The Master said: If one gets to know the Way in the morning, one can die (peacefully) at night.
Five glasses meant losing count.
He sank stiffly to his knees and looked around under the table for the bottle cap. Zita, he saw, cleaned optically, not hygienically. What did that say about the times in which he lived, when women no longer knew what cleaning was? What did it tell you about this day and age, when a man no longer said a word about that? When he only stared morosely at the spots on the carpet, the crumbs in the silverware drawer, the rings in the fridge, and the asymmetrically folded shirts in his closet? Did these things also fit the model of gradual decline?
The radio stayed on until he went to bed. He often forgot why he’d turned it on in the first place, until he turned it off. It was the high-pitched whistling in his ears — it had been with him for years. Two mosquitoes, one on either side. The sound rose up from the unplumbed depths of his skull and was blown through shell-like convolutions, where it took on that high frequency in a flat, constant tone that sometimes seemed to surge and ebb slowly. There were days when he forgot about it; but if things suddenly became quiet, he knew it had never gone away at all.
A Gypsy musician he’d arrested once thought it was a B.
‘When I sing it, it’s a lot lower than it really sounds, of course,’ Beg told him.
‘A C would have been better,’ the Gypsy felt.
‘Why’s that?’
‘Most songs are written in the key of C.’
It was at his mother’s memorial service that he’d first heard the whistling. During the silent prayer, it made its way into his skull. He had listened in amazement. The tone in his inner ear soared above the singing and the benedictions, subjected all other sounds to its will, devoured them, and filled the sacred space all by itself. It will go away in a bit, Beg thought, and tried to concentrate on the pope’s words.
‘Verily, I say unto thee: if a grain of wheat falls not to the earth and does not die, it remains one grain of wheat, but when it dies it bears much fruit.’
During the Kontaktion for the Dead, he had wept. The tone undulated in the background. Pontus Beg left the church a forty-two-year-old orphan with a shrill peeping in his ears.
CHAPTER SIX. The dog of Ashkhabad
The Ethiopian lagged far behind the rest; at times it seemed as though they had lost him, but every evening he joined them again. He pitched camp for the night at a little distance from the others. He tore off handfuls of tough grass and arranged them on the ground in the shape of an ellipse. Then he lay down in the middle. Some of them imitated him, believing it protected them from snakes and the cold.
If they found brushwood or a lone tree, they built a fire. Then the Ethiopian would sidle up and warm his black hands.
His skin hung loosely around his frame. He had been underway since time immemorial, a skinny horse trotting along the earth’s crust, his swayed ribs bedecked with a blanket of stolid despair. Along unknown paths he had come from Africa and ended up in their company. They knew almost nothing about him — only that he came from Teaopia, as he’d said, pointing from himself to somewhere in the distance and back again. The boy looked at him wide-mouthed; this was the first negro he had seen in real life. He had never heard of Ethiopia. The woman told him it was a country in Africa, the continent of black people.
None of them understood what the black man said. At the very start he had occasionally tried to tell them something, but no one knew what he was saying. He tried with wild gestures, making faces like a madman; the boy was afraid of him. When the black man saw that his attempts were fruitless, he gave up and stopped trying to make himself understood.
He had gradually become translucent. At the end of the day, when he showed up and scraped together the rest of the paltry meal, the others realised they had almost forgotten about him.
One time, the man from Ashkhabad saw him pull out a little chain from under his shirt. There was a tiny cross attached to it. He raised it to his lips and kissed it.
‘Would you look at that,’ the man from Ashkhabad said. The boy and the tall man looked.
‘What’s that he’s eating?’ the tall man asked.
‘A cross.’
‘Oh yeah? A cross?’
‘He’s kissing it.’
The tall man, nearsighted as could be, peered hard at the black man.
‘A cross,’ the man from Ashkhabad said. ‘It’s goddamn unbelievable.’
The tall man had thought he was eating something. Where did he get that from?
It was the first time the man from Ashkhabad realised that an African might adhere to a canonical faith. In his view of Africa, black people danced to make it rain. They worshipped weird objects. The Koran, the Bible, the book of the Jews — negroes were no part of that. And here you had the burrhead suddenly kissing a cross. Though the man from Ashkhabad was neither Christian nor Muslim, neither fire-worshipper nor venerator of the dead, he felt a deep disapproval — as though he had witnessed something blasphemous. Now he was forced to see this man from Ethiopia as a person, while until then he had seen him more as a harmless animal trailing behind the caravan, picking around between their feet for leftovers and gnawing down the hare’s bones even further than they had. (From outside the circle, they could hear the bones snap; he sucked the marrow out of them.)
The negro had kissed a cross. That only deepened the enigma. What kind of thoughts did he have? What kind of life lay behind him? And if the man from Ashkhabad had thoughts about the black man, then the black man also had thoughts about him. These things grated like sand in the works. They rattled his reason and heated his blood.
The shadows lengthened; the boy squatted and pricked up his ears to hear the man from Ashkhabad’s monologue. The story of his escape.
In the life of the man from Ashkhabad, too, there had been no foreigners. The country he came from was sealed off from the world. The further he walked away from it, the more insane seemed the place from which he’d escaped. No one came in; no one went out. His country was like a dark fairytale where the people lived under the watchful eye of an all-seeing sorcerer.
That sorcerer’s name was Turkmenbashi.
The tall man rumbled in assent; he had heard of Turkmenbashi, who called himself the father of all Turkmen. He knew of his reputation.
After the decline of the Russian Empire, this minor party boss had knocked together a new omnipotence. The big brother had fallen, and the little brother copied all his bad habits and added a few of his own.
The women dressed in accordance with his code, in traditional, embroidered outfits. Like Peter the Great, he ordered the men to shave off their beards. After his heart attack, he forbade his people to smoke cigarettes any longer. His subjects were wild about gold teeth — a part of the world’s gold reserves was gnashed to powder in Turkmen mouths. The father of all Turkmen forbade gold teeth for reasons of hygiene.
The country’s fossil mineral resources were endless; as extremely poor as the soil was, so extremely rich were the treasures lying beneath its surface. At some spots, the ground was so saturated with oil and natural gas that flames leapt up from the soil.
Ensconced in thick pipelines, it flowed across the country’s borders. From the revenues, the sorcerer made fountains spring up from the parched earth of Kara Kum, and refashioned himself in gold in the centre of Ashkhabad. His golden statue turned to follow the sun: in the morning, it greeted the east; at night, it laid the sun to sleep again in the west. The people suffered his self-aggrandisement resignedly. They grew accustomed to the daily portions of madness. They lived like fleas, with no say in the crazy gyrations of their host.