Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  ‘I thought you meant it. And I agreed. But when I came back with the squash, you nearly killed me. Forced me to take the damn squash back once again, and then locked me up in my room until Father came home and you told him to give me a beating.’

  ‘Good for him. That little bum of yours needed a tanning.’

  ‘Most of the time it was quite undeserved. Not that you ever tried to stop him.’

  ‘You had the sweetest little bum,’ she says, pointedly ignoring my reproach.

  ‘That was a very long time ago.’

  ‘Sometimes I still think of you as my baby.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t. I’m an old man now.’

  ‘You know what upset me?’ she blunders on. ‘It was old Aia who looked after you when I couldn’t. Whenever you were fidgety, she would take that little thingy of yours between her lips until it stood straight up like a lady’s pinkie when she’s having tea from a porcelain cup. Most improper, a black woman and all. But what could I do? I was sick most of the time.’ She sighs. ‘And now the harm has been done. A man just like your father, if you ask me.’

  ‘I am not like him, Mam!’

  ‘You’ve certainly tried your damnedest. All those girls, all these years.’

  ‘Do you remember a girl called Bonnie?’ I launch a frontal attack.

  ‘No. Should I?’

  ‘She worked in Father’s office.’

  ‘Many girls worked in your father’s office. Every time I found out he got a new one.’

  ‘But I think Bonnie was special to him.’

  ‘Most of them were.’

  ‘She was a colored girl.’

  ‘That makes sense. But I don’t remember.’

  ‘Try to think, Mam.’

  ‘Thinking makes me tired, Boetie. It’s been over a century now, you know. And where has it got me?’

  ‘It was soon after the Nats’ victory,’ I press on.

  ‘When was that?’

  I cannot suppress a sigh. ‘In ’48. Not so long after the war.’

  ‘Yes, your father and the war. Many a day I thought he was going to land us all in jail. Those men he hid away in the attic so the police couldn’t get them. Do you remember? Thank God the war is over now, we can breathe again.’

  ‘There’s another war on now.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘America is attacking Iraq.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Nobody knows.’

  She nods wisely. ‘At least that will keep them busy for a while, won’t it?’ She chuckles. ‘Little boys, all of them. If you don’t keep them busy they start fighting and it can become very rowdy and unpleasant. Thank heavens, you were never the fighting kind.’

  ‘I was asking about Bonnie, Mam.’

  ‘Yes, the one who died. Poor thing. How thoughtful of you to go to the funeral and bring me the flowers from her grave. I know your father would have wanted to go, but he was too heartbroken. He really loved that girl. Called her his little liqueur chocolate. He could never get enough of chocolates. Especially the brownies I made. Did I ever give you the recipe?’

  ‘Many times, Mam. Thank you. But I have to go now.’

  ‘I know. Don’t forget to take the flowers. They make me come out in spots.’

  ***

  I cannot let go of Bonnie. Of what happened that day, that signal day. And Mam’s rambling has brought it back more acutely, more disconcertingly than when I first wrote my notes about it. I find it necessary to revisit it, to tease and worry it more, to see if I can make it release the secret it seems to hold, or some of it. The shock of discovering Father’s involvement was, initially at least, a major part of it. Not so much the personal angle, the fact that he had been sleeping with her for God knows how long, however unnerving that was. But that his involvement with Bonnie—and for all I knew, other colored girls (Mam’s reference to the ‘location’ next to the golf course made me feel sick)—came at that time. He was such a staunch member of the very party that was going out of its way to make ‘sex across the color bar’ not just a transgression but a sin, a crime against God. I was both repelled and fascinated by the attempt to figure out the mechanics of the affair. How would he with his dour correctness and his innate sense of superiority have set about it? ‘Now take off your panties for the baas. Open up. There’s a good girl…’ When I was a child, there was little difference, in my mind, between him and God. The long line of punishments that marked my trajectory from childhood to adolescence and beyond, still burns in my mind. The religious prelude, the shameful baring of my nether parts, followed by the thrashing itself, with Mam forced to look on. (He never knew about her surreptitious visits to my room afterwards, to apply ointment to the bleeding welts.) All of it to equip me for service to the nation and to Father, Son and Holy bloody Ghost. While in the meantime he…

  He never discussed Bonnie with me again. To tell the truth, I didn’t give him any opportunity either. The following month I found a position with another firm of lawyers, and in due course moved from Somerset West to Cape Town; until, after Sharpeville and the success of A Time to Weep, I gave up legal practice altogether and began to write full-time.

  During the few weeks before I left the firm, I tried everything I could to discover Bonnie’s whereabouts, but without any luck; she never even came back for her last month’s pay. And Solly and Gerald could not, or would not, help. For days I wandered the streets of District Six, braving the inquisitive or suspicious stares to enquire at every shop and hairdresser and fishmonger, but to no avail whatsoever.

  It was hard enough to reconcile myself to what had happened. But worst of all was simply the struggle to understand the elements of the event itself. To Father, for all I knew, her disappearance might have meant no more than the loss of a good fuck. (And lately I have been wondering whether this was not doing even him a disservice; I postponed for too long any attempt to get closer to him. In our chess games I caught glimpses of a different, more generous person hiding inside him. But these were too few and far between. Which I suppose was one of the many reasons that drove me to the futile interrogation I attempted with Mam earlier today.) But what had that afternoon with her really meant to me? I know I suffer from the Hamlet complaint: thinking too brainsickly on things. But this is something I cannot let go—because it will not let me go. It seems to me now that the day of the pageant during the van Riebeeck Festival had really been a first premonition. Why had the tableau about the arrival of the Dutch colonists disturbed me so? It was more than the humiliation of the Khoi people, or the discomfort it caused me to know that Bonnie and her colleagues and a sprinkling of other colored spectators were witness to it at the same time. It was, I think, the realization that they were not merely watching the spectacle, but watching us watching the spectacle. We were the real spectacle. I was. Their eyes watching me watching the show added yet another pair of eyes to the already unsettling perspective: in my mind I was watching them watching us watching the show. That was it. My awareness of their presence made me conscious of myself in a way I could not otherwise have been. My whiteness became a product and a consequence of their brownness observing me. It brought a disturbing convolution: for the first time I had an intimation (for at that stage that was all it was, no comprehension or ‘insight’ yet) of what it meant to be colored, of living inside a colored skin, behind and within colored eyes, and perceiving through them what it meant to be white.

  What had been, that wretched day, a mere dawning of a new way of seeing, became, the Friday afternoon in Father’s office, an understanding of truly shattering impact. I have tried, since then, many times, to relive, as I am trying at this moment of writing, what had taken place on that floor. Only afterwards could I try to disentangle the—literally—amazing simultaneity of sensations and perceptions. The color of her skin. Yes. Very much that. The delicate cinnamon color of the inside of her thighs, pal
er than the rest. The softness of that skin. Was it so soft by itself, or was it my perception that made it so? Or my perception of her perception of my perception…?

  It becomes too ludicrously convoluted. And yet I must persist. I am trying to understand, trying to see, after all these years. And it is important. Because just as on that day of the festival, only infinitely more acutely, I was not living the moment as a straightforward experience but as an incredibly complicated and many-layered one: while living it, joyously and terrifyingly and ecstatically, as me, I was also living it as me lived by her. Once again, but more painfully this time, I lived my whiteness as perceived by her brownness. Suddenly (but beyond words, beyond understanding; it was only there) I knew, from the inside of her, what it meant to be her, Bonnie Pieterse; to be her, woman; colored woman. And that brought me a new shocking understanding of who I was: a knowledge which would never again forsake me. This I could only be I because it was lived through her. Through my imagining her as she was imagining me. Not my white buttocks bobbing and thrusting between her brown thighs. But my whiteness itself, as an abstraction, yet expressed in the most intensely concrete manner conceivable. Yes, I think in that afternoon I understood something of what has so often puzzled and fascinated me: what it must be like to be a woman, to be entered, to be quickened inside.

  But even that was only the beginning. For it also made me understand something about being a man: being a man as experienced by the woman he enters. Without this, I now believe, I would never have become a writer.

  I’m still not sure that I can adequately explain it. All I know is that that afternoon, with that woman, has for ever changed something inside myself. Without it, I could never have stood before you, Rachel, as I stood beside your bed on the morning of your death.

  ***

  Most of my nights are now completely blank. If I do fall asleep, it is not before six or seven in the morning. It is as if my accumulating memories of love compulsively require the accompaniment of violence. More and more I am stripped naked in the face of war. Those endless bridges burning endlessly. Houses, buildings, towns going up in flames. The same ones, over and over again.

  A day or two ago (I find it difficult to keep up with atrocities) fifteen Iraqi civilians were blown up in a Baghdad residential street. So much for the vaunted ‘lethal precision’ of American weaponry. Pressed about civilian deaths, Big Chief Rumsfeld comments, ‘Stuff happens.’ Years ago our Minister of Justice, Jimmy Kruger, responded to the news of Steve Biko’s death in detention, ‘It leaves me cold.’ Today that is all he is still remembered for. Mr. Rumsfeld may be heading for a great legacy too. Stuff happens.

  There may be much more behind the whole war than even oil. Perhaps macho America is finally finding a way to break out of the terrible depression brought on by women’s liberation and by the crushing blow inflicted by 9/11 on the two phallic towers that embodied the national male ego. A Bush in hand is worth two birds.

  Even if it no longer induces sleep, at least it eases the vigil. As good an occasion as any to comment on the birds and the little bushes of one’s life.

  ***

  It is said that everything in one’s love life is determined by the first thirty years. After that, we can only repeat our earlier loves. I cannot disagree more. At most, there is an air of prelude, of foreplay, about the early years, the allegedly ‘formative’ ones. But the newness really begins to open up and fan out and unfurl after that—not merely as variations, however virtuoso, on the established themes, but as new discoveries. How could anything about you have been ‘anticipated’ or ‘prepared’ by an earlier love in my life? In a way, I realize, of course, that everything I had ever lived before you made it possible for you to happen; but that is different. You are not déjà vu; nor does your appearance in my life turn all my earlier loves into mere rehearsals. They are all linked, I know that, and am happy about it as I sort fondly through the album of my mind; but there is no easy sameness, and certainly no boredom, in the parallels or intersections I discover or rediscover. The very acknowledgement of ‘patterns’, if there is ever anything as definite as a pattern, confirms for me the uniqueness of each moment in it. If each moment is inevitably amplified by all the others, it is still not a mere rehashing of what has been. From the interaction itself can come something that has not been before.

  And so there is you. Or rather you-and-George, the couple, the inseparables. (At least until it was all shattered.) In no other relationship in my life, I believe, has my image and experience of a woman been so conditioned by her involvement with another man—the one she really loved.

  We went to the cricket match together, George and I. He went purely for the pleasure, but even so he couldn’t help taking a camera with him. When I asked him about it, he smiled. ‘Leaving my camera behind would be like walking about naked in public. Perhaps one day when I’m old enough…’

  ‘You think you will ever retire?’

  ‘Not really. I think I’ll follow the example of the famous photographer—was it Cartier-Bresson?—who said, when he was asked in his old age whether he had stopped taking pictures, “Oh no, I’m still taking them, I just don’t need a camera any more.”’

  Twice George phoned you on his cell: once to tell you how the match was going; once from the Forrester’s pub on Newlands Avenue where we went afterwards to warn you that we would be late.

  ‘She isn’t missing us,’ he told me with a smile. ‘She’ll probably be working through the night. She’s firing the kiln. The next time she does it, you must come over and share it with us. It’s an experience not to be missed. Like a photograph emerging from the white paper in the developer: except that for her the stakes are so much higher, there’s so much more work involved, and so much more that can go wrong. Patience. Which she doesn’t have. And a sense of wonder, which she does.’

  You were still at it when we returned, half dozing in an old rattan chair drawn close to the solid kiln in a small outroom at the back of the garage. Your hair covered with a faded red scarf tied tightly over it, a very big, striped, frayed-collar shirt, undoubtedly one of George’s, hanging loosely over the skimpy T-shirt. Cut-off jeans, revealing your sharply angled knees, which were drawn up, so that both your narrow bare feet were perched on the edge of the chair.

  He bent over to kiss you. You unashamedly offered him your tongue.

  ‘What about some coffee?’ he suggested.

  I preferred tea; for me, over the last few years, coffee rules out all hope of sleep. You sided with George and he went to boil the water. When he returned with a tray, on which he’d also placed glasses and a bottle of vintage port, he had one of his cameras with him; and while we sat splayed on our chairs, you never letting the kiln out of sight, he kept on taking quick shots of us, but mainly of you, reclining, sometimes with your arms stretched out above your head, or drooping like a faded but still beautiful flower. It was fascinating how, even when you seemed not to pay any attention at all, you flirted with the camera.

  ‘How did you get hooked on photography?’ I asked him.

  ‘Like everybody else, I suppose. Getting a small box for my twelfth birthday.’

  ‘And taking photos of all his little girlfriends,’ you interposed slyly. ‘In the buff.’

  ‘They just happened to be swimming or something,’ he objected quickly.

  ‘Of course,’ you said demurely, an inscrutable light gleaming in the depths of your eyes—those eyes that keep reminding me of something, of someone, I cannot grasp.

  ‘It was my only defense, damn it,’ he said, perhaps too energetically. ‘I was the fat boy at school, remember. The butt of everybody’s jokes. This was one way of holding my own. Even getting back at them.’

  ‘You just knew how to ingratiate yourself,’ you said lightly. ‘The same way you did with me. And still do.’

  He turned to me and winked. ‘Wouldn’t you say the prize was worth it?�
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  ‘You must have taken thousands of photos of Rachel,’ I said quietly, hoping he would take the bait.

  And he did. He got up. ‘I have a treasure of them.’ He started towards the door. ‘I must show you.’

  But you caught his hand as he came past and said very quietly, ‘No, George, don’t.’

  There was the briefest moment of tension. He pulled a face and pleaded like a boy wanting a favor, ‘Ag please?’

  You shook your head quietly. ‘Rather not.’

  ‘All right.’ He returned to his chair, stopping to fill our glasses. The night continued for some time, relaxed as earlier. But I had become aware, as during the previous evening we’d spent together, of a subtle shift which excluded me from your alliance—even though after the brief exchange about the photos, I detected a suggestion of distancing between you, as between your sculpted figures, the merest hint of a reproachful edge. But it might have been my imagination.

  Soon after that I left, and the two of you remained behind, together.

  With that, a foundation had been established. We regularly had meals together, at your place or mine, or in a restaurant; you both prized good gastronomy as I did. Like music. We often went out to concerts, preferably to the City Hall. Or we went for long walks, usually along the mountain path from the lower cable station at Kloof Nek, along the folds of the mountain above Camps Bay. George had a hard time keeping up with us, but he insisted on going all the way. ‘I need it even more than you do,’ he would explain, even though we were forced to make several halts and he would huff and puff like a steam engine. Making love, I thought more than once, must take him to the edge of a heart attack. But there, as on our walks, I was convinced that he would never give up. How could he, with you there, with your long limbs, your athletic stride, your impossibly alluring body, your navel a small indentation in the slight swell of your belly bared to the caress of the high winds, your cheeks glowing, your dark eyes shining, and the light sheen of sweat on your forehead and the darkening moist patches under your armpits and between your sharp shoulder blades?