Tommy Wieringa - These Are the Names

They sit around the fire and tell each other what they remember: on top of the burial mound he had picked out Vitaly — with his finger he had burned his sign into his arm. They talk of the corrosive mange that had appeared on the tall man’s body; how he had conjured food out of nothingness, after they had left the tall man for dead; and how he had sown fear and conflict among them.

What luck that they had killed him! Such wisdom! In life, he had destroyed them; in death, he was their salvation. In thankfulness and in repugnance, they looked at the head beside the doorpost — that abhorrent, knowing thing.

Vitaly! Where’s Vitaly? They can’t lose him now, now that they know that he is the bearer, that they are saved.

By the time the poacher found him, in the graveyard outside the village, it was already dark. Between the listing headstones he had dug a shallow pit in the cold ground. His eyes closed, hands folded across his chest, he lay waiting for death. And death would certainly have found him if the poacher hadn’t chased him out of his grave before night set in.

Now he is sitting hunched by the fire. He occasionally dips his hand into a can of beans and licks his fingers. He’s beyond hunger. To their questions, he gives no reply.

‘The poacher’s lying,’ the boy tells Beg. ‘He did it himself. After we went back.’

‘Back where?’

‘To Africa.’

‘Why?’

‘We almost couldn’t move. Like we had lead in our shoes. He didn’t want to let us go.’

‘Haç, the one you call the poacher, says that you dreamed the things that made you people go south.’

The boy crossed his arms grumpily. The new comic books Beg had brought with him were lying on the bedspread. His fingertips slid across their colourful covers. His skull sported a fine down of black hairs.

‘Geese,’ he said then, for the sooner Beg left, the sooner he could start on his comics.

‘Geese,’ Beg repeated.

‘Just the things I saw up in the air. I dreamed about that a couple of times. First geese, then airplanes. They asked me what direction they were going in. That way, I said. That’s what happened. Her grandma used to dream about geese, too, she said. She wanted to know everything.’ He snorted. ‘She’s nuts.’

‘Was that before you went back to the black man’s body, or afterwards?’

‘Around the same time. I don’t remember exactly.’

‘And when you got back, Haç cut off his head.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You saw him do that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You were all there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Everyone saw it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How did he do it?’

‘With Africa’s knife. He found it in his pocket. It used to belong to the tall man, that knife.’

‘So why did his head have to be cut off?’

‘Ach.’

He flipped one of the comic books closed and put it back. ‘The woman’s the one who said that he dreamed inside my head, not me.’

‘And was that true?’

The boy lowered his eyes. Beg repeated the question.

‘Have you got a better idea?’ the boy said. ‘If you look at everything that happened after that? All the good luck we had all of a sudden? She said we had to keep him with us, that he would lead us and stuff. But we couldn’t take all of him along. So …’

Beg nodded. His understanding was not feigned; he understood their desperation. Their gods hadn’t answered their pleas. Deaf and mute, they had looked down on them. So they had replaced them.

‘He was still lying there,’ the boy said, ‘but don’t ask me why. Animals had eaten their way right through his ribs. They picked at his liver, his organs. Blecch.’

‘Who beat his brains in, do you know that?’

‘I wasn’t there. I only found him.’

‘Who do you think it was?’

The boy shrugged his skinny shoulders. ‘Anybody could have done that. It’s not all that hard.’

Intuitively, they seemed to have realised that silence was the best policy, Beg thought. That way, all five of them were guilty, just as all five of them were innocent.

The boy leaned forward. He wanted to say something, but hesitated.

‘What is it?’ Beg asked.

‘Nothing,’ the boy said.

‘Just tell me.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Who?’

‘The black man.’

‘In a cooler. The same place where the dead girl is.’

‘Together?’

‘In the same space, yes.’

‘Oh, okay.’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘What are you going to do with him?’

‘Nothing. Bury him, after a while, I guess. If we can’t trace his identity.’

The boy shook his head slowly. ‘You people don’t understand … We want him back.’

Beg burst out laughing.

‘He doesn’t belong to you,’ the boy said. ‘He’s ours. We want him back.’ His black eyes glistened.

Beg had stopped laughing. ‘What are you going to do with him?’

‘We want him back.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

The boy’s upper lip curled in a sneer. ‘Tough shit.’

‘If you talk to me like that, I’ll take these along with me.’ Beg picked up the comic books from the bed and rolled them up. He had trouble disguising his disappointment. He had become fond of the boy. He felt compassion for him. Beg wished the feeling was mutual. Friendship with a child made you a chosen one.

We want him back .

Even now, the head was exercising its magic power; it was still keeping them more or less together. Maybe that explained his fascination, Beg thought, being so close to that. That he was witnessing the start of something. Primal ground. Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee.

There were too few of them, and the times were not suited to it, but in a more distant century it could have happened. Something new, a sacred mystery: blood, retribution, salvation.

The start of a sharply delineated faith.

And immersion, purification. Why not?

The snow in the treads of his patrol boots had melted into little puddles on the linoleum.

‘The woman had a child last night,’ Beg said after a while. He looked at his watch. It was December 19.

The sisters had told him when he came into the ward that afternoon.

The boy nodded. ‘I heard her screaming. They took her away.’

He sniffed loudly and scratched his leg under the blanket. ‘I didn’t know that was what was going on.’

‘Premature, but healthy. It’s unbelievable,’ Beg said. How could a skeleton bear a healthy child?

‘Can I have my comics back?’

Absently, Beg laid the little bundle back on the bed. The boy opened one and began flipping through it.

The baby still had no name, the nurses had told him when he came in. They’d asked how he was supposed to be registered.

‘Saïd Mirza,’ he’d told them. It was a flash of intuition, a hunch. They looked at him in surprise. He said: ‘You wanted to know what to call him, right? Saïd Mirza, that’s his working name. So write it down, already. Who cares if there are two of them?’

The nurse wrote Saïd Mirza on a sheet of paper and asked no further.

‘I’m going by to see her,’ Beg told her.

‘You don’t have much time,’ the nurse said. ‘She’s in intensive care.’

And so it happened that there were suddenly two Saïd Mirzas in the same hospital.

Saïd Mirza the First stared intently at his comic. Did he actually know how to read, Beg wondered. He could handle a slingshot, he knew how to plant corn and tend goats, but was he familiar with the written word? Who would have taught him that, up in those mountains? If he couldn’t read, there was no life for him outside his native village — washing dishes, perhaps, or lugging merchandise at the bazaar, but that wasn’t why he’d undertaken such a journey. He wouldn’t have risked his life for that, to be a drudge. It would be a real loss; the boy had brains. Without writing, without civilisation, he would be only a talented predator, suited for nothing but a life of petty crime. For quick scams and the occasional trouncing.