The Impostor (10 page)

10

The words keep coming. Some of the urgency fades after the initial burst, but at the end of every weekend, after he’s visited Gondwana, he sits down at his desk with that familiar inward glow, which outlasts the act of writing: even in his idle times, he feels fired now with conviction and certainty, a sense of powerful purpose.
This
is what he came up here for;
this
is the self that he wanted to discover.

He doesn’t return to the weeds. They were always a substitute occupation. He feels no guilt these days when he hears them rattling in the wind out there. Writing poems is like a different kind of purging. Though there is a definite moment of unease when he sits on the back step one morning and notices, in the patch of ground he’d cleared at the top of the yard, that a fresh round of weeds is springing up. He goes closer to see and there’s no doubt about it: a fuzz, a soft, green stubble of them, questing out of the soil. As fast as he had taken out the old dead weeds, new ones are suddenly sprouting.

He bends down and tears one of the little plants out. It comes away easily, a translucent filament topped with two bright leaves. It is months away from becoming the tough, thorny adversary he’s been dealing with. But it will: the future is encoded in its cells. It’s the water that’s done it–the same water he’d used to soften the ground. Generations of seeds are lying dormant under the surface, waiting for his labours to release them. The very means of clearing the yard is what will fill it again. He has a melancholy insight into powers that he cannot understand: there are thousands and thousands of weeds, a rising green tide made of numbers and fecundity, and through them an intelligence is at work, larger than each individual plant, replenishing itself through secret strategy.

He’s distracted from these metaphysical qualms by the abrupt appearance of his neighbour at the fence. Blom has a way of creeping up soundlessly, then suddenly barking a greeting. ‘Morning! I see you’ve got a problem there.’

Adam jumps. ‘Yes, they’re growing back.’

‘You can get weed killer at the co-op. Only thing that’ll sort those buggers out.’

‘That means soaking the whole place in poison. I’m not keen on that.’

Blom smirks and shrugs. ‘Then dig, my friend. Dig.’

There have been a few of these conversations recently. Since he’d come over to fix the windmill, Blom has lost his distance and inhibition. He has been using a familiar, matey tone with Adam. Their talks have always been brief, usually conducted over the fence, and they centre on some or other point related to the garden. But when the exchange is over, Blom always hangs around a bit longer than necessary. He never looks at Adam directly in these moments, but stares off at a slant, a cigarette glowing at the corner of his mouth like a lit fuse. It appears as if there is something on his mind, something he would like to say. After standing there for a while in his quietly feverish way, he usually turns quickly and goes back inside his house.

But not today. After hanging around for a minute or two, he suddenly tells Adam, ‘You know, I was afraid of you the first time I saw you.’

‘That first morning?’ Adam says. ‘When I was sitting out here?’

Blom nods. ‘I thought the place was empty. I wasn’t expecting anybody. Then I looked up and saw you.’

‘It’s natural,’ Adam says. ‘To get a fright.’

Blom’s eyes are fixed and wide, looking somewhere else. ‘I thought for a second,’ he says, with a strangled little laugh, ‘that you’d come to kill me.’

Adam blinks. ‘But why would I do that?’

‘I don’t know why.’ He laughs again–a high, disturbing sound. ‘I just thought it: that man will kill me. I don’t know why it came into my mind.’

‘I won’t kill you,’ Adam says. ‘What nonsense.’ The thought stays with him all day, keeping him unsettled.

What to think about Blom? He is both obvious and mysterious. The two of them haven’t had anything like a personal chat and Adam is happy to leave it that way: he likes the neighbourly distance between them. But then one night there is a knock on the kitchen door and when he opens it Blom is on the concrete outside, a bottle of brandy in his hand. He has a vague, unsteady air about him. ‘I decided to come and have a
dop
with you, my
pêl
,’ he announces.

Adam is dismayed, but he lets him in. A line is definitely being crossed here. He hasn’t wanted relations with the blue man to reach this point, with both of them sitting around in his lounge, drinking brandy and Coke, talking about their lives. But as the evening wears on, the alcohol unpicks Adam’s reserve, so that he almost enjoys Blom’s company.

His story is ordinary–a tale of small-town life, drifting from one place to another in the Karoo. He has held down a variety of manual jobs, as a mechanic and handyman, at one time doing repair work for the railways. He was married, he says, for forty years, but his wife had passed away recently. That had been the impetus for his last move, from Middelburg to here. He had arrived in the town not long before Adam.

‘But I tell you,
ou maat
,’ he sighs, ‘I think that was the last time. A man can’t keep jumping around like this! No, it’s finished now, I’m going to stay here until I die.’

He has delivered this whole account in a casual, relaxed way. But then, even in his most languid moments, there is something febrile about Blom. He peers anxiously at Adam now, looking apparently for condemnation or approval.

‘That’s good,’ Adam says. ‘It’s nice to…to be settled somewhere.’

Blom considers this, then his face cracks open in a beaming smile. It’s as if he’s relieved about something. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘You are my only true friend!’

The declaration startles Adam. The two of them hardly know each other, but even if they spent many more hours together, he doubts they would ever be friends. Blom is rural and Afrikaans and working class; Adam is a bourgeois city type. Their proximity here is an accident, an artificial encounter.

Perhaps to bring this home to Blom, Adam starts talking about himself. He tells about his previous job, and about the move up to the town, stressing how passing and temporary it is. He means these details to show how different they are, but the moment he mentions his poems, Blom becomes serious and intense. ‘I also make poems,’ he says.

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘You come and visit me sometime, I’ll show my poems to you.’

‘Oh,’ Adam says. ‘Okay.’ This talk baffles him, but he isn’t curious to find out what it means. He has had enough enforced friendliness for one evening and he’s relieved, not long afterwards, when Blom says that he has to go.

Over the next while there are several more chats over the fence, but Blom doesn’t arrive unexpectedly at the door again. He hints that he’s expecting a return visit from Adam, but when this doesn’t happen, an element of wary reserve creeps back between them. They go back to keeping their distance. They are friendly, but not too close.

All of this feels like part of a growing harmony in Adam’s life, a settling into his new incarnation. The weekdays in town are only half of it. The other half is the weekends he spends out at Gondwana, with Canning and Baby. The days there are unattached to anything else. Even time seems to pass at a different pace–much faster, slipping over him like wind.

When he thinks back afterwards on these visits, it’s as if he’s taken part in something heightened and artificial: a drama in a theatre full of rich colours and subtle lighting effects, with a row of roosting peacocks as an audience. The supporting cast is numerous and nameless. Everywhere in the background there are servants dressed in khaki. They are the guards at the gate, the labourers in the fields, the workers repairing fences. They are, he understands, the community of people from
Nuwe Hoop
, at the gate to the farm. Outside the fence they are individual in their poverty, but inside, in their generic pale uniforms, they are like a single entity, a chorus without a voice. Closer to the centre, there is Ezekiel and Grace, for some reason the only two servants allowed to work in the echoing, empty lodge and the surrounding buildings. They have names and a dim past, which trails behind them when they walk, though their lines are few and indistinct. In the middle of the stage there is Canning and his wife, with their cryptic dialogue, their mysterious exits and entrances. They seem to have usurped the main roles by accident, like understudies suddenly thrust into the spotlight.

His own part in this is as yet obscure. At certain moments he thinks of himself as a central character, at others he is merely a spectator. Nor is it entirely obvious yet whether this is tragedy or farce.

On his visits, he always sleeps in the same
rondawel
where he spent the first night, and it’s soon so familiar to him that he starts leaving some of his clothes in the cupboard. His weekends there become ordinary and normal so quickly that it’s hard to believe he didn’t know these people until recently. When Canning talks about what old friends they are, it almost feels true to Adam. In the beginning he had felt like a fraud, a bit of an impostor. But by now he has half-persuaded himself that they do have a meaningful connection going all the way back to childhood. He almost does have a memory of Canning from their schooldays, and in time it’s hard to know whether this hazy half-impression is recalled or invented.

He spends most of these weekends in Canning’s company, where time shapes itself around a certain routine. There are the fires under the tree at night, the round upon round of blue cocktails. At dusk Canning likes to go down to the lion’s enclosure, to watch the feeding. And during the long, hot days, he likes to take Adam on outings into the bush, either in the jeep or on foot.

There is something about these excursions that hearkens back to boyhood, as if they’re a pair of adolescents, with no adult cares or responsibilities, tramping off on some loose adventure. Canning likes to pack sandwiches and flasks of tea, which he carries in a rucksack. He has a stick which accompanies him on some of the rougher missions. In his designer outdoor gear, wearing a floppy hat and dark glasses, slathered in sun-cream, Canning resembles nothing so much as a plump, enthusiastic scout on a camp.

Adam is more demure and restrained. He has never been one for dressing up and exploring. But the lush green foliage of the
kloof
has set something free in him, something to do with his early years. He feels fresh and rejuvenated when he’s out there, and his energy rises accordingly. He finds himself enjoying these little jaunts, in part for the physical release they bring, in part–he has to admit it eventually–because he starts to quite like Canning’s company.

So they head out into the scrub together, to climb some
koppie
that Canning remembers from when he was a boy, or to a swimming-hole he used to frequent with Lindile, his first black playmate. A lot of these expeditions are nostalgic, burrowing down into special sites from Canning’s past. Once he takes Adam to a stretch of the river that is famous for its fossils. And they have no sooner arrived than Adam trips, quite literally, over a chunk of rock that on closer inspection shows itself to be a kind of prehistoric mollusc. He is dazzled and amazed, until he searches around and finds other casts and impressions scattered nearby, or sticking out of the crumbly river-bank.

‘This is extraordinary,’ he says. ‘It should be a national heritage site or something.’

‘Yes,’ Canning says sniffily. ‘This was a prehistoric flood-plain, with a lot of silt. Very conducive to fossils. Some of them are two hundred and fifty million years old. Rich pickings here. We did have a team from some or other university digging once. I remember watching them as a boy. But then they upset my father and he chased them off.’

On the way back, they drive along the perimeter fence, close to the main road. Canning stops at one point to investigate a section where the bottom of the fence has been forced up, so that somebody could crawl through. ‘Poachers,’ he says. ‘They were a real problem for a while.’ He takes a crowbar from the boot of the car and bashes away at the fence, trying to knock the wire into shape.

‘Something I don’t understand,’ Adam says. ‘You talk about poachers, and this is supposed to be a game farm. But where are the animals?’

In all the time he’s spent driving or walking around, he has hardly seen anything, except for birds or insects, and once a startled buck.

‘Well, my father died just when he’d started stocking the place. There were zebra and kudu and things, but the really big animals weren’t installed yet. He was going to have them all, you know, the big five. Then he popped his clogs. It was after that, while they were trying to wind up the estate and look for me and all the rest of it, that the place fell to pieces. That’s when the poaching happened, on quite a big scale. We lost a lot of game. When I got here, the farm had pretty much been cleaned out. I signed up the local community, the
Nuwe Hoop
people, to guard the place. But the truth is, they were doing the poaching too. The guards and the thieves were the same people–there’s South Africa in a nutshell.’