David's Story

by Zoe Wicomb

  I raise an eyebrow.

  Oh yes, he explains, by making us insecure about our own members so that we remain suspicious, incriminate the innocent, and do terrible things to our own people. Keeping your hands clean is a luxury that no revolutionary can afford; there’s corruption in every institution. It’s only you arty types who think of such problems as something special, something freakish that can bring about a climax in a story. Stick to the real world and you’ll find the buzz of bluebottles deafening.

  Leaning against the bronze horseman, I say nothing; David nevertheless turns on me, his movements stiff with distaste and resentment.

  There is no justification for the likes of you to sneer. People who tend their gardens and polish their sensibilities in the morality of art have no idea about the business of survival out there in the bush with no resources. There things do get distorted and ideals do drift out of sight. You who are too fastidious to use the word comrade, what would you know about such things? Oh, you can talk about ambiguity or freedom, but you can’t face putting the two together, not even from the sunny comfort of your garden chair. That’s why you’ll never understand about Dulcie; hers is another world altogether.

  And when freedom comes, I ask, what are we meant to do with these different worlds? Which one will survive? Or rather, which one will you choose for me?

  My dear girl, he says condescendingly, another bourgeois myth of niceness you’ve swallowed. There’ve always been other worlds; there always will be many, all struggling for survival. Then his tone changes. Look, he pleads, I’ve trusted you with a delicate job. The struggle is sacred; it’s been my life. It must not be misrepresented. You know, as all sensible people do, that the fight against oppression is a just one, that it has been managed as justly as is possible in politics.

  Together our eyes follow the movement of an ant, stumbling with its burden of an enormous breadcrumb.

  Perhaps, I say, as the ant disappears down a crack, it’s too difficult. Perhaps we should abandon the whole thing.

  Oh no, David says anxiously, no need for that. It’s just a matter of being careful, of not distorting things.

  I try to think of my walled winter garden where the basil is still green and bushy and the bougainvillea never lets up on its purple rustle. But another image invades, one of worlds as a stack of so many dirty dinner plates that will not come unstuck as each bottom clings to another’s grease.

  DULCIE’s story: Perhaps the whole of it should be translated into the passive voice. Or better still, the middle voice. If only that were not so unfashionably linked with the sixties and with French letters.

  David shakes his head in disbelief.

  Not only would that be a gross misunderstanding of Dulcie, and as it happens, I do know at least what the passive voice is, but it is also clear that I—and he beats his chest histrionically—have made a terrible mistake in choosing to work with you—pointing rudely at me. I may have overestimated the importance of using someone who is not in the Movement, not of our world; I have certainly underestimated the extent to which your head is filled with middle-class, liberal bullshit.

  Naturally we don’t speak the same language, I say flippantly, so French letters won’t have the same meaning for the two of us.

  He has brushed aside my piece on obsession and silence as an absurd exercise in style; it is not surprising that after that he should object to me. Now that our collaboration is on shaky ground—he blows hot and cold in turn—I have nothing to lose and so push ahead with my inventions. Dulcie has, after all, always hovered somewhere between fact and fiction.

  If speech is not allowed, she would like to have something written up, or written down. Dulcie once thought that she knew the difference. She would like to think that somewhere there are suitable words with which to say, to ask what she needs to know, to record what she thinks she knows. Then there would be something tangible, something to write, something to read, for even if the words were addressed to David, they would remain hers; there would be no point in presenting him with words.

  But she fears for any such writing. Although they come in the early hours she has to be vigilant at all times. Worse than any instrument of torture is the thought of such hard-found words being fingered by them—jabbed, clubbed, defaced into a gibberish that would turn the thing between David and herself into nothing. She had known and accepted that in her position there is no such thing as a private life. Now she insists on keeping a secret. Sometimes, in the clarity of midnight, before they come, she laughs out loud: This is nonsense, kid stuff, what can my private teenage obsession have to do with the weighty matters of a liberation movement? In these times of negotiation, the small, secret world of the guerrilla has grown cracks; her own little secret has come to stand for something else, something to do with a world blown up, enlarged, so that comrades huddle like startled animals in unfamiliar groups.

  And so she does not write, neither up nor down; and so she is drawn into silence, becomes his mirror image, silent like him. She winces at the thought of David being special to her because he is like her, or she is like him—of her kind, as our writers also say about race. She is grateful for the ready-made euphemism.

  The face of the beloved: she recalls the precise brownness of his skin as her own is being disfigured, the precise colour of his eyes as her own are prised open under piercing light, the precise convolution of his neat girlish ear as silence is blasted at high speed into her own. Is the silence to which we are addicted not inherited from our oppression? Do we not in this resolute silence embrace our oppressors? Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Dulcie would say.

  But no, David does not want her voice represented. That is because he wishes to protect her, he says. He has only just explained that I had in fact seen Dulcie once at a party. I can barely summon the image of the large woman of indifferent looks; it is hard to think of such a figure as anything out of the ordinary. But I do remember the voice, hearing her say those very words to someone: Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Sitting with her legs apart, wearing an expensive silk shirt of hideous print, she laughed uproariously. David does not think I am serious when I ask why revolutionaries are so badly dressed.

  Once, only once, did David come close enough to place his hands on her shoulders. His fingertips pressed precisely into the wounds under her shirt, plunged intimately into her flesh, caressed every cavity, every organ, her lungs, liver, kidneys, her broken heart, with a lick of fire. She would not have been surprised to see those hands withdraw dripping with blood.

  In the silence they have no choice but to be like each other.

  You have turned it into a story of women; it’s full of old women, for God’s sake, David accuses. Who would want to read a story like that? It’s not a proper history at all.

  What else can I do? If it’s not really to be about you, if you won’t give me any facts, if you will only give me the mumbo jumbo stuff, my task is to invent a structure, some kind of reed pondok in which your voodoo shadow can thrash about without rhyme or reason, but at least with boundaries, so that we don’t lose you altogether. It’s impossible, this writing of a story through someone else. The whole thing’s impossible. Why, for instance, do you not tell me about the day of your Kokstad trip that’s disappeared? Where is it? Where were you? Why didn’t you telephone Sally? You’ve slipped up, David; you could have got away with it by calling it a day of security meetings. Instead, you choose to pretend that time just skipped from Saturday to Monday without anyone noticing. Or pretend to pretend.

  There’s surely no need for all the old women. Can’t some of the oumas at least be turned into oupas? There’s no harm in that, just turning the she’s into he’s, he suggests.

  Harm? I turn the word round in my head. Harm, I suppose, is a category that I ought to take more seriously in relation to this story.

  Perhaps Dulcie could be turned into a man, I say. But he will not have that.

  No, no, that would not make sense at all. Dulcie is defin
itely a woman.

  I risk another question. Was Dulcie at the Quatro camp in ’84?

  David looks wistfully at the night sky. At the clouds whizzing across an acid moon, at the stars shrilling in the dark. Or so I presume from the angle of his head. At his insistence, we are outside in my garden, not sitting on the rickety bench but squatting on the grass. He has developed an agoraphobia of sorts since his return from Kokstad and will sit outside even in bad weather. I have a scarf wrapped about my neck against the cold; I sit close up and feel his shoulder against mine. I would like this better if it were not for the peculiar sensation of hearing his tinnitus ring in my ears.

  I can’t say for sure, he says at last; I don’t know if we were there at the same time. But she would have been sent for, I imagine; she might have arrived just after I was cleared and sent back home. You see … Dulcie and I kept on missing each other in those days. You see, some of the ringleaders of the mutiny might, I suspect, have been trained by Dulcie. But, of course … see, there was always the assumption among some that Dulcie and I were somehow working together, even though chiefs of different cells do not know of each other, never work together. All based, I now believe, on us being from the same Cape community—which, strictly speaking, we are not. (I note the avoidance of the word coloured.) It would appear that we often expressed the same views, the same objections, but as I’ve told you, we actually met for the first time in Kliprand in quite different capacities, and I now … ag, he sighs, then switches to the pompous mode: In guerrilla warfare knowledge of each other’s movements is carefully monitored, so they must have known that it wasn’t the case. Ag, its all speculation on my part, it’s not … and he shrugs.

  I carry on: And all that stuff, the things that happened in another country, has nothing to do with this story, and besides.… We sit in silence; I am conscious of his shoulder tense against mine. Then, when David speaks, his voice drops to a tortured whisper, and I am glad that I cannot see his face in the dark: It’s here in close-up, before my very eyes, the screen full-bleed with Dulcie. Who? Is it you put it in my head? The terrible things happening to Dulcie? It’s here, in close-up—and he stumbles to his feet with a horrible cry, knocking me over as he charges out.

  I scramble fully clothed into my cold bed and pull the covers over my ears.

  I no longer know which story I am trying to write. Who could keep going in a straight line with so many stories, like feral siblings, separated and each running wild, chasing each other’s tales?

  Recently I have become aware of the complexities of walking. It has something to do with the realisation that other people stride purposefully, mark out their paths mentally and do not expect to deviate, so that anyone else, especially a clumsy, steatopygous woman like myself, simply has to get out of the way or risk being knocked down. Looking back to trace my craven zigzag paths, I cannot help but feel a sense of shame. Thus I am practising my walking skills. It is by no means as difficult as I thought it would be. I hope to compensate for the skimpiness of this tale by sharing (as they say these days) the trick with you.

  Take a generous space, like St. George’s Mall in the centre of Town at about ten o’clock in the morning, before it gets too busy. Mark out your path, lift your chin, and fix your eyes on a landmark well ahead. Now stride purposefully and resolve not to give way to the well-dressed man who comes straight at you. A collision seems unavoidable, but at the very last second and with an expression of disbelief he will swerve to avoid brushing against you. (The same principle, incidentally, holds for developing confidence/competence in driving a car.)

  Encouraged by my first success I keep on trying, using expensive middle-aged men in four-piece suits and with attaché cases as practise targets. It works like a dream except that some, who do not get the point at all, tell me sternly to look where I am going.

  In spite of practising these manoeuvres again today, I have been knocked rather severely by a youngish man, a windbroek in casual dress—the same one, I swear, for whom I had to leap out of the way in the Claremont Shopping Centre yesterday, the very incident that made me apply myself to the complexities of walking.

  Just as I no longer want to have anymore to do with Dulcie’s story, as I fear that my inventions on the page might turn into a demon, an uncontrollable tokolos, David does a turnabout. He behaves as if he had said nothing last night and brushes off my attempts to return to that.

  All this business with Le Fleur has rubbed off on me. Imagine having visions, he laughs. But it is very important, he now says, that we try to piece together a story for her; now it would seem not to be so impossible after all. There is something manic about his manner. I do not believe that he has changed his position. It may be simply his desire to speak of her; he will be as recalcitrant as ever with real information. He tries to get round me as I resist being drawn into this false cheer.

  Howzit with you my friend, he beams, slapping me of all people on the back. At least he no longer tries to call me comrade.

  I say, smiling, prevaricating, Fair-to-mild, in imitation of Ouma Sarie’s new interjections in English: Yes, because, why, the little ones, her very own Jamie and Chantal with their grand English names, are not sommer-so-platlangs—vulgar farm children—no, they speak their English alright and she, old Saartjie, will have to spruce up her own how-do-you-dos. To this purpose she listens to Radio Good Hope, to the messages of birthday greetings and anniversaries and well-wishings of all kinds, for the sick and the far away and, if the truth be told, messages for people nearby that do not sound so respectable at all. Young people nowadays, sending messages to, as they say, everybody who knows me, no wonder the air crackles with lightning sounds and the weather has gone all topsy-turvy—imagine, proper summer days in the second week of June. No, she will have to set an example, she argues, in order to give herself an all-clear for a message. It’s all change nowadays and there is no reason in the world why she, Ouma Sarie, shouldn’t cheer Sally up with a radio request and have at the same time the pleasure of hearing her own voice crackle like that of God through a porcelain blue sky.

  Ouma Sarie rehearses: A message, please, for my daughter, Sally, whom the Good Lord has seen fit to guide through ups and downs and to bless with two lovely children, Jamie and Chantal, and a very nice house also. Keep it always clean and tidy, tidiness is next to godliness, and keep cheerful, my girl, and the Good Lord will keep his fatherly eye on your efforts.

  Ag, no, those words about fatherly eye are from dominee, when he always ends his house visit with a nice little spray of English. No, she’ll find her own, but then, thank God, she remembers that you have to speak on the telephone for this radio business, so just as well she hasn’t wasted her efforts on that plan.…

  David interrupts with a clearing of the throat. Okay, he says, that will do for the mother-in-law jokes. How are you getting on with Dulcie?

  Let me tell you another story, I say. About Bronwyn the Brown Witch who can do anything at all. Oh, there are tests galore for her, the usual ones of three wishes, three trips into the woods, three impossible tasks. She passes them all. She uses her magical powers to get her friends out of scrapes, to feed the poor, to stave off hurricanes and earthquakes, to drive back the enemy, until one day her friends, the sticks in the forest, come clattering together, lay themselves down on top of each other until they are a mighty woodpile. There is no way out. Bronwyn the Witch must die on the stake.

  It’s only a wee little story, I say, as I watch his face crumple and his hands foolishly clutch at his person, patting himself, as if looking for a handkerchief or a gun.

  You’ve been to university, you’ve read all kinds of books, poetry and stuff, he says, you must know about such things, about how things happen, how they twist and turn and become something else, what such terrible things really mean … how to write about, how to turn it into a proper story …

  David’s hand shakes. It would seem that he is not dissembling. But how could I possibly know what he’s talking about, a
nd who could possibly have such simple faith in formal education?

  Just as I think that this man is a windbroek after all, he composes himself and tells me that he has never been able to bear violence of any kind, that to join the resistance movement and overcome cowardice had been the most terrifying decision. That as a child, he dared not confess to his father how his stomach heaved as he had to help with the slaughtering of a sheep, how that brave man, sensing his distaste, had made him hold the severed head from which the warm blood pumped into his hands.

  Before his eyes he sees again the black-and-white skin of the sheep hanging in the shed, studded with coarse rock salt. David puts his hands to his ears as his head pounds, presumably with the bleating of a lamb. Or the buzz of bluebottles.

  You’re wrong, he says, hands still clamped over his ears, eyes shut, haltingly, as if the words are being hauled up from the deep. The sticks won’t sacrifice themselves. Yes, she’s grown too big for her boots and they’ve had enough of her. She must give up her power, hand over her uniform, make way for the big men. But that is not enough. She knows too much; knows the very fabrications, the history of every stitch against her. She must—and he stops abruptly.