Diego Marani - God's Dog

Bogdan always boarded the train at the last minute. He would buy a ticket for Schiphol, and make sure that it was checked by the inspector. Then he had time, until Rotterdam, to eye up any dealer who had had a good day; but the timing had to be calculated down to the last second, and he had to jump out pretty smartly when the moment came. He had noticed the man with the sports bag immediately; that man was clearly ill at ease. There were only four people in the carriage, all facing the engine. His chosen victim was the last one near the door. Standing in the corridor, Bogdan made a show of hanging his overcoat from the coat hook. He had his back to the man and watched his reflection in the window. The outlines of the other passengers were reflected in the black, rain-streaked glass. Further on he could see a foot, a suitcase on the luggage rack, an open newspaper shaken by the rocking of the train. The door to the corridor was closed. All that was needed was a well-aimed punch; then he would grab the bag and jump out of the train. The ticket-inspector had already been round, and Bogdan had made a point of showing him his ticket seated in the first empty place he’d come upon; then he had walked slowly through the train, looking for a possible victim. He waited patiently until the red lights of the Rotterdam wind farm came into view among the greenhouses. He took down his coat and slowly put it on. The corridor itself was empty; the odd arm protruded from a seat, the odd head could be seen leaning against a window, but no one was looking his way; there was no movement behind him, either. He crept towards the seat where the man with the sports bag was sitting and prepared to deliver his blow almost without looking. But Guntur, awoken by a sudden jolt, had raised his head, reacted speedily and avoided it: leaning to one side, thrusting his feet against him, he pushed Bogdan violently against the window. Bogdan fell on top of him and forced him to stretch out on the seat, pressing his knees against the man’s chest. Wide-eyed with fear, Guntur tried to cry out, fending his assailant off with outstretched hands. In desperation, Bogdan aimed repeated blows at his victim’s face, until he saw, with satisfaction, that his nose was bleeding. Then, without a moment’s hesitation, he seized the bag, reaching the step just as the puff of compressed air caused the door to open. The inside of the carriage was lit up by the lights of the station awning; the rain continued to pour down, drumming on the metal roof. There was a scuffle, someone shouted out ‘Au secours!’ Bogdan jumped down on to the platform and ran off.

Ivan’s phone call had stirred up old memories. She looked in the bathroom mirror and tidied her hair, as though she wanted to look decent should he happen to be outside the door and suddenly walk in. She had been ill-advised to tell him everything; now she was putting him in danger too. In any case, Ivan himself was half-crazed by a desire for revenge: he might do something rash. But she had been unable to help herself. At times she thought she heard affection in his voice; or was she just imagining things? Could he really be completely indifferent to her? He too must surely still feel something. Even if she hadn’t heard from him for almost two years. Of course, he had other worries: his escape, his non-appearance in court, and then his father’s awful death. By now he would certainly have found another woman, and the thought of Ivan looking tenderly at someone else was more than she could bear. She could no longer remember how his voice sounded when he spoke lovingly to her. Yet they had been happy together; perhaps it had been the rape which had ruined everything. No, that’s not right, she thought, everything was already over when that happened. Perhaps, though, without that horror story, they would have been able to start afresh; everything could have been as it had been before. The nearest ‘before’ for which she still felt nostalgia was so far away! Now she was running headlong towards the ‘after’. Only the ‘after’ could save her from the unbearable ‘now’. But how had he been able so easily to forget her? She couldn’t have been very important to him if he had been able to detach himself from her so light-heartedly. Yet what did she know about Ivan’s deepest feelings? They had not been able to communicate during the ten months she had spent in prison, and seeing each other during the other three years of probation had not been easy, either. It had always all been such a rush, and they had always been terrified of being caught. Perhaps he was avoiding her for her own good; at all events, that was what Marta liked to think. So why did she persist in wanting to see him now? To help him, that was what she told herself at the time. But he was difficult: it was as though he came to those meetings on sufferance. She had hoped that she might be able to wipe out the past by her mere presence, but Ivan had his mind on other things. He was making plans for his escape; she was not in the forefront of his mind. At the time, she had had to make do with that; she would have to make do with that now as well. Ivan wasn’t coming back to her; he was lost to her for good. He was as caught up in his hatred as she was in her loneliness.

The common grave lay on the other side of a lawn running along the west side of the hill. Ivan went up to the yellow stone with the dates of the earliest and most recent burials carved into it. A light wind blew through the grass, ruffling the cypresses that overlooked the tomb. On the slope that ran down towards the road, yellow mimosa bushes were in flower, giving off a delicate scent of early spring. He thought back to the last time he had seen his mother alive, and that was many years ago by now. It was a summer’s day, he’d just come back from an afternoon at the seaside with Marta. He remembered her mild look, her eyes distorted behind thick glasses, the vague smile she put on in an attempt to please him and above all not let him see that she was worried. At least she had died quickly. Whereas his father…Who knows where they had dumped his corpse? More than the pain, it was the thought of the fear his father must have felt that caused Ivan such gut-wrenching fury. And the loneliness. Locked up in prison, watched over like a murderer, there in his filthy cell. Ivan tried to get these images out of his head, but they kept coming back to him as though he had been a physical witness to his father’s suffering. In fact, he knew nothing of his father’s death. When he had been taken into the hospital on the Caelian Hill, he hadn’t been able to see his own doctor; he tried to decipher the reports of the military doctors to get some idea of his condition. The telephone conversations he had had with Ivan had not been reassuring; not much was said. He had talked like a medical chart, addressing him in the polite form; he knew that his conversations with Ivan were recorded. The police had allowed them hoping they might reveal something about Ivan’s whereabouts. He remembered how wretched he’d felt during that time. He’d desperately wanted to go to see his father, but that would have meant another stint in prison, and this time there would have been no reprieve. At least this way they would leave his father in peace. He would never have thought that they would take it out on him, an old man who was already serving a death sentence. How could they be so cruel? But it was that fanatic Novak who was the wild beast among them, it was he who spurred on all the rest; he was an obsessive, and his underlings were ready to obey him in order to further their own careers. Ultimately Ivan had decided to go back, to get himself arrested. He had been on the road when he had received Boris’s phone call. His father had died, perhaps some days ago. A routine letter had arrived at his old address. The date of death was uncertain. Novak would have liked to keep it secret, in order to lure Ivan to Rome, but the bureaucrats at the papal registry office had overridden him, powerful though he was. Ivan dried his eyes on the back of his hand. He picked a daisy and threw it onto the slab of stone that covered his mother’s tomb.