Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  Copyright © André Brink 2004

  Cover and internal design © 2007 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover photo © GettyImages

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Secker & Warburg

  First published in the United States in 2007 by Sourcebooks

  André Brink has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designsand Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

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  is available from the British Library

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Before I Forget

  Acknowledgements

  Back Cover

  Thank you

  S

  for the little blue bus

  Rompre avec les choses réelles, ce n’est rien.

  Mais avec les souvenirs!…

  Le coeur se brise à la séparation des songes.

  Jean d’Ormesson, C’était bien

  If we cease to grieve we may cease to remember.

  Plutarch, Letter of Consolation to His Wife

  …love is immortal though the body is not.

  Nicholas Gage, Greek Fire

  You died at seventeen minutes to ten this morning. I was of course with you; no one else. The last love of my life? I will soon be seventy-eight, after all. Beyond the age of redemption. There may still be years ahead of me, especially if I’ve inherited Mam’s genes—she turns a hundred and three in late August, three weeks after my own birthday—but duration is, regrettably, not all that matters; and you, more than anyone else, with all the joy you have brought me, have also made me only too aware of my waning powers, desire brought on but performance taken away. I know that Goethe, at seventy-five, still had an affair with a seventeen-year-old, to whom he wrote one of his most beautiful poems. And there are the lustrous examples of Chaplin and Picasso and Bertrand Russell and Chagall and Karajan and Mandela, or even, way back, of Father Abraham, not to mention Methuselah who begat and begat and begat until an unspeakable age. But in due course, sooner for some, later for others, all good things of day begin to droop and die; and not just women, but men too, succumb to the dark forces of gravity. Ever since that first day, on New Year’s Eve, fifteen months ago, something inside me, something well beyond reason or practicality, knew that after you there could not be another woman. There was nothing melodramatic about the acknowledgement: it was very calm, unemotional, and precise. Like a last boundary stone on an ancient road. After this, ultima Thule. Or whatever.

  Have you changed the substance of my life, or just the contours? Whatever it might be, you have given meaning to it at a time when I was beginning to sink into despondency about my waning powers—intellectual, moral, physical and (undoubtedly and regrettably and shamefully) sexual.

  That evening, after all the upheaval in the street with my stalled car, our hands and faces still showing traces of grease and oil, you invited me in for a drink. From that humdrum beginning all the rest flowed, fifteen months of exploring unexpected tracts of the topography of heaven; with, for fair measure, a stretch of purgatory and the odd corner of hell thrown in.

  It is still a pulsating, living memory inside me. As the long December twilight darkens almost imperceptibly over the glimmering surface of the southern ocean, you sit cupping in two slender hands a large glass of red wine.

  I sniff appreciatively. ‘Cabernet Sauvignon,’ I say. ‘About 1995? Paarl region rather than Stellenbosch.’

  Your eyes widen. ‘Spot on. Where did you learn to do that?’

  ‘One of my passions,’ I explain. ‘It’s fun trying to identify all the elements that speak to the palate and the nose.’

  ‘Like what?’

  I swirl the deep red wine in its glass, and take a small sip, slipping into a pretentious pose: ‘Like, in this one, the complex flavoring of cedar wood, blackcurrant, mocha and vanilla, all of them tinted with suggestions of mint and chocolate, of sun-ripened sweet berries and subtle tannins which precede the medley of darker berries, wood spice and toasted coconut that tease the palate.’

  ‘My God,’ you exclaim. ‘You’re either a barefaced liar or a pretty formidable connoisseur.’

  ‘A matter of practice. And picking up the jargon.’ I wink. ‘The real fun starts when one tries to puzzle out people in the same way.’

  ‘Do you do it with everybody you meet?’

  ‘No, no. Only those who seem worth the effort. I must admit I find a particular challenge in reading women in that way.’

  ‘How do you do that?’

  I hesitate, and decide to let it go. (Already, in my mind, I could imagine reading you, unique and euphoric: not a dark heavy red wine this, but a white, a Sauvignon Blanc perhaps, from a cool terroir, fresh and bright but without any tartness or greenness, with an intense straw-like and green-peppery and lemon-grassy bouquet, and hints of asparagus and gooseberry, a fleeting farmyard presence, a complex fruitiness that lingers in the aftertaste, beautifully balanced for perfect aging.)

  All you do is dip the tip of your tongue into your wine and point it wet and glistening in my direction. At last you ask, ‘Are you in the wine business?’

  ‘Strictly as a drinker.’

  ‘Then what are you? You’re definitely not a mechanic—I could see that.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be a writer. But I haven’t written anything for years.’

  Sudden enlightenment dawns in your eyes. ‘Jesus, you’re not the Chris Minnaar?’

  ‘Guilty as charged.’

  ‘Well! I’m sorry, I should never have taken up so much of your time.’

  It is a moment of choice. Without trying to unravel it, I sense that everything may be at stake here. I look very intensely at your face: the contrast between the not-quite-blonde hair and the very dark eyes set wide apart; the small mole on one high cheekbone, the generous mouth. There is something that puzzles me, tugs at memory: I’m sure I have seen a face like this before, but where, but how? And I know I cannot let go until I have traced it.

  ‘I’m not in any hurry,’ I say, willing to compromise not just the night ahead but, for all I know, the future. ‘I don’t really have anything else to do.’

  ‘It’s New Year’s Eve!’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to bother you much.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I’ve been invited to a party. I was actually on my way there, remember, when I found you. But I don’t feel like going any longer.’

  ‘I’m also supposed to go out. But I’d much rather stay here.’

  ‘Think of your reputation.’

  ‘I am doing just that.’

  That was the beginning of it all. You didn’t go to your party, and I skipped mine. We spoke for fourteen hours without coming up for air. In the high morning, you fell asleep on the old sagging couch with the broken springs. I remained sitting beside you, looking down at your face, serene in sleep. It was frank and innocent, hiding nothing from me, and yet the p
urest mystery.

  ***

  There are two moments in the relationship with every woman I have known in my life, which have brought me closer to understanding—even if it was without ever fully getting there—what it means to be alive. One is the moment of orgasm. Not my own, but that of the woman I am with. Because it is immeasurably more wonderful than anything I could hope to feel myself. Seeing—hearing, feeling, knowing—her in the throes of ecstasy, does not primarily bring a sense of achievement, the Little Jack Horner syndrome (Look what a clever boy am I), but a sense of awe: this is what a human individual—this she who is you—is capable of. It is an unfathomable combination of two sensations which ought to be essentially different, and yet are merged: it is a sharing, almost a fusion, which leaves me with a feeling of unspeakable joy, even of gratitude (Thank you for allowing me to be with you in the ultimate moment); but also a feeling of utter solitude. I can see it, hear it, feel it, taste it—but I can never be on the inside of it with you. I cannot even be sure whether I really know what it is like. Is it ‘like’ my own? Or incomparable? Just as I can never know if what you see at any given moment is exactly the same as what I see. We look at a color. We both call it red. But it is only because we have been taught to call it by that name. There is no guarantee—not ever—that we see it in the same way, that your red is my red. How much more momentous is something like orgasm. But for that very reason your solitude, your quite literal wrapped-upness in it, cannot but bring that experience of what for lack of a better word I call awe.

  The other moment is very, very different. And yet not, if one really thinks about it, so different at all. It is the moment when I wake up with a woman in my arms, and see her still sleeping. I raise myself on an elbow. I gaze. I gaze at her without even for a moment being able to understand anything at all of what I see. You: sleeping. The one I have shared a special experience with; the one I have shared hours, days, months, perhaps years of my life with. Yet, here, in this instant, so utterly confirmed in your youness that you are turned into a mystery, I am conscious of being on the outside of it: it actually makes me feel an intruder, someone who should not be here at all, should not be allowed to gaze upon you in this ineffable moment of sleep. Because here you are totally vulnerable, you have no protection against the world. Except the protection of your own self. Which, being unfathomable, leaves you so naked that you may just as well have been peeled from your skin, a grape, a transparent fruit, light in the heart of light. And that is a mystery, for ever.

  And yet by falling asleep beside me, you have sanctioned, silently, this intrusion and this gaze. To sleep with someone can be more intimate than making love. It is a yielding, and a trust, that cannot be compared to anything else. You have granted me this. Can I ever be worthy of it? This is the moment I come closest to understanding something of that overused and misunderstood word: love.

  ***

  After a long time of gazing at you, I got up, taking care not to disturb you, and tiptoed to a narrow divan in the corner, from which I stripped a brightly colored spread—it looked Spanish, perhaps Mexican—which I draped over you. You shifted to find a comfortable position, uncovering one foot. I went to the kitchen to drink a glass of water, and in the too-bright New Year’s morning washed the dishes from the slap-up meal you had prepared sometime during the night without interrupting the conversation. After that I returned to watch you sleep until, like a cat, you stretched and yawned and woke up to resume the talk.

  All of this happened fifteen months ago. And now it comes tumbling back, clamoring to be remembered, without form and void. My love, and all the other loves of my life. Into the emptiness your death has left behind, this absence of everything that used to spell not just your life, but life itself. At my age one should be used to death and dying. In the terse and moving Afrikaans expression: they are chopping in our wood. And have been at it for a long time now. But one never quite gets used to it. You never know when the axe will bite into your own bark and let the white splinters fly.

  Throughout last night I lay awake—I knew what was coming; I knew exactly how it would happen, and yet was wholly unprepared. I lay in bed watching the television. Staring mesmerized at the images of war. What everybody had been predicting for months, had now begun. The bombing of Baghdad. Spectacular flares in the night sky, like Guy Fawkes, the sound of explosions which might be crackers but were not. America on its collision course with Iraq, one face of evil seeking out another. Saddam, Bush. For months the world had been teetering on the edge of this chicken game, wondering whether the US (Britain is merely a snotty little brother running after the big bully in this equation) was really going to plunge in. Now it had begun. Saddam and his sons hopefully killed, the TV said, in a bomb raid on a bunker.

  Since no convincing reasons have been advanced at any stage—least of all in Secretary Powell’s recent song and dance in the Security Council—one is left floundering among wild and wilder theories. I know of few more damning and devastating comments on the philosophy of war than this paragraph by Chris Hedges, war correspondent of the New York Times:

  ***

  The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominate our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.

  ***

  If this is what it is about, if this is an acceptable assessment of the US in the wake of 9/11, then the West has truly come to the edge of the abyss. It is in the face of the Void that humanity has always undertaken its most profound philosophical probings. I must confess that looking at my whole life and all my loves, I can possibly see it as nothing but a response to the ‘trivia’ Hedges talks about: an attempt to find the ‘purpose, meaning, a reason for living’ he now discovers in war. Somewhere, something has gone unimaginably wrong.

  All of it remained unreal on the stark screen of the television set, a spectacle, a show put on for our diversion in the night hours. And yet real people were really dying, might still die in their hundreds or thousands, who could tell? That was the true obscenity. While in the hospital, less than half an hour away from here, you too were waiting for death, for the release from the coma in which you had been lying for almost a month now, ever since your birthday on the last day of February when you went out to buy cigarettes at ‘our’ little supermarket and did not come back.

  At seventeen minutes to ten this morning you died. I was there. Oh yes, I was there. I left soon after. I had no stomach for the formalities to follow: there were doctors and nurses and registrars enough to deal with that. They had all the facts on file since the first day I was brought there by the police. Somewhere in the midst of the breaking war in Iraq was George, your husband, presumably taking photographs: a call with destiny he could not possibly miss. But there would be friends who could be summoned to fill in the details. I no longer belonged with you; if I ever had. As far as the hospital was concerned, I am only your employer and your friend. Was.

  All I can think of for the time being is writing in this new black book with the red spine, bought especially for the purpose: writing, compulsively perhaps, but redeemingly—writing, writing, writing, unable to stop. For it is in the gaps and silences in between that you insinuate yourself. You. Rachel.

  To remember you. In and through every loop and line my hand traces on the page, to recall you, like Eurydice, from the dead. What else does one write for? What else could possibly drive us so? Whence this unnatural urge? To defy death, like Scheherazade? No. I think there is one thing above all. Only one. To hold on. To have and to hold. Before it slips away. Before I forget.

  But as I write about you, others are bound to follow, flowing across the pages like ink, like water, li
ke the menstrual blood of death and life, unstoppable. A test of memory, or of invention, as the case may be. All those others, the women, who have marked my life, every beginning and turn and ending, every curve or darkness of my body.

  It is not even ironical, but only fitting, it seems to me, that writing about my love and loves should be surrounded by the darkness of this war happening in front of my eyes. For is love, any love, all love, not always set in the context of pointless violence? They appear to me as inevitable complements to each other. The rage and inchoate destruction of the one is unavoidably countered by the impression of sense and meaning, of shape and form in the other. If we are born, as the old Romans had it, between piss and shit, then we love between murder and mayhem. I have no idea at all, as I lie here in front of the TV, of where the war may yet go. But that does not even, really, matter. It is there. And I am here. And whatever I have to write about the loves of my life, will now forever remain framed in it. Perhaps on the surface there may not appear to be any parallels between this war, these loves. And yet I believe that the connections must be there, all the time, however subtle or tenuous these may appear. The one is unthinkable without the other. And so, as the violence unfolds and engulfs us, I shall—at last—write. A commemoration of whatever women have shared with me—or added to me? or taken from me?—over my already too numerous years. I’ve always had a passion for organizing, systematizing, patterning. (The persistent push of my father, the lawyer, the rigid, driving man of my early years?) Paging through all the old journals that have accumulated dust and fish moths and mouse or gecko shit for so long, I shall try to find, from all those bygone years, whatever still makes sense. No, not a record of victories and conquests, not that at all. God forbid. Many of them could not be termed ‘victories’ by any criteria whatsoever; on the contrary. In moments of ebullience before I met you I might have been tempted to think that I have tasted every form of success in my life, including failure. Now, after your death, it might be equally true to say that, with women as with much else besides, I have tasted every kind of defeat life has to offer, including success. In love, these distinctions do not come so readily to hand. Let it be a kind of harmless adventure in its own right, as I stumble along.