The Punctual Rape Read online

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ he said eventually. ‘It gives me a chance to acquaint myself with the town.’

  ‘And with me,’ Monika said.

  He put on his jacket and followed her downstairs, counting the number of pins in her hair. He could see at least sixteen, tiny strips of soft metal intricately woven with the strands of her hair. Outside it was warm although there was no sign of the sun. They walked together in silence until they came to the Anniversary Monument.

  ‘Our local landmark,’ Monika said. ‘This is where lovers meet in the evening.’

  ‘I see,’ Berg said. He was struck by the odd absence of traffic: from time to time a motor car went past, or one or two military trucks, but when the noise of their engines had faded there was a surprising silence that he found peaceful.

  ‘Although lovers meet here, they don’t actually do anything here, if you see what I mean. There are plenty of fields around the town for that sort of activity.’

  Berg said nothing to this as they continued to walk. Sometimes Monika would point a place out to him relating it to some personal incident. There was Kriff’s, the butcher, where she had once dropped twelve eggs from her basket; Samuels, the dressmaker, where she had bought a skirt a few months ago, a red skirt that didn’t really fit properly—and anyway, it was well known that Mrs Samuels was fair game for any of the soldiers from the military encampment. Berg found this information uninteresting and the sound of her voice—which he thought had the faint metallic edge of water dripping into a saucepan—extremely monotonous. So when she suggested that they have something to drink in a café, he was relieved: with her mouth full of liquid, she would at least have to pause between sentences.

  They went into a small dark café that smelled of bleach and tobacco smoke. A group of men were playing cards on a long table under the window. Berg asked for two cups of coffee and he and Monika sat down in an alcove at the back of the room.

  ‘Why did you leave the capital?’ she asked.

  ‘I felt like a change,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but why come here of all places?’

  ‘Because of the post I was offered.’

  ‘Are you a party member?’

  Berg took out a cigarette. ‘Politics isn’t my line.’

  ‘But if you’re ambitious don’t you think you should join the party?’

  ‘Did I say I was ambitious?’

  There was an outbreak of laughter from the card table. He turned his head to see what had caused it, but superficially everything was the same as it had been—except that two or three of the players were looking in his direction and smiling. Perhaps irrationally, he imagined that the laughter had been directed at himself and Monika. Perhaps one of the men had made a crude remark: ‘That bugger’s trying to get his hand up her skirt.’ He turned to look at Monika who had noticed nothing unusual and was drinking her coffee.

  ‘Why isn’t a healthy man like you married?’ Monika asked.

  ‘I’ve never had the urge to get married.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever been in love?’

  A little exasperated by her questions, Berg said, ‘Please don’t think me impolite, but I don’t really see the point of your questions. If I don’t answer——’

  ‘That’s your privilege,’ Monika said and reached for her drink, sighing as if she were weary of Berg’s guarded answers to her questions. She crossed her legs and Berg could have sworn that she deliberately applied her foot against his shins with some pressure. But there was no way of telling whether she had meant to do it or not, or whether—if she had intended it—there was any purpose behind it. Just the same, he felt uncomfortable as though the sudden physical contact had left him exposed to her.

  ‘If you don’t answer my questions, how can we ever get to know each other?’

  ‘There are questions and questions,’ Berg said, as tactfully as he could. ‘I mean, there are some sorts of questions one can answer immediately and there are other sorts that shouldn’t be asked.’

  Monika took a cigarette from the packet Berg had left on the table. While she smoked she was silent. When she put the cigarette into the ashtray she asked, ‘What do you think of my aunt?’

  ‘She seems helpful,’ Berg answered.

  ‘The trouble with Vera is that she’s a little crazy. She’s been like that ever since her husband died. Still, you’ll find her competent in what she does. She has a book full of testimonials from her previous lodgers.’

  Berg looked at his watch. ‘Shouldn’t we walk back now?’

  ‘Why not?’ Monika rose from the table and looked down at him. ‘We can go back a different way, if you like.’

  Outside, they turned into a street that on one side consisted of small grey cottages—too small to live in, Berg thought—and on the other of a row of various kinds of shops. When they reached the corner Monika caught hold of his arm.

  ‘Would you mind if I took your arm?’

  Unwilling to appear impolite, Berg did not answer. But he was acutely conscious of the way she seemed to be imposing herself upon him. She held his arm all the way back to the house, releasing him finally at the front door.

  When they were inside she said, ‘Thank you.’

  Berg went up to his room and lay down on the bed. He thought briefly of changing his shirt—since he was still wearing the one he had worn on the train—but such a move meant that he would have to open both his suitcases and once open it would be impossible to resist the task of unpacking everything. He decided to wait until after supper, when he could unpack in peace and as slowly as he liked; after which, he would go to bed early.

  He smoked a cigarette and noticed that he had almost finished the packet he had bought only that morning. Normally a whole packet lasted three or four days. But his present circumstances were hardly normal. Change, such as the change he had made himself, brought with it different kinds of tension. When he had settled into a new routine the number of cigarettes would drop.

  He washed his face and hands before going down to supper.

  Four

  The dining room looked into a small back garden. When Berg stared out through the window he saw a profusion of wild and tangled grass and clumps of overgrown shrubbery. Several limp items of clothing hung on a length of rope. While he was looking out, wondering to himself why the garden had so obviously gone unattended, Mrs Jacobitz came in from the kitchen carrying a large tureen which she set down on the table. She was sweating heavily and struggling to catch her breath. For a few moments she leaned against the table and her shoulders—rather too wide and heavy for a woman—rose and fell.

  After a time she said, ‘I’m so glad that you had an opportunity to speak to Monika. And you must forgive me for failing to tell you about her. Not that she makes any difference to your position in the house. None at all.’

  Berg thought about this: what was his position in the house? He was merely the lodger, nothing more.

  ‘How could it make a difference?’ he asked.

  ‘Let me put it this way,’ the widow replied. ‘I have a duty to my niece. Well, she’s my own flesh and blood. But that doesn’t mean I have any intention of neglecting my professional duty to you, as my lodger. What I’m trying to say is that there won’t be any favouritism. You only have to compare the helpings of food I give you with those I give to Monika and you’ll see what I mean.’

  ‘It never entered my mind,’ Berg said.

  ‘There you are then,’ the widow said. She took the lid from the tureen, stirred whatever was inside, and then closed it again. ‘In a way I’m glad that you had a chance to talk to Monika because she needs—oh, how do I put it?—she needs someone to take her out of herself. She’s a shy girl, you see. But I think she’s basically friendly.’

  A shy girl? Berg thought this description misleading. Monika could hardly be called shy. For one thing, hadn’t she come into his room and plumped herself down on his bed? hadn’t she made certain kinds of remarks of the sort that only a forward person
would make? and hadn’t she, without his permission, gripped and held his arm for about twenty minutes—almost as if he were her lover? And it was a debatable point whether she could even be called a girl, she was at least thirty-five.

  Mrs Jacobitz continued. ‘She hasn’t had what you’d call a very happy life. Both her parents were killed in the war. Her father was taken prisoner and shot. Her dear mother, my sister, was a victim of the bombings. So I had to bring her up like my own daughter. Not that I have any children of my own. But it was always a struggle. She was twenty when she first came here. And there was a romance with a gipsy in a travelling circus. Hardly a circus, really, more a collection of disgusting sideshows, bearded women, two-headed cows, midgets, and that sort of thing. Anyhow, she wanted to marry her gipsy. But what sort of life would that have been for her? Eh? Travelling God knows where in all sorts of weather, getting in with all the wrong kind of people, drinking that cheap gipsy wine. No life at all.’

  Berg said, ‘Well, some gipsies are better than others.’

  The widow looked at him. She was fidgeting with her necklace, her thick red fingers stroking the plum-shaped beads. ‘Are you saying I should have allowed the marriage? Is that the advice you would have given?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have advised anything at all,’ Berg said. ‘I was just making the simple point that you can’t really generalise about gipsies in the same way as you can’t generalise about anything.’

  ‘Then let me tell you that if I’d allowed the marriage she would have come to a pretty bad end. The last I heard of the gipsy he was serving a prison sentence for manslaughter. Manslaughter! That’s only a polite word for murder—and you’re telling me I should have allowed my dear niece, my own flesh and blood, to marry a murderer?’

  ‘No,’ Berg said, realising that in future he would have to choose his words more carefully in front of the widow if such misunderstandings were to be avoided. And although it occurred to him that if the widow had allowed her niece to marry her gipsy then the manslaughter might never have happened, he simply said, ‘You were probably wise not to allow the match. Very wise.’

  ‘Of course I was wise. Of course I was.’ The widow stirred the contents of the tureen. ‘But you see how many misfortunes there have been in Monika’s life. She needs to be taken out of herself, that’s all.’

  Mrs Jacobitz began to cut up a loaf of bread while Berg thought about the story. No doubt it was true—but so what? He had heard of a hundred similar cases: misfortunes in the war, people going to the front and never returning, their bodies never recovered, people suffering from unhappy love affairs: yet somehow they had managed to survive, to retain something of themselves intact. Why should Monika be any different? Her aunt spoke of her as though she were delicate, a plant that had to be nurtured in a very special way. But this, Berg thought, was far from the truth and it indicated that the widow really knew very little about her own niece.

  ‘You must be hungry,’ Mrs Jacobitz said.

  ‘Yes,’ Berg said. He wished that she would serve the food, because his stomach was suddenly painfully empty.

  Monika opened the door and came into the room. She looked pale and her eyes were red.

  ‘Please don’t serve anything for me, aunt Vera. I have another of my migraines.’

  ‘Well, don’t forget to take two of your tablets.’

  ‘I think I’ll go straight to bed.’ Monika smiled thinly at Berg. ‘Good night, Mr Berg.’

  When she had gone Mrs Jacobitz shrugged.

  ‘Migraines, you see. She has them once a month. Another little tragedy. She takes tablets, of course, but they don’t help much.’

  ‘What a pity,’ Berg said, looking at the tureen. Steam was rising from under the lid. He felt desperately hungry now, slightly depressed even. ‘Do you think we might eat now?’

  Mrs Jacobitz sighed and began to crack the bones in her fingers. ‘Sometimes I think it isn’t fair. Some people who don’t deserve anything, enjoy life without pain and suffering. Look at poor Monika. Unmarried, well past thirty, she doesn’t deserve such a life. What will become of her when I’m dead?’

  Her rhetorical question did not interest Berg much. He was struggling with his acute hunger and wondered if he might reach out and take the lid from the tureen himself. He slid his hand across the table towards it only for Mrs Jacobitz to rap him across the knuckles with the flat blade of a carving knife.

  ‘Don’t city people have manners?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Berg said. His fingers stung from the blow. ‘The fact is, I’d love something to eat.’

  After a minute or two—during which time the widow seemed to withdraw into herself in a silent prayer for release from suffering, her eyes closed, her head nodding slightly back and forward—she removed the lid from the tureen and began to dish out a stew of beef and carrots. She piled some on Berg’s plate and then sat back to watch him eat. He raised his fork and tasted: the stew was crude, containing too many herbs and peppers for his liking, and the beef itself was mostly fat, but he was too hungry to be critical. He ate quickly and when he was finished pushed his plate away.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’

  Berg rose from the table. ‘It keeps me awake at night and since I have to get up early in the morning, I don’t think I will.’

  ‘As you wish,’ the widow said and began to clear the plates from the table. ‘If I get up in time I’ll prepare some breakfast for you.’

  Five

  In his own room he started to unpack his suitcases. Most of the small items, like shirts, socks, and underwear, he crammed into the wooden cabinet but there was not enough space for the dark blue suit he intended to wear to the office. In the end he decided to hang it on a peg fixed to the wall beneath the window, although this meant that the bottoms of the trousers touched the floor. It was important, he thought, to present himself for work as smartly as possible; and if he was to make a good impression on Lazlow, a positive impression, then he would have to turn himself out neatly. He hung the suit carefully, spreading an old newspaper on the floor beneath it so that the cuffs of the trousers would not gather dust.

  When he had finished unpacking he took off his clothes, set his alarm clock, and climbed into bed. It was just before ten o’clock, early by city standards, but he had to get nine hours’ sleep if he was to rise at seven in the morning. Closing his eyes he allowed the impressions to flit through his mind. Before today Lazlow had simply been a name at the bottom of an official letter and Mrs Jacobitz the woman to whose house he had been assigned. Of Monika he had known nothing, nothing at all.

  He turned on his side, away from the window and it was only then, for the first time, that he experienced a sudden and irrational wave of panic. Why was he here? what had he done? Why had he come to an isolated town where he knew no one and was unknown himself? Why had he severed connections with everything that had ever sustained him and given his existence purpose, even if that purpose had become eroded with the passing of time? He sat up in bed and looked at the clock. It was ten-fifteen, the hour when his mother habitually called out for her medicine, and he imagined that he heard her voice ring through the empty apartment, calling to him, demanding that he fill a glass with water and fetch the tablets. He bit his lip and buried his face into the pillow, like a child who is suddenly aware of being lost and of darkness inexorably falling.

  He looked round the room. There were shadows he had never seen before. He thought again of his mother and envisaged her lying in her bed, the bedside table littered with the various tablets and liquids that sustained her. He saw her plump white hand gather up a pill to her open mouth, to the flicking tongue that conveyed it to the darkness of her throat. But he knew that she suffered only from the maladies of her imagination: she had to be sick, because otherwise life was meaningless. And because she made herself suffer he had suffered too—from the infelicities of her whim, from the night calls to attend non-existent pains, from the demands to hold her hand while imagine
d spasms passed. He sighed and lay down. It was all in the past, all of it: by leaving her and coming to this place he had broken free. There was no need to panic. Since she did not even know where he was she could not touch him now. And if she had controlled his life, if she had exploited his sense of duty towards her, then he was free of her now.

  He concentrated on the sound of the clock. He was sweating badly. His vest stuck to his flesh. When he slept his dream as usual was filled with the sound of birds, exotic birds that rose up noisily from nowhere, their wings tearing the air with a sound that grew to some terrible climax that he had never witnessed because he always forced himself awake.

  He listened to the sound of the clock. He was in control of himself again. He did not have to think of his mother. And even if he did, he at least knew that he was free, that he was his own man.

  Six

  ‘You will sit at that desk,’ Lazlow said. He had shown Berg into a small room with barred windows. It was a room that disappointed Berg who had expected something more comfortable and less bare. It contained minimal office equipment: a dilapidated filing cabinet and two desks, one of which carried a typewriter and a box of paper.

  ‘You share the room with Miss Selz, my typist,’ Lazlow said. He directed Berg to the desk without the typewriter. ‘I’d prefer you to have an office of your own, naturally, but our space is limited at the moment. In time, perhaps … You will find Miss Selz helpful because she knows the routine, but when you encounter any real difficulties I expect you to seek my advice.’

  Berg was unwilling to seat himself in Lazlow’s presence, because it was too early to say whether he was the sort of man who observed formalities rigidly and it was best to be on the safe side. He picked up a pencil from his desk and turned it round in his fingers.

  ‘Miss Selz comes from an outlying village, so she often doesn’t begin promptly at eight. Her starting time depends largely on transport. Train timetables are notoriously fallible. I’m only telling you this because you might think she’s a persistent latecomer.’