Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  ‘It’s possible,’ you concede. ‘But at the same time I know, I know all the time, that it will end.’

  ‘When I asked you about your most perfect love, I was rather expecting you to say that it was George.’

  ‘And you may not be altogether wrong. It’s certainly better than anything I had before. But “perfect” is too big a word. There are all kinds of things in it: happiness, fulfillment, wonderful sex, care, affection, friendship, you name it. But there’s fear in it too. And a fair deal of guilt.’

  ‘Fear of what?’

  ‘Of death, since you mention it. I wake up at night and touch George’s face, or I tense up to listen with every fiber of my being, to make sure he is still breathing. Knowing that one day it will stop. There is nothing as sure as breath. Because our whole life depends on it. And because it’s mortal.’

  ‘And where does the guilt come in?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I can talk about it.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I say. I get up and put out my hand to help you up too. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude. It is very private.’

  You stand opposite me. ‘I think if there’s one person I can talk to, it is you,’ you say quietly. ‘In a strange way I even owe it to you. You have come so close to us.’

  ‘I have no wish to pry, Rachel.’

  ‘This isn’t about prying. Perhaps it’s about a need to confess.’

  ‘I’m very much a heathen, not a priest.’

  ‘So much the better.’ You come past me towards the large, open French doors and step out on the balcony. It is a quiet night. One can hear the sea far below, breaking against the boulders. The tide must be coming in. ‘Come to me,’ you say.

  I follow you outside and remain standing behind you. I can smell your hair again. Mingled with an indefinite, subtle, extremely complex aroma that says you. A touch of perfume, a touch of sweat, a touch of sadness, a touch of you, woman, a human smell.

  ‘Where does the guilt come from?’ I ask again.

  ‘Being alive, I suppose.’ You say it lightly. Then half turn towards me, your face in darkness. ‘Perhaps it’s just about the children,’ you say. ‘You see, I knew before we were married that I couldn’t have children. But I couldn’t bear to tell George. I thought… What does it matter anyway? It is too late.’ You take a small step back to lean your head against my chest. I lay my hands on the smooth roundness of your shoulders. There is no sensuality in it, just a closeness, an involuntary response to your need for closeness and confession.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘I was afraid he would reject me. I couldn’t bear it.’ This time the silence lasts for a very long time, before quite suddenly, unexpectedly, you say, speaking into the night, ‘Did you know I was married before?’

  ‘I never suspected that.’

  ‘It didn’t last for long. Two years. We were much too young. I wasn’t even out of university yet. He was very jealous.’ A pause. ‘And very violent. When he heard that I was pregnant he was convinced it was another man’s child. He wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘Did he have any reason for thinking that?’

  I feel you tense against me. For a while I expect you to cut off the conversation. Then you say very softly, ‘I suppose he had. I was… No, I’m not trying to defend myself. I was wrong. But I was unbearably lonely. And he preferred the company of his old friends. But I knew the child was his. No doubt about that, not at all. I assure you. A woman knows.’

  ‘I don’t need any assurances.’

  ‘But he refused to believe me. He started hitting me. He was drinking more and more, and when he came home he’d take it out on me. I was actually feeling sorry for him, can you believe it? He became more and more violent. Once he broke my arm. He’d get quite beside himself. And I lost the—the little thing inside me. Then he got scared, he didn’t want me to go to hospital, he was afraid they’d find out. There were complications. I nearly died: not that I cared much at that stage. And that put paid to children.’ Your shoulders move in a shrug. There is nothing I can say. For minutes on end there is only the sea, coming in, far below.

  ***

  Much later we went inside and I retired to my bedroom. I could still hear you moving about in your studio. There was such a desire in me to go back to you, but I knew you needed to be alone; and perhaps I did too. I couldn’t sleep. Everything we had talked about turned over and over in my mind. I thought of the nameless girl who had left from the Gare du Nord that long-ago late Friday afternoon. Her face came back to me, the way she had leaned against the train window to press her forehead against the imprint of my hand on the cold glass. Her eyes were open. Very dark eyes, bitter-chocolate eyes. Like yours. And suddenly it dawned on me that, yes, she was the one you kept reminding me of. That girl I’d never known. The same eyes, the forehead, the wide mouth. Even the little mole like a beauty spot high up on her left cheekbone. Only the hair was different. How vividly she came back, as if the many years—a quarter of a century—in between had quietly faded away. The same face. I was sure of it. Not a shadow of a doubt.

  I’d allowed that one to escape. And you? I shook my head on the pillow. You had already got away. And George had, in his quiet way, made sure of it. I couldn’t tell if he’d done it by design, or in total innocence. All that mattered was that, by asking me to look after you, by making you my responsibility, as it were, he had guaranteed that I could never lay a finger on you. I was in a position of absolute trust. I could never think of betraying it.

  I kept the light on. I did not feel like reading. I simply lay awake, between the fresh-smelling crisp sheets, listening to the dull sounds coming from your studio.

  Were you working, or just fiddling about?

  Later I heard you going to your bedroom. The conjugal bedroom. Water running. I could hear the rush of it from the geyser in the ceiling above my head.

  You were taking your bath. No sounds to betray your movements now, but I could imagine you, reclining in the warm water. Your curls getting damp. Your face glistening, your eyes closed. Your breasts in repose. (What would they look like? One can never guess with any certainty beforehand. Until that instant when a woman uncovers them for you. That first moment of risk, when she turns to face you: Here I am, unarmed, available, for you, what do you think of me, of this, of these?) Your knees protruding from the water. Your toes.

  I leaned over to take a book from the bedside table, but could not concentrate. I was all ears, trying to catch whatever shadow of a sound might come from your bathroom. My whole body was tense with listening.

  The water was let out; I heard it gurgling into the drain outside. You moved to the kitchen. I could hear the kettle being switched on, the hiss of the water. And then, quite unexpectedly, your footsteps down the passage. The light sensual suction of your damp bare feet on the floor. You were listening at my door. You probably saw the chink of light below it, because after a while there was a very cautious knock.

  ‘Chris? You still awake?’

  ‘Of course. Come in.’

  You came in with a cup of rooibos tea and a mug of coffee on a tray. You were wearing a short, light housecoat, barely reaching down to your knees.

  ‘This will help you sleep.’

  ‘How did you guess that I couldn’t?’

  ‘Just took a chance.’

  You gave me my cup and settled easily on the foot of the bed, cross-legged, the tray with your own mug balanced on your knees.

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ you said. Not contrite; perhaps concerned.

  ‘No. It just takes a while to settle into a strange room.’

  ‘I hope it won’t be strange for long.’

  ‘Thank you for telling me what you did.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to burden you with it. I don’t normally go about looking for shoulders to cry on. But I felt a bit defenseless with George gone. A
nd I had a feeling I could trust you.’

  ‘With anything.’ I felt like saying, With your life, but didn’t.

  ‘Why did you never remarry after your wife died?’ you ask.

  ‘It was hard enough to get married the first time. But I loved Helena very much. And she’d made it very clear that she would not sleep with a man unless she was married to him.’

  ‘You got married to have sex?’

  ‘It was not as crude as that. I wanted her. All of her.’

  ‘You think one can ever “have” anyone? All of anyone?’

  ‘No. If there is one thing I know now, that is it. But I suppose at the time I still thought something like that possible. I thought I’d sown my wild oats and should try to commit.’

  ‘Would you have married her if she hadn’t said no?’

  ‘It’s impossible to tell now. Women who say no have always held a special attraction for me. Not just to sex: to anything. To the world. To what everybody expects of them.’

  I thought of all the days and nights of arguing with Helena. The reasoning, the pleading, the rage, the banter, the supplication. Once, after a whole night of passionate imploring, I tried to change my approach. ‘For goodness’ sake, Helena,’ I said. ‘This is really blowing it up out of all proportion. Why can’t you just say yes and let us make love? It’s not such a big deal, is it?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she said in her quiet, decisive way. And that was that.

  ‘So in the end you succumbed,’ you said, looking particularly satisfied, as if you’d scored a personal victory.

  ‘I did. I even thought of it as a new stage of my life. Even though I was scared.’ I felt an urge to tell you about how it happened; but in the end I still held back.

  ‘Why were you scared?’ you asked.

  I shrugged. ‘It’s not so easy to find a reason. All I know is that I was scared. Remember, I was already past forty. Settled in my bachelor ways. Perhaps it was because of my parents’ marriage. Because of my father. What he did to my mother. She never really spoke about it, but I knew, I could see. Before their marriage she’d dreamed of becoming a teacher. But he didn’t believe in a married woman working. Her place was at home. You know the set-up. What made it worse, the way I see it now, is that she believed it too. One thing she did was to keep on reading, though even large-print books have become too much for her. Voraciously. Making notes all the way, something I no doubt inherited from her. For no clear reason, just to have something to hold on to. She still has hundreds of notebooks. The sign of a wasted life. While he… Anyway, I just couldn’t face for myself the prospect of following in their footsteps. Until Helena came into my life.’

  It was getting late. I had a feeling that we both would have liked to go on talking, the way we had that New Year’s Eve when we first met. But it seemed prudent to wind it up. You took my empty cup, put it on the tray and got up from the bed. There was a brief hesitation, and then you offered me a small vestal kiss on my forehead. Dear, dear, old friend.

  ‘Shall I put off the light?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  You closed the door behind you. I still had the image of your long legs moving under the skimpy little housecoat. I could hear you putting off the lights as you went down the passage to the kitchen, and then to your bedroom. The quiet, final closing of the bedroom door. Then the night settled in.

  I tried to think of you. Your peaceful breathing, your body in repose. Superimposed on your face was the remembered face of my lost stranger, all those years ago.

  Perhaps the whole episode had been so touching because of everything that was happening around it. Those years in Paris. My political involvement with the ANC, the urgent meetings, the planning for a future that, even as we planned and plotted, seemed no more than a preposterous dream. And all the compulsive fucking that went on, as if that were the only way in which we could cling to a sense of reality.

  Then Maike filtered back, like a warmth insinuating itself into my bloodstream. I yielded to the luxury of the memories I could summon. Every part of her body a piece of a jigsaw to be fitted together. The texture of her hair, the angle of her elbows, the curve of her spine, the dimples of her lower back, her large, magnificent breasts in which I could bury my whole face. And the most tousled, tangled pubic patch through which I have ever had to find my way. A near impenetrable little forest, a small private Amazon to get lost in. But when one finally got down to the river, slipping and sliding through reeds and weeds and rushes and undergrowth, one could slither through the mud and dive in, wholly immerse oneself, stay down for an impossibly long, long time, nearly drowning, before coming up again, panting and heaving and covered in purple prose.

  ***

  No one could have been less like Maike than Vanessa. She was Lindiwe’s predecessor as my Girl Friday. In fact, she was the one who’d introduced Lindiwe to me. She was colored. Very light-skinned, with a heightened flush in her cheeks, and sparkling eyes, and an unusually wide, generous mouth. It was that vivacity, that air of irrepressible fun, that caused most of her problems, and determined the whole course of our relationship.

  When she first came to me, in reply to an advertisement I had placed in the papers following a few rather disastrous assistants in my employ, recommended by friends and acquaintances, she was newly divorced. Which came as a surprise to me: I couldn’t believe that there was any man in his right mind who would let her go. But, of course, she soon made it clear what a shit he had been. Not that he’d abused her in any way. Unless indifference could rank as abuse; which I suppose it can. ‘I think we just knew each other too well,’ she told me. (I learned at a very early stage that the relationship between a Girl Friday and her employer, especially when it is linked to a serious difference in age, prompts confidences which may be unheard of in many other situations. And to Vanessa, because of her particular circumstances, it seemed to come quite naturally.) ‘We literally grew up together, we were like brother and sister. And also, I’m sure we got married too young. I was only twenty-two, and he a year younger.’ Once they had come to accept the inevitable—although to me, looking in from outside, it seemed everything but inevitable, damn it—they managed to coast along more or less comfortably and evenly. Until he met somebody else and asked for a divorce. She had just turned twenty-eight. That was some six months before she came to me, and her troubles had already begun.

  It is a phenomenon which, up to a point, I can understand: the way in which a young and attractive woman, newly divorced, or newly widowed, becomes a target to every man in sight. A hind to the hunters. Not only the ‘available’ unmarried ones, but the married ones too. In fact, she seems even more alluring to the married brigade. There may actually be something comical about the way in which they fall over their own feet to make an approach. But very soon there is nothing funny about it any more. It becomes revolting, nauseating, infuriating. The more she tries to protest that she is not interested, the less they believe her. Just a matter of finding the right one, they assure her. Come on, babes, give it a chance. You won’t regret it.

  It’s like an ailing animal set upon by others of its kind. Perhaps the vulnerability of the individual brings on a panic about mortality in the others: of course they have no understanding of it (as little, it would seem, as their human equivalents), they just sense it, instinctively, murderously. They cannot rest before they have turned the victim into a bloody mess of torn skin and flesh. This is how these men appear to me, I’m afraid. The scent of vulnerability, of possible weakness, is overwhelming: it makes it so much easier to demonstrate their frantic macho image of themselves. And the slightest sign of resistance makes it worse: now the challenge is that much greater, it lends so much more excitement to any blood sport. The first sign of a bull faltering in the arena makes the crowd go mad.

  There are the never-ending assaults on her resistance: Come on, baby (or sweetie, or lovey, or pussy, all the
diminutives), I know you’re dying for it, you need it, you want it, I’m really doing this for you. And when she turns them down, all those highly sophisticated, successful, highly educated men (like those exemplary young leaders of the future in the university residence, waving the signs of their manhood at Isolde), they respond with the vilest and most filthy abuse: then she is the one who has teased and provoked them and now betrays them, the frigid bitch.

  I have transcribed all of this (as if there was any need to refresh my memory) from old notes, from many different periods in my life, but most pertinently from what Vanessa told me at the time. She’d had to give up her lucrative job as a highly paid secretary in one of the city’s top firms of accountants, because she could not take the harassment any more. (And when in desperation she went to the manager to complain, took her out to console her, and afterwards forced his way into her flat and nearly raped her.) She was obliged to take up a few part-time, private jobs, like mine; even that did not put an end to the approaches of the sex-crazed pack. When she went out with girlfriends at night, members of the pack (the faces changed, as did the lines of approach, but the lust and the arrogance never did) would materialize from nowhere to try their luck.

  There were times when I found her in tears; mostly she was so livid that it took hours, and many cups of tea, to calm her down sufficiently to resume her work. Between us, there was never ‘anything’ at all. Not because abstinence had been forced on the relationship from the outside, or by her, as had happened with Daphne, or Isolde, or for such a long time by Helena, or some others I can think of, but because her distress ruled out any possibility of a move from my side at all. I was up in arms with her, against the world of men deranged by testosterone. I wanted to protect her, I had to protect her; and for once the very fact that she was beautiful, and vulnerable, ensured that I would never dream of taking advantage of her. (As, in a different context, George’s trust guaranteed your safety in my household; and, for that matter, in your own.)