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.

‘Who is that?’ Berg asked.

Sbodin said, ‘The jailer. He won’t give you the chance to get free.’

They covered another few yards. Berg thought that if he could get to the capital his mother would conceal him for a few days. The apartment was large, there were at least nine or ten rooms. She would no doubt be annoyed by the fact that he had run away, but she would be pleased—if not to see him—to have someone attend to her prescriptions and medicants. He hesitated. If he went over the wall and made for the railway station and smuggled himself on to a freight train and remained perfectly still for two days he would reach the capital without any trouble. He turned to look at Sbodin. The man was yawning again, his eyes half-shut.

Berg suddenly swung out with his hand, catching Sbodin by surprise and knocking him off balance. He leaped on to the wall and saw that the drop on the other side was almost fifteen feet at a rough estimate—but he would have to take the chance. Sbodin shouted something. Feet clattered across the concrete. Someone else began to shout. Poised on the wall, Berg hesitated: it seemed to him that he held in his grasp in that burning second of time his own future—that the choice to jump would decide the outcome of his life. In that second it seemed that a hundred different thoughts raced through his mind, images that had nothing to do with his present predicament, irrelevant pictures, remembered faces and landscapes, pointless things. He hesitated. Below him lay the leap into darkness. At his back someone was hurrying across the yard and Sbodin, rising with unusual slowness, was calling his name.

Berg looked down. Through the darkness it was impossible to make out shapes. There were shadowy clumps that might have been bushes but he couldn’t be certain.

‘Why don’t you jump, Berg? What are you waiting for?’

He hardly heard Sbodin’s voice. He threw his body into the air and dropped for what felt like a long time. Wind rushed around him, blood whistled in his brain, rain froze against his breath. He heard his mother say that she was waiting for him, she had been waiting for what seemed to her like a long time, growing a little wearier and more impatient with each passing day. He felt his hand, the whorls of his fingertips, imbedded in her flesh.

He saw a single flash reflected in the sky and heard the sound of thunder. He breathed heavily, his arms and legs aching. The fall had cost him a great deal of effort and he knew that until he caught his breath he would not be able to run. Striking the earth hard had shaken his bones. He looked up at the flares that were sparking through the night sky—yet there was an unreality about this sight that he did not entirely understand. The world seemed, quite inexplicably, to have yet another dimension—a place where lights exploded but did not leave after-images in the sky, where sounds coagulated into a meaningless jumble like the rumblings of some monstrous machine.

He held his breath a moment and thought about the sequence of events. His thoughts had a bright new clarity and certain facts became amazingly clear. He was not, as he had previously suspected, the victim of some elaborate joke—he was the victim of a terrible collection of lies and bad judgements. It was astonishing how clear all this now seemed. He was innocent: his one crime—if that was what you could call it—had been to stumble accidentally into a web of malice. He knew beyond any doubt that Monika had lied, that her every utterance had been false. He knew that the widow was not dead, that even now she was in some hospital bed with mild concussion. He knew that Sbodin had been totally misled by a complex tissue of circumstance, falsehood, and his own overwhelming ambition to make an arrest. It was all so ludicrously clear that any minor doubts he might have had about himself disintegrated at once. He had simply been caught up in the complicated interplay between certain people whose versions of reality did not coincide with his own. How clear it all was, how staggeringly clear.

If there was one aspect of it all that he did not understand it was why they were all—without exception—out to destroy him. But even that seemed a minor point now.

He turned on his side and thought of his mother and realised that in a strange way he was looking forward to seeing her again—even if, as he now considered this possibility, he could not bring to mind an image of her face. He felt a slight ache of guilt that he had walked out on her the way he had done and hadn’t written to tell her that he was alive and well.

The sound of voices through the darkness made him want to rise and, breathing heavily, his strength ebbing away like the tide rushing back from a beach, he wondered in which direction he ought to run.