Absolution (2 page)

‘Certainly not. Just because it’s democratically elected doesn’t grant it immunity from criticism.’

‘Do you think that fiction is essential to political opposition?’ I regret the question as soon as it’s out, but sitting in front of her all the carefully formulated questions I’ve spent months preparing seem impossible to ask.

She laughs and the laugh turns into another fit of coughing and throat-clearing. ‘You have a very strange idea of what fiction is meant to do.’

I stall for time, feeling her stare at me as I study my maze of notes. I naively assumed it would all go so smoothly. I decide to ask her about the sister; there’s no denying the importance of politics there. As I’m trying to frame the question in my head, she clears her throat again, as if to say,
Come along, you must do better
, and I rush into another question I didn’t mean to ask.

‘Did you have any siblings?’

‘You know this, Mr Leroux. It was the climax of a turbulent period. It’s a matter of public record. But I absolutely will not talk about my sister.’

‘Not even the bare facts?’

‘The known facts of the case are on file in the court records and countless press clippings. No doubt you’ve read them. Everyone has read them. A man acting alone, he said. The court found that he was not acting alone, though no one else was arrested. Like so many others, he died in police custody. Unlike so many others, he had actually committed a crime – at least he never denied doing it. I can add nothing else except the experience of the victimized family and that is not new material. We all know how people suffer over the unexpected, violent death of a family member. It is fundamentally no different for the family of a murdered innocent or the family of an executed criminal. It is vivisection. It is limb loss. No prosthetic can substitute. The family is crippled. That is all I wish to say.’

*

Though it’s only supposed to be our second meeting, Clare can’t or won’t see me today. Instead I go to the Western Cape Archives, park on Roeland Street, and nod at the car guard who’s sheltering in the shade of a truck. He gives me a subservient smile and makes some kind of sound of assent. I find myself always on edge, expecting the worst. At the airport I was a foreigner, but a week later, in the market yesterday, I was already a local again. Over a display of lettuces, a woman addressed me, expecting a reply. A decade ago I might have come up with the right words. I had to shake my head. I smiled and apologized, explaining that I didn’t speak the language, didn’t understand.
Ek is jammer. Ek praat nie Afrikaans nie. Ek verstaan jou nie
. I’ve lost too much of my Afrikaans to be able to answer. I didn’t know what to say about the lettuce or the fish, the
vis
. She looked surprised, then shrugged and walked away, mumbling sharply, assuming perhaps that I knew but was refusing to speak her language.

The Archives have been housed on the site of a former prison for nearly twenty years. The car guard watches as I walk up the steps and through the green grille of the old gate in the nineteenth-century outer wall. Inside there are shabby picnic tables and plantings, and the new structure, a building within a building. I sign the register, put my bag in a locker, and carry my equipment to the reading room. The woman behind the desk, a Mrs Stewart, is uncertain at first what it is I want. She looks vaguely alarmed when she understands, but nods and asks me to take a seat while she sends someone to look for the files. All her sentences rise at the end, in a tone that questions everything without questioning directly. A few years ago, the staff might have let me do my own digging in the stacks – friends had such luck, finding things they weren’t supposed to find. Now everything is more organized and more professional, but also a little less hopeful.

The other people in the room all appear to be amateur genealogists working on family histories. When the stack of brown folders with bold red stamps appears on my table I feel the others staring, wondering what kind of files I might be consulting, no longer confidential but still bearing that mark. I take out my camera and tripod and photograph page after page throughout the morning.

At lunchtime, two women from the reading room approach me in the lobby.

‘Are you working on family history?’ one of them asks, her voice rising like Mrs Stewart’s.

‘No. It’s for a book. I’m looking at the files of the Publications Control Board. The censors.’

‘Ohhh,’ the other one says, nodding. ‘How verrrry interesting.’

We talk for a few moments. I ask about their research. They are sisters, investigating their ancestors, trying to track down the right Hermanus Stephanus or Gertruida Magdalena over centuries of people with the same names.

‘Good luck with your researches,’ the first one says as we part on the steps. ‘I hope you find what it is you are looking for.’

I give the car guard what I think is proper. It always seems like too little or too much. Later, I ask Greg what he thinks. I trust his opinion because I’ve known him since we were students in New York, and because he’s the most morally and socially engaged friend I still have in the country. When I told him I was coming back, and that my wife would be joining me later in the year to take up her new assignment in Johannesburg, Greg insisted I stay with him for as long as I needed to be in Cape Town.

‘It can never be too much because they need it more than you,’ he says, balancing his son on his knee. ‘Just like if your hire car gets stolen or somebody takes the radio or the hubcaps – you have to tell yourself, whoever took it needs it more. It’s the only way to live with yourself.’

‘I don’t ever want it to look like charity.’

‘Think of all the fuckers who only give them fifty cents and can’t be bothered. Money isn’t an insult. There’s nothing wrong with charity. Not everything has to be payment for services rendered, however informally. And if you’re a tourist you owe them a little more.’

‘I don’t think of myself as a tourist any more. I’m back now.’

‘You haven’t been local for a long time, Sam, no matter what shirt you wear or the music you listen to. And who’s to say you’re going to stay in the long run? Sarah’s post lasts for – how long? – only eighteen months?’

‘Three years if she wants it.’

‘But then you’ll go somewhere else. That means you’re a tourist. You don’t have to feel bad about it. Just remember it.’

‘And how much do you give?’

‘No, see, the thing is, I give less than I expect you to give because I give every day and have been giving for years. I employ a nanny who comes six days a week, a gardener who comes twice a week, a domestic who comes three times a week, and I give soup packets to the old man who comes to my front gate every Friday. I give my domestic and my nanny money to put their kids through school. I buy the school uniforms. I pay for their medical aid. When I park in the city, I don’t give the car guards as much as I’d expect you to give because I give so much already, and even that isn’t enough, you know. And I don’t give food to people who come to the house any more, except the old man, because he’s never drunk. So I’m one of the fuckers I hate. But you tourists, you’ve got to give a little more.’

He speaks quickly, his son playing with the beads around his neck. ‘Dylan, don’t pull Daddy’s beads.’ He looks up at me, smiling. ‘I was thinking, let’s go to the Waterfront this afternoon. There’s a new juice bar open and I feel like shopping. We’ll leave Dylan with Nonyameko. We can see a movie afterward.’

Another day. Clare shows me into the same room as the one we used for our first interview. This time she has buzzed me in through the gate and opened her own front door. The assistant must have the day off. We sit again in the same chairs. The cat passes through the room, only this time it takes to my lap instead of hers. Purring, it drools on my jeans and digs its claws into my legs.

‘Cats like fools,’ Clare says, straight-faced.

‘Can we go back to your sister?’

‘I knew you weren’t going to let Nora stay dead.’ She looks weary, even more drawn than the first time. I know that her sister’s story is a detour from the main route. This is not the real story I want, but it might be a way of getting there in the long run.

‘Was your sister always political?’

‘I think she regarded herself as
apolitical
, like me. But, that’s not quite fair. I’m not apolitical. I’m privately political. But if one chooses a public life – either by career or association or marriage – that’s another matter. She chose a public life by marrying a public figure.’

‘A writer’s life is not a public life?’

‘No,’ she says, and smiles – either condescendingly or, I flatter myself, enjoying the parry. ‘It was unconscionable to take an apolitical stance in
this
country at
that
time, as a public figure. She was a victim of her own naïveté. She should have known she was marking herself for death. But she was the firstborn. Our parents made mistakes. Perhaps they left her crying in the crib instead of comforting her. Or they were strict where they should have been trusting. She always resented that I was allowed to shave my legs and wear lipstick when I was thirteen, to have skirts above my knees, to bleach my schoolgirl moustache. It was obvious the same standards did not apply to me, and she saw that. Our parents held her under their thumbs until she was sixteen. She did not go to university. Marriage was an escape from authoritarian parenting into an even more authoritarian culture. I was luckier.’

‘You were educated abroad.’ I know all this. I’m laying down the foundations. Everything else will rest on this.

‘Yes. Boarding school here, then university in England. A period in Europe after that.’

‘And then you returned home, at a time when many in the anti-apartheid movement – writers especially – were beginning to go into exile.’

‘That’s correct. It was before I had published. I wanted to come back, to be a part of the opposition, such as it was.’

‘Do you resent those who emigrated?’

‘No. Some had little choice. They were banned, they or their families were threatened, and some were imprisoned. Or they left for a brief while – to study overseas – and found that because of their political activities they could not return, or simply they realized it was easier in many ways to stay in England or America or Canada or France, and so much the better for them, I suppose, if that’s what they wanted, if that is what they felt they needed to do for themselves. I was not threatened, for the most part, and so I stayed – or rather, I returned and stayed. Is this going anywhere, this line of questioning? What can it say about me?’

When we met in Amsterdam she was drunk on the adulation, and on quantities of champagne. As a result, she was effusive and open-handed then, or seemed so maybe only because she was away from home and being celebrated. She pretended it was her birthday and took a magnum of champagne from the conference reception. At the bland tourist hotel where she was staying, she pleaded in halting Afrikaans for the concierge to get some glasses from the restaurant so she could toast her birthday with her friends, old and new. The concierge tried not to laugh at her language, but it had the desired effect.

I was one of the group then, a new friend. Given the champagne, it shouldn’t surprise me that she has forgotten our first meeting, or that she imagines it was in London, at an awards ceremony
instead of a conference. She’s an old woman. Her memory can’t be perfect.

I find it difficult, though, to reconcile the writer I so esteem in print, who took my hand with such grace in Amsterdam, with the woman sitting across from me now. There is open mockery on her face. It triggers a flash of memory that I instantly suppress. I can’t allow myself to think about the past, not yet.

Absolution

It was not the usual kind of slow waking in the middle of the night, from the bottom of sleep. Clare’s bladder was not full, she had consumed no caffeine the previous day. Her window was open, but noises from outside did not, as a rule, ever bother her sleep. Instinctively, she knew something was wrong. She was hyperventilating when she woke and her heart was beating so loudly that if anyone had been in the room it would have betrayed her.

For years she had resisted an alarm, insisting that locks were adequate; anyone determined enough to break through deadbolts and safety glass and burglar bars was worthy of whatever bounty they might choose. But now, how she wished for the alarm, and the kind of bedside panic button that her friends and her son, her scattered cousins, had all chosen to install. She knew, too, that the sound could not have come from Marie, who would be asleep upstairs on the top floor. It had come from below. If Marie had gone downstairs, Clare would have heard her pass in the corridor.

Trying to slow her heart rate, she said to herself,
There is silence, there is only breeze
, an old mantra she had learned as a girl. The curtains played around the security bars. It was not valuables that worried her. Anyone who wanted them could have the electronics, such as they were, even the silver, the crystal, if thieves cared about such things any more. It was confrontation that terrified her, the threat of guns, and of men with guns.
There is silence. There is only breeze. One, two, three, four, slow, six, seven
. She had nearly calmed herself back to sleep when she heard the unmistakable swing of a door on its hinge, metal rotating against unlubricated metal, and the bottom of the door catching and vibrating against the coir
mats in the foyer downstairs. And above there was movement, a creaking floorboard. Marie had heard it, too.

Clare grabbed for the phone in the darkness but when she put the receiver to her ear there was only a hollow silence. Although she had no cellphone she could not answer for Marie, who might be trusted to have a solution. How long since the door against the mat? Seconds? Thirty seconds? Two minutes? A smell began to work its way upstairs, sharp and astringent, chemical, not a smell of her home. And then another sound, pressure on the first stair, a loose board, and a collective intake of breath, or was that her imagination? She could throw her door closed, but the key for the lock had been lost long ago; she would be unable to escape out the window, there was no space under the bed where she might hide, the wardrobe was too full, there was no closet in her bedroom. The courageous thing would be to sit up in bed, turn on the light and wait for them to come, or to shout, ‘Take what you want, I don’t care!’, but she had lost her voice, and her body was paralyzed. She would have screamed if her throat had let her.