Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  I had no certainty about having made the right choice, coming back. In fact, more often than not, it would seem that I had acted like a bloody fool. And yet I never thought of giving up and going back to Europe. That was the one thing my years in London and Paris, my years of traveling in voluntary exile, had made clear to me: that this was where I wanted to be, and needed to be: and this was not something that required explanation. The country was like a woman I had to come back to. Not necessarily a woman I could live with, but a woman I could not live without: a woman I needed, beyond words, in order to know who I am. A woman like Helena had been, perhaps. With this difference: that this woman could not only be betrayed by me, but was also capable of betraying me. Hurting me and wounding me. Deeply. Yet never unforgivably. In fact, a woman who needed forgiveness as much as I needed it from her. Ultimately, I suppose, a woman who showed me that we both needed to be forgiven all the time—not just by each other, but above all, perhaps, by ourselves. And that was why I remained in the country. In my heart of hearts I had no choice. South Africa had become the only woman in my life I could not ever, finally, leave, because she would not leave me. Till death us do part.

  Which does not mean that I’d come back to live happily ever after; or that I did not often doubt whether I was in my right mind, staying with her. There are some women, I am beginning to learn, with whom one stays because you are mad. And because you need to live with your own madness. End of message.

  Even on the most personal front there were reasons to doubt the wisdom of my decision to come back, and then to stay. I made a few attempts to contact women I had known before. Once or twice it was not too bad. But there was something desperate about it. One should not, I began to think, go back to bodies you had loved, and left. A second wind in love is a rarity. But I refused to give up. Sometimes it would take something very small to swing the scales. I remember, from the very first day I returned, in the arrivals hall of what was then still Jan Smuts Airport, sitting down on a bench to get my bearings (I had deliberately not informed anyone of my return, not knowing what to expect, but also wishing to have some time for myself), and seeing a young woman in tight-fitting jeans and T-shirt stroll past. And from a little thing like that I would draw hope. The world was not yet over. There was life yet. There were still beautiful women around. I was still there. It was a point to start from.

  There were some good moments: I remember Petro with the deep blue eyes whom I met with old friends in Sandton, where I remained for a fortnight before going on to Cape Town, and with whom, on the spur of the moment, I subsequently spent a wild weekend on the Wild Coast, a week before she was going to get married to a young tycoon. Only during our weekend did I get a fleeting hint of unresolved fears lurking behind her eyes; only in retrospect did I discover in the excesses of our couplings a desperate uncertainty, not just about her personal future with the young moneyman who was going to convert her into one of his many possessions, but about the future of the country: Let us fuck and make merry, for tomorrow we die… I recently learned that he is at the moment doing time in jail for embezzlement; at least he brought some members of his provincial government down with him. What has happened to Petro, has not been reported.

  I also remember Kathy, whom I met in the wind at Cape Point above the raging sea and wrapped in my jacket against the unexpected cold, and then took back to my hotel where her nimble tapered fingers did wonderful things to my frozen nether parts, and who spent a week with me getting warm again, and only when she left told me she was married. Or the exotic Diana, whom I met in the lounge of a beachfront hotel in Sea Point one evening where she’d been dumped by an angry boyfriend, and who had the most unbelievable green eyes I had ever seen in my life; but who two days later, before she decided to return to the unworthy boyfriend after all, confided in me that she was wearing colored contact lenses. No need to expand on these and other women of that whirlwind time. They were good moments, yes; but in one way or another, every single time, it was followed by disillusionment, the moment of wry or sad discovery that all was not as it seemed, all was not well, perhaps nothing would ever be well again—for them, for me, for all of us. The small deceits, the small lies, the small treacheries. Nothing important. Lives were not at stake. But the world, like the country, was not quite a good place any more.

  Freckled Frances seemed to be an exception. By that time I’d been back for a couple of months. I had found a more permanent place to stay, a flat high up in Tamboers Kloof, not all that far from where I’m living now. I had a few invitations to contemplate—a lecture here, a festival there, a writer-in-residence somewhere else—and the early anxieties about what might await me, politically, socially, had dissipated. The SB seemed to have lost interest in me. And Frances struck me as a possibility of something more wholesome and long term than the others I’d tried and tested since my return.

  I had known her before. But as with Melanie—God, how long before?—there was unfinished business between us. And it seemed we were driven by instinct, if not by pheromones, once I was back in the country, for both of us simultaneously started putting out feelers, each about the other. The reason why, the first time round, our love had never been consummated was both simple and silly: at that time she had acquired a dog, a ridiculous little Maltese poodle, who for some reason couldn’t stand me; and whenever we moved in the direction of her bed the creature would go crazy and jump on top of me and try to pull me off her (we could not attempt anything at my place, because she wouldn’t leave the little mutt behind). Which was either so funny that we would collapse in laughter and lose whatever passion we had worked up, or I would fly into such a rage that I would try to murder it, whereupon she would start laughing at me. And before there was time to find the kind of obvious solution the situation called for, I had met Aviva in Johannesburg, and then I’d left. At the time, Frances had been in radio broadcasting. Now, with her striking looks, she had shifted to television where she was in charge of a quite prestigious program in Cape Town.

  I fondly thought of her as the Little Partridge. She was indeed as speckled as a quail’s egg, but in a most alluring way. And I was captivated by her soft sweep of ginger hair, with a gleaming of copper and gold where the light touched it. Where her skin had been sheltered from the sun—her hard, small breasts, her compact, tightly packed bottom, the insides of her thighs—it was the rarest milky white with a hint of pale blue veins, delicate as eggshell. Her pubic hair was ginger too, a very thin, tentative, wispy haze, a mist of reddish down that barely fuzzed the slit of her neat little filimandorus.

  And she was funny. I can remember how, on the way home from a film or a concert or a walk on the mountain we often had to stop, clutching a wall or a railing to recover from a bout of helpless laughter. She had the most boisterous, vulgar laugh, deep from her very guts, I have ever heard coming from a woman. She could set a whole theatre going once she started. More than once she was so overcome that she wet her pants, which she would then promptly kick off and leave behind.

  Her wide, generous mouth was almost always smiling, as if life was a precious, hilarious secret no one else knew about. This was important for the small but emphatic part she played in my life. Because to understand how a woman like Frances could crack in a crisis, one must appreciate the enormity of the pressure.

  Our first few months were a festival of unclouded joy. Then the crunch came. From the moment she came home from work that Monday afternoon I could see that there was something very wrong. But for a long time she evaded my questions in a way that just confirmed my suspicion more eloquently than anything else. Only when I had poured her a second generous drink did she say, staring into the depths of the red wine: ‘I had a visit today. A rather unexpected one.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Two men. Sort of middle-aged. In sports jackets and flannels. Grey shoes. You know…? I first thought they were funny, like caricatures of themselves. But then suddenly it was no longe
r funny.’

  I could feel a bunch of very long, very thin fingers touching my scrotum. Not Kathy’s kind of touch, with her tapered fingers. This was fear.

  ‘You mean…?’

  ‘Security policemen. A Colonel Retief and a Major Stemmet.’

  ‘And…?’ All this time since my return, I had thought that they’d let go of me, turned to other, more urgent business.

  ‘They said they had photographs of us. You and me.’

  ‘What kind of photographs?’ My jaws were tight.

  ‘You know.’

  ‘But how…? When…? Where… ?’

  ‘They didn’t elaborate. Does it matter? It could have been that day on Signal Hill. You know, among the rocks, when we thought there was no one else. Or on the beach at Llandudno, when it was so cold.’

  ‘There wouldn’t have been anything to photograph. I must have shrunk to about two millimeters.’

  ‘That didn’t put you off.’ For a moment she giggled. Then she took a deep breath. ‘No, seriously, Chris. If you think of it, there must have been more than enough opportunity.’ She fell silent. Bit her lip. Looked up again. ‘It could even have been here, right here in your flat. A half-open window. A chink in the curtains. They don’t need much, do they?’ No hint of a smile any longer.

  ‘But what’s the point of it?’ I asked. ‘What did they want of you? We haven’t done anything that could be of any use to them at all. So why…?’

  ‘All they wanted, they said, was for me to confirm that there has been a relationship between us.’

  ‘So what? We haven’t tried to keep it a secret.’

  ‘That’s what I cannot understand. They just wanted me to make a statement, and sign it, to say that we have been… “intimate.” That was the word they used. Very discreet.’

  ‘And if you don’t?’

  ‘They said they hoped it wouldn’t come to that. “Think of the embarrassment,” they said, “if something like that landed on the desk of someone high up in the SABC.”’

  ‘Blackmail.’

  She shrugged impatiently. ‘What’s the difference? I’d lose my job, for sure.’

  ‘And what would be in it for them?’

  ‘I don’t know. They didn’t say.’

  ‘It’s pure intimidation, nothing else. They cannot get any mileage out of it at all. If either of us were married or something, yes.

  Not now. They’re bluffing, Frances. Just call it. You have nothing to lose.’

  ‘Except my job.’

  ‘But it makes no sense! Nothing at all.’

  ‘It seemed to make sense to them.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘I said I had to think about it. They were quite understanding. Except they said they couldn’t be kept waiting too long.’

  ‘If they really wanted to, they could still use the photos—if they have any photos. So what difference would it make to have a statement in support?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.’

  Already, I thought, it was beginning to have an effect; already it was beginning to seep in between us. They knew so well how to manage this. They had so much experience.

  I asked her to wait. To try, if she felt up to it, to play the staring game. See who blinked first.

  She agreed. But that night we did not make love.

  A week went by without any move from them. A week without the sound of her laugh. We were just beginning to relax, assuming they’d accepted that they had overplayed their hand, and that would be it. But then they came back. The moment Frances came home that afternoon I knew what had happened. I didn’t say anything, just looked at her. She nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, clutching her glass of whiskey very tightly; her knuckles showed white through the taut skin. ‘Yes, they came round again.’

  ‘Anything new?’

  ‘Not really. Except that I know now, for sure, that they have the photos.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘They showed me. Only one. They took it out of a thick buff envelope. It looked like there could be ten or twenty inside.’

  ‘Easy to pretend.’

  ‘They don’t need more than one.’

  ‘What did it show?’

  ‘Us.’ The hint of a smile. ‘Quite a funny one, actually, but I didn’t feel like laughing.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Oh Jesus, Chris, does it matter? It showed us. Fucking. No doubt about it.’

  ‘Photos can be faked. Everybody knows it.’

  ‘Please try to sound intelligent. What do these things matter? They’ve got photos of us, they can do us harm. That’s all there is to it. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘Just calm down for a moment and think about it. Suppose all that is true. How can they really harm us?’

  ‘My job, I told you before. They mentioned it again.’

  ‘But why should you interest them?’ I pulled myself together. ‘I’m not trying to be deprecating or anything, Frances. But they are concerned—or supposed to be concerned—with state security. Where do you fit into that?’

  ‘I am with you. You matter to them because you’re a writer, you’re an enemy of their system, they’ll do anything to discredit you.’

  ‘They used to be concerned about that. No longer. They’ve got tougher enemies now.’

  ‘Perhaps they don’t think the same about that.’

  ‘So how will they discredit me by telling the world I’ve slept with you?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it a lot, Chris. I can come up with at least one reason. They can push you to break up with me, or me to break up with you. It won’t incapacitate you. But it would hurt you.’ An almost unbearable pause. Then: ‘Or wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it would, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘So by doing it they might just be applying the first bit of pressure to make you more careful in future. Not to be quite so hard on them and their system. For my sake. And if they carry on long enough, they can start discrediting you enough to pull your teeth. This Chris Minnaar is really just a compulsive womanizer. One cannot take too seriously what he says. Wine, women, and song. He can be shrugged off. Even by well-meaning, serious people who have been reading you all these years. Or especially by such people.’

  We talked deep into the night. There was only one possible outcome: Frances had to consent to their game. Draw up a statement, admit she had been ‘intimate’ with me. Sign it. And leave it at that. Of course they would hang on to it, keep it for whenever in the future they might find it useful. They might accumulate five, ten, twenty-five of these statements over the next months or years. And then…? It was a chance we had to take. At least we still had each other, didn’t we?

  Or did we?

  She didn’t hear anything more from them. For all we knew, it might have been a bluff. But what mattered was that we did not escape unscathed. We could no longer make love, go to a restaurant, climb the mountain, spend a day at the beach, without wondering whether we were being watched by someone, hiding somewhere, someone who had an infinity of time at his disposal, but who might also pounce suddenly, when we least expected it. Pounce how? There was no way of knowing. And that was the point.

  Frances, Freckled Frances, with the carefree smile and the indomitable inner joy, Frances was the first to crack. How could I blame her? All I knew was that the way ahead could only become more difficult, though I had no idea, then, of just how difficult that might be.

  That was when I knew, for the first time since my return, with quite dazzling clarity: I am home again.

  ***

  From the day George returned from Palestine I had the impression that the turbulence at the time of your exhibition was over. As usual, he brought you a whole suitcase full of presents—not the obvious kind of object one picks up
at the airport, but each of them clearly selected with great care, with love. (Just as his gifts for me showed the trouble and thought that had gone into the choice: a novel by a young Palestinian writer, Izzat Ghazzawi; a beautiful coarsely woven Bedouin cloth for the couch in my study.)

  His account of his visit, of his nightmare experiences in Ramallah and Gaza City and Nazareth, was as dramatic as anything he’d ever told; his eye for the small human facts of everyday life remained extraordinary. Some of his anecdotes about the stratagems employed by Palestinians to avoid the constant Israeli raids or to pass through checkpoints were reminiscent of stories from our own Struggle, of comrades evading arrest by the Security Police; and like the combatants from our anti-apartheid forces, he managed to clothe his tales in a downbeat humor which had us in stitches. But he could just as readily move us to tears.

  He’d been present when the Israeli army moved in to avenge what they regarded as an act of intolerable defiance from an old man living on the edge of a village near Ramallah. Most of the olive groves in the area had already been destroyed by nocturnal raids (‘because the soldiers knew that the whole of Palestinian culture and economy depend on the olive,’ George explained); but this old man, half blind and in his eighties, still had a few trees in his backyard. So he’d put up a water tank on his flat roof to catch whatever little rain that fell. But he had not asked for permission to install the tank (he hadn’t even known that official permission was required to catch rain on his own roof in his own tank for his own trees), and so the mighty army moved in with their mortar bombs and machine guns and reduced his little house to rubble. George showed us the photographs he’d taken of the old man sitting on a stone in front of what had been his home, his bearded face with the eyes half blinded by cataracts turned up to the sun.

  ‘You see why I had to go?’ he asked in the silence that followed.

  ‘Were not the atrocities on both sides?’ Rachel asked at last, almost in a whisper.