Tommy Wieringa - These Are the Names

Nagged by regret, Beg followed the rabbi up the steps, back from the hollow in the earth to the surface world where his old soul rejoined him. It was dark in the synagogue now; the vibrant blue had faded from the pillars.

Humming, the old man straightened a cloth that hung before the cabinet containing the Torah. Beg felt like going away, like leaving behind the questions without answers, and resuming his life. The rabbi stood with his back to him, nodding his head slightly now and again. Beg sat down in the front pew. Who had sat here before him? What had those people been like? How unthinkable, suddenly, that he should be one of them! He knew nothing about them; they were as remote to him as the Eskimos. Or the dead. That was more like it, he thought, for there was only one of them left: the captain, who would be the last to leave the ship.

He crossed his legs. No sound made its way in here. He heard only the crystalline singing in his head — inside his head it wasn’t quiet at all. It would never be quiet again. It was in surroundings such as these that the metallic whistling had started. He tried not to think about it, that was his strategy; he lived around his burgeoning defects. But now, in the synagogue — where, just like on the steppes, the absence of sound came across as a gentle murmur — he felt a light, serene sorrow at the loss of silence.

For a long time he had feared that the whistling in his ears was a harbinger of deafness. He was afraid of going deaf. The deaf man seemed lonelier to him than the blind, because his world was limited to what he could see. A blind man could hear what happened behind and above him; for the deaf man, the world behind was an abyss. A deaf person could tell you less about the world around him than a blind person; he had proved that to himself at work one time by sealing his ears with balls of wax. The bustle of police headquarters had disappeared as if by magic: he could barely hear the phone, or the knocking on doors. The conversations in the corridor, Oksana’s silly chatter, the lowing of a drunken prisoner — all vanished. As did doors that opened and closed, cars in the courtyard, snatches of conversation, the cooing of pigeons on the sill. The world without sound was a flat surface; all depth disappeared.

The rabbi straightened and turned around. He gestured to his guest to follow. At the exit, Beg saw a tapestry woven with gold thread and depicting a candlestick. He stopped in his tracks. There was a memory he was groping after, but couldn’t quite reach. He strained his eyes, as though that might help him squeeze out the memory. Suddenly, in his mind’s eye, he saw his mother emptying a bucket of potato peels into a trough. She was perspiring, and the hair at the back of her neck was straggly. It was a living memory, so different from the pictures he had of her; photographs tended to overgrow living memories, and finally to replace them. But now he was seeing how she put down the bucket, straightened her back, and rested her hands on her hips; with the back of one hand, she brushed away the hair that hung in her eyes from beneath her kerchief.

The first thing he forgot after she died was her scent. Then it was her voice. And soon enough after that, he could no longer summon up her looks and expressions.

Words had moved in to take their place. That she was loving and hot-tempered, maternal and dominating. At her funeral, he recalled, they had said that she worked like a horse, and had a will of iron. Without her stamina and financial insight, people said, the family would have gone to ruin. (Because the head of the household was a financial nincompoop, he heard them think.)

Gradually, his mother was put in a nutshell of a few traits: a life in catchwords.

The words had replaced her.

Now there she stood, squinting as she looked out over the fields; behind her, her son snuck into the house, an intruder in his own memories, through the kitchen and into the dark hallway, on stockinged feet into his parents’ bedroom, the planks creaking beneath his footfalls — forbidden territory. There is the corner cupboard with its glass doors; she stores her valuables behind panes of cut glass. Her wedding photo in its silver frame, the picture of her parents beside it: her father in the infantryman’s summer uniform; her mother in white, a coronet in her raven hair. A jade cameo, an ivory hair clasp — the riches of a farm wife. At the back, covered by the veil she wore at her wedding, is a little candleholder with seven branches.

A candleholder exactly like the one he was looking at now.

Beg stood in the alleyway and put on his cap. The back door of the restaurant was open, and an old woman was peeling onions in the doorway. The skins fell into a bucket between her knees. A cigarette dangled from a corner of her mouth; she kept one eye closed to keep out the smoke. The woman followed his every move, but her hands went on peeling mechanically. Behind her, under fluorescent lighting, Asians were at work in the kitchen.

Beg entered the restaurant from the street side, passing through a curtain of tinkling beads. A man and a girl behind the counter looked at him as expressionlessly as the old woman had.

Sitting at a little table by the window, he flipped through the menu, which featured pictures of the various dishes in strange colours and attitudes, as though a pilot had squeezed off a random series of aerial landscape photos. The caramelised duck glistened temptingly. Beg looked up at the girl and pointed to the duck: ‘This one.’

She nodded.

‘And a coke,’ he said.

He watched her go. The Chinese were every bit as enigmatic as the Jews. His legs were shimmying under the table.

‘That thing, what is that?’ he’d asked Zalman Eder, after they had stood looking at the candleholder.

The rabbi explained to him that the menorah, along with the Ark of the Covenant, was one of the most important attributes of Judaism.

Beg thought about the poignancy he’d felt — the same thing he’d felt when he talked to his sister. So much had been lost, he thought; sometimes you could survey that loss in its entirety. His sister’s voice had carried him back to where he came from, to the days when everything still had its natural place, and none of them had foreseen a future in which your rightful spot on earth was a thing half forgotten. Condemned to years of air and dust, the inconstancy could only be combated with ironclad routine. There was less and less difference between him and the nameless ones they sometimes found — the anonymous ones committed to the soil with a modicum of formalities. His sister’s voice was a lifeline tossed to him from the past, to keep him from forgetting who he was and where he came from.

The candlestick showed him his place in the past and awarded him a place in the present. It reminded him about the child he was, sneaking through his parents’ bedroom and taking in the objects in the corner cupboard, and told him that he had been born of a Jewish woman who had concealed her past — just as she had hidden the menorah beneath the veil. He had no doubts anymore. He must be a Jew — no, he was one. That was his place in the world, part of a people, of a community. A community extinct, but for one.

That he belonged somewhere, that was the poignant thing.

Sitting in the Chinese restaurant, he looked back over his life. The boy taking a swan dive from the bridge by the weir: a Jew. Pontus the son: a Jew. The cadet: a Jew. Commissioner Beg: a Jew. This time, history, that process of erosion, had won something rather than lost. Nothing had changed, yet everything was different. He belonged to another people now, as chosen as they were doomed, as the rabbi had said.

The last century had roared over their heads with such brute force that now only one of them was left — or, in fact, two. When Zalman Eder died, Beg would be the last Jew in Michailopol. The shuddering of his legs made the table shake.