These Are the Names Read Free Page B

and Catholic — and two synagogues as well. The services at the Armenian Orthodox church had attracted boys from far and near, like flies to honey, for there were no prettier girls than the Armenian ones.
    Beg recalled the fistfights outside the church — fathers and brothers against the country bumpkins who were after their daughters and sisters.
    The Armenian church, too, had disappeared long ago.
    He parked in front of Tina’s Bazooka Bar and went in.
    â€˜Pontus, darling,’ Tina said as he settled down at the bar. Ah, Tina Bazooka — sacred icons began to sweat when she was around. She caressed the back of Beg’s hand. Brothel manners never faded.
    She had just come back from visiting her son, who lived with his grandmother in the south of the country. Tina put a plate of meatloaf in the microwave and tapped a beer for him. Switching on her mobile phone, she showed him pictures of the boy.
    â€˜Amazing, how fast he’s grown,’ Beg said.
    â€˜Next year he’s coming to live with me.’
    Beg slid the phone back across the bar. Heart-shaped plastic charms dangled from its fuzzy fluorescent skin.
    â€˜Sure, why not,’ he said. ‘We have everything here. Schools …’
    â€˜Yeah, and besides that?’ she asked sardonically.
    â€˜A swimming pool.’
    â€˜Closed.’
    â€˜Oh?’
    â€˜We used to go swimming there with the girls. But not anymore.’
    Beg searched his memory for another facility suitable for children. ‘Valentine Park,’ he said. ‘He can …’
    â€˜Get chased through the woods by a rapist? Ha-ha.’
    â€˜They’ve got a playground.’
    â€˜He’s thirteen.’
    â€˜So he can play soccer,’ Beg said, feeling acquitted.
    Tina turned brusquely and walked to the far end of the bar. Beg realised he’d said something wrong, and then remembered — too late, jerk that he was — the boy’s foot. Tina had always blamed the deformity on the nuclear rain; her native village lay next to a notorious testing site. Her attempts to get the boy benefits for the victims of atomic testing had proven fruitless. Even today, outright monsters were being born, mutants; a clubfoot was nothing by comparison. It didn’t help either that the child had been born at Michailopol hospital, and probably conceived at the Morris Club.
    Beg ate his meatloaf and drank his beer. He looked at Tina out of the corner of his eye. How did they grow them like that? A heavy gold cross wobbled on her bosom. Tina had left the business; like everyone else at the bar, Beg was consumed by regret.
    The joke was one her customers passed on. ‘Take this bread, it is my body,’ Jesus of Nazareth told his disciples at the Last Supper. ‘Take this body, it’s how I earn my bread,’ Tina Bazooka told her customers.
    When she opened the bar, most of those customers had followed her. Everyone thought her meatloaf was excellent, but her body would have pleased them a thousand times more.
    It took some getting used to at first, but they all did their best.
    In fact, Beg thought, the transition had been remarkably serene. No one made a fuss, maybe because they’d all had their piece of her.

CHAPTER FOUR
    The abandoned village
    They spread out silently among the houses. They ransack rooms, kitchens, and pantries, and call out to each other from darkened cellars. The tall man falls through a rotten wooden staircase. Nothing edible has been left behind; nothing to check their hunger. Cursing, Vitaly breaks off a table leg and smashes a room to bits. He swings the wood around savagely, until at last he breaks out in a cold sweat and shivers like a man in a fever. He falls to the floor, waves of nausea racking his body.
    In an overgrown garden, the woman finds potato plants that have bolted. With her hands, she digs a few wrinkled little spuds out of the wet soil. Most of them are rotten, and the stinking