‘Who beat his brains in, do you know that?’
‘I wasn’t there. I only found him.’
‘Who do you think it was?’
The boy shrugged his skinny shoulders. ‘Anybody could have done that. It’s not all that hard.’
Intuitively, they seemed to have realised that silence was the best policy, Beg thought. That way, all five of them were guilty, just as all five of them were innocent.
The boy leaned forward. He wanted to say something, but hesitated.
‘What is it?’ Beg asked.
‘Nothing,’ the boy said.
‘Just tell me.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Who?’
‘The black man.’
‘In a cooler. The same place where the dead girl is.’
‘Together?’
‘In the same space, yes.’
‘Oh, okay.’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘What are you going to do with him?’
‘Nothing. Bury him, after a while, I guess. If we can’t trace his identity.’
The boy shook his head slowly. ‘You people don’t understand … We want him back.’
Beg burst out laughing.
‘He doesn’t belong to you,’ the boy said. ‘He’s ours. We want him back.’ His black eyes glistened.
Beg had stopped laughing. ‘What are you going to do with him?’
‘We want him back.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
The boy’s upper lip curled in a sneer. ‘Tough shit.’
‘If you talk to me like that, I’ll take these along with me.’ Beg picked up the comic books from the bed and rolled them up. He had trouble disguising his disappointment. He had become fond of the boy. He felt compassion for him. Beg wished the feeling was mutual. Friendship with a child made you a chosen one.
We want him back.
Even now, the head was exercising its magic power; it was still keeping them more or less together. Maybe that explained his fascination, Beg thought, being so close to that. That he was witnessing the start of something. Primal ground. Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee.
There were too few of them, and the times were not suited to it, but in a more distant century it could have happened. Something new, a sacred mystery: blood, retribution, salvation.
The start of a sharply delineated faith.
And immersion, purification. Why not?
The snow in the treads of his patrol boots had melted into little puddles on the linoleum.
‘The woman had a child last night,’ Beg said after a while. He looked at his watch. It was December 19.
The sisters had told him when he came into the ward that afternoon.
The boy nodded. ‘I heard her screaming. They took her away.’
He sniffed loudly and scratched his leg under the blanket. ‘I didn’t know that was what was going on.’
‘Premature, but healthy. It’s unbelievable,’ Beg said. How could a skeleton bear a healthy child?
‘Can I have my comics back?’
Absently, Beg laid the little bundle back on the bed. The boy opened one and began flipping through it.
The baby still had no name, the nurses had told him when he came in. They’d asked how he was supposed to be registered.
‘Saïd Mirza,’ he’d told them. It was a flash of intuition, a hunch. They looked at him in surprise. He said: ‘You wanted to know what to call him, right? Saïd Mirza, that’s his working name. So write it down, already. Who cares if there are two of them?’
The nurse wrote Saïd Mirza on a sheet of paper and asked no further.
‘I’m going by to see her,’ Beg told her.
‘You don’t have much time,’ the nurse said. ‘She’s in intensive care.’
And so it happened that there were suddenly two Saïd Mirzas in the same hospital.
Saïd Mirza the First stared intently at his comic. Did he actually know how to read, Beg wondered. He could handle a slingshot, he knew how to plant corn and tend goats, but was he familiar with the written word? Who would have taught him that, up in those mountains? If he couldn’t read, there was no life for him outside his native village — washing dishes, perhaps, or lugging merchandise at the bazaar, but that wasn’t why he’d undertaken such a journey. He wouldn’t have risked his life for that, to be a drudge. It would be a real loss; the boy had brains. Without writing, without civilisation, he would be only a talented predator, suited for nothing but a life of petty crime. For quick scams and the occasional trouncing.
‘Do you actually know how to read?’ Beg asked.
‘Of course I can read,’ the boy said without taking his eyes off the page.
Beg went to the window. The park lay in white innocence at his feet. It was growing dark; the shadows were leaving their hiding places. Yellow light fell from the windows onto the snow in the garden. The trees stood white and heavy, taking a time-out. From behind him, now and then, came the sound of a page being turned; the rustling of paper wings. Later he would go visit the rabbi in his consecrated den, amid the moulding relics, and burden him with the things that were troubling his heart.
It looked as though nobody was lying beneath the taut sheet. There were dark rings under her eyes. Every gasp of breath sounded as though she was surfacing from the deep. Beg shivered involuntarily. She had gone to the very limit for the child she was carrying, and now she was going to die beneath that sheet. And she knew it; Beg recognised the look of the animal that senses its life slipping away. Despair and resignation flow like layers of cold and warm water in a single stream.
‘My son,’ she says, ‘where is he?’
He nods. ‘I’ll ask them to bring him.’
He goes back out into the hall. In the distance he sees a nurse, and he calls to her. She presses a finger to her lips in warning. He gestures to her, tells her to get the child.
‘We can’t …’
Beg shakes his head. ‘You have to. Now.’
‘The baby’s premature,’ the nurse says. ‘Seven or eight weeks too early! It’s very vulnerable.’
‘I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.’
‘Then it’s your responsibility,’ the nurse says, her mouth as sharp as paper.
A few minutes later, the baby is brought in, wrapped in a cotton cloth, only its little head sticking out like a doll’s — a waxen, pale little face, black hair in brush strokes against its scalp. It looks as though it hasn’t opened its eyes yet. Long, syrupy tears slide down the mother’s cheeks. She rolls slowly onto her side and takes the bundle in her arms.
Beg stays in the room with mother and child, deeply aware of his heavy, indiscreet presence. The woman makes quiet, soothing sounds at the impassive baby. Outside of this union, nothing exists. Beg averts her eyes as she bares her breasts, wrinkled sags of skin. She raises a nipple to the child’s mouth. The lips do not part; the baby is asleep. She wrings the nipple between his lips. Now, led by one of the first assignments given him by nature, he begins to suck; feebly at first, and then with increasing force.
The woman closes her eyes, and she smiles.
The baby starts crying weakly — a bleating, lonesome wail.
‘Shh, shh,’ the woman hushes.
When the child keeps crying, the woman looks up at Beg in a quandary.
In the hall, he finds no one. He comes back, empty-handed.
The child’s disappointment is unbearable; the baby is inconsolable.
‘Take him,’ the woman whispers.
Beg swears under his breath. ‘How …?’
‘Take him!’
Beg reaches out with his big hands and scoops the baby from its mother’s embrace. He holds it away from his body. What discomfort — how long ago was it that he last held a child?