Absolution (43 page)

‘I haven’t found out.’

‘Nor shall we, I suspect,’ Clare says, looking preoccupied. ‘I suppose I could have denied knowing who Charles was or where
he might be, but there seemed no point in lying to you. You, I think, would have dug up the truth no matter what I might have said.’

‘But would you acknowledge that it was also self-serving, in a way, to admit it was you?’

‘Oh yes. If I reveal that I was the writer whose work I advocated banning then I inoculate myself against criticism. I do see that entirely. But it’s the truth, and even though it should immunize me there’s also something damning about
that
, isn’t there? As if I had planned it from the beginning – a way to indemnify myself against ever being called to account for my work as a censor. See, I would be able to say,
I may have banned a book, but it was only one of my own
. I fear I did not think quite so tactically at that age. If anything, it was an experiment. And the experiment failed, in a way, when the book was delivered to me for review. Some other censor might have read it and decided it should pass, though I cannot imagine that would have happened. Or they might have read it and said,
This is indisputably the work of Clare Wald
. Though that is even more unlikely, because the book was nothing like anything else I’d ever written, and not least because at the time Clare Wald did not have an unmistakable style or trademark. My first few books were so different from one another. At the time, Clare Wald was too young to be known or even recognizable. There, you have trapped me into talking about myself in the third person,’ she says, holding out her cup for me to refill. She smiles in a way that looks almost compassionate, but I’ve learned not to trust my readings of her expressions. The face says one thing and she’ll be thinking something else altogether.

The afternoon progresses and while I try to concentrate on the task at hand, returning to points we’ve covered in the past and clarifying a few areas that still seem fuzzy, the whole time I’m thinking of Laura, of what I’ve learned about her, and of standing on Clare’s porch at her old house. I look at Clare and
I see her younger face, behind the mesh of screen, and I see her daughter’s face, too, as I last saw it in the hills above Beaufort West. In moments of silence between us I try to understand what Laura’s care for me means in light of Timothy’s revelation, but I can’t reach any conclusions. All I know with certainty is what I experienced and what I observed. In the absence of evidence, everything else is hearsay and conjecture.

Clare’s face gradually falls into the look of disappointment I’ve come to know so well. I’m letting her down, but if she wants me to ask about my own place in her life, the place that almost was, I still can’t bring myself to do it. The dread of hearing her answer is enough to keep me mute on that point. If only she would give me some concrete sign that she remembers that day on her doorstep.

‘You might have guessed that the other thing I have to ask about is Nora.’

‘Yes, I thought you would come to that.’

‘
Absolution
is fiction–’

‘I didn’t want to call it that. The publishers insisted. It’s easier to sell a novel than a weird hybrid of essay and fiction and family and national history, although it’s really the latter – both fiction and something that is not quite fiction but less than proper history or memoir. That is why I said I didn’t think it would usurp the position of your own book.’

‘So the confession about your role in Nora’s assassination is which of those? Fiction or non-fiction?’

‘I leave that to you to decide, Samuel. You know I am loath to explicate my own texts. All I will say is that there is no evidence to support either conclusion – that the historical Clare Wald did or did not make herself complicit in the assassinations of the historical Nora and Stephan Pretorius, as distinct from the fictional analogues for all three of those individuals, which is how I would urge anyone to read the characters in that book.’

‘And the wig? Was the house invasion real?’

‘It was real. The wig was stolen, and recovered more or less as the book suggests. But it remains, like so many crimes in our country, unsolved.’

‘But–’

‘No, Samuel. Really. I’ve said as much as I dare.’

One half of Clare’s mouth turns up in a smile and she looks like she might want to say more, but it’s clear that I can push her no further. Just then Marie returns having taken much longer than necessary to buy the Australian writer’s book. Clare tells her we’ve almost finished, explaining to me that she has a dinner appointment with the Festival organizers.

‘I have a great many commitments over these few days. More and more people are scavenging for a shred of my time. The university wished for me to spend a month with them and did what such institutions are capable of doing, dangling bewitching amounts of money in an attempt to convince me I should be resident on campus and give a whole series of readings and lectures. “Really, I do not need the money,” I told the very nice woman who approached me. “But think of your children, and your estate,” she said. “One of my children has long been missing and presumed dead,” I told her, “and the other is quite rich.” “Then give it all to a deserving charity and think what good it would do,” she said. “I
have a better idea
,” I suggested. “Why don’t
you
give it directly to a deserving charity of
my
choice and we can leave it at that?” “I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way,” said the woman, explaining in her terribly nice way that it was money in payment for services, as though I were some kind of working woman and the university the wealthiest of possible tricks. That is unkind of me. In fact I think nothing of the sort, but it is not quite my idea of what a writer’s life is supposed to be, all that punditry, puffery, public intellectual posturing and – I’ll avoid the most obvious word since we both know what it is. In the end I told her no and begged her give the money to one of a list of charities I thought worthy of support. She said she would do what she could, but
suspected it would not be possible. Would I at least give a lecture? she asked. I submitted to that. So I must also come back here next week. It is exhausting even thinking about it. You will have to forgive me, Samuel, if I must say goodbye for now. Others make demands on me and I lack the strength to fight off all of them.’

Though she looks sympathetic I can’t help wondering if it’s a performance of sympathy and she’s just a very good actress, playing the role the situation demands. I gather my recorder and notebook and stuff them into my satchel. Before I leave the hotel room, she stops me, a hand on my arm.

‘This you may take away,’ she says, passing me a thick envelope that she’s pulled from the drawer of an end table, her hands shaking, lower lip finding its way in between her teeth. ‘It is for you. I mean, you may keep it. It’s something I need you to read. Wait until you get back to wherever you’re staying. Do not read it now. Do not read it in front of me. Please do not read it in the lobby downstairs and come racing back. Read it and think. I shall wait to hear from you.’

I can’t help being intrigued, but I promise to wait. I walk back into town and then turn south, towards the river, stopping at a café on Ryneveld when I can’t contain my curiosity any longer. Inside the envelope there’s a letter and a thin typescript.

Dear Samuel
,

There are questions you came to Cape Town to ask that you did not ask. There are questions I should like to ask you as well. But in the absence of either of us having the courage to ask the questions for which we most want answers – the answers without which the entire process seems to me pointless – I offer you the enclosed text. I thought I knew how to frame the questions, but I did not. I also thought I should find the courage to ask you, and I did not, still have not. The text I offer is for you, not for the book. It is for you and for my daughter and for me, not for publication. The only way I know how to ask the questions is to write around them, to interpose my own imagination into the events as parties necessarily invested with their own versions of history have related them to me. What I want from you, if you feel able to offer it, is an indication of where I have gone wrong in this imagining. I am asking in the only way I know how, for you to tell me what you know
.

Love
,

   
Clare

At first I am simply confused, and unsure what it is I’m reading.

You come out, across the plateau, running close to the ground, find the hole in the fence you cut on entry, scamper down to the road, peel out of the black jacket, the black slacks, shorts and T-shirt underneath; you are a backpacker, a student, a young woman hitchhiking, a tourist, perhaps with a fake accent. Soon it will be dawn. But no, I fear this isn’t right. Perhaps it wasn’t there, not that town – not the one on the plateau, but the one further along the coast at the base of the mountains …

She must have made a mistake. She never would have intended for me to see this. It is far too personal. And then I turn a page and find myself in the text and begin to feel dizzy. But the versions of me and of Bernard that I find in her words are people I don’t recognize, and the events she recounts are not the events as they occurred. She knows and she doesn’t know. As dinnertime approaches, and I’m due to meet Sarah back at our hotel, I come to the end:

You wanted him to throw out his arms and cling to you, cry out not to be abandoned, force you into doing what you could not.

But he had nothing to say.

Of course I remembered him at once. Not just here. I knew him immediately in Amsterdam. And finding him suddenly
before me, it was like being faced with my own assassin. I wondered if he had come to exact his pound of flesh. But he has only ever been charming.
What does he want?
I ask.
Why can he not say what he has come to say?

On the final page, in the long lines of her shaky hand, is a brief postscript:

Come back tomorrow afternoon and say what you failed to say in Cape Town. Let us say what we both know is between us. C.

Absolution

Though still shaken by Mark’s abrupt dismissal of her confession, the next morning Clare made an attempt to return to her usual routine. She woke early and swam before her son was up. Adam arrived as she was drying off and she buzzed him in through the front gate. After a long period of negotiation and renegotiation, she and Adam had settled into a routine that suited Clare and that she hoped also suited him. He had accepted her small patch of exotic plants, the vegetables and herbs and flowers, while she had accepted that as far as growing conditions and soil amendments and the indigenous species were concerned, Adam would have to be treated as the authority, and that beyond the imposition of her kitchen parterre, the structure of the garden should remain unchanged, at least for the present.

With Adam’s agreement, Clare ordered two hundred Queen of the Night bulbs, which she had decided should go across the pale front of the house in an unbroken mass, providing a sombre and elegant ribbon of contrast in the spring. ‘We will have to replant them every autumn,’ she told him. ‘Queen of the Night is a fussy, unpredictable tulip, not very robust. If you can make them bloom from year to year, I should be impressed. Would your brother approve of them, do you think?’

‘He did not like tulips so much,’ Adam said, ‘because he thought they are the Dutchman’s flower. But these black tulips, I think he never saw these ones. I think they will make a nice memory.’

‘A memorial. Yes, I think it is a very nice way to think of them,’ Clare said. ‘One fitting for a gardener, always needing renewal.’

When Clare returned indoors, she found Mark in the kitchen, drinking his milky coffee and reading the
Mail & Guardian
.

‘Have you had time to consider?’ Clare asked. ‘Have you reached a decision, or can you only offer absolution from the instance?’

‘No pleasantries this morning, Mother?’

‘You leave me to sleep on my confession and refuse to pass sentence. I have not slept. I could not sleep, in expectation of what you might say. I have been swimming to try to do something with my nervous energy and my anxiety of anticipation. Don’t make me wait any longer. Tell me if what I did deserves amnesty, if it truly had political motivation, or if you think I did it out of nothing more than personal spite. That is all I am asking, for your opinion.’

Mark closed the newspaper and folded it in half, so that the masthead remained visible. The front-page story was an investigation of government corruption, of backroom deals and nepotism and fraud in the ruling party, of police payoffs and arms deals and trafficking and the silencing of dissent. Smoke and fire, Clare thought, there is far too much smoke. She sat across from Mark at the breakfast table and tried to draw his eyes to hers as he looked down at the paper, at his coffee cup and pale hands, avoiding her gaze. He drank, slurping his coffee, exhaling and inhaling, and exhaling again so loudly that the exhalation could only be called a sigh. He had condescended to play Clare’s game; it struck her as unfair that he should now begrudge fulfilling his role, which would see the process to its necessary conclusion.

‘You want to know my opinion. This is only the verdict of this court, as you clearly like to imagine it. I don’t say that I’m the final authority or that I have any particular
moral
authority in this case. I feel, perhaps, that I should recuse myself because of my involvement with you, the defendant, and with the victims, although I have no memory of the latter and nothing that I recognize as strong feeling for them. Possibly, though, a small part of me even now wishes that I had been given the chance to know them, and wishes that they had also been given the chance to change, to show themselves more than and less than what
you and others thought of them. Change, as you would yourself admit, Mother, is not impossible. The crime you committed – betraying the location of two people whose lives held a symbolic value in this country at the time – is not clear to me. That is to say, it is not clear to me that there is a definite connection between what you said and what happened. We would have to prove that someone – perhaps the man you suspected of being an MK cadre – had reported the information to someone else, perhaps Mr Dlamini, the man who was found guilty and sentenced to death for carrying out the assassinations. Without being able to determine that, I cannot reach a verdict. Let us assume, though, for the sake of this artificial process, that you were responsible in some way, directly or indirectly, which leaves the question of whether your motivation was political or personal – the one being excusable, under the rubric of amnesty that briefly held sway in this country, the other being merely criminal. What I must decide is whether you’ve proved that your motivation was political. My immediate feeling is that you have not. You were not a member of the ANC or the Communist Party, and certainly not of MK,’ he snorted. ‘You couldn’t even bring yourself to become a member of the Black Sash. You were taking orders from no one, so I fail to see how your action was political.’