Fitfully, in a voice that sometimes raced ahead of his thinking and sometimes lagged behind, he talked about what was on his mind. Wasn’t it ironic, he said, at this very point, just as he was taking his first steps in the direction of the Everlasting, that something like this should happen to him? A group of people who had, in a certain sense, relived the journey of the generation in the wilderness, with nothing over their heads but the empty sky? They had fled from poverty and repression; the generation in the wilderness had escaped from the slavery of Egypt. They were different, not to be compared, but still the same. Mankind lost in the wilderness, looking up in despair: Lord, help us, protect us.
Lord?
He had no trouble imagining the despair of those who had remained below, when Moses failed to return from the mountain. The rebellion and the euphoria. The dancing and screaming and exorcism of fear in a wild rite.
‘And what if Moses really hadn’t come back from Mt. Horeb?’ Beg said. ‘Would we now be worshipping a golden calf? Why not — organised religions have worshipped everything: fire, the sun, bulls, demi-gods …’
‘All down the tubes,’ the rabbi sneered. ‘Show me one existing religion based on the sun, or fire. Or anything like that. Just one!’
‘They went down the tubes,’ Beg said, ‘but only after hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. And all that time they provided people with comfort — comfort, reassurance, and a life after this one. Everything you and I long for, too.’
The rabbi jabbed a finger at the air. ‘You’re staring so hard into the distance that you can’t see anything anymore! Thirty-five hundred years ago, the Everlasting gave us his Torah, which contains everything a person needs. That’s what you should be investigating. He lacks for nothing.’
‘But those people out on the steppes didn’t receive any answer; the heavens remained silent. Their imagination shaped a holy monster, or a monstrous holy-of-holies. I’m only thinking out loud about circumstances at some other point in history, unlike this one, when something like this … could have had a greater impact, if it had the chance to spread throughout entire tribes.’
‘But it didn’t happen, for heaven’s sake!’ The fire of the wine lit up in the rabbi’s eyes. ‘You should be taking into account what exists, not the non-existent! There’s plenty of room for doubt and discussion within the boundaries of the Torah itself. To deal with doubt we have Lernen, learning. That’s the way, lernen! Explore the beliefs, not the unbelief.’
Beg shrugged. ‘I thought that’s what I was doing. That’s all I do, I mean. But thoughts go where they will. How could I not see the similarities?’
‘I take it you know the story of the heathen who came to Rabbi Shammai and Rabbi Hillel?’
The rabbi told him how an unbeliever had come to Rabbi Shammai and asked him to teach him the Torah in the time he was able to remain standing on one leg. In a rage, Shammai sent him away.
Then the man went to Rabbi Hillel and asked again: ‘Teach me the Torah while I’m standing on one leg.’ Rabbi Hillel replied: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is the whole of the law. The rest is interpretation. Go now and learn.’
‘Go now and learn,’ Beg repeated. He nodded. ‘I’ll keep doing that. But I can’t close my eyes to the exceptional … the exceptional fact of a faith that arises almost before my eyes. A seed … A sacred moment, and four or five people who follow it. Who truly believe in what they think they’re seeing …’
‘What you’re seeing is idolatry. Humans worshipping another human, their equal — a consecrated perversion of themselves. I hope your interest is strictly intellectual.’
Beg grinned. ‘Let’s drink to a long life in good health. For just as you stopped being a Jew when your cook died, I will stop being a Jew once you’re no longer around.’
Zalman Eder laughed and shook his head. He raised the glass to his lips and drank. He was enjoying himself. He was awake.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN. Fried chicken
They had taken up housekeeping with the chicken lady. They gorged themselves on her supplies, and didn’t worry about the long winter to come. The floor was littered with empty cans, boxes, and cardboard packaging. They had pillaged her closet and spread out all the textile they could find around the woodstove. There they lay, purring like bloated cats. Her bed in the little niche behind the stove, with its ticked mattress of straw and its featherbed, had been appropriated by the poacher. The chicken lady herself had withdrawn to an old easy chair; through eyelids narrowed to slits, she watched the skinny ghosts who had invaded her home. They were hungry and sleepy. They stoked the stove till it glowed, bringing in wood from the lean-to outside, and wringing the neck of one chicken after the other. The blackened pan on the roaring stove was the epicentre of their contentment. There could be no more wonderful smell than the odour of a chicken hissing and popping in lard.
Afterwards they fell asleep again around the stove.
Outside, in a bag on the doorpost, hung the thing that had led them to this abundance. They nodded to it upon leaving or entering the house, and murmured words of thanks.
Sometimes the woman knelt out front, laying a wreath of charms and incantations around the doorway. None of them doubted the power the head emanated. They had expelled the black man and killed him by orders of an implicit group will; now they lived on intimate terms with his head. It lived; it sent signals. The woman understood his messages, and arranged them into a tightly knit cult. The others followed hesitantly. Even the most stubborn atheist among them, the man from Ashkhabad, sank down before the head and raised his thoughts on high.
Vitaly was the only one who didn’t take part, rarely emerging from the mist of his ghost realm.
The poacher paid respects to the head in the same even-keeled way he did everything: with dogged conviction and to the exclusion of anything that might distract him. He talked at times about the thicket of horrors, the never-ending suffering at the hard hand of circumstance. You had to steel yourself; you had to learn how to bear up.
They spoke quietly to the head, each on their own, beneath their breath and unintelligibly to the others, jointly sounding like a dull buzz. Along that humming, resonating web they sent him their dreams and lamentations by airmail — their supplications for a good end to their journey.
The chicken lady stepped around the bowed figures on the little wooden porch and went on living imperturbably, as though nothing had happened. They heard her voice only when she called her chickens; she spoke to them in soothing sounds in which no human language could be discerned.
Inside the little house, the lady and the new inhabitants slipped past each other like fish in a pond; whenever someone asked her the name of the village or where the other villagers had gone, she was so startled that after a while they stopped asking at all.
The poacher had found tyre tracks outside the village. The deep, frozen ruts disappeared in a westerly direction, in a route crossed by other tracks here and there. The village was being visited from time to time by someone with a jeep — someone who brought the chicken lady her supplies.
The poacher stood staring worriedly at the graphite-grey sky to the north. A growl of disapproval rose from the back of his throat. They had talked about it before — about whether, and if so when, they should move on. They would have to be quick about it now, the poacher said, before the tracks disappeared under the snow.
Now he and the boy were standing beside each other at the edge of the village. The hard-frozen grassland stretched out before them, white and crackling with cold. The poacher scratched at his beard and squinted. His eyes fixed on something in the distance, he said: ‘We can’t wait any longer.’ The steam from his nostrils scattered quickly.