‘With all due respect, Inspector Matuszak, the period I mentioned was not negotiable. On January 1, they’ll be all yours.’
‘You have no authority to impose that delay.’
‘You should see them — then you’d understand. Someone here described them as “the Jews in the camp”. Their condition prohibits it.’
Before they hung up, Matuszak said he would call again in a couple of days. And so their first confrontation ended in a draw.
Beg sat in the interrogation room, his arms folded across his stomach. The final prisoner would be brought in after lunch. Beg’s eyes slowly fell shut.
Only now, at rest, did he become aware of the noises in the building. He heard the elevator cables meowing in their shaft, and the gurgling of air and water in the heating. Somewhere, there was a ruffling he couldn’t place. Somewhere else, slamming doors, and voices floating down the corridor. He had been walking around in this building for almost twenty years, but he had never before heard the way it sounded like an organism gasping for breath.
When the final prisoner was led in, Beg awoke from his catnap with a start. As he watched them chain the man to the metal ring, he twisted the top off a bottle of energy drink. He gulped it down. The police guard left the room. The two men were alone.
‘You’re the last person in the group I’ll be talking to,’ Beg said. ‘I already know a lot, but maybe not everything. This is your chance to tell your side of the story.’
When the other man said nothing, Beg slowly screwed the cap back onto the empty bottle and said: ‘Do you understand what I just said?’
The man nodded.
‘Good,’ Beg said. ‘Your name, age, and occupation, please.’
Alexander Haç had left his tiny village in the Urals to find a better life elsewhere. A butcher could get work anywhere, he’d figured. He was forty-seven.
‘You’ve been charged with attempting to cross the border illegally,’ Beg said, ‘but seeing as you were never even close to a border at all, I guess that charge won’t really stick. What will stick is the man’s head we found in your baggage. Murder — I think that’s what the prosecutor will call it. And desecration of a corpse, if he’s particularly pissed off.’
The man shrugged. ‘You know what they say. The law is a serpent that bites only those who have no shoes.’
‘I suppose you’re right, but you’re forgetting the head. You’ll be prosecuted for that.’ He scratched at the little bump on the tabletop. It looked like a clump of dried glue. He looked up. ‘Unless, of course, you tell me that’s not the way it was.’
‘I can’t do that,’ Haç said. ‘I’m guilty. Just like the others.’
‘What are you guilty of?’
‘What I’m charged with.’
‘Accepting the charge is not the same as the crime itself,’ Beg said. ‘What exactly are you guilty of?’
Haç kept his mouth shut. The hair on his forearms was standing straight up. The room was much too warm, but he had goose flesh. He was still nothing but skin and bones, so every trace of warmth flowed right back out of him.
‘You know,’ Beg said, ‘they say I’m a patient person. I usually question people mildly. My colleagues laugh at me because of that. After all, violence is so much more … effective. Soon the National Investigation Service is going to interrogate you. They know what pain is all about. They went to school to find out. If they want, they’ll make you remember the date when your grandparents got married. And then you’ll wish you’d answered me, instead of letting things get to that point.’ He sank back in his chair and laid his arm on the table. ‘What are you laughing about?’ With his knuckles, he began tapping out the rhythm of ‘Chopsticks’.
‘You say I’m the last one you’ll talk to,’ said Alexander Haç. ‘So how come you still don’t know who you’re dealing with?’
‘So who am I dealing with?’ Beg asked in irritation.
‘You have no idea how often we fell asleep in the certainty that there would be no tomorrow. We’re dead people. You can’t get to us.’
Beg stifled a belch. The sweet chewing-gum taste of the energy drink swirled in his mouth. ‘Let me tell you something weird,’ he said. ‘I really don’t care all that much who murdered him and who cut off his head and all that. They’ll find out all about that when you get there. For me, the point is … what I want to know …’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Maybe I should ask this first,’ he said then. ‘Do you believe? In a god?’
The man’s eyes clouded over. He shrugged.
‘I,’ Beg said, ‘… not so long ago, I myself found the way that leads to the Everlasting. Lots of things still aren’t clear to me, but I have to say that I … well, that I’ve embraced a faith. It’s a long story, it’s all still pretty fresh, but what matters to me is this …’
Then he told the man about the exodus. How the Israelites were led by a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night. The sea had parted to let them through. For forty years it had rained food, always just enough for one day at a time. ‘We all know the story,’ Beg said, ‘but what I didn’t know was that all that time they were carrying the bones of one of their forefathers. Joseph, who had made them promise to bury him in the Promised Land … Hundreds of years later, and they still remembered … That kind of faithfulness, that kind of breathtaking faithfulness …’
He felt his eyes burning.
‘So?’ the man asked. ‘Did they bury him when they got home?’
Beg nodded. ‘He entered the Promised Land. He did … but not Moses, who had the most right to. The reason I’m telling you this, though … the Ethiopian. Why was it necessary for him to die? Why was it necessary for you people to keep him with you? It must have been important to you, otherwise you wouldn’t do something like that. Tell me what importance he has for you people. Only that.’
Haç sat motionless. It looked like he had stopped breathing.
‘We lived with wonders all around us,’ he said slowly. ‘Once they started, we never doubted that we were going to be saved. These things are impossible to talk about. They’re only important to the ones who were there — those who passed through the thicket of horrors.’
‘What is that, this thicket?’
‘You keep on asking questions, as though there’s an answer to everything.’
‘You’re the one who started talking about the thicket of horrors. I’m asking you what it means.’
But the man across from him was sunk in thought. He seemed to be wandering amid his memories, a bit amazed at the things he saw there.
Beg’s suspicion of idolatry grew and became increasingly concrete — a thing they couldn’t talk about, because every faith shivers and shrinks under the cold lamplight of inspection.
‘After we killed him,’ the man said suddenly, ‘the boy’s dreams started. He dreamed the way for us. The woman said they came from him. She could interpret them. The boy told them, and she understood them.’
‘So you’re saying … who did these dreams come from?’
The man grimaced. ‘From Africa. Who else? He sent them so that we would know the way. I swear, we walked straight to it.’
‘To what?’
‘The woman said we had to start going south. All that time we’d been heading west; now suddenly we had to go the other way. I didn’t want to — once you choose a direction, you have to keep following it, otherwise you go completely nuts. But they were so sure of themselves. I figured … well, what if it’s true … That he’s the one telling them … Who am I to … Then we found the village. That’s what saved us.’
‘So you’re telling me the black man sent those dreams?’