Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  Isolde was making funny giggling sounds, as if she found it all unspeakably funny. But it could have been whimpering.

  Some of the men, recovering from their bewilderment, were starting to undo their clothes. A general cheering billowed through the room. And a chanting began, as on a grandstand at an intervarsity rugby match, a rhythmic scanning of ‘Cunt! Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!’

  I still don’t know what possessed me. I can only remember that at some stage—three or four of the men were already naked, prancing about with priapic glee, and others were kneeling beside her to pull her legs apart and hold her down—I pushed through the throng of reeking male bodies and shouted with a voice I myself did not recognize, ‘For fuck’s sake, boys, stop it! You can’t do this!’

  ‘And why not?’ someone asked with unmasked aggression. ‘We’ll never get another chance like this!’

  ‘Stop it!’ I yelled again. My voice was breaking. ‘Jesus, boys! If it was one of us, we’d have fallen over each other to pick him up and carry him home to sleep it off. Just because she’s a girl…’

  ‘Sap cunt! Sap cunt! Sap cunt!’ they roared.

  Anonymous hands were grabbing me from behind, tugging at my clothes. ‘Stop moaning, man. You can go first.’ They started pushing me forward, towards the spread-eagled Isolde who was still lying there, giggling and whimpering, stark white on the filthy floor, among empty beer bottles and cigarette butts and pools of vomit. I felt my belt go. A cheer went up. Somebody emptied a beer bottle on to Isolde’s crotch. Foam bubbles briefly frothed in her dark pubic hair. My pants were tugged down to my knees.

  ‘Fuck you!’ I bellowed like a bull being castrated, and stormed forward, flailing my arms and kicking in all directions, lowering my head to butt it into the nearest face.

  If they hadn’t been so drunk, they could easily have overpowered me. But I was fired on by a rage that seemed completely and utterly to possess me. In some inexplicable way I crawled half under her and hoisted her inert body on my back, and broke through the mass of stinking, sweating, beer-belching bodies, moving into them like a battering ram, trampling whatever and whoever came in my way, aiming my knees and my feet at stomachs and groins and faces. Until we were out on the landing. A number of them, I had no idea of how many, came after me, but I was already on my way down the stairs, more tumbling and falling than walking.

  When I was halfway, the aging house warden came stomping up from below, gaping myopically at me through sleep-tousled hair as he tried to tie up the cord of his baggy gown.

  ‘What the hell…?’ he stammered.

  But I was already past, and he had no choice but to continue upstairs to face the mob. In a crazy way I had saved them, because I’d carried off the corpus delicti. And the poor man, half blind without his spectacles, could never be entirely sure that what he’d seen passing him on the stairs was a naked girl draped across the shoulders of a half-clothed man. (I had by then shed my trousers in order to free my legs.)

  At some ungodly hour—the birds were already cavorting in the trees, shrilling and twittering to cleave my throbbing head—I stumbled into my rented room a block or two away, and shed my load of pale femininity on to the narrow bed. She dropped like a bag of wheat. I had the befuddled presence of mind to cover her with a bedspread, before my legs went limp and I flopped down beside her, half over her.

  I don’t know when I woke up. It must have been in the late afternoon. My head was splitting. In a complete daze I stared around me. Isolde was sitting on the foot of the bed, wrapped in the bedspread, staring at me with mad eyes through matted blonde hair.

  The first thing she said, in fact the only thing for a long time, was, ‘How could you have done this to me?’

  Even the next morning, after I’d somehow forced or coaxed her into sleep again and then spent the night under a tree in the garden (where I got rained upon at dawn, a most unseasonly event), she refused to believe me or even listen to me. She had no recollection, or pretended to have no recollection, of what had happened in the men’s residence. I was bitter, and carried a foul taste in my mouth for days; but perhaps I shouldn’t have blamed her too much. I couldn’t be too sure about my own memories.

  Much later in the day—I didn’t know exactly when, and frankly I didn’t care—Isolde wended her way back home to her own residence, still shrouded in my bedspread like a mummy. I never found out whether she’d run into any trouble, nor did I try to make enquiries. I sometimes saw her on campus again, but we never spoke. Only once, in later years, did I experience something comparable in the aftermath of such a crazy night, and that was the day after Daphne had danced for me. She, too, erased everything after the event. But at least on that occasion I myself had something to remember, secretly, if rather wryly. This time it was a total loss.

  The only rather bittersweet consequence was that a small delegation from the house committee of the men’s residence came round to my digs several days later to offer me their thanks. They were lavish in their praise for the way I’d risked my life to save them all from a fate worse than death. In their eyes I was, truly, one of the boys.

  ***

  Something like that—that blanking out—could never have happened to you. You are too unflinchingly honest. I remember so many of our conversations from the time after George’s departure, when I stayed over to look after you. That first evening: You are sitting in the middle of the floor in your studio lightly clutching your feet, your chin on your drawn-up knees. ‘If something were to happen to me,’ you say, staring straight at me, ‘what would you do?’

  ‘Nothing will happen to you. I won’t allow it.’

  You pull a face. ‘No, but seriously. If.’

  ‘I’ll roll over and die very quietly.’

  ‘That’s funny. That’s what George said too.’

  ‘Then don’t ask such questions.’

  ‘I suppose I just got jittery with the burglaries in our little street.’

  ‘It is precisely to make sure it doesn’t happen again that I’m here,’ I remind you.

  ‘I know. And I am grateful. Also, it makes George feel better. He is always worried about leaving me behind. This time more than ever. Although I told him it is good for me to have time and space on my own.’ A gesture towards the work table. ‘I have such a lot to do. I’m thinking of an exhibition in the spring, have I told you?’

  ‘You haven’t. It’s wonderful news.’

  ‘I get very uptight about exhibitions. I love sculpting, but I can’t stand the public side of it. Putting all my work on show. It’s like taking off one’s clothes in front of strangers. Sculpting is such an intimate thing.’

  ‘Yours especially.’ I get up and cautiously take one of your figures in my hands: a penguin-like creature with a human face, sitting on a nest filled with small, squirming babies. ‘I don’t know how you do it. The detail of the feathers. And in these others, the way in which you capture the texture of materials: you can see this is silk, this velvet, this one wool. It’s like that sculptor from the eighteenth century, I think, Houdon. But he was more earthbound, restricted by the real.’

  ‘It’s much easier for me,’ you say. ‘I can imprint the real materials on the wet clay and leave it to dry. Houdon had to replicate it in marble.’ A reflective pause. ‘But in one way or another we are all restricted by whatever we think of as real.’ I am aware of your large, searching eyes on me.

  ‘My impression is that the one thing you’re always trying to do is to break out of restrictions.’

  ‘You romanticize me. Your whole world is romantic.’

  ‘Not yours?’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘What is yours?’

  ‘I’m not sure. That’s the point. I just want to learn to see. If I can do that, I’ll be halfway there.’

  ‘Halfway between here and—what?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. Just somewher
e else. Everything that’s really worthwhile is somewhere else.’

  ‘And you don’t think that is romantic?’

  ‘No. Because I don’t fantasize about it and I have no illusions. I don’t think I’ll ever get there. In fact, I don’t think I’d want to.’

  ‘The in-betweenness again?’ I ask. You nod quietly, perhaps wistfully. I resume: ‘I have a story to tell you about that. A love story.’

  ‘You have a love story for every occasion.’ You must have noticed the reproach on my face, because you quickly qualify what you have said: ‘I don’t mean it in any belittling way, Chris. Please don’t think that. If anything, I think I admire you for it. I certainly envy you. If we are together, I always feel that my own life has been so—narrow. Even now with George. Don’t get me wrong. I love that man. I really love him more than I’ve ever loved anyone. But I sometimes wonder whether it’s good for me.’

  ‘Love is always good for you, even if it leads you to hell.’

  ‘I don’t agree. It can limit you. Because you don’t want to hurt the person you love, so you hold yourself in check. Every inch of the way there are other possibilities, other roads branching off—but if you’re in love, you close yourself off to them. You make compromises. That is my greatest fear.’

  ‘Even when I am in love, I’ve always tried to explore the byways, and I’ve never regretted it. Or almost never. In fact, that’s part of what the story I have for you is about. A byway not taken. And which I’ve regretted ever since. So I was stuck in between.’

  ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘It was in France, when I went there after the country here went mad in ’76. I was away for seven years. First in London, then mostly in Paris, as I’m sure you know. It must have been about halfway through my stay that on a visit to Amsterdam I met a girl. She was a sculptor, actually, like you, and she lived on a riverboat on the Amstel. Maike. The dirtiest hands I’ve ever seen on a human being, probably because she worked with iron and scrap metal and stuff, collected old car parts which she stripped and gave a new lease on life, did a lot of welding. But Maike is not the story, just a kind of background to it. We spent a week together inside her boat, pretending we were sailing through foreign lands and places of the imagination, our own Amazon, our own Lake Titicaca, our own Ganges, our own Yangtze Kiang. I was, as usual, convinced that this was the beginning of something that might last for ever and a day, and kept on asking her to come and join me in Paris afterwards. But Maike was not a tomorrow person, she hated thinking about the future. The past was already a no-no place, but the future was worse. All that mattered to her was now, this moment in the heart of the flame, as she put it. The sex was so good that I couldn’t bear to think of not going on, not repeating it in the future. It’s like traveling. Any new place I come to, and I used to travel a lot, I look at as if I might return to it one day, imagining what it may look like from the future. This used to drive Maike up the wall. Up swaying sides of her long fish-shaped boat, where we lived like Pinocchio in the belly of the whale.’

  ‘So after you went back to Paris…?’ you gently nudge me back on track.

  ‘Maike had no telephone, so I had to rely on letters. I wrote to her every day. Trying to persuade her to come. In the beginning I thought of it as a whole life together. Then, slowly, I began to cut my expectations down to size. A month. Three weeks. Two. What about a weekend…? I was just beginning to give up all hope and bury all my dreams when quite unexpectedly she wrote to say: All right, she’d come over the following weekend. Arriving at the Gare du Nord at six on the Friday afternoon. I spent the whole week tidying up the little garret in which I lived at the time, off the place de la République. Which was ridiculous, because she wouldn’t even notice. But to me it mattered.’ I fall silent for a minute.

  ‘Here,’ you say, ‘have a cigarette.’

  ‘You know I don’t smoke any more.’

  ‘You’re starting again tonight.’

  ‘It’s a filthy habit.’

  ‘Then please be filthy with me.’

  I hesitate, shrug, take the cigarette you offer, and watch you closely as you lean over to light it for me. The smoke smell of your hair, the brief bright flare of the match against your cheekbone.

  You lean back. ‘And on the Friday she came?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not the story. The real story, the in-between story, the story about the lost love, only started on the platform at the Gare du Nord. Where I arrived more than an hour early, to make sure I’d be there, waiting, when her train pulled in. I’d visualized it like one of those Monet scenes. But of course there were no steam trains around any more. Not that it mattered. I was there. Soon Maike would be there. And the future would begin.’

  I draw the smoke in deeply, too deeply, and begin to cough. You watch me, giggling like a little girl at a circus. It takes a minute before I am able to take the next pull, more cautiously this time.

  ‘As I was waiting for the Amsterdam train to arrive, another train was preparing to leave from the same platform. There were little knots of people all along the platform, to see off friends and relatives. Passengers were arriving in twos and threes. It wasn’t very full. And then I saw the woman. I just noticed her skirt flaring briefly around her legs as she mounted the two or three steps into the coach. French legs, slim and tanned and beautifully shaped.’

  ‘Of course,’ you say, your eyes shining with suppressed laughter.

  ‘That was that. One of the myriad little things one notices in the course of a day. But then, the next moment, she appeared at the window right opposite the spot where I was standing. She stretched up to put a small case on the luggage rack.’

  ‘And you saw her outstretched arms. And her breasts. And possibly a wisp of underarm hair. If it was summer.’

  ‘It was midsummer. How did you know?’

  ‘Just guessed. I’m slowly getting to know you.’

  ‘And then she sat down, straightened her dress –’

  ‘Her rather flimsy summer dress?’

  ‘Indeed. Straightened it on her thighs. And looked out.’

  ‘Right into your eyes.’

  ‘Right into my eyes. And did not bother to look away again.’

  ‘You must have been very beautiful.’

  ‘She was very beautiful. Very black hair.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And so she looked at me, and I looked at her. One of those moments when you feel, quite irrationally, perhaps insanely, that suddenly your whole life is at stake. I began to move towards the window. She sat without moving, looking at me. And gave a slow, easy smile. As if she knew I was on my way. I mean, really, on my way. Not just towards the train, but towards her. My whole life. Her whole life. And then I stopped. I had to make a decision. A few seconds, and the train would begin to move. She was leaning closer to the window. Pressing her forehead against it. I could see her breath misting up a small patch. She looked, I looked. And yes, then the train began to move. You know how those trains in Europe start moving. There is no sound, no jerk, just an almost imperceptible gliding. Her mouth—perhaps I am imagining it now, so long afterwards, but I could swear her mouth was half open. Breathing. And I was right there. Outside. Only the window in between. An invisible barrier, except for the small, erotic patch of mist on the pane. There was still time, a few seconds, no more, then she would be gone for ever. I was thinking frantically about Maike who was due in another half-hour, about everything we had been waiting for and dreaming about. And the train was gliding faster. Another moment. There was nothing I wanted more than to get on that train. But for once in my life I was being reasonable. I tried to calculate, in a single instant, all the possibilities for the future. The train was gathering speed. I was running outside on the platform. She was inside, waiting. All I could do was to put out my hand as I ran, and press it against the small patch of condensating moisture on the cold gl
ass. And in that instant, only for that instant, she pressed her forehead against my hand from the inside. And then she was gone.’ I stop speaking. I cannot go on. ‘You know,’ I say after a while, with an effort, ‘I have sometimes thought that perhaps it was the single most perfect love affair of my life. You would say: because of the glass in between. I would say: in spite of the glass.’

  ‘And obviously you never saw her again?’

  ‘No. But not for lack of trying. After that weekend, I returned to the Gare du Nord every single day for three weeks, at the same time. Just in case she was making the journey every day. But she never came back. I had missed my only chance.’

  After a long silence, almost grudgingly, you ask, ‘And the weekend with Maike?’

  ‘A mess, a total fuck-up. For both of us.’

  You nod quietly, wisely. ‘What else did you expect?’ you say.

  ‘What about you?’ I ask. ‘What was the most perfect love of your life?’

  You ponder this for a while, frowning with concentration. ‘I think it happened when I was three years old. A little dog, his name was Pixie. He got run over by a car. From that moment I knew that one couldn’t rely on love. It ends when you least expect it. There’s nothing you can do, nothing at all. It’s got to end. That is what love is about.’

  ‘How can you be so defeatist?’

  ‘There is nothing defeatist about it,’ you protest. ‘If we lived for ever, or for two hundred years, or a hundred and fifty, then love—certainly sex—would lose all its urgency, its whole meaning. It would become a purely repeatable thing. But now, because of time, and because of death, because that is what gives time its meaning, repetition is informed by the need to affirm, to make sure, to set up something in the face of an ending. The notion, the very possibility, of the erotic, is shaped by time. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘In one way I believe you’re right,’ I admit. ‘I think of love as a train, on an endless journey. It runs its course, whether we are there or not. For a certain distance I am on it. At every stop—and there are very many—people get on and off. Every now and then a woman comes in and shares my compartment for a while. But sooner or later we get to a station where she has to get off. And someone else comes in. And at some stage I, too, will have to get off.’ I bring my face very close to yours, with an urgency that surprises myself. ‘But when you’re on the inside of love, there is no time. It may be an illusion, but at least it is an illusion of infinity. The train is there. It goes on. Is that not what you feel when you are with George?’