Disgrace (14 page)

Indoors, the two policemen take off their caps, tuck them under their arms. He stands back, leaves it to Lucy to take them through the story she has elected to tell. They listen respectfully, taking down her every word, the pen darting nervously across the pages of the notebook. They are of her generation, but edgy of her nevertheless, as if she were a creature polluted and her pollution could leap across to them, soil them.

There were three men, she recites, or two men and a boy. They tricked their way into the house, took (she lists the items) money, clothes, a television set, a CD player, a rifle with ammunition. When her father resisted, they assaulted him, poured spirits over him, tried to set him on fire. Then they shot the dogs and drove off in his car. She describes the men and what they were wearing; she describes the car.

All the while she speaks, Lucy looks steadily at him, as though drawing strength from him, or else daring him to contradict her. When one of the officers asks, ‘How long did the whole incident take?' she says, ‘Twenty minutes, thirty minutes.' An untruth, as he knows, as she knows. It took much longer. How much longer? As much longer as the men needed to finish off their business with the lady of the house.

Nevertheless he does not interrupt.
A matter of indifference
: he barely listens as Lucy goes through her story. Words are beginning to take shape that have been hovering since last night at the edges of memory.
Two old ladies locked in the lavatory / They were there from Monday to Saturday / Nobody knew they were there.
Locked in the lavatory while his daughter was used. A chant from his childhood come back to point a jeering finger.
Oh dear, what can the matter be?
Lucy's secret; his disgrace.

Cautiously the policemen move through the house, inspecting. No blood, no overturned furniture. The mess in the kitchen has been cleaned up (by Lucy? when?). Behind the lavatory door, two spent matchsticks, which they do not even notice.

In Lucy's room the double bed is stripped bare.
The scene of the crime,
he thinks to himself; and, as if reading the thought, the policemen avert their eyes, pass on.

A quiet house on a winter morning, no more, no less.

‘A detective will come and take fingerprints,' they say as they leave. ‘Try not to touch things. If you remember anything else they took, give us a call at the station.'

Barely have they departed when the telephone repairmen arrive, then old Ettinger. Of the absent Petrus, Ettinger remarks darkly, ‘Not one of them you can trust.' He will send a boy, he says, to fix the kombi.

In the past he has seen Lucy fly into a rage at the use of the word
boy
. Now she does not react.

He walks Ettinger to the door.

‘Poor Lucy,' remarks Ettinger. ‘It must have been bad for her. Still, it could have been worse.'

‘Indeed? How?'

‘They could have taken her away with them.'

That brings him up short. No fool, Ettinger.

At last he and Lucy are alone. ‘I will bury the dogs if you show me where,' he offers. ‘What are you going to tell the owners?'

‘I'll tell them the truth.'

‘Will your insurance cover it?'

‘I don't know. I don't know whether insurance policies cover massacres. I will have to find out.'

A pause. ‘Why aren't you telling the whole story, Lucy?'

‘I have told the whole story. The whole story is what I have told.'

He shakes his head dubiously. ‘I am sure you have your reasons, but in a wider context are you sure this is the best course?'

She does not reply, and he does not press her, for the moment. But his thoughts go to the three intruders, the three invaders, men he will probably never lay eyes on again, yet forever part of his life now, and of his daughter's. The men will watch the newspapers, listen to the gossip. They will read that they are being sought for robbery and assault and nothing else. It will dawn on them that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket.
Too ashamed
, they will say to each other,
too ashamed to tell
, and they will chuckle luxuriously, recollecting their exploit. Is Lucy prepared to concede them that victory?

He digs the hole where Lucy tells him, close to the boundary line. A grave for six full-grown dogs: even in the recently ploughed earth it takes him the best part of an hour, and by the time he has finished his back is sore, his arms are sore, his wrist aches again. He trundles the corpses over in a wheelbarrow. The dog with the hole in its throat still bares its bloody teeth. Like shooting fish in a barrel, he thinks. Contemptible, yet exhilarating, probably, in a country where dogs are bred to snarl at the mere smell of a black man. A satisfying afternoon's work, heady, like all revenge. One by one he tumbles the dogs into the hole, then fills it in.

He returns to find Lucy installing a camp-bed in the musty little pantry that she uses for storage.

‘For whom is this?' he asks.

‘For myself.'

‘What about the spare room?'

‘The ceiling-boards have gone.'

‘And the big room at the back?'

‘The freezer makes too much noise.'

Not true. The freezer in the back room barely purrs. It is because of what the freezer holds that Lucy will not sleep there: offal, bones, butcher's meat for dogs that no longer have need of it.

‘Take over my room,' he says. ‘I'll sleep here.' And at once he sets about clearing out his things.

But does he really want to move into this cell, with its boxes of empty preserve-jars piled in a corner and its single tiny south-facing window? If the ghosts of Lucy's violators still hover in her bedroom, then surely they ought to be chased out, not allowed to take it over as their sanctum. So he moves his belongings into Lucy's room.

Evening falls. They are not hungry, but they eat. Eating is a ritual, and rituals make things easier.

As gently as he can, he offers his question again. ‘Lucy, my dearest, why don't you want to tell? It was a crime. There is no shame in being the object of a crime. You did not choose to be the object. You are an innocent party.'

Sitting across the table from him, Lucy draws a deep breath, gathers herself, then breathes out again and shakes her head.

‘Can I guess?' he says. ‘Are you trying to remind me of something?'

‘Am I trying to remind you of what?'

‘Of what women undergo at the hands of men.'

‘Nothing could be further from my thoughts. This has nothing to do with you, David. You want to know why I have not laid a particular charge with the police. I will tell you, as long as you agree not to raise the subject again. The reason is that, as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, at this time, it is not. It is my business, mine alone.'

‘This place being what?'

‘This place being South Africa.'

‘I don't agree. I don't agree with what you are doing. Do you think that by meekly accepting what happened to you, you can set yourself apart from farmers like Ettinger? Do you think what happened here was an exam: if you come through, you get a diploma and safe conduct into the future, or a sign to paint on the door-lintel that will make the plague pass you by? That is not how vengeance works, Lucy. Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets.'

‘Stop it, David! I don't want to hear this talk of plagues and fires. I am not just trying to save my skin. If that is what you think, you miss the point entirely.'

‘Then help me. Is it some form of private salvation you are trying to work out? Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?'

‘No. You keep misreading me. Guilt and salvation are abstractions. I don't act in terms of abstractions. Until you make an effort to see that, I can't help you.'

He wants to respond, but she cuts him short. ‘David, we agreed. I don't want to go on with this conversation.'

Never yet have they been so far and so bitterly apart. He is shaken.

FOURTEEN

A
NEW DAY
. Ettinger telephones, offering to lend them a gun ‘for the meanwhile'. ‘Thank you,' he replies. ‘We'll think about it.'

He gets out Lucy's tools and repairs the kitchen door as well as he is able. They ought to install bars, security gates, a perimeter fence, as Ettinger has done. They ought to turn the farmhouse into a fortress. Lucy ought to buy a pistol and a two-way radio, and take shooting lessons. But will she ever consent? She is here because she loves the land and the old,
ländliche
way of life. If that way of life is doomed, what is left for her to love?

Katy is coaxed out of her hiding-place and settled in the kitchen. She is subdued and timorous, following Lucy about, keeping close to her heels. Life, from moment to moment, is not as before. The house feels alien, violated; they are continually on the alert, listening for sounds.

Then Petrus makes his return. An old lorry groans up the rutted driveway and stops beside the stable. Petrus steps down from the cab, wearing a suit too tight for him, followed by his wife and the driver. From the back of the lorry the two men unload cartons, creosoted poles, sheets of galvanized iron, a roll of plastic piping, and finally, with much noise and commotion, two halfgrown sheep, which Petrus tethers to a fence-post. The lorry makes a wide sweep around the stable and thunders back down the driveway. Petrus and his wife disappear inside. A plume of smoke begins to rise from the asbestos-pipe chimney.

He continues to watch. In a while, Petrus's wife emerges and with a broad, easy movement empties a slop bucket. A handsome woman, he thinks to himself, with her long skirt and her headcloth piled high, country fashion. A handsome woman and a lucky man. But where have they been?

‘Petrus is back,' he tells Lucy. ‘With a load of building materials.'

‘Good.'

‘Why didn't he tell you he was going away? Doesn't it strike you as fishy that he should disappear at precisely this time?'

‘I can't order Petrus about. He is his own master.'

A non sequitur, but he lets it pass. He has decided to let everything pass, with Lucy, for the time being.

Lucy keeps to herself, expresses no feelings, shows no interest in anything around her. It is he, ignorant as he is about farming, who must let the ducks out of their pen, master the sluice system and lead water to save the garden from parching. Lucy spends hour after hour lying on her bed, staring into space or looking at old magazines, of which she seems to have an unlimited store. She flicks through them impatiently, as though searching for something that is not there. Of
Edwin Drood
there is no more sign.

He spies Petrus out at the dam, in his work overalls. It seems odd that the man has not yet reported to Lucy. He strolls over, exchanges greetings. ‘You must have heard, we had a big robbery on Wednesday while you were away.'

‘Yes,' says Petrus, ‘I heard. It is very bad, a very bad thing. But you are all right now.'

Is he all right? Is Lucy all right? Is Petrus asking a question? It does not sound like a question, but he cannot take it otherwise, not decently. The question is, what is the answer?

‘I am alive,' he says. ‘As long as one is alive one is all right, I suppose. So yes, I am all right.' He pauses, waits, allows a silence to develop, a silence which Petrus ought to fill with the next question:
And how is Lucy?

He is wrong. ‘Will Lucy go to the market tomorrow?' asks Petrus.

‘I don't know.'

‘Because she will lose her stall if she does not go,' says Petrus. ‘Maybe.'

‘Petrus wants to know if you are going to market tomorrow,' he informs Lucy. ‘He is afraid you might lose your stall.'

‘Why don't the two of you go,' she says. ‘I don't feel up to it.'

‘Are you sure? It would be a pity to miss a week.'

She does not reply. She would rather hide her face, and he knows why. Because of the disgrace. Because of the shame. That is what their visitors have achieved; that is what they have done to this confident, modern young woman. Like a stain the story is spreading across the district. Not her story to spread but theirs: they are its owners. How they put her in her place, how they showed her what a woman was for.

With his one eye and his white skullcap, he has his own measure of shyness about showing himself in public. But for Lucy's sake he goes through with the market business, sitting beside Petrus at the stall, enduring the stares of the curious, responding politely to those friends of Lucy's who choose to commiserate. ‘Yes, we lost a car,' he says. ‘And the dogs, of course, all but one. No, my daughter is fine, just not feeling well today. No, we are not hopeful, the police are overstretched, as I'm sure you know. Yes, I'll be sure to tell her.'

He reads their story as reported in the
Herald. Unknown assailants
the men are called. ‘Three unknown assailants have attacked Ms Lucy Lourie and her elderly father on their smallholding outside Salem, making off with clothes, electronic goods and a firearm. In a bizarre twist, the robbers also shot and killed six watchdogs before escaping in a 1993 Toyota Corolla, registration CA 507644. Mr Lourie, who received light injuries during the attack, was treated at Settlers Hospital and discharged.'

He is glad that no connection is made between Ms Lourie's elderly father and David Lurie, disciple of nature poet William Wordsworth and until recently professor at the Cape Technical University.

As for the actual trading, there is little for him to do. Petrus is the one who swiftly and efficiently lays out their wares, the one who knows the prices, takes the money, makes the change. Petrus is in fact the one who does the work, while he sits and warms his hands. Just like the old days:
baas en Klaas
. Except that he does not presume to give Petrus orders. Petrus does what needs to be done, and that is that.