Four

In the kitchen Berg found some sausages in a piece of wrapping paper and fried them on the stove. They were hard and probably mouldy, but for once he was too hungry to be particular. While he cooked them, Sbodin sat by the window and stared morosely into the garden.

‘It’s like a bloody jungle,’ he said once. And then he was silent until Berg brought the sausages to the table. He ate noisily as if he hadn’t seen food for weeks, cutting the sausages almost savagely and sliding them around the plate in their own grease. When he was finished he sat back and belched quietly. He lit a cigarette, belched again, and watched Berg eat.

‘You haven’t told me anything about your background,’ he said.

‘Background?’ Berg pushed his plate away. Although painfully hungry before, he was unable to finish the meal. He looked at the half-eaten sausages and the discarded skins that lay crumpled on the side of his plate.

‘The sort of home you come from. What your parents are like. What school you went to. That sort of thing. Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself?’

Berg instinctively mistrusted this question. It seemed to him that Sbodin was asking something altogether different—not quite the question he had phrased, but another one, although Berg could not think what. He was reluctant to talk about himself. When you did, you invariably gave something away. You revealed all sorts of things that you wanted to keep to yourself. He rose from the table and straightening himself slowly said,

‘There isn’t much to tell you.’

‘I find that hard to believe,’ Sbodin said. ‘I’m pretty sure you’ve led an interesting life. What are your parents like?’

‘My father died when I was born. There’s only my mother.’

‘Only your mother?’ Sbodin placed the tips of his fingers together in a gesture that seemed to Berg uncharacteristic. ‘And do you get along with her?’

‘Of course.’

‘What I really mean is—would you say that your relationship with her is a normal mother-son one?’

Berg turned to the investigator as though he expected to detect in the man’s expression the true meaning of his question—but Sbodin was impassive, his eyes half-shut.

‘Naturally,’ Berg said.

‘How do you get on with other women?’

‘What other women?’

‘Girl friends, mistresses, that sort of thing.’

‘As well as anyone, I suppose.’

Sbodin took out his little notebook and, licking his thumb, began to flick over the pages. He didn’t write anything, he merely stared at something he had written there before.

‘Let me be more specific, Berg. When you go out with a woman, do you expect to take her to bed that same evening?’

Berg had a sensation of nagging anxiety and his mind seemed suddenly to go blank. When you go out with a woman do you expect to take her to bed that same evening? The question went round and round in his head. He stared at Sbodin, then at the window, then at the various kitchen objects around him. He found himself thinking of his mother and an incident that had once taken place—when?—some years ago. He had taken a girl home, someone whose name and face he could no longer remember, and his mother, seeing the girl wander through their apartment making sounds of approbation, suddenly had a heart attack. At least she claimed to have one. She dropped to the floor, scattering pills and bottles in a mad cacophony of noise, and lay there with her breath coming in sharp bursts, her hands about her own throat like someone seeking to strangle himself.

‘Well?’ Sbodin asked.

‘I don’t know how to answer that,’ Berg said. He remembered the girl screaming in alarm and that was where his recollection of the incident faded. With the scream, the single solitary sound that raked through the rooms of the apartment like an unending cry of pain and despair. And after that? Had he called for a doctor? Had he administered one of the sacred tablets? Had he stood, looking down at the hideous face of his mother, not knowing what to do? He couldn’t remember. There was a mist, a screen drawn across the memory.

‘Are you good in bed?’ Sbodin asked.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Do you please your women?’

‘Please them?’ Berg felt his anxiety rising to a panic. He wanted to get out of the house, get away from Sbodin and his endless asking.

‘Do you give them what they want and do they come back asking for more?’

‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’

Sbodin laughed: a sound like the burst of machine-gun fire. Berg stopped in the centre of the room. All this time he had been walking up and down, crossing and recrossing the floor, working his hands together. He felt drained. He sat down and looked at Sbodin’s face for some clue to the laughter.

‘Do you know what I think, Berg? I don’t believe you had a woman until Monika Jahn. That’s my opinion.’

‘That’s nonsense. Of course I’ve had other women.’

‘Other women before Monika Jahn?’

‘Other women. I never had Monika. I swear to you.’

Sbodin flicked the pages of his notebook again and Berg strained to see what was written there. He caught a glimpse but it was a kind of shorthand that he couldn’t read. Sbodin closed the notebook and shut his eyes. Yawning, he began to massage the sides of his face.

‘I get so exhausted,’ he said. He yawned again. His mouth stretched open, his nose went briefly out of shape. ‘This job exhausts me sometimes.’

Berg felt a sense of relief. Perhaps Sbodin was going home for some sleep. He waited for some sign from the investigator. Having been still for a moment, Sbodin worked his fingers into the muscles of his shoulders, sighing continually as he did so.

‘What about your politics, Berg?’

‘I don’t have any.’

‘You never joined the party?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Politics don’t interest me.’

‘Ah. How could you expect any advancement in your career if you aren’t a party member?’

‘It didn’t occur to me that the two are related.’

Sbodin closed his eyes and kept them shut as he talked. ‘Then you’re naive.’

‘I don’t think I am.’

‘I have a theory about you, Berg. Let me explain. You realised that you couldn’t have a successful career without being a party member. With this in mind, you made attempts to join the party, but these were unsuccessful. So you took the only job you could get—namely, as a clerk in Lazlow’s office. Day after day, you became more and more aware that because you didn’t have a party card you were doomed to spend your life as a petty clerk——’

‘I wasn’t a petty clerk. The job was an important one——’

‘Don’t interrupt me. You were doomed to this drudgery. Naturally you became frustrated. No matter how hard you tried to advance you kept banging your head on a brick wall. Day by day, the frustration built up inside you. You began to make a nuisance of yourself in the office, asking questions you had no right to ask, expecting answers you had no right to expect. The more you became frustrated, the more you made yourself a nuisance. And now, because of your frustrations, you’re in your present difficult position.’

‘That’s not true. You know——’

‘Please, let me continue. You’re in this dreadful position through your own actions. You were tired of meeting obstruction, you didn’t have the guile to defeat the obstacles in your path, and you were nothing more than a piddling little clerk with a boring job. So you react in the only way you can. You want attention. You act as if you want to be noticed. Your whole life has been a cry for attention. You rape Monika—it brings you notoriety. You accuse Lazlow of adultery—it brings you attention. Your whole life, Berg, your whole existence, everything you do and say can be translated into two words—Notice Me.’

Berg got up from his chair and stumbled angrily around the room. It was preposterous. Did Sbodin really believe all this? This … this nonsense? Did he? He walked to the window, turned round, could not bring himself to look at the investigator’s face.

‘You bloody liar!’ he shouted. ‘You can’t believe all that!’

Sbodin calmly lit a cigarette. He said nothing for a time, seemingly content to watch Berg’s rage burn itself out. Berg pressed his hands up against the window and pushed at the glass. He tried to control himself. Why should he let Sbodin’s words upset him? He hadn’t been a mundane little clerk. His whole life wasn’t a cry for attention. He didn’t care if people noticed him or if they didn’t. He wasn’t such a slave that he had to care about the things other people thought of him. He was an independent human being, fettered now—temporarily—because of other people’s stupidity, but an independent person just the same. He forced his hands against the glass and did not know if he wanted to break it out of frustration, or out of a desire to get through it and flee. When the pane snapped and shards of glass fell away into the rain like the broken colours of a kaleidoscope he stepped back and looked at the ragged hole he had made. It wasn’t large enough to pass through, he would cut his body if he even tried.

Sbodin said, ‘Mrs Jacobitz will love you for that. First her niece. Now her window. What next?’

Berg turned. If he could break the investigator as easily as he had broken the glass—— He turned and twisted his hands together. Suddenly it seemed to him that this had been the longest day in his life. He wanted to call his mother for help but realised the futility of that. What could she do? What good could come of it? He envisaged his cry for help falling on her deaf ears and saw her white face numbly, blankly, staring at the alien words on his agonised letter.

Sbodin examined the window as if to be certain that it had truly been broken. He ran his fingers softly on the rim of the jagged glass and sighed. ‘You’re a violent man. Berg.’

‘It was an accident. I didn’t exactly mean to break——’

‘No excuses. I saw it.’

‘It was an accident.’

‘No. I wouldn’t call it that. I saw you smash it with your fist.’ The investigator tutted and turned his back away. Now Berg had the feeling that he was being mocked, that his pathetic protest—shattering the glass—was being ridiculed. He followed Sbodin across the room.

‘I’d like a cigarette,’ he said.

Sbodin took out his packet and opened it, holding it towards Berg. ‘How badly?’

‘I want to smoke. I need to smoke.’

‘But how badly?’

‘Badly enough.’

Sbodin counted the cigarettes in the packet. ‘Perhaps I can afford to let you have one.’

‘I only want one.’

Sbodin took out one of the cigarettes and raised it in the air.

‘I didn’t lock you in your room, did I?’

Berg, shaking, stared at the cigarette.

‘I didn’t get someone to forge your writing, did I?’

Berg caught his breath. How could a white cylindrical object obliterate everything else in the world? He made a gesture with his head.

‘Speak up, Berg. I can’t hear you.’

‘Please, the cigarette.’

‘Answer my questions first.’

Berg said, ‘You didn’t lock me in my room. You didn’t forge my writing. The cigarette, please.’

Sbodin brought his hand down, dropping the cigarette from his fingers. It struck the table and rolled across the floor beneath the stove. Berg watched it disappear and then, on his knees, groped under the stove for it. In the narrow, dark space his fingers encountered a conglomeration of sticky objects—of grease, congealed fat, pieces of bone, scraps of paper, twisted tissues, matches. He was sickened. He brought out the cigarette, cleaned it, and put it in his mouth. He felt like closing his eyes and drifting away—if only he could have drifted, out through the window, down across the town, away. It was disgusting, grovelling amongst filth for a cigarette. Sbodin tossed him a box of matches and trembling he struck one, holding it to the cigarette. He sucked smoke deeply and felt immediately sick and dizzy. The dizziness seemed to transport him across the room, as if he were floating. It was like the feeling of the dream, rising up like a bird and moving across a barren landscape. Dark shapes moved in front of his eyes.

Sbodin said, ‘You smoke too much, Berg.’

Berg coughed. He hated the investigator. He hated the man for the way he probed and the way he punished.

‘I have a colleague in the city. I sent him a cable this morning asking for some information about you. It should be interesting to hear what he finds out, don’t you think?’

‘What sort of information?’ Berg asked—all too quickly. Something in him caused a brief flare of panic. But what? The mention of the word city? The thought that somehow this man Sbodin had connections with the capital? The realisation that the very place he had left still had some relevance to his life?

‘Who knows? Perhaps he’ll come up with something interesting.’

Something interesting, Berg thought—but what? He walked around the room, drawing on the cigarette. It seemed to him that he was looking for something, that he was turning over stones in his mind as if in search of a vital, missing object. Moving this way and that, half-formed images went through his head in sequences of puzzlement. Bewildered, he went to the window and stared out at the jumbled garden and the sparrows that flitted through the rain, rising up from damp, springing branches, whirling upwards into the trees. Through the broken pane came a motion of cold air that froze against his sweat. Sbodin had a colleague in the city to whom he had sent a cable; an electric message tapped out on a machine, whispering across tangled miles of wire, a message that would take—what?—three, four hours to reach the capital. Berg moved away from the window. The chill seemed to have entered his brain. Something about the thought of the cable nagged him, stirred up in his brain a hundred old anxieties, none of which he could name. He felt like a blind man in an unfamiliar room, fumbling amongst objects he can neither see nor identify. A flash of panic, sweat on his forehead, numb images chasing each other like circus clowns through his brain. It would take four hours for a cable to reach the capital—why was that length of time suddenly and bewilderingly important to him? What was it about Sbodin’s colleague that worried him? As if exhausted by his own thoughts he went to the table and sat down.

Sbodin was examining his fingers in silence. From time to time he would raise one to his mouth and bite the flesh. Then, tired of the one hand, he would start on the other. This went on for some time while Berg sat with his eyes closed and smoked the cigarette. He imagined the smoke swirling around in his chest, billowing as if blown by an invisible wind through the dying cells of his body. Dying? Now why had he thought of it like that? He stared at the investigator as though afraid that Sbodin had been conscious of his thoughts. He vaguely remembered his mother, long ago, had warned him of lung cancer.

‘Anyway, if you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to worry about,’ Sbodin said. ‘The innocent never suffer pangs of guilt, do they?’

Berg didn’t feel like talking. He dropped his cigarette and stamped on it. He thought about the cable again and wondered exactly what words Sbodin had used. And then he thought of the electric wires that transported the cable to the city. There it would be received in some sort of machine and deciphered. It would reach Sbodin’s colleague and a whole new process would begin. It was strange to think that a man he didn’t know was about to examine his life. Some faceless stranger blundering into his past, questioning, searching, sifting through written records and other people’s memories, treading heavily on recollected speeches and actions—and no doubt misinterpreting them. It was strange to think all this and he had the sensation you get when you say that someone is walking over your grave. Sitting there, he shivered. As he shivered he received a peculiar image: it was of himself as a young child, of six or seven, walking in a park. Far away, shimmering like a column of heat, he saw his mother. As he approached she began to fade amongst the trees. He went forward, pushing through shrubbery that sprang back into his face, through thorns that tore his flesh—and then Sbodin’s voice cut across the picture.

‘Do you want another cigarette?’

‘Am I supposed to beg for it again?’

Sbodin made a noise of surprise and then was silent. He picked up the packet that lay on the table and stuffed it into his pocket. Sighing heavily three or four times, he rose and went out of the room. Berg watched him go through the door.

‘Where are you going?’

Sbodin made an unintelligible reply. Berg got up and followed him into another room he had never seen before. He assumed it was Mrs Jacobitz’s. It was furnished in a glacial way; everything was immaculately in place, there was nothing to prove that anyone had ever lived there. The bed was tidily made. Along the dressing-table were several boxes, a comb stuck in a hairbrush, an imitation pearl necklace neatly folded. On the wall hung a photograph of a man who had been snapped in an expression of surprise. Sbodin stopped in the middle of the floor and looked around as if conscious of the fact that he had entered the wrong room.

‘Where are you going?’ Berg asked. ‘Whose room——?’

Sbodin ignored him. Holding up a hand to silence him, he stared at his own face in the mirror.

‘Tell me, Berg. Do you think I’m mad?’

Berg was puzzled. Was this some new strategy on Sbodin’s part?

‘Do you think I’m a little crazy?’

Berg shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

Sbodin stared at himself a little longer, rubbing his chin with his hand. And then he turned and looked slowly at Berg. When he spoke he did so unhurriedly.

‘If I’m not crazy, if I’m perfectly sane, then it must be you who’s mad.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Berg said, looking puzzled.

‘When I offered you a cigarette, did you ask me whether you were supposed to beg for it again?’

‘Yes. The last time——’

‘I don’t understand, Berg. What is that supposed to mean? Why do you think you have to beg?’

‘You made me beg the last time.’

Frowning, Sbodin stared at Berg for a time. He seemed to be thinking about something serious, as though he were about to make a momentous decision. And then all at once he relaxed, his body went limp and he smiled. He took out the cigarettes and extended the packet towards Berg. Cautiously Berg put out his hand and wondered what game Sbodin was playing now. It seemed to him that Sbodin’s games were without rules, that if there were rules then they were so flexible as not to be rules in any ordinary sense but could be broken or changed at a whim. He placed his fingers inside the packet and waited for something to happen—perhaps for Sbodin to snap the lid shut on his fingers and laugh. Berg slipped one of the cigarettes out and carried it to his mouth and even then expected the whole situation to change. But Sbodin came forward with a burning match and held it to the cigarette. Both men were silent for a long time, the only sound being that of Berg exhaling.

And then Sbodin said, ‘You didn’t have to beg for that, did you?’

Berg said nothing; he still vaguely expected something to happen. He was standing only inches away from the investigator. Looking straight at his face, he could see tiny globules of sweat rise from the open pores in his flesh, he could see himself reflected in the cold eyes, and he could hear, if he really listened, the faint sound of the man’s breathing. This sudden awareness of Sbodin made him conscious of a faint fear—like an animal catching a dangerous scent on the wind. The same man who had given him the cigarette, and who only minutes ago had humiliated him, would destroy him if he could. This realisation made him take a few steps backward, as if there were safety in distance, but somehow the movement away from Sbodin only increased his awareness of him. He was conscious in the silent room not only of Sbodin, not only of his own fear, but of seemingly extraneous things—like the incessant rattle of the rain at the window, the movement of the curtain, the faint swing of the electric light bulb above, the drab patterns of the wallpaper. Both Sbodin and the room seemed simultaneously to imprison him. They fell across him like heavy shadows, trapping him in a more frightening manner than when he had been locked in his bedroom. It was a different kind of prison. Deep in Sbodin’s eyes he thought he saw what it was, but when he really looked there was only a diminishing reflection of himself.

Sbodin said, ‘My colleague will have received my cable by now. Isn’t modern communication a miracle?’

Berg turned his face away. The sound of Sbodin’s voice had liberated him from the sensations he had been experiencing—but his sense of relief was abruptly severed when he thought of the cable. What did it mean? Why was he so concerned about Sbodin’s nameless colleagues in the city?

‘Isn’t it really a miracle, Berg?’