Disgrace (8 page)

TEN

THE SIGN OUTSIDE the clinic reads ANIMAL WELFARE LEAGUE W.O. 1529. Below is a line stating the daily hours, but this has been taped over. At the door is a line of waiting people, some with animals. As soon as he gets out of his car there are children all around him, begging for money or just staring. He makes his way through the crush, and through a sudden cacophony as two dogs, held back by their owners, snarl and snap at each other.

          The small, bare waiting-room is packed. He has to step over someone's legs to get in.

          'Mrs Shaw?' he inquires.

          An old woman nods toward a doorway closed off with a plastic curtain. The woman holds a goat on a short rope; it glares nervously, eyeing the dogs, its hooves clicking on the hard floor.

          In the inner room, which smells pungently of urine, Bev Shaw is working at a low steel-topped table. With a pencil-light she is peering down the throat of a young dog that looks like a cross between a ridgeback and a jackal. Kneeling on the table a barefoot child, evidently the owner, has the dog's head clamped under his arm and is trying to hold its jaws open. A low, gurgling snarl comes from its throat; its powerful hindquarters strain. Awkwardly he joins in the tussle, pressing the dog's hind legs together, forcing it to sit on its haunches.

          'Thank you,' says Bev Shaw. Her face is flushed. 'There's an abscess here from an impacted tooth. We have no antibiotics, so - hold him still, boytjie! - so we'll just have to lance it and hope for the best.'

          She probes inside the mouth with a lancet. The dog gives a tremendous jerk, breaks free of him, almost breaks free of the boy. He grasps it as it scrabbles to get off the table; for a moment its eyes, full of rage and fear, glare into his.

          'On his side - so,' says Bev Shaw. Making crooning noises, she expertly trips up the dog and turns it on its side. 'The belt,' she says. He passes a belt around its body and she buckles it. 'So,' says Bev Shaw. 'Think comforting thoughts, think strong thoughts. They can smell what you are thinking.'

          He leans his full weight on the dog. Gingerly, one hand wrapped in an old rag, the child prises open the jaws again. The dog's eyes roll in terror. They can smell what you are thinking: what nonsense! 'There, there!' he murmurs. Bev Shaw probes again with the lancet. The dog gags, goes rigid, then relaxes.

          'So,' she says, 'now we must let nature take her course.' She unbuckles the belt, speaks to the child in what sounds like very halting Xhosa. The dog, on its feet, cowers under the table. There is a spattering of blood and saliva on the surface; Bev wipes it off. The child coaxes the dog out.

          'Thank you, Mr Lurie. You have a good presence. I sense that you like animals.'

          'Do I like animals? I eat them, so I suppose I must like them, some parts of them.'

          Her hair is a mass of little curls. Does she make the curls herself, with tongs? Unlikely: it would take hours every day. They must grow that way. He has never seen such a tessitura from close by. The veins on her ears are visible as a filigree of red and purple. The veins of her nose too. And then a chin that comes straight out of her chest, like a pouter pigeon's. As an ensemble, remarkably unattractive.

          She is pondering his words, whose tone she appears to have missed.

          'Yes, we eat up a lot of animals in this country,' she says. 'It doesn't seem to do us much good. I'm not sure how we will justify it to them.' Then: 'Shall we start on the next one?'

          Justify it? When? At the Great Reckoning? He would be curious to hear more, but this is not the time.

          The goat, a fullgrown buck, can barely walk. One half of his scrotum, yellow and purple, is swollen like a balloon; the other half is a mass of caked blood and dirt. He has been savaged by dogs, the old woman says. But he seems bright enough, cheery, combative. While Bev Shaw is examining him, he passes a short burst of pellets on to the floor. Standing at his head, gripping his horns, the woman pretends to reprove him.

          Bev Shaw touches the scrotum with a swab. The goat kicks. 'Can you fasten his legs?' she asks, and indicates how. He straps the right hind leg to the right foreleg. The goat tries to kick again, teeters. She swabs the wound gently. The goat trembles, gives a bleat: an ugly sound, low and hoarse.

          As the dirt comes away, he sees that the wound is alive with white grubs waving their blind heads in the air. He shudders. 'Blowfly,' says Bev Shaw. 'At least a week old.' She purses her lips. 'You should have brought him in long ago,' she says to the woman.

          'Yes,' says the woman. 'Every night the dogs come. It is too, too bad. Five hundred rand you pay for a man like him.'

          Bev Shaw straightens up. 'I don't know what we can do. I don't have the experience to try a removal. She can wait for Dr Oosthuizen on Thursday, but the old fellow will come out sterile anyway, and does she want that? And then there is the question of antibiotics. Is she prepared to spend money on antibiotics?'

          She kneels down again beside the goat, nuzzles his throat, stroking the throat upward with her own hair. The goat trembles but is still. She motions to the woman to let go of the horns. The woman obeys. The goat does not stir.

          She is whispering. 'What do you say, my friend?' he hears her say. 'What do you say? Is it enough?'

          The goat stands stock still as if hypnotized. Bev Shaw continues to stroke him with her head. She seems to have lapsed into a trance of her own.

          She collects herself and gets to her feet. 'I'm afraid it's too late,' she says to the woman. 'I can't make him better. You can wait for the doctor on Thursday, or you can leave him with me. I can give him a quiet end. He will let me do that for him. Shall I? Shall I keep him here?'

          The woman wavers, then shakes her head. She begins to tug the goat toward the door.

          'You can have him back afterwards,' says Bev Shaw. 'I will help him through, that's all.' Though she tries to control her voice, he can hear the accents of defeat. The goat hears them too: he kicks against the strap, bucking and plunging, the obscene bulge quivering behind him. The woman drags the strap loose, casts it aside. Then they are gone.

          'What was that all about?' he asks.

          Bev Shaw hides her face, blows her nose. 'It's nothing. I keep enough lethal for bad cases, but we can't force the owners. It's their animal, they like to slaughter in their own way. What a pity! Such a good old fellow, so brave and straight and confident!'

          Lethal: the name of a drug? He would not put it beyond the drug companies. Sudden darkness, from the waters of Lethe. 'Perhaps he understands more than you guess,' he says. To his own surprise, he is trying to comfort her. 'Perhaps he has already been through it. Born with foreknowledge, so to speak. This is Africa, after all. There have been goats here since the beginning of time. They don't have to be told what steel is for, and fire. They know how death comes to a goat. They are born prepared.'

          'Do you think so?' she says. 'I'm not sure. I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.'

          Things are beginning to fall into place. He has a first inkling of the task this ugly little woman has set herself. This bleak building is a place not of healing - her doctoring is too amateurish for that - but of last resort. He recalls the story of - who was it? St Hubert? - who gave refuge to a deer that clattered into his chapel, panting and distraught, fleeing the huntsmen's dogs. Bev Shaw, not a veterinarian but a priestess, full of New Age mumbo jumbo, trying, absurdly, to lighten the load of Africa's suffering beasts. Lucy thought he would find her interesting. But Lucy is wrong. Interesting is not the word.

          He spends all afternoon in the surgery, helping as far as he is able. When the last of the day's cases has been dealt with, Bev Shaw shows him around the yard. In the avian cage there is only one bird, a young fish-eagle with a splinted wing. For the rest there are dogs: not Lucy's well-groomed thoroughbreds but a mob of scrawny mongrels filling two pens to bursting point, barking, yapping, whining, leaping with excitement.

          He helps her pour out dry food and fill the water-troughs. They empty two ten-kilogram bags.

          'How do you pay for this stuff?' he asks.

          'We get it wholesale. We hold public collections. We get donations. We offer a free neutering service, and get a grant for that.'

          'Who does the neutering?

          'Dr Oosthuizen, our vet. But he comes in only one afternoon a week.'

          He is watching the dogs eat. It surprises him how little fighting there is. The small, the weak hold back, accepting their lot, waiting their turn.

          'The trouble is, there are just too many of them,' says Bev Shaw. 'They don't understand it, of course, and we have no way of telling them. Too many by our standards, not by theirs. They would just multiply and multiply if they had their way, until they filled the earth. They don't think it's a bad thing to have lots of offspring. The more the jollier. Cats the same.'

          'And rats.'

          'And rats. Which reminds me: check yourself for fleas when you get home.'

          One of the dogs, replete, eyes shining with wellbeing, sniffs his fingers through the mesh, licks them.

          'They are very egalitarian, aren't they,' he remarks. 'No classes. No one too high and mighty to smell another's backside.' He squats, allows the dog to smell his face, his breath. It has what he thinks of as an intelligent look, though it is probably nothing of the kind. 'Are they all going to die?'

          'Those that no one wants. We'll put them down.'

          'And you are the one who does the job.'

          'Yes.'

          'You don't mind?'

          'I do mind. I mind deeply. I wouldn't want someone doing it for me who didn't mind. Would you?'

          He is silent. Then: 'Do you know why my daughter sent me to you?'

          'She told me you were in trouble.'

          'Not just in trouble. In what I suppose one would call disgrace.' He watches her closely. She seems uncomfortable; but perhaps he is imagining it.

          'Knowing that, do you still have a use for me?' he says.

          'If you are prepared...' She opens her hands, presses them together, opens them again. She does not know what to say, and he does not help her.

He has stayed with his daughter only for brief periods before. Now he is sharing her house, her life. He has to be careful not to allow old habits to creep back, the habits of a parent: putting the toilet roll on the spool, switching off lights, chasing the cat off the sofa. Practise for old age, he admonishes himself. Practise fitting in. Practise for the old folks' home.

          He pretends he is tired and, after supper, withdraws to his room, where faintly the sounds come to him of Lucy leading her own life: drawers opening and shutting, the radio, the murmur of a telephone conversation. Is she calling Johannesburg, speaking to Helen? Is his presence here keeping the two of them apart? Would they dare to share a bed while he was in the house? If the bed creaked in the night, would they be embarrassed? Embarrassed enough to stop? But what does he know about what women do together? Maybe women do not need to make beds creak. And what does he know about these two in particular, Lucy and Helen? Perhaps they sleep together merely as children do, cuddling, touching, giggling, reliving girlhood - sisters more than lovers. Sharing a bed, sharing a bathtub, baking gingerbread cookies, trying on each other's clothes. Sapphic love: an excuse for putting on weight.

          The truth is, he does not like to think of his daughter in the throes of passion with another woman, and a plain one at that. Yet would he be any happier if the lover were a man? What does he really want for Lucy? Not that she should be forever a child, forever innocent, forever his - certainly not that. But he is a father, that is his fate, and as a father grows older he turns more and more - it cannot be helped - toward his daughter. She becomes his second salvation, the bride of his youth reborn. No wonder, in fairy-stories, queens try to hound their daughters to their death!

          He sighs. Poor Lucy! Poor daughters! What a destiny, what a burden to bear! And sons: they too must have their tribulations, though he knows less about that.

          He wishes he could sleep. But he is cold, and not sleepy at all.

          He gets up, drapes a jacket over his shoulders, returns to bed. He is reading Byron's letters of 1820. Fat, middle-aged at thirty-two, Byron is living with the Guicciolis in Ravenna: with Teresa, his complacent, short-legged mistress, and her suave, malevolent husband. Summer heat, late-afternoon tea, provincial gossip, yawns barely hidden. 'The women sit in a circle and the men play dreary Faro,' writes Byron. In adultery, all the tedium of marriage rediscovered. 'I have always looked to thirty as the barrier to any real or fierce delight in the passions.'

          He sighs again. How brief the summer, before the autumn and then the winter! He reads on past midnight, yet even so cannot get to sleep.

ELEVEN

IT IS WEDNESDAY. He gets up early, but Lucy is up before him. He finds her watching the wild geese on the dam.

          'Aren't they lovely,' she says. 'They come back every year. The same three. I feel so lucky to be visited. To be the one chosen.'

          Three. That would be a solution of sorts. He and Lucy and Melanie. Or he and Melanie and Soraya.

          They have breakfast together, then take the two Dobermanns for a walk.

          'Do you think you could live here, in this part of the world?' asks Lucy out of the blue.

          'Why? Do you need a new dog-man?'

          'No, I wasn't thinking of that. But surely you could get a job at Rhodes University - you must have contacts there - or at Port Elizabeth.'

          'I don't think so, Lucy. I'm no longer marketable. The scandal will follow me, stick to me. No, if I took a job it would have to be as something obscure, like a ledger clerk, if they still have them, or a kennel attendant.'

          'But if you want to put a stop to the scandal-mongering, shouldn't you be standing up for yourself? Doesn't gossip just multiply if you run away?'

          As a child Lucy had been quiet and self-effacing, observing him but never, as far as he knew, judging him. Now, in her middle twenties, she has begun to separate. The dogs, the gardening, the astrology books, the asexual clothes: in each he recognizes a statement of independence, considered, purposeful. The turn away from men too. Making her own life. Coming out of his shadow. Good! He approves!

          'Is that what you think I have done?' he says. 'Run away from the scene of the crime?'

          'Well, you have withdrawn. For practical purposes, what is the difference?'

          'You miss the point, my dear. The case you want me to make is a case that can no longer be made, Basta. Not in our day. If I tried to make it I would not be heard.'

          'That's not true. Even if you are what you say, a moral dinosaur, there is a curiosity to hear the dinosaur speak. I for one am curious. What is your case? Let us hear it.'

          He hesitates. Does she really want him to trot out more of his intimacies?

          'My case rests on the rights of desire,' he says. 'On the god who makes even the small birds quiver.'

          He sees himself in the girl's flat, in her bedroom, with the rain pouring down outside and the heater in the corner giving off a smell of paraffin, kneeling over her, peeling off her clothes, while her arms flop like the arms of a dead person. I was a servant of Eros: that is what he wants to say, but does he have the effrontery? It was a god who acted through me. What vanity! Yet not a lie, not entirely. In the whole wretched business there was something generous that was doing its best to flower. If only he had known the time would be so short!

          He tries again, more slowly. 'When you were small, when we were still living in Kenilworth, the people next door had a dog, a golden retriever. I don't know whether you remember.'

          'Dimly.'

          'It was a male. Whenever there was a bitch in the vicinity it would get excited and unmanageable, and with Pavlovian regularity the owners would beat it. This went on until the poor dog didn't know what to do. At the smell of a bitch it would chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide.' He pauses.

          'I don't see the point,' says Lucy. And indeed, what is the point?

          'There was something so ignoble in the spectacle that I despaired. One can punish a dog, it seems to me, for an offence like chewing a slipper. A dog will accept the justice of that: a beating for a chewing. But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts.'

          'So males must be allowed to follow their instincts unchecked? Is that the moral?'

          'No, that is not the moral. What was ignoble about the Kenilworth spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. It was ready to punish itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it.'

          'Or to have it fixed.'

          'Perhaps. But at the deepest level I think it might have preferred being shot. It might have preferred that to the options it was offered: on the one hand, to deny its nature, on the other, to spend the rest of its days padding about the living-room, sighing and sniffing the cat and getting portly.'

          'Have you always felt this way, David?'

          'No, not always. Sometimes I have felt just the opposite. That desire is a burden we could well do without.'

          'I must say,' says Lucy, 'that is a view I incline toward myself ' He waits for her to go on, but she does not. 'In any event,' she says, 'to return to the subject, you are safely expelled. Your colleagues can breathe easy again, while the scapegoat wanders in the wilderness.'

          A statement? A question? Does she believe he is just a scapegoat?

          'I don't think scapegoating is the best description,' he says cautiously. 'Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious power behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat's back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read the ritual, including the gods. Then the gods died, and all of a sudden you had to cleanse the city without divine help. Real actions were demanded instead of symbolism. The censor was born, in the Roman sense. Watchfulness became the watchword: the watchfulness of all over all. Purgation was replaced by the purge.'

          He is getting carried away; he is lecturing. 'Anyway,' he concludes, 'having said farewell to the city, what do I find myself doing in the wilderness? Doctoring dogs. Playing right-hand man to a woman who specializes in sterilization and euthanasia.'

          Lucy laughs. 'Bev? You think Bev is part of the repressive apparatus? Bev is in awe of you! You are a professor. She has never met an old-fashioned professor before. She is frightened of making grammar mistakes in front of you.'

          Three men are coming toward them on the path, or two men and a boy. They are walking fast, with countrymen's long strides. The dog at Lucy's side slows down, bristles.

          'Should we be nervous?' he murmurs.

          'I don't know.'

          She shortens the Dobermanns' leashes. The men are upon them. A nod, a greeting, and they have passed.

          'Who are they?' he asks.

          'I've never laid eyes on them before.'

          They reach the plantation boundary and turn back. The strangers are out of sight.

          As they near the house they hear the caged dogs in an uproar. Lucy quickens her pace.

          The three are there, waiting for them. The two men stand at a remove while the boy, beside the cages, hisses at the dogs and makes sudden, threatening gestures. The dogs, in a rage, bark and snap. The dog at Lucy's side tries to tug loose. Even the old bulldog bitch, whom he seems to have adopted as his own, is growling softly.

          'Petrus!' calls Lucy. But there is no sign of Petrus. 'Get away from the dogs!' she shouts. '_Hamba!_'  The boy saunters off and rejoins his companions. He has a flat, expressionless face and piggish eyes; he wears a flowered shirt, baggy trousers, a little yellow sunhat. His companions are both in overalls. The taller of them is handsome, strikingly handsome, with a high forehead, sculpted cheekbones, wide, flaring nostrils.

          At Lucy's approach the dogs calm down. She opens the third cage and releases the two Dobermanns into it. A brave gesture, he thinks to himself; but is it wise?

          To the men she says: 'What do you want?'

          The young one speaks. 'We must telephone.'

          'Why must you telephone?'

          'His sister' - he gestures vaguely behind him - 'is having an accident.'

          'An accident?'

          'Yes, very bad.'

          'What kind of accident?'

          'A baby.'

          'His sister is having a baby?'

          'Yes.'

          'Where are you from?'

          'From Erasmuskraal.'

          He and Lucy exchange glances. Erasmuskraal, inside the forestry concession, is a hamlet with no electricity, no telephone. The story makes sense.

          'Why didn't you phone from the forestry station?'

          'Is no one there.'

          'Stay out here,' Lucy murmurs to him; and then, to the boy: 'Who is it who wants to telephone?'

          He indicates the tall, handsome man.

          'Come in,' she says. She unlocks the back door and enters. The tall man follows. After a moment the second man pushes past him and enters the house too.

          Something is wrong, he knows at once. 'Lucy, come out here!' he calls, unsure for the moment whether to follow or wait where he can keep an eye on the boy.

          From the house there is silence. 'Lucy!' he calls again, and is about to go in when the door-latch clicks shut.

          'Petrus!' he shouts as loudly as he can.

          The boy turns and sprints, heading for the front door. He lets go the bulldog's leash. 'Get him!' he shouts. The dog trots heavily after the boy.

          In front of the house he catches up with them. The boy has picked up a bean-stake and is using it to keep the dog at bay. 'Shu... shu... shu!' he pants, thrusting with the stick. Growling softly, the dog circles left and right.

          Abandoning them, he rushes back to the kitchen door. The bottom leaf is not bolted: a few heavy kicks and it swings open. On all fours he creeps into the kitchen.

          A blow catches him on the crown of the head. He has time to think, If I am still conscious then I am all right, before his limbs turn to water and he crumples.

          He is aware of being dragged across the kitchen floor. Then he blacks out.

He is lying face down on cold tiles. He tries to stand up but his legs are somehow blocked from moving. He closes his eyes again. He is in the lavatory, the lavatory of Lucy's house. Dizzily he gets to his feet. The door is locked, the key is gone.

          He sits down on the toilet seat and tries to recover. The house is still; the dogs are barking, but more in duty, it seems, than in frenzy.

          'Lucy!' he croaks, and then, louder: 'Lucy!'

          He tries to kick at the door, but he is not himself, and the space too cramped anyway, the door too old and solid.

          So it has come, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare, it is here, and he is in the middle of it. In his chest his heart hammers so hard that it too, in its dumb way, must know. How will they stand up to the testing, he and his heart?

          His child is in the hands of strangers. In a minute, in an hour, it will be too late; whatever is happening to her will be set in stone, will belong to the past. But now it is not too late. Now he must do something.

          Though he strains to hear, he can make out no sound from the house. Yet if his child were calling, however mutely, surely he would hear!

          He batters the door. 'Lucy!' he shouts. 'Lucy! Speak to me!'

          The door opens, knocking him off balance. Before him stands the second man, the shorter one, holding an empty one-litre bottle by the neck. 'The keys,' says the man.

          'No.'

          The man gives him a push. He stumbles back, sits down heavily. The man raises the bottle. His face is placid, without trace of anger. It is merely a job he is doing: getting someone to hand over an article. If it entails hitting him with a bottle, he will hit him, hit him as many times as is necessary, if necessary break the bottle too.

          'Take them,' he says. 'Take everything. Just leave my daughter alone.'

          Without a word the man takes the keys, locks him in again.

          He shivers. A dangerous trio. Why did he not recognise it in time? But they are not harming him, not yet. Is it possible that what the house has to offer will be enough for them? Is it possible they will leave Lucy unharmed too?

          From behind the house comes the sound of voices. The barking of the dogs grows louder again, more excited. He stands on the toilet seat and peers through the bars of the window.

          Carrying Lucy's rifle and a bulging garbage bag, the second man is just disappearing around the corner of the house. A car door slams. He recognizes the sound: his car. The man reappears empty-handed. For a moment the two of them look straight into each other's eyes. 'Hai!' says the man, and smiles grimly, and calls out some words. There is a burst of laughter. A moment later the boy joins him, and they stand beneath the window, inspecting their prisoner, discussing his fate.

          He speaks Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa. He is helpless, an Aunt Sally, a figure from a cartoon, a missionary in cassock and topi waiting with clasped hands and upcast eyes while the savages jaw away in their own lingo preparatory to plunging him into their boiling cauldron. Mission work: what has it left behind, that huge enterprise of upliftment? Nothing that he can see.

          Now the tall man appears from around the front, carrying the rifle. With practised ease he brings a cartridge up into the breech, thrusts the muzzle into the dogs' cage. The biggest of the German Shepherds, slavering with rage, snaps at it. There is a heavy report; blood and brains splatter the cage. For a moment the barking ceases. The man fires twice more. One dog, shot through the chest, dies at once; another, with a gaping throat-wound, sits down heavily, flattens its ears, following with its gaze the movements of this being who does not even bother to administer a coup de grâce.

          A hush falls. The remaining three dogs, with nowhere to hide, retreat to the back of the pen, milling about, whining softly. Taking his time between shots, the man picks them off.