The punctual rape, p.16
The Punctual Rape, page 16
He clenched his hands together. The fingers were cold, like chips of ice. He rubbed them for warmth and thought how strange it was that he should end up in this place. All this time he had been anxious to know about the Site—now all he would ever remember was the dreadful smell and the time of his imprisonment.
Sounds came from outside again. Voices that he could hear across the noises of construction. They approached the hut, circled it, and then faded away. After that there was a total silence. Even the noises of work ceased and the night was incredibly quiet, as silent as the inside of the hut itself. What were they doing now? He imagined they had stopped, gone home or to their lodgings—after all, it was very late.
Unable to stand the strain of crouching, he went down on his knees. Then, quite suddenly, he started to tremble. The movement began in the muscles at the back of his legs and spread across his whole body. He clenched his teeth and made an effort of will to stop it—but he couldn’t. What was causing it? Some delayed reaction to the sight of the widow lying at the bottom of the stairs? The knowledge that she might be dead? But she wasn’t dead: somehow he was certain of that. She may have broken a bone or two, she may have been concussed, but she certainly wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be dead, because if she were then technically he was her killer. And he knew within himself that he was quite incapable of killing anyone. Therefore the widow was alive. He wanted all at once to tell this to someone, he wanted to say that the widow was alive and that after treatment she would be as well as ever before. But only the pressing darkness groped back at him, swirled heavily around him.
He closed his eyes again. It made no difference to the depth of the darkness. When the fit of trembling passed, he wanted to sleep. Curling over, he lay across the tiny area of the floor. He tried to ignore the various smells that rose up and the various objects that came in contact with his skin—and when, at last, he was on the point of sleeping, he heard the roar of an engine and the shriek of tyres as a car braked suddenly.
There were a great many voices again. They began to echo up out of the dark as if they had been there all the time, lying in wait.
He heard someone say, ‘He’s dangerous.’
Footsteps approached the hut. They came unrhythmically across the soft earth and then stopped. Berg sat up and stared through the darkness in the direction of the door. It was pushed open and a flashlight picked out his face. The spiked arc of light was a painful thing that burned his eyes, causing him to raise his hands over his face.
‘Come out,’ someone said.
He got to his feet and, tracked by the flashlight, stepped outside. The clear night air was unbelievably pure: it rushed against him and he choked on it. Several hands pushed him forward.
‘He’s covered in shit,’ someone said. ‘Look out.’
Stumbling through the mud again, he was pushed towards a car that was parked at the side of the road. One door was open. As he went towards the car he had the impression that a multitude of eyes were following him, but when he looked round he saw nothing but the three or four men behind him and the deserted rubble of the Site.
‘He’s covered in it,’ someone said.
Another voice said. ‘Who put him in there for fuck’s sake?’
He stopped just outside the car. Sooner or later, he knew that the opportunity to make a run for it would come again. But this was not the right one.
He went into the car. Pieces of excrement, human or otherwise, began to flake and fall from his clothes. He slumped in the seat next to the steering-wheel.
The men who had released him from the hut entered the car. One of them opened the windows. Another switched on the engine and reversed the car clumsily, striking something hard.
When they were driving back in the direction of the town, Berg said, ‘It’s cold—can I close the window?’
Nobody answered him.
Eleven
Sbodin was sitting behind a desk. He still wore his raincoat and his hat lay in front of him. When Berg was brought into the room, the investigator said nothing for some length of time. He pressed the tips of his fingers to his lips and stared at something on the desk. But apart from the hat Berg could see nothing, no object likely to hold Sbodin’s attention so completely. Minutes went past. Berg stood in the middle of the room and looked around. It wasn’t a large room. The walls were painted a regulation shade of brown and the weak electric light was reflected back palely. Apart from the desk and Sbodin’s chair there were no other items of furniture—unless you counted the waste-basket and the telephone.
And then Sbodin said, ‘What a pity you took the wrong turning, Berg. But it was a worthwhile attempt.’ He fidgeted with his hat as if nervous. ‘Now that we’ve fetched you back, I think my case is watertight, don’t you? If you were really innocent, you wouldn’t have run.’
Berg said, ‘I ran because I was innocent.’ He looked at Sbodin and wondered when he was going to mention the widow.
‘You ran because you were innocent,’ he said flatly. In the near-empty room his voice echoed a little. The last syllable of innocent came back like a pale whisper. He rose from the desk, lifting his hat.
Berg saw that beneath the hat lay a pistol. It gleamed: it was the gleam as much as anything that took Berg’s attention. He stared at it like a child attracted by a shining object. He had never before seen a pistol close to. The size of it impressed him and it looked heavy, much heavier than he would have imagined. An urge to touch it came over him and he made an imperceptible movement forward before he checked himself.
‘Do you like the gun, Berg?’
‘I wouldn’t say that I like it exactly——’
‘But it attracts you?’
Berg was silent. Sbodin began to move round the room, keeping close to the walls, and then he stopped immediately behind Berg. Berg realised then that he was nearer to the gun than he was to the investigator. If he were to move quickly—— But no; it was too obviously a trap. Probably it wasn’t even loaded, probably Sbodin wanted him to reach for it. Another of his devious plans. As soon as he picked it up Sbodin would no doubt pull another gun from his coat and fire. That was almost certainly the situation. He stood very still, hardly breathing. With a little insight it was possible to play Sbodin’s games and even win some of them.
‘The gun attracts you?’ Sbodin asked.
‘I’m not going to pick it up. I’ve never handled a gun before.’
‘Go on,’ Sbodin said. ‘Feel it.’
Berg said nothing. He listened to the investigator’s heavy breathing. A moment passed before Sbodin moved and made his way back to the desk.
‘Why did you run away?’
‘You know why. I wanted to prove my innocence.’
‘You keep talking about your innocence, Berg. If you were really innocent, would I want to see you punished? Would I? I’m not an unfair man, am I? This job is difficult enough—but I think I keep some sort of control. I think I manage to keep a balance, don’t you?’ He stared at Berg. His eyes were barely visible. ‘It’s very hard, but I manage.’
‘I’m not guilty,’ Berg said. When was Sbodin going to say something about the widow? He had a mental image of the widow at the bottom of the stairs: there was something obscene in the roundness of her eyes, in the glazed expression. But his memory was flawed. He knew intuitively that when he had looked at her she was not staring at him. He was positive that the eyes had been closed.
‘So you thought if you made a run for it everything would clear itself up, did you? Where were you trying to run to, Berg? I sat down and worked it out. You were going for the border, weren’t you? You thought you’d slip across the border and be safe over there. That was very naive of you. In the first place there are guards who ask—politely, mind you—to look at such formalities as identification papers and entrance visas. In the second place, even if you had slipped past them there are extradition arrangements. You’d have been picked up and brought back.’ The investigator looked at the gun for a moment. ‘You were heading for the border—isn’t it ironic that you ended up at the site?’
‘Ironic?’
Sbodin sat down. ‘You’re really in trouble now, Berg. Do you realise that?’
Shifting his feet, Berg had the feeling that he was about to be unjustly punished by a censorious adult, that he was a child again in a world where adult expressions and adult behaviour were beyond his comprehension. He stared at the light-bulb. It flickered bleakly, reminding him of something—even if he did not know what.
‘First the widow——’
‘The widow?’
Sbodin said, ‘Yes, the widow. That poor woman,’
‘What do you mean—that poor woman?’
The investigator picked up his gun, handled it. ‘She’s dead. I found her at the bottom of the stairs. She didn’t fall down—you wouldn’t try to tell me that, would you? She didn’t fall down a flight of stairs she must have climbed and descended thousands of times. You pushed her. When I saw her she was quite dead.’
‘No, I don’t believe that.’ Berg saw the round shadow of the gun’s barrel. ‘I didn’t push her. What actually happened was that she——’
‘Please, Berg. I’m not going to listen.’
Berg moved to the desk. There was a faint smell from the gun—of warm metal, cleaning fluid, and something else he did not recognise.
‘You killed the widow.’
Berg said, ‘Prove it.’
‘The circumstantial evidence is strong. Can you disprove it?’
Berg placed his hands on the edge of the desk. ‘I didn’t kill her. I’m quite incapable of killing.’
‘No more, Berg.’
‘At school I didn’t even play games. I didn’t want to take the chance of hurting someone. I can’t stand violence. I can’t stand pain. Ask anyone who knows me. They’ll tell you that I wouldn’t hurt a fly. And now you say that I killed the widow. It’s preposterous.’
Berg stared at Sbodin and tried to remember what had happened. He had gone through the skylight—the widow, the stupid bitch, had hung to his legs. And then, quite suddenly, she had slipped. He remembered it clearly. She had slipped and slipped and gone on slipping all the way down the stairs.
‘Her neck was broken,’ Sbodin said.
‘She slipped. I saw her slip.’
Sbodin stared down at the gun. ‘You’ll hang, of course. It’s really too bad.’
‘She slipped. I was there at the time. I saw what happened.’
Sbodin put the gun into his coat and stood up. Yawning, he stretched his arms. Berg watched him, as if waiting for his expression to change, as if in the thin hope that he might suddenly smile and say: Go home, run along, the whole thing—Monika, the widow—the whole thing’s been a bad joke. But Sbodin dropped his arms, sighed wearily, and asked:
‘Why did you strangle your mother?’
Twelve
They were walking across a yard, Sbodin a few feet behind, talking about how comfortable the cell would be. A soft rain had started to fall. Berg thought it strange that he had no idea about time. All his life he had been accustomed to clocks—he had been accustomed to administer certain sorts of tablets at certain hours, certain powders at certain other hours, certain liquids at other hours still. If he tried hard he could even repeat the routine to himself: nine o’clock—green liquid; nine-twenty five—yellow pills; ten-five—white powder. But what was that Sbodin had said about his mother? It was some sort of joke—in very poor taste, but all Sbodin’s jokes were in poor taste. Why did you strangle your mother? Was that the question? It hardly seemed a question at all—it was one of those trick questions they sometimes put in at the end of examination papers. They had to be answered in a special sort of way. You could not treat them normally. They looked like ordinary questions, yes, but they demanded a different sort of answer. Sbodin’s question was like that: in reality, he was asking about something else altogether even if Berg could not think what.
Why did you strangle your mother? Hearing Sbodin’s steps behind him made him think, for some reason, of the very last time he had seen his mother. She was fast asleep. She had fallen asleep on the sofa and he had carried her, very gently, to her room. And then, after a few moments to be absolutely sure, he took his suitcase and departed. The memory of all that was vague now—but then so many things had happened to him in the meantime. Yet he felt that that was how it had been—lifting her calmly and with all the gentleness he had, from the sofa to the bed. That was his memory of it. Like an over-exposed photograph it was blurred, but he was sure that essentially this was right.
And now Sbodin’s question—what did it really mean? Somehow he felt like laughing aloud, like laughing and listening to the drift of his laughter as it went spinning across the yard, over the wall and into the night. First Monika; second the widow; third his mother. Sbodin’s trilogy was an insane joke. You could only react to insane jokes by laughing at them.
And he did laugh.
‘I don’t see anything funny,’ Sbodin said.
Stopping a moment by the wall, Berg waited for his laughter to subside. He realised that the conspiracy—that was the only name he could put to the sequence of events—he was aware that the conspiracy against him would, under close scrutiny, fall apart. Sbodin could never hope to bring a successful case against him.
He thought about his mother. Perhaps in the morning he would send her a cable, telling her what had happened. She would find it funny too, in a different sort of way. He laughed again, and Sbodin prodded him to move.
‘Come on, it’s cold. The sooner I can get you into your cell, the sooner I can get to bed.’
‘Wait. My side hurts.’
‘In a very short time, you’ll cease to feel pain,’ Sbodin said.
Berg wanted to ask what Sbodin’s question really meant: if it was a trick question then he had to be very careful. Did you strangle your mother? Why did you strangle your mother? Did you strangle her because you hated her? It was rather strange, but he could no longer remember Sbodin’s exact question.
He said, ‘What did you say about my mother?’
Sbodin said, ‘She was found in her apartment. She had been dead for some time. Our estimation of the time of her death coincides with the night you left the capital.’
Berg remembered now. On the night he left the capital it was raining. His mother had been complaining about the weather. She had been saying how the damp atmosphere affected her health. While talking in this monotonous way she had become drowsier, yawning much of the time. And then, exactly as he remembered, she had fallen asleep. He had lifted her into the bedroom. There was about this memory a certain sort of feeling, as if he knew it wasn’t exactly right but that it was as near as he was likely to get.
He turned to look at Sbodin. ‘I must say that I find your humour in the worst possible taste.’ The remark echoed on his lips for a moment and was snatched away by the rain.
‘Keep moving, Berg.’
They moved along the wall. ‘I love my mother,’ Berg said. ‘If I hated her, as you imply, would I have spent so many years looking after her?’
Sbodin shrugged. He was tired now. His face seemed smaller to Berg than before, and paler.
‘But I wanted a change,’ Berg said. ‘I had to get away from home. There’s a time in everybody’s life, isn’t there, when they want a little freedom?’
Sbodin yawned. He looked miserably through the rain, scratching his hands with a bored expression.
‘Not much further,’ he said. ‘Keep moving.’
They turned a corner. There, looming up through the dark, was a sight that suddenly numbed Berg. He was looking at a scaffold. It seemed pathetically thin, far too frail to bear the weight of any man—living or dead. He stopped and Sbodin, a few feet behind, coughed a couple of times. The shadow of a rope hung down, sodden by rain. Berg thought that rain would surely swell the fibres of the rope, making it stiff and flexible. It was another of Sbodin’s jokes to lead him in this direction quite deliberately so that he would see the gallows upon which Sbodin wanted him hanged. It wasn’t exactly funny this time: even for Sbodin it was in the worst possible taste.
‘What’s that?’ Berg asked.
‘That’s where you’ll die.’
Why did you strangle your mother? The question reverberated in his head and he had the strange intuition that behind the question lay a direct threat. Sbodin really wanted to say: I am going to strangle you. Sbodin wanted him to mount those steps, walk towards the rope, fix it around his neck like a collar, and then drop forever through a trapdoor.
Rain swept across his face. Between his lips he could taste it. It had an unusual taste, faintly acid. He leaned against the wall and looked at Sbodin.
‘You know that I didn’t rape Monika, don’t you? And basically I think you believe that the widow slipped—just as I told you—don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Sbodin said. ‘And I’m of the opinion that your mother strangled herself. Keep moving.’
They moved a little further along the wall.
Berg said, ‘If you believe I’m innocent then, why do you want to punish me?’
Sbodin said nothing. He pushed Berg from behind, forcing him to take a few more steps.
‘Give me a chance. Close your eyes for a minute, let me get away. Why don’t you give me a chance?’
‘Hurry, keep moving.’
They moved on. Berg brushed his shoulder against the wall. He wondered how long it would take to leap over it and make a run for cover somewhere. The wall wasn’t high. It was probably no more than four feet in height. It would be easy to get over it, drop down on the other side, and run. He would be hidden by darkness. Sbodin was tired and therefore his reactions would be slow. Should he take the chance?
They walked a little further. About a hundred yards away was a dark building that Berg assumed was the prison. He could not stand the idea of being forced to spend the night in a cell. He stopped. A door in the building was pushed open and a square of light fell through the rain. The ground glimmered. A man appeared in the doorway and shouted something but his voice was lost in the rain.
