by Andre Brink
“Come, “she said.
At the same time police were moving in with dogs to break up the crowd before it could turn into a demonstration; and in the confusion they escaped to the miserable little café of the previous time. At this hour it was nearly empty; one of the neon tubes on the ceiling had fused, and the other was flickering on and off at irregular intervals. They went to a table behind a large green plastic pot-plant and ordered coffee.
Ben was in no mood to talk, brooding over his own thoughts. Accepting it without comment, Melanie finished her cup in silence. At last she asked:
“Ben, did you really expect a different verdict?”
He looked up, stung by the question, and nodded in silence.
“What now?”
“Why do you ask me?” he said angrily.
Without answering she beckoned the waiter and ordered more coffee.
“Can you understand it?” he asked, challenging her.
Calmly she said: “Yes, of course I can understand it. What else could they have decided? They can’t admit that they are wrong, can they? It’s the only way they can keep going.”
“I don’t believe it,” he said obstinately. “It wasn’t just anything: it was a court of law.”
“You’ve got to face it, Ben: it’s not really the function of the court to decide on right or wrong in absolute terms. Its first duty is to apply the laws.”
“What made you so cynical?” he asked, stunned.
She shook her head. “I’m not cynical. I’m only trying to be realistic.” Her eyes softened. “You know, I can still remember how my father used to play Father Christmas when I was small. He always spoiled me, in every conceivable way, but his favourite diversion was that Christmas game. By the time I was five or six I’d found out that all this Father Christmas stuff was nonsense. But I couldn’t bear to tell him, because he enjoyed it so much.”
“What on earth has that got to do with Gordon?” he asked dully.
“We’re all constantly playing Father Christmas to one another,” she said. “We’re all scared of facing the truth. But it’s no use. Sooner or later we’ve got to face it.”
“And ‘truth’ means that you must reject the notion of justice?” he said in a rage.
“Not at all.” She seemed bent on mollifying him as if she were the older person. “I’ll never stop believing injustice. It’s just that I’ve learned it’s pointless to look for it in certain situations.”
“What’s the use of a system if it no longer has any place for justice?”
She was looking at him with silent, ironic eyes. “Exactly.”
He shook his head slowly. “You’re still very young, Melanie,” he said. “You still think in terms of all or nothing.”
“Certainly not,” she objected. “I rejected absolutes the day I rejected Father Christmas. But you cannot hope to fight for justice unless you know injustice very well. You’ve got to know your enemy first.”
“Are you quite sure you know the enemy?”
“At least I’m not afraid of looking for him.”
Irritable, cornered, he pushed his chair back and got up before he’d touched his second cup. “I’m going, “he said. “This is no place to talk.”
Unprotesting, she followed him outside, to where the home-going traffic had subsided and the streets looked empty and plundered; hot, smelly air was moving in listless, hopeless waves among the buildings.
“Don’t brood on it too much,” said Melanie when they came out on the pavement. “Try to sleep it off first. I know it’s been an ordeal for you.”
“Where are you going?” he asked in sudden near-panic at the thought of her leaving him.
“I’m catching my bus down in Market Street.” She prepared to go.
“Melanie,” he said, not knowing what had got into him.
She looked round, her long hair swinging.
“Can’t I take you home?”
“If it isn’t out of your way.”
“Where do you live?”
“Westdene.”
“That’s easy.”
For a moment they stood opposite one another, their vulnerability exposed in the grimy light of the afternoon. In such insignificant moments, he wrote afterwards, in such trivial ways, a life can be decided.
“Thank you,” she said.
They spoke no more as they walked on to the parking garage; nor in the car, later, over the bridge and down the curve of Jan Smuts Avenue and left in Empire Road. Perhaps he was regretting it now. He would have preferred to be alone on his way home; her presence affected him like light beating on unsheltered eyes.
The house was in the older part of the suburb, on an incline, a large double plot with a white picket fence in which there were several gaps. An ugly old house from the Twenties or Thirties, with a low curved verandah sheltering the red stoep, rounded pillars covered in bougainvillea, green shutters, no longer rectangular, and hanging from half-broken hinges. But the garden was appealing: no landscaped lawns or streams or exotic corners, but honest well-kept flowerbeds, shrubs and trees, a luxuriant vegetable patch.
Ben got out to open the door for her, but when he came round the car she had already stepped out. Uncertain, crestfallen, he hesitated.
“Do you live here on your own?” he asked at last, unable to reconcile the house with her.
“My father and I.”
“Well,” he said, “I’d better go.” He wondered whether he should offer her his hand.
“Wouldn’t you like to come in?”
“No, thank you. I’m not in a mood for people now.”
“Dad isn’t home.” She narrowed her eyes to look at him against the late glare. “He’s gone climbing in the Magalies-berg.”
“All alone?”
“Yes. I’m a bit worried, because he’s almost eighty and his health isn’t very good. But no one can keep him away from the mountains. Usually I go with him, but this time I had to stay for the inquest.”
“Isn’t this a very lonely place to live?”
“No, why? I can come and go as I wish.” After a moment: “And one needs a place like this, where you can withdraw when youfeel like it.”
“I know. I tend to do the same.” He was, perhaps, giving away more than he’d intended. “But then I’m a lot older than you.”
“Does it make any difference? One’s needs depend on oneself.”
“Yes, but you’re young. Don’t you prefer being with other people and enjoying yourself?”
“What do you call ‘enjoying yourself’?” she asked with light irony.
“What young people normally mean by it.”
“Oh I enjoyed myself in my own way when I was younger,” she said. “I still do.” Then, not without a touch of wryness: “You know, I was even married at one stage.”
It intrigued him; he found it hard to believe: she looked so young, so unscathed. But looking at her eyes again he felt less sure of himself.
“You said you were in a hurry to get home, Mr Du Toit,” Melanie reminded him.
She had called him by his first name before; and it was this unexpected, slightly provocative formality which prompted him to say: “I’ll come in if you offer me a cup of coffee. I didn’t drink my second cup in the café.”
“Don’t feel obliged.” But with a quietly satisfied air she went through the broken iron gate and followed the unevenly paved path to the stoep. It took her some time to find her key in her handbag; then she unlocked the door.
“Follow me.”
She led the way to a large study comprising two ordinary rooms with the major portion of the wall between them knocked out to leave a wide archway supported by an enormous elephant tusk on either side. Most of the walls were covered with bookshelves, some built-in, a few lovely antique cases with glass doors; for the rest, ordinary pine boards balanced rather precariously on bricks. There were a few worn-out Persian rugs on the floor, and springbuck and oryx hides; the curtains before the large bay windows were of fad
ed velvet, once probably old-old, now a dirty yellowish brown. Prints in the open spaces between the book cases: Munch’s three girls on the bridge, a Rembrandt Titus, a Braque still-life, an early Picasso, Van Gogh’s cypresses. Several enormous easy chairs with cats sleeping on them; an exquisite inlaid chess-table with yellowed ivory and ebony chessmen, oriental in design; an old baby-grand piano, and a veritable ark of a military dropside desk. The desk, as well as two smaller tables and all other available spaces large and small, including the floor, were covered with piles of papers and books, some lying open, others with torn paper bookmarks protruding from the pages. On the floor lay tangled lengths of flex leading from a record-player to two voluminous speakers. The whole room was redolent of old tobacco and cats and dust and mould.
“Make yourself comfortable,” said Melanie, sweeping an armful of books, newspapers and handwritten sheets from a chair and persuading one of the innumerable indolent fat cats to give up its place. Going across to a record cabinet standing with doors wide open because the shelves inside were too crammed for them to be closed, she turned on a reading lamp perched on top. It cast a dull, dusty, yellow glow across the splendid chaos of the room. In a strange way she seemed to belong to the room, even though at the same time she appeared wholly out of place. Belonged, because she was so obviously at home there and could find her way so surely in the confusion; out of place, because everything there was so old and musty and used and lived-in while she appeared so young and untouched.
“Sure you’d like coffee?” she asked, still standing beside the lamp, its light touching her shoulders and one cheek, one half of her dark shiny hair. “Or would you prefer something stronger?”
“Are you having something?”
“I think we need it after today.” She passed under the arch flanked by the improbable tusks. “Brandy?”
“Please.”
“With water?”
“Thanks.”
She went out. He began to explore the double room, stumbling over the wires of one of the loudspeakers, mechanically running his hand along the spines of books in a shelf. There seemed to be the same lack of any discernible system in the books as in the room itself. Arranged haphazardly next to one another, he discovered books on law, a Greek Homer, the Vulgate and an assortment of Bible commentaries, philosophical works, anthropology, old leather-bound travel journals, art history, music, Birds of South Africa, botany, photography, dictionaries in English, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Latin; a collection of plays; Penguin novels. Nothing appeared new, everything used and read and thumbed; in the few books he pulled out to scan, there were dog-eared pages, underlined passages, margins filled with comments in a minuscule almost illegible handwriting.
He lingered beside the chess-table, lovingly touching a few of the delicately carved pieces, executing a few moves in the classical, satisfying harmony conceived by Ruy Lopez – white, black; white, black-and feeling, for the first time, the pang of envy: to play with a set like this after handling the soiled, worn wooden pieces of his own; to live in daily contact with it, like this girl Melanie.
She entered so softly behind him that he never heard her; and he was startled when she said:
“I’ll put it down here.”
Ben looked round quickly. She had kicked off her shoes and was settling into the chair she’d cleared earlier, her legs folded under her, a cat on her lap. He removed the debris from a chair opposite her and took the glass she’d left on a pile of books. Two large grey cats approached him, rubbing against his legs, tails in the air, purring luxuriously.
In the heavy, sombre snugness of the disordered room they sat drinking in silence for a long time. He could feel the dull fatigue slipping from him like a heavy overcoat gliding from a hanger and landing on the floor. Outside the dusk was deepening. And in the dusk of the room inside, caressed by the brooding yellow light of the single lamp, the cats were moving silently, invisible in the darker gloom where the light could not reach.
Temporarily, only temporarily, the harsher realities of the long day were softened: the courtroom, death, lies, torturers, Soweto and the city, everything which had been so unbearably vivid in the seedy little café. Not that it ever disappeared entirely: it was like a charcoal drawing over which a hand had lightly brushed, blurring and smudging the starkness of the lines.
“When will your father be back?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Don’t know. He never sticks to a schedule. A few more days, I think. He left a week ago.”
“This looks like the study of Dr Faustus.”
She grinned. “That’s him, all right. If only he’d believed in the Devil he might have decided to sell his soul to him.”
“What does he do?” It was a relief to be talking about her father, bypassing himself and her and whatever had happened.
“He was a professor, Philosophy. Retired years ago. Now he does whatever he feels like. And every now and then he goes off into the mountains, collecting plants and things. He’s been all over the place, up to Botswana and the Okavango.”
“Don’t you mind staying behind here all on your own?”
“Why should I?”
“I was just asking.”
“We get along perfectly.” In the obscure golden gloom of the lamp, surrounded by everything familiar to her, she seemed to shed her reticence more easily. “You see, he was nearly fifty when he came back from the War and married my mother in London. She was – oh, years younger than he, the daughter of old friends. And after a romance of only three weeks – when he’d known her before the War, she’d still been a child, he’d never paid any attention to her – they got married. But she couldn’t adapt to South Africa and just a year after I was born they were divorced. She went back to London and we’ve never seen her since. He brought me up on his own.” She sipped her brandy, smiling with all the generosity of her mouth. “God knows how he managed, he’s the most unpractical man I’ve ever seen.” For a while it was quiet, except for the cats purring, and the rustling sound of her chair as she moved her legs. “He studied law to start with,” she said. “Became an advocate. But then he grew fed up with it and dropped everything and went to Germany to study philosophy. It was in the early Thirties. He spent some time in Tübingen and in Berlin, and a year in Jena. But he got so depressed by what was happening in the Third Reich that he came back here in ‘Thirty-eight. When war broke out, he joined the army to fight Hitler and ended up spending three years in a German camp.”
“What about yourself?”
She looked up quickly, studying him for a minute. “There isn’t much to say about me.”
“What made you become a journalist?”
“Sometimes I ask myself the same question.” She fell silent again, her eyes large and mysterious in the dusky room. Then, as if she’d suddenly made up her mind, she said: “All right, I’ll tell you. I don’t know why, I don’t like talking about myself.”
He waited quietly, aware of a growing relaxation, an openness made possible by the increasing darkness outside and the gentleness of the old house.
“I was brought up in a very sheltered way,” she said. “Not that he was possessive – not openly, anyway. I think he’d just seen enough of the mess the world was in to want to protect me as much as he could. Not against suffering as such, but against unnecessary suffering. And later, at university, I took a nice, safe course. Literature mainly. Hoping to become a teacher. Then I got married to a man I’d met at school, he’d been one of my teachers. He adored me, carried me on his hands, just like Dad had done.” She moved her head; her dark hair stirred. “I suppose that was where the trouble started.”
“But why?” He felt a sudden pang of longing for Linda.
“I don’t know. Perhaps there’s always been something contrary inside me. Or is it the opposite? I’m a Gemini, you see.” A provocative smile. “Deep down, I suppose, I’m just lazy. Nothing would be easier than to indulge myself, to allow myself to sink back into it, like in
one of these old easy-chairs. But it’s dangerous. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? I mean, one can lead such a delightfully cushioned existence that you actually stop living, stop feeling, stop caring. As if you’re in a trance, living in a constant high.” She was toying with her glass. “Then, one day, you discover that life itself is slipping past and you’re just a bloody parasite, something white and maggot-like, not really a human being, just a thing, a sweet and ineffectual thing. And even if you try to call for help, they don’t understand you. They don’t even hear you. Or they think it’s just a new craze and start doing their best to humour you.”
“So what happened? What made you break out of it?”
“I’m not sure that anything really dramatic or spectacular is necessary. It just happens. One morning you open your eyes and discover something prickly and restless inside, and you don’t know what’s the matter. You take a bath and go back to your room and suddenly, as you pass the wardrobe, you see yourself. And you stop. You look at yourself. You look at yourself naked. A face, a body you’ve seen in the mirror every day of your life. Except you’ve never really seen it. You’ve never really looked. And now, all of a sudden, it comes as a shock, because you’re looking at a total stranger. You look at your eyes and your nose and your mouth. You press your face against the smooth, cold surface of the mirror, until it’s fogged up, trying to get right into it, to look right into your eyes. You stand back and look at your body. You touch yourself with your hands, but it remains strange, you cannot come to grips with it. Some mad urge gets into you. An urge to run out into the street just as you are, naked, and to shout the filthiest obscenities you can think of at people. But you repress it, of course. And it makes you feel even more caged in than before. And then you realise that all your life you’ve been hanging around waiting for something to happen, something special, something really worthwhile. But all that happens is that time passes.”
“I know,” Ben said quietly, more to himself than to her. “Don’t you think I know what it feels like? Waiting and waiting: as if life is an investment in a bank somewhere, a safe deposit which will be paid out to you one day, a fortune. And then you open your eyes and you discover that life is no more than the small change you’ve got in your back pocket today.”
