Disgrace

"All right, I'll handle the dog-meat, I'll offer to dig for Petrus. What else?"

"You can help at the clinic. They are desperate for volunteers."

"You mean help Bev Shaw."

"Yes."

"I don't think she and I will hit it off."

"You don't need to hit it off with her. You have only to help her. But don't expect to be paid. You will have to do it out of the goodness of your heart."

"I'm dubious, Lucy. It sounds suspiciously like community service. It sounds like someone trying to make reparation for past misdeeds."

"As to your motives, David, I can assure you, the animals at the clinic won't query them. They won't ask and they won't care."

"All right, I'll do it. But only as long as I don't have to become a better person. I am not prepared to be reformed. I want to go on being myself. I'll do it on that basis." His hand still rests on her foot; now he grips her ankle tight. "Understood?"

She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. "So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change."

***

One at a time he fetches them out of the cage at the back and leads or carries them into the theatre. To each, in what will be its last minutes, Bev gives her fullest attention, stroking it, talking to it, easing its passage. If, more often than not, the dog fails to be charmed, it is because of his presence: he gives off the wrong smell (They can smell your thoughts), the smell of shame. Nevertheless, he is the only one who holds the dog still as the needle finds the vein and the drug hits the heart and the legs buckle and the eyes dim.

He had thought he would get used to it. But that is not what happens. The more killings he assists in, the more jittery he gets. One Sunday evening, driving home in Lucy's kombi, he actually has to stop at the roadside to recover himself. Tears flow down his face that he cannot stop; his hands shake.

He does not understand what is happening to him. Until now he has been more or less indifferent to animals. Although in an abstract way he disapproves of cruelty, he cannot tell whether by nature he is cruel or kind. He is simply nothing. He assumes that people from whom cruelty is demanded in the line of duty, people who work in slaughterhouses, for instance, grow carapaces over their souls. Habit hardens: it must be so in most cases, but it does not seem to be so in his. He does not seem to have the gift of hardness.

***

Of the dogs in the holding pens, there is one he has come to feel a particular fondness for. It is a young male with a withered left hindquarter which it drags behind it. Whether it was born like that he does not know. No visitor has shown an interest in adopting it. Its period of grace is almost over; soon it will have to submit to the needle.

Sometimes, while he is reading or writing, he releases it from the pen and lets it frisk, in its grotesque way, around the yard, or snooze at his feet. It is not "his" in any sense; he has been careful not to give it a name (though Bev Shaw refers to it as Driepoot); nevertheless, he is sensible of a generous affection streaming out toward him from the dog. Arbitrarily, unconditionally, he has been adopted; the dog would die for him, he knows.

***

It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier too. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet. He can save the young dog, if he wishes, for another week. But a time must come, it cannot be evaded, when he will have to bring him to Bev Shaw in her operating room (perhaps he will carry him in his arms, perhaps he will do that for him) and caress him and brush back the fur so that the needle can find the vein, and whisper to him and support him in the moment when, bewilderingly, his legs buckle; and then, when the soul is out, fold him up and pack him away in his bag, and then the next day wheel the bag into the flames and see that it is burnt, burnt up. He will do all that for him when his time comes. It will be little enough, less than little: nothing.

-- Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

Easily one of the best novels I've ever read, and on so many levels.

I must've stopped to cry at least three times just typing this out.