Disgrace

He opens the cage door. ‘Come,’ he says, bends, opens his arms. The dog wags its crippled rear, sniffs his face, licks his cheeks, his lips, his ears. He does nothing to stop it. ‘Come.’
Bearing him in his arms like a lamb, he re-enters the surgery. ‘I thought you would save him for another week,’ says Bev Shaw. ‘Are you giving him up?’
‘Yes, I am giving him up.’

He ties the last bag and takes it to the door. Twenty-three. There is only the young dog left, the one who likes music, the one who, given half a chance, would already have lolloped after his comrades into the clinic building, into the theatre with its zinc-topped table where the rich, mixed smells still linger, including one he will not yet have met with in his life: the smell of expiration, the soft, short smell of the released soul.

He and Bev do not speak. He has learned by now, from her, to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love.

‘Will you come in and have some tea?’
She makes the offer as if he were a visitor. Good. Visitorship, visitation: a new footing, a new start.

She is flushed from her labours and perhaps a little sunburnt. She looks, suddenly, the picture of health.

Lucy is wearing only a wrapper. As she rises, the sash slips loose and her breasts are bared.
The last time he saw his daughter’s breasts they were the demure rosebuds of a six-year-old. Now they are heavy, rounded, almost milky. A stillness falls. He is staring; the boy is staring too, unashamedly. Rage wells up in him again, clouding his eyes.

I must have peace around me. I am prepared to do anything, make any sacrifice, for the sake of peace.’
‘And I am part of what you are prepared to sacrifice?’
She shrugs. ‘I didn’t say it, you said it.’
‘Then I’ll pack my bags.’

‘How humiliating,’ he says finally. ‘Such high hopes, and to end like this.’
‘Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.’
‘Like a dog.’
‘Yes, like a dog.’

‘There is a question I never got to ask, Mr Lurie. You are not hoping for us to intervene on your behalf, are you, with the university?’
‘To intervene?’
‘Yes. To reinstate you, for instance.’
‘The thought never crossed my mind. I have finished with the university.’
‘Because the path you are on is one that God has ordained for you. It is not for us to interfere.’
‘Understood.’

‘Normally I would say’, he says, ‘that after a certain age one is too old to learn lessons. One can only be punished and punished. But perhaps that is not true, not always. I wait to see. As for God, I am not a believer, so I will have to translate what you call God and God’s wishes into my own terms. In my own terms, I am being punished for what happened between myself and your daughter. I am sunk into a state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself. It is not a punishment I have refused. I do not murmur against it. On the contrary, I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept disgrace as my state of being. Is it enough for God, do you think, that I live in disgrace without term?’