The television technician had never needed a lawyer, he was an ordinary law-abiding young man who wanted to marry in the usual progression of life, and, white and sure of his own, he had never taken any part in organisations concerned with human rights but remembered reading in newspapers of a legal aid resource that offered help in such matters. There he was received by a rumpled, well-rounded woman lawyer who ran her hands up through her hair as if they were going over a story she’d heard in various versions many times.—I know, I know it’s an awful prospect, but your ‘intended’ will have to go before the Population Registrar. We’ll make an application for her to be reclassified. White. Don’t think I’m doubting you in any way, but I must meet her, first.—
—You’ll see for yourself. Whoever they are can’t have any doubts.—
—The parentage questions—habitation, childhood—complicates things, even if the physical appearance seems to fit by their invented genetic standards …—
When there is trouble you take your shock home to those to whom you went with the hurt of grazed knees.
She took him with her to Mama and Daddy, Abraham and Elsie, there she was able to give way to tears and they wept with her, hugged the young white man who hadn’t given her up but become confined, as they had been all their lives, in one of those cages of the law that made people species of exotic animals: he must understand—yes—he’s in the whites’ cage. And she, their girl? If the lawyer knows the procedure, everyone in the township knows how you must present yourself before it. Everywhere, close, there are families to whom nature—God’s will—has produced one of a brood who could play for white, Abraham and Elsie could call in all manner of advice from friends, relatives, expert in their ways; lore unknown to any lawyer. Without papers, registered Coloured, the girl must present herself, to that bastard looking her over, as if the girl really is a play-white who must disguise herself. He’ll only be convinced, by his model of a real white girl, if she gets herself up in the right way that they know, from experience, will succeed. She looks too—what’s it—lady-like. He’ll find it fishy. He’s not used to that. He’s used to letting pass—all right, got to make a few who do, just to show the law is good—the special kind of looks, it’s like they’re on a rubber stamp ready to his hand, he recognises as properly faked. How she must dress and make up—that’s important. Really white, you must look; she and her boyfriend go swimming a lot, she’s rosily-dark sunburned.
Who knew better than the aunties, cousins, neighbours how to deal with the law’s servants, those white ‘civil servants’ that decided your life for you. On the day she and her future husband met the lawyer at the office of the Population Registrar she was heavily plastered with chalky makeup, as if she truly had mixed blood to conceal, her hair, which lately she had followed the craze of the girls at the bank to have cooked into a rippling Afro, was tortured even straighter, her blondness bleached even blonder, than these were naturally.
The lawyer from Legal Aid was appalled. She left the future husband standing in a corridor and rushed the girl to the women’s toilet where, totally concentrated, exasperatedly wordless, she scrubbed the face with paper tissues from her briefcase and drew palms-full of liquid soap from a dispenser to finish the job. The clean shining face of a tanned white girl, pink around the nostrils, emerged and it was in this naked aspect that the foundling applicant entered the official’s office accompanied by the woman lawyer. The future husband left behind the door: he could make out the voice but not the words of the lawyer explicating her client’s claim. His lips moved on the words he would have used. And he would also have said what surely couldn’t be denied by any Registrar, I love her, isn’t there a right to love.
His girl and the lawyer were on the other side of the door a long time. He did not allow himself to look at his watch as if the hour might be an omen; good or bad. He could scarcely catch his girl’s low voice and an indifferent-sounding growl of the official’s questions was infrequent, impossible to follow.
They came out and the door closed on a moment when he saw the official with his chin pressed into a swag of flesh as he bent over papers on a desk. She was looking straight in front of her, not at him. The woman lawyer was slowly wagging her head, lips tight. Absence of documentation, the applicant’s answers to where her parents lived, who they were, what school she was admitted to, recognised as a Coloured among Coloureds all her childhood—these criteria have decided that her classification cannot be changed to white. Application refused. Sorry. That was what the half-audible growl had been decreeing.
They wandered out into the forest of city in which they were abandoned strangers. The lawyer was guiding them, at their backs.—Let’s go to my office and have some coffee.—What could she have to say to them there? Application for reclassification refused.
They don’t know, but she receives in never-silenced memory her echo of what they are feeling; as a child, a life ago, in a German town called Dortmund she was turned away from school with a yellow star stuck to her dress.—Look, I have experience with these people.—A note taken of the afterthought: ‘Sorry’. —I’m going to see him tomorrow.—
Mr van Rensburg was amiable: you again. Rose from his chair, both sat down. Across the desk from one another, a level of understanding confidentially, professionally assumed. You know, I know. The girl is white. Years ago some other white girl dumped an unwanted infant on church premises.—A church for Coloureds, ja.——Yes. But in those days, you’ll remember, there was a poor whites’ area only a few yards away across the veld. If it’d been a whites’ church, the mother might have been discovered.—
And now he released himself to the assumed level of understanding. —Look. Ag, she’s white, can’t I see it for myself. Of course. Anyone can see it. A nice young man wants to marry her. Jesus, I see what she is. But it’s the law it’s my job. She can perhaps apply again. If you can dig up something from the orphanage or church or whatever she was found. Sorry.—
They’re saving up now. Not to see the Tower of London, the Champs Élysées, Piazza San Marco in Venice, but to go away, for good. That’s how they describe leaving a home they can’t have.
Perhaps they’ve come back since all the laws that decided who she was, who he was, have gone, as the politicians and newspapers like to put it, into the dustbin, the rotten eggshells and beer cans, of history. Years ago now, by the time that is measured when you’re in bodily manifestation. The names of those heroes who made the laws have even been taken off street signs and airports.
I must have been released from her—she must have died, somehow, young: you don’t always keep, know, the moment when you were recalled; how it ended. But of all my Returns that one was unique, there never was anything like it! Because, each time, you are one manifestation, sent back to live out one life. But that Return was in itself two, I had come back twice over in the same enclosure within space that is a planet.
Denise—my pretty name they gave me because I didn’t have one. I’m thinking in the taal; I was so happy among the other kids in the township, our own place, my Mama and Daddy giving me my Barbie doll and all her outfits, even a pearl necklace that broke and Mama threaded again, the prizes I got, top girl in class, the Sundays when the aunties and uncles and cousins came, we kids ran races, turned cartwheels, and stuffed ourselves with sweets and cold drinks. The time when I had grown breasts, still not full like Mama’s but quite nice, and Terry held them and sucked the nipple and put his finger in my hole at the donga we kids roofed over with branches as our headquarters in the veld. His name was Tertius, teacher told us it means number three, but he was first-born, we used to tease him, his parents were stupid. I was in junior choir at our church, with Mama in the ladies’ choir. Daddy—oh he had me with him so many times, we went to watch dirt-track racing, very exciting, and when there was a fun fair set up in our township and a circus he bought tickets for us for the rides and the seats. He held my hand when I was scared that the lion was going to bite the tamer. When I was
little I used to climb into their big bed between them and cuddle on Sunday mornings, and when I grew bigger and didn’t anymore they didn’t know about Terry and the headquarters we kids had.
Then—without a death yet, without the proper end—that Return ended. There was Miss Denise Appolis, trainee at the bank. Now it comes to me in English. I live in a flat in the city with another girl. We’re white—well of course, what else could we be? What a question. Like other people who work in the bank or the attorney’s office where my friend is also some sort of trainee. We try out different hairstyles together, have boyfriends we mock and laugh about when we’re alone, we go to parties. But sometimes this Denise Appolis who I am goes, crosses from one self to another, to a place and people, feelings towards these people, that should belong to another Return entirely. So I don’t know what happened to the force that sends me back, again and again, but never as the same being, even if, rarely, I do have a recognition that must come from another life. How can there be two in one Return?
There are no answers.
There is no answer. Only that you have to go back, in whatever form, again and again.
Perhaps there are things people on the planet decree upon one another that would explain this freak Return that once happened.
‘I have been part of it always and there is maybe no escape, forgetting and returning life after life like an insect in the grass.’
I would have been Denis—if she hadn’t pushed her way into the world first. They were expecting me. Hoped for, planned for—a son. So far as you could then; it was before the discovery of tests that would reveal the sex of what was in the womb. They knew only that we were two of us—Gemini—in the biological package.
Still-born. Which means you don’t get a name. Still-born: means ‘still’ in the sense of unable to breathe, to move, to live. So it’s true that my corporeal life outside the shelter, the womb, was only the passage from the birth canal to the hospital incinerator. You have seen a foetus? Head and genitals—that’s it. Both outsize. What is inbetween is dismissable. Because a foetus doesn’t have to eat, digest, evacuate. Head and genitals—intelligence and sex. That’s about what I was; she had hogged the vital juices meant for both of us and she emerged ready to meet the requirements, fully formed. I was the runt, underdeveloped, the feeble heart arrested, not even incubator material, still-born. Never got further than that. Only head and genitals, intelligence and sex as my share of experiencing the world in the flesh the way you do; but never to have your experience of humiliating functions that, from the tangled nuisance of gut and stuff, plague and disrupt these two great powers! You begin to understand? I wonder …
Memory belongs to the corporeal—you have to have lived, to travel your time through the body, to remember. I have no memory of my own beyond that passage from the birth canal to the incinerator. Instead I find I flit about, I experience snatches of corporeal life of any and all of you, as I please. That’s the explanation for my non-existent existence. Of which I have proof to offer in response to your disbelief.
How is it that I think? Know words? Something of history, literature, politics, contemporary life, what it’s all like—as you’ll see. Is it the collective unconscious some of you believe in, others deride? Or do I have, as the ancient religious mystics believed and some of your fashionable novelists resort to for their characters, in invigoration of flagging invention—the ability to inhabit someone’s body, invade his or her experience as incubus, succubus, dybbuk—I don’t know. But I do no harm; the subject isn’t even aware of what I have appropriated and is not deprived in any way; there’s enough for both of us. You’d be surprised if you knew how much goes to waste in your experience; how much you don’t grasp, just don’t get it, don’t (what’s your word) intuit, and how much you don’t want to accept, although it’s been provided.
And even that faculty of memory, which as I’ve told you, I don’t have because I’ve lived nothing to remember except that trip from the birth canal to the incinerator you’re tired of hearing about—you, with your corporeal ability to create memories, don’t always retain the ability to hold on to them, and that can be either your kind of deprivation or your protection against the suffering I see you’re subject to in the stages of mortality. There’s an old man I know in my way, whose occupation of your kind of life is the same chair each day and whose corporeal activity is moving between it and the bathroom on a contraption like one I’ve seen infants supporting themselves on as they are learning to walk. He was a scaler of mountains and once was part of an Everest expedition that if it did not reach the summit gallantly survived an attempt in dangerous weather conditions; friends and even an occasional journalist come to talk to him about this, and while he smiles with pleasure to be reminded that it must have been an experience somewhere in the past that has abandoned him, he cannot relive any moment of it. The friends and the journalists find this sad; it depresses them and I’m the one who knows why, because while I’m living their experience I accept the meaning within them they suppress: living is growing old on the way to death, losing those faculties they treasure so much, and although they think their lives are choices, there are the two stages over which they don’t have any choice—to be born, and to die.
But when I’m experiencing the old man I reach into something else laid away in his past to which he no longer has access. He dearly loves his wife (feeling this, with my own precocious, arrested awareness of sexuality, those genitals I was at least equipped with, I have an inkling of what I’ve missed, the joy she, my greedy twin, robbed me of as she shouldered me aside). The wife is much younger than the old man, she lies beside him and the life that is in her keeps him going, she buries her warm face in the grave between his jaw and skeletal shoulder-blade. She is the joy I experience in him and he’s going to die happy because he does not remember the long love affair she had with another man, in the middle years of their marriage, which caused him such violent misery and demeaning jealousy, and almost—imagine that, since he possesses her totally now—led him to divorce her.
And she? Isn’t that female lucky? Not merely forgiven, if you please! It never happened. The cheat never lied. The bitch never came home and sat at dinner with another man’s semen inside her. But don’t be too sure about her. I know in her that other something I’ll never have: remorse. In her chest there’s a tightening as if a drawstring has pulled together all that she did, that time, there’s an emotional congestion she can’t relieve by asking, as she longs to, his forgiveness. For what? he would say, lovingly. For what, my darling? And to remind him would be the final cruelty of all she did to him.
But there’s even more to it. The complexity of these lives of yours between birth and death! I wake up as her in the night and she raises herself to listen for his breathing. Her love for him is devastating. She has never contemplated death but now knows sorrow will be silence.
And how does she live, that sister who twinned my life with hers in the closest meaning of the word, worse than any freakish Siamese twinning, for she grabbed the chance, the oxygen, at any cost. Does she live it up, doubly, for both of us who fought it out in the womb? The odd thing is, I can’t take on, as I do here and there, as the fancy moves me, her consciousness and subconscious. I have difficulty even in identifying her. I can’t find her. Sometimes I think I’m on the wave-length … but it’s just a choking exclamation that strangles. It’s the umbilical cord that was round my neck. Never mind her; how would I have lived—quite unlike her, for sure, however her way might have turned out to be. I can’t pretend to be without prejudice; I can’t imagine, in the here-and-there of the lives I light upon, anything particularly interesting or fulfilling for her. I don’t think she merits it. But I should like to experience her, to confirm this. Although I would have been a man (evidence that outsize bunch between the legs of the wretched little corpse) if I had not been still-born, my disembodied state, as you’ve no doubt noticed, means that I can enter both male and female experience—in my own
way.
Don’t think it’s all grave. (No pun intended. ) Only now—what you would call a little while ago, or a day ago, in your measuring-out of your time—I was on a bicycle with curved handles like the horns of some swift beast. The bicycle and I were cutting a swathe through the air up a tree-lined street. Gateways, houses, telephone poles sliced away from us on either side, leaves and branches rushed out to meet—and just missed—us. On my head was a yellow casque slashed with red arrows. I had eyes that could see as keenly as fish in the depths of an ocean. I had a heart: I was that pump, a creature whose corporeality was all one pulse of energy. Glory. Mouth open to gulf wild laughter. Whoever you were, half-grown boy: I understood from you what it means to be alive!
Glory.
Some I’ve come upon can’t find it simply, as the boy did, in this life that you complain about continually yet cling to fiercely—even abjectly, as I’ve come to know, in circumstances you yourselves bring about. Like ticks on the body of the world, you suck there inert until you bloat and fall off. Ugh.
Glory: there are others—completely other. They believe it can’t be experienced in corporeality, it belongs to something they visualize: an after-life. Which must be the opposite term of still-born (you can tell I hang around intellectuals and amateur philosophers). Perhaps that’s where I belong, if anywhere: their after-life, because I’ve missed out what’s inbetween. How do they get to their after-life? Strapped to the chest of that other being I took on—hardly older than the bicycle rider, he must have been—was a device with a stopper like a heavy pin. The thing was hard against the breast-bone under a flowing garment; on the crown of the head I was also aware of an embroidered skullcap. The pin came out with an easy tug. There was an embrace more passionate than any I’ve been privy to, and without boasting, I don’t mind telling you there’ve been quite a few, between men-and-men and women-and-women, as well as the kind of woman-man one that half-created me. This one was between man and man and the climax was an orgasm unlike any other, unsurpassable, an explosion that ended everything, for both. There was nothing to remember of it, for him, my chosen partner, just as for myself, who can only borrow memory. I don’t know if the Believer I was, for a while, for the flashed duration of the embrace, received the reward of the after-life, and if it was better than the one that flew apart in darkness beyond any dark. I left him at that moment of nothingness. You will perhaps know because you will have lived, whereas I have never existed in my own right, and if you don’t experience life you don’t experience its end. I suppose I could go on the way I do for ever, while you, my friend, you will come to that nothingness one way or another, in bed slowly or fast on a highway, even if it is extremely unlikely that anyone would find reason to bring you into a final clinch with a grenade.
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