by Damon Galgut
I remembered the two men working in the garden, and the brown military overalls they were wearing, and I was still thinking about them when more army uniforms showed up in the headlamps. New uniforms, the new army; but for a moment it was like the old days again, with soldiers looming in the night, guns in their hands. A line of lights on the road, metal barriers dragged across the tar, a torch drawing me over to the side. A roadblock. But this was Colonel Moller and his men, doing a different sort of work. I recognized the upright bodies I’d seen strung along the line of the bar, but tonight they were searching through car boots and cubby-holes, covering each other with rifles. The black man who questioned me was brisk and polite. Where are you coming from? Where are you going? Would you open up the back, please, I want to take a look.
As I pulled away again I looked for Colonel Moller. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him near by somewhere, another kind of ghost, one that stayed with me through all the bends and dips in the road until I got to Maria’s shack.
And then it happened. The third thing. I hadn’t gone back to visit Maria on the night I promised I would, or on the night that followed. I’d been too preoccupied with what was going on at the hospital – Tehogo and the stealing – and I knew the shack would still be there, whenever I was ready to go. I had it in mind to stop there tonight on my way, but I saw now that the white car was parked outside.
And that was it: the white car. An arbitrary image, one I carried around unthinkingly in me, but now I remembered, with an inner flash like lightning, the white car parked outside the Brigadier’s house on the hill. And though I didn’t even know whether that other car resembled this one, I became instantly certain that they were the same.
Instantly certain – and then uncertain again... but the connection was made. And the sense that I had, as I drove on and on through the dark, a sense that was like a huge disquiet powering me along, was of the interlocking pieces of a puzzle just beyond my grasp, eluding me.
I drove with the window down, letting the hot wind go through the car. The escarpment rose and lifted me, and soon I was clear of the forest and in the open grassland of the veld. The night was very big here, spread like a huge canvas on the taut wires of the horizon. The car rose and fell on dark undulations, the light from the headlamps tiny and lost. There was comfort in being so small. At one place there was a veld fire burning. I could see the flames from a long way off and, as I got closer, a congregation of cars and people. The flames were very big and bright and black smoke boiled and rolled in the artificial yellow light. I slowed, but I was waved past and the heat of the fire beat on my face as the weird midnight coven sank away in the mirror.
Then the little towns, shuttered, sleeping, barred. Other roads joined this one, feeding it, fattening it up. Pylons and smokestacks against the sky. Garages lit in neon with shivering attendants sleeping in booths. Far off in the distance, cities burned like smouldering piles of coal. All the elements of a foreign world were coming together for me, assembling to make a picture of the past.
I arrived as dawn was breaking. But I didn’t go straight to the house. I drove aimlessly for a while through the suburban streets, feeling the presence of people in the houses, behind the walls, in the gardens. Even the first stirrings of activity – a few cars, a couple of workers on the pavements – made the place seem unnaturally full to me.
My father lived out in the southern part of the city, in a rich, exclusive suburb. Broad tree-lined streets, a sense of distance and light. It was the house I’d grown up in from my early teenage years, though the bottom half of the garden had since been divided off and sold. Another change was the wall that had sprung up around the property. In my day there had been only a fence. Now the wall just seemed to climb and climb.
My stepmother answered the intercom when I buzzed. ‘This is Frank junior,’ I told her, and the gate swung heavily open for me on its big hinges. I parked outside the garage at the top of the driveway. Plants grew green and heavy under looming trees, the brick castle leaned overhead.
She came out to meet me, dressed in smartly casual clothes, face heavily made up. But all the makeup couldn’t conceal a little pained place in her expression. Valerie was my father’s fourth wife, but she was in fact a few years younger than me. We had never found a comfortable level at which to speak to each other.
She kissed me awkwardly on the cheek. ‘Dad’s in the bath. How was the drive? Do you need help with your bag? You must be tired.’ Her anxiety buoyed me up the stairs, into the house. Two maids danced and grovelled in blue uniforms with frilly aprons, both of them barefoot so as not to spoil the carpets. Of which there were many, oriental with cryptic designs; they were a passion of my father’s.
‘Let me see you. Oh, you look more and more like Dad.’ I wished she wouldn’t call him that, as if he was father to both of us; she was too much like a sister already, with her small, painted, worried face hiding secret rivalry with me. ‘You can have your old room, Frank. I’ve kept it just the way it was.’
Each of my father’s wives had insisted on redoing the house – a way, maybe, of staking a claim when they sensed that their stay was temporary. Since I’d left home my room had been changed and repainted a few times, so Valerie’s idea of preserving my little childhood refuge was to hang my old model airplanes from the ceiling and to set up some embarrassing photographs from my schooldays on the windowsill. Frank in the fifth rugby team. Frank as deputy head boy, shaking the hand of the headmaster. Otherwise the room was as pretty and clinical as a mid-range hotel, full of fabrics and colours my mother would never have contemplated.
‘Do you want to shower after the long drive? You must be tired, do you want to sleep? Do you want some breakfast?’
I sat out on the back patio, drinking black coffee. I could hear my father in the bathroom, splashing and humming to himself. Once he burped. He sounded in a good mood. Valerie came out and made a pretence of fiddling with the pot plants on the stairs, then called out instructions to a gardener hidden somewhere in the foliage outside. She went back in and busied herself until she could hear my father was on his way, then came out with her own coffee and sat herself near by.
‘How long are you down for, Frank?’
‘Just a day or two. I’m here to see Karen.’
‘Karen? Oh, that’s nice.’ Her voice had a hopeful upward note.
‘No, no.’ But before I could explain, my father came out on to the patio.
Frank Eloff senior was in his middle sixties by now, but he had the body and voice of someone fifteen years younger. A big, loose, long frame, a handsome face that was always, however faintly, smiling. He was groomed and clipped and elegant – even now, first thing in the morning, shaved and scented, in his paisley dressing gown and Turkish slippers. He shook hands with me, his customary greeting or farewell even when I was a boy, and his hand carried some of the damp warmth of the bathroom, or maybe his hair oil.
‘Frank!’
‘Dad.’
‘It’s an unusual surprise. To see you, I mean. I hope you’re taking a proper holiday for a change.’
‘No, this isn’t a holiday, Dad. I have some personal business to attend to.’
‘Personal business.’
‘He’s here to see Karen,’ Valerie said primly.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘It’s to sign the divorce papers, actually,’ I said, and there was a noticeable lowering of pressure on the patio. My father was of the opinion that my separation from Karen was responsible for the decline of my career, and he frequently expressed the hope that we’d get back together again.
I heard Valerie say, ‘Oh.’
‘Well, Frank, I’m sorry to hear that.’ My father put on his sombre look, which didn’t quite erase his smile, and made his voice low. ‘Is that final? Whose decision is that? Wouldn’t it be better to wait a little longer?’
‘Her decision. It’s final, yes. They’re getting married and moving to Australia.’
‘Oh. Well. Y
es. A lot of the young people are moving away. Very sad.’
‘I’d move,’ Valerie announced. ‘I’d move tomorrow. But your dad won’t have it.’
‘Still the best country in the world,’ my father said, grinning. ‘Still the best quality of life. Now I have to get dressed.’
The morning sun was hot on the patio, so while my father dressed we moved inside to the study. This was the biggest room in the house, lined with books and the prominently displayed accolades of my father’s career. The strongest memory of my adolescent years – which seemed to be one memory but was really many, overlaid on each other – was of facing him across his desk, with that clutter of photographs and publicity like a cloud suspended behind him.
I went up close to look at them now. Most of the pictures showed Frank senior in his early forties, with his broad gleaming grin and backswept hair. In some he was posing with actors and politicians from twenty years ago. I was surprised to see a couple of newer photographs among them; he still wasn’t forgotten.
My father had been something of a smash hit in his time. An unusual fate for a doctor. But he’d seized his moment when it came. He’d started out as a small-town boy from a poor family, who’d gone to medical school on a scholarship from a mining company. After he qualified he went to work for this same company as a doctor on one of their mines. Bad beginnings: but everything turned around for him when there was a terrible accident underground one day and he was on the scene. For one straight forty-eight-hour period, my father crouched in a crumbling tunnel, setting bones, performing amputations, stitching up wounds. He saved the lives of six or seven miners who would almost certainly have died.
The achievement was real. But it’s hard, a quarter of a century later, not to see it through cynical eyes. This was back in the time when the big white dream was turning grey; they needed a poster boy to make them look good, and for a while Frank senior was it. He did look good. He had the dash of a matinee idol, with his boyish forelock and toothy grin. And the media jumped on him. There were front-page articles in the national papers, interviews on the radio, magazine features on his difficult struggle to success. Never mind the miners, who went back to their underground obscurity; my father was the hero of the day.
It all might still have faded again, as quickly as it began, if it hadn’t been for television. TV had just started in South Africa and, after an appearance on the news, somebody decided that my father would be ideal as the host on a new programme. It was a medical quiz show, featuring Frank senior as the suave quiz-master, asking questions of various local personalities. The public loved it, and him. The media attention went on and on. Piles of fan mail arrived at the house. Somewhere in the middle of all this my mother died, but I truly think he hardly noticed – though he did get some more press coverage out of it.
He somehow managed, through all of this clamour and glamour, to keep a serious career going too. Not at the mine any more: he’d moved on from there. But by all accounts he was a gifted surgeon and much in demand. Of course the publicity couldn’t have hurt much either. He’d also branched out into marketing his own products – hair straightener and skin light-ener for black people, all kinds of cosmetic creams for white women. These things were still on the shelves, still bringing in money for him.
It was a spectacular, unlikely rise to stardom, and it hadn’t quite faded yet. He was still feted and dined and dandled, wheeled out for special events, giving honorary lectures and appearing on panels. It was a circus. Nobody cared that the one singular achievement of my father’s life was five, ten, thirty years ago and that he’d never done a substantial thing since. No, he would be young and brilliant for ever.
So there was pressure on me. I had something to prove. I imagined not only that I wanted to be like him, but that it would be easy to do. But of course it hadn’t happened like that, and now the pictures and words on the wall were like a judgement on me.
I heard him coming and went to sit down. He’d changed into golf clothes, slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Frank, it’s a game I arranged before I knew you were coming.’
‘No problem, I’m going to see Karen this morning anyway.’
‘What is this all about anyway, this thing with Karen?’ He settled himself seriously behind the desk. ‘Do you want me to have a word with Sam?’
Sam was Karen’s father, an old friend of my father’s.
‘What? No, no. That wouldn’t change anything.’
‘Are you sure? A bit of discreet pressure —’
‘I’ll leave you two to talk,’ Valerie said.
‘No, don’t. It’s not for discussion.’ I sounded very firm. The last thing I wanted: my father having a quiet word, as though the whole matter could be settled by him. But he didn’t like to be spoken to this way. He said angrily to Valerie, ‘Those flowers are dead.’
He was referring to a big bouquet on the mantelpiece, which was turning brown.
‘I’ve told Betty to take them.’
‘Well, tell her again. I don’t like them there.’ This was the other side of his expansive charm, a mood of petulant fury that was also centred entirely on himself.
I got up. ‘I’m going to shower and change. I’ll see you both later.’
‘I’m not trying to interfere, Frank. You know that.’
‘Of course I know that, Dad.’
I went to my room and showered and shaved and dressed myself in clean clothes. All the time the noises from the big space of the house radiated in: the throb of the washing machine, the hum of air-conditioners, the almost-noiseless flurry of servants cleaning. All strange sounds to me, remembered from long ago. And the face that looked back at me from the bathroom mirror was the same combination of memory and strangeness. If you looked hard you could just make out the schoolboy from the photographs on the windowsill. But he was very different now. The rosy flush had gone, the hair was darker and thinner, the flesh on the cheeks and throat had thickened. It was a face in slow decay, tumbling and sliding down from its bones, sprouting veins and moles and blemishes. You could see an old man in it already, and the expression on his face had a quality of defeat.
Karen and Mike lived in a large penthouse apartment in an area of the city that was almost entirely flat-land. A middle-class area, not very rich. But Sam, Karen’s father, owned the whole block, as well as a number of other blocks near by. That is not to mention his other properties around the country. He’d given the penthouse to Karen as a wedding present when she married me.
Sam had known my father since the early days, when they’d both been at university together. My father was fond of telling me how he and Sam had been close long before money had entered the scene for either of them. In those days Sam was just a hopeful studying law, my father still the poor country mouse trying to shape his future. The moral, I suppose, was that their friendship was based on real values of liking and respect, not the transitory shifting sands of fame and income.
Sam didn’t like me. He never had. Maybe he saw what neither I nor my father was willing to acknowledge: that my future wasn’t glorious, that I wasn’t made of the same fine stuff as Frank Eloff senior. Nevertheless, he was gracious when his youngest daughter and I fell in love. I’d known and hung around with Karen from my earliest years. There was something inevitable, in a social sense, about our coming together. Similar backgrounds of privilege and wealth, similar families forged almost single-handedly by the efforts of determined men with low beginnings. It didn’t matter that neither Karen nor I had exceptional qualities. Our lives could be made exceptional by money.
Karen was a bit aimless, a bit of a drifter. She started studying one thing, then dropped it and moved on to something else. She finally completed a degree in drama, which she claimed to feel passionate about, but after a few thankless walk-ons she dropped that too. At the time that I married her, just after my two years in the army, she had gone into a business with her mother, running a couple of gift shops that did quite well, but
after a while she got bored. It was in the empty period that followed, when she was playing at being an idle madam at home, that her affair with Mike started; for a time I tormented myself with the idea that if she’d only been working...
These days she called herself an interior designer. And I must admit she had an eye. She’d redone the whole penthouse, transforming it from an expensive mausoleum to something airy and comfortable, if a little upmarket for my sensibilities. Lots of open space, wooden floors, tall windows looking out on the city.
Karen’s mother, Jacqui, was just leaving as I arrived. She was walking carefully in high heels, as if to keep the tall pillar of hair balanced on her head. Old and immaculate, mummified under makeup that threatened to crack with even her driest smile, she offered one cheek without a change in expression. ‘Frank,’ she murmured. ‘I know you have an appointment, I’m on my way out.’
‘I thought you and Sam were in France.’ They’d emigrated six years ago.
‘Back for business. The third time this year. You know Sam, he never lets go.’
‘No.’
‘And you, Frank. Still working so hard?’
‘Um. Yes. As hard as ever.’
‘I hear you do such wonderful work up there. Amongst the rural blacks.’
Karen only greeted me when her mother had gone. She pressed her lips to my cheek, a quick dry peck, and there was the momentary feeling of her bony hips in my hands.
‘You’ve lost weight,’ I told her.
‘You’ve put some on. You look terrible, Frank. What’s happened to you?’
‘Nothing. Same old life.’
‘Let’s go through to the lounge.’
Once we had settled ourselves on the big leather armchairs, above the city skyline, she picked up a sheaf of papers from the coffee table. ‘Here. Business first. I have it all ready.’
