Photo by Matthew Mahon. Read a Q&A with
David Bergen at The Walrus Blogs.1. The lieutenant’s office was dimly lit. There was a glass of water on the desk and a large seashell that was an ashtray, and a telephone and one pencil, perfectly sharp. The lieutenant walked around the room, smoking, touching the desk as he passed by it. Once, he lifted the pencil and then put it down again and he began to talk about the girl. He said that the death of a foreigner was never a good thing for him. He said that the error of her death might lie with the girl herself, with her own foolishness. Perhaps she did not know how to swim, or perhaps she wanted to die — this sometimes happened. The lieutenant said that the girl’s death was a mystery, and he did not like mysteries. He liked to know the truth. He paused, lit another cigarette, and said, “You know this girl.”

The boy shook his head.

“You went to her house.”

“Not yet.”

The lieutenant stepped forward quickly and struck the boy with an open hand to his head. To an onlooker it might have appeared that the lieutenant was striking the dust from a cushion. The boy did not react, though his head moved slightly.

“How many times did you go to her house?” the lieutenant asked.

“Once. She fed me.”

“She fed me.” The lieutenant repeated the words as if some meaning could be gleaned from them. He said, “You did not know her, yet she fed you.”

The boy was frightened but he did not show it. He knew that because he was sitting in this lieutenant’s office, and because he was being questioned by a man who had much power, for these reasons he was in trouble. He understood that he might not ever leave the building. He understood that his own death might be imminent. Even so, knowing all of this, he showed no fear. He said that the girl had had friends and the friends had invited him to eat because he was hungry.

“What did you eat?”

“I don’t remember.”

The lieutenant said that he would give the boy time to remember.

The boy thought about this and then he said, “Bread. And cheese.”

The lieutenant said that he did not like cheese and those people who ate cheese smelled like goats. “Do you like cheese?” he asked. And then, not waiting for an answer, he went to his desk and picked up the pencil, opened a drawer, took a pad of paper, and began to write. He wrote with his left hand. He leaned on the desk and wrote carefully for a long time. When he straightened, he said, “On Tuesday you saw her.”

The boy said no.

The lieutenant said, “You saw her and together you rode up to Monkey Mountain and then went down to the beach and she took off her clothes and she had on a bathing suit. What colour was the bathing suit?”

The boy said that he did not know the colour. “I was not there,” he said.

The lieutenant put down the pencil and walked over to the boy and he took the boy’s neck in his left hand and he squeezed and leaned forward and whispered, “The bathing suit was blue.”

The boy saw pain. It entered the back of his head, passed by the backs of his eyes, and came out of his mouth. The lieutenant stepped back. He said that the boy should not think he was an equal. Neither to the lieutenant, nor to the girl. “She was beautiful,” he said. Even when she was dead. “Did you touch her?” he asked.

The boy stared at the floor. He did not answer. He saw the lieutenant’s boots. The toes were round and scuffed. They needed polishing. The boy was good at polishing shoes. When he was younger, seven or eight, he had worked the corner near the post office on Bach Dang. Perhaps he had even polished this lieutenant’s shoes.