by Andre Brink
We sat on the wide cool stoep, drinking tea and chatting effortlessly. Nothing of importance. The drought and the prospects of rain; the labourers becoming less dependable and more “cheeky"; the strawberry harvest; last night’s radio news. There was something wholesome about getting involved in trivialities again.
They wouldn’t let us go without dinner. Roast leg of lamb, rice and roast potatoes, peas and beans and carrots from the garden, homeground coffee. It was past three before we could shoulder our rucksacks and set out on the footpath up the steep slope behind the stone house, into Phil Bruwer’s mountain wilderness.
He led the way in his heavy climbing boots and grey stockings and wide khaki shorts flapping round his bony knees. Brown sinewy calves. Leaning forward under the weight of the rucksack stained and faded with age. The beret with its jaunty guinea-fowl feather. Well-worn beech stick. Perspiration on his weatherbeaten face, his beard stained by tobacco juice. Melanie on his heels, in an old shirt of her father’s, the tails tied in a knot on her bare belly; cut-off jeans with frayed edges; lithe brown legs; tennis shoes. And I beside her, sometimes falling behind.
The mountains aren’t particularly high in those parts, but steeper than one might suspect from below. A curious sensation: it isn’t you who go higher but the world that recedes from you, slipping away to leave you more desolate in that thin and translucent air. A mere hint of a breeze, just sufficient to suddenly sting your face with coolness when you stop in a sweat. The dry rustling of the grass. Occasionally a small bird or a lizard.
We stopped repeatedly to rest or look about. The old man tired more easily than I’d expected. It didn’t escape Melanie either; and it must have worried her for once I heard her asking him whether he was all right. It annoyed him. But I noticed thatafter that she would more frequently find some pretext for interrupting the climb, stopping to point out a rock-formation or a succulent or the shape of a tree-stump, or something in the valley far below us.
On a particularly rocky slope we passed a cluster of huts, a small flock of goats, naked black children playing among the brittle shrubs, a lonely old man squatting in the sun in front of his doorway smoking a long-stemmed pipe and raising a thin arm to salute us.
“Why don’t we build us a little hut up here too?” I said lightly, nostalgically “A vegetable garden, a few goats, a fire, a roof overhead, a clay wall to keep out wind and rain. Then we can all sit here peacefully watching the clouds drift by.”
“I can just see the two of you sitting there smoking your pipes while I have to do all the work,” said Melanie.
“Nothing wrong with a patriarchal system,” I replied, laughing.
“Don’t worry, I’ll give you more than enough to keep you busy,” she promised. “You can teach the children.”
I’m sure she meant it quite innocently. Still, when she said it — the children – there suddenly was a different kind of silence between us, a different awareness. In the candid light of the sun she was looking at me, and I looked back. The fineness of her features, the large dark eyes wide apart, the gentle swelling of her lips, her hair moving in the breeze, her narrow shoulders straining against the weight of the rucksack, the faded khaki shirt with its knotted tails, baring her belly, the navel an intricate little knot fitting tightly into its cavity. For a moment all that mattered was simply being there, relinquishing the world, isolated in that immense space.
Inevitably her father nipped our silly and extravagant romanticising in the bud.
“Impossible to turn your back to the world,” he said. “We’re living in the wrong age. We’ve tasted a different forbidden fruit, so we have no choice but to go back.” A neatly timed punctuation mark; and then he was off on one of his tangential anecdotes. “Old friend of mine, Helmut Krueger, German from South-West Africa, was interned during the War. But old Helmut had always been a clever bastard, so one day heescaped, clinging to the chassis of a truck that used to deliver vegetables to the camp.” Out of breath, he sat down on a rock. “So far so good. But when he got back to South-West, he found that all his friends and neighbours had either gone away or been interned; and he himself couldn’t show his face for fear of being recaptured. So life became pretty dreary.” He started fiddling with his pipe.
“What happened then?” I prodded him.
Bruwer smiled impishly. “What could he do? One fine day he just went back to the camp, in the same vegetable truck he’d used to escape. You can imagine the commandant’s face at the next roll-call when they found they had one prisoner too many.” A resounding crackle. “See what I mean? In the end you always have to go back to your camp. It’s our condition. Rousseau was wrong about being free and acquiring fetters later. It’s the other way round. We’re born in bondage. And from there, if you receive enough grace or if you’re mad enough or brave enough, you break free. Until you see the light and return to your camp. We still haven’t learned to handle too much freedom, you see, poor miserable creatures that we are.” He got up. “Come on. We can’t sit around on our backsides all day.”
“You’re very pale,” said Melanie.
“You’re imagining things.” As he wiped the beads of sweat from his face I could also see the pallor through his deep tan. But without paying attention to us he jerked the rucksack back into position, took his heavy stick and strode on.
However, Melanie saw to it that we settled into a camping spot well before sunset. A small sheltered opening surrounded by large boulders. We gathered wood. Then I stayed behind with him while Melanie went off in search of grass and shrubs she could use for bedding under her sleeping bag. I sat looking at her until she disappeared behind a ridge as knobbly as the vertebrae of some prehistoric animal: how I would have loved to go with her, but the “proper behaviour” of a lifetime forced me to keep the old man company.
“What are you looking so depressed for?” he asked, and I realised that he’d been watching me closely for some time. “You’re in the mountains now, Ben. Forget about the world outside.”
“How can I?” I started telling him about the disappointments and dead-ends of the recent weeks, the disappearance of the old cleaner, my visit to John Vorster Square. “If only they would allow me to talk things over with them,” I said. “But I just seem to blunder on blindly. They simply won’t give me a chance to ask, or to explain, or to discuss.”
“What else did you expect?” The familiar crackling sound. “Don’t you realise?-discussion, dialogue, call it what you will, is the one thing they dare not allow. For once they start allowing you to ask questions they’re forced to admit the very possibility of doubt. And their raison d'être derives from the exclusion of that possibility.”
“Why must it be so?” I asked.
“Because it’s a matter of power. Naked power. That’s what brought them there and keeps them there. And power has a way of becoming an end in itself.” He began to carry the wood to the spot he’d chosen for the fire. “Once you have your bank account in Switzerland, and your farm in Paraguay, and your villa in France, and your contacts in Hamburg and Bonn and Tokyo – once a flick of your wrist can decide the fate of others – you need a very active conscience to start acting against your own interests. And a conscience doesn’t stand up to much heat or cold, it’s a delicate sort of plant.”
“Then it would be madness to hope for even the most paltry form of change.”
He was standing on hands and knees like a Bushman, tending his fire. The sun had gone down and the twilight was darkening. His face red with blowing, gasping for breath, he sat up after a while, wiping his forehead.
“There are only two kinds of madness one should guard against, Ben,” he said calmly. “One is the belief that we can do everything. The other is the belief that we can do nothing.”
In the deep dusk I saw her coming towards us, and my heart gave a jump. Through what unfathomable ways does a thing like this announce itself to one? – it’s like a seed you put in the earth; and one day, miraculously, a plant breaks throu
gh the soil, and suddenly nothing can deny its existence any more. In just that way I knew, the instant I saw her approaching from afar, minute in that infinite dusk, that I loved her. And at thesame time I knew it was an impossible thing, going against the grain of everything that had shaped me, everything I believed in.
Almost deliberately I started avoiding her. Not because I was wary of her, but of myself. It was, of course, impossible to keep out of her way altogether. I could manage it while all three of us were preparing supper; but not afterwards. Because the old man left us quite early to bed down in his sleeping bag.
Worried, she went over to sit beside him. “Dad, you sure you’re all right?”
He shook his head, annoyed. “A bit tired, that’s all. I’m not as young as I used to be, remember.”
“I’ve never known you to get tired so easily.”
“Oh stop it. I’m feeling a bit nauseous, something I’ve eaten. Now leave me alone, I want to sleep.”
And so the two of us were left beside the fire. From time to time she would turn her head to look in his direction; once or twice she got up to investigate, but he was sleeping. Whenever the flames began to subside I added more logs to the coals, sending up a spray of red sparks into the dark. Occasionally there was a dry breath of wind. Smoke swirling, temporarily obscuring the stars.
“Why are you so worried about him?” I asked her once.
She was staring into the coals, a cardigan draped loosely over her shoulders to ward off the chilly night air creeping up from behind. “Oh I’m sure he’ll be all right in the morning.” A long pause. Then she turned to look at me: “What upsets me is the way one gets attached to someone. Then you begin to panic when you suddenly realise—” A fierce shake of her head, sending her dark hair swinging over her shoulders. “Now I’m being silly. I suppose the night does it to one. One’s defences are down in the dark.”
“You do love him very much, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. He’s always been with me. That time I was breaking up with Brian he was the only one really to understand – even when I was just battling on blindly, not really knowing what was happening. But that wasn’t why I went back to live with him again: I couldn’t simply exchange one bond for another. Once one has taken the sort of decision I took then,you’ve got to be able to go it alone. It’s a precondition. Otherwise—” Once again she looked round to where he was sleeping, a dark bundle in the dark; then her eyes returned to the fire.,
“Can one really survive entirely on one’s own?” I asked. “Is it possible to be so totally self-sufficient? Is it wise?”
“I don’t want to detach myself from anything. In that sense you’re right, of course. But – to be dependent on another person, to derive your whole sense and substance from another—”
“Isn’t that what love is really about?”
“When I left Brian,” she said, “he loved me and I loved him. Inasmuch as we knew anything about love at all.” A silence. Her unavoiding eyes. “If you want to be a journalist, if you’re really serious about it, you’ve got to give up security, stability, predictability. Here today, off again tomorrow. Up and down the face of Africa. Now and then you meet someone who makes you realise you’re also human, you’ve got human needs, you’re hungry. But you daren’t yield. Not quite. Something is always held back. You may share a few days with him, perhaps a night.” This time she was quiet for a very long time and I was conscious of nausea lying inside me like a dumb animal. “Then it’s off again.”
“What are you trying to achieve?” I asked. “Is it really necessary to punish yourself like that?”
Impulsively she laid her hand on mine. “Ben, don’t you think I would love to be a simple little housewife with a husband I can meet at the door when he comes home from work at night? Especially when you are thirty, and you’re a woman, and you know time is running out if you want to have children?” She shook her head angrily. “But I told you before. This country doesn’t allow me to indulge myself like that. It isn’t possible to lead a private life if you want to live with your conscience. It tears open everything that’s intimate and personal. So it’s less messy to have as little as possible that can be destroyed.”
I didn’t look at her but deep into the coals, as if trying to probe beyond them, into the heart of the black earth; and I said what I could not keep secret any more: “Melanie, I love you.”
The slow intake of her breath. I still didn’t look at her at all. But I was aware of her beside me, knowing her more intenselythan I had ever known another person: her face and hair and the slight body enclosing her, shoulders and arms and hands with sensitive fingers, small breasts under the loose shirt, and the tense curve of her belly, everything that was hers; and even more exquisitely than her body I knew her presence, and ached for her as the earth aches for rain.
After some time she leaned her head against my shoulder. It was the only caress we exchanged. It would have been possible, I suppose, to express our need and our discovery more intimately. On the hard soil we might have made love that night, body and body together in the dark. But I was afraid, and she too, I think. Afraid of everything that would be defined and circumscribed by such an act; everything which, until that moment, had existed only as possibilities. We owed one another that compassion not to involve each other in more than we could handle or more than was allowed us.
It must have been quite late when we got up. The coals were burning very low, their light a dull red glow on her face. She turned to me and, standing on her toes, briefly pressed her lips against mine. Then turned away quickly and went to her sleeping bag beside the old man who was breathing deeply and unevenly.
I stacked more wood on the fire, made a brief excursion into the night, and returned to my own bag. Slept restlessly for a few hours before I woke up again and remained lying, my head on my arms, staring up at the stars. Jackals cavorting eerily in the distance. Pushing myself up on an elbow I looked at the two dark shapes beside me in the flickering light of the coals. The old man nearer to me. Then she, Melanie. From very far back came her playful, theatrical words: When one person unexpectedly finds himself on the edge of another – don’t you think that’s the most dangerous thing that can happen to anyone?
I could lie down no longer. The jackals had stopped howling. But her nearness and her almost inaudible breathing disturbed me. I pulled a few heavy logs to the smouldering fire and with the help of some brushwood coaxed the flames back into life. Then sat down beside it, wrapped in my sleeping bag, and lit my pipe. Once or twice I heard the old man moaning in his sleep. There was no sound from Melanie. It felt like keeping watch by the bedside of a sleeping child.
This was what it had come to. But what was “this"? Peace, grace, a moment of insight, or a still greater wilderness? Night around us, as dark as faith.
My thoughts wandered back, all the way. Childhood. University. Lydenburg. Krugersdorp. Then Johannesburg. Susan. Our children. Responsibilities. The empty predictable rhythms of my existence. And then the change of direction, so slowly that I’d barely noticed it. Jonathan. Gordon. Emily. Stanley. Melanie. Behind every name an immensity like that of the night. I felt myself groping on the edge of a strange abyss. Utterly alone.
I thought: There you lie sleeping, two yards away from me, yet I dare not touch you. And yet: because you’re there, because we are both alone in this same night, it is possible for me to go on, to go on believing in the possibility of something whole and necessary.
The bitter cold of the predawn. A breeze stirring. Stars fading and turning grey. The early, murky light pushing up from the horizon. A landscape slowly revealed. The simple secrets of the night exposed, intricate and indecent in the light.
At sunrise I started making coffee and before I’d finished the old man joined me beside the fire, looking very pale and shivering.
“What’s the matter, Prof?”
“Don’t know. Still this nauseous feeling. Can’t breathe properly.” He rubbed his chest an
d stretched his arms to expand his lungs; then looked round uneasily. “Don’t mention it to Melanie. It will just upset her and I know it’s nothing, really.”
It wasn’t necessary to mention it to her. She saw it at the first glance when she joined us a few minutes later. And after breakfast, which none of us enjoyed, she insisted on turning back in spite of his indignant protests. Neither of us made any reference to the previous night. In this daylight it appeared preposterous and absurd. For the last kilometre or so we had to support him between us. Melanie drove back from the Greylings’ farm. I wanted to go home with them to give a hand, but she insisted on taking me back first.
All day I waited anxiously. In the evening she telephoned. Hewas in the intensive care unit in hospital. Heart attack.
Late this afternoon I went to their house but it was deserted. Tonight she phoned again. He is no longer critical, but still very weak. Will probably have to spend several weeks in hospital.
“Shall I come over?” I asked.
“No, rather not.” A momentary return to the peaceful warmth we’d shared so briefly in the mountains: “Really, it’s better this way.”
I’m left with the disquieting, ridiculous thought: Is Phil Bruwer the latest victim of my leprosy?
But I dare not give way to a new depression. Whatever happens from now on I must remember that one night we were together on the mountain. It is the truth, however unreal it seems in retrospect. And for the sake of that memory, even though I can give no logical explanation for it, I must go on. Stanley was right, after all. We must endure. We must survive.
9
In late November Phil Bruwer was discharged from hospital. Ben drove him home, Melanie sitting in the back. The old man was shockingly frail and white, but nothing could quell his exuberant spirit.
“I decided not to die just now,” he said. “Realised I’m not quite ready for Heaven yet. Too many sordid habits I still have to conquer.” With some effort, and none of the carefree virtuosity of earlier days, he forced out a fart to illustrate his point. “I mean, suppose I blew out my last breath at the wrong end. St Peter may not approve if a jet-propelled angel came whizzing through his gates like that.”
