David's Story

by Zoe Wicomb

  Afterwards they went to Ant Mietjie’s, where Dulcie took charge of the braaivleis. From the boot of her car she produced a bag of potatoes and several kilos of Namaqua boerewors, which she claimed was the best in the country and which further endeared her to people who knew that the sausage, with its crucial ingredients of coriander and clove, came not from Afrikaners but rather from the Kok ancestors, those slave cooks who would go nowhere without their spices. And so they were steered away from the new municipal building, where they would certainly have been raided.

  They drank Ant Mietjie’s chicory and coffee brew with sweet condensed milk. David watched people drifting towards Dulcie, bringing her the first potato, watched the young people hanging onto her every word, watched her speak to everyone except him. When the party ended he walked her to her lodgings; they had won the first round, but there was the future of the new branch to discuss.

  Again they stood in the wash of the riot lights that swept all night long over the village, that turned the new concrete community centre and its large concrete square, the ugly architecture of surveillance, into an eerie, surreal emptiness. He congratulated her, shaking her hand as if they had just met, a hand that was surprisingly soft. Avoiding each other’s eyes, they looked up simultaneously into the crammed night sky and saw a shooting star; she thought it meant something but could not remember what.

  That night he resolved not to think of her, the statuesque woman who had not changed her rough corduroy trousers for the meeting but who had drawn a fine black line along her eyelids, turning those eyes—licensed for a second by a shooting star to look boldly into his own—into a dark and preternatural flash.

  Those were the days, David sighs, when things were clear and we knew what had to be fought, what had to come down.

  And Dulcie, I ask, did you see much of her in Town?

  He shakes his head. No, not at all. In our positions it simply wasn’t possible, we couldn’t afford to be linked in any way. It’s only lately, this year, that we’ve even seen each other again, but it’s not like that, not what you think.

  I ask again, How can it be possible to know so little about another human being who at some level matters to you?

  David responds with the following: Dulcie ran away from home at the age of thirteen, leaving behind a drunken mother who would barely have noted her absence. Coming and going for years between casual jobs and houses of various friends, she was in the perfect situation to disappear for long periods without anyone questioning her whereabouts. At the age of twenty, already a trained cadre, she marked in a crowded open-air gathering the grinning policeman responsible for shooting a comrade standing right beside her. Within an hour she had him pinned in a doorway and in broad daylight shot him with his own Magnum; she pulled his policeman’s hat over his face, took out the comb wedged in his sock and flung it away, emptied his wallet and donated the money towards the comrade’s funeral expenses.

  But she didn’t tell you this herself, I venture. He glares at me suspiciously.

  It’s no use, I say. I give up. This is a task for someone addicted to your cloak-and-dagger struggle stuff.

  I suppose, David confesses, that I don’t see the need to flesh her out with detail, especially the kind invented by you. You see, she’s not like anyone else; one could never, for instance, say that she’s young or old or middle-aged. I think of her more as a kind of—and he has the decency to hesitate before such a preposterous idea—a kind of a scream somehow echoing through my story.

  A scream, I laugh, a scream? You won’t get away now with abstracting her. Besides, Dulcie herself would never scream. Dulcie is the very mistress of endurance and control. Dulcie knows that there is only a point to screaming if you can imagine someone coming to your rescue; that a scream is an appeal to a world of order and justice—and that there is no such order to which she can appeal.

  And since when do you know so much about her? he asks.

  David knows nothing of the art of inferencing, or perhaps he doesn’t realise how much he has told me, even if it is somewhat opaque. Because of his inability to speak of her, he has promised to make notes on Dulcie. Writing things down, I suggested, would clarify what it is you want to say, bring to the surface things that you have not thought important, or simply have not remembered.

  You mean, he retorted, make up a story, invent things.

  But he promised all the same. What is clear from the sheaf of paper he hands over to me is that having tried and failed, he chose to displace her by working on the historical figure of Saartje Baartman instead. Thus he brought along the meticulously researched monograph, complete with novelistic detail: Saartje’s foolish vanity, the treachery of white men, the Boer mistress who would not let her go, whose prophetic words rang in her ears, the seasickness on the ship, the cage in London decked with leopard skins, and, on the catwalk of her cage, the turning of the spectacular buttocks, this way and that, so that Europeans would crack their ribs with laughter. And the bitter cold of a northern winter that lasted all year long.

  There are quite enough of these stories, I say impatiently. I believe ours can do very well without. Besides, what on earth has Baartman to do with your history?

  But it’s not a personal history as such that I’m after, not biography or autobiography. I know we’re supposed to write that kind of thing, but I have no desire to cast myself as hero, he sneers. Nothing wrong with including a historical figure.

  But she may not even have been a Griqua.

  David gives me a withering look. Baartman belongs to all of us.

  Ergo, we are all Griquas, I laugh.

  A good editor would know what to do with this material, he persists.

  There is no point in arguing; it is clear that the Baartman piece will have to stay.

  And Dulcie? I ask.

  He waves a helpless hand.

  The page at the end of the unfinished section on Baartman is a mess, schoolboy scribbles that ought to have been thrown away. The foolscap pages had been torn in one clump from a pad so that they remained glued together at the top. It is possible that he had forgotten about the last page, or chosen to forget—that the following day, in a fit of exasperation, he had ripped out the entire thing and passed it on to me.

  Although I have made numerous inferences from that last page, I do not quite know how to represent it. It is a mess of scribbles and scoring out and doodling of peculiar figures that cannot be reproduced here. I know that it is his attempt at writing about Dulcie, because her name is written several times and struck out. Then there are beginnings scattered all over, and at various angles that ignore the rectangularity of the paper, as if by not starting at the top or not following the shape of the page he could fool himself that it is not a beginning.

  Truth, I gather, is the word that cannot be written. He has changed it into the palindrome of Cape Flats speech—TRURT, TRURT, TRURT, TRURT—the words speed across the page, driven as a toy car is driven by a child, with lips pouted and spit flying, wheels squealing around the Dulcie obstacles. He has, hauling up a half-remembered Latin lesson, tried to decline it.

  trurt, oh trurt, of the trurt, to the trurt, trurt, by, with, from the trurt

  But there is no one to ask. You pass by the austere figures sitting erect in their chairs, but their faces dissolve with the first movement of your lips. You hold up a board on which the question is written, but the disembarking figures that file past do not read it; their guarded eyelids drop like shutters. You find the place where questions are asked, a vast sports hall with no windows, flooded in electric light. Your words break down into letters that bounce about the hall, chasing each other until they fall plop through baskets jutting out from the walls, as if they have arrived. But you find a useless heap of play-letters without magnetic backs. There are rumours that if you go at midnight, as the clock strikes twelve, you can slip the words into the silent seconds between the strikes of the gong, but you do not believe this; you cannot see how they will not drown in the di
n.

  There are all the symbols from the top row of the keyboard, from exclamation mark, ampersand, asterisk, through to the plus sign, then all are scored out. There is also a schoolboy’s heart scribbled over, but not thoroughly enough to efface its asymmetrical lines.

  TRURT … TRURT … TRURT … TRURT … the trurt in black and white … colouring the truth to say that … which cannot be said the thing of no name …

  towhisperspeakshouthollercolour

  Who, dear reader, would have the patience with this kind of thing? My computer has none; it has had enough, is embarrassed, and mysteriously refuses to process the elliptical dot-dot-dots, which I have to insert by hand.

  It is with the greatest difficulty that I get David to admit that there is something between them. Then he retracts it immediately, saying that he does not know the meaning of that coy bourgeois description. Yes, they like each other, are attracted to each other, but there has never been any question of anything physical; he has no patience with that kind of messing about. Besides, Comrade Dulcie, herself a disciplined cadre, could not possibly have that kind of interest in him, would, like himself, have nipped it in the bud. It is also for this reason that he refuses to indulge Sally’s jealousy, to explain anything to her, for as he says, there is absolutely nothing to explain.

  So, I persist, people in your positions are immune to physical relationships, to passions?

  He pulls a face. No, of course not, but it is out of the question, can’t be tolerated. To indulge in such passion is to betray the cause, and there is far too much of that already. You see, he says condescendingly, it’s a different world out there, one you’ll never understand.

  David instructs me to remove all references to a special relationship between him and Dulcie.

  KOKSTAD 1991

  Kokstad carries no traces of Andrew Abraham Stockenstrom le Fleur. There are no street names, no monuments, and it would seem no memories. In the houses to which the Bezuidenhout woman takes David, he learns nothing. That poor woman has sadly, predictably, let herself down by treating David as her guest, helping him with his enquiries, and now must brave the skinderbekke, gossips young and old, who are already talking about the new suitor. And a married man, too, her mother says bitterly.

  This evening they are nevertheless hosting a little get-together for his benefit. People drift in as if for a formal meeting that they have decided beforehand to hijack; they are only too happy to speak about the old days, about what they have heard, but seem unwilling to talk about Le Fleur, and all David’s efforts to steer the conversation in that direction are thwarted. There are, after all, not many real Griquas left, says the Bezuidenhout mother, having decided to come to his rescue. Those people of the past have disappeared, passed on, she supposed, with Le Fleur’s many treks. That Le Fleur guy certainly messed things up, squandered people’s money, puts in a neighbour. But no, seriously, says another, he did what he could, a clever ou; he was like a kind of lawyer, trying to get back the stolen land from those rogues, but there was of course no beating those white skelms. And so on to real politics and the New South Africa, David taking his practised position of saying little while encouraging them to speak.

  That they ate dainty meat pies that had fluted edges and were garnished with sprigs of parsley, followed by delicious granadilla cake that must have taken hours to make, is a detail that he does not remember. But Ms. Bezuidenhout surely looks on silently and thinks of the waste as the men speak through mouthfuls of food that might as well be shovels of mealie pap. What, she wonders, is the point of copying in one’s best hand recipes from Cosmopolitan or Tribute into a book with hard marbled covers? She might just as well cut them out and paste them any-old-how into an old ledger, but, she supposes, smoothing a crocheted doily through all that talk, a woman has her pride, has to keep up standards.

  Heitse! croaks an ancient toothless woman, a silent, crooked shape who has been sitting all evening in a big chair with a tea towel tied around her neck and a rug around her knees. David, after the many handshakes, has forgotten about her, but now, just as the gathering breaks up, she cries out triumphantly, East Griqualand for the Griquas and the Natives! That’s it, she says. That’s what’s been hiding from me all night. I knew there was a mouthful after the Griquas, and that’s just it, For the Griquas and the Natives, that’s the slogan the Chief taught us. We would come singing out of the church and form a circle and shake hands, and—she raises with difficulty her own trembling hand to show her height—just such a young girl I was, then the Chief would say, And now the children, and we raise our fists and call out and call out …

  Her head bobs up and down, but the voice drifts off in the effort of remembering and her trembling fist refuses to lift off her lap.

  So Ouma knew Le Fleur? David squats excitedly in front of her, but she shuts her eyes.

  It’s too late my boy, far too late, she mutters stubbornly, far too late, and her lips begin quivering, so that the Bezuidenhout woman comes to stroke her hand.

  Granadilla cake is Ouma Rhodes’s favourite and look, Ouma’s eaten nothing, she complains.

  The slice of cake lies untouched on the plate by her side. In all the excitement with the stranger no one has mashed and fed it to her, and now she shakes her head.

  Late, too late, she says over and over, pursing her lips against the spoonful held before her by the young woman and trembling all over.

  David tries to speak to her again but Bezuidenhout brushes him aside. No, leave Ouma Rhodes alone now, she needs to get home. So he offers to help carry the old woman next door.

  She whimpers and struggles as they lift her into her sagging bed.

  It’s not the cake, my child, it’s the wind in the tamboekie grass, sweeping it up, up sweeping it all.… And then, as her eyes fall on David, she says, staring wildly, Goeienaand my Opperhoof—good night my Chief—naand tog my hoof, naand … naaaghgh … trailing off into a snarled gurgle as her face contorts and her body convulses.

  She didn’t die, I exclaim.

  Well, yes, he says, later that very night that we tucked her into bed. The Bezuidenhout woman said what a relief it was that it couldn’t be blamed on the granadilla cake.

  And you really don’t remember the Bezuidenhout woman’s name?

  I told you, either Mary or Mandy. Something like that.

  •

  It is just as well that David is not serious about becoming a student. He is not much of a reader; he looks cursorily at the pages I produce, making no amendments to my attempts at a story. It is a measure of my incompetence that I expect to have several drafts, he says. For him that would be a serious failure, a waste of time; one surely would at least aim to get each section right in one final version. The thing should be kept in proportion: why write and write when it will take no more than one reading?

  Even newspapers are of no interest to him. Why read their propaganda or the dreary reports of beauty competitions in dusty dorps? He prefers listening to the news headlines on the radio. Those who, like the comrades in the security department, believe in pondering over messages between the lines clearly have nothing better to do. No point, David says scornfully, in reading about freedom when we should be playing active roles towards attaining it. He just about tolerated the poetry readings at political rallies, and then valued the poems entirely for the passion with which they were delivered and which they whipped up in others; no one, after all, can hear much of the words on such occasions. A weapon of the struggle indeed, he laughs. Imagine the cadres spending time debating such nonsense. It’s simply a question of having to humour the mad poets and painters in bandannas bandying about their stuff on the suburban battlefields of Observatory.

  Why, then, does David want his story written—which is to say, have it read? Yes, he does feel ambivalent about this project, which invites a reader to perform a task he does not value. But he cannot explain: he is in a sense ashamed of appearing to be vain, of thinking of himself as special. It is not that he wants to
be remembered; rather, it is about putting things down on paper so that you can see what there is, shuffle the pages around, if necessary, until they make sense. When I suggest a pseudonym, he looks scornful and says no, not that he wishes to be naive about the truth, but he does want his own story told, wants to acknowledge and maintain control over his progeny even if it is fathered from a distance. And how does truth relate to the gaps in the story? David shakes his head; the corners of his mouth drop in disappointment or disbelief. It would seem that truth is too large a thing even for those who take on vast projects like changing the world, that it can only be handled in titbits: something like a sheet of steel has since fallen between the truth about things in the world and the truth about himself.

  Today he does want something added to the text. Instead of deleting and rewriting a misremembered event from his childhood, he insists on the reader going through the tedious details of his own revision.

  That David should have been thinking such trifling and inappropriate thoughts in that hotel room bristling with terror is beyond me. He appears to be so disturbed by the falsehood of a memory that he asks me to rewrite the offending section, which is on one level a ruse; he perhaps regrets telling me about the hit list, or wishes to bring the Kokstad weekend to a close. But I can tell by his agitation, the way in which his jaw is set, that he is genuinely concerned about getting things straight, as he so disingenuously puts it, and perhaps, rusted and ill fitting as it seems, it may be a key of some kind to the story. Clutching at straws and having agreed at the beginning not to overstep the role of amanuensis, I must put up with his digressions.

  So it was not the truth, the episode embedded in his memory for so many years that he does not know how it came to be there in its distorted form. But now, in his state of confusion—or whatever it is called when one’s eyes, tired of flitting between the butt of a gun and a list on a sheet of lined paper, settle on the improbable Bakelite of a doorknob in the hope of being transported, of finding an explanation elsewhere—something else indeed takes over from the present. Sounds and images reel chaotically through time until a picture growing out of the morass, out of the cacophony, slowly flickers into shape like the marks on a developing photograph, unintelligible at first until the black-and-white image, whole and in sharp focus, settles, and there it is—the truth, which he recognises after years of false memory.