The Book of Revelation (29 page)

For the next half-hour he took down my details, filling endless boxes with neat, clear handwriting that had a slight forward slant to it. After the registration, I was fingerprinted and photographed, then I was escorted back to my cell. The policeman told me that I would be interviewed later that morning, and that I would be required to make a statement. It would be advisable, he said, if I prepared for this.

When I left my cell again, towards lunchtime, the mood in the police station appeared to have altered. One or two of the officers gave me thinly veiled looks of disapproval as they passed me in the corridor. Others studied me with a curiosity that seemed cold, aloof, as if I were a specimen in a laboratory. There was no sign of the smooth-faced policeman who had treated me with such consideration.

This time there were two policemen sitting at the table when I was shown into the grey room. One had a long face and narrow shoulders. His name was Snel. He was smoking a cigarette, exhaling through his nostrils in two disdainful streams. The other one, Pieters, was balding, with a square head. They both seemed exhausted, bored. They would rather have been anywhere but in this room, and their presence there was something for which they were holding me personally responsible. As I took a seat in front of them I felt guilty and on edge.

They wanted to hear my version of what had happened the night before. I gave them the bare facts, in so far as I could remember them. When I had finished, Pieters began to tap his biro on the notepad that lay in front of him. The top page was still unmarked, quite blank. I found it slightly insulting that he hadn’t bothered to make a single note. Snel rose to his feet and began to pace back and forwards with both hands thrust deep into his pockets. He was unusually tall, I noticed, and his body tilted forwards from the waist. Sideways-on, he looked like a ski-jumper in mid-flight.

“You have told us what you did,” Snel said in a nasal voice, “but you have not told us why you did it.”

“That’s not something I can explain,” I said.

Snel looked at me askance, his chin aligned with his shoulder. “You can’t explain why you did it?”

“No.”

“According to information we received this morning,” Pieters said, “you assaulted the girl and attempted to rape her.”

I shook my head. “I had no intention of raping her. It wasn’t rape.”

“But you tore off all her clothes,” Pieters said.

“Yes.”

“If that isn’t rape,” Snel said, “what is it?”

I stared at him as he leaned against the wall, both hands in his pockets. I couldn’t think of an answer to that question. Though my hands and feet were cold, I felt sweat collecting on the back of my neck and on my chest.

“Why did you assault the girl?” Pieters said.

“I told you,” I said. “I can’t explain.”

Back in my cell I fell into a deep sleep. I dreamed that Stefan Elmers was married to a big buxom woman in a tight-fitting pale-pink dress and high-heeled silver sandals. To watch her walk across the room was to witness the most astounding feat of balance. Smiling fatalistically, he told me that he already had five children, and that his wife was now pregnant with the sixth. Then I dreamed that a man was cutting my hair. He botched the job completely, shaving my head in some places, but leaving clownish clumps of hair in others.
Usually, I work in the zoo,
he said. I woke to the sound of my cell door banging open. It was a policeman I had never seen before, bringing me some lunch.

That evening Pieters and Snel interviewed me again. They wanted me to make a statement before I left the room. While the facts seemed beyond dispute, they were still puzzled by the motivation. If only I could give them a clearer picture of what had been going through my mind at the time. . . .

“It might make your statement easier to write,” Snel said.

He sat on the corner of the table, one leg dangling, one foot on the floor. He offered me a cigarette.

I shook my head. “Thank you, but I don’t smoke.”

“Did the girl make any advances?” he said. “Did she encourage you in some way? After all, you’re a good-looking man. . . .”

He lit a cigarette with a crisp snap of his gold lighter, exhaling through his nostrils as usual, then stood up and walked to the far side of the room.

“No,” I said. “She didn’t encourage me.”

Pieters seemed surprised by my answer. His big square forehead creased as he leaned over his pad of paper and jotted something down.

“What about this?” Snel said. “You saw her in the club and you liked the look of her immediately. You don’t know what came over you. You couldn’t help yourself.” He brought his cigarette up to the corner of his mouth and inhaled deeply. “You wanted her.”

This was such an obvious and yet, to me, unlikely version of events that I must have smiled.

“Did I say something amusing?” Snel was leaning against the wall now, with one hand in his pocket.

“In a way,” I said.

“But you can’t explain it?”

“No.”

“So you didn’t find her attractive?” Snel said. “You didn’t find her,” and he paused, “irresistible?”

“No.”

Snel walked back to the table, crushed his cigarette out in the ashtray and then sat down. “How do you feel about women?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

Snel leaned forwards. His hands lay folded, one on top of the other, limp as gloves. “Do you have a grudge against women?” He paused, and then distilled the thought. “Did you have a grudge against this woman?”

“I wouldn’t call it a grudge exactly,” I said, “but it’s an interesting question.”

“What would you call it?”

I stared down at the table, its grey metal surface freshly painted, free of blemishes. I didn’t see how I could be of any further use to the policemen. I had gone as far as I could go. Why were they so obsessed with motivation? Were they trying to do me a favour by finding me an escape-route? Or were they intent on trapping me?

“Well?” Snel lit another cigarette.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t go into that.”

Some air rushed out of Pieters’ mouth, almost as if he had just been punched in the stomach. It was involuntary—part sardonic laughter, part disgust.

“One final question,” Snel said. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

I nodded. “Yes, I do.”

“What will she think about all this?”

My voice rose suddenly. “She’s got nothing to do with this.”

“No?”

“No. They’re two completely different things.”

Pieters turned sideways and muttered something rapid that I didn’t quite catch. Then he selected a form from the pile in front of him and slid it contemptuously across the table.

“Here,” he said. “Write your statement.”

•

I must have woken up a dozen times that night. My right elbow had stiffened, and it was hard to find a comfortable position on the bed. Also, I was aware of doors slamming in the distance, and the constant murmur of voices. A police station is never quiet. I lay there under the fluorescent light and went back over my statement. I had been unable to avoid using words like “tore” and “ripped.” The word “dragged” had appeared too. The whole thing looked so much worse when you wrote it down. What’s more, I had been unable to give any reasons for my behaviour, although, at the end of the statement, I did say that I realised I’d done wrong, and that I deeply regretted any injury or offence that I had caused.

After reading the statement, Snel looked up sharply.
Is there anything you want to add?
The way he asked the question made me think that I must have left out something important. But I couldn’t for the life of me think what that might be. Perhaps there was something about my expression of remorse that seemed inadequate, that didn’t quite feel genuine, but I couldn’t improve on it, so I just shook my head.

I lay on my narrow bed and stared at the ceiling, feeling as if I had sleep-walked through the day. I had concerned myself only with my most immediate reality—the look of the police officers, the taste of a Danish pastry. Perhaps there was a kind of comfort or distraction in these details, but they were minor, inconsequential, and had no relevance. Now, though—finally, you might say—the gravity and hopelessness of my situation were beginning to filter through to me, and what happened in the middle of the following day stripped away any last remaining layers of delusion I might have had.

I had just woken from a light sleep when a policeman unlocked the door of my cell and told me that I had a visitor. I would be allowed ten minutes with her, he said.

Her.

I swallowed nervously. My face flushed and, for a few moments, the floor seemed to tilt, as if I was falling forwards.

Juliette was already sitting at the table when I walked into the interrogation room. I hesitated behind her, taking in the healthy shine on her black hair and the shape of her shoulders under her black ribbed sweater. Though I had known it would be her, her appearance was so unlikely, so incongruous, somehow, that it had the quality of a hallucination.

I walked round the table and sat down opposite her. The policeman who had escorted me into the room stood by the door, his eyes unblinking, his mouth pressed shut, like a child pretending to be invisible.

“Juliette?” I said.

She had been staring at her hands. Now she looked up. She seemed tired, dark smears reaching from the corners of her eyes. A greyness lay beneath the surface of her skin instead of the gold that I remembered. I tried to smile.

“Did you get the part?”

She looked puzzled.

“That audition,” I said. “Did you get the part?”

“Oh, that. Yes.” She nodded. “Yes, I did.”

“That’s wonderful.”

I watched her as she slowly pulled off her gloves. When she looked up at me again, her eyes had filled with tears.

“What did you do?” she asked in a small, strained voice.

It wasn’t a question. It was just the closest she could get to an expression of her bewilderment. I wondered how much she’d been told.

“Juliette?”

She shook her head and, glancing downwards, touched one of her eyes with the back of her wrist.

“Juliette, listen. It’s not what it sounds like.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No.”

I stared down at the table. Juliette sniffed twice, then blew her nose. It struck me that this was the first time I had ever seen her cry.

“It’s not what you think,” I said.

I had used the same words before, and though they were as true then as they were now, I remembered how unconvincing they had sounded, how inauthentic. How guilty. I also remembered that they hadn’t worked. It was as if my life consisted of a series of desperate and ineffectual repetitions.

No, it was worse than that. I was like someone with a market stall who brings out the same fruit day after day until, eventually, what he’s selling is rotten to the core, nothing more than putrefaction.

I looked up at Juliette.

“Nothing’s changed,” I murmured.

But I knew I was wrong. The ice had cracked and we had fallen through. There was a distance that could be measured by such things, a distance that could not easily be closed.

Of course, I could have told her the whole story. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t had the opportunity. In our hotel in Paris, at three in the morning, red roses exploding silently behind her—her fingers hesitating on the scar. . . . But she hadn’t asked, and I hadn’t answered, and we had made love with the unspoken hovering between us. . . .

Juliette was saying that she had brought some letters from my apartment. They had been confiscated at the front desk, but they would be given to me later. As she was talking, the police officer who was standing by the door stepped forwards and informed us that our time was up. I did not ask Juliette to come again. I simply repeated what I had said earlier, that none of this was what it sounded like, and when she looked at me, her eyes reluctant, forlorn, I told her that I loved her, and I saw her nod gravely before she turned away.

It was only later that I wondered whether the police had asked her to visit me, thinking it might throw some fresh light on my character.

•

On Thursday evening, some thirty-eight hours after my arrest, I was summoned to the interrogation room by Snel and Pieters. Snel was smoking, as usual. In a voice that was both soft and urgent, he told me that I was being charged with aggravated assault and attempted rape. They had received a statement from the girl in question. Though still shaken by the experience, she seemed determined to press charges, and there was nothing in my statement to suggest that she might not be fully justified in doing so. In fact, Snel said, inhaling, our statements were remarkably consistent with one another, almost as if we were in collaboration. He looked up at the ceiling, expelled smoke from his nostrils in two flamboyant streams, and then repeated the words “remarkably consistent.” It was clear that my behaviour intrigued him.

An hour later I received a visit from the lawyer who had been appointed by the state to represent me. He was a short man with a ruddy, good-humoured face, and from the first moment I saw him, I knew I had virtually no chance of winning the case. Alone in my cell with him, I told him I would plead guilty to the assault charge, but not guilty to the charge of attempted rape. I told him there was no evidence to suggest that I had tried to rape the girl. He disagreed.

“You followed her to the toilets,” he said. “You forced her into an empty cubicle. You tore off all her clothes. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming.” He smiled, which, in the circumstances, seemed both inappropriate and condescending.

“I didn’t touch her,” I said.

“You were interrupted,” the lawyer said.

I stared at him. “Whose side are you on?”

“I am only saying what the prosecution will say.” The lawyer clasped his hands on the table in front of him, as if he was about to say grace. “I am on your side, of course I am, but you must give me some assistance.”

I could not satisfy him, though, and he left shortly afterwards, looking at the floor and shaking his head. At that point I was tempted to contact Isabel or Paul Bouhtala and ask for their advice, but, in the end, I just didn’t feel as if I could bother either of them. They had done too much for me already.