As soon as a guard left his post on deck, he would slip aboard one of the ships. He would disappear down the first hatch he came across and only reappear in a port far from here. He would take along bread and water and remain hidden until they reached a far shore. He would mislay himself, roll away like a coin between the tiles, and never be found again. That’s what he would do. Vanish himself into thin air.
That was how he reached Baku.
CHAPTER SEVEN. The last Jew
The rabbi left his home covered in a sheet, relieved of all cares. The question now was how they were to bury him. You couldn’t simply stuff a rabbi into a hole in the ground, could you? His wife had been lying in the Jewish cemetery at Smogy for the last twenty years, their only daughter emigrating to Israel long ago. No one knew how to find her, to inform her of her father’s death.
‘So how do you even know she exists?’ Pontus Beg asked police sergeant Frantiçek Koller.
‘The cleaning lady,’ Koller said.
‘Her name?’
Koller flipped through his notepad. ‘Valeria Belenko.’
‘The daughter’s name, man.’
Koller’s eyes skittered across his notes. ‘Ariëlla Herz.’
‘No other kin?’
‘Nope.’
‘No address book? Envelopes with a return address?’
‘Maybe Yiri could take a look?’
‘Tell him to come back with an address for that daughter, and a phone number. And tell him to find someone who knows how to bury a Jew.’
Koller shook his head. ‘The cleaning lady said there aren’t any left. No one has come to the synagogue for years. He was the last Jew around here.’
Koller, a bit amazed, watched his own words go.
Beg gestured to him that he was dismissed. He spun his chair around and looked outside. His window looked out onto a blank wall, and, if he craned his neck a bit, onto an airspace between the houses that admitted a view of the street. The opening was so narrow that you saw pedestrians only for a moment — a flash — and then they were gone again. Zhuangzi had said: ‘The life of men between heaven and earth is like a ray of light falling through a chink in the walclass="underline" a moment, and then it is gone.’
Beg enjoyed Zhuangzi’s cheerful anarchism, but when searching for direction he fell back on Confucius. The Taoists were troublesome folk, slippery, fleeting as fumes. Confucius was more a man of structure and order; he provided a toehold. Respect for the aged, the rituals and the Way, and his love of the right word: sometimes Beg truly regretted that he wasn’t living in China in the days of the Master.
He drummed his fingers on the table. There was, he was sure of it, another synagogue in town. He hummed a melody from his boyhood, a song his mother had taught him. Astride the melody, the words came back. He murmured them without knowing exactly what they meant; he thought maybe it was a Jewish love song. It was about a girl named Rebecca. ‘Ay, Rivkele, ven es veln zayn royzn, veln zey bliyen.’
Lots of things from the past were returning to him lately. His childhood was so much closer than in all those years before.
He picked up the phone. ‘Oksana, tell Koller there’s another synagogue, on Polanen Street. There must be someone there who knows how to bury a Jew.’
The roads glistened at dusk beneath the lamps as he drove away from the station house. Polanen Street was only a little out of his way, so he decided not to wait for Koller.
It was a broad, quiet street — well-to-do citizens had built big houses for themselves here, long ago. The stained-glass windows above some of the doors were still intact; the influence of the Vienna Secession had reached as far as Michailopol.
The Lada creaked so loudly when he climbed out, the whole street could hear it. He deserved a car that didn’t creak so much, he figured. After thirty-four years on the force, he had a right to better. Of course, he could commandeer a confiscated vehicle. Some colleagues did that — they drove around in rigs that had belonged to serious felons. He noticed reticence in himself, though, a certain prudishness. The people didn’t need to have it rubbed in, that which they already knew: that crime did pay. That even a policeman was dependent on it if he wanted to drive a fairly presentable car.
He found himself standing before a tall, green door. There was no bell. He pounded on it with the flat of his hand. He looked around: the street was covered in a grey mist. The plane trees reached for the sky with their bare, pale arms. The dim taillight of a car vanished around the corner.
Beg entered the alleyway beside the building, where he found trolleys and trash barrels, and the back door of an Asian restaurant. Through a metal register he could hear the clatter of pans. At the end of the alley, where darkness had already settled in, he discovered the service entrance to the synagogue. Something was written in Hebrew on a scrap of paper taped to the door. Again, there was no bell, and no mail slot either. He took the steps and pounded loudly on the door. The building seemed hermetically sealed. The life of the Jews took place in concealment, in a shadow world, far from that of the others. Was the building still in use? Or were there indeed no more Jews in Michailopol?
When an old man opened the door, Beg moved down a step.
‘Can I help you?’ the man said.
‘Beg,’ he said. ‘Police commissioner. Could I come in?’
The old man eyed him for a moment, then stepped back into the corridor. ‘Enter.’
They sat down at a table in the little kitchen. The old man’s blue-veined hand trembled as he put down the steamy glasses of tea. He had introduced himself as Zalman Eder; he was the rabbi. His grey beard was streaked with something that had the colour of nicotine.
‘I’m here about Rabbi Herz,’ Beg said.
‘What about him?’
‘You heard about his death?’
Zalman Eder nodded.
‘You knew him?’
‘More or less.’
That was all; apparently, he felt no need to explain further.
‘Do you know whether he still has relatives here, or friends?’ Beg asked. ‘The problem is … He has to be buried. The undertaker has to do something.’
‘You know …’ the rabbi said then, shaking his head slowly. ‘Yehuda Herz and I … we didn’t really get along.’
When nothing else came, Beg asked: ‘For any particular reason, or …?’
‘Not for no particular reason. Nothing is for no particular reason.’ The rabbi sipped his tea, seemingly without scalding his mouth. Then he said: ‘He was a bad person. I’m glad he’s dead.’
Startled, Beg asked: ‘Yehuda Herz?’
‘A heretic. His soul was leaky as a sieve. Now he’ll finally hear that from God himself.’
Beg had imagined that an old rabbi like Zalman Eder would be a wise man, a father leading his people through the wilderness, not a vindictive old Jew who cursed other people’s souls.
He asked whether services were still held in the synagogue.
‘There’s no one here anymore,’ the rabbi said. ‘Only me.’
His eyes were set far back in his skull, and his eyebrows bristled every which way. When he looked up, the washed-out blue of his eyes lit up for a moment.
Beg asked himself what could make one Jew welcome the death of another. The world never ceased to amaze him.
‘I’m the last one,’ the rabbi said, ‘and I won’t be around much longer either.’
Beg dabbed his finger at nonexistent crumbs on the tabletop.