Tommy Wieringa - These Are the Names

It took ten minutes before the elevator doors opened and the ward stepped out. He was holding something wrapped in newsprint. He handed it to his superior. Beg unwrapped the package and saw Akmuhammet Kurbankiliev’s almost entire set of teeth, the gold molars and teeth set in a gold retainer.

‘These are the ones,’ the ward said, his head tilted hen-like to one side.

‘What were you thinking …?’

The other man shrugged. ‘I was keeping them for him.’

Beg looked at him, while the warder clasped his hands and waited.

‘Dismissed,’ Beg said, and the man vanished in relief into the elevator.

In the interrogation room, Beg laid the packet on the table and slid it over. The man leaned forward and opened it. He slid a finger between the teeth and molars, feeling them. He looked up. ‘These are mine,’ he said.

‘Take a better look if you like,’ Beg said.

The man nodded. He seemed pleased to see his teeth again. Beg averted his eyes, not to see the brown roots. He lit a cigarette and ran a hand over his jaw. The stubble on his chin felt like sandpaper. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘let’s get down to it.’

The man refolded the packet carefully. It remained on the table.

‘What am I being held for, actually?’ Kurbankiliev asked.

Beg leaned back and folded his hands on his stomach. ‘Attempting to cross the border illegally, and first-degree murder. And desecration of a corpse. But because you’re not from around here, the first charge will probably be dropped.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘But of little import. The other two charges, that’s what I’d worry about if I were you. You’ve been assigned a lawyer. You have a right to that. Only thing is: he’s not coming. They couldn’t get hold of him.’

‘So when’s he coming?’

‘Sometime.’

Kurbankiliev nodded in resignation.

‘The head,’ Beg said.

‘I don’t know who did it.’

‘That’s impossible — you people were on the road together for months.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Whose head is it?’

‘Africa’s. The Ethiopian’s.’

‘Why did he have to die?’

‘Don’t ask me. Because.’

‘Let’s not have any misunderstandings,’ Beg said. ‘It’s not wise to underestimate me.’

That wiggling again. When Kurbankiliev wasn’t scratching himself, he was shimmying with his legs.

‘Ethiopia,’ Beg said.

‘Only because that’s where he came from, at least that’s what we understood. Almost no one ever talked with him besides that, I don’t think. Except for the tall guy, for a while.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘I don’t know him. We knew almost nothing about each other. I think he mentioned his name once …’

‘So where’s “the tall guy” now?’

‘Dead, right? Dead as a doornail.’

‘How did it happen?’

A pitying look. ‘Starvation, all of them. Our own natural cause.’

‘How many of you were there?’

‘Fourteen, fifteen when we started. Two of them walked back right away. They were smart — they had it figured out. We didn’t. We walked in exactly the wrong direction.’ He nodded. ‘There were fourteen of us, not fifteen.’

Beg wrote down the number fourteen, and retraced the ciphers with his pen. Then he drew a circle around them. He asked: ‘Why is the Ethiopian dead?’

‘I’m not the one to ask about that.’

‘I’m going to ask you one more time.’

Beg tapped the tip of his pen on the table and looked at the man from beneath his eyebrows. ‘Why is he dead?’

‘Man, I don’t know. I didn’t have anything to do with it.’

‘Goddamn,’ Beg said calmly. He slid his chair back, got up, and left the room. When he returned, he was carrying a claw hammer. He placed it on the table in front of him.

The hammer had now become the room’s burning vortex; outside it there was nothing at all.

‘All right,’ Beg said, ‘let’s try it again.’

‘What do you want?’ Kurbankiliev said. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

There was shrillness in his voice.

Beg leaned across the table and grabbed the packet of dentures. He unfolded it, and selected one front tooth from among the rest. It was circled by a frame of gold. The root was stained brown. He picked up the hammer.

‘Okay, here we go again: who did it, and why?’

‘I really don’t know, man,’ Kurbankiliev said. He frowned deeply. ‘What is it, do you want me to make something up?’

The hammer came down with a bang, shattering Akmuhammet Kurbankiliev’s front tooth.

‘Aw, fuck!’ he screamed. He tried to jump up, but the manacles around his wrists pulled him back down. ‘Why are you doing that? Aw, fuck!’

The tooth was now a little heap of gold-veined powder. Carefully, Beg laid the hammer on the table. He folded the paper back around the teeth and held the little package in the air. ‘You wanted this,’ he said, ‘and then you were going to tell me what was going on. Instead of that, all I’m hearing is bullshit.’

‘My tooth, man,’ Kurbankiliev whimpered. ‘Aw, fuck.’

‘You should abide by your promises. Then things like this wouldn’t happen. Smoke?’

He slid the pack across the table. Kurbankiliev took one and lit it. The coughing that followed bent him over double. After a bit, teary and red-eyed, he sat up straight and took another drag. He was able to suppress the next coughing fit.

‘How’s that taste?’

He nodded. ‘Good,’ he said in a pinched voice.

Beg looked at the pack of cigarettes. ‘Marlboro. Freedom.’ He flipped it over and read the back. ‘You think it’s really as harmful as they say?’

Kurbankiliev sucked on his cigarette and said nothing.

‘Such freedom,’ Beg said, ‘especially if it kills you.’

The face across the table was veiled in a column of smoke. That was the way the Everlasting had spoken to Moses on Mt. Horeb, from inside a pillar of cloud. He longed for Him at times — a sudden, ecstatic longing that he didn’t understand and that frightened him. This was the image: a ship is pulling away from the dock, and there he, Pontus Beg, comes running, waving his arms because he is on the verge of missing his destination. The gap between the ship and the quay widens. He screams, he leaps …

Maybe the dream meant that He was calling him. That he was on the right road. That he was almost ready to be immersed in the mikveh, the water that awaits him, the dark niche into which he’ll lower himself until the living water closes over his head.

But then again, maybe not.

He put the pack of Marlboros on the table. ‘ A striking similarity, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘That you wanted to be free, and that it almost killed you. Just like these cigarettes.’

Kurbankiliev ground out the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, above the ashtray. He sniffed at his fingers.

‘Anything was better than that,’ he said. He nodded at the back wall, with the transoms in it. ‘Anything.’

‘Even dying?’

Kurbankiliev scratched his chest. ‘I think so, yeah.’

‘And the same went for the Ethiopian?’ Beg asked.

‘I don’t know why he was on the road.’

‘It wasn’t his longing for freedom that killed him,’ Beg said.

‘I wouldn’t know.’

Beg glanced at the packet of teeth.

‘Vitaly had the head with him the whole time,’ Kurbankiliev said. ‘He was the bearer.’

‘Why Vitaly?’

‘He was appointed.’

‘Who appointed him?’

‘The black man.’

‘I don’t get it. The Ethiopian announced who was supposed to carry his head after he was dead?’

‘While he was still alive, yeah. That’s when he appointed him. On top of the hill. He burned the truth into him.’