Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  She had already accepted, when she suddenly said, ‘Oh, but

  Wayne…’

  ‘If you already have a date with him,’ I said smoothly, ‘please don’t let me stop you. Or else you could bring him along.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t think that will work.’

  ‘Well, perhaps I should just say goodbye then. I’ll probably be going back to Cape Town tonight.’ Which I had absolutely no intention of doing.

  ‘No, please don’t. I can always see Wayne later. At what time would you like to come round?’

  That was the beginning. Not that it was smooth sailing. If my intuition, or my experience, was anything to go by, she was as eager as I was to start something. But she was held back. By Wayne (to whom, I discovered that evening, she was in fact engaged, with a wedding date already set), or by some scruples of her own, or simply by the confusion she was in, surrounding the exhibition and the knowledge that the SB was on the prowl. Whatever the cause, I could feel that it was serious. I could also feel—or at least hope—that it was temporary. So we had a few nights and days of talking, of dining at her place or in restaurants, of sauntering around Zoo Lake, of making trips to the Hartebeespoort Dam or the Magaliesberg. After that, I returned to Cape Town, safe in the knowledge that I had to come back in a fortnight for a lecture at Wits.

  The whole story took longer than I had anticipated. Considering how eager we were, it was amazing that we could hold out for so long. But we did—because, I should hope, we both sensed that it would be worth our while. It was three months before Wayne finally cleared out, under the impression that he was the one who’d put an end to it. And then another four weeks before we could find a watertight reason for her to come to Cape Town. (It is always smoother on one’s own turf; although the challenge may be greater away from the stamping ground.) But when finally we came together, in a manner of speaking, all those months fell away from us like old skins.

  Without her clothes Aviva was even smaller, slighter, than I’d expected. She almost seemed anorexic. But not in a sick or appalling way at all: it just confirmed the waif-like appearance she made, her Madonna-like beauty. With those huge dark eyes. And no breasts at all, barely a swelling, just two very prominent nipples perched on her chest like large death beetles. The unbelievable frailty of her arms and legs, her ribcage like a little bird’s, her jutting hip bones. It seemed as if all the flesh on her frame was concentrated on the mound of her sex, which was disproportionately—but beautifully—high and rounded, overgrown with a luxuriant mop of long black pubic hair, not crinkly at all, but soft and feathery; and the vulva itself, the little inside lobes as well as the more naturally fleshy, ovoid outer ones, was of an unusual plumpness, almost spherical, like a large exotic mushroom in the fork of a tree, a little pleasure dome if ever I’ve seen one, where Alph the sacred river ran down to a tideless sea. No, not tideless. Her tides were convulsive, an ebb and flow that could take you very far, far back, before hurling you out, wildly and triumphantly, on a ribbed and windswept beach without end. (I have transcribed this verbatim from the notes I made after our first night; I know it is about as purple as it gets, but nothing but the most royal purple can do justice to Aviva.)

  It was serious, for both of us. I’d had a few brief flings after losing Helena and Pieter in the accident, but this was the first real relationship. I gave up the house I’d been renting in Gardens since the accident, and moved to Johannesburg; Aviva’s ramshackle old place was big enough for both of us. I’d seldom worked so hard, so focused, in my life. We were planning our book together, our Black and White, with her photographs, my text. We were driven by a lot of anger, but it was a good, inspirational anger that kept us on a permanent high.

  Even so, it was also a tough time. Ever since the conflagration of ’76 the country seemed to be going into a spin-dive of violence and rage and disaster. My hopes of being published locally had finally dried up with Intimate Lightning: in my own country I had become a writer without a word, and there was something more and more futile about embarking on new books—including our photographic book in progress—without any hope of seeing it published here. Censorship controlled everything. And in the background hovered the ever more sinister figures of the SB. The awareness of being under surveillance, day and night, was beginning to gnaw at our resources and rack our nerves. A few nasty things happened to Aviva: her little Mini was blown up in her garage two minutes after she’d made an unplanned stop at home to collect some films; and one night a firebomb was hurled into the bedroom where we normally slept but which, by pure coincidence, we had vacated for the night because her cat had pissed on the bed. There was considerable damage, but at least we’d escaped with our lives. All the signs were there that the thin red line around her had finally been overstepped: the weapons of mass destruction, all those sinister invisible forces of poison fumes and gas and infernal bacteria were being mustered against us.

  The relationship itself kept us going. The sex was still explosive. We were both, in one way or another, making up for lost time. But the pressure was becoming too much to bear.

  Aviva was the first to broach what both of us could feel building up for months: ‘It’s not worth it any more, Chris. We’ve got to move on.’

  I knew she was right, but I found it almost unbearable to admit it and pull up our roots. ‘If we go now, we admit defeat. How can we possibly play into their hands like that?’

  ‘It’s only your pride, your pigheadedness. There’s nothing shameful about moving away to fight from elsewhere, attack from a different angle.’

  ‘Think of how they’ll gloat.’

  ‘Let them gloat. You’re a writer, I’m a photographer. We shall have the last word.’

  ‘Not if neither of us can publish or say anything.’

  ‘We can still hit them from there.’

  ‘Just being here, staying here, hits them harder than anything we can do from elsewhere. Can’t you see that? That’s why they are turning on the screws: they’re getting desperate. They know we may be losing battle after battle but we’re winning the war.’

  It was the morning after the bomb. We were cleaning up the debris in the bedroom. She pointed at the half-charred remains of curtains and bedding and carpets around us, and asked, ‘Does this really look like winning, Chris?’

  ‘A temporary setback.’

  ‘If they kill us, we can’t do anything any more. And that is what is going to happen if we stay here.’

  ‘They won’t dare to go so far. They’re counting on intimidating us.’

  ‘This was not intimidation.’ She gestured again at the rubble in the room. ‘When they threw this bomb, they counted on us being inside.’

  ‘What about your threat to tell the truth about that secretary’s involvement with your friend Claudie?’

  ‘I believe they have weighed up the odds and decided they don’t care any more. The old rules don’t hold any longer. This is life or death for them now. And so it is for us too.’

  ‘Please, Aviva! Don’t let them win.’

  ‘That is precisely why we must leave now.’ And then she said the one thing she knew I had no defense against: ‘My mind is made up. I’m going anyway. If you want to stay, then stay.’

  Trying to attract as little attention as possible, we left instructions with some close friends of hers, and left within days, on separate flights: Aviva to Zurich, I to Frankfurt; and met a week later in London. Most of our possessions were forwarded in due course by the friends. It was a tense time, but all went smoothly. I can only presume that the SB were so relieved to be rid of us that it suited them not to make any fuss.

  We found a dingy little place to stay in Acton, and immediately set to work on preparing Black and White for publication: it was imperative, mainly for my dented sense of dignity, to make our statement as soon as possible. Within a few months the book was out, and because the press was eager to
exploit the whiff of sensation which surrounded our ‘flight’ from South Africa, it became something of a cause célèbre, not only in the UK but in America and several European countries. Believing that our bridges were now irrevocably burned behind us, we set to work to carve out a new life.

  What followed was one of the most hectic times I have known. The turmoil was good, at least initially, because it prevented us from dwelling too much on the past; but after nine months or so I began to feel trapped, with no or little time to write: there were too many other things happening all the time—conferences, discussions, interviews, festivals, in the US, all over Europe, and of course in Britain. We moved house a few times, and regularly changed our telephone number, in our attempts to find a more private space; but nothing really worked. We were caught in a net which in many respects we welcomed and sometimes needed, but which also ensnared us. In the beginning it affected me more than Aviva, who seemed to thrive on the stimulation of challenges and new projects, but in the long run the impact was corrosive.

  We traveled a lot, both separately and together; and the joy and excitement of meeting up afterwards and catching up with each other’s lives added a dimension to our relationship, but it was exhausting too, and the lack of time and energy brought us to the end of our tethers more readily than would otherwise have happened. In that whirlpool we began to lose sight of each other. Our love became an old, hollowed-out pumpkin, the flesh and seeds scooped out, leaving no inner core from which we could set out on our foragings into the world, or to which at the end of a day, or a week, or a meeting, or a trip, we could come back to replenish ourselves. We kept on assuring each other that it was only temporary—another few weeks, another month or, at most, another year, and all would fall into place and our life and love would become manageable again. But it only got worse.

  And there was something else gnawing at Aviva. It took me a long time to realize, but when I tried to mention it, she would close up and refuse to discuss it or deny that there was anything wrong. It was this: in my writing, as I slowly learned to withdraw from pressing demands and carry on working, battling with In the Dark, my new book, in a tiny room I had rented as a study near our latest flat, in Stockwell, I had a ready pool of memories to draw on; and should that ever become depleted, which didn’t seem very likely, I could find an endless supply of new material in the community of exiles we had entered—a locust swarm of South Africans of all kinds, black and white, old and young, miserable or enterprising and ambitious; but also from elsewhere in Africa, from South America, from the Middle East or Central Europe, all of them converging on London. But for Aviva it was different. For some time she could return to her old negatives and make new prints, but memory in itself was not enough; as a photographer, she needed a here-and-now to engage with. She had no interest in taking nice studio portraits, or recording weddings or social events from Buckingham Palace to Ascot. Her art, and her reputation, had been shaped by the struggle back home, her most memorable work had been determined by oppression and resistance; she had a deep need to believe that what she was doing was having some effect, or making some change to people’s perceptions about their real world, about South Africa. And for that, she needed to be there, not here.

  I tried to steer her towards the world of exiles, and for a while she became charged up with it. But soon she found it counterproductive. Depressing images about exile, she argued more and more passionately, did nothing to encourage or galvanize people back home: in fact, they were working against the struggle by disheartening the oppressed. She no longer felt needed, a vital cog in the great machine of resistance. She was just another exile—better known than most, but no longer really effective. The machine, the batteries that charged her, were elsewhere, no longer lodged inside herself any more. And instead of bolstering and helping her, I was becoming an obstacle to her. My writing became, for her, a way of withdrawing from the world and, particularly, from her; it was an opting-out, not a plunging-into. She may have been right.

  All that really mattered was that we were running out of steam. She started accepting commissions to faraway places (Chile, Peru, Iran, Turkey, Sri Lanka), and when she came back she often spoke about new friends or contacts she had encountered, or traveled with on the tour. Returning from the Chile trip, there was an American name that came up with noticeable regularity, Raymond Cook. In the beginning, when I asked about him, she would shrug it off. But after a month or so it all came out. Yes, there had been an affair. Nothing serious, she’d been feeling very down, and he had been so helpful and understanding, and one late evening after they’d had too much to drink, et cetera. It upset me less than I would have expected, and it was the absence of outrage which alerted me to just how far we had drifted apart. Also, to be fair, I had had a diversion of my own in her absence, with a provocative young journalist from Ghana. So we had a session of mutual mea culpas, which led to a springtide of making up lasting for a night and a day, and a few months of rediscovered bliss. But the end had already signaled its presence, in the undertow of our shared tides. I had encounters with Uschi from Uppsala, and Ghislaine from Grenoble, and Hannelore from Hanover, while Aviva spent time with a Richard and an Amos and one or two others never more specifically identified; and then we broke up, by mutual consent, although there were tears and recriminations and despondency as well, seasoned by relief on both sides.

  ***

  Two years after Aviva and I had arrived in London I packed up and left. I had strongly considered going back to South Africa, but not much seemed to have changed there—and if so, then only for the worse. In London both Aviva and I had become drawn quite deeply into the ever-changing community of ANC exiles—it was a way of staying in touch, I suppose, although it also kept the wounds open—and dreaming together of ‘going home’ and of that ever more improbable day when the old order would have passed, was a way of keeping one going. There were also, since ’76, more and more younger people around, although most of them were just passing through on their way to the training camps in Angola, or to Berlin, or Prague, or Moscow, and this lent greater urgency and purpose to being there.

  Our involvement with the ANC became more and more overtly political, but it remained rooted in the personal, thanks to the community of exceptional individuals we met, whether artists or officials, academics or cadres: enthusiastic and passionate and sensitive and determined women and men, committed people, people with wide-ranging interests, people who could laugh and cry and plan and talk through long nights and who never stopped dreaming. It offered us an intensity of living unequalled by anything either Aviva or I had ever experienced before or since. (I do not want to sound ridiculously romantic. Not everybody in the crowd was exemplary! The group had its share of misfits, of chancers and cheats, of layabouts and parasites, of drunks and junkies, of mean schemers and—yes—sell-outs and traitors. But among those we worked with there were, I think, more individuals memorable for their special qualities than in any other comparable community I have yet encountered.)

  But deep down, even among the best of them, despondency was growing, as the Vorster regime darkened into the Botha years: on the surface there seemed to be signs of thawing, of changing course ever so slightly, of taking the most obvious edge off oppression, but below that there was a hardening and increasingly bitter polarization to deal with.

  So when I left, it was for France. There were programs set up for preparing people for the day-to-day practicalities of managing change, however far away that still seemed to be. And although most of these were designed for young recruits and I was already approaching sixty, my books and my increasing international profile seemed to guarantee my credentials. In March or April 1981 I arrived in Paris, and was immediately drawn into one of the programs for running a viable underground alternative to the regime back home. In the end I stayed for five years and became something of a fixture. I know that a number of the younger comrades were cynical about my presence, but the fact that I�
�d passed muster with members of the older guard, like Tambo and Slovo and Wolpe, broke down some of the resistance or suspicion; and on the whole I was always made to feel welcome. At the very least I was tolerated, and perhaps indulged. I was allowed to become something of an honorary member of a new fledgling group with the rather disingenuous name of ‘Amandla,’ that replaced the misbegotten Okhela. This turned out to be a mixture of a writer-in-residence (in between stints which I continued to do in that capacity at universities in the US, Canada, and Australia, and even once or twice at Patrice Lumumba in Moscow or in Leipzig), and what Lenin had designated a useful idiot. It meant that I was given access to all the ‘facilities,’ such as they were. Most memorably, but in the long run also most perniciously, I was drawn into the most dizzying fuck fest of my life.

  Siviwe Mfundisi, the man in charge of Amandla, was the most accomplished womanizer I had ever come across, and he hand-picked quite brazenly from the casting couch all the female recruits for the organization, mainly on the basis of age and looks. During those few years, I regret to say, it was mostly a matter of quantity rather than quality, and there must have been few countries in the world which were not in due course represented. The common denominator was mainly a kind of upfront beauty: it was all there at first sight, what you saw was what you got; no secrets or surprises, nothing of the romantic notion of ‘mystery’ which has been the driving force in my lifelong addiction to women.

  But there were a few exceptions who stood out, and still do. And the test is probably this: the notes I made on those women who shared moments of my life at the time were all destroyed when I came home at last—they were too precarious to keep; I had to bear in mind the possibility that they might be confiscated by the SB on my return, and so I had to get rid of them, not without regret, even distress. But the memory of a handful, no more than two or three, survive without any aide-memoire. And so, if any number of them are now no more than names from a lost album, there are these few I can never let go of, as they will never let go of me. Because, precisely, they did not ‘belong,’ they were different, the rare exceptions, each unsettling in her own right, a disturbing and illuminating presence among so many almost-not-theres or just-about-theres.