Absolution (9 page)

‘I’m going to sleep,’ Bernard said. ‘You can stay and wait, or you can leave. Suit yourself. Don’t mind your company, but don’t want to keep you if your mother’s expecting you.’

‘What about the boy?’

‘Sam’s fine.’

You walked around the picnic ground, looking for somewhere to sit out the day, while Bernard stretched along the length of the seat. Tiger was between his legs, the dog’s tail slapping the man’s gut. Sam slipped out of the cab after you and sat at the base of a tree, fiddling the earth with a stick, boring into the dust between his feet, red canvas shoes, withdrawing the stick, boring again, deeper, withdrawing, a chimpanzee using a stick to harvest ants from a hole. His dark hair was red with a layer of dust and his skin was peeling from sunburn.

You knew it would have been wiser to keep moving, but the child kept staring at you, opening his mouth as if to speak, then turning again to the stick and the earth, grinding and digging into the soil, up and down, one hole after another.

Cars were passing. If you wanted to play your part properly you would have continued your journey. Instead, you ate a peach and read the newspaper, which told you nothing you did not already know, nothing the authorities did not want everyone to know. Terrorists would be blamed. At that moment the police were raiding several properties and two remote farms suspected
of operating as training camps. Did you imagine the knock on my own door that morning, the men, the memories that knock conjured of an earlier knock, many years ago, on the morning after a similarly horrific night? You dismissed the consequences for the rest of your family – you had to in order to survive. I understand that, at least.

And me? What of me? What should I have said when the men asked, when they shouted? What did I know? I tell myself that I knew nothing that could have changed anything at that point. Earlier, though – if they had come the day before, or the day before that, demanding I confess what I knew of my daughter’s plans and her associates, I can no longer say what I might have given away. And why, I ask myself now, every day that passes, did I not take the chance myself? To save you, to save others, I might have betrayed you. Would a defeat on that day have changed the course of anything, the balance of lives lost against lives saved?

There was no news for you, who knew all that mattered on that day. You clawed in the sand trying to make up your mind – cruel, an ostrich in the wilderness.

1989

The boy understood that his Uncle Bernard had been a soldier once and still called himself a warrior. This was a reason for doing and not doing all kinds of things. A warrior did not listen to music except when going into battle and a warrior trained his body to live on less, to eat only once a day, twice at most. A warrior knew the psychology of his enemy. A warrior had to rely on nature for survival and so a warrior had to be – what was it he said? – intimately acquainted with the bitch.

This meant that when they went on these drives there was no music.

Are we going into battle?
Bernard barked, when the boy asked if he could turn on the radio.

No
, the boy said, even though he didn’t know if this was the answer Bernard wanted to hear.

Then no music, hey? No battle, no music. You got to keep your mind focussed. Music and food, these things distract a person, man
.

Was my father a warrior?

Bernard laughed and rolled down the window and spat into the wind.

The boy remembered car trips with his parents to see his Aunt Ellen in Beaufort West, and once to visit friends in Kenton-on-Sea. The radio was always on, all the time, even if his parents complained that the music was terrible. It was something to drown out the sound of the road and the hot wind that came in through the windows if it was a dry month, or the rain on the roof that hammered them deaf if it was wet. Music made time pass, sped up the hours that seemed so much longer driving fast in a car. The boy would fall asleep to music, especially if it was the
old-fashioned music his parents liked, and wake after dark when they arrived on the street where his aunt lived, and felt himself being carried inside by his mother or father and tucked between sheets stretched tight over the cushions of the sofa in his aunt’s lounge, a sofa that smelled like one of his parents’ parties if it were held in a sweet shop or bakery.

On the road that night with Bernard, the boy thought about how he hadn’t seen his aunt in at least a year. He wondered if he would see her again. Somewhere he was sure he had her phone number and address. If only she knew how things were, he couldn’t imagine that she’d let him stay with Bernard. He’d asked Bernard if they couldn’t get a cat or a dog, to have some company on the long trips.
I’m not running a blerry zoo
, Bernard had said,
I don’t like animals
.

The boy tried to stay awake, to watch Bernard out of his right eye, the road with his left, but the images kept coming together so that the man’s face turned black and the road turned white. As he fell asleep, the boy imagined that he had the strength to tie Bernard to the front of the truck, so that his head was like a plough or the guard on the front of a train, and he dreamed of driving the truck fast and forward, so that Bernard’s face became black with the road and the road became white with his face.

Sam

A Saturday night. At great expense, Greg has Nonyameko come in for the evening so the two of us can go out to dinner. We drive around into the City Bowl, park up on Kloof Street and have a drink with one of the artists represented by Greg’s gallery. The night is warm, so we decide to walk down the hill to Saigon for sushi. As we pass Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck a young woman comes out of the darkness.

‘Excuse me gentlemen, I don’t mean to be rude,’ she says. Moved by some kind of metropolitan instinct, I turn away. I don’t hear the next words. Out of the corner of my eye I look at her face and clothes, wondering where the clipboard is. She’s either doing a survey for the city, I think, or she’s selling magazine subscriptions, or canvassing for a charity.

Then the story comes out and I can’t help listening. She does odd jobs for people but was unable to find work today. She doesn’t think that ninety rand to pay for a night in the shelter is going to fall out of the sky. She has a daughter. They lost their house. She begins to tremble. I keep my body turned away. New York has hardened me against this kind of plea. But Greg listens, asks me if I have any money, any coins, he doesn’t have any change. I take out my wallet, remove the largest silver coins I have in the change compartment, and ignore the hundreds of rand in notes. The woman has an educated accent; she isn’t drunk and doesn’t appear to be high. As I’ve been trying to decide whether to give her fifteen rand or twenty, she’s covered her face and started to cry. Maybe, I think, she’s a drama student. I knew drama students in New York who were sent out to beg on the streets as a test of their skill. Grades for the exercise were awarded on a scale pegged
to how much each student earned in handouts. The thinnest ones always got A’s.

‘Here,’ I say, and empty the coins into her hand. She mumbles, ‘I’m so ashamed, I am so ashamed.’ I know that the money’s too little. I tell her not to be ashamed and hold her gaze and say it again. She has a crescent of dark freckles around her eyes and brow. Her clothes are good but dirty.

‘There’s nothing shameful about asking,’ I say, and we leave her. Fifteen or twenty rand is nothing to me – less than five dollars, less than four.

As we walk down the hill Greg says, ‘I couldn’t pass her knowing that we were going to spend several hundred rand on raw fish and beer. I think she was telling the truth. It could have been drugs or something else, but I think she was telling the truth.’

‘It doesn’t actually matter,’ I say.

*

At the end of our interview yesterday I asked Clare what my purpose was, why she herself didn’t write about her past.

‘You mean why I didn’t choose to write a memoir?’

‘Yes. Or autobiography.’

She had me at the door and was trying to transfer me over to Marie, so that I could be ushered out of the house. ‘I can’t see my life as a totality, or as a continuous narrative. I wouldn’t know how to write my own life in that way.’

‘But what about fragments?’

‘Yes, fragments, I suppose I could write fragments – I have written about moments. Transitional periods. Narratives of personal trauma, specific traumas. I can write about periods of my life but not my whole life. I wouldn’t know what to put in and what to leave out. Or, I guess what I mean is, I would want to leave out so much there would be very little left. That’s why I need you.’

I wasn’t looking for it. The image comes when I don’t want it, in the middle of the night, bloated with fish and beer.

I’m standing at the screen door, not alone. Someone else puts his palm against the wooden frame. He tightens the palm into a fist and knocks three times. It’s a polite knock, not an insistent one. We hear steps inside and then the interior door opens, and we see her face behind the screen. She asks who we are and what we want.
What is your business?
she asks, and I can hear that she’s trying to be polite but is alarmed by the sight of us. We’re strangers and we must be strange in appearance, too, ragged and bony. I can almost smell myself then. One of the others says who we are and holds up a bag. She takes us through the house, down the dim central corridor and out to the garden. She gives us tea and biscuits. She sees that we’re still hungry and goes back inside to make sandwiches.

Or do I imagine that hospitality? Did she keep us on the front porch, a screen separating her from us, a discreet hand tripping the lock on the door, which would not have been difficult to break down, not for the three of us, travelling for days with so little, so hungry and thirsty we could have broken through deadbolts. Or is that a false memory, too?

It’s her face behind the screen that comes to me. It’s the only thing I can see with any clarity. The rest I don’t know.

*

It’s possible that the conversation late on Friday has changed things between us. This Monday morning I sense that Clare and I have reached a new level of understanding, or at least that she’s beginning to trust me. She speaks more freely, so I return to questions about censorship, since those have produced her most fluent responses so far.

‘You’ve described the mental effect of living under the threat of censorship, but how did it specifically impinge on your writing?’

‘Quite simply, it acted as a constant distraction. Under such conditions, one cannot even begin to put pen to paper in the morning without weighing the implications of every letter, because the censoring mind, parsing and legalistic, looks for meaning even in spelling and punctuation. And that is when one knows that the censor has won, because, ultimately, what the censor most desires is not total control of information, but for all writers to self-censor.’

‘Did you?’

She draws herself up but her shepherd’s crook spine keeps her always somewhat stooped, vulture-like. How tall she must have been before her body began to turn on her. I remember that height from the past, and how it intimidated.

‘Yes and no. I never wanted to write the kinds of books they were inclined to censor. You know that. Protest is not difficult, neither is journalism; even good journalism today requires nothing more than a notebook, a recorder – look at
you –
and the ability to ask dogged questions of someone who does not want to answer, or else merely to observe the world and describe it with insight or a particular point of view. People will always write protest novels and reportage and pornography. One might argue that the tyranny of the censor fuelled my writing as much as defined its parameters. The body of my work is at least in part a product of the place the censor held in my own imagination.’

‘Was the censor embodied in your imagination?’

‘Why?’ She looks startled; the question seems to catch her by surprise.

‘I wondered if you envisioned the censor as a person, rather than an abstraction, or a worm, as you said last week.’

‘Yes, I did,’ she says – no hesitation now.

‘Would you care to say what he, or she, looked like?’

‘Why?’

‘Curiosity.’

‘The censor looked like me. She was an internal doppelgänger, hovering just behind me with a blue pencil, poised to attack. I often thought that if I was very still, writing at my desk, and turned around suddenly, I might see her there, just behind me. You will think me insane,’ she says, sounding amused by her own confession. ‘It is a good question, you know. No one has ever asked me that. I called her Clara – the censoring half of my mind. Not half – maybe quarter or eighth, the little bit I allowed her to occupy, the bit she claimed.’

‘Clara?’

‘It sounded smug to me. A smug little housewife censor who thinks she knows what literature is. The fear I’ve always had–’ She stops and raises her hands. ‘Turn off your recorder.’ I switch it off and put down my pencil. ‘The fear … I’m just a smug little housewife who thinks she knows what literature is. Unlike you, I have no doctorate. I belong to a generation of academics who could build a career on a first degree alone, and a generation of writers who did not go to school to learn how to tell stories. Often I wonder how much of Clara I have let take over. More than an eighth? More than half?’ She holds my gaze, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know, you know, that’s the thing.’

The gardener, who seems to be here every day, draws her attention away from me. ‘What does one do with a man like that? I certainly don’t know what to do. I don’t want to be thought rude, even by him. Especially by him, I mean – by someone like him. I don’t want to be like my mother was. I don’t
want
to be the imperious white madam who can’t help being an autocrat with the servants. Even that, you know – I’m aware what I give away in calling them
servants
instead of
staff
. Don’t think I don’t know. But what is one to do? This is life on the feudal estate. I want to tell him to go away and not come back.
Fire him
as Americans say – such a violent way of ending a professional relationship, burning the terminated, or firing upon them, executing them. But I don’t know how to fire him. My
mother never taught me how to terminate a relationship – any kind of relationship. What is one to do? If I fired him, how many lives would I imperil?’