Tommy Wieringa - These Are the Names

‘Who’s the poacher?’

The man remains silent.

‘Do you know where you are right now?’

But he has sunk back into himself already, to a place where Beg can’t reach him.

‘You’re here because a man’s head was found in the baggage of someone in your group,’ Beg said. ‘You are all suspects, unless you tell me who crushed that man’s skull. If you do that, you’ll be a free man soon.’

The man says nothing.

‘This thicket you were talking about, what does it look like?’

Not a word. Beg raps his knuckles on the tabletop. The highest row of windows is as grey as a television screen. It snowed again last night. When he left the house, the morning was windless and cold.

The man’s chin has sunk to his chest. His breathing is deep. Has he fallen asleep again?

Earlier that morning, as he came into the office, Oksana said to him: ‘The mayor’s here.’

There could have been no worse way to start the day. Oksana rolled her eyes.

‘He’s down in the cellar.’

Whenever she rolled her eyes, Beg knew, it meant trouble.

Blok had arrived with two of his men and made someone take them downstairs. When Beg came in, he had just summoned the prisoners. They were standing lined up in front of him, shivering.

‘Pontus!’ Blok shouted.

The door fell closed behind him with a click. He stood there and looked. Looking had a way of slowing down the events, of giving you time to think about what to do.

‘What a bunch of beanpoles, man,’ Blok said. ‘And what’s this I hear? They were carrying a head? A head? Pontus, listen … Why don’t you call me about things like that? One little call, right?’ He held up his thumb and forefinger to mimic a telephone. Beg made a mental note: boisterous, talkative. Red eyes; pupils like keyholes.

The prisoners stood in a wretched clump, their shaven heads bowed. Broken sunflowers.

With brusque, pent-up waves of his arms, Beg herded the prisoners back into their cells.

‘Hey, Pontus, what are you doing now, man, hey?’

Beg turned. Semjon Blok came closer, as though he were planning to push Beg aside. Beg smelled whisky. They had been up all night drinking and snorting cocaine. Then they’d decided to have a little fun. The party must go on.

‘And now I want everyone out of here,’ Beg said. ‘This is not a fashion show.’

Blok wagged his index finger in front of his face. ‘No, Pontus, you’ve got it all wrong. This is not up to you.’

Beg didn’t budge. Rage had cleared the way for him; now there was no going back. ‘Shoo,’ he said, ‘get out, now.’

‘Pontus, Pontus.’ Semjon Blok shook his head, but his dash had shrivelled, he was suddenly so incredibly tired. Wasn’t there someplace around here where he could lie down?

‘You’re a gutsy one, Pontus,’ he said. ‘Real gutsy.’

He gestured to his companions. The guard pressed the buzzer, and the electric lock clicked open. Laughing feebly in disbelief, Blok left the room, defeat like a monkey on his back.

The guard cleared his throat. ‘Commissioner, you put them back in the wrong cells, I’m afraid.’

Beg’s index finger punched thin air. This was the fucking limit. The guard’s mouth slammed shut like the muzzle of a dog snapping at a fly.

Blok will never forgive him for this. Somewhere, in an unguarded moment, he will strike back, and Beg will think back on this morning.

The office of mayor has given Semjon Blok almost limitless power. Michailopol is his private domain. He parks his black Cadillac Escalade on the sidewalk, he drives too fast, he ignores all the traffic lights. During his term of office, the property he owns has doubled. No one crosses him in any way; he stands above the law.

Feathering one’s own nest, giving and taking bribes, nepotism — all part of a system, true enough, but that system is defective and shortsighted. In the last ten or fifteen years, Beg has seen everything slow down, as the city’s entire economic life has fallen under the spell of favouritism and greed: no land is sold, no house built, without dubious permits and money changing hands under the table — which means that, often enough, nothing is built at all. Social relations have become bogged down in the mud of corruption; no one can call anyone else to account, for they all have dirt on their hands. No one looks beyond his own interests. Not a single manager or government official thinks about the long term. It’s a system that demands your participation; if you don’t join in, you relegate yourself to the sidelines. In the end, it corrupts even the purest soul. This way, everything goes rotten.

This morning, he not only hurt Semjon Blok’s pride, but he also ran the system off the rails. Not for long, though. It will avenge itself. It will exclude him, somewhere, at some point, not long from now. His position will be undermined, and he will have to step down. He knows that; that’s the way it works. The system protects you as long as you play along.

It doesn’t bother him; it had to happen sometime. In some ways, the overt hostility between him and Blok comes as a relief. He has jammed the tip of the scalpel into the abscess, and the stinking pus that wells up reminds him of a dignity he lost long ago.

Later today, Blok will get his letter.

He has the prisoners separated. Isolation will make them emerge sooner from the spell that binds them.

He follows the shadow of the psychiatric hospital to the entrance. Snow chirps beneath his shoes. The plaster on the walls is flaking — the building is suffering from psoriasis. The windows are tall and arched; the entrance is flanked on both sides by sandstone knights in niches, their faces almost obscured by their helmets. The realisation that Vienna’s influence once reached all the way to Michailopol never fails to amaze Beg.

The boy is in bed, in a bright, high-ceilinged room. A drip is infusing high-calorie nutrition into his veins. His skin has the dark hue of a Gypsy or an Arab. His head is on the pillows; he is asleep. The nurses have been spoiling him with candy and fondant hearts. On the bedside table is a bottle of Coca-Cola — the real stuff, not an imitation. He’d never tasted Coca-Cola before, the nurse said. They’ve stuck colouring-book illustrations of stags and pirates to the walls, even though he seems a bit too old for that. Their down-to-earth nurses’ hearts have been touched by his story. They know that he has eaten from garbage cans. News of the severed head has reached the hospital, too, but they can’t imagine that the boy — their fledgling — has done anyone any harm. The pregnant woman just down the corridor doesn’t seem that way to them, either. And besides, they were travelling with a group of men, weren’t they? Men are the bane of this world.

Beg looks at the boy through the little window in the door. Suddenly, behind other doors, a few crazies begin screaming at the same time — a zoo. The boy frowns in his sleep. The senseless cries of alarm cut through you like a knife.

The boy looks like he’s about to die of some ancient disease, he’s that skinny — translucent, almost.

‘Has he been talking?’ Beg asks the nurse.

She nods. ‘Sometimes.’

‘What about his name? Did he tell you that?’

‘No. But he said other things. We wrote it all down, like they asked. Nothing very special, though. That this is softest bed he’s ever slept in. And that he has a brother. He comes from a farming family. He’s a good kid.’

She unlocks the door and leads him into the room. ‘I’ve got a visitor for you.’ The boy looks wide-eyed at Beg. The nurse checks the drip, and then leaves the room.

Beg has brought along a few comic books, which he lays on the bed. ‘I guess it can get pretty boring around here,’ he says. The comic books are Japanese — they’re about Astro Boy, a boy automaton with a heart. Beg had flipped through one of them: Astro Boy fights on earth and in the cosmos against the forces of evil, and when he flies his legs look like the flame from the afterburner of a fighter plane. The boy snatches the comics and hides them under the blankets.