The Punctual Rape, page 14
‘You have to admit that there isn’t any way out for you.’
‘No,’ Berg said. ‘How could I admit that? How can you justify your own actions in condemning an innocent man?’
Sbodin stared a moment in disbelief. And then, raising his head a little, laughed noisily. It was a strange, emasculated laugh, as though the man were wary of giving the impression that he had a sense of humour. When it had stopped, he said, ‘Do I have to justify my actions? Why do you think that? I simply interpret the evidence and the evidence against you is very strong. I present the evidence to the court, with my recommendation, and that is all. In my eyes you are a guilty man. The facts point in your direction. Need I say more?’
Berg searched the investigator’s face for a moment, as though he were looking there for some glimpse of humanity. What had gone wrong in the world? Why were so many people telling so many lies? Why did they all want his destruction? Endlessly, these questions circled his mind. He battered his fists against them, he attacked them, but still there were no answers.
Sbodin said, ‘I told you yesterday, Berg, that your arrest is imminent. I could arrest you now that I have reaffirmation of Monika Jahn’s testimony. She has not changed her mind. So far as she is concerned, there isn’t a doubt in the world. All the evidence I have would be enough for any court. But I’m a thorough man and one of my qualities is patience. Consequently, I’m prepared to wait for the report from the capital. Whatever it is that I learn from my colleague there, it will have to be of strking importance to swing the case in your direction. And at this moment, I can’t think of a single thing that would help you.’
Berg walked away from the window. ‘I’m hungry.’
Sbodin said, ‘No doubt Mrs Jacobitz has prepared us some breakfast.’
‘Mrs Jacobitz?’
‘She returned with me this morning. Reluctantly, she agreed to make breakfast for both of us. Even the guilty have to eat—that’s what I told her. You look a little pale, Berg. Does the thought of seeing the widow again worry you?’
Berg didn’t answer the question.
Seven
He saw her first from the top of the stairs. Hands on her hips she was staring up at him her head cocked to the one side, her eyes—even from that distance—cold and glassy. For a moment he hesitated and then there was a gentle pressure from Sbodin against his shoulder and he continued down the stairs. The widow turned and went through the door that led to the kitchen. When Berg entered she was at the sink, her back to him. Staring at her shape he wondered why he was suddenly so afraid of speaking to her and realised that he was reacting and behaving as though he were truly guilty of the crime. He was the criminal, the man who had gone to Monika’s bedroom and raped her—all of which was preposterous. Only a few moments ago hadn’t he even offered to sign the incriminating document?
Clearing his throat he said in a dry voice, ‘I’ll be glad when this misunderstanding is settled.’
Without turning, the widow muttered something that he could not catch. Her voice was partially lost in the clatter of wet dishes, the rattle of running water. Steam, belching from the sink, enshrouded her. Sbodin sat at the table and scraped the prongs of his fork along the wooden surface. These various noises seemed inordinately loud to Berg who moved towards the window and saw, to his acute horror, that a large part of the crowd had invaded the back garden. They stood outside, some hidden by the tangled shrubbery, some reclining on branches of the trees, others standing only a few feet away from the window itself. He was about to draw the curtains when he realised that there were none. He sat at the table and looked imploringly at Sbodin who was deeply engrossed in the movements of his fork.
The widow said, ‘Breakfast will be ready in a moment.’
Berg said, ‘They’re in the garden as well. I can’t stand it. Can’t you do something?’
Sbodin shrugged: ‘What can I do?’
The widow laid plates on the table and glanced quickly at Berg. He saw that her face was pale and thin; the ordeal had left its scars. She seemed about to say something to him and then changed her mind, turning to go to the stove. When she came back a moment later she was carrying a large frying pan. Seeing this, Berg had the momentary illusion that nothing had changed, that everything was as it had been a few days ago, that at any moment Monika would come in and sit down beside him. The widow silently began to dish out some slices of fried pork. Sbodin cut a piece and swallowed it quickly.
‘It’s delicious,’ he said.
The widow sat down but ate nothing herself. Her head supported by her hands she looked at Berg as though examining him in great detail. Sometimes she turned her face to the left, sometimes to the right, like someone trying to get a painting into its proper perspective. He felt nervous beneath her scrutiny. He stared at the slices of pork but his appetite was gone. He watched Sbodin eat hungrily and was revolted by the sight.
‘Your prisoner isn’t hungry,’ Mrs Jacobitz said.
His mouth stuffed with food, Sbodin said, ‘He’s a worried man. I wouldn’t like to be in his position.’
‘He never enjoyed my cooking, you know. It isn’t grand enough for him.’ The widow began to crack the joints in her hands. ‘He’s used to better things, you know. He’s used to—what do you call it?—refinement. That’s why he was never really happy here.’
The widow stopped speaking. She made a small choking noise and looked out into the garden. If she saw the crowd gathered there she said nothing about it. Suddenly she began to weep; huge tears slid down her cheeks and she produced a ragged handkerchief that she used to smother her face in. Her thick shoulders vibrated and her breasts heaved. Berg thought she looked like a whale that is suddenly dragged out of the sea to expire on a dry beach.
Sbodin said, ‘There, there. It won’t do any good to cry.’
Encouraged by this, the widow wept louder. She banged her fists on the table and from beneath her closed eyes large, and still larger tears fell. When finally she stopped she twisted her handkerchief in her fingers and said, ‘I can’t bear to think what this man has done to my niece. I keep asking myself: Why did it have to happen to us? Why? Did I do something wrong somewhere? Is God punishing me for some sin? Is that what it is?’
Sbodin said, ‘There’s no question of God punishing you, Mrs Jacobitz.’
‘I know it’s old-fashioned to believe in God, but I’m an old-fashioned person. I put my trust in Him. I thought He’d look after me. I say my prayers. Now He’s let us down—oh, what’s to become of us?’
Sbodin patted the back of her hand and Berg saw her bulbous fingers coil around Sbodin’s wrist. There was something horrific in this conjunction of flesh and tentacles.
‘Why was this man sent here? I keep asking myself that. If he hadn’t come my niece wouldn’t have been so cruelly—I can’t even bring myself to say the word. Why did this man cause us all so much pain?’
Berg wanted to say something, but all the words at his disposal had already been used and ignored. He remained silent: he was as silent as the crowd in the garden. He stared at the widow. She looked at him with a cold fury and then, opening her mouth, dropping her head back and pushing it suddenly forward, spat at him. The trickle of saliva ran down his forehead and into his eyes.
Sbodin said, ‘I don’t blame you for that, Mrs Jacobitz. I know how despicable you find this man.’
The widow sighed. She got up from the table. Those in the garden close enough to get a view of what she had done made low noises of approval. Someone clapped his hands and there was a brief outbreak of applause. Berg rubbed his eyes: it wasn’t the humiliation of what had happened that angered him, it was the realisation that no matter how badly he was treated the crowd outside would approve. He felt totally isolated.
The widow stopped before the broken window. ‘Who did this?’
Sbodin said, ‘Berg. He was trying to escape. I stopped him in time.’
‘Trying to escape, eh?’ The widow approached Berg and looked as if she were going to spit on him again, but she didn’t. She said, ‘You bastard. You bastard. If you hang, I hope they let me do the job myself.’ Then, as though horrified by the depths of hatred she had discovered in herself, she went weeping from the room. Berg heard the door of her bedroom slam shut.
‘An unfortunate incident,’ Sbodin said.
Berg sat with his head bowed. ‘She loathes me,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t surprise you, does it?’
Berg said nothing. He looked upwards through the window. In the branches of the trees several people were precariously seated. They were staring into the room; one, he noticed, had a pair of binoculars.
‘I want to go back to my room,’ he said.
Eight
He lay on his bed for hours, sleeping fitfully sometimes, at other times half-conscious of the noise of voices from the street. There were other sounds too: the slamming of doors within the house, as if Mrs Jacobitz were working off her rage by trying to fill the structure of the house with innumerable echoes. He woke once and realised that his limbs were stiff, either from cold or fatigue—he wasn’t certain which. He had not set foot outside the house for almost two days. The air he had breathed in that time seemed full of staleness and dust; his room had grown an alarming collection of cobwebs he had never noticed before. Netted in all the four corners they were vacant of their tenants but spotted by the shards of trapped flies. They threw flimsy shadows and once, in a brief dream, he observed the motionless reflection of a gigantic spider—like a vision on the surface of a disturbed pool, or like the fading after-image of a blinding flash of light. In his state of intermittent consciousness and restless sleep he suffered headaches and nausea, much of which was inspired by the thought of death. He had visions of mounting the steps to the gallows. He had other images of being dragged across a field of rubble to a slender stake, of being tethered to it by a length of sharp rope, of a multitude of rifles raised against him. Echoes of gunshot filled his ears and his senses seemed to spin beneath the weight of his suffering.
He woke once and wondered what had become of Sbodin. Was the man downstairs now, concocting new lies in association with the crazy widow? Was he at his office—wherever that might be—awaiting the report from the capital? Was he with Lazlow, taking a statement? Preparing the papers for a formal arrest? Speaking again with Monika? Talking about the charges with the man who was to be Presiding Magistrate? It seemed to Berg that all of these things were associated in some inexorable way, that he was at the centre of some monstrous cancer of falsehood and that further lies—each containing the seed of his destruction—were being grafted on to the original growth. Once, in a dream, he was sinking through some sea of viscous fluid, struggling upwards to the sunlight but eventually accepting his fate and going under, watching the sun grow weaker and weaker as he dropped beneath the ocean. In another dream he was watching his mother’s funeral. He approached the coffin, swore, and spat on his dead mother’s face. He woke in a sweat, shivering and frozen.
At other times he thought of Monika and wished that he could see her. He was sure that if he could speak to her he would be able to clear everything up in a matter of minutes. He could make her see that her claim was without justification. That in her state of shock she had accused him. That he wasn’t responsible. That the real criminal was probably miles away. But even in this certainty he had doubts. Perhaps she would refuse to retract, insist that he was the rapist, ignore his pleas entirely. Perhaps she would refuse to see him at all—or if she did see him, perhaps she would ignore everything he said. It is a case of mistaken identity, he would say. I do not blame you in any way, I understand how shocked you must have been, but I ask you now to withdraw. Yes, she might say. I see how wrong I was. It was dark, you see. I did not get a proper look at the rapist’s face. Now I know that it wasn’t you, Berg. It was someone else.
She might say: she might not say. He wanted to talk to her, but didn’t even know where she was being kept. It was possible that she was in a hospital somewhere—but where? It was possible that she was being detained in a different place altogether—but where? His knowledge of the area was scanty. Monika could be anywhere. Even if he were free to look, he might never succeed in discovering where she was being kept.
In another dream he had the feeling that he was being pursued by Lazlow. Behind Lazlow, behind his glinting glasses and the sparkling sweat on his bald head, were the shadows of his superiors—those very men who had refused him access to the knowledge he had so badly wanted. Now even that seemed purposeless. He could not imagine why he had asked the questions he had—perhaps he had been overzealous, unwilling and quite unable to accept that there were certain facts to which he could not gain access. Was he such an impatient man? He thought of Lazlow and Miss Selz sprawled on top of his desk. How could he be sure that he had ever seen such a thing?
Confused, he wandered around the darkness of his room. He stumbled into tables and chairs and found his way to the window. The crowd had almost entirely dispersed. Only a few scattered figures still remained, their shadows limp in the light of the streetlamp. He watched for a moment and then turned away. But it did not really matter where he turned—in the sense that every move he made could only lead to the ultimate humiliation of a trial. He tried to imagine the questions of the Presiding Magistrate:
‘When you lived in the capital, Berg, how many times did you have sexual intercourse with a member of the opposite sex?
‘How many times with members of your own sex?
‘Are you impotent?
‘Since you deny that you are, how do you explain this medical report I have in front of me?
‘Did you ever sleep with your mother, Berg?’
Berg sat at the table in the darkened room. He imagined some clumsy doctor fumbling with his genitals, looking for evidence that would be given in the public court. The shocked gasp. The smirking whispers. The entrails of his private life dumped on some table in public view, probed and prodded by insensitive men, talked about objectively, sneered at privately.
‘Are you in the habit of looking through keyholes?
‘Is it true that you visited Monika Jahn in her bedroom?
‘Is it also true that you physically attacked Mrs Jacobitz, a helpless widow?
‘Would you deny that you left the capital to seek a new life because you are an abject failure? Would you deny that you left university because of your inability to complete your course of studies? That you were—on the evidence of your contemporaries—an impossible man to befriend?’
He saw a thin sliver of light beneath the door of his room and heard slow footsteps on the stairs that he recognised as being those of Mrs Jacobitz. The slop-slop of her slippers as they collided with her heels. He waited, holding his breath. There was a light tap on his door.
‘Yes?’
‘Berg? Mr Sbodin requested that I should bring you some coffee.’
‘Where is Sbodin?’
‘He went out for a moment. He will come back shortly.’
There was a pause. Even from within the room, he could hear the widow wheezing from the effort of climbing the stairs.
‘I’m going to unlock your door,’ she said. ‘I must warn you not to try anything, because Sbodin has men posted all over the place.’
‘Try anything?’ he asked and listened to the key being turned. He saw the widow’s silhouette in the doorway. ‘I wouldn’t try anything.’
‘Why are you sitting in darkness?’ she asked. He saw her hand go to the lightswitch and then the room was flooded—painfully—with light. She came across the room and set the tray she was carrying on the table. It held a cup of coffee and a dry bread roll.
‘I’ve been asleep.’
‘I don’t know why Sbodin should bother his head about seeing that you have some refreshment. If it was up to me, I’d let you rot.’
He reached for the coffee and drank some. It scalded his tongue and throat. ‘You really believe I’m guilty, don’t you?’
She laughed. ‘Really—that sort of question doesn’t make much sense.’
‘I read your testimony.’
‘Oh did you?’
Berg put the coffee down. He looked at the dry roll. ‘It’s a pack of lies, isn’t it? Why did you tell those lies about me? You know I didn’t rape your niece—why do you want to see me punished for something I didn’t do?’
‘Didn’t do? Didn’t do?’ The widow laughed again; this time it seemed to Berg more of a vindictive cackle. He felt a surge of anger. ‘Do you know what the penalty is for a crime of this kind?’ She drew a finger across her neck and made a gasping noise.
‘Why do you hate me? You hated me from the very first moment I came here, didn’t you? You want to see me destroyed——’
‘It can’t come soon enough,’ the widow said. She sat back, swinging her legs, smiling at him. Her twisted hands lay in her lap. Sometimes one would flutter up to her necklace and tug on the beads.
Berg got up from the table. He stood in front of the widow and looked at her. For a moment Mrs Jacobitz seemed ill at ease because she said, ‘Sbodin will be back at any moment.’
Berg walked to the centre of the room. He had noticed that the widow smelled, that a strong aroma rose up from her. It was like the pungent smell of very dry concrete washed at last by rain, the smell of sodden dust. He remembered the smell in Monika’s room. It returned to him, seeming now to trap him, to ensnare his senses. And before that there was the same smell in his mother’s room—distinctly feminine. Why should that memory make him feel anxious? He looked beyond the widow to the open door and the thin light on the landing. Above, he saw the glass skylight in the roof. These openings were calling to him. It would take—what? two, three minutes to climb through the skylight and get down the roof. He thought of his trial and the shame. He thought of the cable from Sbodin’s colleague that even now might be travelling along the telegraph wires that connected this backward town to the capital.
