Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  Just then a few informal entrepreneurs turned up alongside the queue with bundles of black plastic refuse bags which we could transform into raincoats. Almost immediately this led to a loosening of the tongues. Soon we were all bantering and joking and laughing together. The man beside me turned out to be a black municipal cleaner from Khayelitsha. Behind us were a law student from UCT and a large, jovial woman, a domestic worker from Rondebosch; in front of us a white medical doctor from Groote Schuur and a colored vagrant who, it transpired, lived under a nearby bridge. In our stylish black plastic raincoats we all looked much the same; more importantly, we were joined together by a common purpose—the making of that portentous little cross at the end of the long wait.

  Not even in a rugby queue have I encountered so much humor, such sharp wit, and such a sense of camaraderie. To stretch our legs, we took turns to wander up and down the queue, encountering everywhere strangers bubbling with eagerness to talk, to share with us their expectations for the day, their reminiscences of the previous months, or years, or lifetimes. For a few hours we escaped from the singularity of our lives to discover how much we actually had in common. The rain, the cold, the hunger, the memories of the past, the hopes for the future, erased all the customary awareness of difference—in a country where, for centuries, everything had been predicated on difference. Some individuals opened sandwiches or chocolates they had brought along for themselves, happy to share with all the bystanders; it was a partaking of loaves and fishes. One man, some distance back, who turned out to be a plumber, left in his bakkie while his new friends kept his place in the queue, and came back with a whole load of hotdogs and sandwiches and cool drinks from a café in Durban Road. The husband of a queuing woman arrived with a shoebox of food for her, assessed what was happening, and promptly returned home to stock up with new supplies for twenty or thirty more people. And a few shrewd street vendors who had got wind of the marketing possibilities, began to ply their trade up and down the constantly lengthening line. A water tower at the edge of the Liesbeek River provided shelter for those in need of toilet facilities, and soon a roster was established, for ladies and gentlemen in turn. Not a single person was complaining or grumpy; laughter rippled up and down the queue, like vocal Mexican waves.

  It was after about three hours that I met Jenny, who had been standing some distance behind me. She had begun to feel nauseous and had broken from the queue to sit down for a while, her head between her knees. Impossible to miss her. Pretty and fair-haired, slight, with big eyes, and a sharp, intelligent face which in the circumstances seemed alarmingly pale. It turned out that she had been working all night finishing a paper for some conference, and had gone without breakfast that morning, so it was nothing serious, just unpleasant. As it happened, I had just been offered a sandwich and a small carton of fruit juice by the plumber, and I persuaded her to share it with me. Afterwards, for safety’s sake, I brought her the doctor who had been standing in front of me. Soon the color returned to Jenny’s cheeks, although there was still something feverish glowing in her eyes, which were a very deep luminous blue, almost violet.

  We started talking. I learned to my delight that she was recently divorced; she was an anthropologist (later that night, back at home, listening to the rain outside, she told me about her research into the phenomenon of the moon-cloth; but there in the queue we had other things to discuss). It turned out that we had much in common. Her father ran a bookshop in town, specializing in second-hand and antiquarian books. After a messy divorce from her mother he had brought her up in their cramped and rather moldy little flat upstairs from the shop. Some of her best memories involved tiptoeing downstairs at night in her long nightdress to pick a book from the shelves and snuggle up in bed with it. Her father did not mind; in fact, he encouraged it, with the sole provision that the book should be restored to its place afterwards in the same condition in which she’d found it.

  Only once had such a nocturnal mission gone wrong, in an entirely unforeseen way. She was thirteen or fourteen. It was midwinter and she’d just run a bath when she realized that she’d forgotten to choose a book for the night; knowing her way by heart, she promptly tripped downstairs, naked, to find something. On nimble bare feet in the half-dark she nipped up the tall ladder to reach the top shelf under the high ceiling where she had recently discovered her father’s collection of erotica. She was perched on the top rung of the ladder when the light was turned on and a strange man appeared at the end of the narrow aisle: she had forgotten that her father sometimes arranged with out-of-town customers to come in for a browse after hours. All she could do was to huddle with her head pressed against the ceiling and hope that the visitor would go past without looking up. But he was taking his time, and she was beginning to shiver and turn blue with cold. And then he started climbing the ladder too, heading quite obviously for the same destination. The ladder was not very steady. When the stranger reached up and accidentally touched her knee, he uttered a smothered sound of shock, looked up, saw a live naked girl where he had expected a book of erotic drawings, lost his footing and tumbled down. The ladder toppled over, Jenny landed sprawling on top of the visitor, and scrambled off on all fours, leaving it to the embarrassed stranger to explain to the incredulous shop owner what had happened. By the time her father came upstairs to ask for her version of the story, she was already thawing in her brimful bath, assuring him with an angel-face through clouds of steam that she had no idea of what he was talking about.

  It was that look of innocence which hooked me—precisely because I soon discovered how deceptive it was. For as I was to discover before the end of that long day, there was no end to Jenny’s capacity for pleasure, which often reminded me of Tania in France, with her over-the-top approach to sex. But I’ll get to that later.

  As we followed the random lines of our excited conversation, the queue kept inching forward, sometimes coming to a dead stop for half an hour or more while the election officials in the gym hall frantically replaced their stocks of ballot papers, pencils, indelible ink and other materials; then there would be a brief surge forward, before we settled once again into a barely perceptible shuffle.

  We were hardly conscious of the delays, as our conversation grew more and more eager. It was as if we’d spent lifetimes together and after a long separation now had to cram all the catching-up into a single day. From time to time she would grab my hand to lend urgency to what she was saying; in sudden spasms of cold, we would huddle together for warmth—while all around us the exuberant conversations and newly established comradeships among the hundreds of other people flourished and flared despite the wind and rain. It was as if with every tentative step forward we were also moving closer together, Jenny and I, feeling the current of electricity between us running ever more strongly, until it was almost unbearable. Even if we never saw each other again, her luminous eyes would be burned into my memory for ever. But we no longer even considered as a possibility that after the voting we might go our different ways. History had thrown us together, no man would put us asunder.

  After nearly seven hours, we entered the polling station in a tight embrace, and reluctantly parted to go to separate booths to make our crosses; then, like schoolchildren on the last day of term, ran to my car hand in hand, as if it had all been agreed in advance, and drove home on what felt like automatic pilot, and burst into the house like two pieces of flotsam washed up by a tide. I am sure we might have made love right there on the front stoep, in the rain, had Frederik not opened the door for us and stood back in his imperturbable manner to let us in.

  He mumbled something about coffee and crumpets (having left with Andrea at daybreak, he must have come back from his own voting long before us; I wasn’t expecting her before midnight or later). Right then, it was the funniest and most inopportune thing we could possibly think of. We both collapsed in laughter. Poor Frederik must have been deeply offended, but true to form he did not show anything. He merely withdrew to
the back of the house, presumably to put as much distance between himself and us as possible while we took off our muddy shoes and charged upstairs, littering every step of the way with items of clothing. Our teeth were chattering with cold, but even that could not restrain us. The elation of the day had charged us with too much energy to think of anything else.

  I ran a luxuriously deep bath for us as we stood on the dark red mat, shaking with the extremes of cold and passion. And then we plunged in. It was like the night, she said later, when she’d sought refuge in the hot water after scaring the stranger in the bookshop out of his wits. We very nearly drowned ourselves in the process. When once I quite literally came up for air, I discovered that the water on the bathroom floor had flooded into the bedroom, leaving a dark stain on the sisal carpet for weeks to come, which re-emerged after every spell of bad weather for many months as an eloquent reminder, like arthritic pains.

  Only after we had eased the first wave of desire, we noticed that the water was discolored. It started as a faint, delicate pink; but slowly darkened as a small whorl of red unraveled from between her thighs like an exotic flower blooming. Her period had started. There was something incredibly beautiful and moving about it. That was when I had my first lesson in the tradition of the moon-cloth. And Jenny was still holding me in its thrall, hours later, when we finally decamped to the kitchen for some copious late-night eating and drinking, Jenny wrapped in a royal-blue dressing gown from my cupboard, her long blonde hair plastered to her glowing cheeks

  Andrea came home well after midnight, by which time we were more or less ready to retire. For a moment her arrival startled me. But there was no occasion for alarm. She showed all the signs of immoderate celebration herself and was accompanied by a tall young black man she had met at the last of the polling stations she had monitored during her long day. It had occasionally happened in the past that one of us would bring someone home: after the first year together, our relationship had become very open-ended. But this was the first time both of us had a companion for the same night; and somehow it was exactly as it should be. With a brief wave in my direction, she led her own election prize past the kitchen to the spare bedroom. For both of us it was an end and a beginning; and Jenny and I remained together for a year.

  ***

  The final drive towards Baghdad is underway, sooner than expected. The US, Sky News showed last night, have seized a bridge over the Tigris thirty kilometers from the capital. (Another bridge, or the same one again?) The Third Infantry Division has now encircled Karbala and is moving north. They’re showing continuous spectacular shots—more spectacular than the fireworks exploding over us that first night Anna and I made love—of the bombing of elite units in Baghdad. It is now estimated that within four to eight weeks the city will fall. The expectation is that at any moment an invisible ‘red line’ may be crossed by the invaders, which may invite retaliation with the much vaunted weapons of mass destruction. From sheer perversity I cannot wait for that invisible line to be reached. On the other hand, from the Iraqi television comes a self-assured statement that the crossing of the Euphrates is an illusion; nothing of it is true, and the Americans are not advancing. Perhaps this whole war is an illusion, it is not really happening, except on TV. Perhaps I have never loved you. Perhaps my mother is a camel.

  ***

  George brought home a funny little clay camel for you. Why on earth he should have thought a camel an appropriate gift to bring from Japan, I don’t know. He loved surprising you with his presents, and you loved receiving them. It was like a birthday. And of course there was much more besides the camel (which from then on you proudly exhibited among your own sculptures, and in due course even copied and incorporated, in weird and fantastical ways, in your work). There must have been a whole suitcase full of presents when he came back. He even brought me something: a very beautiful little lacquer box, hand-painted with wonderfully stylized erotic pictures. They matched the small collection of netsuke which he brought you, very old, in exquisite smooth ivory turning yellow like mellowed piano keys, representing loving couples, human and animal, in a variety of almost-impossible positions.

  The pride of the presents was a new wedding ring to replace the one you’d lost: an intricate Oriental design in white and yellow and red gold. You were unexpectedly subdued as you held out your finger for him to put it on—a perfect fit; he must have taken the measurement before he left—but that must have been because you were so overwhelmed by its strange and intriguing beauty.

  While we are all admiring the array of presents in the studio the day after his return (you had invited me to go to the airport with you to meet him, but although my first reaction had been to accept, I’d decided that the two of you deserved to be alone for a while), you caress the smooth patina of the intricately carved little couple of a woman and a monkey. ‘I think we should try out all these positions,’ you suggest, looking up at George with an impish glint in your eyes. It is exactly what Anna would have said, all those years ago.

  ‘Is there anything you haven’t tried out yet?’ I tease.

  ‘I wouldn’t do it with a monkey,’ you laugh.

  ‘I often feel like a big uncouth ape next to you. A gorilla or something,’ mocks George.

  ‘I’ll always make an exception for you,’ you say. ‘You taught me to love the jungle.’

  Through the open buttons at the top of his shirt I can see the luxuriant ground cover of black, curly hair on his chest. And like often before, in spite of my efforts to suppress the thought, I imagine the two of you together: the smoothness of your limbs, his heavy, hirsute body. I can see your nipples entangled in the dense undergrowth of his chest. The image is deeply perturbing. But it is soon overlaid by our conversation; and then we go out for a meal at the Japanese restaurant in Hout Bay, so that George can compare his recent experience of the real thing with the local approximation.

  Over the next few weeks he is working almost day and night in his darkroom, a surprisingly cramped little pimple at the side of the house, to follow up on the photographs he has taken in Japan. I am invited to lend a hand, which pleases me immensely. Not only because it gives the two of us time to spend together, but because it means a return to an activity which was once a quite serious pastime. It was in the late seventies, when I was working on a book on the ’76 riots with the driven, passionate, young activist photographer, Aviva. The project was her idea; I wrote the text, she took the pictures. The rather obvious title, Black and White, we chose together.

  Aviva was a small, slight person, with more passion than one would have expected her frail frame to contain; but there was no end to her dedication and her anger. The nature of her work had prompted a number of run-ins with the Security Police and we always went to bed expecting to be awakened by the ominous knock on the door at three in the morning—the sort of fear that was to be repeated, after my return from Europe in the eighties, when I was with Abbie. That time it did not end so well; but although with Aviva there was always an awareness of danger, we also knew that there was an invisible, thin, red line protecting her—because some years earlier a close friend of hers, a colored girl, Claudie, had had a brief and ill-advised clandestine fling with a man who soon afterwards became the secretary of a deputy minister in the Nationalist hierarchy. On a few occasions the couple had used Aviva’s cottage as a hideout, so she knew about the affair. She had been sworn to secrecy, and even though the political implications of the relationship pained her, she would not betray her friend. It ended very dramatically, soon after the man had been appointed secretary, when Claudie died in an inexplicable car accident. No one was ever indicted, and no names were mentioned; but Aviva had her own suspicions, and she began to make enquiries.

  Very late one night, she had a visit from a stranger who said he was a colleague of the new secretary. It was a very friendly, almost unctuous, man who just wanted to tell her of his deep sympathy about the sudden death of her dear fr
iend Claudie, and to reassure her that she herself had absolutely nothing to worry about. Why should she worry? Aviva asked. Unless there had been something fishy about Claudie’s death…? No, no, no, he told her. It was just one of those things, wasn’t it? She should try to relax and get on with her life. It was in Claudie’s interest, and in her own, to let the whole unfortunate matter rest. Didn’t she agree? She was terrified, so she agreed. But from that moment her dedication to the anti-apartheid cause was absolute.

  As the man prepared to leave, she managed to summon enough courage to issue a quiet warning of her own: Since Claudie’s death, she told him, she had been living in fear of something happening to her too. And so she had been forced to take precautions. He should tell his friend the secretary, as well as his boss the deputy minister, that she had written a full statement including not just her suspicions, and all the details she knew about the relationship, but everything that had come to light during her enquiries into the accident; and this statement had been lodged with a lawyer, who had instructions to divulge it all if ever anything untoward were to happen to her. They parted on the best of terms, but the man did appear somewhat pale as he went out into the dark.