by Andre Brink
In the seemingly interminable silence that followed they sat weighing each other.
“Why don’t you come out with it?” Ben asked at last. Although he hadn’t meant to, he took out his pipe to keep his hands occupied.
“Mr Du Toit, what I’m going to say to you now is in strict confidence—” He seemed to be waiting for reaction, but Ben only shrugged. “I suppose you know there are photographs in circulation which may cause you some discomfort,” said Stolz. “It so happened that I came across one of them myself.”
“It doesn’t surprise me, Captain. After all, they were taken on your instructions, weren’t they?”
Stolz laughed, not very pleasantly. “You’re not serious are you, Mr Du Toit? Really, as if we haven’t got enough to do as it is.”
“It surprised me too. To think of all the manpower, all the money, all the time you’re spending on someone like me. There must be many bigger and more serious problems to occupy you?”
“I’m glad you’re seeing it that way. That’s why I’m here today. On this friendly visit.” He emphasised the words slightly as he sat watching the thin line of smoke blown from his mouth. “You see, that stuff was brought to my attention, so I thought it was my duty to tell you about it.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t like to see an ordinary decent man like you being victimised in such a sordid way.”
In spite of himself, Ben smiled stiffly. “What you really mean, I presume, is: if I’m willing to co-operate, if I stop being an embarrassment or a threat to you, the photographs will remain harmlessly filed away somewhere?”
“I wouldn’t exactly put it in those words. Let’s just say I may be able to use my influence to make sure that a private indiscretion isn’t used against you.”
“And in exchange I must keep my mouth shut?”
“Well, don’t you think it’s high time we allowed the dead to rest in peace? What possible sense could there be in continuing to waste time and energy the way you’ve been doing this past year?”
“Suppose I refuse?”
The smoke was blown out very slowly. “I’m not trying to influence you, Mr Du Toit. But think it over.”
Ben got up. “I won’t be blackmailed, Captain. Not even by you.”
Stolz didn’t move in his chair. “Now don’t rush things. I’m offering you a chance.”
“You mean my very last chance?”
“One never knows.”
“I still haven’t uncovered the full truth I’m looking for, Captain,” Ben said quietly. “But I have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to look like. And I won’t allow anyone or anything tocome between me and that truth.”
Slowly and deliberately Stolz stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “Is that your final answer?”
“You didn’t really expect anything else, did you?”
“Perhaps I did.” Stolz looked him in the eyes. “Are you sure you realise what you’re exposing yourself to? Those people – whoever they may be – can make things very difficult for you indeed.”
“Then those people will have to live with their own conscience. I trust you will give them the message, Captain.”
A very slight hint of a blush moved across the officer’s face, causing the thin line of the scar to show up more sharply on his cheekbone.
“Well, that’s that then. Good-bye.”
Ignoring Stolz’s hand Ben went past him and opened the door of his study. Neither said another word.
What amazed Ben was the discovery that there was no anger against the man left in him. He almost, momentarily, felt sorry for him. You ‘re a prisoner just like me. The only difference is that you don’t know it.
There was no sign of Melanie at the airport when Ben went there the next afternoon to meet her. The stewardess he approached for help pressed the buttons of a computer and confirmed that Melanie’s name was on the passengers’ list all right; but after she’d gone off to make further enquiries an official in uniform approached Ben to tell him that the stewardess had been mistaken. There had been no person by that name on the flight from Nairobi.
Prof Bruwer received the news with surprising equanimity when Ben visited him in hospital the same evening. Nothing to worry about, he said. Melanie often changed her mind at the last moment. Perhaps she’d found something new to investigate. Another day or two and she would be back. He found Ben’s anxiety amusing; nothing more.
The next day there was a cable from London: Safely here. Please don’t worry. Will phone. Love, Melanie.
It was nearly midnight when the call came through. A very bad line, her voice distant and almost unrecognisable.
Ben glanced over his shoulder to make sure Susan’s door was shut.
“What’s happened? Where are you, Melanie?”
“In London.”
“But how did you get there?”
“Were you waiting for me at the airport?”
“Of course. What happened to you?”
“They didn’t want to let me through.”
For a moment he was too shocked to speak. Then he asked: “You mean-you were there too?”
A distant laugh, smothered and unsettling. “Of course I was.”
It hit him forcibly. “The passport?”
“Yes. Undesirable immigrant. Promptly deported.”
“But you’re not an immigrant. You’re as South African as I am.”
“No longer. One forfeits one’s citizenship, didn’t you know?”
“I don’t believe it.” All his thoughts seemed to get stuck, idiotically, in the violent simplicity of the discovery that she would never come back.
“Will you please tell Dad? But break it gently. I don’t want to upset him in his condition.”
“Melanie, is there anything I—”
“Not for the moment.” A strange, weary matter-of-factness in her voice. As if she had already withdrawn herself. Perhaps she was scared to show emotion. Especially on the telephone. “Just look after Dad, Ben. Please.”
“Don’t worry.”
“We can make other arrangements later. Perhaps. I haven’t had time to think yet.”
“Where can I get in touch with you?”
“Through the newspaper. I’ll let you know. Perhaps we can think of something. At the moment it’s all messed up.”
“But, my God, Melanie—!”
“Please don’t talk now, Ben.” The immensity of the distance between us. Seas, continents. “It’ll be all right.” For a while the line became inaudible.
“Melanie, are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m here. Listen—”
“Tell me, for God’s sake—”
“I’m tired, Ben. I haven’t slept for thirty-six hours. I can’t think of anything right now.”
“Can I phone you somewhere tomorrow?”
“I’ll write.”
“Please!”
“Just look after yourself. And tell Dad.” Tersely, tensely, almost irritably. Or was it just the line?
“Melanie, are you quite sure—”
The telephone died in his hand.
Ten minutes later it rang again. This time there was silence on the other side. And then a man’s voice chuckling, before the receiver was put down again.
2
It felt as if her letter would never come. And the tension of waiting, the daily disappointment at the mailbox, sapped his nervous energy as much as anything else that had happened to him. Had the letter been intercepted? That possibility in itself brought home the futility of his anger to him in a more nauseating way than even the discovery of the photograph had done. However vicious the pressures he had been submitted to, they had all been related to his efforts in connection with Gordon. But now Melanie had been drawn into it, involving what was most private in his existence.
Interminable nights of lying awake. Groping back to that unbelievable night, so farfetched in his memories that he sometimes wondered whether it had been a hallucination. All he had to su
stain him was the vividness of those memories. Theachingly vulnerable, barely noticeable swelling of her breasts. The long dark nipples and their golden aureoles. The taste of her hair in his mouth. Her quicksilver tongue. Her rising voice. The slickness of her sex opening under the soft mat of hair. But the acute physicality of those very memories was disturbing. It had been so much more than that, hadn’t it? Unless their love in itself had been an illusion, a fever-dream in a desert?
And on the other hand, the painful fantasies: that she’d deliberately decided not to write because she wanted to withdraw from him; that she’d grasped at the opportunity to escape from him because he’d become an embarrassment to her. Worst of all: that she herself had been planted by them, instructed from the very beginning to play cat-and-mouse with him in order to find out what he knew and who his collaborators were. Surely that was madness! And yet it had become such an effort merely to drag oneself from one day to the next that nothing really appeared more outrageous than anything else.
Perhaps everything had become part of one vast mirage. Perhaps he’d imagined the whole persecution. Perhaps there was an illness in his brain, a tumour, a cancerous growth, a malignant accumulation of cells causing him to lose touch with what was really happening. What was ‘real', what was pure paranoia? But if that were so, was it possible for a madman to be aware of his own madness?
If only it had been a real desert and he a real fugitive running from a real enemy in helicopters or jeeps or on foot. If only it had been a real desert in which one could die of thirst or exposure, where one could go blind of the intolerable white glare, where one could shrivel up and bleach out like a dried bone in the sun: for then, at least, one would know what was happening; it would be possible to foresee the end, to make your peace with God and with the world, to prepare yourself for what lay in store. But now – now there was nothing. Only this blind uncontrollable motion carrying him with it, not even sure whether it was actually moving; as imperceptible as the motion of the earth under his feet.
The events and minor afflictions of every day hardly served as landmarks any more, having become part of that general blind motion. The telephone calls. The car following him into town. Even the more serious incidents: the crude bomb hurled through his study window one evening while he was with Phil Bruwer in hospital (thank God Susan had gone to spend a few days with Suzette; and Johan was able to put out the fire before much damage could be done). The shots fired through the windscreen of his car while he was returning from an aimless zigzagging trip through the streets on another night. Was it just his luck that he hadn’t been hit: or had they missed him deliberately?
In the beginning he was relieved by the Easter holidays, not having to worry about the tedious duties imposed by his school routine. But soon he came to regret it, missing the security of that very routine, infinitely preferable to this dizzy, unpredictable course from day to day. The pale autumn days growing ever more wintry. The leaves falling, the trees barer, drier. All sap invisible, unbelievable. All softness, all tenderness, all femininity, all gentle humanity, compassion, burnt away. Dry, dry, and colourless. An inhospitable autumn.
And all the time, in a steady, ceaseless flow, the people coming to him for help. Enough to drive him out of his mind. What was there he could really and effectively do? The widely divergent requests: heart-rending, serious, mendacious, banal.– The young black man from the Free State, illegally in search of work because his family was starving on the farm: four rand in cash and half a bag of mealie-meal a month. Twice before he’d tried to run away, only to be brought back and beaten to within an inch of his life by his master; but the third time he’d escaped and now the Baas must help him. – The woman whose wages were stolen in a supermarket. – The man who’d just spent eight months in jail and received six cuts with the cane because he had been impudent enough to tell his white master’s teenage daughter, “You’re a pretty girl.”
It was getting boring. He couldn’t go on with it. But he was overrun by their collective agony. The Baas must help me. There is no one else. Sometimes he lost his temper. “For God’s sake stop pestering me! Dan Levinson has fled the country. Melanie has gone. I hardly ever see Stanley any more. There’s no one I can send you to. Leave me alone. I can’t do it any longer.”
Stanley did come round again, late one night when Ben was in his study, unable to face another sleepless night in bed.
“I say, lanie! Why you looking like a bloody fish on dry ground?”
“Stanley! What brought you here?”
“Just blew in.” Large and bristling with life his virile presence flooded the little room. Like so many times in the past he seemed to act like a generator, charging all the inanimate objects around him – carpet, desk, lamp, books, everything – with secret uncontrollable energy.
“Got you another bit for your jigsaw. Not much, but so what?”
“What is it?”
“The driver of the police van that took Jonathan to hospital that time.”
Ben sighed. “You think it will be of any use?”
“I thought you wanted everything.”
“I know. But I’m tired.”
“What you need is a fling. Why don’t you find yourself a girl? Fuck the shit out of her. Trust me.”
“This is no time for joking, Stanley!”
“Sorry, man. Just thought it would help.”
They sat looking at one another, each waiting for the other to say something. At last Ben sighed. “All right, give me the driver’s name.”
After he had taken down the particulars he listlessly pushed away the paper, looking up.
“You think we may still win in the end, Stanley?” he asked wearily.
“Of course not.” Stanley seemed surprised at the very idea. “But that’s not the point, man.”
“Is there any point?”
“We can’t win, lanie. But we needn’t lose either. What matters is to stick around.”
“I wish I could be as sure of it as you seem to be.”
“I got children, lanie. I told you long ago. What happens to me don’t matter. But if I quit now it’s tickets with them too.” His bulky torso supported on his arms, he leaned over the desk. “Got to do something, man. Even if my own people will spit on me if they knew I was here with you tonight.”
“Why?” Ben asked, startled.
“Because I’m old-fashioned enough to sit here scheming with a white man. Make no mistake, lanie, my people are in a black mood. My children too. They speak a different language from you and me.” He got up. “It won’t be easy to come back here again. There’s informers all over the bloody place. It’s a hell of a time, lanie.”
“Are you also abandoning me now?”
“I won’t drop you lanie. But we got to be careful.” He put out his hand. “See you.”
“Where are you off to this time?”
“Just a trip.”
“Then you’ll be back sometime.”
“Sure.” He laughed, taking Ben’s hand in both of his. “We’ll be together again, sure’s tomorrow. You know something? The day will come when I won’t have to dodge your neighbours’ fucking dogs at night no more. We’ll walk out here in broad daylight together, man. Down the streets, left-right, all the way. Arm in arm, I tell you. Right through the world, lanie. No one to stop us. Just think of it.” He bent over, limp with glee. “You and me, man. And no bastard to stop us saying: ‘Hey, where’s that domboek?”
He was still laughing, a great sad booming sound. And suddenly he was gone and it was very quiet in the room. It was the last time they saw each other.
Beside him, Susan went her own way, distant and aloof. They spoke very little, exchanging a few indispensable words at table, but no more. When he did make an attempt to start a conversation, asking a question or offering an explanation, she sat looking down, studying her nails in that absorbed way a woman has when she wants to convey to you that she finds you boring.
Actually, Linda was the only one he
still spoke to, telephoning her from time to time; but it often happened that in the middle of a conversation he would become absent-minded, forgetting what he’d wanted to tell her.
And Phil Bruwer, of course, even though Melanie was an unspoken obstacle between them. The old man constantly spokeabout her, but Ben found it difficult to respond. Although the old man was her father – perhaps because of it? – she was too painfully private to discuss.
Her newspaper had carried a prominent report about the confiscation of her South African passport, intimating that it might have some connection “with a private investigation she had been conducting in connection with the death in detention of Gordon Ngubene a year ago". Curiously enough, though, they never followed it up. The Sunday paper continued to refer to Gordon’s story at irregular intervals, owing mainly to the perseverence of one or two young reporters who kept in touch with Ben about it; but even that was losing momentum. A few readers’ letters specifically requested the newspaper to drop the ‘tedious affair'.
“You can’t blame them, really, “said Prof Bruwer. “People’s memories are short, you know. They mean well. But in a world that has seen Hitler and Biafra and Viet Nam and Bangladesh the life of a single man doesn’t mean much. People are moved only on the quantitative level. Bigger and better.”
It was the day Ben brought the old man home. The doctors still were not very happy with his progress but neither was he ill enough to be kept in hospital. And since Melanie’s departure he had become more short-tempered and restless. He would not be at ease again before he was back in his own home and pottering in his own garden. Ben had arranged for a full-time nurse to attend to him – much against the old man’s wishes – and with that care taken from his shoulders he stayed away until, a few days before the reopening of the schools, Bruwer telephoned him and asked him to come over.
