Excerpts from
The Judge
By Lars Bonnevie
"For heavenīs sake, stop!" Bonaventure begged.
Albert would have shouted a lot of other things, but there was a loud bang that deafened him for a moment and then a resounding shout a little further away, just as a hand grabbed his shirt at the armhole to rip it off of him. He looked down. It was not a hand. A bullet had passed through his shirt without touching him, ending up in Bonaventureīs side.
In the noise and shouting, time stopped, or so it seemed to him, even as he wondered when it would start up again. Some higher power had suspended it, possibly the God he would have asked to keep away, if he had believed in him. Then, he wondered whether he had been hit, but he could not feel anything. The soldier who had fired the shot looked at him, as if he had seen a ghost. Behind him, his comrades had lowered their weapons; they, too, appeared to be paralysed and frightened. The man who had shouted did it again.
It was a young lieutenant with a narrow face hidden by sunglasses. His newly pressed uniform made a striking contrast to the rags of the soldiers. Albert stared at him, embracing him in that moment with something that resembled love, not because he had stopped the shooting, but because he represented order in this inferno. But he felt an emptiness expand to fill the space beside him. He did not need to turn around to know that Bonaventure was dead. He slowly stepped out of the car, and time began sluggishly to run once again, except for Bonaventure, who sat in a heap against the right front door in his safety belt, looking as if he was asleep. Not much blood came out of the bullet hole. He could observe this without anything falling apart inside. It was as if he were not really a part of it all, as if time could be rewound back to the point at which he met the solders at the road block and decided that he had better turn back to Kigali and wait with the interrogation for another day. He got back into the car. It had been a big mistake to get out. Now time stopped again. The Goldberg variations were still playing, number thirty-two, aria, they would soon finish and start again from the beginning. Very simple. Music suspends time, just as sex does. No problems.
Hereīs what really happened, he said to himself. A bad dream. The soldiers, the smoking hull of a car and Bonaventure dead were just visualizations of his own recurring nightmare and would disappear again. If he just stayed sitting in the car long enough, he would wake up, and everything around him would evaporate, even Bonaventure. He would wake up in his own bed, take a pill and a shot of vodka, irritated at having had such a bad night. It was probably all the reports he had listened to that had created a universe of murder and destruction in his unconscious. This dream seemed more real than his dreams usually did. He could sense his body and smell his own sweat. But he had done that in dreams before. Anyway. Since he had ascertained that the dream was a dream, he did not need to just keep sitting and waiting to wake up in his bed. He made a mental note that the dream also contained a warning and determined that in future, he would not take Bonaventure along on these sorts of expeditions. In his dream, though under the influence of the dream pictures surrounding him, he realized that if he left the car, he would step into an existence that would show no mercy. The soldiers stood in a circle, staring at him.
Translated by Russell Dees
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