These Are the Names (22 page)

Sometimes Beg thought that the need for cruelties and the perverse delight at the other's expense was part of being an impoverished people that had suffered a great deal itself. The pain of others was a distraction from one's own suffering, from existential worries. But Koller had told him that in Japan there were much crueller programs on TV. He had seen a few examples on the Internet — and the Japanese were a civilised, prosperous people. Nowhere else in the world, said Koller, did people laugh so loudly at someone else's pain. That was the end of Beg's theory: tested against reality, it collapsed like a bad soufflé.

Brushing his teeth, he looked at his face in the mirror. He rolled his eyes and opened his mouth. He turned his head as far as he could to the left and to the right — everything was still working. That was all you could say about it, though: everything was still working.

The coroner's report had come in late that afternoon: the head they'd found was, indeed, that of a black man. Forensics noted that the insect damage showed the head had been outside for quite a while. Exactly how long, it was hard to say. What was certain was that the cause of death — here it came, Beg thought, his favourite formulation — was violent impact with a blunt object.

Tomorrow he would interrogate a couple of them, whether they were in a weakened condition or not. They'd been detained as a public nuisance, but with the addition of a crime the temperature of the case had skyrocketed.

In bed, his thoughts were still jittery and alert. The crime had brought them together, or kept them together. They had carried the evidence, a head, along with them. It reminded them of the crime. Why did they want to be reminded of that? What was the point? The question kept him awake. His eyes wandered over the ceiling to fix on a pale spot, which could be a kilometre away, or just as easily a couple of metres. They might have known that the head would be found, at some point, one day. They had accepted the consequences. The consequences were subordinate to another, greater interest. The head symbolised something; it stood for something.

In the course of the years, Beg had come across abnormalities in all shapes and sizes. A moment always came when someone stopped thinking about the consequences of his actions, the punishment that awaited, and simply followed his own nature.

Last winter, two drifters had eaten a dog. You had those who saw the animal as a pet, others who saw it as a tasty morsel — the boundaries were not the same to everyone. The dog's owner had gone into the park and split the drifters' heads with an axe. He had submitted calmly to his arrest; he was prepared to pay the price for following his own nature. ‘They should have kept their dirty fucking hands off of my dog,' he'd said, and everyone at the stationhouse knew what he meant. The world was a hard place; children and pets represented a kind of final innocence — you kept your hands off that.

The general sympathy for the man with the axe worried Beg. You knew how close chaos really was when you approved of someone splitting another person's skull because they had eaten his dog. ‘Hold your thumb and index finger so close together that there's barely any light between them, and you'll know how close the chaos is,' he'd told his people. They were there precisely to preserve that little bit of light, that tiny crack — to whatever extent that was possible.

His thoughts spun in ever-widening circles, until he fell asleep and dreamed things he would forget by morning. He never remembered his dreams.

In the morning, he showered and pissed into the drain. Only first thing in the morning did he piss as vigorously as he used to.

If he was converted, he would have to be circumcised. There was no doubt about that; the Everlasting demanded it.

This
 
is
 
my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised. And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you.

Abraham was ninety-nine when he received that order. He circumcised all the men in his household and then himself. The Everlasting wanted to place a brand on the bodies of his people. He called for blood and pain: the covenant was not merely spiritual; it was also physical.

What would Zita think if his foreskin suddenly disappeared? He could hear her disapproval already. The same way she couldn't stand the table covered with books in the living room.

‘Look,' he'd told her, ‘you don't read this from front to back, you read it like this … you start at the back of the book.'

She looked as though she had just encountered a highly dubious sort of newfangledness.

The books served as run-up to the announcement that soon there would be no more pork eaten in his house, just as that announcement served in turn as run-up to a possible circumcision. He hadn't told her about his meetings with the rabbi, or about the fact that he now belonged to the Jewish nation. Things like that had to be communicated one step at a time. Slow and steady seemed the best strategy. The head-on confrontation could have undesired consequences: ‘Come on, Pontus, I'm Catholic. I don't sleep with Jews! You should know that!'

It made him uneasy. What he feared most was her dead mother. From the far side, the old cow whispered bad advice in her daughter's ear. It was a sorry state of affairs when the dead started throwing their weight around over here. Let the dead see to the dead, the living see to the living.

He couldn't afford to lose Zita. There were other women he could pay for — the Morris was full of them — but they would never fit as comfortably as Zita. They would have annoying traits. Gum-chewing. Sublime figures. Words he didn't know.

He would not be able to stand their lack of interest.

Tina! Yes, Tina, but then she had quit the business. She had gone off and specialised in meatloaf.

When Zita came into his house she took off her shoes and replaced them with a pair of slippers she kept in the hall closet. She was as at home in his kitchen as she was in her own. She wiped down the stove and boiled water to make soup. The soup steeped as she cleaned the house, so that she and the soup were finished at the same time, a few hours later. Neither of them were in a hurry.

His uniforms hung in the closet, laundered and starched. She sewed the buttons on the waistband of his trousers (he wore suspenders and a belt, as though afraid that his pants would fall off), and every two months she put fresh mothballs on the shelves.

On the evenings when she stays over, the bottle appears on the table. The rest of the transaction takes place in a mild haze. She listens breathlessly to his stories about criminals and car chases, all of which she's heard before. Sometimes he adds a new twist to the circumstances, the setting, or the events, making the story new again. The results amaze him, too, at times. Then they watch television until it is time to go to bed.

She withdraws to the bathroom and comes back a little later in a bright pink nightgown that reaches all the way to her ankles. She goes to the toilet and then climbs in between the sheets. He follows the same route, but much more hurriedly. She lies waiting patiently for him.

He turns off the light.

Now we hear only the rustling of sheets before the finding of positions, the brushing of bodies as they approach, the hurried reconnoitring in the dark, and the ‘Wait just a minute, Pontus.' He feels himself becoming weighed down with desire again, a capsizing ship. Then his body is on hers, their bellies slapping together. Fumbling, he whispers: ‘What have you got on under there, woman?'

She says: ‘Ow! You're not a dragoon, are you, Pontus?'

But he is a dragoon. A soldier returning from war, it's been so long since he's felt a woman's body. He is the paramour of need, his deeds said and done in a matter of minutes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Restless legs

The interrogation room is on the third floor. The cast-iron radiators glow. The first prisoner's file reads ‘male, nameless, age unknown'.

The man is alone in the room. He can't keep his legs still. His legs are still underway, while the rest of his body has come to a halt in the interrogation room. His cuffed hands are resting in his lap. The hands are calm. They're not going anywhere anymore.

When Beg enters the room, the man keeps his legs still for a few beats, but before the commissioner has had time to reach the table the jittering has resumed.

Beg sits down. He places a folder on the table and pulls out a few sheets of paper. He spreads them out in front of him, and chooses a black ballpoint pen from his breast pocket. He has red and blue ones, too. The ballpoint slides out with a click.

‘Okay,' he says. ‘First we need a name.' He looks up. ‘Your name is …?'

The man looks and says nothing.

‘No name,' Beg says. He takes a deep breath and leans forward. ‘My name is Beg,' he says then. ‘I'm the commissioner around here.'

The man stares at a spot on the wall behind Beg. His shoulders are a clothes hanger for the jacket of his tracksuit. It's hard to imagine what he would look like with flesh on his bones.

Beg has seen the washed-out tattoos on his body — the icons of the convict — and the tracks of the needle. That's why he's the first one to be interrogated. You can negotiate with junkies.

‘Okay,' Beg says, as though picking up the thread of a momentarily interrupted conversation. The man doesn't move. That he still has no name makes things difficult. You can use a name to flatter and to flog; it's the start of an understanding. The game begins with a name — the negotiations. But no identification has been found on any of them.

‘We found the head,' Beg says. ‘Which one of you was carrying it?'

Silence.

‘Was that your bag?' He snaps his fingers. ‘Hey, do you hear me?'

The man's eyes pull away from the wall for a moment, but are drawn back to it right away.

‘That's where we've got a problem,' Beg resumes. ‘Whatever you people were planning, I can't judge that, but the head …'

The man says nothing, and now and again his eyes fall shut. It's as though he hasn't slept for years.

Beg recalls a sentence from a police academy handbook: ‘The victim is deceased when the head has been lastingly separated from the body.'

That ‘lastingly', that was the thing. They had laughed so hard about that.

Beg scratches at a minuscule bump on the tabletop. They've been sitting across from each other for ten minutes already. It doesn't bother him. If there's one thing he's good at, it's remaining silent — waiting and remaining silent. He's in no hurry.

The creature sitting across from him, Beg had learned at the academy, was thinking back over its sins. Louder and louder, the crime he had committed was echoing inside him. It looked for an opening through which to crawl out, to shout itself from the rooftops. Even if the crime had taken place in the deepest darkness, he was seeing it before him now in the clearest of light. There was nothing else he could think about anymore. You could almost see it taking place behind his eyes. His body seemed to do its utmost to drive out the crime, to be shut of the guilt; only the spirit was still resisting. But his body would betray him. It made the spirit ripe for capitulation.

Beg looks at the man across from him, and has his doubts. It seems as though the man isn't even here, but somewhere far away.

‘Smoke?' Beg asks.

He lights a cigarette himself and slides the pack with the lighter on top of it across the table. A junkie rarely has only one addiction.

The man reaches for the pack with both hands; but because his cuffs are chained to a ring on the table, he can barely get to it. Two fingers on his right hand are missing. He takes a cigarette from the pack and puts it between his lips. The wheel scrapes across flint, and then comes the flame, and the quiet crackling of paper and tobacco. He keeps his eyes closed as he sucks the smoke into his lungs. Pleasure has returned to his life, thanks to the man across from him. He doesn't know it yet, but inside him gratitude and dependence have formed a reluctant alliance — he is being made ripe for a regimen of punishment and reward. He will be thankful for either; he has earned both the punishment and the reward.

The little bump on the table is a tough one. Beg can't get it off with his fingernail.

There is no ashtray, and the cone of ash on Beg's cigarette is growing longer and longer. He gets up and walks to the door. Holding it open with his foot, he shouts to someone out there to bring him an ashtray.

Halfway through his cigarette, the man begins coughing violently. He sounds like he's choking.

‘Been a long time, I suppose?' Beg asks once he's calmed down a bit.

The man nods, his eyes filled with tears.

‘How long?' Beg asks.

The man smiles and shrugs. Long ago.

‘A few months? Six months?' Beg asks.

The smile fades. An expression of endless melancholy takes its place. He leans forward and puts out the cigarette in the ashtray. The question dissipates along with the smoke.