Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  ‘Never enough,’ you retort with a straight face, but with what I think may be an impish glint in your eyes.

  ‘You still have time to catch up.’

  You refuse to take the bait, and deftly change the subject: ‘I can come and work for you,’ you say without any warning. ‘Two mornings a week.’

  ‘You’re a sculptor.’

  ‘I was a mathematician too.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean you can type and file.’

  ‘You can always fire me.’

  ‘What I meant was that your sculpture is a full-time occupation. Look at the things you make. It would be criminal to spend all that time on Girl Fridaying.’

  ‘Not all my time. I said two mornings a week. In fact, I have been discussing it with George: finding something to do part-time, just to get out of the house sometimes, a complete change of scene. I need the stimulation.’

  ‘I can’t offer much stimulation.’

  ‘You can talk to me. I miss people to talk to in the daytime. In the evenings, when George is away, I can go out to see friends. But the days can be long.’

  ‘Discuss it with your husband first. When he’s around again. When will he be back?’

  ‘I never know for sure. A week, perhaps two.’ An almost imperceptible narrowing of your eyes; it’s the kind of thing I do not miss. ‘There’s one condition.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘If I’m your Girl Friday you’re not allowed to interfere with my work. And I won’t interrupt yours.’

  ‘Agreed. But I have nothing to interrupt anyway. I’ve had a block for years now, six, seven, eight.’

  ‘We must work on that.’

  ‘There’s always the possibility that you may inspire me to get going again.’

  You think it over for a while, then nod. ‘I think I’d like that.’

  ‘And occasionally we may break for tea.’

  ‘I’ll have coffee.’

  ‘Agreed then.’

  ‘I’ll discuss it with George.’

  ‘You sure he won’t mind?’

  ‘My husband isn’t the jealous type. And he certainly won’t be jealous of you.’

  ‘Whatever that may mean.’

  ‘All I mean is that he will know that I’m safe with you.’

  ‘Like Father Christmas?’

  ‘Like a creative person.’

  A quick change of direction: ‘When did you first know you’d be a writer?’

  ‘I told you I started very late. I was already well into my thirties when A Time to Weep was published. But I’d always known I would write, and throughout my teens I did, as I told you. But my father nipped it in the bud. Said it wasn’t a decent occupation for a self-respecting man.’

  ‘Or woman?’

  ‘I’m afraid his world allowed no space for women. Except for…’ I shrugged. ‘You know.’

  ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘She was the one who always believed in me. Still does, at over a hundred. In her lucid moments, which are becoming more and more rare.’

  I withdraw into my thoughts; and sensing, perhaps, that you shouldn’t intrude, you wait patiently, smoking. After a while I say, ‘I think it began when we had our first English lesson in school. Where I grew up, in Graaff Reinet, it was something of a foreign language. Thanks to my beloved old nanny I knew some Xhosa. But not English. My father couldn’t stand the English. The Boer War, you see, in which his own father had fought and died. He himself had barely survived the English concentration camp in which he spent two years with his mother. As a lawyer he had to be bilingual of course, and he had an impressive command of the language. But he left English at the office. At home there was only Afrikaans. So I was brought up with all those prejudices. And then we had that first lesson at school. The teacher read us a poem in English, without trying to explain anything. All we had to do was close our eyes and listen. And that afternoon when I came home, I wandered about in our garden with the English reader the teacher had handed out, and I tried to read from it, aloud. I had no idea of the correct pronunciation, I literally didn’t understand a word of it. But I was caught in the strangeness of that other language, its rhythms and cadences, the whole sense of otherness it brought with it. I started doing it every day. And after a week or so I suddenly made the discovery that my own language, Afrikaans, was also made of sounds and rhythms and cadences. As I spoke it out loud to myself I was entranced by how extraordinary everything sounded that had previously been so familiar that I never took a step back to look at it, to listen to it, from a distance. I think that was when I became a writer. Thirty years before I ventured into print.’

  ‘I love that,’ you say. ‘I love listening to you. You’re making the language foreign for me too. It’s beautiful.’

  A long, easy silence full of thoughts. Then I ask, ‘And your sculpture? How did that begin?’

  ‘On that farm I went to with my father.’

  ‘The clay oxen?’

  ‘No, before that.’ You stretch out both your legs into the air. The long dark silky dress falls back to your hips. You do not even seem aware of it. You begin to rotate your neat ankles, wiggling your toes. ‘It started with my feet.’

  ‘But how…?’

  You smile without looking at me, still twirling your ankles very slowly, pensively. ‘It was down at the river, one late afternoon. The boys all had farmwork to do, bringing home the cattle, milking, securing the kraals, watering the vegetables and the herb garden, whatever. I was all by myself. I had a swim.’ I fleetingly think of Driekie. ‘And after I came out of the water I sat on a big smooth rock to dry. My feet were in the water. And as I moved them, they sank into the soft mud at the edge. I could feel it squishing through my toes. Squishing and squiggling. It was one of the most extraordinary sensations I have ever had. Ever. I suppose I was too small for a thing like that, but you know, I think now it was the first orgasm I had in my life. The sheer sensuality of that mud through my toes. I lifted my feet and looked at the thin little snakes wriggling down back into the water. I was totally fascinated. Later, I climbed down from the rock and squatted at the edge of the water to repeat with my hands what I’d just done with my feet. And I knew, I just knew, that this was what I would like to do with my life. To work with clay. For a few years I experimented with all kinds of material. But every time I come back to clay, to ceramics. I need material I can shape and bend and twist and form into something new.’ You chuckle at a memory. ‘In the beginning, when I just started sculpting, I rather liked working with iron, melting it until it was soft and pliable. But I burnt my hands so much, and once even singed off most of my hair. And then, for some time, I tried marble. Which has a special kind of excitement. I seem to think that it was no less a sculptor than Michelangelo who said, “Marble is easy. Suppose you want to make a horse. You just take the block and chip away everything that is not a horse.” But that wasn’t my line. I don’t want to find something that is hidden but already there. I want to make something that has never been before.’

  I do not answer, there is no need. In silence I watch you finish your cigarette and reach out for another. You are really smoking too much. It is something that often repels me in others. But for the moment I am fixated on the movement of your hand, the way you hold the cigarette between forefinger and thumb, like a joint. And I can imagine the taste of the tip of your tongue, the smoky smell of your hair in the morning. Which right now I would give my kingdom for. I have known only one other woman whose smoking has so captivated me, and that was Nicolette. Closing my eyes I can indeed smell her hair and taste her tongue. Yours.

  And so the night grows very old around us, and very young again. I remember that at one stage you reached for another cigarette, and how upset you were to find the packet empty. But I recalled my stop at the supermarket before you’d come to rescue me, and told you not to worry
, and went outside—the wonderful freshness of the early-morning air outside, the first streaks of color coming over the mountains at the back, the peculiar rustling of silver trees in the stirring of the breeze—and took the unopened packet from the cubbyhole.

  When I came back, you were asleep, your hair spilling in a dark blonde pool around your head on the old sofa, your legs now folded, but the dress still rucked up to your hips. I bent over and carefully straightened it down over your knees. Your eyes half opened and you mumbled something. A thin trail of saliva ran from the corner of your mouth. I wanted to kneel beside you and recover it with my tongue, but wouldn’t run the risk of waking you.

  ***

  There was one woman about whom I never had such qualms. She just loved being woken up with caresses, or even with me inside her; usually she was already wet with anticipation. Whether it was ten or eleven in the morning (how she loved sleeping late), or two, or three, or four at night. Her warm voice moist in my ear. No one else I have ever known had so many contradictions poured into one small, perfect body. (‘Poured’, for with her everything was liquid.) What she loved above all was for me to pour champagne on her nipples and watch it form delicate foaming patterns down her ribcage and her stomach; and I would lick it from her navel, and nuzzle down to her very smoothly shaven sex. The woman who was, without any doubt at all, the most turbulent, the most exhausting, the most incredible love affair of my life; I still wake up shuddering at night when I dream of her. Not for anything in the world—and I really mean that—would I have missed a day of it; yet it drained me and shattered me, and irrevocably broke down much I had previously thought of as vital to me, and added immeasurably to whatever I might today bring to anything as inadequate as a definition of what ‘woman’ means to me. The kind of woman, I have often thought, who makes one believe that life before death is actually possible.

  Even before I met her, I’d heard about her—who hadn’t? All the gossip: the scarlet woman, the shameless bitch, living under the protective hand of a well-meaning older man who devoted his life to her. She sucked him dry in every imaginable sense of the word. A lost woman, a mad woman, a witch, a chancer, an unscrupulous social climber, an incorrigible cock-teaser, someone no decent person would allow their daughters to be seen with in public. At the same time, as even other women had to concede, her looks were simply incomparable. ‘With such beauty,’ I once heard one of them say, ‘one can turn the world upside down.’ Which was exactly what she did. At least my world: and I was only one of many.

  The first time I met her, I was expecting someone older, given her reputation, and yet she couldn’t have been more than nineteen, at most twenty. (But then, as several men had warned me—nudge nudge, wink wink—she’d been no more than seven when the sugar daddy first took her under his dubious wing.) Yet at first sight there was absolutely nothing disreputable about her. In fact, she made an immaculate impression, in a black dress of an extremely simple and elegant cut; her hair, which appeared to be dark brown, was done up in a simple, homely style; her eyes were dark and deep-set, her forehead was pensive; her expression was passionate and somewhat haughty. She was rather thin in the face, and pale.

  But there wasn’t much time for leisurely scrutiny. Almost immediately some kind of squabble broke out among several of the men at the reception (a very posh affair, of the kind I wouldn’t normally attend alive or dead; but a very good friend was receiving a rather special award, I had been urged to be there for him, and I couldn’t very well let him down; glory to God in the highest). I didn’t quite catch what the argument was about, but I did become aware of a most unpleasant tone in the altercation: right there in her presence, and knowing that she could hear every word, this group of fine gentlemen were making the most offensive and obscene remarks about her. She didn’t bat an eyelid, and that probably encouraged them to become more and more insulting; it was no excuse that they had been to another party just before the reception, where they had got thoroughly sozzled. It was all so noisy, and so distasteful, that I still have no idea of the exact sequence of events. All I know, and all that matters now, is that in some confusing way the two of us were thrown together in the throng, and managed to make our escape through the drunken mob, and suddenly found ourselves outside in the very dark, moonless night. And only came to our senses again when the sunrise dazzled us the next morning among the crown pines on the slope of Table Mountain, somewhere above the Rhodes Memorial. What I remembered was with what primitive relish she had rubbed my semen all over her breasts and stomach and the smoothness of her mound, and how starkly white and wet her thighs were as we got up from where we had spent the night under the dangerously careening flourish of the Milky Way, and she bent over to retrieve the crumpled black dress and put it on, and the grass and twigs in her hair, the lipstick smudged across her face, her carefree laugh, and her taste and stickiness all over my body.

  I knew, all the time, that I was courting disaster. Quite early on during our affair good and well-meaning friends had gone out of their way to inform me of everything that was disreputable about her. I refused to listen. Invariably it ended with:

  ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  ‘I promise you I won’t. I tell you I love this woman.’

  Which must also explain my pig-headedness at yet another unbelievable party, this time on her birthday. We had made plans for a quiet and passionate celebration for just the two of us, but in the end she succumbed to the lure of lights and laughter and wine and vodka and something which I’m afraid I can only call madness. That was it, really. She had always lived on the brink, on the very edge of an abyss too dark and terrifying to acknowledge. But that night she went further than on any other occasion I’d been with her. Were there drugs involved too? The constant shifts of mood, from one extreme to the other, seemed to suggest something like that: in the course of one party she could swing from black despair and bouts of uncontrollable sobbing to the shrieking laughter of a child on a merry-go-round. And yet I doubt the explanation of drugs: it is simply too obvious, too easy, too pat. There were darker and more powerful forces swirling in her mind. And certainly in her outrageously articulate and seductive body.

  On the night of her birthday—which fifty or more years later I still find terribly difficult to talk about (also because now I know what came later)—everybody went into a kind of collective madness. As if, knowing her all too well, we were all bent on turning it into an extreme experience. Yes, I think that is the only word for it: extreme. We were all—and none more than she—hell-bent on testing the very limits of behavior, of the body, of the mind and feelings. To see, as a French writer once put it, how far we could go too far.

  From the muddle of memories I clung to through the fumes of alcohol and cigarettes and dagga and God knows what else that still cloud the recollection of that night, I remember a kind of auction that took place, with several of the men trying to outbid each other for a night with her. (A night? There were moments when she got carried away so fantastically that she offered herself up for sale for the rest of her life.) Eighteen thousand—eighty thousand—a hundred thousand. One poor bastard, let’s call him R, and God have mercy on his soul, actually stormed out into the night and came back, can you believe it?, with a hundred thousand in notes. Everybody went totally overboard, she more than anyone else. I was trying to speak to her, to shout to her, to drag her away, but she just shook me off, laughing hysterically. Until the inevitable happened: she grabbed the bundle of notes and threw them into the fire—it was a bitterly cold August night with Cape rain beating against the windows and a spectral wind howling through the black trees outside—and dared one pitiful young man whom she had rejected a few months earlier (I shall just call him G) to pluck them out of the flames. ‘If you do that, I’ll marry you,’ she promised recklessly, completely ignoring the poor fool who had brought the money.

  At some stage I grabbed hold of her. ‘Shut up!’ I pleaded, ‘just s
hut the fuck up. Why don’t you marry me? For Christ’s sake, I love you. Don’t you know that?’

  It was before Helena, and the first time I’d ever proposed marriage to a woman; I had persuaded myself that I would never give up my freedom. But in the raging abandon of that night I was prepared to make an idiot of myself. Publicly.

  She paid no attention to me, only to G. And he was simply too flabbergasted, I think, to believe her. In the end we all just stared, transfixed, as that whole thick bundle of notes was consumed by the fire.

  And after all that, still laughing, but with an ever more ominous undertone to her gaiety, she suddenly turned away from G and went back to R, the one who had brought the money, and caught hold of him, entangling him in her bare arms, like poison ivy, and started whispering in his ear; and the two of them staggered out into the night together. There was little any of us could do to stop them, to stop her.

  What I remember after that, is the end. About a year later, if my memory can be trusted. It was Rogozhin after all, I may as well admit to his name now, who ‘got’ her. Got her in every terrible sense of the word. On the very day that was supposed to be our wedding day. Because, yes, after too many other more or less unbearable turns in our story she did, as suddenly as any of her other decisions, announce that she would marry me. But then did not turn up, literally leaving me waiting at the church door. I had a good idea of where to look for her. But it was only the next morning that Rogozhin opened to my hammering on the door of his flat. When I’d gone there the night before, there was nobody home; or that was how it had seemed to me. All that matters now, is that he was there to let me in the following morning—following what was to have been our wedding night.

  The flat was deadly quiet. We both knew why I had come, but it was a long time before I dared to ask him whether she was there.

  He nodded.

  I got up. ‘Where?’ I asked.

  ‘There.’