Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  A slight grin. Your wide eyes the color of bitter chocolate. The suppleness of your long body as you got out again and ducked under the bonnet.

  ‘I just stopped here –’ I pointed at the small supermarket on the corner—‘to get cigarettes for a party, I was dawdling on the way and I’m already running late and everybody’s waiting—and now the car won’t start.’

  ‘Have you checked the battery?’

  ‘Do you know about cars?’

  ‘Not a thing.’

  That strangely reassured me. ‘There was nothing wrong until I stopped,’ I told you.

  ‘It happened to me the other day. That’s why I think it is the battery. Shall we have a look?’

  ‘We haven’t even met yet.’

  You stretched out your hand, noticed how dirty mine was, hesitated, and then took it regardless.

  ‘Chris,’ I said helpfully. ‘Chris Minnaar.’

  ‘I’m Rachel Lombard.’ There was a pause. What next? Then you asked, ‘Shall I check your water?’

  ‘I’ll check the car’s battery,’ I said with a straight face.

  That was exactly where the problem lay. All the cells were dry. You offered to give me a lift to a nearby garage.

  ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ I asked.

  ‘I won’t harm you,’ you said.

  ‘I was thinking of you.’

  ‘I’ll take the chance.’ This time the smile was wider. ‘I wouldn’t normally, but you won’t believe this: I went to a star-woman this morning, an astrologer, and she said I’d have an opportunity to help somebody today and if I didn’t, I might lose the chance of a lifetime.’

  ‘The stars can be notorious liars.’

  ‘They’ve never lied to me.’ You opened the passenger door of the Golf; it took some wrenching, I noticed, before it yielded with an infernal squeak.

  ‘Do you mind turning on the Beethoven again?’ I said. ‘Les Adieux, I think it was.’

  Your eyes became almost phosphorescent with delight. ‘You like it too?’

  ‘One of my favorites.’

  That, I think, did it. We drove to the garage—I couldn’t help noticing, with some atavistic patronizing approval, I presume, with what easy and deft self-assurance you handled the little blue Golf. I bought a liter of distilled water and a set of jump leads, and we returned to my car. But it made no difference; the cells must have been damaged beyond repair. Even after the jump-start the car just shuddered to a halt again.

  ‘I cannot possibly impose on you any more,’ I said. ‘I’ll call a cab from the supermarket and take it from there.’

  ‘What about my chance of a lifetime?’ you mocked. ‘I can’t just leave you to your fate. Get in.’

  ‘This is really the wrong way round,’ I said. ‘The damsel on the blue pony saving the decrepit knight in distress.’

  ‘Suits me. Let’s go. After Les Adieux there’s still the Appassionata.’

  In a manner of speaking, I thought. But it’s usually the other way round.

  We went back to the garage, but they could not supply me with a new battery. They did direct me to another place, though, not too far from there, where I might be helped. No luck. In the end it took the better part of an hour before we arrived back at my car. We were halfway through the Hammerklavier and the supermarket staff was already preparing to lock up for the festive night ahead. Together we started doing battle with tight bolts corroded by old battery acid. It was you who thought of Coca-Cola; and just before the supermarket doors were bolted, you skipped inside to buy a bottle from the none-too-friendly manager. Between the two of us we finally got the better of the job, but by that time we were both looking the worse for wear. A smudge on your left cheek made you look irresistible; but I felt less happy about a large black stain on your long red dress.

  ‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ I said. There were some suggestions I could make, but in my position I could not possibly push it. And I knew better than to try some of my old lines on today’s youth. Not that you were all that callow. Early thirties, I should guess. (But no rings, as I’d noticed when I had first, approvingly, checked your hands.)

  ‘You look a sight,’ you said matter-of-factly. ‘Why don’t you come home with me first and get yourself cleaned up? I live just round the corner.’

  ‘Can you spare the time?’

  You glanced at your watch: a big, rather cheap, but practical, no-nonsense affair.

  ‘I won’t keep you long,’ I promised, guiltily. ‘Then I must be on my way. I’m late already. You too, I should imagine.’

  You shrugged. Then you drove off; I followed. Your house, small and surprisingly old-fashioned, was tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac, high up on the slope, with a spectacular view.

  After some cursory ablutions, as I was reversing in your small backyard, preparing to leave, you suddenly said, ‘What about a quick drink?’

  I said, ‘Yes.’

  And so our night began.

  The ceramic sculptures are the first I notice. Not that one can miss them: they are everywhere. Most of them quite small, no more than fifteen or twenty centimeters tall, but there are a few larger pieces in the studio that overlooks the bay. They seem to constitute a fantastic world of their own, spilling into the living spaces of the house: figures that might have stepped straight from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, but with a strong African flavor. As if on one of his journeys to hell the old Flemish master has made a detour through Benin, Mali, Mozambique. It is evident that no one has bothered to tidy the place in weeks, perhaps months. But it is a friendly chaos, a smiling and human chaos. (I cannot help reaching for Nietzsche’s great line, One must have chaos inside oneself to give birth to a dancing star.)

  ‘Who did these?’

  ‘All my fault.’

  ‘The detail is amazing. You must have spent a lifetime on them.’

  ‘Five years. I’ve lived with them in my mind all my life, but I never had the guts to start doing something about it.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  A brief pause. Your eyes seem to become even darker. ‘My father died eight years ago, you see.’

  ‘What did that have to do with it?’

  ‘Would you like some wine?’ you interrupt.

  ‘I’d love some, but –’

  ‘Red or white?’

  ‘Red.’

  Without giving me any further opening you go out. I bend over the nearest small sculpture. The detail and precision are indeed astounding. There is even something Egyptian about it: all those gods with the faces of birds and animals. But so perfectly done as if everything has been taken straight from life.

  You come back so quietly on your bare feet that I don’t hear you, and am startled when you put the tray with the bottle and two huge glasses on the table.

  ‘Will you open for us?’

  As I cautiously pull out the cork and sniff it I say, casually and without looking at you, ‘You were going to tell me about your father.’

  ‘You don’t let go, do you?’ Suddenly your mood seems to clear. ‘It’s not a special story at all. Just the old one of a man who wanted to turn his only daughter into the son he never had. He was a mathematician, and so I had to become one too.’

  ‘That’s pretty daunting.’

  ‘I loved him, that’s all,’ you say, very simply. ‘I couldn’t let him down. You see, my mother went off with someone else when I was quite small, so there were only him and me.’ And then, as the wine stands breathing silently between us, you tell me of how you’ve dreamed of making sculptures all your life, ever since as a little girl you spent a holiday with him on the Free State farm of some relative, where you played in the muddy trickle of the river with all the farm boys and learned to make clay oxen. Your love of textures, your love of shapes. Your dreams at night of strange, enchanting�
��or enchanted—forms that came to life. But always there were the figures and equations of your father’s world to return to. Throughout your school years, and through university. And you must have been brilliant, although now you downplay the whole thing very much and seem embarrassed to talk about it. Then you got a junior lectureship at Wits, and completed your Ph.D., and were promoted to lecturer. But still the dreams were there. And then he died, a stroke, and six months later you gave up your academic career and took the plunge to become a sculptor.

  ‘You certainly had guts,’ I comment.

  ‘Plain chutzpah. Fortunately I wasn’t exactly destitute. He’d left me some money. Not much, but enough to keep me off the streets. And so here I am.’

  That is when you pour the wine, and I do my little number about mocha and vanilla and chocolate.

  When much later we return to the subject—by that time we’ve given up our party plans for the night, and opened another bottle, and had something to eat, and you are more forthcoming—you pull a face and blow out smoke and say, ‘Actually it was hell to get started. Okay, I’d always, when I had a bit of spare time, which was never much, made little things, sometimes when I was studying, just to feel something between my fingers, little figurines of plasticine or whatever. But suddenly it was my life, you see, and I was terrified. There were many days when I thought I’d done the dumbest, craziest thing ever, giving up a secure job—for this. And all my friends agreed.’ A slow, illuminating smile. ‘But in the end I knew there was nothing else I could have done. I just had to. I don’t think anyone will ever really understand.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ I say. Outside looms the night—the French doors are open and from far away the deep, reassuring bass boom of the sea goes on and on—and inside are the two of us, alone in all that space. ‘I do understand very well. I had to make much the same journey. My father was a lawyer, so I had to be one too, never any doubt about that. That is just the way our society works, isn’t it? But unlike you, I didn’t wait for him to die. I just kept on writing, secretly, for myself, mainly at night. And then, around the time of Sharpeville, I was in such a state of rage about what was happening in the country, I wrote a novel about it, it seemed to come out in one painful spurt, and Marlene, the woman I was with just then, said I should do something about it. No hope of ever getting it published in Afrikaans, so the two of us worked together on translating it. She was English. I was rather dubious about my chances, but she had a ferocious belief in the manuscript. So she sent it off to London, where she had a friend with some kind of connection in the publishing world, and before I knew what was happening the book came out and suddenly I was the flavor of the month. That gave me the kick in the backside which I needed. I turned my back on my father and all his projects and expectations, and gave up my career as a lawyer and took the plunge.’

  ‘What happened to Marlene?’ you ask.

  I shrug. ‘I’m not sure. It just ran its course. Once the book came out, she started feeling jealous about it. Terrible irony it was: she said it took me away from her.’

  ‘We do need someone to believe in us, don’t we?’ you ask. By this time we are settled on the somewhat dilapidated old sofa from which the stuffing is coming out, you are lying prone on your back, an arm under your head, one hand holding a cigarette; one knee drawn up, the other foot balanced on it.

  ‘Do you have such a someone?’ I ask with some caution; I’m not sure that I really want to know.

  ‘I’ve been incredibly lucky,’ you say. ‘Just a few months after I started on my own I had two or three little things on exhibition at a big art-fair thing at the Waterfront. That’s where I met George. He simply bought them all, and we started talking, and that was that. I had just popped in to check, in my oldest clothes, looking like something the cat had dragged in, and he had all his cameras draped around his neck, like a big bear in a circus, and we had a coffee, and sat talking until the place closed down for the night, and he took me back to his house, which is this one, and we only woke up again about a week later.’

  ‘So you’re still with him?’ I ask, in as neutral a voice as I can muster.

  ‘Of course,’ you say. ‘We’re married. We lived together for two years, and then we said I do, I do, and now it’s another four years later.’

  ‘I haven’t noticed any rings.’

  ‘I lost mine in a lump of clay and we haven’t had time to replace it. Anyway, that is supposed to be unlucky, isn’t it? But it hasn’t made any difference.’

  Without meaning to, I heave a sigh.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ you ask with a small frown of concern.

  ‘I think I’ve just missed the last bus home,’ I say.

  You cast a quizzical look at me, but say nothing. A slow question mark of smoke moves thinly from your cigarette up into the air, unfurls, disappears.

  ‘If you are married, why are you interested in a new chance?’ I ask suddenly, perhaps more provocatively than I meant to.

  ‘Who says I’m looking for a new chance?’ You sound offended.

  ‘That’s what you told me the astrologer said.’

  You burst out laughing. ‘Yes, of course. I went there this morning. I was with a friend, we saw the ad and just impulsively went for a consultation.’ You pull a face. ‘A seedy little hole in Sea Point. And a funny little woman, like a praying mantis with big bulging eyes and misshapen hands. I don’t think she was very good. But she did say a few things that really were close to the bone. She told me I was very sad because my husband wouldn’t be with me over New Year’s Day, that he was somewhere in the wilderness…’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Yes, in the Congo.’ You interrupt your story to tell me about George’s travels, then return to your astrologer. ‘She said I hadn’t been working as well as I should, because I was feeling lonely and my mind was distracted, and why didn’t I give my house a spring-cleaning? It would help to sort out my mind. And you know what? She said I was planning to go out on New Year’s Eve, but in the end I wouldn’t go, because the new person who was going to turn up in my life might help me sort things out.’

  I prefer not to comment. You lean over to find and light a new cigarette. The way you cup your hand around the flame suddenly seems very familiar, but for a moment I cannot place the gesture.

  ‘I think I can do with some sorting out myself,’ I reflect. ‘For the last number of years I’ve always had someone coming over to keep my papers in order. Sometimes I placed an ad in the paper, more often than not it was a friend, or a friend’s daughter, or niece, or acquaintance, whatever. A kind of Girl Friday. To type my letters, the odd article, sort my papers. I have an old major-domo, Frederik Baadjies, who’s more or less taken over the house, but he won’t touch my papers. I don’t like strangers around, but I really can’t cope with all that stuff on my own. Just too bloody lazy, if you ask me.’

  ‘Why don’t you have anybody at the moment?’

  ‘The latest one left to get married.’

  Lindiwe. I am aware of smiling fondly at the memory, but I suppose there is something wistful in it. I didn’t want to see her go. Especially not to get married. Still, I had probably given her a useful induction into matrimony. Not just the secretarial work and a bit of housekeeping with Frederik’s reluctant consent. But the conversations. And, I may as well admit it, something of a sentimental education. Surprisingly mature for a girl her age, twenty-three. A beautiful woman, she could have been a model, a thoroughly modern miss. I was fascinated by her hair, plaited in intricate geometrical patterns close to her head, from where a curtain of thin braids reached down to her shoulders. Her body was a dark, lustrous brown, smooth and groomed and radiant, with large and perfectly spherical breasts and lovely feet. With all the energy and inventiveness of youth, but with patience and understanding as well. Over the last few years my forays into love have suffered some let-downs. I am no longer the man I was. I used t
o take courage from the widely held belief that the longer you remain active sexually the longer you can keep it up. But it is not true. Not true. And Lindiwe had the patience and understanding not to be put off by temporary incapacity. The almost adoring expression in her eyes, the quiet and humorous understanding, with which she would coax the recalcitrant member back into life, the skill of her long, pale brown fingers with the rosy tips. And even if my own performance might occasionally fail, there had never been anything amiss with my tongue. And then she had to go and get married. Very properly, in the Catholic church in Gugulethu; her father was dead, and I was asked as a very special favor to give her away to the bridegroom. Lionel. A handsome colored man, an up-and-coming young executive. He looked so proud, so tall and erect in his new suit. When I lifted her misty white veil and kissed her farewell, our eyes met in a final smile of complicity. No one would ever know. Gone now, like so many others. Married. Like you, Rachel. What a loss.

  I straighten up on the old lived-in sofa, keeping my eyes on your hands, your long strong hands shaped by working with clay, the no-nonsense yet sensitive fingers, the dominant thumbs.

  ‘Were you in love with her?’ you interrupt my wandering thoughts.

  ‘With whom?’

  ‘The woman you spoke about. Lindiwe, your Girl Friday.’

  I shrug. But the frankness with which you are observing me makes me hesitate. It is a night for confidences; under any other circumstances I may not have opened up so unreservedly, but now I do. ‘Yes, I was. I very much need to be in love.’

  ‘You were in love with every Girl Friday you had?’

  ‘I suppose so. Just as I fell in love with every one of the heroines in my books.’

  ‘Even the bad ones?’

  ‘Especially the bad ones. They were in need of redemption. And so was I.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’

  ‘We certainly all need love.’

  ‘You must have loved a lot in your life.’

  ‘But not enough. Never enough.’ And after a moment I take the obvious risk: ‘What about you?’