Sbodin said, ‘I’m afraid I shall have to lock you in your room, Berg. The situation demands it now. I can’t take the risk of letting you roam around freely.’

  Wearily Berg rose and went upstairs, followed by Sbodin. It seemed to him that the upwards climb was never-ending and he wondered if he had the strength to reach the top. Against the darkened glass skylight rain fell with sounds that he felt upon his skin. On the landing he saw that the door to Monika’s room was open. He caught sight of the bed, the untidy sheets, the bits and pieces of her clothing that lay around and suddenly it all seemed familiar to him. He could feel the texture of the clothing and knew the contours of the rumpled sheets. But how did he know these things?

  Sbodin said, ‘Does the scene of the crime still interest you? Shall we go inside and have a look?’

  They entered Monika’s room and Berg, standing in the doorway, reluctant to move any further, looked around. It was dim and drab. In the thin light he could see very little. An ashtray overflowing beside the bed. Nylon stockings on the floor. The window open as if to rid the place of the scent of some obscenity. It was all agonisingly familiar to him.

  ‘This is where she was raped,’ Sbodin said. ‘Then she must have staggered downstairs and fallen in the hall, where the widow heard her screams.’

  Berg nodded his head dumbly. The room opened its mouth and seemed to swallow him. He wanted to get out. He turned and went back to the landing. A moment later Sbodin came out.

  ‘Go inside,’ he said. ‘I’ll lock the door.’

  Berg went into his own room. It smelled of cigarettes and sweat. Listening to the sound of the key turn in the lock, hearing the clatter of the investigator’s boots on the stairs, he became conscious of the depth of silence. He felt like a man who has encountered a silent and sullen landscape which will not respond to any gesture, any caress—which will not even throw back the echo of a sound. He lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Night was falling. It darkened the glass and accentuated the rain. The ceiling gave up its shadows and only the infrequent passage of a car, its lamps glaring through the rain, threw reflections. Darkness fell in the room with the noise of whispers. He was aware now of the empty house. He tried to remember when he had last seen his mother and the words that had passed between them. But he could not get the memory right—as if some delicate mechanism in his brain were malfunctioning. A door that would not open. A bolt drawn across, threading door to wall. He had a sudden urge to telephone her, to ask her to save him. There was a sinking, dropping sensation as though someone had taken him to a great height and then let him slip. Falling, he was aware of space.

  He had last seen his mother on the evening before his departure. She had not known he was leaving. He was going to wait until she was asleep before he left. She had complained of a burning sensation in her stomach and began to catalogue a Whole list of possible causes—ulcer, appendix, gall stones, cancer of the intestines, a mere chill. No, it couldn’t have been a mere chill—such an ordinary complaint would not affect her. Her illnesses had to be exotic, they had to endanger her life. He listened to the sound of her voice and waited nervously until finally she was asleep. And then, dragging his suitcase, he had left the house and gone to the railway station.

  But no—that memory was wrong. It had happened in a different way.

  He had gone to her room and held her hand while she had tossed and turned with a pain that raked through her complex nervous system. He had thought: I have devoted my life to you. You have sucked me dry. And then, watching until she was finally asleep, he took his suitcase and went out into the darkness.

  But that too wasn’t exactly right. The memory wouldn’t come to him. In his brain somewhere was a photograph that he couldn’t find—an image of the exact truth.

  He had carried her to her room because she had fainted. That was correct. He had lifted her in his arms and was conscious that he was holding a woman pressed against his body. Forcing a little brandy into her mouth he was aware of her purple lips and her yellow teeth. Beyond that he could see the shape and shadow of her tongue. All this was correct. He had laid his hands on her breasts—for what reason, he wasn’t exactly certain. They had yielded like something incredibly soft. And then, certain that she was asleep, he crossed the city to the railway station.

  But that wasn’t exactly correct either. In his mind, he had the sensation that he was confusing his mother with Monika Jahn. The memory of his departure was slipping away from him, fragment by fragment.

  He rose from the bed and walked around the darkened room. He had the feeling that he was stumbling in the darkness of his life. He wondered what was going to happen to him now—when Sbodin came back with his colleague’s report from the capital. He stopped by the window. In the street below he observed several people grouped together. They seemed to be looking at the house. A few of them had their faces upturned and were staring at the window of his room. A little frightened, he stepped back, certain that he was invisible to them. What did they want? One of them he thought, was Mrs Jacobitz, but he couldn’t be certain. He felt suddenly like a criminal. It was the first time since Sbodin had come to his room that he felt he really had committed the act of rape. That was why they were standing down there now, staring at the house where the criminal was being held, at the place where the crime had taken place. He went back to his bed.

  Although the darkness depressed him, he did not want to switch on the light. He lay down and closed his eyes. He tried to sleep but kept thinking about the cable, about the electric impulses that carried Sbodin’s words all the way to the capital and the nameless colleague there. Turning, and turning again, he fell eventually into the most restless sleep of his life.

  Six

  The voices seemed to burrow into his dream as if they were a part of it but it was only when he woke that he realised they were coming from the street outside. For some time he did not move; movement seemed futile, there was nothing he could do to disperse the echoes of his restless sleep. Besides, it took him several minutes to remember exactly where he was—since he had woken with the odd feeling that he was back in his mother’s apartment. Slowly he rose from the bed and went to the window. In the thin dry light of the early morning he saw a crowd of people packed tightly along the pavement, some of them spilling on the road, some in doorways opposite, some hanging from windows and gazing across. He blinked at them and all at once they fell into an unanimous silence as if ordered by some invisible leader. Even the vendors amongst them, the various pedlars with their trays of goods, no longer cried their wares but froze into silence and immobility like men suddenly stunned by an unnatural catastrophe. He realised that his own appearance had silenced them that probably they had been waiting for hours in the rain to catch a gimpse of him. Now, in awe, they were quiet. He saw the first shapes of sunlight come up on the roofs opposite, an eery yellow light that made little impression upon the thick grey stone but instead seemed to be absorbed by it. He didn’t move. He held his breath and scanned the crowd as if searching desperately for a familiar face, someone who could offer a crumb of comfort—yet he felt less like some caged freak or animal scrutinised by paying spectactors, and more like a man who was wakened inexplicably into a peculiar dream world, as though the waking experience were a mere extension of the nightmare. They had come to see the rapist. He felt vulnerabe all at once and his eyes moved up and down the silent faces looking for the man who was going to throw the first stone. Yet nothing happened. They seemed content to stand and feast their eyes on him and while he watched them in return he had the strange feeling that the crowd was a separate entity over and above the individuals who composed it, it was a huge sprawling animal that had come hungrily to pick what little flesh remained on his bones. It was a thousand-eyed monster that devoured everything around it. He stepped back from the window out of their view and went to the bed where he sat down, his arms hanging between his legs. Some seconds later the voices began again and the vendors started to offer their goods. Filtering up to him, it was like the noise of an unholy orchestra tuning its instruments.

  He heard the door being unlocked and saw Sbodin enter. He looked tired and pale. He did not smile. Saying nothing to Berg, he crossed to the window, looked out, and sighed.

  ‘What do they want?’ Berg asked. ‘Can’t you make them go away?’

  Sbodin turned and said, ‘It’s like a bit of sport to them. They’re curious to get a look at you. Who can blame them?’

  ‘Make them go away,’ Berg said. The sound of his own voice seemed to him something that he had dredged up, some foreign object, from fathomless depths.

  ‘I couldn’t do that. They’d only come back again. Anyway, why worry about them? They aren’t dangerous yet.’

  ‘How did they find out?’

  Sbodin took a newspaper from his coat and threw it on the bed. Berg picked it up and there, on the front page, read about himself. The piece contained a succinct statement from Sbodin: ‘A man is being detained and investigations are taking their normal course.’

  ‘You see how famous you’ve become,’ Sbodin said.

  ‘Famous.’ Berg folded the newspaper. It was the first time he had ever read about himself in print.

  ‘Think of the large crowd that will attend your trial,’ the investigator said. ‘There hasn’t been anything like your case in this town for—oh, close on fifty years. We shall have to build an extension to the Magistrates’ Building to house everyone who wants to attend. Places will be sold on the black market. The trial will have enormous entertainment value.’

  At the mention of the word trial Berg felt uneasy—like a man pushing a frail craft out on an uncharted ocean. ‘Do you mean that you’re going to charge me?’

  ‘That’s a mere detail,’ Sbodin said. ‘I’m thinking ahead now to the trial itself. I don’t like making a spectacle of the machinery of law, but even if I say so myself I put up a good show when I testify. I enjoy it, Berg. I’m not a sadistic man, as you’ll have gathered, but something about a big trial sets my blood on fire.’

  ‘But are you going to charge me?’ Berg asked again.

  ‘We’ll come to that.’

  Berg did not pursue the point. If Sbodin was going to be elusive, it was useless to force him. Besides, it was obvious that Sbodin—now pacing the floor with an uncharacteristic display of excitement—it was obvious that he had something else on his mind.

  ‘I remember only two years ago, when I charged a man called Kuniczek with espionage, I gave a performance that is talked about in legal circles even today. The Presiding Magistrate, Masser, publically complimented me on my economic use of words, on my logical approach to tangled issues, and on my professional bearing throughout a long and exhausting trial. Naturally, I hope to excel myself at your own trial.’

  Berg lay down. ‘I’m hungry.’

  Moving back to the window, Sbodin said, ‘Later. First, I want to tell you that I’ve been to see Monika Jahn.’

  Berg remained silent.

  ‘She’s recovering, of course. She’ll be fit in good time for her to testify at the trial, but I don’t want to rush things. However, I had a little talk to her and told her of your reaction to the charge.’

  ‘What did she say?’ Berg asked the question with little hope. The tone of his voice was flat and despairing.

  ‘She emphasised that her version of the affair is the true one, and that your denial is false.’ Sbodin took out his cigarettes. The smell of tobacco smoke made Berg feel sick. ‘She’s an attractive woman, Berg. Nobody’s going to blame you for raping her. I wish I could make you see that. I’d go as far as to say that certain elements in the crowd down there probably even envy you. They’re saying to themselves, He’s the fellow who had that beautiful creature—what a pity he’s been discovered.’

  Beautiful creature? Berg formed an image of Monika: he supposed that in an odd way she was beautiful—in an unobtrusive way, shy and unconceited, probably unconscious of her own attractions. Even if he hadn’t raped her he found a certain pleasure in the thought that some of the crowd were envious of him. The man who raped the beautiful Monika Jahn.

  ‘But that’s beside the point,’ Sbodin said. ‘She reiterated what she had said before. You came to her room. You asked her to let you sleep with her and when she refused you pulled her nightdress off. You then chased her around the room.’

  Sbodin took out his notebook and flicked the pages over. He read for a moment before going on to say, ‘She resisted you as much as she could but eventually fatigue overcame her and you proceeded to have forced sexual intercourse with her. Later, when you had returned to your room, and when her senses had come back, she was filled with shame and fear. Worried, terrified, she vaguely remembers leaving her room, crawling downstairs, and collapsing in the hall. Later, Mrs Jacobitz heard her sobbing and went out to her. At that point, I was called in.’

  Berg was on the point of saying that this was a pack of lies when he realised the uselessness of protesting his innocence. At every other turn, at every angle in the complex maze, when he had contested or disputed any part of Sbodin’s so-called evidence, his protestations were either dismissed or completely ignored. What was the point then in denying the truth of Monika’s statement? Sbodin would simply override him—either by ignoring what he was trying to say or by diverting him into quite another point. He got up and went to the window. His appearance again silenced the crowd. Even crying children, gathered in their parents’ arms, stopped. He tried to imagine what his trial would be like. He envisaged some cavernous hall stuffed with these people, thousands of breathing, terrifying human beings, each peering at him from morbid curiosity. He imagined the Magistrate, some unsmiling wretch whose total experience of life had been gained from law books and whose only happiness was in computing the length of a sentence. And he could see Sbodin strutting across the court room spinning spirals of words while the spectators gasped at the intricacies of his logic. He realised then that he could not go through an experience like that—he could not suffer such a monstrous intrusion of his privacy, such a painful probe into his existence.

  He looked down at the crowd again. ‘What is the punishment for rape?’

  ‘It depends,’ Sbodin said.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On the mood of the Presiding Magistrate.’

  A brilliant shaft of sunlight burst through the crowd, seeming to create the illusion of space. For a second he thought of it as some deadly cosmic ray that disintegrated human beings. But even his imagination would not allow any optimism.

  ‘Can’t you give me some idea of the statutory punishment for rape?’

  ‘It’s somewhat complicated,’ Sbodin said. ‘It’s complicated in the sense that different statutes appear to conflict. Therefore it depends on which statute the Presiding Magistrate is likely to prefer. There are some who incline to the 1948 Code, which stipulates the death sentence, provided the woman in the case has offered the rapist no encouragement. Others prefer the earlier 1933 Statute which stipulates a minimum of twenty years hard labour for a first offence, thirty years for a second offence, and death for offences after that. Finally——’

  ‘The death sentence?’ Berg turned from the window. Was that what the crowd wanted to see? The sight of his corpse strung up on a bleak scaffold, the enjoyment of seeing him carted away to some meagre burial plot? He could not entirely grasp the idea of his own death—it was like the concept of infinity. The more he thought about it the further it moved from his conceptual orbit. And he could only chase after it, crying for comprehension, chasing harder and harder—until, all at once, he discovered he could no longer will his limbs to move. That when he was moved it was other people who shifted him around, taking him down from a thick rope, wheeling him to a plot of land, dumping him in an open grave. It was all much more than he could take in. It was all totally insane. They were making a huge mistake and he would die an erroneous death. A huge mistake, a huge mistake. Like the wheels of a locomotive churning, the dreadful phrase echoed inside him.

  Turning to Sbodin he asked, ‘Can you help me?’

  The investigator smiled. ‘Are you afraid?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be?’

  ‘A man has to take responsibility for his own actions, Berg. Don’t we all learn that as little children? Have you forgotten?’

  Berg looked at the crowd. Blurred, the hundreds of faces fused into one amorphous horror.

  He said, ‘You offered me a document yesterday. You said if I signed it the magistrate would be lenient. Let me sign it now. Give it to me and I’ll put my name to it.’

  Sbodin leaned against the wall. ‘I’m sorry, Berg. I offered you the document on two or three occasions. You refused. At the time, I didn’t have a strong case. Now I think my case is a good one. The-opportunity to sign has passed.’

  ‘Passed?’ Berg looked at the investigator uncomprehendingly. He felt suddenly weak. He felt as if he were disintegrating, as though the molecules of which he was composed were cracking apart. Sunlight flared against the window. The crowd in the street, like some tragic chorus, stared upwards.

 

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