J. Coetzee - The Schooldays of Jesus

He tries his best to console the boy. ‘Ana Magdalena loved you very much,’ he says. ‘That is why she visits you in your dreams. She comes to say goodbye and to tell you not to have any more dark thoughts because she is at peace in the next life.’

‘I had a dream about Dmitri too. His clothes were all wet. Is Dmitri going to kill me, Simón?’

‘Of course not,’ he reassures him — ‘why would he want to do that? Besides, it is not the real Dmitri you are seeing, just a Dmitri made of smoke. Wave your hands like this’ — he waves his hands — ‘and he will go away.’

‘But did his penis make him kill people? Did his penis make him kill Ana Magdalena?’

‘Your penis doesn’t make you do things. Something else entered Dmitri to make him do what he did, something strange that none of us understand.’

‘I’m not going to have a penis like Dmitri when I grow up. If my penis grows big I am going to cut it off.’

He reports the conversation to Inés. ‘He seems to be under the impression that grown-ups are trying to kill each other when they make love, that strangling is the culmination of the act. He also seems to have seen Dmitri naked at some time. Everything is confused in his mind. If Dmitri says he loves him, it means he wants to rape him and strangle him. How I wish we had never laid eyes on the man!’

‘The mistake was in sending him to their so-called Academy in the first place,’ says Inés. ‘I never trusted that Ana Magdalena.’

‘Have a little charity,’ he says. ‘She is dead. We are alive.’

He bids Inés have more charity, but was there not, in truth, something strange about Ana Magdalena — stranger than strange, inhuman? Ana Magdalena and her pack of children, like a wolf mother with her cubs. Eyes that saw straight through you. Even in the all-devouring fire, hard to believe those eyes will ever be consumed.

‘When I die will I go blue like Ana Magdalena?’ asks the boy.

‘Of course not,’ he replies. ‘You will go straight to the next life. You will be a bright new person there. It will be exciting. It will be an adventure, just as this life has been an adventure.’

‘But if I don’t go to the next life, will I go blue?’

‘Trust me, my boy, there will always be a next life. Death is nothing to be afraid of. It is over in a flash, then the next life begins.’

‘I don’t want to go to the next life. I want to go to the stars.’

The courts of justice in Estrella have as their mandate the recovery, rehabilitation and salvation ( recuperación, rehabilitación y salvación ) of offenders: so much he has learned from his fellow bicycle messengers. From this it follows that there are two kinds of trial at law: the long kind, in which the accused contests the charge and the court must determine his guilt or innocence; and the short kind, in which the accused admits his guilt and the task of the court is to prescribe the appropriate remedial penalty.

Dmitri has, from the first, admitted his guilt. He has signed his name to not one but three confessions, each more copious than the previous, relating in detail how he violated and then strangled Ana Magdalena Arroyo. He has been given every opportunity to minimize his transgression ( Had he been drinking on the fatal night? Had the victim died by misadventure in the course of erotic play? ) but has refused them all. What he did was inexcusable, he says, unforgivable. Whether what he did is forgivable or unforgivable is not for him to decide, reply his interrogators; what he must say is why he did what he did. This is the point at which the third confession comes to an abrupt stop. ‘The accused refused to cooperate further,’ report his interrogators. ‘The accused became foul-mouthed and violent.’

Proceedings are set for the last day of the month, when Dmitri will appear before a judge and two assessors for sentencing.

Two days before the trial a pair of uniformed officers knock at the door of his, Simón’s, rented room and deliver a message: Dmitri has requested to see him.

‘Me?’ he says. ‘Why should he want to see me? He barely knows me.’

‘No idea,’ say the officers. ‘Please come with us.’

They drive him to the police cells. It is six in the evening; a change of shift is taking place, prisoners in the cells are about to receive their supper; he has to kick his heels for quite a while before he is led into an airless room with a vacuum cleaner in one corner and two mismatched chairs, where Dmitri — his hair neatly cut, wearing sharply ironed khaki trousers and a khaki shirt and sandals, looking considerably smarter than in his old days as a museum attendant — awaits him.

‘How are you, Simón?’ Dmitri greets him. ‘How is the fair Inés, and how is that youngster of yours? I think of him often. I loved him, you know. I loved them all, the little dancers from the Academy. And they loved me. But it is gone now, all gone.’

He, Simón, is irritated enough at being called out to visit the man; being treated to this sentimental patter brings him to a boil. ‘You bought their affection with sweets,’ he says. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘You are cross, and I can see why. I have done a terrible thing. I have brought grief to many hearts. My behaviour has been inexcusable, inexcusable. You are right to turn your back on me.’

‘What do you want, Dmitri? Why am I here?’

‘You are here, Simón, because I trust you. I have cast my mind over all my acquaintance, and you are the one I trust most. Why do I trust you? Not because I know you well — I don’t know you well, just as you don’t know me well. But I trust you. You are a trustworthy man, a man worthy of trust. Anyone can see that. And you are discreet. I myself am not discreet but I admire discretion in others. If I had another life I would choose to be a discreet, trustworthy man. But this is the life I have, the life allotted to me. I am, alas, what I am.’

‘Get to the point, Dmitri. Why am I here?’

‘If you go down to the storage area of the museum, if you stand at the bottom of the stairs and look to your right, you will see three grey filing cabinets against the wall. The filing cabinets are locked. I used to have a key, but the people here took it away from me. However, the cabinets are easy enough to break into. Push a screwdriver into the crack above the lock and give it a smart blow. The metal strip that holds the drawers shut will buckle. You will see for yourself once you try. It is easy.

‘In the bottom drawer of the middle cabinet — the bottom drawer of the middle cabinet — you will find a small case of the kind that schoolchildren use. It contains papers. I want you to burn them. Burn the whole lot, without looking at them. Can I trust you to do that?’

‘You want me to go to the museum and break open a filing cabinet and steal papers and destroy them. What other criminal acts do you want me to commit on your behalf because you cannot commit them yourself because you are behind bars?’

‘Trust me, Simón. I trust you, you must trust me. That little case has nothing to do with the museum. It belongs to me. It contains private possessions. In a few days I am going to be sentenced, and who knows what the sentence will be? Never again, in all likelihood, will I see Estrella, never again pass through the doors of the museum. In the city I used to call my own I will be forgotten, consigned to oblivion. And that will be right, right and just and good. I don’t want to be remembered. I don’t want to linger on in the popular memory just because the newspapers happened to get their hands on my most private possessions. Do you understand?’

‘I understand but I do not approve. I will not do as you request. Instead I will do the following. I will go to the director of the museum and I will say, “Dmitri, who used to work here, tells me there are private possessions of his on the premises, papers and so forth. He has asked me to recover them and restore them to him in jail. Do I have your permission to do so?” If the director agrees, I will bring the papers to you. Then you can dispose of them as you wish. So much I will do for you, but nothing illegal.’