Absolution (30 page)

At the end of his first week in the city there was a party for new graduate students in the Arts and Humanities at one of the brownstones owned by the university. As Sam arrived a jazz trio was playing and a caterer pushed a glass of white wine into his hand. He saw a group of people he recognized from one of his seminars, but when he joined them he had difficulty keeping up with the references to plays and concerts they had attended just in the first week. Plays and concerts would require money Sam didn’t think he could afford to spend, even with the scholarship that had allowed him to come. He had vowed to himself to save as much as he could, in anticipation of returning home.

Without being missed, Sam retreated to a corner table where finger food was arranged on platters. As he was making up his mind to leave a voice next to him said,
God this is depressing. I’m Greg. What are you? You’re familiar
.

Sam looked up at the man, surprised to hear a Cape Town accent.

I decided you were the only person I could bear to talk to, other than the Israeli over there
, Greg said, nodding at a woman with a shaved head who was talking to the Dean of Arts.
These Americans undo me
.

How did you know I wasn’t American?

Your clothes
, Greg said.
The way you stand. Your hair. Your shoes. Your hair especially
.

Sam put his fingers to his hair and brushed it away from his brow.

No, like this
, Greg said, mussing his own hair to demonstrate. The backs of Greg’s hands were patterned with tattoos of astrological symbols.
Say something else and I’ll tell you where you’re from and where you went to school
.

What makes you think you can read me so well?

Because there aren’t that many white South Africans and we’re mostly all related. We’re probably distant cousins. I’d say you spent time in Cape Town but went to school somewhere in the Eastern Cape. Grahamstown?

Port Elizabeth
, Sam said. It was unnerving to be so transparent.

Greg had come to New York to do a master’s in art history.
When I go back I’m going to open an art gallery and sell to all the rich Europeans who come looking for authentic Africa
, he said, making horns with his fingers and pulling a horror face.
My parents say I should try to stay here
. He raised an index finger and wagged it at Sam:
‘It’s just a matter of time,’ my father says, ‘before they have us all strung up from the trees my boy.’ So you see I have no choice. I have to go back to prove him wrong
.

*

Sarah was presiding at the first club meeting Sam attended. At the end he approached her to sign up and pay dues for the year. These amounted to fifteen dollars, and even that felt like a stretch, but the club was the kind of thing he thought he should be doing to meet people. When he saw her smile with her eyes as well as her mouth he thought this was also a reason for joining. Her teeth were straight and she had thick, light brown hair and there was something wholesome and unmistakably American about her looks – as if she had woken up that morning on a farm and drunk a glass of milk fresh from a cow milked by her father, and eaten pancakes made from scratch by her mother. Her clothes were spotless and unrumpled. Later, when he learned she knew nothing about farms and that her father would have no idea what to do with a cow, Sam wondered what her childhood had really been like but didn’t know how to ask. Asking about Sarah’s childhood would only invite questions about his own.

When the members of the club weren’t meeting to listen to local poets or reading their own work, they were usually at bars on Bleecker Street or gathering at someone’s apartment. It was one of those nights – at the home of an exiled Somali poet who lived
far into Alphabet City and walked with her keys poking out from between the fingers of her left hand, pepper spray at the ready in her right – that Sam first had time alone with Sarah. He knew that she was regarded as a rising star in the journalism department, that she was approaching the end of her masters programme, that she had already published articles in leading news magazines, and that she lived nowhere near the university. No one in the club knew where she lived because she had never invited anyone to her apartment. The two of them talked about Sarah’s thesis on American media coverage of the Iran-Contra scandal. As she spoke, moistening her lips by rolling them into each other and taking long slow sips from a red plastic cup, now and then popping a chip into her mouth, Sam began to feel that he needed her. He realized that she reminded him, strangely, of Laura.

My father spent time in Africa
, she said,
in the Foreign Service. He was in the Congo and Rhodesia in the Sixties, in South Africa, too – in the Seventies and Eighties. I think he spent quite a while in South Africa
.

But you never went with him?

He always said the postings were too dangerous, so Mom and I always stayed in Virginia. I don’t know – maybe we could have gone with him, but I think he was too worried about our safety. He liked South Africa. He said it was a beautiful country. I can’t imagine what it must have been like growing up in such a dangerous place
.

Even though terrible things had happened, Sam had never considered that the country as a whole was a dangerous place, any more than America was. He tried to make out the expression on Sarah’s face. She looked curious and preoccupied, but it could have been the light refracting through the glass lampshade, which patterned her face in a labyrinth of strong shadows.

As they spoke, Sam thought more and more of Laura, seeing in Sarah the same energetic curiosity, but also a physical likeness, in her muscular limbs and sharp features, a bundle of angles and olive-blonde complexion, and eyes that were always active, when
not scrutinizing Sam then taking in their surroundings, logging everything and everyone around them. If she was interested, Sam intuited, if she smelled a story, then this was a woman who wouldn’t stop until she understood everything about a person, until she discovered the truth.

Sam

We wake to the sound of birds, a jungle cacophony like nothing I’ve ever experienced, not in Cape Town or Beaufort West or Grahamstown. Along with the hadedas, which are familiar to me, there are grey loeries that look as prehistoric as the ibis and make a blood-chilling cry like a baby being strangled.

Sarah runs across the patio to the garden cottage first thing this morning, starting research on a story about American oil companies in Angola. The pool is tempting but I know I have to get to work. We say goodbye for the day, I implore Sarah to be careful and not let anyone in, and she reminds me to remain calm. As I pull out of the drive and watch the gate close behind me, a woman approaches on foot, hand-woven baskets stacked on her head and grass whisks tied to her body, looking as though she’s just arrived from some rural area.

As hectic and congested as Cape Town traffic can be, it has a kind of fluid logic that makes sense to me. I know its neighbourhoods and landmarks, its energy and codes. But Johannesburg has its own aggressive rules and an unrelenting pace that leaves me in a cold sweat, even with the satnav voice issuing constant directions to change lanes, to turn in so many metres, to watch out for speed cameras. By the time I arrive at the university I feel like I need to be sedated.

The faculty has arranged a parking space for me in the garage beneath Senate House, which on the outside looks like a late-Soviet grand hotel. Inside it’s an Escher nightmare of lifts and staircases and galleried walkways that never meet up in the way I expect they should. After losing myself twice I finally arrive at English Studies where the administrator tells me I need to go to
another office to fill out paperwork, and then another office after that to get my staff ID card. An hour and a half later I return with the ID and requisite paperwork and no memory of how I got where I went. The department administrator shows me to my office, teaches me the code for the keypad, and explains that I must always remember to deactivate the silent office alarm when I arrive or the security services will be dispatched to investigate.

Left alone in the office, which is bare except for a desk, a chair, an empty bookcase, a filing cabinet, and a computer, I download all the recordings of my interviews with Clare and the scans of her manuscripts. My teaching duties won’t begin until February, and they’ve given me a light load for my first semester, but I intend to work on the book here at the office, even though the house, which offers the distractions of the pool and the television, is much more comfortable, particularly on a hot day like this. I spend the rest of the morning transcribing one of the interviews, and reply to Clare’s message, which arrived in the middle of the night.

*

Dear Clare,

I hope this finds you well. A French friend once told me that one should always begin a letter with a statement about, or wishes for, the recipient, rather than beginning with something self-reflexive. I’m afraid I’ve never quite mastered that.
I
do hope that you are well as you read this. How artificial it would seem to begin a letter with something like ‘Dear Clare, You will no doubt now be enjoying these long December days and preparing for the festive season.’ Perhaps it is something only the French can do – or do well – or perhaps it is the kind of form only truly possible in French. So instead I begin with myself, because it’s the only way I know how.

Please don’t be offended when I say that I was shocked to
hear that the new book might in some way be a memoir – that’s certainly what your last message seems to imply. Of course I look forward to it, and can only say how intrigued I am. I’ve managed to bully an editor into letting me review it. Do you read reviews?

Knowing
Absolution
is now on its way, I feel more than ever that other areas need to be explored for the biography, and doing so in person would be the best possible way. I have teaching duties here from February, but would like to see you in the next six months if at all possible.

I also feel that I need to apologize again. In the process of transcribing our interviews, I realize now how stupid my questions were, and how juvenile. I don’t know how you found the patience for them. I can sometimes hear the irritation in your voice on the recordings, but only in your voice. Thank you for that – for the restraint you showed, and the patience of your words.

Yours,

   Sam

Before going to find lunch downstairs, I look up Lionel Jameson’s office location in the main building. If it’s him, as I know it must be, I’m not sure what I’m going to say when we meet. Perhaps it would be better to phone or e-mail first, but when I’m outside, eating my sandwich on the front steps of the Central Block, I decide there can’t be any harm in going to see where his office is, even if I don’t intend to knock, even if I lose all courage and never end up meeting him.

His door of heavy brown wood, covered in posters about direct action and anti-globalization rallies, is midway down a long corridor with high ceilings. It’s enough for now to know where it is. I can make contact in time, once I’ve mustered the courage. Though I tell myself that I want to ask him about Laura, my hesitation, I realize, is as much to do with what he may remember about me as a child.

I turn to walk away when the door opens. He stands looking at me, unmistakably Lionel, though his hair is thinner and wilder than it was two decades ago. It’s a relief to see him and I feel an unexpected flush of happiness. For the first time, I understand that we’re not that far apart in age – he must be only six years or so older than me, but at the time he seemed remotely adult.

‘Are you waiting for someone?’ he asks.

‘Lionel Jameson.’

‘That’s the name on the door.’ He’s gruffer than I remember him, louder too, his voice booming down the corridor and bouncing off the high ceiling.

‘I’m Sam.’

He studies my face and shakes his head. ‘Sorry, are you one of the candidates for the lectureship? The interviews are down the hall.’

‘I’m Sam Leroux. I used to be Sam Lawrence. That was the name you would have known at the time. Laura Wald brought me to you.’ I watch his face change, the furrows in his brow flatten, his pupils dilate.

‘Come inside,’ he says, swinging open the office door. ‘I’m afraid I’m in a hurry.’

Lionel’s office is full of book boxes that have never been unpacked from some prior move. It has the feeling of antiquity, of a storehouse forgotten by everyone except its lone attendant. I’m making him more than he is. He’s just a prematurely ageing academic, a typical professor, blind to chaos or too overworked to bring order to his own mess. The shelves are stacked with papers and files and it looks like nothing has been dusted in months.

‘I’m so relieved you’re okay,’ he says, studying my face. ‘Not a boy any more! You are all right, aren’t you?’

‘So you do remember me.’

‘You sound almost as American as I do now. Tell me you weren’t in Chicago too?’

‘New York.’

He shakes his head, crossing his arms over his chest and laughing. The drawers of the filing cabinet in the corner of the room are open, disgorging bundles of paper-clipped documents and hanging folders. ‘There are so many questions,’ he says, pulling his red hair away from his head. ‘But you are
all right
after all? I worried so much when we left you.’ His face twitches as he fidgets with a paperclip holding together a sheaf of papers. I reassure him, tell him I’m fine. This was never the reaction I expected. ‘You must have questions for me, too. Whatever I can tell you– ’ He pauses, shakes his head again, as if thinking better of something he was about to say.

I tell him that I’m writing Clare’s biography, that I’ve almost finished the research, but still have a few leads I’d like to pursue. Even though Clare has been unwilling to talk to me about Laura, I don’t feel I can let the story go. It deserves at least a small place in the book.