Tommy Wieringa - These Are the Names

‘Come,’ he says, ‘we’re falling behind.’

He grabs her arm and pulls her to her feet. She falls back on the ground, on her stomach now, and rubs her face in the sand. Her forehead, her nose, her cheeks are covered in dust. The boy pulls her up again and drags her along. She takes a sudden step towards him, he ducks too late, and the flat of her hand hits him in the face.

Then she walks away from him, after the others.

The boy remains standing. He feels each individual finger burning on his cheek.

They go back to the kurgan; the poacher thinks there may be wild animals there that will walk into his traps. In the late afternoon, they pitch camp in the hill’s long shadow. The boy knows that the hill is hollow inside. The dead wander around in there. They will come to get him. That night, they will reach out their knobby hands to seize him and drag him by his feet into their underworld.

Vitaly walks over to the woman, who is sitting in the sand, and pulls her to her feet. He wants to take her to his bed for the night, but the man from Ashkhabad intervenes.

‘Let go,’ he says.

Vitaly snorts.

‘Let go. Or do you want me to kick the shit out of you?’ the man from Ashkhabad says.

The others watch. They expect Vitaly to give in. He steps back — not to retreat though, not like they think, but to jump at the other’s throat. They fall and roll, panting through the dirt. Most of the blows miss their mark. The man from Ashkhabad rolls on top of Vitaly, and punches him hard — in the head, on the chest, right through the arms he’s raised to protect himself. Vitaly is no longer the canny street fighter he was a while back, when he almost always won. Now, he remains lying on the ground as the man from Ashkhabad drags his prey along into the gathering darkness.

The next morning, the trailer truck was empty. The slashed canvas billowed in the wind. The trucking company was informed, and sent someone to pick it up. The driver remained in custody, for having driven under the influence and resisting arrest. Sergeant Koller looked at his boss’s raw knuckles, and entertained no illusions. Beg was a fine fellow, but he had his moods.

The detainee lay in his cell with his face to the wall, and didn’t respond to their questions. He didn’t touch his food. His lips were split; some of his teeth were broken. The doctor had come by. ‘Bruised ribs, nothing broken,’ he ruled. He didn’t look at the man’s teeth — they hadn’t talked about teeth at medical school.

In the basement cellblock at the station house, the filth of the world piled up like flotsam against the walls of a sluice. Once a week, everything down there was cleaned with Lysol, but the smell of vomit and stale sweat drilled straight through it all.

At noon, Beg locked his office door from the inside and pulled a little address book from his desk drawer. It was an old one: lots of the names had been scratched out, and new ones were no longer added. In the same way that the rabbi wandered amid the headstones of his loved ones, Beg found himself leafing through pages containing the names of people who had once been a part of his life but had now disappeared from it. Under ‘U’ he found his sister Eva. She had divorced that talented good-for-nothing Alexander Uspensky, but she had kept his name. The name ‘Beg’ was too countrified for her; it had too much flatland, too much steppe to it.

He had no idea whether the number was still in service. She might have moved — people were restless, more than they used to be, blown hither and thither. Only he stayed where he was, immovable amid the wheezing heating pipes and the upstairs neighbours who tossed cigarette butts onto his balcony.

He picked up the phone, hesitated for a moment, and then dialled the number.

It rang. A man answered, without stating his name. All he said was, ‘Yeah?’

‘To whom am I speaking?’ Beg asked.

‘To whom am I speaking?’

Beg sighed. ‘Tadeusz, is that you?’

It was quiet for a moment. ‘Who’s asking?’

‘Your uncle, Pontus.’

Silence again. ‘Mum’s not here,’ he said then.

‘Oh.’

‘Sorry.’

‘When’s she coming back?’

‘I don’t know.’

The unwillingness at the other end was almost palpable. He had probably interrupted his nephew while he was playing some computer game — a modern-day sin against the spirit.

‘Well, it was nice talking to you, Tadeusz.’

‘Yeah,’ the boy said.

‘Would you tell her I called?’

‘Sure.’

‘I really need to talk to her.’

‘I’ll tell her.’

Then they hung up. Beg sank back in his chair. Tadeusz was still a teenager the last time he’d seen him. Now he’d had a young adult on the line whom he would have liked to tell that things could turn out all right, that there was no cause for such suspicion.

Whether that was true, he had no idea.

He had known Eva better than anyone; they had been the sole witnesses to each other’s youths. That one day they would turn their backs on each other in bitterness had been unthinkable. Still, it had happened. They could die unnoticed, without either of them knowing that about the other. It was something you shouldn’t dwell on, otherwise it would weigh you down and make you sad.

Oksana’s blonde bouffant hair-do appeared above the strip of smoked glass that separated his office from the hallway. It sailed past like a ship on the horizon. With her long legs and high heels, Oksana, if she stood on tip-toes, was the only one who could look over it. Whenever she walked past she would toss a quick, almost compulsive glance inside, then turn away quickly as though she had seen nothing. Beg had thought about taping off the top section of the window, too, but never got around to it. Perhaps, he thought, he appreciated being seen by at least one person.

That afternoon, he drove to a sandy stretch outside town. After the empire’s collapse, a bazaar had arisen there, a market bigger than Michailopol had ever seen. Beg had witnessed the birth of a new kind of trading place — the planned economy vanished, the bazaar shot up from the soil like a field of wildflowers in spring. Roads were built, latrines dug — replaced later by portacabins and even later by toilet blocks with running water — and there were snack bars and exchange offices. Michailopol suddenly found itself smack dab in the middle of the world, at a crossroads. The bazaar was frequented by gypsies with brown faces and scars on their scalps; traders crossed the border in their old Mercedes; farmers brought in grain and livestock; and they all returned home with pruning shears, hunting rifles, grinders, and plastic flowers for their ancestors’ graves. Old women carried such heavy loads of checkered shopping bags that it was a wonder their legs didn’t buckle beneath them, like old cavalry mounts. From one day to the next, everyone became a merchant. Everyone had something to sell and was champing at the bit to buy something in turn. An old man who made ice cream said the bazaar reminded him of the market at Krakow after the Great War — the riotous outburst of mercantile fever that marked life’s return after the hunger and the horrors, he had seen it there, too.

Moneychangers, ex-convicts who were recognisable by the way they squatted with their backs to a wall — years of their lives had been spent like that in prison yards — moved between the stacked shipping containers. You smelled soap and bread, caustic cleansers, and broiled meat, you walked a few hundred yards down a street full of brightly coloured plastic toys, and then suddenly found yourself in the audio lane, between towers of cassette tapes, bootlegged CDs, and sound systems. Men used corn brooms to sweep the streets, bawled at by merchants who tossed blankets over their wares to keep off the dust.