Disgrace Read online

‘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.

  Nevertheless, their takings are down: less than three hundred rand. The reason is Lucy’s absence, no doubt about that. Boxes of flowers, bags of vegetables have to be loaded back into the kombi. Petrus shakes his head. ‘Not good,’ he says.

  As yet Petrus has offered no explanation for his absence. Petrus has the right to come and go as he wishes; he has exercised that right; he is entitled to his silence. But questions remain. Does Petrus know who the strangers were? Was it because of some word Petrus let drop that they made Lucy their target rather than, say, Ettinger? Did Petrus know in advance what they were planning?

  In the old days one could have had it out with Petrus. In the old days one could have had it out to the extent of losing one’s temper and sending him packing and hiring someone in his place. But though Petrus is paid a wage, Petrus is no longer, strictly speaking, hired help. It is hard to say what Petrus is, strictly speaking. The word that seems to serve best, however, is neighbour. Petrus is a neighbour who at present happens to sell his labour, because that is what suits him. He sells his labour under contract, unwritten contract, and that contract makes no provision for dismissal on grounds of suspicion. It is a new world they live in, he and Lucy and Petrus. Petrus knows it, and he knows it, and Petrus knows that he knows it.

  In spite of which he feels at home with Petrus, is even prepared, however guardedly, to like him. Petrus is a man of his generation. Doubtless Petrus has been through a lot, doubtless he has a story to tell. He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mould of English, Petrus’s story would come out arthritic, bygone.

  What appeals to him in Petrus is his face, his face and his hands. If there is such a thing as honest toil, then Petrus bears its marks. A man of patience, energy, resilience. A peasant, a paysan, a man of the country. A plotter and a schemer and no doubt a liar too, like peasants everywhere. Honest toil and honest cunning.

  He has his own suspicions of what Petrus is up to, in the longer run. Petrus will not be content to plough forever his hectare and a half. Lucy may have lasted longer than her hippie, gypsy friends, but to Petrus Lucy is still chickenfeed: an amateur, an enthusiast of the farming life rather than a farmer. Petrus would like to take over Lucy’s land. Then he would like to have Ettinger’s too, or enough of it to run a herd on. Ettinger will be a harder nut to crack. Lucy is merely a transient; Ettinger is another peasant, a man of the earth, tenacious, eingewurzelt. But Ettinger will die one of these days, and the Ettinger son has fled. In that respect Ettinger has been stupid. A good peasant takes care to have lots of sons.

  Petrus has a vision of the future in which people like Lucy have no place. But that need not make an enemy of Petrus. Country life has always been a matter of neighbours scheming against each other, wishing on each other pests, poor crops, financial ruin, yet in a crisis ready to lend a hand.

  The worst, the darkest reading would be that Petrus engaged three strange men to teach Lucy a lesson, paying them off with the loot. But he cannot believe that, it would be too simple. The real truth, he suspects, is something far more – he casts around for the word – anthropological, something it would take months to get to the bottom of, months of patient, unhurried conversation with dozens of people, and the offices of an interpreter.

  On the other hand, he does believe that Petrus knew something was in the offing; he does believe Petrus could have warned Lucy. That is why he will not let go of the subject. That is why he continues to nag Petrus.

  Petrus has emptied the concrete storage dam and is cleaning it of algae. It is an unpleasant job. Nevertheless, he offers to help. With his feet crammed into Lucy’s rubber boots, he climbs into the dam, stepping carefully on the slick bottom. For a while he and Petrus work in concert, scraping, scrubbing, shovelling out the mud. Then he breaks off.

  ‘Do you know, Petrus,’ he says, ‘I find it hard to believe the men who came here were strangers. I find it hard to believe they arrived out of nowhere, and did what they did, and disappeared afterwards like ghosts. And I find it hard to believe that the reason they picked on us was simply that we were the first white folk they met that day. What do you think? Am I wrong?’

  Petrus smokes a pipe, an old-fashioned pipe with a hooked stem and a little silver cap over the bowl. Now he straightens up, takes the pipe from the pocket of his overalls, opens the cap, tamps down the tobacco in the bowl, sucks at the pipe unlit. He stares reflectively over the dam wall, over the hills, over open country. His expression is perfectly tranquil.

  ‘The police must find them,’ he says at last. ‘The police must find them and put them in jail. That is the job of the police.’

  ‘But the police are not going to find them without help. Those men knew about the forestry station. I am convinced they knew about Lucy. How could they have known if they were complete strangers to the district?’

  Petrus chooses not to take this as a question. He puts the pipe away in his pocket, exchanges spade for broom.

  ‘It was not simply theft, Petrus,’ he persists. ‘They did not come just to steal. They did not come just to do this to me.’ He touches the bandages, touches the eye-shield. ‘They came to do something else as well. You know what I mean, or if you don’t know you can surely guess. After they did what they did, you cannot expect Lucy calmly to go on with her life as before. I am Lucy’s father. I want those men to be caught and brought before the law and punished. Am I wrong? Am I wrong to want justice?’

  He does not care how he gets the words out of Petrus now, he just wants to hear them.

  ‘No, you are not wrong.’

  A flurry of anger runs through him, strong enough to take him by surprise. He picks up his spade and strikes whole strips of mud and weed from the dam-bottom, flinging them over his shoulder, over the wall. You are whipping yourself into a rage, he admonishes himself: Stop it! Yet at this moment he would like to take Petrus by the throat. If it had been your wife instead of my daughter, he would like to say to Petrus, you would not be tapping your pipe and weighing your words so judiciously. Violation: that is the word he would like to force out of Petrus. Yes, it was a violation, he would like to hear Petrus say; yes, it was an outrage.

  In silence, side by side, he and Petrus finish off the job.

  This is how his days are spent on the farm. He helps Petrus clean up the irrigation system. He keeps the garden from going to ruin. He packs produce for the market. He helps Bev Shaw at the clinic. He sweeps the floors, cooks the meals, does all the things that Lucy no longer does. He is busy from dawn to dusk.

  His eye is healing surprisingly fast: after a mere week he is able to use it again. The burns are taking longer. He retains the skullcap and the bandage over his ear.
The ear, uncovered, looks like a naked pink mollusc: he does not know when he will be bold enough to expose it to the gaze of others.

  He buys a hat to keep off the sun, and, to a degree, to hide his face. He is trying to get used to looking odd, worse than odd, repulsive – one of those sorry creatures whom children gawk at in the street. ‘Why does that man look so funny?’ they ask their mothers, and have to be hushed.

  He goes to the shops in Salem as seldom as he can, to Grahamstown only on Saturdays. All at once he has become a recluse, a country recluse. The end of roving. Though the heart be still as loving and the moon be still as bright. Who would have thought it would come to an end so soon and so suddenly: the roving, the loving!

  He has no reason to believe their misfortunes have made it on to the gossip circuit in Cape Town. Nevertheless, he wants to be sure that Rosalind does not hear the story in some garbled form. Twice he tries to call her, without success. The third time he telephones the travel agency where she works. Rosalind is in Madagascar, he is told, scouting; he is given the fax number of a hotel in Antananarivo.

  He composes a dispatch: ‘Lucy and I have had some bad luck. My car was stolen, and there was a scuffle too, in which I took a bit of a knock. Nothing serious – we’re both fine, though shaken. Thought I’d let you know in case of rumours. Trust you are having a good time.’ He gives the page to Lucy to approve, then to Bev Shaw to send off. To Rosalind in darkest Africa.

  Lucy is not improving. She stays up all night, claiming she cannot sleep; then in the afternoons he finds her asleep on the sofa, her thumb in her mouth like a child. She has lost interest in food: he is the one who has to tempt her to eat, cooking unfamiliar dishes because she refuses to touch meat.

  This is not what he came for – to be stuck in the back of beyond, warding off demons, nursing his daughter, attending to a dying enterprise. If he came for anything, it was to gather himself, gather his forces. Here he is losing himself day by day.

  The demons do not pass him by. He has nightmares of his own in which he wallows in a bed of blood, or, panting, shouting soundlessly, runs from the man with the face like a hawk, like a Benin mask, like Thoth. One night, half sleepwalking, half demented, he strips his own bed, even turns the mattress over, looking for stains.