.
The boy’s name was Saïd Mirza.
‘He told me it was Nacer Gül,’ Beg mumbled.
Nacer Gül, the woman said, was the man who had almost sent them to their death. Nacer Gül with his white BMW and his sunglasses that he wore even at night. Nacer Gül — the betrayer, the faithless one.
She knew Vitaly’s name, and the boy’s, but not those of the others. There had been no call for names.
‘You were already pregnant when you left?’ Beg asked.
A brief glare. She shook her head.
‘Who is the child’s father?’
She kept her eyes averted.
‘You don’t know who the father is?’
When she remained silent, he exhaled through his nose in disgust. ‘Then I see only … three possibilities, am I right?’
But although she told him all about the fake border crossing, Samira Uygun remained silent on two counts: the life inside her, and the death of the black man.
Beg bought cigarettes, a pack of chewing gum, and a couple of bottles of energy drink. He climbed the stairs to the third, because the elevator took forever to travel from floor to floor. Beg mounted, holding the railing with one hand. He needed to do something about the shape he was in, he thought — not for the first time. There was a little gym on the first floor. It was slowly filling up with broken office furniture and crates of empty soda bottles.
In the interrogation room he arranged the things on the table. He put the chewing gum in his inside pocket. He slid the cigarettes and plastic bottles around until he was satisfied. It was no mean feat to make things look as though you hadn’t thought about it.
The toothless man was brought in. Beg tried to estimate his age; he could have been forty, but just as easily fifty-five. The man was leaning over, so that he could reach his chest and scratch at it. His fingers clawed frantically at the fabric of his sweater. The handcuffs rattled. Beg looked on in amazement at how he lost himself in his scratching, his eyes fixed on the floor, in a sort of trance.