Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  That was why I could not let her go. I remember how, even on that first day, when we came back to gasp for air once, I lay tracing with a fingertip an angry bruise across her left nipple. She put her hand on mine.

  ‘Bongani?’ I asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘You’re not ever going back to that man,’ I said.

  She nodded again, then asked, ‘But what shall I do?’

  ‘Stay with me.’

  ‘But…’

  She did not go on, and for the moment we left it at that. In the days that followed she took me on long walking tours through Paris, showing me quarters and streets and sights I had never dreamed of, even though after two years in the city I had come to think that I knew it. We did not speak again about whatever might happen later. There was a strange feeling of permanence in the way she took possession of the place: she still had a key to Bongani’s apartment and went back there a few times in our early days together to retrieve her things when he was out. From then on she squatted, rather than settled, in my place, littering it with her clothes and shoes and fake jewelry and make-up and hairpieces and creams and lotions. If it did have to end sometime, it was not yet in sight.

  And that was why I was caught so completely unawares when, coming home from a conference one late afternoon, she was not there. A few empty bottles, an odd shoe, a torn pair of jeans, a few thumbed and tatty fashion magazines, and a battered-looking black-and-red vibrator with broken batteries (I checked) were all that remained. Enough to show that she had been there. Enough to confirm that she was gone. I suppose I could have started asking around among the ANC cadres; I might even have gone in search of Bongani and confronted him directly. But I couldn’t. Even if I were to find her, she would not come back. This was the end, and had to be. To respect the dignity of a relationship also implies accepting the end when it comes. Except in my mind, except in my dreams, where the aftertaste of her still lingers. Even in you, Rachel, she continues to lurk. Absent and forever present.

  ***

  Baghdad, the TV showed last night, has been plunged into darkness by the continuing bombardments as the US tries to take the main airport. The end now seems much closer than anybody had expected. On the very outskirts of the capital there seems to be almost no resistance. What could have happened to the 70,000-strong Republican Guard? What has happened to military intelligence? Where are the hidden weapons?

  I have to remind myself why I am watching these nightly shows: to help me sleep, to find perspective on love, and on my women. The ubiquitous image of us, men, fucking up the world—counterbalanced by women who must keep it going, to safeguard sanity. All my life I have been surrounded by violence of one kind or another, it has framed every relationship I have ever had. And when it seemed, with the liberation of Mandela and the dawning of free elections, that we had finally outpaced the nightmares of apartheid, new forms of violence irrupted into my relations with women. Only now, with you gone (and how violently that happened) and a vacuum of events surrounding me, do I feel released into a space where no milestones are left to mark my progress and help me find my bearings. The violence is still there, but somehow I have become inured to it. Like any junkie I need my daily shot. It takes less and less effect, but I cannot kick the habit. And so I turn to Iraq.

  ***

  After our return from the Cedarberg and once I’d gone back to my own home (much to Frederik’s relief), most of my daily stimulation came from knowing you and George were there; and twice a week, without fail, you turned up to impose some order on my study. Frederik had become used to your visits, and accepted your presence without question, which was more than he’d done to some of your predecessors. I had the distinct impression that he, too, had a special spring in his step on the days you came.

  In the run-up to your exhibition, now fixed for September in the AVA gallery in Church Street, I tried to persuade you to suspend your Girl Friday duties and turn to your own work, but you wouldn’t hear of it. You needed the time away from sculpture to clear your mind, you insisted, which I refused to buy; but it was with great relief that I pretended nevertheless to believe you, as I don’t know how I could have coped without you. Not because of the work, but because of you. Even if it was only two mornings a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, your presence had subtly transformed the whole place. It was visible in the flowers you brought, the small rearrangements you made in the furniture, without asking, the smells you stirred up in the kitchen (something Frederik wouldn’t stand in anyone else); but it was much more evident in the change in atmosphere. It was simply no longer an old man’s house: there was hope in it now. I hadn’t registered how autumnal the place had become over the past years—even if I could observe it, painfully and rebelliously, in my body. There have been times, recently, when the once so true and trusted old root of evil delight could no longer do its bit on its own and had to be thumbed in on the slack. How humiliating the mere thought would have been even ten years earlier. Now one has to be grateful for fringe benefits. Soon it will be time for the days when the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and I shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of musick shall be brought low; also when I shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.

  Coming home after the Cedarberg, even if by then I had resigned myself to the knowledge that I could not think of you as a sexual possibility, your presence became part of the routine that both kept me going and helped to reconcile me to the failing flickerings of desire in my dry old age. I remember days of actually feeling relieved that nothing could ever happen between you and me, blessed in George’s presence, in the closeness and assurance of your love. Because suppose these restrictions had not been there, suppose we were free to love openly: how would I have fared? How could I ever bear the shame of making a pass and then failing you?

  We often worked together, you and I—not just on the mornings you came over, but on the many days when George was in the darkroom or off on an assignment and you needed help with stacking your kiln, or firing, or mixing glazes, or preparing the special paints and concoctions you used for your sculptures. And there was never any awkwardness. The framework within which we were allowed to meet and share had been established so surely and unambiguously that I could be happy, even carefree, within it. And when George put in an appearance, we could readily and generously include him—go for a meal, go to a concert, potter around in your garden or mine, buy provisions, attend auctions or exhibitions, be a threesome without an odd one out.

  I developed more and more of a closeness with George. You encouraged it, because you were always concerned that he tended to be too absorbed in his photography to realize that he needed friends, so you saw the time he spent with me as a healthy and necessary dimension of his life. As for me, I have never been one of the boys, never had a busy social life. Not that I consciously withdrew from people; and wherever I went, I invariably had one or two good, solid friendships with other men. But I have never known a need of that kind of bonding which defines the contours of so many men’s lives.

  At school, even at university, I had played rugby, fly-half and sometimes inside center: not by choice—I was pushed into it by my father who felt the need of a son to be proud of. He made a habit of coming to watch when we played: that was what made it special. He didn’t turn up merely to be critical, but—I soon discovered—because he was really quite passionately interested. In his youth, he told me, he’d also played. Eighth man. But then broke a leg which didn’t mend properly. And now I was his surrogate on the field. Even more than chess, it was a way to communicate with him. And the mere fact of his presence beside the field made me feel that life was worthwhile after all. Even though I had very little natural talent for the game,
I learned to enjoy it for his sake. And there were other, unexpected compensations in the rowdy closeness, the slapstick and competition of the dressing room and the playing field. I remember days when being ground into a muddy spot on the field and nearly drowned in five centimeters of dirty water with three or four or six men sitting on me, twisting my ankles or thrusting knees up my groin or squeezing my balls or biting chunks from my ears or farting in my face, was the badge of a worthwhile existence: this was what being a man was about, this gave sense and substance to it, this was the life. And Father was there! In that brotherhood there were discoveries of generosity, of exuberance, of joy, even a willingness to share pain or despondency or anger, which made it all seem worthwhile.

  There were those special moments, after a try or a successful line kick or a good sidestep or a well-timed pass, when a high-five, a slap on the back, a hug around the shoulders, a hand ruffling your hair, confirmed a camaraderie and a physical male closeness that gave me a real sense of belonging. More than that, I discovered that being covered in mud, stained by grass and blood and snot, sporting grazes and cuts and, God willing, broken legs or collarbones or arms or ribs, was the surest way of gaining access to some of the most beautiful, and certainly the most willing, girls around. So how could I complain?

  But close friendships? Not really. And that was why being with George was not just good for him, but for me too. I could confide in him some of my most private fears about growing old, even some of the anguish about the likelihood of impending impotence, and my secret rage and despair about drying up as a writer. So many years now… Would I ever get something down on paper again? All I could show for these years were my notebooks—the many, many notebooks which still surround me here where I keep myself busy filling the void of your absence. I remember how I once thought of Mam’s vast collection of notes culled from her years and years of reading as ‘the signs of a wasted life.’ Is that all my own notes will amount to in the end?

  With George I could share memories of my early days of exuberance mixed with misgivings and self-doubt after the publication of that first book, A Time to Weep, which so unexpectedly catapulted me to notoriety; of the years between that book and Radical Fire, my last (so far). I could discuss with him the uneasy limelight during my years of international success (whatever that might mean) balanced by disapproval from the local hierarchy of power and the constant surveillance of the SB, as well as the suspicion of some more conservative local writers who could not mask their disapproval of me as a political sell-out.

  I spoke of the brief fulfillment but also the increasing dépaysement of my years in London and Paris after the publication of Black and White with Aviva and In the Dark on my own.

  To him I could talk about my women, the joys I’d known as well as the grief, the sadness of loss or betrayal or—yes—guilt. And, in recent years, more and more, the fear of futility.

  We could laugh uproariously together. But there were also moments, fleeting as they may have been—when I told him about losing Helena and little Pieter, or about Nicolette, or about Abbie—when I could shed tears in his presence without feeling ashamed.

  And George reciprocated.

  From the way he told it, I could hear that with almost no one else, perhaps not even with you, had he been able to speak so frankly about his feelings of shame and inadequacy as ‘the fat boy’ at school, or his failures with girls before he won acclaim as a photographer. As on previous occasions, he admitted how, even when through his work he began to be sought out by desirable women, he could never get used to the mere idea that a woman might want him: every time he’d had a relationship he thought of it as a one-off miracle, never to be repeated, and therefore to be greedily grasped while it was there—a sense of inadequacy, never healed or assuaged. ‘Even as I went to bed with a woman for the first time I just knew she was going to reject me in the end. How could any woman possibly choose to be with me? And so, more often than not, I would be the one to break it up, to spare myself the humiliation of being rejected.’

  Until he’d met you, that is.

  How often did our conversations come back to this?—‘Chris, do you really believe Rachel is happy?’

  ‘She adores you, and she knows you worship her.’

  ‘But is that good? The very words you use: adore, worship—do they not suggest that there’s something wrong? That we’re trying too hard to prove something to ourselves?’

  ‘That is crap, George, and you know it. I’ve told you before: the two of you are the only reason why I believe there may still be something to be said for marriage.’

  ‘I sometimes think I am doing her an injustice by staying with her. She deserves so much better than me. She should be free to choose.’

  ‘She was free to choose when she chose you!’

  ‘One day Rachel will discover her mistake. Then she will leave me.’

  ‘How can you say a thing like that?!’

  ‘I cannot fulfill her real needs. Not all of them.’

  ‘Nobody in this world can fulfill all the needs of another person. We’re all like intersecting circles. There are simply no two circles that overlap perfectly. There’s always a little segment left uncovered. Which is why one keeps going frantically in search of that uncovered bit. At least, that is what I have been doing all my life. But some people—and you and Rachel strike me as good examples—are wise enough, or simply mature enough, to accept the circle part and even learn to appreciate it. How boring it would be to find a perfect fit. Nothing left to go in search of, or to long for and pine for, no art, no music, no writing, nothing.’

  ‘I think you and Rachel would have been better suited than us.’

  His directness startled me. I felt I was going pale. But I tried to remain calm: ‘If I were a hundred years younger, perhaps, who knows. But what’s the use of wondering?’ (I could not help but think of all the nights I’d spent wondering about just that.)

  ‘I’m worried about my work,’ he persisted. ‘It keeps me away from her too much.’

  ‘You both need your separate space. That is why it is so good when you do come together.’ I felt a bit embarrassed about the way it came out. But then decided to match his openness: ‘That night in the Cedarberg—I couldn’t help it, I’m sorry, but I heard you. And I may as well say it: I envied you.’

  He blushed like a big schoolboy. ‘We didn’t mean to disturb you. Rachel tends to become a bit—vocal.’

  ‘It was very beautiful. And it is a motion of confidence in you. In your relationship.’

  ‘But can it last?’

  ‘How can you ask that? It is good now. I see no end in sight.’

  ‘One never sees an end. Do you believe love can last for ever? I mean for ever?’

  ‘No. Because we die.’

  ‘That’s not what I had in mind.’

  ‘Let’s leave that to death, or to life, to decide. I certainly don’t believe in thinking about endings before they’re there.’

  ‘Rachel believes very firmly that anything that begins, must end. Including, most especially, love.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I don’t want to. I really don’t. But there is always this fear. That with her it will turn out just as with the others.’

  This was—when? Perhaps in May, perhaps in June. On a cold rainy day, on our way back from the Cape Flats where I’d attended one of his workshops in Khayelitsha for the kids. On the back seat were a number of brightly colored empty boxes which had been filled with food and goodies when we drove there earlier: ‘Picasso or someone once said that you cannot paint with cold feet,’ he’d explained. ‘Well, you certainly can’t work on an empty stomach. So I first make sure they are fed before we start.’

  I remember it all so well, as if each word had been spoken to prepare ourselves for what was to come.

  Then came the day in July.

  George had g
one to Johannesburg for a week, an assignment on the ‘new’ Soweto. As before, I drove over to Camps Bay to wife-sit you in his absence. You had tried to dismiss the idea when he’d first broached it, but he was adamant. You needed to work, he said, and you couldn’t concentrate properly if your nights were sleepless. It just wasn’t safe any more for a woman to be on her own at night. And so the arrangement went ahead.

  It was easier than the first time. We knew our roles by now. Both of us, and George, had been welded into them by the previous months. And particularly the memory of the Cedarberg trip, prematurely aborted as it had been, had brought a new calm, a new steadiness which made all three of us more confident.

  And so that day. One of those immaculate, unbelievable Cape winter mornings, perfect and blue and resplendent with sun, the mountainside glistening with new streaks of water: preceded and followed by rain and dark masses of cloud, but suddenly opening up into a magic world of light. I had slept late, but had been aware of you pottering about in the house since sunrise. By the time I came into the studio you had already started on a few new figures—you always had three or four taking shape at the same time, your hands working at incredible speed, with prescience and precision and passion, as if they were functioning independently of you, as if you could work with your eyes closed.

  And you were happy with what you’d done so far, you couldn’t help talking about it as you picked up the new figures and thrust them into my hands, and stood back, and laughed, and looked up at me, the deep light of the day falling in through the picture window like a sheet of pure white saturated with all the colors of the rainbow.