Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  It procured for Aviva some space to maneuver and to work on the photographs for our book. This was the tenuous, invisible line drawn around her: it was impossible to tell when she might overstep it and unleash all the regime’s weapons of mass destruction against her; but at the same time it was a line they dared not readily overstep from the outside. In the meantime we could continue working together, on Aviva’s field trips and in her darkroom. I picked up as much about photography as I needed to know for the novel In the Dark which I wrote once I was safely in London. At the same time it drew me into the processes of an art form I’d long been fascinated by but knew little about. And, perhaps most importantly, it was at the heart of one of the most meaningful love affairs of my life, with enough of Durrell’s plumbing, and enough metaphysical enquiry, to last me for a very long time.

  I told George about all this as we worked together, he handling the cropping and lighting and printing, while I performed the more menial but ever-spellbinding tasks of developing and fixing the prints.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘Aviva Scholnik was one of my role models. I remember seeing one of her exhibitions here in Cape Town before she left the country. I must have been in my early twenties. And then that book came out. It was immediately banned here, of course, but I had some contacts in London and someone smuggled me a copy. That woman had a technique without peer. Above all, she had the eye. You can have all the technique in the world, but unless you have the eye you may just as well become a bookkeeper.’

  ‘She certainly changed my life. She taught me to write in a different key. A more visual key. Apart from the fact that if it hadn’t been for her I would not have left the country just then.’

  ‘What a pity she never came back,’ said George. ‘We need more photographers like her.’

  ‘For many years she couldn’t risk it. And then she met her German, and got married, and that was that.’

  ‘It must have been tough for you?’

  ‘Not really. We’d broken up before she met him.’ I pulled a wry face. ‘That’s the way it goes with love, isn’t it?’

  ‘I hope not,’ he said with a quiet smile.

  ‘I suppose I was talking about my loves,’ I qualified. ‘You and Rachel are something else. You know, you’re about the only couple I’ve met in years who make me feel that there may be something to be said for marriage after all.’

  ‘I still can’t quite believe it,’ he said disarmingly. ‘Rachel is the most incredible thing that has ever happened to me. I’ve always been rather awkward with women, especially with beautiful women.’

  ‘Yet you’ve worked with lots of them in your life.’

  ‘I know.’ A boyish grin, the kind which made me understand why you fell in love with him. ‘And it’s not as if I came to Rachel with a clean slate. But I could never really believe it would happen. Every time someone showed interest in me I got quite weak in the knees with sheer gratitude.’

  ‘And I’m sure every time they took advantage of your naivete—if that is what it was.’

  ‘I never thought of it that way. I just counted each lovely little blessing as it came. And not one of those was a match for Rachel.’

  At some stage during our hours of work, every day, there would be a knock on the closely sealed and blacked-out door, and you would call from outside. And five or ten or sometimes forty minutes later, depending on our work, we would join you in the studio to inspect what you had been doing in the meantime, and have tea (coffee for you, while you smoked like the most reckless and desirable of chimneys), and plunge into one of our breathless, dizzying, endless conversations. They were, you used to say, like one of those descriptions which George had once read to you, of a sentence in a novel by Thomas Mann, where you dive in at one end of the Atlantic and finally emerge at the other with the verb in your mouth. Except, I think, we often skipped the verbs, and just continued our explorations in the hinterland on the other side of the sea.

  The three of us went out together quite often. Mostly films, occasionally a concert at the City Hall (there was one really memorable Beethoven recital), once an unexpectedly moving production of Tosca in the Artscape. Which was followed, predictably, by a discussion that lasted for so long that in the end I was invited to sleep over. Since my wife-sitting stint this had happened more than once, a quite natural extension of many a long evening of argument and discussion. On this occasion it began with a comparison between the evening’s performance and, inevitably, the great performances we knew on disc: the purity of Caballé, the passion of Leontyne Price, the controlled fire of Renata Tebaldi, the dulcet tones of Kiri Te Kanawa—and then, in a separate category altogether, the divine Callas, with di Stefano and Gobbi. From Callas we moved into the role of Tosca herself.

  ‘A bit overdone,’ muses George. ‘Romantic melodrama is all very well, but it can so easily lose itself in muddy feelings. The “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore” is probably the best thing Puccini has done for a soprano, and every time I see Tosca laying out Scarpia’s body and lighting the candles, I am moved to tears. But apart from that… I think the different dimensions of the story become confused. There’s no balance between the private and the political. That’s what all three of us are struggling with all the time, isn’t it?—you in your writing, this one in her sculpture. I in my photography. And in Tosca it doesn’t work. Unless it is exceptionally well done, it’s just too much of a ten-cents-a-dozen emotion.’

  ‘How dare you say that?’ you storm—a reaction which, judged from his laugh, is exactly what George has tried to provoke. ‘In our time, in this country, what we have is a lack of feeling. Everybody knows everything about things like democracy, transparency, accountability. Been there, got the T-shirt. But damn it, that isn’t all that matters. We’ve become ashamed to admit that we have a private life and personal feelings. We don’t seem to trust them enough any more, we don’t believe in them. Don’t you agree, Chris?’

  ‘There are feelings and feelings,’ I try to avoid taking sides.

  ‘I don’t mistrust feeling,’ George persists. ‘Only false feeling, ersatz feeling, cheap emotions. Even Tosca and Cavaradossi have their share of it. The kind of feelings Don Giovanni professes to have for all his women, only until he has bedded them. Then it all goes out of the window.’

  ‘The problem with Don Giovanni,’ you say (it is a topic about which you can always be relied on to have a comment), ‘is that he never grows up. He wants everything, and he wants it now.’

  ‘Is that so different from Antigone?’ I object, more vehemently than I may have meant to. ‘All those exceptional individuals who refuse to toe the line, to accept mediocrity, the eternally young ones who keep the world from growing staid and grey, the Peter Pans who keep magic alive?’

  ‘You are not just hopelessly romantic, Chris, you are incorrigibly sentimental. And that is unforgivable in a man your age.’

  ‘Anything should be forgiven in a man my age,’ I say. ‘I’m entering my second childhood, remember.’

  ‘All I can tell you is that you’ve got Don Giovanni totally wrong.’

  ‘It’s easy to judge from the outside,’ I caution. ‘Can we ever be sure about what drives Don Giovanni? Do you think he was ever sure? Perhaps he really believed in what he was doing, every time. He may have had a much more profound conviction than you accuse him of.’

  This is where you squarely turn against me. ‘No, Chris! He most certainly didn’t! Look at how he behaved to Donna Anna, to Donna Elvira. No, damn it, that was shit. You can’t compare it to Tosca. She feels. She feels enough to murder the hateful Scarpia and kill herself.’

  ‘But Mozart’s music is better,’ I try to trump you.

  ‘That’s not the question. Mozart’s music itself condemns Don Giovanni. As far as I remember, he has two rather precipitate arias and a charming but very short canzonetta. Even Leporello gets a better deal than his master, musically.
And the most beautiful arias are given to the women, including the little peasant Zerlina. Mozart sides with them because what they feel is genuine.’

  ‘Because women are better equipped to deal with feeling?’ George says defiantly.

  And thus begins a whole new argument, to be continued the following morning.

  In one way or another, this returned in many of our conversations, always coming to rest, eventually, in the comfort you and George found in your relationship, the brightness and humor with which everything could eventually be resolved. That, I thought, like the story of Scheherazade and Shahriyar behind the tales told during their nights, was what it really was about. And it was in evidence again during one of the best experiences we ever shared. You had nagged us for a long time about going to the Cedarberg; most of the time there was other, more urgent, business to occupy us. But this time, in mid-April, you simply went ahead and booked a hut, and blithely confronted us with the fact of it.

  It meant taking a risk with the weather, but it turned out to be perfect: the warmth of late summer still lasting, but somewhat attenuated, the days becoming gentle and vulnerable around the edges, with a lucent tranquility in the heart of it, the merest quiver of approaching winter. Above all, an awareness of endless space opening up to all sides, as in a Rilke poem—an autumn sonnet or one of the Duino Elegies. The vineyards that surrounded us for the first half-hour were turning from green to the deepest shades of Cabernet, bringing back a distant harvesting summer in the vineyards of Bordeaux, at Saint-Émilion. (Tania covered in sticky red grape juice from her deep navel to her pretty toes.) Then came the gentle billowing of the Naples yellow and burnt sienna and terracotta wheatlands as, to the right, the acetylene flames of the mountains on the horizon deepened in color from almost transparent blue to deepest purple. After the wheat followed the dark green of the citrus orchards, teeming with early oranges like a swarm of little suns nesting in them. And then we turned off towards the mountains, which seemed to open to welcome us, closing again behind in wall upon wall of dun-colored slopes and high red cliffs.

  We drove past the Algeria forestry station towards the camp at Krom River where you had booked the hut. It was comfortable enough, but because the weather was so splendid, even in spite of the slender hint of a chill, we unanimously decided to move outside and spread our sleeping bags under some tall trees beside a very shallow, very clear stream of rapid water. George and I made a fire and he prepared supper: in his hands even something as straightforward as a braai became a gourmet experience, thanks to an assortment of home-made condiments and sauces which he’d brought along. As it was midweek, there were no other campers at the picnic spot. We had the mountains and the stars to ourselves.

  Again, our talk ranged over everything in heaven above, and in the earth beneath, and in the water under the earth. George had previously told us a lot about his visit to Japan; but this time he really explored it in depth, probing everything that appeared mysterious to Westerners like us: the mindset behind the sand patterns in the Zen gardens of Kyoto, the ritual of the tea ceremony, the love hotels, the profound philosophies informing the relations between men and women. The two of you must have discussed much of this at times when I was not present, because you could fill in a surprising number of links between what he had to say and features of your work: the absences, the silences, the beyondness, the in-betweenness. And from there our minds returned to these mountains: the San drawings not far from our camp, the sculptures made by wind and sun and rain along the cliffs and outcrops and deep kloofs.

  Sometime during the detours of the conversation I simply drifted off. When I woke up, the stars very white above me and almost within reach, and a deep silence on all sides, your two sleeping bags had disappeared. I was still too dazed with sleep to grasp the obvious, and suddenly gripped by a kind of primitive terror about being abandoned, I dragged myself from my own sleeping bag and stumbled off in search of what I myself could not explain. First this way, then that. After a while I came more clearly to my senses and retraced my steps towards the picnic spot beside the stream which was still rustling along, unperturbed and lyrical.

  Amid the silence I thought I could hear something else, something human, and wandered in that direction. Now the sounds were clearer. It was your voice, moaning softly, in half-smothered tones, but slowly going higher, becoming more expressive. For a moment I thought you were singing to George in the dark, it was so melodious, but then I heard the deeper groaning of his voice as a rhythmic accompaniment to yours; and I knew what was going on. It is something I normally cannot listen to—an association of foreign hotels and unfamiliar rooms in distant places, sounds unpleasantly reminding me of others threatening to invade my space, obtruding into the privacy of my own dreams or thoughts, my own enforced solitude in a strange place—but this time it was different. Not because I knew you (in different circumstances such knowledge might have been even more embarrassing), but because there was something so unabashed, so affirmative, so free and happy about it, that there was nothing to feel ashamed or self-conscious of. I may well be romanticizing again, but I felt that this was what lovemaking ought to be like.

  I knew I ought to leave you to your shared and mumbled music; but I could not move. Not until your voice rose from the low, joint rhythms into a single clarity, like the warble of a nightbird, clear as a flute, so haunting that it brought a shiver to my spine. Only then could I tear myself away, and cautiously return to our spot, realizing too late how soft and vulnerable my bare feet were on the uneven ground strewn with branches and rocks and smaller stones. Emptied of thought, but not of feeling, I crawled back into my cold sleeping bag. After a long, long lifetime of sharing my loneliness with others, other bodies, women, at the end of it all, here I was on my own, forsaken it seemed even by memory.

  When I woke up from the sun in my eyes, your bags were back in place, close together, and you were both fast asleep. Your left arm was outside the sleeping bag, George’s right; your hands were clasped. In the thin sunlight the new wedding ring glinted almost too bright on your finger. I went down to the stream to wash, brushed my teeth, and then made a fire on the still glowing embers from the night before. By the time I had breakfast ready, you were awake too. And afterwards, in the thrilling cool of the early morning, we set out on the route you had planned for us, up to the Wolfberg Arch, apparently some three or four hours away.

  Five, as it turned out, because we were not all as fit as you. But it was worth every cautious step and painful breath of the way. It was like a journey into the heart of the craggy mountains, a quest for origins, for innocent beginnings. Past huge rock formations like vast ragged sculptures, orange and red and grey and black, mottled with lichen, pock-marked and gnarled, ageless: monoliths like solitary figures abandoned by their tribe; others like small crowds or congregations turned to stone by an unknown malignant passing god who did not approve of trespassers; and some of them like couples, groping towards each other or welded together by age and wind—mountains resembling another tribe and state of being, and yet replicating ours, with the same silences, the same staring, the same attempts at understanding, the same agonies, and always the same urge, the same desire. To be together, to be joined at the hip, never to be left alone.

  The arch itself, where we spent a leisurely hour for lunch, was magnificent. One could imagine dinosaurs waddling through it, thousands or millions of years ago, incomparably bigger and stronger than us, their puny successors. Yet they were all gone now. And we, too, would be gone one day. All our inventions and achievements and dreams and wars gone, our music and our writings and our paintings gone, lost beyond memory. All our loves gone. On this ancient earth only these motionless rocks would remain as testimony to what had been or might have been. Not even as testimony, because there would be no one and nothing left to read them, interpret them, understand the first thing about them.

  Somewhere in the distance, behind rocks and brittle bushes
and a small cluster of gnarled cedar trees on an outcrop, there was movement. A little buck scurried away, darting this way and that, then disappearing like a shadow, as if it had never been there at all. A few small stones were still clattering downhill, then even that was gone. Far overhead a lone bateleur eagle made a single loop, uttering its forlorn cry—like your cry of love in the night—and then sailed away over the cliffs and was eclipsed. It, too, might never have been there. Like us in due course, all too soon.

  It must have been from staring too hard at the cliffs and rocks, imagining too much, that about three-quarters of the way down, on a steep incline littered with the stones and pebbles of an ancient rockfall, I lost my footing and stumbled, and fell. It wasn’t dangerous, I only rolled a few meters, but I grazed my hands and knees rather painfully. More seriously, I twisted my right ankle. Both of you were immediately at my side to help me up, but the leg was too painful to stand on. You made me sit and wrenched off the boot. Already the ankle was beginning to swell.

  There was a thin little stream cascading down the steep slope only a hundred meters or so to the left, and you accompanied me to it, and helped me to bathe my foot in the water. Cold as icicles it pierced up into my leg. But it numbed the pain, and after a few minutes the swelling seemed to stabilize. Even so, I could not readily step on it with my full weight. Which meant that I had to be supported by both of you, dangling between you like an oversized, clumsy marionette (from a Noh play, George joked), the rest of the way back. Our progress was painfully slow, and very soon we realized that night would fall long before we had any hope of getting back to the camp. I wanted you to leave me there and return on your own; from the camp you could drive to Algeria and get some help. But that would still mean attempting a rescue, and a hazardous descent, in the dark; so you wouldn’t hear of it. In the end we agreed on the only practical, if not very pleasant, solution: making a halt for the night right there.