Absolution (8 page)

‘Did my sister kill anything? I cannot remember. She was not inclined to shoot. It is better not to imagine my sister armed.
But after witnessing the appalling execution of my cousin’s horse (where was my cousin in all of this? this, too, I have unremembered) my sister put down guns forever and, one might say, bided her time, waiting for the gun to come back, to find her, to answer her rebuke.’

Clare

There is the struggle between what I know – what was reported officially, what was reported to me in the last letter from you, the notebooks you kept before you disappeared completely, Laura – and what I imagine. I feel towards the place where the line between the reported and the imagined must lie. But how do I know when and where my own mind pushes that line in one direction or the other, questioning reported fact as possible imagination, crediting fantasy with the reliability of fact? Can you imagine the force of my desire to know the truth from you, who can no longer tell it or else refuses to do so?

No more demurrals, no more waiting or delay or hesitation over what it is possible to know. This must and can only be my own version of your last days, culled from what you chose to tell me, and from what I can piece together from the official record. There will necessarily be other versions, perhaps more complete, less subjective in their way – versions not so far removed from events as this fractured narrative of longing and lamentation that is all I can muster.

It was quiet at first, a radio to fill the gap in conversation, a woman wailing a country ballad. Bernard glanced at the route on his map, and Sam fell asleep against your arm, his breath coming heavy and warm. You squirmed under the heat of the child’s body, hard and trusting, smelling sulphurous and unwashed, a small insect crawling in his hair.

You checked your watch. It was after three in the morning, and you knew how long it had been since you emerged from the trees, crossed the broken fence and skidded down onto the road. You could not sleep.

When you left the old house a month before, neither one of us can have imagined it would be the last time, the last meeting, the first and only final farewell. I nearly write
final failure
, because there were so many between us – farewells that were failures, shortcomings that were also, in some abstract way, incremental steps away from each other, so that we were always saying goodbye, and failing to do so in ways that did neither of us justice. I cannot count the number of times I failed, have failed, continue to fail you. Perhaps you alone can make that tally.

It was only in the previous few days, through the
strange felicities of chance
, as I once wrote, that you threw yourself into what you must have realized was the inevitability of exile. At our final meeting, when we sat in my garden, the shabby cottage garden of the decaying old house on Canigou Avenue (the garden I loved rather than the garden that now intimidates me with its meticulous beauty), my home-grown beets mixing with soured cream and paprika bleeding on a plate, I wore a smug grin at seeing you dishevelled again. You’re allowed to hate me for that, for my smugness, for so much else. Know at least that I never hated you. You said,
This is just the first in a new cycle of meetings, and we’ll go on meeting like this, for many years, until one of us dies
. It was not much of a beginning for a reunion. It was your decision to meet again. I suppose you were finally able to stomach me, even on my terrible terms, to bear my smugness, my judgement, and my failure to judge, too.

In that last letter to me you wrote,
For your sake, I hope you are okay
. Is it true? Would you really have been worried about my feelings, my well-being, in those terrible few days? Apart from yourself, did you not care for me least of all people?

No, that is unfair.

I know that you’ve never approved of my decisions
, you wrote,
or the kind of life demanded by my activities. But I don’t regret. What I’ve done is what I feel has to be done
.

I knew all that. You did not need to tell me.

As Bernard drove, humming along to the radio, you forgot for a moment what had brought you to this point, and, staring at yourself in the rear-view mirror, you wandered through imagined confrontations with him. You beat him to death when he tried to force himself against you, and then you fled with the child into the wilderness, living on scrapings from the bush, deserting sleepwalking civil society for the full consciousness of hermit life. You would raise this boy, Sam –
Samuel
, you would call him, renewing him – alone in a cave, teaching him the world, the names and uses of plants, how to steal eggs and trap birds, the best ways to disappear into the landscape. Or perhaps you would fail to overpower Bernard and he would imprison you in his own remote fastness, teaching you a different vocabulary of power, until you escaped, a serpent prophetess entering the man’s mouth in his sleep, consuming him from the inside, heart first.

The sonic jolt was so strong that the truck swerved off the road to the unpaved shoulder. Bernard clutched the steering wheel, veering back onto the tarmac as a thundering wake thudded through the truck, rattling the windows. Tiger began to howl and Sam woke, grabbing at your waist. You felt the hairs on your body quiver and isolate. Sam’s hands were hot on you and you tried to push him away but he held fast, dumb with fear.

Bernard was trying to catch his breath while a man whined through the radio’s speakers:
pure love, it’s pure love, it’s our love, baby, my love
.

‘Jeez. Must be the power station. Or the gas works. Look at the sky.’

Behind you the horizon was bright with an orange fire. It backlit isolated trees ascending the line of the mountains and the ragged heads of dense forest along the highway.

Tiger pushed his body against Sam, who cringed and whimpered himself, holding tighter to you. ‘The whole coast will be dark. It won’t be safe to stop until daylight.’

At the next crossroads the streetlights had gone out and an abandoned car was ablaze, tendrils of flame leaping into the air and igniting the trees. Ten minutes later a caravan of ambulances and fire trucks passed, sirens droning, strobe lights picking out the trees on either side of the road. Bernard slowed, pulling aside to let the convoy pass.

There had been similar blasts, other kinds of sabotage – you and Bernard both knew what this explosion meant, though your knowledge was more complete than his.

‘Maybe just an accident,’ you said.

‘I wouldn’t bet on it. We’ll see in the papers tomorrow.’

‘I wouldn’t trust the papers.’

‘You’re not one of these sympathizers are you?’

‘No. Not a sympathizer,’ you said, knowing you should stay awake as he drove, listening to the radio, waiting for a news report that would not come, while further convoys of ambulances and fire engines passed, dispatched from the closest city and other neighbouring towns.

Bernard clucked. ‘If it’s
them
, well, you can bet they’ll be hitting other places, too. Lucky I’ve got a full tank. We’ll be okay until it’s light. Can you stay awake to watch the road? Sometimes I don’t see so well at night.’

‘Then why drive at night?’

‘Less traffic. But more risks of course. Hijackings. And what happens if I get a blow out? Then I’m really fucked. Hasn’t ever happened, but I’d be in God’s hands if it did, I’m telling you, you know what I’m saying? That’s why I always bring Tiger.’

‘And your boy?’ Sam was falling asleep again, arms constricting your waist, his head wedged up under your breasts.

‘
Ag
, he’s used to it now I guess.’

‘Not easy.’

‘Naaaa. He likes it,’ he said, like a man insisting a woman enjoys being knocked around. ‘You have any kids?’

‘No.’

‘Husband?’

‘I’m going to my mother’s. She lives near Ladybrand. You can see the peaks of the Malotis from her back door.’ I know you said this, a fact I can count on, me as the excuse, the point of destination. But I lived nowhere near Ladybrand. Is it ungenerous for me to think I was always a convenient excuse for you?

‘I’ll take you as far as Port Elizabeth, but you’ll have to find your own way from there.’ Bernard began to hum along to another song, a woman lamenting the loss of three husbands. He knew it by heart, anticipated each note, could not resist mouthing the words, then singing himself. ‘Your mother know you’re coming?’

‘I’ll phone her when we stop.’

‘That’s if the phones are working.’

*

My biographer pretends to be American now, but there is something unfinished about him that I know like my own breath. Of course, I remembered Sam at once. Rather, in Amsterdam I half-recognized him, and in the weeks that followed learned to trust my memory of him. How could I forget? I do not acknowledge this to him when he sits so uncomfortably before me, squirming on the couch in my study, his palms sweating in this room that I always keep cool. It would be a lie to say I remain silent about our connection because I wish to torture him. I have no such wish. In truth, I am terrified of what may yet be revealed.

So call it, my dear daughter, my Laura, a kind of restitution – my letting Sam in, at long last, much later than I should. I have been tardy in so many things, terrified by so much else. Perhaps in letting him in, I will begin to understand why you did what you did.

But as the days pass and he asks ever more intrusive questions, I begin to see, just barely, the magnitude of what I have done by allowing Sam to come here, to sit in judgement before me, as my auditor, interlocutor, and elegist. I have summoned my own judge,
perhaps even my own executioner – executioner of spirit and will and certainty if not in fact of life. I find it toxic to explain myself, but this is the bargain I have made – the mistake I’ve made at being intrigued by him, at recognizing someone I should have forced myself to forget, for my own sake, ignoring whatever his own needs might be, whatever my debt to him, real or imagined, might yet prove to be, and how it will be settled. What is it he needs? I sense it is not just one thing. I want to say
How dare you?
and know I cannot, because all this turning over of my old soil, hoping a poppy might emerge, was my idea. I wanted it, I agreed on him, which means he is, by my hand, not just conjured, but
authorized
. I will not be one of those who invite and then refuse to accept the consequences of that hospitality. He is my guest and I his hostage. I have invited him into my life because I was curious, because I thought, foolishly, that
on my terms
meant
in my control
. But he is always coming from more than one direction. He does not himself know what he thinks of me. I suppose there is a kind of power in that, but I am too exhausted for an exercise of power.

Was he always so tentative? How did he behave as a child? Is your account of him accurate, or itself a performance for my benefit? What would you make of him now, Laura? In your notebook, he is always cowering and flinching, clinging and trembling. I see some of that now, but also a more sinister quality. He is like a beast that feigns vulnerability to put its prey at ease.

*

A cloud of toxic smoke was moving along the coast, following the weather patterns. You could already see its black mass approaching behind you on the western horizon. Bernard stopped for fuel at a station that had its own generator; everywhere else along the coast was in blackout, as he had predicted. Sam was asleep in the cab, Tiger standing guard over him, panting his sticky breath. You knew that it would have been easiest just to leave them, but
you pretended to phone me, you mimed a conversation, laughing in a way that you have never laughed with me. I told you that I couldn’t wait to see you, in a way that I had never told you. You had a story ready, you were going to tell them that plans had changed, that I was about to leave for our beach house – a house that does not exist – and that I was getting a little forgetful these days, had been confused about plans. But when you returned to the truck Sam was awake and staring at you, his body crossed into a tight knot against the vinyl upholstery. He asked if you were coming with them and before you could remember your invented story you said yes, because he looked afraid.

You bought a newspaper, peaches, another packet of Safari Dates, and bottles of water, which you put into your red rucksack on top of your clothes, folded neatly over your notebooks, hidden at the bottom.

The interior of the cab was ripe with human sweat and dog breath, vinyl and petrol, the rotten egg of the child’s skin. As Bernard drove, Sam sat looking blankly ahead at the road. Every few minutes the child turned his head to stare at you. His mouth pouted, grime at the corners, sometimes opening to show his small teeth. There were globs of sediment in his tear ducts. No one had taught him to care for himself, even to scratch the sleep from his eyes. You smiled at him as if to say, ‘Yes? Ask me anything you like, tell me something, what is wrong, why are you afraid?’, but Sam only stared at you, his mouth hard and impassive, eyes yawning vacant in his skull. It was not a normal child’s expression.

Near dawn, Sam’s nose began to bleed and you helped him with a tissue, pressing until the blood stopped. You wiped his face, and he turned away from you to bury it in the seat. You were accustomed to the smell of blood, but it was overpowering in the heat of the enclosed cab, the hot-iron stench. You opened your window, but Bernard told you to close it. ‘Gravel sometimes flies in. Rather I’ll put on the fan. We’ll stop soon. Always getting
bloody noses. You’d think he was a girl. What a girl, Sam, what a little girl you are, hey?’

After another hour of driving Bernard stopped at a picnic ground. He parked the truck in the shade of a grove of eucalyptus trees clustered next to the road, their sharp-edged leaves rattling. It could have been anywhere along any road in the Cape. There was nothing to mark it as unique – the same stand of trees, the same concrete bench and picnic tables, at this one, perhaps, also a standpipe for water. There were no toilets, not even a barbecue pit or emergency phone.