Читать книгу The Praetor and Other Stories - Aurel Stancu - Страница 9

HOMICIDE

In colloquial terms, one could say he was beaten to a pulp. In medical terms, he was a patient placed in the surgery with the following diagnosis: “Multi-traumatisms inflicted by aggression, cranial and facial traumatisms.” In other words, he had been wiped out with an oaken towel. He had been brought to the hospital by an ambulance from a village in the plain about fifty-five miles in a crow line from the town. A village famous in the area as a pole of violence, poverty, and ignorance. Its people usually fought over land and because they could barely make ends meet. Heavy drinking and jealousy led to many family misunderstandings, one of the reasons why ambulances were called there quite frequently. Four, five, or six times a year ambulances went there for nothing—too late for the victim.

Valentin had been taken to hospital several times before, after fighting villagers at the pub or in the village lanes. Although rather slovenly in appearance, he was a good-looking man. Hadn’t he behaved like a genuine peasant or had he spent more time in school, he would have been a real seducer in the town. But, with only middle school to his credit and having read not even one book in his life, he couldn’t master the art of the professional seducer. Those who first met him didn’t know that, though. Dark-skinned and blue-eyed, he always turned on the nurses in the surgery, although every time he turned up there it was with a cracked skull. The last time had been eight months before, after a fight with his elder brother. It had been a strange situation: his bed stood next to his brother’s, in the same ward, neither of them remembering exactly how the fight had started.…

“Are you a carter or a farmer?” the surgeon asked him while filling out his chart.

“It’s been a long time since I last had a cart or a piece of land,” answered Valentin looking away in shame.

“Then how do you make a living?”

“The odd job, you know.… Working by the day whatever comes my way.”

“You don’t know what’s what, eh? You may be handsome, but you don’t seem too smart,” the surgeon remarked.

“Well, I don’t know. You’re much better at judging it.”

“Hmm, you’ve got the quick answer. Now tell me, who beat you?”

Valentin took his time gazing at the nurses and pretended not to hear the question. He seemed taken up with something. It was a stifling summer day and in the ward which had no air-conditioning everyone was sweating profusely. Valentin was sweating more than the others. He closed his eyes—in the way of a stratagem.

“What’s the matter? Did you swallow your tongue? What am I to write here? If you won’t speak, I’ll send you back home, and not by the ambulance,” said the surgeon.

“I don’t want to go home, at least not for a while. I want to stay here.”

“OK then, you need a week to recover. You were very lucky. A few inches and you’d have been hit in the temple. Which might have been fatal. So who got your hide tanned?”

“I can’t remember how it happened.”

“What are you trying to do, kid me? Girls, call the police, and then we’ll see how he’ll get out of trouble!”

Valentin closed his eyes again. He wanted to sleep not to remember, he wanted to sleep a recovery sleep. What was to be said? What was the use of saying it? Their job was to cure not to investigate, he wasn’t dead, after all. His state was stable now.

When the policeman patted him on the shoulder, a cold shiver went down his back. He had got used to answering the policemen’s questions, although in his village he wasn’t thought for a troublemaker.

“What happened to you, man?” a thin mustachioed policeman asked him gently.

“What happened? I got walloped, that’s what happened.”

“So you got walloped. And who did you upset?”

“Someone who thought I was gonna beat him. I don’t know. I didn’t upset anyone.”

“How come? Did you get walloped by mistake?” asked the policeman acting the naïve.

“There was no mistake. Please, I don’t want to report anyone. I may have fallen off the cart for all I know. I’ve got a couple of vicious horses.”

“But you said you didn’t have a cart,” the surgeon put in.

“Well, it was my neighbor’s cart. What, couldn’t I have been in someone else’s cart? I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“All right then,” the police officer agreed too promptly.

Valentin couldn’t stand the policeman’s eyes and his moustache was getting on his nerves. For one moment he thought he wouldn’t have to talk any more. After all, it was no big deal, he had just got a good hiding. It happened now and again. The policeman watched him carefully. Maybe, if he had talked, the policeman wouldn’t have been so interested in the case, but Valentin’s hesitation made him suspicious.

“It’s all right if you don’t want to say anything. Doctor, since we don’t know what happened, have him pay the ambulance fare and the treatment. That’s what the law says,” he said a little angrily.

“Sure, that means a lot of money for someone like him,” the surgeon joined in the game. “If he doesn’t have it, we’ll send him home and sue him to cover the expenses.”

The beaten man got scared. He couldn’t afford to pay anything. What money? The money he got from working by the day? So he found his voice again:

“I went to the pub and bought a packet of cigarettes. Then I went home and tried to find a candle and, while trying to find the damned candle, I caught them in the act.”

“Who did you catch in the act?” the policeman asked calmly.

“My wife, Agapita. She was having sex with my older son.”

Stupefaction impressed itself on everyone’s face instantly. The air seemed to have been whipped by the man’s words. So it had been more than an ordinary fight. It had been incest.

“And what did you do?” the policeman asked.

“What did I do? I saw red and started to hit them. Then I chased them throughout the yard, that’s what I did.”

“But how did you come to get beaten?”

“Well, at one time Agapita grabbed a shovel and hit me hard. First in the back, and then in the head.”

“I see. Can you be more specific about what you saw?”

“The two of them were lying in bed, she only with her bra on. When I started to fight with the boy, she rushed out. She put on a dressing gown, grabbed the shovel and started to hit me.”

Indeed, the last blow had been terrible. It had knocked him down. He didn’t move until the ambulance came.

The man’s confession set the policemen on motion and soon a police car left for the village, for Valentin’s house. The medical staff changed their attitude towards Valentin and began to deal with him more friendlily. Relieved by the confession, Valentin slept like a top.

The Arghire family lived from hand to mouth. There were seven of them, staying in two rooms and a small kitchen: the parents, Valentin and Agapita, two boys and three girls. The mother, the older boy, and the girls worked by the day in the field. The head of the family, Valentin, no longer brought any money home. More often than not he came home drunk from the pub and beat his wife and children.

When the police got there, tranquility had set in the village. The cattle and sheep were coming back after the day’s grazing.

“When was the last time he beat you?” a policeman asked Agapita.

“Well, it was yesterday, when he got back drunk from the pub, that’s where he spends all day, damn him,” Agapita waved her hand, sick of everything.

“Doesn’t he work anywhere?”

“He work? Work no—brandy yes, every day. Once in a while he gets asked by one neighbor or another to help them, takes the money and spends it on drink. That’s the man!”

“I see. Let me tell you what he said you were doing yesterday, when he got home.”

“He must have said a lot, the bastard.… He’s good with words.”

“He said he caught you having sex with your older son.”

Despite the smothering heat, the air in the house turned to ice. The woman dressed in shabby clothes opened her large mouth as if to say something and stayed like that, agape and about to burst, her eyes big as cart wheels.

“What?! Sex with my son?! God knows how hard it was for me to raise him and the others, I moiled and toiled for them, to do what? Sin with one of my sons? How could he say such a thing?”

“He said he’d caught you in the act and that’s why you and your older son beat him.”

“Poor me, poor me! Such a blasphemy coming from that animal who doesn’t even know which way to turn. The thought of it!”

The policemen were looking at the woman both distrustfully and compassionately. They had reached a stage when they couldn’t believe either story. The truth could be his or hers.

“I beat him, I admit I hit him.… I could no longer stand it. It was the first time I hit back. I usually stood there like a fool and he kept buffeting me. I just watched how he was hiding the children. And then we took refuge in the lane, all of us.”

“Is he that violent?”

“Only to us, officer. Otherwise, everyone else mocks at him. A while ago his brother stabbed him and the best thing my husband could do was say he was sorry. He does the grand only with us—but yesterday I could no longer stand it.”

Her children were all around her now and, hearing what the policemen were saying, began to shout, angry, hard to control. Dressed in rags and barefoot, they made up a pathetic picture. A policeman took Catalin, the younger brother, aside and asked him:

“Tell me, what happened yesterday? When your father came home, did he really find your mother lying in bed with Emil, naked, doing silly things with Emil? Did you see that?”

“No, I didn’t. Pa came home drunk, hit Emil and then Ma, and then he and Ma chased and hit each other in the yard.”

“Do your father and mother fight very often?”

“Yes, when Pa has a drink or two, or when Ma has a drink or two…but Ma didn’t do any foolish things with Emil, ever!”

The children were telling the truth. The couple fought all the time. It was the wife and the children that got beaten. Until now, when Agapita no longer stood it and grabbed the shovel.…

“I think he was ashamed, he didn’t want anyone to know his wife had beaten him,” said one of the policemen on their way back. “So he made up this story.”

“The thing is he got his first beating from his wife. Which set a precedent,” another policeman said, laughing. “From now on, who knows.…”

“The frozen limit would be if the bastard lodged a complaint. Then we’d have to take the case to court.”

“I’ll go talk to him tomorrow, at the hospital. I’ll persuade him to do nothing of the kind,” said the mustachioed policeman.

While the police car was driving away to town, in the middle of the village Agapita was weeping furiously, digging a hole in the ground. She was saying in tearful bursts to those who were watching her:

“When I hit him with the shovel.… I killed him…even if he was still alive and they took him to hospital to patch him up.… When he comes back…I’ll bury him here.… God forgive him!”

Painful traces of anger and wet dust were twining on her face.