Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  In the end we thought up a remedy together. It was very simple and very obvious, but we congratulated ourselves on our ingenuity. And it worked. I gave her an engagement ring, quite an expensive one in fact, and we started going out together whenever she, or I, wanted to go to a concert, or a film, or a meal. It was astounding to notice how soon the news spread. Vanessa could begin to relax; she was safe. There were still a few chancers who caused us moments of anger, but usually they were quite easy to handle. And it even brought us some comedy—when she was harassed in a restaurant, for instance, and excused herself for a minute to go to the Ladies from where she would call me on her cell, and I would turn up soon afterwards to claim my ‘fiancée.’

  On at least one occasion it didn’t turn out well. The man in question, a very important executive as it happened, felt so insulted that he threw a tantrum in front of all the patrons of the Green Point restaurant, treating Vanessa like a whore and me as her pimp.

  ‘You fucking decrepit old fart!’ he shouted at me. ‘Won’t miss an occasion of screwing a halfnaatjie, will you? Well, I won’t stand for this. I’m going to teach both of you a fucking lesson you won’t fucking well ever forget.’

  I made the mistake of telling him to mind his language.

  ‘I will fucking well say what I fucking well please,’ he retorted, pushing me against the counter.

  ‘I’m not talking about the expletives, sonny,’ I said, trying to keep my cool. ‘I’m concerned about the paucity of your vocabulary.’

  ‘You fucking what…?’ For a moment he stared at me, then struck me a blow to the side of my face that made me reel.

  At which point the manager came out from behind the counter and, assisted by two of his waiters, shoved both of us outside. Vanessa followed hard on our heels. The moment we landed on the pavement outside, she let fly with her handbag, hitting our assailant at the back of his head. The unexpectedness of the blow sent him staggering against me, which provoked him into a flurry of blows to my chest and shoulders and head.

  ‘Will you please call the police to take this thug away?’ I asked the manager in as dignified a way as possible, which in the circumstances could not have been very impressive.

  ‘Thug?’ screamed the man. ‘You call me a fucking thug?’

  ‘Just an ordinary one,’ I said.

  His next blow landed me on all fours on the pavement. It could have become very nasty indeed, but fortunately the two waiters, assisted by several of their colleagues, intervened and managed to pin the aggressor’s arms to his sides. I did not respond, mainly because I was too busy spitting out blood. Vanessa was kneeling beside me, cradling my head in her arm and uttering soothing words which I wished afterwards I could remember.

  A few minutes later the police arrived and we were all taken to the Three Anchor Bay station. The restaurant manager followed in his car. It took a while for things to calm down sufficiently for statements to be taken. But thanks mainly to the manager intervening on our behalf, it was sorted out in due course; and as it happened Vanessa’s attacker recognized my name while the constable behind the counter was painstakingly writing down my statement, and began to gawk at me in shock. ‘Oh my God,’ he muttered, ‘are you the writer? Oh fuck, oh holy shit.’ He thrust his hand at me. ‘Look, I never realized… I’m so sorry…Whatever you do, please don’t go to the newspapers with this… Just tell me what you want. Anything, I swear to God, I promise I’ll…’

  ‘That is for me to decide,’ I said with as much haughtiness as I could muster through my badly swollen lips. ‘For a start, you can apologize to Ms Booyse.’

  ‘I’m not interested,’ said Vanessa and stalked out.

  It still went on for some time—the constable trying desperately to get everything on paper, the manager interrupting after each phrase to correct or add something, the executive pleading non-stop, and I trying to stop the blood. But at some stage we left in the restaurant manager’s car, leaving the fucking champ on the cold pavement addressing his imprecations and supplications to the distant stars.

  This was not yet the end. When we came home, Vanessa insisted on first attending to my mouth—which wasn’t too badly hurt after all: just a tooth which had cut into my cheek—and then leaving me on the couch in my study with a tot of neat whiskey while she went to the kitchen to make me some tea with several heaped teaspoons of sugar. It was only much later, after the surge of adrenalin had dissipated, that she started crying.

  She was trembling all over, still too upset to speak. All she could say, several times over, was, ‘I thought we’d put all that behind us.’

  ‘What do you mean, Vanessa?’

  ‘He called me a halfnaatjie. That was all he could think of. After everything that has happened in the country we’re still trapped in black and white and colored and all the rest. Isn’t this supposed to be the new South Africa?’

  ‘He’s just a single idiot,’ I tried to soothe her. ‘We’re not all like that.’

  She shook her head violently. ‘He’s not a single idiot, Chris. Didn’t you look at him? He’s supposed to be one of the upper crust. If that is the way he thinks—it was the first thing he said, the first thing that came to his mind—then what about the rest?’

  She started sobbing again, now more in anger than in hurt.

  I held her for the better part of an hour, speaking softly to her, trying to exorcise her rage and pain. And when at last she seemed calmer I insisted on running her a very deep, very hot bath, and left her in the bathroom while I returned to the study and poured myself another whiskey.

  I was in the kitchen, rinsing the glasses, when she came back, so softly that I didn’t hear her. She was wrapped in a big white towel, the ends of her hair were still wet. It seemed inevitable, natural, that I should put my arms around her, hug her. She responded with unexpected passion. It would have been so easy simply to go on. I think we both needed the sheer relief. But something incomprehensible in myself reached out to stop me. Don’t ask me to explain. In most similar situations in my long life I would have taken the plunge. If there is one thing about relationships I believe in it is Zorba’s dire warning: There is one sin God will not forgive: if a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go. But this once I desisted. For a moment I continued to hold her, then I let her go.

  She stared at me uncomprehendingly. There were tears in the corners of her eyes.

  ‘We cannot, Vanessa,’ I said, half choking on the words. ‘We’re both too upset. We cannot do it to each other. We shall never forgive ourselves. If we want to make love tomorrow, or next week, or a month or a year from now, yes, it will be wonderful. But not now. Do you understand?’

  And half an hour later I took her home.

  We never spoke about it again. It wasn’t necessary. And we continued as before, as if that night had never happened. Which, in a way, was absolutely true. She continued to be my Girl Friday. We continued to go out together and pretend that we were lovers, to keep away the raptors. But never again was there another moment of weakness. If weakness it had been. (I am not suggesting that I lived an entirely monastic life for the two years Vanessa was with me. There were a few inconsequential flings, nothing memorable—either for me or, I dare say, for the women. During a week of workshopping in Pietermaritzburg there was Charmaine, an eager but bland, run-of-the-mill Colombard; at a festival in Stavanger there was Astrid, a pleasant Tinta das Barrocas, down-to-earth, ready for drinking on the spot; in Cologne, where I had to collect a prize, which at my age becomes something of a bore, there was Gertrud, a rather thin, metallic Zinfandel, with little prospect for aging—and I was a flop.)

  The arrangement worked perfectly. It was not just a form of protection for her: it brought both of us a feeling of security. I had, by then, had a few disheartening experiences with women, when unexpectedly, at the decisive moment, I was unable to ‘perform.’ The long-trusted old body was no longer up
to it; not every time, and not predictably. That night with Vanessa, I have no doubt, it would have ‘worked’; but it was no longer an option, and barely a memory.

  And yet the relationship came to an end. Not because of anything that happened, or did not happen, between us; but because of something entirely different. Politics, to give it its shortest, dirtiest name. And even that may not be quite just.

  Her family had been, for a very long time, divided by politics. They lived in Athlone, where her father was a school principal. A gentle, God-fearing man, he supported the government’s disingenuous new tricameral parliamentary system, because he saw it as a step forward; her two brothers violently opposed it. One of them was detained for months, the other one emigrated. The tensions broke their mother’s health. One day, after a quarrel, she ran out of the house. In a back street she was set upon by a band of skollies and gang-raped. She survived, but her mind was damaged and she was committed to Valkenberg. When Vanessa was eighteen her father died when he tried to squeeze into an already overfull train and was thrown out by an irate white conductor and died under the wheels. So from the very beginning Vanessa was conditioned by anger and political resistance. The problem was that all she really wanted was to lead a normal life—whatever that might be. But trying to be normal in an abnormal society—going to UWC, preparing herself for a career—turned out to be more difficult than many other choices available to her.

  For some time after the beginning of the transition in the early nineties a rewarding future seemed possible.

  The first few years were a blur of celebrations, expectations, euphoria. Then the disillusionment began to settle in. For Vanessa the final straw was when the African National Congress, once the leading liberation movement in the country, later the ruling party of the New South Africa, entered into an alliance with the old (but allegedly reborn) National Party which had denied her people the vote, then uprooted thousands of coloreds from District Six and elsewhere, relegating the Hotnots to second-class citizens. She could not understand how so many of these rejected people preferred to vote for this alliance.

  ‘When the whites were in power,’ she told me with flaming eyes, ‘we were too black for them. They threw us out into the sand of the Cape Flats. Like meerkats. So we started working for the ANC. We thought Mandela would give us back the dignity we once had. But we didn’t realize that he would not be allowed to have the final word. And now we’re too white for the new fat cats, and we’re still out in the wind. I can’t stand it any more, Chris. When there’s an election coming, they travel up and down the place to woo us for our votes. And then they just turn round and kick sand in our faces. I’ve had enough.’

  ‘But what can you possibly do?’

  ‘I’m going away. I told you my older brother is already in Canada. The other one was killed in crossfire between two gangs. Now I’m going to Canada too.’

  I said the stupidest thing I could possibly have said: ‘What am I going to do?’

  Without warning, she put her arms around me and kissed me. ‘Come with me, Chris,’ she said.

  It was such a temptation. But Canada is too cold for my old bones. I’ve been to Calgary and Edmonton and Vancouver for conferences, and several times to Harbourfront in Toronto. Met wonderful people. Wonderful writers. But I wouldn’t last through the first winter.

  She went on for some time. But I know her heart wasn’t really in it. What would she have done if I’d accepted? It would have been the end for both of us.

  Vanessa went, but not before she had brought me Lindiwe as a replacement. I stayed behind. And not too long after that you came. I felt vindicated after all.

  Now I just don’t know any more.

  ***

  The little dark one, is how after all these years I still think of her. In a sense she paved the way for Vanessa, because with her, too, I was never involved sexually. Not for lack of trying, but right from the outset she’d made it clear that the last thing she wanted to be concerned with was the body and its needs. And unlike the relationship with Helena so long ago, this one offered no prospect of solving the problem through marriage. But I found her so fascinating as a person, and her dedication to what she believed in—her feminine intransigence—so obsessive, that it was unthinkable to opt out of it. For years, I think, she influenced my choice of women; and although she made it clear that she found this a weakness in my make-up she never tried to interfere, to make me desist, to change my mind. It was the passion she brought to everything she truly believed in that hooked me. And in one way or another, I am convinced, the slightest hint of that kind of absolute dedication, the fierceness of that passion, in any other woman I ever encountered, provoked an immediate reaction in me, like the needle of a compass which unfailingly points North.

  Thinking back now, I realize that I did not know all that much about her: her life, I mean, her background, her story. What I do know is that she was very young when she’d lost her father (she was barely twenty when I met her, by which time he’d been dead for years). But he had remained the major influence in her life; there was something almost incestuous in her feelings for him. She often took me along on Sundays to put flowers on his grave: very simple flowers, arum lilies or marigolds or heather; and then I had to help her tend the grave. She used to take a little spade with her, the kind a child would use at the beach, to dig up the weeds and spread the soil smoothly across the surface, almost like making a bed, or covering a body with a shroud. She would scrape it down with her hands, and her fingernails used to be black with dirt by the time we went home.

  At some stage I met her sister too, who was a few years older. A pretty but somewhat vacuous girl. She never spoke much and seemed mostly to defer to her younger sibling whenever there were decisions to be made about a restaurant to go to, a film to see, friends to visit. There had been two brothers as well, who had both died in the border war: and for her this was the catastrophe that determined the rest of her life.

  Since the death of their father they had been in the care of an uncle. I never met him personally, but from all accounts he was a strict and rather dogmatic kind of man. Discipline, discipline all the way. Much like my father. And this was where the trouble started, because it would seem that there had never been any love lost between the father and the uncle—an old family quarrel that went all the way back to their parents. Her father, as far as I could make out, had been a likeable but stubborn man who had charted the course of his life—in politics, in the choice of a career, in everything—without any regard for the wishes of the family. The uncle, a stickler for propriety and correctness, intractable and downright mean under an exterior of piousness and conformity, soon made them understand that they were a deplorable lot who should be eternally grateful for his benevolence after the death of the no-good head of their own family. And this, fired as she was by her fierce feminine independence, she simply couldn’t stomach. A disastrous clash became unavoidable. She would not be dictated to by a man, least of all by such a shit.

  The aunt, I gathered, was quite sweet and caring; the older sister seemed to get along with her quite well. But not my little dark one.

  In that relationship my only role really was that of father confessor. Because of the age difference, I presume, she was inclined to come to me with whatever bothered her. There was, for example, an episode with a young man who was head over heels in love with her and wanted to marry her. In the beginning she resisted, she was too young, she did not yet feel ready for marriage; but he was really very serious and seemed to care a lot for her. I believe she turned to him mainly because she saw him as a possible ally against the uncle. So they did get engaged, which was shortly before she came into my life. And then the problems began.

  High-minded and caring he might have been, but he was also a young man of flesh and blood. That was when she started confiding in me. He was always at her, couldn’t keep his hands off her. She became quite embarrassingly
frank. Kissing she could accept. Even, although initially with some reluctance, the fondling of her breasts. When he proceeded his explorations into her knickers, she found it alarming. But for his sake—she couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, he was so very eager—she allowed it; even had to admit in the long run that it was no longer so terribly distasteful. (At this stage of her confessions to me I started wondering about the priesthood: all the occasions for vicarious fulfillment; and for such a good cause.) But when he started expecting her to bring him to climax too and even—just once, oh please, oh please—to take him in her mouth, she felt she had to put an end to it. No so much because of guilt feelings or remorse or anger, but simply because she felt there were many more useful things they could do together. (‘Don’t do anything you feel you may regret later,’ I piously advised her; it was not my loss anyway, and it might even get rid of a youngster I’d come to detest because he was being allowed access and privilege of a kind denied to me.) So she dumped him. ‘That takes care of him,’ was all she said about it. Now she could turn her mind to more worthy preoccupations: mapping a future in which she wouldn’t always have to be dependent on a man.

  This aggravated the relationship with the uncle. Again I was the one she turned to for advice, as if I were the father she’d lost. Or not even a father but a grandfather, which I did not exactly relish. But I had to play my part. For her it was very serious indeed, and she needed me.

  The end, I believe now, had really been unavoidable from the very beginning. A matter of two unrelenting wills, the immovable object and the irresistible force, the rock and the hard place.