These Are the Names (13 page)

He knows the smell. He knows it all too well. He has smelled it in the cellars and the little rooms where junkies lay rotting away under coarse blankets. It is the odour of despair that had told him he could now ‘do business'. Most customers came to him; some, he visited himself — those who were so badly off that they could no longer get to the door. Hollow-eyed as the Häftlinge from the camps, they lay waiting for him. He could have started a pawnshop with all the things they offered him in return for a shot. Antiques made him uncomfortable — he didn't know their value — and so he stuck to plain old cash and precious metals. His clientele's mortality rate was high, but their ranks were always replenished. It was a good line of business to be in; no need to advertise, wheedle, or grovel.

The poacher leads the way more often now. His stamina is exceptional. Never has he become involved in the struggle for dominance; he is sufficient unto himself. Fanning out through the tall, plumed grass, the others follow. Vitaly scratches at the sore on his upper arm. He took his sweater off this morning and looked at the deep, leaking wound. It had come up suddenly, as though he'd been shot with a phosphor bullet. There is a bright red ring around it. At the spot where the sore is, that's where the black man touched him a few days ago — atop the hill, when he pointed out something to them in the distance. Right there is where the sore came up, not anywhere else, not on his stomach or on his arse; no, right where the one body touched the other. With his finger, the black man had burned a festering crater in his arm. Vitaly stays far away from him now; the man's eyes alone are enough to do harm. He doesn't want the darkie to touch him again, or even look at him. He's got the evil eye; his hands are charged with magic powers. He's the one who brought disaster down on them — their misfortune is all his fault. Hadn't their luck been rotten right from the start? From the start of the journey all the way up till now? They should have beaten him to death right away, crushed his head — but instead they had wandered further and further off course, until the steppes had almost killed them.

To the rhythm of his footsteps, Vitaly's mind churns round and round: a dying machine that generates only fear and hatred.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A new soul

‘The point,' said the rabbi, ‘is whether or not you came from a Jewish womb. That's what it all boils down to. The rest doesn't matter. There is no other way, except that of the
giyur
, the process of converting to Judaism. But that's not something I'd recommend. It is extremely hard. We would never encourage that. Better a good goy than a bad Jew, as Rabbi Stiefel said. The chance that he will obey the seven laws of Noah is greater than that he will subject himself to the six hundred and thirteen laws of Moses.'

Pontus Beg, feeling uneasy, said: ‘All I want to know is whether my mother … whether she was a Jewess.'

There it was — his barely noticeable hesitation in using that word, the way it rubbed up against the epithet, as though he'd cursed in front of the rabbi. The word dragged a world of suffering behind it. Mockery is a cover for a fundamental lack of understanding. For condescension. That's how the word came to him. But here, in Rabbi Eder's kitchen, it is washed of the world's filth and goes back to what it means: a daughter of the people of Israel.

The rabbi shook his head impatiently. ‘You can't just ask that about your mother! When you ask about her, you're asking about yourself. I explained that to you already. If that's what she is, then that's what you are. Then you even have a right to an Israeli passport, whether you like it or not.'

Beg straightened up, as though trying to wriggle out from beneath the role of the slow learner. ‘And if you're not much of a believer? Even then?'

‘Reason can bring one to God as well,' the rabbi said. ‘Did you know that a child in the womb assumes a position like it's reading the Torah?'

‘I read Eastern things. Books without God in them.'

‘A Jew is a Jew, even without the Eternal. We … we are a braided rope, individual threads woven to form a single cord. That's how we're linked. What ties us together is what we are.' He raked his fingers through his beard.

Beg suddenly realised where his heavy-heartedness came from: there were no windows in this room. The only light came from bare bulbs on the ceiling. No ray of sunlight ever entered here; no breeze ever blew through the rooms. Here and there, the plaster formed bulges on the walls. Moisture made the building smell like a cadaver.

Beg was curious about the other rooms, about the floor plan of this labyrinth. The door facing the street opened onto the synagogue; the rabbi lived in the rooms beside it, which one reached from the alleyway. The building was as mysterious as an oriental bazaar. The old man had to have a bed somewhere, just as somewhere there had to be a door that led from the inside to the house of prayer.

‘Rabbi Eder, who cooks for you?' Beg asked.

‘The neighbours,' the rabbi said gloomily. ‘Chinese food, every night. It's making my eyes go slanty. When my cook died, I stopped being a Jew. The kitchen is the cathedral of the Jews, my good man.'

Beg nodded.

‘It takes me three days to finish one helping,' the rabbi said.

Could he still comply with the dietary laws, while eating Chinese food every night? Beg didn't dare to ask. Maybe the whole thing was crumbling away, now that there were no successors, he thought. Maybe he doesn't care much anymore, now that there's no one breathing down his neck.

‘I can't tell you whether or not your mother was Jewish,' the rabbi said suddenly. ‘You'll have to find out for yourself. Ask the people who are still alive. That's where the answer lies. What made you think so, anyway?'

‘Her surname, Medved.'

‘All right.'

‘And that song.'

‘What song?'

‘The love song. About Rebekka.'

The rabbi shook his head. ‘I don't know any song about Rebekka.'

‘I sang it for you!'

‘Sing it again, then I'm sure I'll remember it.'

And so it happened for the second time that Pontus Beg sang a Yiddish love song for the old rabbi.

‘Very good,' he said contentedly when Beg was finished. ‘Singing brings us closer to God.' He rocked his head back and forth, lightheartedly, as though at a dance party. ‘So your mother used to sing that to you? When you were little? But that's very unusual! Why would she sing a Yiddish song? Do you have any idea?'

Beg wiped his eyes with one hand. ‘That's why I'm here,' he said.

‘You really should have a little more than that to go on. Indications.'

‘Like the name,' Beg said. ‘Her maiden name. Here …' He pulled out Professor Urban's book of names, found the right page, and slid it across the table.

‘What am I supposed to look at?'

Beg put his index finger beside his mother's surname.

‘I can't see anything without my glasses,' the rabbi said grumpily. ‘Where did I put my glasses?'

‘There,' Beg said.

The rabbi slid his reading glasses down from his forehead and mumbled: ‘Old man, keep yourself together.' He bent over and read the word in the book that Beg held up for him. ‘Also Jewish, indeed,' he said. ‘Ashkenazi, um hum. High German.'

He looked up. His washed-out blue eyes slid over Beg's face. ‘Your mother received her surname from her father. That doesn't mean anything. If her mother was Jewish, then she was Jewish, and so are you. What interests me is your maternal grandmother — if she was Jewish, then you are, too. What do you know about your grandparents?'

‘Not much. I never met them. Patriots, my mother said. My grandfather died … the last year of the war, on the Neisse, the last big offensive. My mother was raised by her mother. My grandmother married again, but I don't know much about her second husband … I can't remember him so well. An officer, if I'm not mistaken.'

‘How can you live like that? Without any history? We Jews … we're touchy enough as it is, and our memory goes back four thousand years! Some people … they don't care about where they belong anymore. They hide it away, they don't talk about it, and when they die someone suddenly says: “Shouldn't we be giving him a Jewish burial?” General consternation, no one knew, all this time. Why? There are so many reasons. The Eternal not only blessed us, he cursed us, too.' He was silent for a moment. ‘What do you want to do with this knowledge, anyway? A Jew, a Gentile — does it really make any difference to you?'

‘Yes,' Beg said resolutely, without knowing what else he was going to say. ‘There's a difference.' And, after some hesitation: ‘Even though I couldn't tell you what it is.'

To arrive at an answer, he needed to delve deeper into himself than was his wont. He had a sneaky feeling about what he would find there — the loneliness to which he'd grown accustomed, like having a cold foot and a peeping in his ears. Long ago he had decided to tolerate life and demand from it nothing that was beyond his own capacity to fulfil. Eastern schools of thought advanced resignation as a way of life, too. But a seed might sometimes sprout, even in a crack in the pavement — it shouldn't have been there, yet still it grew, its roots stuck right through the concrete …

It had become a longing, to know where he came from.

‘There's no hurry,' the rabbi said. ‘The only right answer is the answer at the right moment. It will come of its own accord.'

He stood up and shuffled to the sink. His hands shaking, he poured himself some tea concentrate and added hot water from the samovar. Blue veins lay beneath his thin, yellow skin. Long nails. Liver spots on the backs of his hands.

‘We're going to need a bit more — documents, perhaps. Something irrefutable. Paper is the best proof. Can you get hold of documents?'

‘What kind of documents?'

‘Something that proves you're descended from Jews. The problem is that the system here keeps track only of the paternal line. That can complicate matters.'

The rabbi asked whether Beg would like to see the synagogue. He shuffled out in front of him, across the grey tiles. The place looked like an underground bunker complex where the sun never shone — a phantom realm where you became less and less a body and more and more a shadow, an erased pencil stroke. The rabbi stopped in front of a door, felt around under his coat, and pulled out a bunch of keys. He held them up to the light of a bare bulb and ran through them one by one until he found the right one.

‘Wait here for a moment,' he said.

He came back with a yarmulke. ‘Put this on.'

Beg wormed the thing onto the back of his head and followed the old man inside. The high, open space was a hallucination — after the darkness, it was as though the heavens had opened. The pillars bearing up the roof were inlaid with royal blue and gold mosaic tiles; the late afternoon light fell through high windows. The smell was of a space no longer animated by any human presence. The wooden benches and cabinets along the walls were hung with webs of grey light. The rabbi, his hands behind his back, stood looking around, a tourist at an antique ruin. Beg walked past the podium in the middle, a cupboard draped with curtains, and the stone steps leading to the platform above it all. He knew nothing of what had been said and done here, in this mysterious world where the memory of a journey thousands of years old was kept alive. This, then, was where that journey ended, and there stood the last traveller, waiting for him to get his fill of looking.

The rabbi gestured to him. They passed through a door and down a narrow corridor. At the end was yet another door. He opened it; behind it, all was darkness. When the light clicked on, Beg saw a landing the size of a little room, with more wooden benches along its walls. It resembled a dressing room. The rabbi led the way down the stone flight in front of them. The steps were worn hollow. Deep in the ground, a long rectangle had been hewn from the rock — a bath beneath a brick masonry arch. And standing motionless in the basin: chimerical, clear water. The steps disappeared below the surface and on to the bottom of the bath. It was a descent to a place that seemed more vital than the synagogue itself: the sacred heart of a mystery cult. The light from the landing above reflected off the water's surface. Beg would have liked to touch it, to set it in motion, but it would scald his unclean skin, as punishment for that act of blasphemy.

Water trickled down the walls. The grey stone gleamed.

‘The forefathers built the house on a source of living water,' the rabbi said. ‘Like Moses, they struck it from the rock.'

Here a Jewish man or woman went down the steps, naked and alone. There was to be nothing between the body and the water. No clothing, bandages, jewellery — even the paltriest crumb under a nail was to be removed. Only then were you cleansed.

‘A sort of baptism, in other words,' Beg said.

The rabbi looked up at him, displeased. ‘Those three little drops of water! You have to go all the way under, all the way! And not just once — again and again. How else could you be purified?'

In silence, they looked at the glassy water. Deep in the earth was where they found themselves; the world was far away. The rabbi's voice sounded quiet now. ‘It's not a baptism; it's not a bath in the sense of soap and water. He who is immersed in the mikveh becomes a new person. He gets a new soul.'