Tommy Wieringa - These Are the Names

And now he had fallen asleep above the third book of the Torah. An odour of mould and incense rose from its pages. With pleasure, he had read the accounts of the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The sun of the Holy Land burned on his face, he heard the bleating of sacrificial goats, and he laid his head to rest on a stone.

But Leviticus did not hold his attention for long. The Eternal had been fairly detailed in His directives; He left nothing to chance. It was his tough precision that had rocked Beg to sleep. A trail of saliva dangled between his lips and the tabletop. His breathing was laboured, and it was the discomfort that finally woke him. On the silent TV screen, a man in drag was being laughed at by an audience with wide-open mouths. What was it that made everyone so wild these days about a man dressed as a woman? In how many shows did that pop up? The one-man carnival, that failed clown, loud and boorish, the born victim. He was a punching bag and a scapegoat — you could hit him and abuse him as much as you liked, he shrieked and writhed, but seemed essentially immune to the violence done him.

It was past eleven. Beg wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He walked over to the television. His Achilles tendons had started hurting recently whenever he got up. They seemed to become too short in his sleep; he was afraid that one day they would tear off completely. He turned on the sound, and the room was awash in laughter. The transvestite ran through the studio, but before he could disappear into the wings he was seized by a bodybuilder in a ridiculous gym suit. The roughing-up began all over again. ‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen!’ the host cried. And then, leering at the camera: ‘Or should I say lady and gentleman?’

Again, the laughter came rolling down from the gallery.

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.