by Damon Galgut
The men looked as strange as they’d sounded. They were both dressed in brown military overalls that were too big for them. One man was white, a few years older than me, with thinning ginger hair and a swollen, florid face I recognized from newspaper photographs; he was one of the ‘advisers’ that the white government had assigned to the homeland cabinet, back in the days of the first deposed chief minister. He’d come a long way, through a military coup and the annulment of all his labour, to end up pushing a lawnmower at midnight. The other man was young and black and fresh-faced; I didn’t know him. They were both staring at us in bemusement, while the Brigadier spoke to them in a low voice. He told them to move on to the next area of the garden; he was just going up to the house and would be back in a moment. Then he set off again, dragging us behind him, up the long central avenue and the broad back steps to the slate stoep. Through French doors there was a glimpse of a dark room, emptied of furniture.
The house was large, ostentatiously designed, but otherwise there was nothing remarkable about it. In a big city it would’ve been merely one of many sumptuous, tasteless houses. What made it striking here was its lonely setting on the top of a brown hill, with a green moat of garden around it. But now that we were standing here, up close, I wondered what we were looking at.
‘Did they take everything away?’ Zanele said.
He nodded sadly. ‘Everything. They came with three trucks.’
‘Where did they take it?’
He shrugged. ‘To Pretoria. They said they wanted to look after it. But by now where is it all?’ He nodded meaningfully. ‘Gone. Gone.’
We could see him now in the light. And though he was cleanshaven and gave off a hint of perfume from somewhere, there was a dissolution in his face. A crassness, an undoing of the muscles from deep inside. His eyelids hung heavily down.
But she didn’t notice. Though she didn’t touch him it was as though she’d put a hand on his arm. And I saw that I was wrong to think that his power had been taken from him. He was still a dangerous man, as dangerous as anybody who will do anything he wants to you in a locked room somewhere, and he gave off his power like the metallic smell of sex.
Leaning to him, she said, ‘Can we, could we, go in?’
‘They took the keys. They changed the locks. They threw me out of my own house.’
‘How did you open the garden gate?’
‘That key I kept.’ He smiled slowly. ‘There is always one lock they forget to change.’
‘Why are you looking after the garden?’
‘Who else will do it? I ask you: who else? These people? They can take, but they can’t give anything. So I come sometimes, once a week, twice a week, just to make everything okay.’
‘It must be difficult for you. Lots of memories.’
‘Ja,’ he said. ‘I remember everything. Everything.’
‘Do you mind if we take a look around?’
‘Come.’
He went ahead of her, like an official leading a guided tour. But there was nothing to see. Just one empty room after another, visible only through heavy glass and shrubbery. They went around the side, stopping to peer in every few steps. He pronounced the function of each room – ‘reception hall’, ‘pantry’, ‘study’ – like a fact loaded with great historical significance. But he was outside the history now, looking in at it through a thin but impervious barrier.
When we had gone around to the front of the house, where the pillars and the sentry-box were, he paused at the top of the steps. From here there was a view of the town. ‘If it was daytime,’ he said, ‘you could see my statue now.’ He meant the one down there, at the crossroads. She came and stood next to him, staring down into the dark.
I didn’t exist for them. Since our little walk had begun, he hadn’t once looked at me. She was his sympathetic ear. And I felt for her a rising revulsion that was not unconnected with desire.
But it was true that the strangeness of the scene was powerful, inclining all attention towards the small, lost figure at its centre. The emptiness of the house seemed somehow to emanate from him. He gave off a melancholy, injured air, as if he’d been dispossessed of his birthright, instead of what he’d taken by force. And in this moment it was hard, even for me, to see him as truly dangerous. He was like a child dressed up for some imaginary role.
The front door was heavy; now he went and tried the handle as if he thought that this time, just once, it would open for him again. I was glad we couldn’t go in. It would have been too much to follow this tiny monster through the entrails of his old domain. He stood like a shadow across the bright scene of the garden, in which the two figures were still moving, pruning and mowing. Beyond the wall the dead frieze of lights marked the town.
I said, ‘We have to go.’
She heard the note in my voice. She shifted her weight uneasily and said, ‘Well.’
But he had heard it too. For the first time he looked directly at me. From behind the ivory glint of his eyeballs I could feel his disdain. He said, ‘Do you not like my house?’
‘What do you come here for?’
‘To look.’
‘To look at what? This is past for you.’
The silence deepened and grew. She said again, ‘Well.’
But he moved closer to me. ‘What have they done with this place? Nothing. They throw me out, they take my furniture. Three trucks came. Three.’ He held up three fingers. The number seemed important to him.
‘It didn’t belong to you.’
He ignored me. ‘Then they leave it. They do nothing. If I don’t take care of the garden, what will happen? It will die. Who will cut the grass? Who will give it water? If I don’t guard everything, one day some rubbish will break in and live in these rooms. These beautiful rooms.’
She said anxiously, ‘It must be hard for you.’
‘It is hard. Very hard. One day to be living here. Next day living in a tent. One day everything is possible. Next day nothing is possible any more. Terrible. Terrible.’ He turned his head heavily back to me. ‘So tell me, Doctor, if you were me, would you not want to come back?’
Doctor: the word dropped coldly into me, like a stone: he knew.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what it’s like to be you.’
He smiled slowly again, baring his big, white teeth. ‘I will tell you. People, small people, nothing people, they think I am the past. But I am not the past. My time is coming still.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I am very happy for you. But now we have to go. It’s very late. Linda. I mean, Zanele.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well. Thank you. It was nice to meet you.’
He took her hand and bowed over it, still wearing that big smile, like another worthless medal. I was already halfway down the steps.
She caught up with me as I was passing the two gardeners. They had moved on to a new section and were back in their rhythmic cycle of cutting and complaint. Their faces looked up in consternation as we went by; then the noise of clacking blades started up behind us again.
‘Slow down,’ she said. ‘What’s the hurry?’
I slowed. We walked in silence the whole way back – to the gate, then up the side of the house. We had to go past the other cars before we got to ours: a black one and a white one parked next to each other, like some crassly obvious symbol of unity. I’d thought they belonged to romantic lovers – arbitrary people visiting the hilltop – but now I knew their cargo was more sinister. I laughed aloud.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘It isn’t funny, actually.’
‘What isn’t funny?’
How could I explain? It all came down again to simple, unreal ideas. Earlier in the evening she had seen me as a villain because I’d told her I’d been in the army. And now this awful little man was some kind of icon to her, just because he’d been in charge. Never mind the homeland, the violence, the greed; never mind the dirty politics and meaningless titles. It was the clear moral universe that Laur
ence inhabited, in which no power was ever truly false.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
We coasted down the hill in silence, both staring in front of us, with the lights of the town rising. Then we were back among the deserted streets, the crumbling buildings. As I stopped outside Mama’s place, I had a moment of dry-mouthed uncertainty: was the silence empty with failure, or heavy with possibility? But as I turned towards her I knew. She was turning towards me too. Our mouths locked hotly. And even then – before the climb up the stairs, the room with the hard little bed – all the echoes from the evening were with us, so that more than two people were grappling together there in the dark.
10
When I got back to the hospital that night I could see him inside the office – on duty, sitting at the desk. But although he must have heard my car pull in, he didn’t come to the window to look. And I didn’t go in to see him.
I didn’t feel guilt; not then. The guilt came later, slowly, like a dark seed starting to sprout. What I felt that night was a kind of perverse closeness to him, as if an agreement had been fulfilled: as if the contract was between him and me, and she was the instrument.
I saw him the next morning when he came in. He looked tired and drawn, but he wasn’t going to bed. He shaved and showered and dressed in clean clothes. Then he asked – but casually, in an offhand way – how last night had been.
‘Oh, okay. We sat at Mama’s and had dinner. Nothing too exciting.’
‘Thanks for helping me, Frank. You’re a real friend.’
I don’t know why I said nothing about the Brigadier. That part of the evening didn’t reflect on me. But when I saw her with Laurence a bit later, before she set out to drive back to Lesotho, I knew that she hadn’t told him about it either. It was odd, but the angry intimacy of the end of the evening seemed to have begun in the forbidden garden on the hill.
‘Thank you for keeping me company,’ she said, holding out a hand. ‘It was good to meet you.’
So formal, so nice. Her face was closed and neutral. I shook her hand, but our eyes didn’t meet, and when the time came for her to leave I kept myself busy in the office.
Laurence went out with her. He was back five minutes later, looking thoughtful and preoccupied, but I could still feel him glancing at me from time to time. It was as though he could see the infidelity in my face. But my expression was calm and clean; I had learned with Claudia how to conceal betrayal.
By the time night came I knew what I wanted to do. I got into my car and drove through town to a telephone booth on the far side. There were other telephones I could’ve used, one right at the hospital, but somehow this lonely spot, at the very edge of things, was the most suitable place to hear her voice.
‘I don’t know why I’m calling,’ I said.
‘Who is this?’
‘Cast your mind back. We’re still married to each other, technically speaking.’
‘Frank? Oh! Frank!’
She sounded so joyful that for a moment everything seemed possible again.
‘Karen,’ I said. ‘You’ve been on my mind.’
‘I’ve been thinking about you too, Frank. This is such a coincidence! I’ve been going to call you. To tell you that the agreement’s ready now. You can come and sign it.’
My mind was so far from this subject that it took me a few seconds to understand that she was talking about our divorce agreement, the dissolution of our marriage.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So you want me to come down there?’
‘That doesn’t seem so much to ask, Frank, after seven years, does it? Other people manage to do it without running away. For God’s sake!’
Her querulous voice came shivering down the line to me out of the dark, out of the past. The telephone booth I was standing at was on the gravel verge of the last road, at the edge of the light. A step away from me the blackness began, and the bush. I could see serrated rows of leaves and hear the soft sibilance that came out of them: wind, branches, insects sending signals to each other. I said, ‘You don’t have to.’
‘What?’
‘Talk like this. You can have the divorce. I’m not running any more.’
There was a pause before she talked again, more conciliatory now, but wary. ‘That’s good, Frank. We have to, we have to let go now.’
‘I’ll come down in a few days.’
‘When?’
‘Can I let you know? I have to make some arrangements here —’
‘Can’t you at least give me some idea? We’re trying to arrange our lives at this end too, you know.’
‘Thursday,’ I said. ‘How about Thursday?’
‘Thursday would be fine. I’ll bring the agreement home.’
‘All right. I’ll see you then.’
‘Frank. That wasn’t what you were calling about. What were you calling about?’
I had to think about it until I remembered, and even then I wasn’t completely sure what I’d been calling about. Just to hear her voice. But I wanted to hear it saying things it would never say again; they were lost, buried, gone. I put down the phone and stood there with my face pressed to the plastic rim of the booth, looking out into the dark. The past and the future are dangerous countries; I had been living in no man’s land, between their borders, for the last seven years. Now I felt myself moving again, and I was afraid.
I got back into the car and drove slowly to Maria in her shack. But I didn’t know what I was looking for there either. I was aimless and displaced. I sat down on a crate in the corner, rubbing at my forehead.
‘Friday, Saturday, you don’t come,’ she said. ‘Why, why?’
I was with Laurence’s girlfriend. But I didn’t say that. These were questions that belonged to a normal relationship; not here.
‘I’ve been very busy. Working.’
‘Working.’
‘Yes.’
She was sitting apart from me, in the dark corner. The lamp was next to me, burning hotly.
‘Tonight you come early. Why?’
It was six or seven – long before my usual visiting time. I hadn’t even realized that, but I said, ‘Because I must go soon. I must sleep. I’m very tired.’
‘Tired.’
‘Yes. Maria, why didn’t you tell me he was here?’
‘Who was here?’
‘Laurence. My friend. He said he’s come to the village here, behind the shop. A few times. Why didn’t you tell me?’
But she shook her head, and her frowning face was blank. No, she said, she hadn’t seen him. She didn’t know what I meant.
Was she lying? I looked hard at her to see. Then I noticed for the first time that she wasn’t happy.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
No, nothing was the matter.
A moment later a tear went down her cheek. I got up and went to her, but she turned away from me.
‘What’s this? Maria, what’s this?’
There was a bruise, a darkening down one side of her face. And I saw that she’d been hiding it, sitting away from the light, angled away from me.
No, she said, it was nothing.
‘What do you mean, nothing? How can it be nothing? Where does it come from?’
‘No, no.’ She waved it away; another tear fell. Suddenly I understood all the questions that she’d asked when I arrived. You don’t come. Why, why? I tried to put my arm around her, but she got up and started rearranging the wooden animals on the shelves. After a minute or two she said, ‘You go now.’
‘I want to stay.’
‘No. Now is danger. Problem, problem.’
‘Can I come back later?’
She shook her head. ‘Is better you go. Tomorrow you come.’
I stood up, dusting off my knees, feeling awkward and ashamed. Because I didn’t know what else to do, I fished in my pocket for money. I held it out to her: fifty rand. But tonight, for the first time, she didn’t want it; she seemed almost not to see it; she shook her head again. It was something else she wa
nted.
‘You come tomorrow night?’
‘Yes.’
‘You promise tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and I meant it with my whole heart, but she looked at me as if I was lying.
On Monday mornings there was a staff meeting in the office. In theory this was when patients were discussed, particular cases focused on with a view to improving our work, any problems or ideas aired and shared. In practice it was an exercise carried out mostly on paper: roll-call was taken, Dr Ngema said a few words, everybody went away again.
But this morning Dr Ngema said, ‘There is a... special announcement today.’
We were all looking at her. She shifted uncomfortably and gestured to Laurence.
He looked important. He had dressed in his smartest clothes and combed and re-combed his hair so that the wet strands gleamed separately. His white coat was buttoned stiffly, all the way to the chin. He stood up, a sheaf of papers in his hand.
‘Um. Yes. Thank you. I just want to say that on Thursday... this Thursday morning... I will be running a clinic in one of the villages near by.’
A faint consternation went through the room. There was a shifting of chairs, a sound of papers being rustled.
‘Excuse me?’ Claudia said.
‘A clinic. We will be running a clinic.’
Jorge coughed. ‘I don’t understand. You want...?’
Into the silence a first trace of dismay was creeping. Laurence’s face had fallen slightly and he looked at the papers in his hand as if the answer was written there.
Dr Ngema coughed; we turned to her pinched face. ‘This is an idea,’ she said, ‘an idea put forward by Laurence. It’s a... very good idea, I think. But it’s entirely voluntary, of course. If any of you want to go and help out, it would be very much...’
‘Appreciated,’ Laurence said. He was still standing.
‘I myself won’t be able to go,’ Dr Ngema said. ‘Prior work commitments.’
‘Maybe I should explain,’ Laurence said. ‘The plan is for me to do a presentation. I’m not a hundred per cent sure yet, there are so many things... but I was thinking, a talk on sanitation and hygiene, you know, then a talk on HIV-Aids. Then there’ll be condom distribution, it’s about all we have to distribute at this stage, but more stuff will come, I’m sure. Um, then there’ll be the part where people line up to see one of us, for whatever problem they have. That’s all I can think of. Oh, it’s happening at a village near by, I’ve forgotten its name, but I did write it down somewhere...’
