“I pointed out that the line in Luciana’s letter about sexual harassment was being used by my wife to support her divorce petition. The solicitor said I should prepare myself for much worse accusations: it was all part of the game. I told him about my fears for Pauli’s safety, now that she was alone with her mother. He asked if anyone else had seen the cuts and bruises I’d found on Pauli when she was a baby. He said he had children himself and they often hurt themselves. Perhaps my wife was less vigilant than I was? Had Pauli ever had a particularly serious accident? Did she have any permanent marks or scars? Was I absolutely certain that my accusations were well founded? I had to admit that nothing bad had happened to Pauli in the past few years. He asked if the nurse I hired during my absence had noticed anything unusual that she might testify to. I had to say no. He held up his hands as if to say there was nothing he could do. Again, he said, it would be my word against another’s. I asked if we couldn’t file a writ, even if only as a warning. He said no judge would take it into consideration, because you needed much more than a vague accusation to deny custody of a child to its mother. He thought it best not to use their ploys, but to play the rationality card throughout the case. He told me to leave both matters with him and that he’d get on with obtaining an access order as soon as possible so that I could see Pauli again.
“It took almost a month, during which time the first conciliation meeting with Luciana took place. The solicitor attended alone as I wanted nothing to do with it. All I cared about was seeing Pauli. At last the order arrived, specifying my visitation schedule. My first day was a Thursday afternoon at five. I telephoned a little before the hour but no one answered. I assumed it was another of Mercedes’s tricks to irk me. I went to the house that had once been my home and rang the doorbell, but no one came. I tried my key but Mercedes had had the lock changed. I saw a light at one of the windows and called out my daughter’s name. No answer. I thought I was going to lose my mind. I went to get a locksmith and the man managed to force open the door. I rushed upstairs and saw Mercedes’s inert body on the bed, a bottle of pills on the bedside table. I didn’t stop to go to her. I was calling Pauli’s name, but there was a deathly silence in the house. She wasn’t in her bedroom or the playroom. Then I saw the light in the bathroom. I went in and drew the shower curtain. Pauli was there, submerged in the bath, white, motionless, her hair floating around her face like seaweed. She’d drowned in twelve inches of water. She could have been dead for hours. I snatched her out of the water. She was cold and slippery. The clothes she was going to wear on her outing with me lay folded on a chair. From somewhere very far away I heard the locksmith shouting: Mercedes was alive and the man was saying we should call an ambulance.”
“So what had happened? You don’t think she…”
“According to her statement she started drinking-a couple of glasses of brandy-while she was running Pauli’s bath. She left her in the bath and went to lie down for a while. She said she’d had an exhausting day and fell asleep for a little over an hour. When she woke up she couldn’t hear any sounds of splashing so she rushed to the bathroom. She found her as I did, drowned in the bath. She didn’t try to pull her out. She said she just wanted to kill herself when she saw her like that. She couldn’t stand the thought that it was her fault. So she went back to the bedroom and swallowed all the sleeping pills in the bottle. But there weren’t that many, at least not enough to kill her. And because Mercedes knew when I’d be arriving for my visit, she could count on me finding her in time. And that’s what happened. They pumped her stomach and she was fine.”
“But there must have been an investigation. Or did they accept her story?”
“There was an investigation and they believed her story. In the forensic analysis they found that Pauli had a haematoma on the back of her head. According to their reconstruction of events, Pauli had tried to get out of the bath on her own. She must have slipped and banged her head, losing consciousness before sliding under the water. Maybe she cried out as she fell but if you accepted that Mercedes was asleep, you could also accept that Pauli’s cry didn’t wake her. The way in which water had filled the lungs was compatible with Pauli’s having lost consciousness beforehand.”
“But you accused her?”
Kloster was silent for a moment, as if my question came from a distant dimension, or was in a foreign Ianguage. He looked at me as if I belonged to a different species.
“No. When you hold your dead child in your arms, everything changes. And I’d already seen what I could expect from the justice system. But I knew who the real culprit was. And the laws of men would never touch her. During that time I felt as if I weren’t part of the human race. Some time before, for my novel on the Cainites, I’d looked at some ideas on the law, even dictating a few notes on it to Luciana. It was a purely intellectual exercise. First I looked at the ancient law of retaliation, the lex talionis, which is part of the Code of Hammurabi: a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand. A law we tend to consider cruel and primitive. But if you look at it another way, it’s on a human scale, with an element of equivalence that’s merciful: it recognises the other as an equal, and limits retribution. Because in fact the first ratio of punishment in the Bible is the one laid down by God as a warning to anyone who would kill Cain-seven to one. Of course, this might be the proportion that God reserves for himself, in his absolute power. It’s always in the interests of the powers that be for punishment to be excessive, unforgettable. Above all, to act as a warning. But also, I wondered, given its source in the highest divinity, the ‘fount of all justice’, could there be something more here than simply the will to crush? Could there even be a kernel of reason in the disproportion? The will, perhaps, to distinguish between attacker and attacked? To ensure that they’re not equal when it comes to the harm done and that the aggressor suffers more than the victim? How would one mete out punishment if one were God? I’d made the notes almost as a game, to prepare for my novel. But now my daughter was dead and the words I’d dictated suddenly made no sense. Because any idea of justice, or reparation, looks forward to the notion of a future and a community of men. But I felt that something inside me was broken for ever. That I no longer belonged to any community or any future. That I stood, howling, outside humanity. When I went over the papers, I also came across the Bible Luciana had lent me and I remembered, as if it were part of another life, someone else’s life, that I had to attend a conciliation meeting because of the letter that had set everything in motion. I called my solicitor and dispensed with his services: as I told him, I wanted nothing more to do with human justice. I attended the meeting myself and returned the Bible to Luciana. The red bookmark was at that page because that’s where I had left it after dictating my notes to her. It wasn’t meant as a threat. I just wanted her to know. Strange, everything that happened afterwards, that series of…of misfortunes, because the punishment I’d imagined for her was in principle very different.”
He fell silent, as if he couldn’t continue, or had said something he might regret later.
“But why punish Luciana for your daughter’s death? Wasn’t your wife to blame?”
“You don’t understand. As I said, Mercedes and I had a pact. And until that time we had respected it. Have you ever played Go?” he asked suddenly.
I shook my head.
“Sometimes the game reaches a point at which players are condemned to repeating the same moves indefinitely-the Ko position. Neither player can break the stalemate because if they make any other kind of move they lose the game immediately. That is what my days with Mercedes were like. We’d reached an equilibrium. A Ko position on which Pauli’s life depended. It was a question of time, until Pauli was grown. But Luciana’s letter destroyed everything.”