Oliver Nienaber stood quite still, with the attaché case in his hand, his head bent, his eyes closed. He seemed to be praying.
Joubert knew he wouldn't be able to read. The evening was hot and the southeaster made sad noises as it blew around the corners of the house. The front veranda faced north. There the wind was only audible in the trees. He sat down on the slate-tiled floor, his back against the wall, and lit a cigarette.
He wanted to laugh at himself.
Had he really thought he would be able to bury Lara?
Just because he had thought about the ripe body of an eighteen-year-old for a few days? Because he was consulting a psychologist?
It wasn't the first time that he had heard the sounds torn out of Benny Griessel.
He knew those sounds. He had made them himself. Not with his voice but in his head. In that hazy past when he still hated the pain and the humiliation. Before he had become addicted to it.
Tell your psychologist, he thought. Tell her youre as addicted to the darkness of your soul as Griessel is to the bottle. But there is a difference, Doctor. You can take Mat Joubert out of the dark, but you cant take the dark out of Mat Joubert. It had become part of his flesh, his body had grown around it as a tree will take a length of barbed wire into its trunk to have it forever scratching and tearing and causing the sap to bleed.
He heard Laras laugh again, the one he played over and over again on the tape recorder while he banged his head against the wall over and over again until the blood ran into his eyes.
Griessels pain tonight had been a blessing in disguise. It had brought Joubert to his senses.
He should have realized it the day before, when Hanna Nortier asked her last question. When hed realized that he would have to speak about Lara, when hed realized that he would not be able to tell the doctor everything.
He was Lara Jouberts captive. And the key to his cell was there, within reach, so invitingly within reach. Just tell the good doctor everything. The whole truth, nothing but the truth. Tell the doctor that part of Laras death which only he knew about and he knew he would be freed. Share that hour with Dr. Hanna Nortier and he could shake off the burden, tear the dark curtain.
It was half past twelve when he had reached the tape recorder, down in the cellar, and pressed the button to turn the cassette. With the earphones illegally on his head, hed looked round to check whether anyone could see him, certain of his right to break the law in this way. Press the button. Unsuspecting. In the execution of his duty.
PLAY.
He wouldn't be able to tell Hanna Nortier.
Joubert leaned his head against the wall and shot the cigarette into the dark.
He couldn't even tell it to himself, he thought. How many times hadn't he tried to look at it anew. To look for excuses, mitigation, a way out. To consider other interpretations.
But nothing would work.
He had burned the cassette. But the voices were still on tape. In his head. And he could no longer press the PLAY button. Not even for himself. It was too fucking painful.
He leaned sideways to get his hand into his trouser pocket, took out his cigarettes, lit another one.
Come on, Dr. Hanna, he thought. Could you really sweep up the debris of a human being and fit it together, apply the wonder glue, and say that he was whole again? The cracks would be visible forever, so that only the lightest touch would be enough to shatter the whole into fragments once more.
What was the use of that, Doctor?
Tell me, Doctor, why shouldn't I put the cool maw of my service pistol into my mouth and blow the last copy of the tape, together with all the ghosts collected up there, into eternity?
Carina Oberholzer sat at her dressing table, writing.
She wrote as the tears ran down her cheeks and dripped onto the blue notepaper.
Carina Oberholzer didn't write why the Mauser murderer was busy sending people into eternity with one pull of the trigger. She didn't want to. She couldn't. All that her mind allowed her was to write
We deserve it.
And then she wrote that they musnt stop the murderer. And that they mustnt punish the murderer.
She wrote down a name and surname with a shaking hand, but it was quite legible.
She added the words
Mama, forgive me,
although her father was still living, and signed the letter:
Carrie.
Then she put the pen down next to the paper and walked to the window. She opened it wide, lifted her foot and put it on the sill. She hoisted herself up into the frame, balanced briefly, and then she fell.
She fell soundlessly, except for the fabric of her skirt, which fluttered softly in the wind, like a flag.
Later, when the wail of a siren sounded above the citys roar, the wind shifted. It blew gently through the open window on the thirteenth floor and like an invisible hand picked up the single sheet of blue notepaper and let it slip down the thin dark space between dressing table and wall.
Joubert sat on his front stoop and looked up at the pale stars that glimmered above the suburban sky and didn't know how to react to his newly found insight.
Yet he knew something had changed.
A week or two, a month, a year ago the concept of a pistol in his mouth had been so logical. Not a yearning, only a logical way out that would have to be used like a tool for a specific task. Now, when he thought about the moment of truth, when the hand had to pick up the gun and the lips had to open and the finger had to contract, Mat Joubert still wanted to live for a while.
And he briefly considered the reasons why things had changed. The Triumph of the Great Erection? The many aspects of Hanna Nortier?
But then his thoughts wandered.
He was going to be a cripple, he thought. The poor mans Ferdy Ferreira. He would have to take Lara Joubert with him if he couldn't tell Hanna Nortier everything. He would have to drag the load of pain with him for the rest of his life.
Could he do it?
Perhaps.
He got up off the stoops cold floor, stretched his arms, and felt the muscles of his back and his shoulders, the vague, pleasurable lassitude of muscles that had been exercised in a swimming pool.
Perhaps, he thought.
He turned, walked into the house, locked the door behind him, and walked to the spare bedroom, looking for something to read. The paperbacks lay in an untidy heap.