by Damon Galgut
‘The trial… It… I…’
He was desperate for words.
The policeman leaned towards him and took his hand off his arm. He held the minister’s hand as he spoke. He talked clearly, distinctly, each word exact:
‘Not now, Dominee. All right?’
He let go his hand.
The man stood trembling, alert, his body enclosed by a nimbus, his mouth open to speak. Then he suddenly went slack. He was one moment full and the next moment empty, as if the contents had been scooped out of him. He was tired. The words that had been leavening in him receded now. He stood there and though there were people all around him it felt as if he stood alone on a hilltop. The sun came down whitely and there was no sound and he was alone on a hill.
He turned and walked back towards the township. When he came to the edge of the grass he stopped. The crowd was larger than before and other people were streaming out from the houses with expressions of delight on their faces. There was a surge of movement. The ropes tautened and the canvas rose up over the crowd like a kite and there were cheers and small bursts of applause and this time the tent didn’t fall.
He walked away over the grass, going in the direction of the sea. He walked quickly, going at speed, and soon he left the crowded place behind. The township receded and the spires of the town and then he was stumbling through marshland.
He came in time to the sea. The water stretched away in a flat grey immensity and waves ran up on the sand. He took his shoes off and walked and he could feel the granules on his feet with a heightened and almost painful awareness and there were rocks here and there and pools in the rocks and things grew and lived in the pools. Tiny fish the colour of rust and fronds that had the texture of flesh. He walked with his shoes in his hand. The shore was desolate and cold. The sun was going down and he was a solitary traveller tonight. There was kelp and flotsam lying scattered on the sand and crabs moved like small armies dancing.
After a time he came to a headland that thrust out into the water. He walked to the end of it and sat. The headland was made of rocks, haphazard and black, and nothing grew here except mussels. There was the sound of water. Salt accreted on his skin. He sat, crouched over like an old man or a baby, as the last light went out of the sky and the stars began to flicker overhead. The darkness was strong and he couldn’t see the horizon and he sat there as if waiting for something. A ship went slowly past far out in the water like a burning city floating out to sea.
When he got back to the house the woman and Captain Mong were sitting in the kitchen. There was another man with them. This man was the doctor.
They took him to his room. ‘You’re sick, Dominee,’ they said. ‘You must rest.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
‘You must get into bed.’
‘You’re not well.’
They helped him undress and he got into the bed and their faces were above him like the faces of gods and they looked down from a great height on him.
26
The dimensions of objects would not remain constant and they waxed and waned in constellations. They appeared between interstices of sleep and he experienced them as textures or as qualities of intensity and only later did they resolve themselves, sometimes quite suddenly, at other times by degrees, into a coherence that he could name: desk window chair floor wall
The woman was there too. Once she helped him to use the bedpan. He said to her
I’m sorry.
It doesn’t matter, she said. She smiled at him.
It was hard to tell as he lay there whether it was day or night or what time of day or night it was. He could feel the mattress under him and he seemed always to be tangled up in the sheets but then sometimes he was not in bed at all but outside lying on the ground under the branches of a huge spreading tree Why have you brought me here he said why have you she laughed at him I didn’t bring you she said you came
At other times he was in chains. He could not move his arms or legs and he raised his head to see he saw that he was not chained but was floating in a vast expanse of water that spread around him, saline and green, upholding him warmly from below fish nibbled at him and the sun went down redly over the sea and he saw that he was not after all in water but drifting through a darkness a space and it came to him that that was what nothing was the absence of shape but how can that be he said I am a shape
Then the doctor came and touched him on the forehead, the wrists the fever is bad he said i must inject him again the doctor brought pain and after the pain he felt cooler again the room began to coagulate around him, he saw the crucifix hanging over the desk, he saw the grain in the wood. Then Captain Mong came. He sat next to the woman at the side of the bed and he touched at her with his hands. The woman went. The Captain was alone next to the bed and he tried to speak to the Captain, i have done something he said if you have done something Shh said the Captain Shhh
and then
and then he swung the bottle and the wine exploded redly like blood like blood or perhaps it was blood he had blood all over his hand i cut it on a piece of wire next to the road when i stopped but you must clean that she said
She cleaned him all over with a cloth she sat him up in the bed and wiped him under the arms the neck
It will never come off, he said
Don’t talk, she said
Thank you for doing this
It’s all right, she said
But it will never come off
What are you talking about, she said
She lay him back down on the bed, the cool sheets He slept and
then he rose slowly again to the surface of things and he was in the bed in the room in the house He could see the black robe hanging skewly across the back of the chair and he could see its creases, its folds It was morning and a thin wash of sunlight came in past the curtains, casting small pools of shadow, and he felt the edges of the light acutely as though they were made out of stone. Everything had a lustre and a brilliance to his eyes that he had never detected before and he looked around with a kind of awe at the shimmer and luminance of forms. He could smell odours and fragrances from close by and far and sounds penetrated his ear with a piquancy that hurt him. ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s music,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’
‘What music?’
‘Circus music,’ she said.
27
It carried over the plaza, tinny and distant, and found its way through the high barred window into the cell. The three men lifted their heads for a moment.
‘What’s that?’ Small said.
‘It’s circus music,’ said the lawyer. ‘They’re practising.’
The lawyer was a soft short man with stiff brown hair combed back and a front tooth made of gold. His hands as they shuffled papers had a nervous air to them. He wouldn’t look directly at the men.
He had come into the cell shortly before. They hadn’t asked for him. The door had opened and he was standing there with a striped suit on and a briefcase and with his pale face and his out-turned feet he was himself not unlike a clown.
‘Who are you?’ Small said.
‘I’m your lawyer.’
‘We didn’t ask for a lawyer.’
‘I’ve been appointed for you by the State. Your trial is coming up, gentlemen.’
He sat on the edge of the bed. His briefcase was open on his knees. He had a sheaf of papers in his hands which he kept referring to intently and his demeanour was slope-shouldered and unhappy. It was clear that he wished himself elsewhere.
‘We don’t want a lawyer,’ said Valentine.
They were all very still in the cell.
‘But you –’
‘We don’t want a lawyer. Get out.’
‘Without a lawyer there isn’t much chance –’
‘Get out, I said. Get out.’
The lawyer sat rigid for a moment. Then he gathered his papers together and neatened them with his fingertips and put them into his brief
case. He closed it and got up. He looked at them and walked to the door. He knocked on it loudly and waited. His vast pinstriped back to them. When the door was opened he went out.
Small looked at Valentine. Small’s face was frightened. Valentine took from his shoe what looked like a silver splinter or a blade. But it wasn’t. It was a spoon. It was bright and precise in his palm. He crouched down and began to rub it against the wall. The sound it gave off was high and thin like a baby crying.
He stopped and looked up at Small.
‘What are you doing?’ said Small.
Valentine gestured once. ‘Watch at the door,’ he said.
‘What are you doing?’
‘What does it look like I’m doing?’
Small watched at the door. Valentine started and again the cell was filled with the thin high noise.
‘What are you going to do with that?’ Small said.
‘I’ll find something to do with it.’
Small watched him. For an instant the movement stopped and Valentine looked at his brother in the gloom with his eyes glinting dimly like a rodent’s eyes. Then his hands started moving again. The spoon was outlined in a thin thread of heat and Small was very still at the door. Only Valentine’s hands were moving with a separate volition like creatures he couldn’t control as if by their repeated and violent agitation making up for what both of them had lost.
28
‘This high it was growing. This high.’
‘They say that he –’
‘They’ll say anything. To save themselves.’
‘Shame.’
‘I hope they –’
‘And they tried to blame –’
‘Do you think it’ll be full?’
‘You better go early, if you go. Are you going?’
‘I’m going.’
‘It’s the circus tomorrow too.’
‘The circus will come again.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I can’t go. The shop –’
‘I’m going.’
‘I’m not.’
‘I’m going.’
29
The youngest of them was a child and the oldest a man of ninety. There were whole families and couples and some single people, all dressed in the smartest clothes that they had, dark suits or dresses of floral crimplene, hats and button-holes and rosettes and one of them even in medals that had been awarded to somebody else in a war.
There were too many of them. They could not all fit into the white church, which was where the court was held, there being no courthouse in the town, and they milled around on the slate outside, speaking brightly to each other, all of them edging closer to the door that was still closed but very soon would be opened.
Their eyes moving quickly.
‘There. That’s him.’
‘Where? Where?’
‘Him there. Isn’t that him?’
‘No. That’s somebody else.’
‘Where are they?’
Then the doors were opened. The people started to go through into the church. Some of them had never been here before and they looked around at the ordered rows of pews and the tall windows made of fragments of coloured glass and at the altar and the huge crucified figure only slightly smaller than an actual man affixed to the wall in bronzed and perpetual torment. They sat. There were policemen here and there at various points in the church. The church filled quickly. Then the doors were closed again. The policeman stood at the back and turned the latecomers away and there were many disappointed that day.
But from outside the church the top of the striped tent was visible in the distance and it was towards this that they began to go now, streaming across the uneven ground singly or hand in hand like pilgrims setting out on a journey and soon the slate was empty again.
Now those inside the church were looking around, whispering to each other. A desk and a chair had been set out at the front and a flag was hung hugely behind it. The choir was the single area as yet unoccupied and it was clear that this was to be the dock but of the accused there wasn’t a sign. Nor of the minister or the policeman or of any other official.
And the heat. And the waiting. And the eyes. That audience began to grow restless.
Then the side door to the vestry opened and Captain Mong came in, followed by the two prisoners. He led them to the choir-stall and watched them sit. He unlocked the padlocks on their wrists and took the handcuffs with him. He went back to the vestry door and stood there.
The crowd watched the prisoners in the dock. How they sat. At what they were looking. The two men were very still and apart on those lonely wooden benches.
Then a voice said All Rise and another side door opened, one near the apse of the church, and the judge came in and went to the table near the altar and sat. He wore a red robe and without it he would be in no way remarkable. He was a small man with hair turned prematurely ashen and brushed straight back from his forehead. His hands were plump and freckled and he took a long time to settle at the desk. When his papers were arranged about him he looked around across the top of his glasses until his gaze fell on the prosecutor and he nodded.
30
In an office next to the vestry the man sat waiting to be called. He could hear through the wall faint intimations of what was taking place in the church. Raised voices, chairs shifting, the gavel. He coughed. It was hot in the room. He sat with his hands together, palm to palm.
Now another sound carried into the room. It was reedy and percussive and merry and came in intermediate staccato phrases. Circus music. He listened for a while. Then he got up and walked around the room.
He stopped when he came to the window. He looked out into the deserted stretch of street on which the sun was whitely pouring but his gaze seemed fastened on some vista or happening elsewhere and his lips shaped words he didn’t speak. He looked down at his hands. On his finger the cut had healed by now but there was the faint brown outline of a scar and he brought it up to his mouth and touched it with the tip of his tongue. Then he lowered his hand again. He walked back to his seat but something had changed in him now and he sat differently to how he had sat before.
He wore the same clothes in which he had first come to the town and which he took off only to wash. The stains were less distinct than before but they were still there on the front of the shirt, the pants, like the outline of a continent on a map, a private marking known only to him. Sun came in the window. It fell in a yellow beam on the carpet and there were flies lying dead at the base of the glass and a clock was ticking somewhere with a soft glottal sound like somebody swallowing over and over.
At noon the court broke for an hour. Though the church was empty and the silence it gave off was immense he didn’t himself leave the room and he asked for nothing to eat or drink. In the afternoon the proceedings resumed and shortly afterward the circus. Once again these separate discords were mingled in the room as if produced only for his torment. There was a quality to his waiting now of expectation, of imminence, and his chin was resting on his hand and his eyes were no longer downcast.
Then the door was opened and it was Captain Mong. ‘They want you now,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ he said. He stood up.
‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m all right.’
He followed the policeman into the court. He walked to the witness box. A lectern had been set up for this purpose with an iron chair behind it. Over his clothes the man wore as always that scorched black robe and he looked more like a beggar than a preacher and there was a sound of breath from the spectators in the pews. The judge rapped once with his gavel. Yet even the judge was watchful. The man turned at the edge of the lectern and across the breadth of that sanctified space faced the eyes of the two men accused. He looked at them and then he looked down.
On top of the lectern was a bible. Captain Mong had been walking behind him. Now he came and took the bible in his hands and held it out.
‘Put your right hand on the bible,’ he said. ‘Raise your left hand in the air.’
The man put his right hand on the bible. It was a book and meant nothing to him. The leather was cool under his fingers. He raised his left hand in the air.
‘Are you Frans Niemand,’ said Captain Mong, ‘minister of the mission church of – ’
‘No,’ he said.
Silence in the church.
‘Are you the Reverend Frans Niemand –’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’
Now into the silence a buzzing. In the choir-stall Valentine stood up and held the railing and sat down again. The judge rapped smartly with his gavel.
‘Order,’ he said. ‘Order.’
Captain Mong turned to the judge. ‘The minister has been sick,’ he said.
‘I’m not a minister,’ he said.
Now the murmuring was words and somewhere somebody laughed. The man turned his head and for the first time looked at that audience which gave off sound without seeming to produce it just as bees do or water.
31
Then the back door of the church was kicked open and a man came running in. He was bawling out words that few people could make out except for the name of Captain Mong. There was consternation. The policeman and the newcomer held a whispered conversation and the policeman whispered to the judge and then the policeman ran out of the church. The judge struck again with the gavel. He said that the court was adjourned. Then a voice said All Rise and the judge went out and the people were left sitting in a stupor of amazement before they all began talking to each other. Someone had heard animal and someone had heard cage and someone else had heard the word escape.
32
‘What kind?’
‘A lion.’
‘I heard a bear.’
‘There weren’t any bears.’
‘It was a goat.’
‘He killed a goat?’
‘In the middle of the street.’
