Absolution (35 page)

Accidents were always happening. He had come from a country of accidents. He tried to understand what this meant. It seemed to mean that no one was ever responsible for anything if only you could tell the truth and most of all if you could say you were sorry. But he had not told the truth and he was not sorry.

There was no way to explain all this so he said nothing for a moment and tried to think of an explanation that would make sense in his head. By some movement of grace he had found this woman who seemed to like him, and now that he had found her he could not imagine being without her, but to tell the truth about everything would risk too much. He could not trust that she would understand, he could not trust that she would keep his secrets. He could sense her hunger for strangeness and story,
for the hidden and the scandalous, and he knew that hunger was insatiable.

It just happened
, he said, shaking his head.
I don’t remember how it made me feel. I missed my parents. That’s what I felt
.

He could see that she wouldn’t be satisfied with what he had felt. He would always need to give more, to paint a landscape of fantasy, because he was sure that she wanted for him to have come from a place she couldn’t imagine. So he told her about birds she hadn’t heard of – hadedas and bulbuls and loeries – and plants she had never seen – giant euphorbia and cabbage trees and wild figs – and mountains so green and soft it looked as though they’d been upholstered with velvet and dotted with specks of cotton-wool sheep. He animated grey motes of dust into troops of vervet monkeys on plateaux and mountain passes and herds of springbok grazing the plains, great bustards exploding out of the flat Karoo and families of baboons camped in the middle of highways. He told her about landmarks from his childhood, Table Mountain, Fish Hoek, Camps Bay, and spun stories of hot weather in the months that were winter in the northern hemisphere.

Yes
, she said,
it sounds like an amazing place. But there are people in it, too, Sam. And I want to hear about them. I want to hear more about your parents. You’ve never even told me their names
.

Peter
, he said,
and Ilse
.

Sam

Before we were married, I finally told Sarah what my parents really were, that they had died in an attack, but that they were the attackers, that they had killed themselves by accident, and killed others in the process – some innocent, some complicit in the institutions of apartheid.

I told her in the car on a trip to her parents’ house in Virginia. I waited until we were driving, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to back away from what I had to confess.

‘You’re saying that your parents were suicide bombers.’ Her voice was so quiet it was almost inaudible above the sound of the road.

‘Their deaths were accidental. As I understand it, they were going to leave the car outside the police station and phone in a warning, but there was a problem with the device. While they were waiting for the right moment, the appointed time, before they’d left the car, the bomb detonated.’

‘I thought the anti-apartheid struggle was non-violent.’

I had imagined she would scream and shout in anger. Instead, she sounded stunned, like someone struck by a sudden and incomprehensible grief.

‘You have to understand it in context. It was an accident. It wasn’t supposed to happen the way it did. Innocent people were not supposed to die. You can read the TRC testimony about their case. Their deaths were an error.’ I remember struggling to catch my breath, feeling my throat constricting. It seemed perverse to talk about my parents in this way, as though their deaths were the equivalent of a clerical mistake: the wrong file pulled from the records, the wrong order processed, the wrong employee terminated.

For ten miles we drove in silence. I opened my mouth and felt myself beginning, almost despite my own better sense, to tell Sarah the truth about Bernard. My heart was racing to collapse but I wanted her to know. I wanted finally to tell someone what I’d done.

‘I guess in the end it doesn’t matter,’ she said, before I could find the courage to speak. ‘But I wish you’d told me in the first place.’

In the end I didn’t tell her about Bernard. I still haven’t. I tell myself that now it’s too late, and that no good could ever come from the telling.

With no one left to ask which year I received the train set, which the red tricycle, I stew all the Christmases before my parents died into a single hot, chaotic day with a trip to the beach, a Hawaiian-themed feast, a Mexican lunch, twelve guests, two guests, grandparents, no grandparents, and my mother and father always drinking sundowners out of a plastic thermos, wearing swimming costumes and rubbing sunscreen into my skin. The first Christmas that I spent with my aunt in Beaufort West, the heat shimmered off the painted metal roofs and my arms stuck to tables, my legs to the plastic chairs on the back veranda. Friends of Ellen’s came for lunch and she made five different salads and a roast chicken and there was Christmas cake with rolled icing and marzipan, bought from a woman at the church. She gave me gifts designed to comfort more than cheer: new shoes, a pair of shorts, an anthology of short stories. As I opened them I felt no happiness and struggled not to burst into tears, and then I cried anyway when I opened the photograph of my mother as a teenager, which Ellen had put in a silver frame. Whether Ellen had any gifts to open herself I can’t remember.

I’ve managed to forget the first Christmas after my parents died, alone with Bernard in his house, surrounded by beer and beef, hot from the braai. There were no gifts that year, none that I want to remember.

I decide to believe that my parents doubted, withdrew at the last moment, considered, consulted each other, confirmed they were doing the right thing no matter the risk to themselves or what their failure would mean for me. They couldn’t believe they were driving to their own deaths. They couldn’t have wished to kill. I’ve tried to convince myself it was only supposed to be an exercise to prove the power to kill, assuming a bomb can ever just be an exercise.

The container from New York came a few days ago and I go searching for the file I’ve kept of transcripts and clippings relating to my parents.

*

CAPE TOWN, 29 OCTOBER 1999 – SAPC

MK COMMISSAR DESCRIBES TRAINING FOR CAPE TOWN SAPS BLAST

The TRC today heard that the 1988 bomb that killed five people outside of the Cape Town Central Police Station was a justifiable attack on a government target designed to demonstrate to the apartheid regime that they were not untouchable.

Six former members of MK, Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress, made applications for amnesty in relation to their involvement in this and a number of other attacks on government installations in the 1980s.

Among the applicants was Joe Speke, 52, who planned some of the attacks during his tenure as head of the ANC’s Special Operations Unit, including the attack on Cape Town’s Police Station. Mr. Speke described how the Cape Town Central Police Station bomber Peter Lawrence underwent training in the use of a remote-controlled device that malfunctioned, inadvertently killing both Lawrence and his wife, the reporter and ANC activist Ilse Lawrence, who was with him in the car at the time of the blast. One police officer and two
civilians were also killed when the car, loaded with 10kg of explosives, prematurely detonated.

Mr. Speke, who is represented by Cape Town-based lawyer and Professor of Law at UCT William Wald, was cross-examined by Carlo Du Plessis, SC, who is representing the families of the two civilians killed in the blast. The families oppose the amnesty application of Mr. Speke on the grounds that the victims were civilians whose deaths could serve no political purpose. Mr. Speke suggested it was possible that the Lawrences’ cell had been infiltrated by the security services and the bomb sabotaged.

Mr. Speke will finish his testimony on Monday.

© South African Press Corporation

*

I read a report like this and struggle not to be angry. What stupid people, I think. What stupid people to risk their lives in that way. Even if the bomb hadn’t gone off prematurely, they almost certainly would have been caught and sent to prison – or if they’d managed to escape, taking me out of the country for a life in exile, as must have been their plan, then they still might have been assassinated. I know that they loved me but how much can they really have loved me if they were willing to risk my own wellbeing? I put the file away before I make the mistake of reading anything more unsettling. If their mission was compromised, perhaps there is a kind of solace in that, knowing that they were killed not in error, as a result of their own mistakes, but by the enemy itself, the state.

We take only a few days off for the holidays and then both go back to work. I shut myself in the office at the university and return to the recordings of my interviews with Clare, making careful transcriptions that take much longer to complete than the conversations themselves. I’m still only in the first days of the
interviews, early in the process. My voice always sounds strangled, pinched and otherworldly as it comes out of the computer speakers. Clare, though, sounds just like I remember her.

‘Did motherhood change the way you wrote?’ I can hear the inflection in my voice, a modulation I know was intended to suggest a judgement already formed.

‘You forget that I was a mother,’ she drawls, clearing her throat and coughing, ‘before I was ever a writer.’

‘But the two unpublished novels that you dismiss as juvenilia, those were written before you were married, so I think the question isn’t unjustified.’

‘Fine then. Did motherhood change the way I wrote? You mean the practice of writing or the content?’ Without any audible transition, she goes from dismissive to sounding as though she’s at least willing to weigh the question seriously.

‘Either. However you wish to interpret “wrote” or “writing”.’

‘It’s not a terrible question now that I think about it,’ she says, pausing again, and I remember her looking out the windows at her garden, always looking, as though the plants, the trees and the flowers, perhaps even the lawns and the lap pool, held all the answers. ‘Motherhood changed the practice of writing in predictable ways. My time was no longer entirely my own, though such an experience is not unique, least of all for a mother. Simply, the case is this: investing oneself in the institution of family is always about the partial annihilation of self (for the unlucky, for those who comprehensively rebel against the constraints of family because they feel no other choice but to do so, family feels like the
total
annihilation of self, the foreclosing of all possibility of individual subjectivity). For me, as a mother and wife at that historical moment in this most socially retrogressive of settler countries, it meant that I was suddenly burdened with child care, with the fundamentals of dirty nappies and hungry mouths and wailing and nap time and then, eventually, with the ferrying back and forth to school and to see friends and the dramas of
adolescence, while the children see the parents, if they see them at all (if mine saw me at all), as disciplinarians and facilitators and protectors rather than actors in their own right: the child’s narrative, for the child, has to eclipse that of the parent, who is a mere supporting character. So motherhood robbed me of time, and to claw back some of that time (here I’m being grotesquely confessional), I carved it out of my marriage – less time for my husband, more for the writing and the children. My son would tell you a different version, one in which, once my career took off, I was almost always absent, and he was raised by his father, nannies, au pairs, maids, and even gardeners. But it would not be an accurate version, nor, I admit, a wholly inaccurate one, and in that respect I do not feel I have to apologize for having been absent at times as my children grew up. I was there when it was important to be there. As for the content of the writing, whether the biological and chemical fact of motherhood changed my style and form and subject matter, I’ll have to leave that to the critics, who will decide after my death.’

Absolution

Clare had no appetite for dinner. She pushed her food around on the plate, toying with it like a cat fondling an animal it has killed by mistake, while Mark finished one portion and helped himself to another, as if he could neither eat his fill nor be done with the meal fast enough. Eye contact between them, when it happened, was only momentary; it seemed that her son was doing everything in his power to avoid looking at her. The plate before him, the series of four geometric paintings on the walls of the dining room, and the windows with their views of the floodlit back garden, lights turning the trees and shrubs into a static menagerie and the pool into a fantasy portal of shimmering green, these were what Mark’s eyes rested upon, not on the face of his mother. It was impossible to tell him how much this hurt. Clare tried not to stare at him, but she could not help it; he was all she had left in the world apart from the people whom she paid to organize and look after her. She knew that he was no longer hers to claim – that right belonged to his wife and his children, if it belonged to anyone.

‘Was it only last year that I had the house invasion?’ Clare asked, less because she was uncertain and more to break the silence.

‘Don’t you remember, Mother? It was the year before.’ He said it in a way that suggested Clare was often forgetful and she felt the rebuke like a punch to the gut.

For many years before the break-in Mark had encouraged her to sell up and move somewhere more secure than the house on Canigou Avenue, and when at last she had recognized there was no other choice but to subject herself to voluntary house arrest behind high walls and gates and electric fencing, with
Marie as her personal turnkey, always stalking behind, even then she had complained that it was no way to live, no way for a woman, no way for any person, let alone someone who had forever taken her freedom for granted. In retort Mark had told her South Africa was no place for a single elderly woman, or two such women, to be living without the protection of a man at home twenty-four hours a day. Go to Australia or New Zealand, he’d pleaded, or Britain or France, or even America. Any one of those would be preferable to here. Clare had asked him, thinking of his wife who had experienced several near misses on the street outside their house, if marriage or the companionship of a man guaranteed protection. No, Mark had been forced to concede, if it were possible for him to find a job elsewhere in the world, somewhere safer, a place where he could go out to the shops in the evening without worrying about what might be waiting at home when he returned, or what might happen on the way there or back when he was doing something as innocuous as picking up the dry-cleaning, then he would move the whole family, Clare included, without hesitation. He had reached the conclusion that South Africa was simply no place to be a woman of any age or any race. ‘The only thing that would make these people change,’ he’d said, ‘is if all the women in the entire country simply left. That’s what it would take: the desertion by more than half the population to demonstrate that they’ve had enough of being treated as less than second-class citizens, less than animals, but as property held by the community of men, open to the exploitation of men, abused and subjugated and made to act against their own interests, to be complicit in the violence that is done against them by men.’