‘I really don’t know, man,’ Kurbankiliev said. He frowned deeply. ‘What is it, do you want me to make something up?’
The hammer came down with a bang, shattering Akmuhammet Kurbankiliev’s front tooth.
‘Aw, fuck!’ he screamed. He tried to jump up, but the manacles around his wrists pulled him back down. ‘Why are you doing that? Aw, fuck!’
The tooth was now a little heap of gold-veined powder. Carefully, Beg laid the hammer on the table. He folded the paper back around the teeth and held the little package in the air. ‘You wanted this,’ he said, ‘and then you were going to tell me what was going on. Instead of that, all I’m hearing is bullshit.’
‘My tooth, man,’ Kurbankiliev whimpered. ‘Aw, fuck.’
‘You should abide by your promises. Then things like this wouldn’t happen. Smoke?’
He slid the pack across the table. Kurbankiliev took one and lit it. The coughing that followed bent him over double. After a bit, teary and red-eyed, he sat up straight and took another drag. He was able to suppress the next coughing fit.
‘How’s that taste?’
He nodded. ‘Good,’ he said in a pinched voice.
Beg looked at the pack of cigarettes. ‘Marlboro. Freedom.’ He flipped it over and read the back. ‘You think it’s really as harmful as they say?’
Kurbankiliev sucked on his cigarette and said nothing.
‘Such freedom,’ Beg said, ‘especially if it kills you.’
The face across the table was veiled in a column of smoke. That was the way the Everlasting had spoken to Moses on Mt. Horeb, from inside a pillar of cloud. He longed for Him at times — a sudden, ecstatic longing that he didn’t understand and that frightened him. This was the image: a ship is pulling away from the dock, and there he, Pontus Beg, comes running, waving his arms because he is on the verge of missing his destination. The gap between the ship and the quay widens. He screams, he leaps …
Maybe the dream meant that He was calling him. That he was on the right road. That he was almost ready to be immersed in the mikveh, the water that awaits him, the dark niche into which he’ll lower himself until the living water closes over his head.
But then again, maybe not.
He put the pack of Marlboros on the table. ‘ A striking similarity, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘That you wanted to be free, and that it almost killed you. Just like these cigarettes.’
Kurbankiliev ground out the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, above the ashtray. He sniffed at his fingers.
‘Anything was better than that,’ he said. He nodded at the back wall, with the transoms in it. ‘Anything.’
‘Even dying?’
Kurbankiliev scratched his chest. ‘I think so, yeah.’
‘And the same went for the Ethiopian?’ Beg asked.
‘I don’t know why he was on the road.’
‘It wasn’t his longing for freedom that killed him,’ Beg said.
‘I wouldn’t know.’
Beg glanced at the packet of teeth.
‘Vitaly had the head with him the whole time,’ Kurbankiliev said. ‘He was the bearer.’
‘Why Vitaly?’
‘He was appointed.’
‘Who appointed him?’
‘The black man.’
‘I don’t get it. The Ethiopian announced who was supposed to carry his head after he was dead?’
‘While he was still alive, yeah. That’s when he appointed him. On top of the hill. He burned the truth into him.’
‘And then he said: “I want you to carry my head once I’m dead”? Get off it.’
The man was leaning back in his chair, his eyes travelling across the ceiling.
‘Hey!’ Beg said. He snapped his fingers. ‘I asked you something.’
‘I heard you.’
‘So answer me already.’
‘He pointed him out. With his finger. He burned a big old hole in his arm. You can still see it. That’s the way it went. There’s nothing more to tell.’
‘And who beat his brains in?’
‘It was necessary.’
‘Why?’
‘There was no other way.’
‘Why not?’
Silence.
‘Why not?’ Beg repeated.
‘He had to go so that we could go on.’
‘That’s what you figured? And then you killed him?’
‘No.’
‘So who did? Come on!’
Kurbankiliev shook his head slowly, almost pityingly. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he said, and laughed bitterly. ‘We all did.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE. We are the dead
On the morning before the last suspect was questioned, Beg received a call from Inspector Matuszak, and frowned. Because this was also about frontier-running, the fugitives had been reported to the National Investigation Service. Matuszak had wasted no time in jumping on the case. Beg had never thought the service could exhibit so much get-up-and-go.
The inspector wanted to hear all about the fake border. There had been suspicions for a long time: bodies found out on the steppes, some of them kneeling in the sand; others with their arms still raised in supplication to the skies, sculpted in death. But this was the first time survivors had been found.
‘I’ll put in an order to have them transferred,’ Matuszak said. ‘We’ll get them out of your hair.’
Beg said that the woman still had to give birth. The others were sick and malnourished.
‘So when do you think you’ll be finished with your investigation?’ Matuszak asked.
‘Depends,’ Beg said.
He told him about the head, about which he still knew so little. ‘They agreed with each other not to talk about it,’ he said.
He knew what the man at the other end of the line must be thinking: Stupid hayseed, can’t you do anything?
He didn’t care; he just wanted to get his work done. His life had become bound up with the refugees, with the road they had travelled. They had wandered through the wilderness like the Jews, and like the Jews they had carried the bones of one of their own along with them … Beg’s reasoning came to a halt at the glorious analogy. They had carried a head with them, just as the Jews, three thousand years earlier, had carried the bones of Joseph — Joseph, who had died in Egypt, and was then embalmed and placed in a box.
God will surely come to your aid, and then you must carry my bones up with you from this place.
Hundreds of years went by, but the promise remained unforgotten. A proof of fidelity, the rabbi had called it.
Carry my bones from this place — that was how the history of Beg’s ancestors was bound up with that of a group lost on the steppes.
Three thousand years ago, or the day before yesterday. What was the difference?
The rabbi had said that every Jew, wherever and whenever on earth, had to see himself as a refugee out of Egypt, a wanderer in the desert; that’s how important the escape and the forty years lost in the wilderness were for the people of Israel. Every step a Jew took was a reminder of the exodus, and carried him back to the birth of a people in the desert. That was where God had given them his Commandments, and where their belief in Him had assumed concrete form.
In some mysterious way, the interrogations brought the exodus closer to Beg. History was being projected before his eyes — he sometimes had the feeling that the refugees’ story had been spun specially for him. The Everlasting was so close at such moments that he was seized by joy.
But what did Inspector Matuszak know about any of this? He only did his job; he had no idea what such things meant.
‘In three or four weeks,’ Beg said, ‘they’ll be strong enough for transport. My investigation will be finished by then, too.’
‘Today … two weeks from today, on December 22, I’ll have them picked up.’