The Schooldays of Jesus

  ‘No, Dmitri. We are not here to obey your commands. We are here to render justice.’

  ‘You cannot render justice! You cannot measure my guilt! It is not measurable!’

  ‘On the contrary, that is exactly why we are here: to measure your guilt and decide on a sentence that fits it.’

  ‘Like a hat to fit a head!’

  ‘Yes, like a hat to fit your head. To render justice not only to you but to your victim.’

  ‘The woman you call my victim does not care what you do. She is dead. She is gone. No one can bring her back.’

  ‘On the contrary, Dmitri, Ana Magdalena is not gone. She is with us today, here, in this theatre. She haunts us, you most of all. She will not go away until she is satisfied that justice has been done. Therefore tell us what happened on the fourth of March.’

  There is a distinct snap as the casing of the microphone in Dmitri’s hands cracks. Tears well from his clenched eyes like water squeezed from a stone. He shakes his head slowly from side to side. Strangled words emerge: ‘I can’t! I won’t!’

  The judge pours a glass of water and motions to the guard to take it to Dmitri. He sips noisily.

  ‘Can we proceed, Dmitri?’ asks the judge.

  ‘No,’ says Dmitri, and now the tears flow freely. ‘No.’

  ‘Then we will take a break to allow you to recover yourself. We will reconvene this afternoon at two p.m.’

  There is a growl of dissatisfaction from the spectators. The judge bangs sharply with his gavel. ‘Silence!’ he commands. ‘This is not an entertainment! Bethink yourselves!’ And he stalks offstage, followed first by the two assessors, then by the guard, propelling Dmitri before him.

  He, Simón, joins the crowd flowing down the stairs. In the foyer he is astonished to come upon Inés’s brother Diego, and with him David.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he demands of the boy, ignoring Diego.

  ‘I wanted to come,’ says the boy. ‘I wanted to see Dmitri.’

  ‘I am sure Dmitri finds it humiliating enough without having children from the Academy here to gape at him. Did Inés give you permission to come?’

  ‘He wants to be humiliated,’ says the boy.

  ‘No, he doesn’t. This is not something a child can understand. Dmitri doesn’t want to be treated like a lunatic. He wants to be left with his dignity.’

  A stranger, a thin, bird-like young man carrying a satchel, has

  been listening in. Now he intervenes. ‘But surely the man must be sick in the head,’ he says. ‘How could anyone commit such a crime unless his mind is twisted? And he keeps demanding the heaviest sentence. What normal person would do that?’

  ‘What counts as the heaviest sentence here in Estrella?’ asks Diego.

  ‘The salt mines. Hard labour in the salt mines for the term of one’s life.’

  Diego laughs. ‘So you still have salt mines!’

  The young man is puzzled. ‘Yes, we have salt mines. What is so strange about that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ says Diego. But he continues to smile.

  ‘What is a salt mine?’ asks the boy.

  ‘It is where they dig up salt. Like a gold mine where they dig up gold.’

  ‘Is that where Dmitri is going?’

  ‘It is where they send the bad apples,’ says Diego.

  ‘Can we visit him? Can we go to the salt mine?’

  ‘Let us not get ahead of ourselves,’ says he, Simón. ‘I don’t believe the judge will send Dmitri to the salt mines. That is my sense of the way things are going. I believe he will rule that Dmitri has a sickness of the head and send him to a hospital to be cured. So that in a year or two he can re-emerge a brand new man with a brand new head.’

  ‘You don’t sound as if you think much of psychiatry,’ says the young man with the satchel. ‘I am sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Mario. I am a student at the law school. That is why I am here today. It is an intriguing case. It raises some of the most basic issues. For instance, it is the mission of the court to rehabilitate offenders, but how far should the court exert itself to rehabilitate an offender who does not want to be rehabilitated, like this man Dmitri? Maybe he should be offered a choice: rehabilitation via the salt mines or rehabilitation via the psychiatric hospital. On the other hand, should an offender be allowed any role in his sentencing? In legal circles the resistance to such a course has always been strong, as you can imagine.’

  Diego, he can see, is beginning to fret. He knows Diego, knows that he is bored by what he calls clever talk. ‘It’s a nice day, Diego,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you and David find something more interesting to do?’

  ‘No!’ says the boy. ‘I want to stay!’

  ‘It was his idea to come here, not mine,’ says Diego. ‘I could not care less what happens to this Dmitri person.’

  ‘You don’t care but I care!’ says the boy. ‘I don’t want Dmitri to get a new head! I want him to go to the salt mine!’

  The trial recommences at two p.m. Regathered, the audience is considerably smaller than before. He and Diego and the boy have no trouble finding seats.

  Dmitri is brought back onto the stage, followed by the judge and assessors.

  ‘I have before me a report from the director of the museum where you, Dmitri, were employed,’ says the judge. ‘He writes that you have always performed your duties faithfully and that, until these recent events, he had every reason to think of you as an honest man. I also have a report from Doctor Alejandro Toussaint, a specialist in nervous diseases, who was commissioned by the court to evaluate your state of mind. Doctor Toussaint reports that he was unable to carry out his evaluation because of violent and uncooperative behaviour on your part. Do you wish to comment?’

  Dmitri is stonily silent.

  ‘Finally I have a report from the police doctor on the events of the fourth of March. He writes that completed sexual intercourse took place, that is to say, intercourse ending in ejaculation of the male seed, and that this took place while the deceased was still alive. Subsequently the deceased was strangled, manually. Do you contest any of this?’

  Dmitri is silent.

  ‘You may ask why I rehearse these last distasteful facts. I do so to make it clear that the court is fully aware of how terrible a crime you have committed. You violated a woman who trusted you and then killed her in the most pitiless way. I shudder, we all shudder, to think what she went through during her last minutes. What we lack is some understanding of why you committed this senseless, gratuitous act. Are you an erring human being, Dmitri, or do you belong to some other species, without a soul, without a conscience? I urge you again: explain yourself to us.’

  ‘I belong to a foreign species. I have no place on this earth. Do away with me. Kill me. Grind me under your heel.’

  ‘That is all you will say?’

  Dmitri is silent.

  ‘It is not enough, Dmitri, not enough. But you will not be required to speak again. This court has bent over backwards in its efforts to do you justice and you have resisted at every step. Now you must bear the consequences. My colleagues and I will retire to confer.’ He addresses the guard. ‘Remove the accused.’

  There is an uneasy stir among the crowd. Should they stay? How long is the whole business going to take? Yet no sooner have people begun to drift from the auditorium than Dmitri is led back onto the stage and the judges return to their seats.

  ‘Stand, Dmitri,’ says the judge. ‘In accordance with the powers invested in me, I will now pronounce sentence. I will be brief. You offer no plea in mitigation of sentence. On the contrary, you demand that we proceed against you with the utmost rigour. The question before us is, does this demand come from your heart, out of contrition for your heinous actions, or from a deranged mind?

  ‘It is a difficult question to answer. In your demeanour there is no sign of contrition. To the bereaved husband of your victim you have uttered no word of apology. You present yourself as a being without a conscience. My colleagues
and I have every reason to send you away to the salt mines and close the book on you.

  ‘On the other hand, this is your first transgression. You have been a good worker. You treated the deceased with respect until the day you turned on her. What malign force took control of you on that day remains a mystery to us. You have resisted every effort on our part to understand.

  ‘Our sentence is as follows. You will be removed from here to the hospital for the criminally insane and detained there. The medical authorities will review your case once a year and report to this court. Depending on those reports, you may or may not be called before the court at some future date for review of your sentence. That is all.’

  Something like a collective sigh goes up from the citizenry. Is the sigh for Dmitri? Are they sorry for him? It is hard to believe so. The judges file offstage. Dmitri, his head bowed, is removed.

  ‘Goodbye, Diego,’ says he, Simón. ‘Goodbye, David. What are your plans for the weekend? Am I going to see you?’

  ‘Can we talk to Dmitri?’ asks the boy.

  ‘No. That is not possible.’

  ‘I want to!’ And without warning he races down the aisle and clambers onto the stage. In haste he and Diego follow, through the wings and down a dark passage. At the end of the passage they come upon Dmitri and his guard, who is peering through a half-opened door onto the street.

  ‘Dmitri!’ the boy shouts.

  Ignoring his chains, Dmitri hoists the boy aloft and hugs him. Half-heartedly the guard tries to separate them.

  ‘Won’t they let you go to the salt mines, Dmitri?’ says the boy.

  ‘No, it’s not the salt mines for me, it’s the madhouse. But I will escape, never fear. I’ll escape and catch the first bus to the salt mines. I’ll say, Dmitri here, reporting for duty, sir. They won’t dare to refuse me. So don’t worry, young man. Dmitri is still master of his fate.’

  ‘Simón says they are going to chop off your head and give you a new one.’

  The door is flung open and light floods in. ‘Come on!’ says the guard. ‘The van is here.’

  ‘The van is here,’ says Dmitri. ‘Time for Dmitri to go.’ He kisses the boy full on the lips and sets him down. ‘Goodbye, my young friend. Yes, they want to give me a new head. It’s the price of forgiveness. They forgive you but then they chop off your head. Beware of forgiveness, that’s what I say.’

  ‘I don’t forgive you,’ says the boy.

  ‘That’s good! Take a lesson from Dmitri: don’t ever let them forgive you, and don’t ever listen when they promise you a new life. The new life is a lie, my boy, the biggest lie of all. There is no next life. This is the only one there is. Once you let them chop off your head, that’s the end of you. Just darkness and darkness and nothing but darkness.’

  Out of the blinding sunlight two men in uniform emerge and haul Dmitri down the steps. As they are about to bundle him into the back of their van, he turns and calls out: ‘Tell Simón to burn you know what! Tell him I will come and cut his throat if he doesn’t!’ Then the door slams shut and the van drives off.

  ‘What was that last bit about?’ says Diego.

  ‘It’s nothing. He left some stuff behind that he wants me to destroy. Pictures he cut out of magazines—that sort of thing.’

  ‘Ladies with no clothes on,’ says the boy. ‘He let me see them.’

  CHAPTER 14

  HE IS shown into the office of the director of the museum. ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ he says. ‘I come at the request of an employee of yours, Dmitri, who would like to save both himself and the museum from potential embarrassment. On your premises, he tells me, there is a collection of obscene pictures that belongs to him. He would like them to be destroyed before the newspapers get hold of them. Will you permit this?’

  ‘Obscene pictures…You have seen these pictures, señor Simón?’

  ‘No, but my son has. My son is a student at the Academy of Dance.’

  ‘And you say these pictures have been stolen from our collection?’

  ‘No, no, they are not that kind of picture. They are photographs of women cut out of pornographic magazines. I can show you. I know exactly where to find them—Dmitri told me.’

  The director brings out a bunch of keys, leads the way down to the basement, and unlocks the cabinet described by Dmitri. The bottom drawer holds a little cardboard case, which he opens.

  The first picture is of a blonde woman with garishly red lips sitting naked on a sofa with her legs apart, gripping her rather large breasts and thrusting them forward.

  With an exclamation of distaste the director shuts the case. ‘Take them away!’ he says. ‘I don’t want to hear any more about this.’

  There are another half-dozen pictures of the same kind, as he, Simón, discovers when he opens the case in the privacy of his room. But in addition, underneath the pictures, there is an envelope which contains a pair of women’s panties, black; a single silver earring of simple design; a photograph of a young girl, recognizably Ana Magdalena, holding a cat and smiling for the camera; and finally, held together with a rubber band, letters to Mi amor from AM. There is no date on any of them, nor any return address, but he gathers they were posted from the seaside resort of Aguaviva. They describe various holiday activities (swimming, gathering shells, walking on the dunes) and mention Joaquín and Damián by name. ‘I long to be in your arms again,’ says one letter. ‘I long for you passionately (apasionadamente),’ says another.

  He reads them through, slowly, from beginning to end, reads them a second time, getting used to the handwriting, which is rather childish, not what he would have expected at all, each i surmounted with a careful little circle, then puts them back in the envelope together with the photograph, the earring and the panties, puts the envelope back in the case, and puts the case under his bed.

  His first thought is that Dmitri wanted him to read the letters—wanted him to know that he, Dmitri, was loved by a woman whom he, Simón, might have desired from afar but whom he was not man enough to possess. But the more he thinks about it, the less plausible this explanation seems. If Dmitri had in fact been having an affair with Ana Magdalena, if his talk of worshipping the ground on which she trod and her disdainful treatment of him in return had been nothing but a cover for clandestine couplings in the basement of the museum, why did he in his various confessions claim to have forced himself on her? Further, why would Dmitri want him, Simón, to learn the truth about the two of them when in all likelihood he, Simón, would promptly inform the authorities, who would just as promptly order a new trial? Is the simplest explanation not after all the best one: that Dmitri trusted him to burn the case and its contents without examining them?

  But the greater puzzle remains: if Ana Magdalena was not the woman she seemed to all the world to be, and her death not the kind of death it seemed to be, why had Dmitri lied to the police and to the court? To protect her name? To save her husband from humiliation? Was Dmitri, out of nobility of spirit, taking all the guilt upon himself so that the name of the Arroyos should not be dragged through the mud?

  Yet what could Ana Magdalena have said or done, on the night of the fourth of March, to get herself killed by a man whom she longed—longed apasionadamente—to be in the arms of?

  On the other hand, what if Ana Magdalena never wrote the letters at all? What if they are forgeries, and what if he, Simón, is being used as a tool in a plot to blacken her name?

  He shivers. He is truly a madman! he says to himself. The judge was right after all! He belongs in a madhouse, in chains, behind a door with a sevenfold lock!

  He curses himself. He should never have involved himself in Dmitri’s affairs. He should never have answered his summons, never have spoken to the museum director, never have looked inside the case. Now the genie is out of the bottle and he has no idea what to do. If he turns the letters over to the police, he becomes an accomplice in a plot whose purpose is dark to him; similarly if he hands them back to the museum director; while if he
burns them or conceals them he becomes an accomplice in another plot, a plot to present Ana Magdalena as a spotless martyr.

  In the middle of the night he gets up, removes the case from under his bed, wraps it in a spare counterpane, and puts it on top of the wardrobe.

  Then in the morning, as he is about to set off for the depot to collect the pamphlets he will be distributing that day, Inés’s car draws up and Diego gets out, the boy with him.

  Diego is clearly in a bad mood. ‘All day yesterday and again today this child has been nagging us,’ he says. ‘He has worn us down, both Inés and me. Now here we are. Tell him, David—tell Simón what you want.’

  ‘I want to see Dmitri. I want to go to the salt mine. But Inés won’t let me.’

  ‘Of course she won’t. I thought you understood. Dmitri isn’t in the salt mine. He has been sent to a hospital.’

  ‘Yes, but Dmitri doesn’t want to go to a hospital, he wants to go to the salt mine!’

  ‘I am not sure what you think goes on in a salt mine, David, but first of all the salt mine is hundreds of kilometres away and second of all a salt mine is not a holiday resort. That is why the judge sent Dmitri to a hospital: to save him from the salt mine. A salt mine is a place where you go to suffer.’

  ‘But Dmitri doesn’t want to be saved! He wants to suffer! Can we go to the hospital?’

  ‘Certainly not. The hospital where they have sent Dmitri is not a normal hospital. It is a hospital for dangerous people. The public isn’t allowed in.’

  ‘Dmitri isn’t dangerous.’

  ‘On the contrary, Dmitri is extremely dangerous, as he has proved. Anyhow, I am not going to take you to the hospital, nor is Diego. I want nothing more to do with Dmitri.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you why.’

  ‘It’s because you hate Dmitri! You hate everybody!’

  ‘You use that word far too sweepingly. I don’t hate anybody. I just want nothing more to do with Dmitri. He is not a good person.’

  ‘He is a good person! He loves me! He recognizes me! You don’t love me!’