The Devil Is a Black Dog Read online

  Published by New Europe Books, 2014

  Williamstown, Massachusetts

  www.NewEuropeBooks.com

  Copyright © Sándor Jászberényi, 2014

  Translation © M. Henderson Ellis, 2014

  Cover design by Hadley Kincade

  Cover photo by Sándor Jászberényi

  Interior design by Knowledge Publishing Services

  First published, in Hungarian, in 2013 by Kalligram, Budapest.

  First U.S. edition 2014

  Stories from this book have appeared in the following publications: AGNI, BodyLiterature.com, the Brooklyn Rail, and Pilvax.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.

  ISBN: 978-0-9900043-2-5

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-9900043-3-2

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Fever

  Professional Killers

  The Blake Precept

  How Ahmed Salem Abandoned God

  The Devil Is a Black Dog

  The First

  Taking Trinidad

  Something About the Job

  How We Didn’t Win

  Registration

  End of the World

  Twins

  Somewhere on the Border

  Homecoming

  The Field

  The Desert Is Cold In the Morning

  The Majestic Clouds

  The Strongest Knot

  The Dead Ride Fast

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  To Hafiz

  The Fever

  I’m sick. My temple throbs. I can feel my entire nervous system, down to every last nerve ending. My head is wrung out. It hurts. My mouth is like dry clay, as if I haven’t had water for days. Just a few minutes ago I was gazing listlessly at the rocky desert as it flew past. Now, if I turn my head, the landscape comes with me. It slips, like the sound in an old video recording. I don’t know where I caught this sickness. Perhaps when we crossed Lake Nasser. We had to hurry on the Egyptian side and scrambled to get tickets for the ferry. I remember how thirsty I was in the market, and that I drank from a communal clay pot. Yes, perhaps it was the water, the green water of the lake.

  It is also possible that I became infected in Abuja. I was staying in a damp room in a boarding house called the Hotel Mechko. I didn’t think twice that there was no mosquito netting on the windows or bed. Hundreds of bugs must have sucked my blood that night while the rainy season bellowed outside.

  Or perhaps it found me in the air of Kinshasa, Mombasa, or Aden. Or came from the roaches that crawled across me at night in hotel rooms, or from holding hands or a lover’s embrace; for everything is infectious in the tropics. If you live here, you know you can’t avoid disease. Even with an iron constitution, the continent will get a taste of you sooner or later. Of course there is preventative medicine, but the side effects are so strong that it is not out of irresponsibility that you decline them. Who would want to bear the continual retching and nausea in 110-degree heat, when the bottom of your mouth is dry as paper and your lungs are burning with such hot, steamy air that you think you are breathing fire?

  No, living in the tropics isn’t about overcoming disease but trying to survive it. You should be ready, because it is unavoidable. And vaccinations are useless. I remember how proudly I asserted to a doctor while walking between beds of the slumbering TB patients in the leper and tuberculosis hospital in Zaria, Nigeria, that I was inoculated and thus didn’t need a face mask.

  “There are no vaccinations for this,” responded the doctor. He explained that TB patients are put to sleep in the last stages of their disease so they don’t suffocate while awake.

  Most African diseases come with fever. When it begins, time pauses. The hand on the wristwatch doesn’t move, the wind doesn’t blow sand. There is nothing to a person, just a body. One that is about to betray you.

  The woman I’m traveling with, Zeinab’s her name, comes from the Fur tribe. I pay five dollars a day for her love. We have a special ritual for the payment. In the morning, after we make love, she gets her backpack, takes out her leather wallet, stands in front of me, and says, “A new day is beginning, so pay.” I pay. Her teeth flash in the morning light as she smiles. We’ve been together for two months. I think she’s in love with me, and I probably haven’t needed to give her any money for a while now, but I do anyway, so she can’t use that against me when it ends.

  “You’ll take me home with you, right? So I can see the snow.”

  “I’ll take you.”

  “You were joking, right? When you said you have no soul.”

  “I was joking.”

  “Because if you don’t have a soul, how can you go to heaven or hell?”

  “What makes you think I want to go anywhere?”

  “Because you are always traveling.”

  “And?”

  “There is nothing wrong with travel, that’s not why I said it. I love traveling with you. Traveling, making love, drinking beer, and eating opium for nice dreams.”

  When Zeinab sees I am in trouble, she tells the driver. His name is Abdul Sabur, and he drives barefoot. I had contracted him in Khartoum to take me to Sawakin, because I wanted to see the face of evil. Zeinab told me it’s a haunted place, where the devil sits on your chest at night.

  Along with that, there was also a civil war, and the tribes were on the move; this is what I am supposed to write about. We’re traveling in a thirty-year-old black Ford Cortina. My woman turns toward me and says something, but I can’t make sense of her words, which come to me in gurgling sounds. She presses a plastic bottle of water into my hand. I lift it to my mouth and drink. The water should be warm, but it feels cold to me, and makes my esophagus ache. I see Zeinab’s expression of worry, tears forming in her eyes as she begins to recite the Koran. In Africa, when there is trouble, everybody turns devout. For example, once during a police raid on a Cairo brothel, I saw a Saudi man, who wasn’t in the least bit religious, swear on the Koran that he was only there by accident.

  Abdul Sabur turns toward me. He looks terrified. I don’t understand why, until I see my face in the rearview mirror. My eyes are blood red and my pupils have all but disappeared. Abdul pulls off the main road and heads in the direction of a village. Mud huts appear against a horizon of beaten red earth and goats. The inhabitants stand at the huts’ entrances and stare at us as we come to a stop in the village commons.

  “It’ll be alright,” says Zeinab. I respond in Hungarian. When a fever is up around 107 degrees you forget all languages but your own.

  Abdul Sabur opens the door and I try to get out. All my muscles stiffen and tense, and I can’t bend my leg. Tears of pain flow from the effort, and in the end I fall flat on my face. I taste salt in my mouth; perhaps it’s blood. Men from the town rush toward us; they lift me up and carry me into one of the huts. Inside it’s dim, and smells of smoke and feces. They lay me by the fire.

  “Halfan,” I say. “I have Malaria, bring Halfan.” A black man with tattoos on his face says that the nearest pharmacy is in a city ninety miles away.

  Abdul Sabur de
parts immediately, but on this road he won’t get back until dawn, which means a twelve-hour wait. Zeinab collapses in tears. She knows that in twelve hours death could come knocking a thousand times. More, if the person is a foreigner.

  Crying suits her. The straps of her blouse fall down and I can see her shoulders. It reminds me of how, on our first days together—when she only wanted to make love—she would sleep only on her back. She paid careful attention, on the soiled bed, under the fan, to be sure I wouldn’t see her body, having wrapped herself in a blanket. Then, once after I followed her into the shower, I figured out what she was hiding: the bloody scars given to her by her father; the same man who had molested her and finally went blind from the Nile water and 80-proof moonshine made with embalming fluid.

  The village women bring clay pots of water into the hut. Zeinab takes the scarf from her neck, dampens it, and wipes my brow. I plead with her to stop, because it hurts. I feel like I am floating a yard above the ground. From an opening cut in the ceiling I can see the violet-blue, cloudless sky. My eyes get used to the blue. A Hungarian song plays in my mind, and I may even be singing loudly along. The old woman sitting next to me chews betel, her spit forming red pools on the ground. She holds my head up for ten minutes or so as she feeds me on goat milk. I take it without protest; I don’t even have the strength to gag. After that, I don’t know how much time passes. Finally the door opens and Zeinab steps in, accompanied by a man in a long beard, wearing a jellabiya, holding a Koran in his hand.

  In Sudan every village has at least one sheikh and one faki. While the sheikh relies on the Koran and white magic to heal, the faki’s power comes from the dirty little deals he strikes with the devil. In Khartoum, for example, for twenty dollars I bought an amulet that, when stitched into my clothing, was supposed to protect me from bullets. There was one for sickness as well. I should have bought that one.

  “But he isn’t a Muslim,” says the sheikh, turning toward my woman. In response she takes a five-dollar bill from her wallet, puts it in his hand, and says, “Just try.”

  He kneels over me. With the Koran stuck under my arm, the sheikh begins to recite an incantation against demonic possession. It doesn’t help. If the devil is inside of me, he has lived there for a long time. He’s dug himself in, and won’t be roused by any common village exorcist.

  I turn on my side and can see my father standing there. He is in his brown jacket, a collar shirt, and is looking down at me with a strict, professorial expression.

  “The increasing body temperature bolsters the immune system in the many segments of the spine while also stemming the spread of pathogenic bacteria,” he says and nods, to which I say, “That’s for sure, Dad.”

  “This is what you wanted, right? Do you at least know what you are looking for here?” he asks.

  “I’m a correspondent. It’s my job to go to places like this.”

  I smile, because I know this is not the whole truth, but I won’t tell that to my father, especially if he happens to be the product of a fever-induced dream.

  He disappears, but I can’t stop smiling. The sheikh completes his recitation from the Koran; and again Zeinab collapses in tears. In Darfur, where she comes from, if a patient begins to smile, it means he or she is about to die. Around there peaceful deaths are few, but held in great esteem.

  But that is not why I am smiling. I am smiling because I don’t regret anything, really. I never wanted to live a sensible life. I didn’t want to be a model citizen; I desired neither a family nor children, and when I found myself in possession of both, the enterprise wound up a dismal failure. I have answers only when the circumstances are clear, like life and death; that’s when I feel best, when the questions are easy, uncomplicated by the reflexes of a dying civilization.

  I lift my head, so I can establish that I have indeed lost my sight. Everything looks white, blinding white, as though I am staring into the sun. The world goes quiet as my life begins to flash before my eyes. I am not afraid. I didn’t want a sensible death either.

  Professional Killers

  We were lying among the trees in the yard. The sweet smell of fruit was everywhere. Bees and wasps buzzed above our heads. The sun shone through the leaves and warmed us through our clothing; it was a good feeling. We liked being there, in the garden behind the house, where nobody had a word to say to us. It was just my little brother and I on that early afternoon.

  We lay there silently plucking the fallen sour cherries from the grass, eating the soft flesh and making a game of shooting the wet pits from between our fingers. It was then that my brother noticed the bird. He poked me in the shoulder and pointed to a cherry tree. I followed the line indicated by his finger to the lowest branch, where the crow was perched. It was a big one, the branch dipping under its weight.

  Until then we had seen its kind only in the plowed fields around our village; they never came so close as to venture into the trees on our property. We had tried to see one from up close before, but unlike smaller birds, these were too intelligent and cunning to let us near.

  I felt my pulse quicken, and I reached over to grab our gun, a Slovak-made air rifle. Its black oily barrel flashed in the sunlight as I pulled it close. Dad had tricked it out with a tighter spring, so that we could hunt with it. We were so proud of that rifle—a firearm of our own. We didn’t mind sharing it; we shared everything else.

  I sat up and cracked the barrel. I dug some ammo from my pocket, trying to make sure none of the excess rounds fell out. We had only 923 pellets for the entire summer, as many as came in one box. Dad said he wouldn’t buy us more, so we would have to take care of how we used them. We had done the math and figured we could shoot no more than ten rounds a day, but after Father stopped supervising us, the ration was soon forgotten.

  I loaded the gun. With my thumb, I gently pushed in the lead pellet and cracked the barrel back in place. I momentarily worried that the sound had startled the crow. I froze, sitting dead still. But the bird wasn’t concerned with us. It was much more interested in the fruit dangling off the tree’s outer branches. It preened itself, and lazily plucked the nearby cherries with its beak.

  I carefully rested the rifle against my shoulder, looked into the sight, and tried to control my breath. My brother began to squirm beside me.

  “Sure you can hit it from here?” he whispered.

  “Yep.”

  “We already used one pellet today.”

  “Well, this guy is worth at least two notches.”

  With a pocketknife we had been carving notches into the gun after every kill, just like the American Indians had done in our books about them. We had sworn that by summer’s end there would be fifty notches cut into in the gun’s stock. Though a month and a half had already passed, we had only accumulated eighteen. My brother didn’t think we would make it; for his part, he was too small to properly hold the gun, and this resulted in lots of misfires. As for me, I wasn’t too worried about it: from the moment I picked up that rifle I was a professional killer.

  When he gave us the weapon, our father instructed us to make only clean kills. Figuring that sooner or later we would realize that rifles weren’t invented for mere target practice, he reasoned that it would be better if he told us all we had to know.

  We were standing in the yard, and the smell of potatoes stewed in paprika sauce wafted through the air. Then, right before our eyes, our father shot a sparrow from its perch on the branch of a walnut tree. “One shot, one kill,” he said. One shot: that’s what he meant by “clean.” He went on to explain that if we killed something (as he was sure we would), we shouldn’t play with the dead body afterward. If we kill, we should do it quickly and precisely. Anything that has a heart must be shown respect.

  In the first few weeks, we actually weren’t able to shoot a thing, but not long afterward we got the hang of it. We soon became drunk on the power, knowing we could have this impact; where before there was this living, moving creature, now there was nothing but carrion on th
e ground. We had killed ants and other bugs before, but this sort of daring was a new and seductive feeling. We’d proudly pick up the shot sparrows by their feet, and bring them to the graves we had already dug for them. He who had made the kill completed the ritual: carving our mark into the stock of the rifle.

  “I’m hungry,” my brother said, sitting up.

  “Eat some cherries,” I replied, without turning to look at him.

  “I’m sick of cherries.”

  “We’ll eat after this shot. Dad’s coming home soon.”

  I flattened myself on the ground. I didn’t want to startle the bird. I looked at my watch. Dad was indeed a bit late for lunch, and I was also hungry.

  Our mother had been in the hospital since the beginning of the summer. Dad was almost certainly with her now. Since it had become apparent that there was something wrong with her womb, that she had to be admitted to the hospital, Dad didn’t do much but shuttle between my mother’s bedside, work, and home. My brother and I didn’t know exactly what Mom was sick with, as they had taken care to talk about it only after they put us to bed.

  I remember that on the day before she went to the hospital, I found Dad crying in the kitchen. He said everything would be alright. Then they left for the hospital and he didn’t return for days. For two months he spent all his time there. It became normal for my brother and I to cry ourselves to sleep, though we eventually gave this up, as we became distracted by the impending summer.

  Dad wouldn’t let us come with him on visits. He said that we were still too young for this. We communicated with Mom by drawing her pictures and writing her letters. I was in second grade and could already write well. I composed serious letters to her, filled with sentences like, “Today we hunted in the woods.” My brother mainly sent crayon-drawn pictures of volcanoes, tanks, or whatever happened to be on his mind that day.

  Since our mother’s disappearance, there were lots of changes at home. For instance, Dad didn’t play with us anymore. He became irritable, lost a lot of weight, and took up smoking again.