by Damon Galgut
He told the policeman what had happened. He started from the time he had arrived in the town and recounted events simply, unhurried. He spoke in a low, flat voice. The policeman looked from him to the page and only his hand was moving. He wrote quickly. The man saw he had a neat and tiny writing and that he pressed down hard on the page. When he bent his head his parting was visible like a clean line ruled down his scalp. He saw these things as he sat there. Then at some point his eyes moved sideways and on the noticeboard behind the Captain’s shoulder there was a photograph of his own face looking out. He stopped speaking.
The Captain looked up at him. He started speaking again. The Captain’s hand moved as it wrote. The man told him about stopping at the café, about asking directions at the white church. When he told about the man who had showed him the way the pen stopped moving on the page. The policeman was looking at him.
‘You took him in your car?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘He said he would show me where to go.’
The policeman pressed the mole on his forehead as though he was activating a button.
‘Did he tell you his name?’
‘He said his name was Valentine.’
On another white pad that was lying near his elbow the policeman printed VALENTINE and underlined it.
‘What is the car registration?’
The minister looked at him.
‘The number-plate number,’ he said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s your car.’
‘I can’t remember the number.’
The policeman bent down over the page. The pen scratched and scratched on the pad. Then he finished and sat upright and blew on the ink to dry it. His face was petulant and pretty, a cross between a girl and a horse. He turned the form around and held out the pen. ‘Read through and sign it,’ he said. He went out.
The minister got up and ran around the desk. He tore his face from the wall. When the Captain came back he was sitting again and the photograph was crumpled in his pocket. He had signed his new name to the statement he had given and was sitting there, looking at it.
10
They worked by the light of a single bulb that hung down from the roof on a length of flex. They were in a shed that adjoined the house. There was Valentine and Small. They were brothers.
They broke open the boxes and dumped their contents on the floor. Books, papers, documents, a few household objects. Ornaments. They rummaged through everything with their hands, holding things, weighing them, deciding. What they could sell or use they threw into a pile in the middle of the floor and the rest they threw into the corner to be burned.
This was the way that they worked.
Till Small picked up the cassock.
‘Wat’s die?’ he said.
Valentine took it from him. ‘It’s mine,’ he said.
‘It’s a dress,’ Small said. And they laughed.
Valentine sat apart in a corner of the room. He held the cassock on his lap.
‘Look at this.’
A shirt.
One of the boxes had letters in it. They opened some of the letters and Valentine read them aloud. But they soon got bored with this and the letters were thrown into the corner. In another box there was an identity document with a photograph of the minister on it. The photograph was grainy and smudged but they pored intently over it as if it held a clue to their future.
‘Is that him?’ Small said.
‘Ja,’ said Valentine. He lost interest abruptly and threw the document into the corner. He turned back to the mound on the floor.
Then Small whistled. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘What is this?’ He looked at Valentine.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I never saw the man before. Maybe his nose was bleeding.’
Small laughed shrilly. ‘Ja, maybe,’ he said.
They looked at the minister’s clothes. There was a great deal of blood on them.
‘No,’ said Valentine. ‘Throw them away.’
‘Ja,’ said Small. ‘Throw away.’
The clothes were thrown into the corner.
They rolled a joint and passed it between them, squatting together on the floor. Then Small had a bottle in a brown paper bag and this was also handed round. By this time they were happy.
‘Trek aan jou rok,’ Small said.
Valentine pulled on the robe. The effect in that tiny room was startling. His brother looked in silence at him.
He walked in his mantle. When he came to the door he raised his hands and turned and something fell out of the sleeve. It fluttered to the ground and lay there. He picked it up. Then he made a soft sound with his mouth.
‘What is it?’ Small said. He came over. They looked at it together.
It was the blue flower that the man had taken off the vine in the quarry and worn afterwards in his hair. By now it was wilted and limp.
‘It looks like those ones,’ said Small.
Valentine turned the flower around carefully in his palm. He looked at it from all angles. He held it to his nose and smelled it.
‘Don’t you think, Valentine? Don’t you think it looks like those ones?’
Small took the flower from Valentine. He also smelled it and looked at it.
‘It’s the same,’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ Valentine said.
‘Maybe he brought it with him.’
‘Who?’
‘Die man.’
There was a silence.
‘Do you think he was there?’ Small said.
‘Why will he go there?’
‘I don’t know why.’
Valentine took off the cassock. He hung it over a chair. He looked around at the room, at the objects strewn on the concrete floor. Small stood watching him.
They continued to drink as they walked. There was an air of jollity to their outing. Small ran ahead of Valentine and stopped and waited for him. Valentine was drinking. When he had finished the bottle he threw it and it burst softly off in the darkness. They walked on. The night was soft with a peppering of stars and though Valentine was carrying a torch he didn’t switch it on. They knew the path they were walking. As they got closer they grew gradually quieter until they were trudging in silence.
They crossed the dirt road and in the cool dark their feet stirred up the smell of dust. Then they walked across the gravel. In the blueness the quarry was black, an absence in the surface of the world. It looked like a lake. They stood at the edge of the drop and looked down but they could see nothing below. Warm air passed up over them.
Valentine switched on the torch as they started to go down. They followed a route that was familiar. When they came to the bottom Valentine went through a narrow defile and came to the bank of green plants that the man had walked down yesterday, thinking that they were weeds. But they weren’t weeds. They were the garden that Small and Valentine had planted.
‘Is daai ’n footprint?’ Small said.
Valentine didn’t answer. He knelt there, thinking. Then he got up and went back through the defile and up to the vine that grew across the cliff. He had the wilted blue flower that had fallen out of his sleeve and he held it up and stood there, comparing.
‘Is it the same?’
Valentine thought. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He dropped the flower and spat.
They searched the bottom of the quarry, shining the light into crevices and hollows. They couldn’t see any sign of disturbance. They climbed back up out of the quarry.
‘Who is that man?’ Small said.
‘I don’t know who he is.’
‘Do you think he was here?’
‘Why will he come here?’
‘I don’t know why he will come here. I’m asking do you think he was here?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Valentine.
The sky behind them was starting to lighten as they walked back slowly to the town. When they got there the sun was already coming up.
There were people in the streets. They walked to the house across a vacant lot strewn with pieces of zinc and wire and the discarded innards of engines. They opened a padlocked door and came into the shed where the minister’s belongings were. They looked at them.
‘Gaan ons nog rook?’ said Small.
‘No. I must sleep.’
‘Kom ons maak nog ’n ding, man.’
‘No,’ said Valentine. ‘I want to sleep.’
He went. Small stayed behind. He sat in the corner with the cassock in his lap and he rubbed the cloth between his fingers. It had a sensual texture that his life did not and its smoothness was strange and consoling. He sat there, rubbing. His eyes were closed. The lamp was still burning although the sun had come up and it was light in the room.
11
She lay in the bed and watched while the policeman got dressed. Naked, his body seemed fatter and looser than it did when he was clothed. He didn’t look at her.
She said, ‘Why don’t you stay?’
‘I have to meet somebody,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘Somebody.’
Only when he was dressed did the policeman put on his gun. He was altered, not altogether human. He went to the door. He opened it a crack and looked down the darkened passage to the closed door of the minister. He couldn’t see any movement.
‘He’s asleep,’ she said. ‘Long ago.’
He went out, closing the door. He didn’t kiss her or say goodbye. Those were things he never did. She could hear him going down the passage and out the front door. Then the quick footsteps fading on the plaza. She lay there a long time in the bed, her hands idly tweaking the sheets, looking around her in the room. Her clothes lying loose on the floor. A dog-eared bible on the table. A wooden crucifix on the wall. All the old symbols had died for her a long long time ago. She got out of the bed and wandered aimlessly for a bit before sitting on a chair in front of the dressing-table and looking at her body in the mirror. She held her breasts up in her hands and pointed them and let them drop again. Sat there, looking. She knew that something had to change.
12
In the veld at the edge of the township there was a ditch with brown reeds growing in it and a worn plank laid across. At night it was very dark here. The policeman came down the slope cursing, his feet snagging and sliding in holes.
The other man was waiting already. When the policeman came close he rose out of the ditch like an assassin and the two of them moved away together. They huddled head-to-head in the dark and spoke in sibilant whispers. They didn’t talk for long. Then something glinted as it changed hands between them and coins splashed softly in a pocket. Then the man who had been waiting walked quickly up the slope towards the lights of the township. His figure ballooned in silhouette and went. The policeman waited at the edge of the ditch and looked around and looked up at the sky. Then he also headed back up the slope towards the township, going a different way to the other man.
13
On the night before his first sermon he borrowed a bible from the woman. He sat at the desk in the room with the crucifix hanging on the wall over him and he read certain pages in the book. He had a piece of loose paper and he made notes on it, writing in pencil. His writing was disconnected and rapid, slanting in contrary directions, and he covered the page with words. Another page, and another. Towards dawn he appeared to be satisfied and he squared the pages on the desk and placed the bible on them. He fell asleep on top of the covers without taking off his boots.
He woke late in the day to the sound of children playing outside. He got up and went down the passage to the kitchen. The woman was sitting at the table with a magazine opened in front of her and she looked up at him in alarm. The silence and the suddenness of him. His feet made no sound on the floor.
‘I want to see the church,’ he said.
‘Tonight…’
‘Before tonight,’ he said.
She went to her room and came back with a key on a chain. He walked behind her. She led the way across the plaza to the church. At the far end of the concrete near the sandbags the policeman was squatting at his motorbike with a tin of polish and a cloth in his hand. He stopped working and watched them through the wheel with a canny and covert attention.
The doors were massive and wooden, mounted on iron hinges, and people had scratched their names into them. She pushed the key in and turned it. The doors cracked down the middle and yawned and they went through into the church.
It was small and dirty inside. The floor was bare earth. There was an altar of sorts at the front and a few rows of chairs and a collection box stood at the door. He walked down the nave. There were candles standing here and there in saucers. Holes in the bricks all around, pigeons roosting in the rafters overhead, pigeon shit streaked on the walls. He walked to the front and stood for a while and then he walked back to where she was waiting.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘We can go.’
They closed the doors behind them. The policeman was standing behind his motorbike and he watched them as they walked back to the house. She said, ‘Do you like to give sermons?’
‘No,’ he said.
He borrowed a bucket from her. In the late afternoon he walked to the communal tap and filled it and walked back. On his return he came past the red motorbike in the plaza and the Captain was lying on the concrete.
He got up. Smiling.
‘First service, Dominee,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
The policeman was shirtless and his nipples were like purple medallions on a chest smeared with oil and with sweat. The minister looked away. The Captain came closer, wiping his hands over and over on a cloth.
‘I have a lead,’ he said.
The man blinked, confused. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said.
‘With your car. With your case.’
‘My case,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
‘I’ll be making an arrest soon.’
‘Yes,’ the man said. He stood.
Then there was a silence in the plaza and the policeman was wiping and wiping.
‘I have to go,’ the man said.
‘Good luck with your service,’ said the Captain.
He walked across to the house with the policeman’s eyes like a drill-bit in his back. He went in and down to his room. He stripped naked in front of the mirror. He washed his face and shaved and then washed the rest of his body, the water cold as metal on his skin, and when he had finished he walked to the window and looked out but the policeman had gone.
14
There were twenty or thirty people in the church. They were mostly fishermen or their wives and families, the scarred and hardened people who went to sea on the boats in the bay. They were taciturn and wary. He had stood outside, watching them go in, and they had watched him in turn.
Now he went in and walked to the front of the church. He stood there a moment, looking at them. The candles placed in saucers here and there made a flickering yellow light by which he could see the faces, the hands. He carried the bible. He had no cassock and he wore the same clothes in which he had arrived, marked still with faint stains of blood. He was trembling slightly.
He started to speak. His voice was soft and they couldn’t hear him. He stopped. He coughed and swallowed and wiped his palms on his shirt and looked at them and started again.
They listened. He told them that the world was a prison, that they were all prisoners in it. He told them that they could escape the prison of the world and that there was freedom beyond it and as he spoke upon his theme a sort of inspiration touched him. He spoke quietly, distinctly, but a faint grey light was glimmering on his forehead and on the backs of his hands and the faces too seemed to take on this light so that the church was lambent with its glow. He told them about freedom and the meaning of death and then he stopped speaking and stood there.
‘That’s all,’ he said. ‘Let’s pray.’
The next week there were forty people there for the service
and the week after that almost sixty. They could not all fit in and they jammed up the doorway and peered in through the holes in the bricks.
15
It was a huge bonfire and it had been burning for an hour in the middle of the vacant lot next to the house. There was a white heat at its centre. They had thrown into it the minister’s letters, his identity book and the other things they couldn’t use. Valentine had picked up the minister’s clothes and he was about to consign these too to the flames when three policemen appeared suddenly out of the darkness. They had approached quite silently. One of them had his gun drawn. They were all in uniform and the light of the fire made their buttons shine redly like eyes. Small and Valentine stood staring at them and time changed shape as it does in instants of extremity.
Valentine was wearing the cassock. He had taken to wearing it lately at night or while he was in the house. It billowed around him as he walked and he felt that it somehow enlarged him. He dropped what he was holding. Now he leaped in the airy black garment and by the time he knew he had moved he had passed through the centre of the fire and was on the other side running.
Small was behind him. His feet were light and frantic and he emitted a high, keening scream. Valentine had heard a rabbit scream once with a cry not unlike this cry. He ducked to one side, as much to escape his brother as the pursuers of them both. He ran through the grass and there were rocks and holes in the ground and once he fell on a piece of twisted metal but he was up before he knew he had fallen. He ran. Though the fire was far behind him it cast long flickering shadows and the outlines of men in motion were around him and he ran without destination.
There was a log, a fence. He jumped. He landed on his feet and stumbled and ran on. Now he heard oaths from somewhere, and shouting. There was a shot. He was on ground that sloped away gently and he ran down, following the slope. He could hear feet behind him and the sound of breath and he knew that he couldn’t get away. He stopped and turned. He held up his hands although it was dark and they couldn’t be seen. ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Here. It’s me.’