Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  ‘Please come back,’ I said, trying to contain the sudden surge of emotion. ‘In the meantime, take care.’ I really meant it.

  And then he went into the building, and I have not heard from him since. I don’t even know if he is still alive.

  On the way back to Camps Bay I stopped at the top of Kloof Nek and sat there for a long time, looking out over the city on the slopes below me, down to the sea. I did not know how I would face you. All I knew was that it had to be done.

  You were surprised to see me.

  ‘I thought you’d go straight home.’

  ‘Too empty.’

  ‘There’s no need for you to sleep over now,’ you said.

  ‘I know. But tonight… Just to help you over the threshold.’

  ‘Is it for my sake or for yours?’ There was a touch of mockery in your voice.

  ‘I have no doubt that I need it. I was hoping you might too.’

  You nodded, then gave a pensive little smile. ‘Thank you, Chris. I appreciate it.’

  You made a simple salad for supper. Tomatoes and mozzarella and basil leaves. Neither had much to say, but we were reluctant to go to bed.

  ‘It will take some getting used to,’ you said after a long silence. ‘I mean, George being gone.’

  ‘His stuff is still here.’

  ‘We agreed he could leave it. Until he comes back. If he comes back.’

  ‘George always comes back.’

  ‘It’s different this time.’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Now it’s only the two of us.’

  It sounded portentous; I hadn’t meant it that way. I sat looking at you; you went out towards the night-blackness beyond the dark balcony, where the bars faintly caught some light from inside. There had been other nights too, I thought, when we two had been alone. But not like this, because in the back of our minds there had always been George.

  Now only you and me, woman and man. And space; and time, lots of time.

  I thought then, as I remember now, that I had seldom seen you look quite so beautiful.

  When we went to bed later, you to your bedroom, I to mine, it was still unresolved. It did not concern something that might have been and now was lost; for perhaps it had never been possible at all. I know for certain now, that the love I felt for you in the silence that followed George’s departure was one of the purest feelings I have felt in my life. Without desire.

  And nothing of this changed during the weeks that followed. Occasionally I spent the night at your place, usually for a pre-arranged meal, or an impromptu drink, or when you phoned to say you’d seen some unsavory characters loitering in the street above and felt apprehensive. A few times you even came over for dinner at my house and then slept over, in the spare room. Frederik always found a small bunch of flowers—nasturtiums or delphiniums—from the garden for your bedside table. Otherwise we led our separate lives. After a few weeks you even started working, tentatively, on a few ceramic sculptures again. There was nothing ‘wrong’ with them, not technically, but nothing striking either; and some time afterwards you destroyed them all. As for me, I felt as far removed from writing as I’d been for the past eight years. Yet we both dutifully promised each other that we would start again, soon, soon.

  I began to make preparations for your birthday well in advance. We would drive out to Franschhoek and have a quiet but classy celebration there at Haute Cabrière. I took a small painting from my bedroom wall and wrapped it for you: a Czech primitive, which I’d had for many years and which you’d loved at first sight. And a French perfume which I knew, by now, you liked. And a book on last year’s big Picasso/Matisse exhibition in Paris. And a long dark green skirt which I was sure would suit you perfectly. I couldn’t wait to spoil you.

  But on the morning of the 28th you phoned to say you couldn’t go.

  ‘What has happened, Rachel?’

  ‘Nothing. I just can’t go. I don’t feel right. One cannot celebrate if there is nothing to celebrate.’

  ‘It is your birthday.’

  ‘I’m thirty-seven instead of thirty-six. There’s nothing memorable about that.’

  It was clear that nothing would change your mind. Instead, I proposed that I’d come over and make dinner there, which we could have quietly, privately, by candlelight. I could sense that you were still reluctant. But at last you accepted, even though I suspected that it was more for my sake than for yours.

  I drove to Camps Bay by mid-afternoon and set to work in the kitchen. On your insistence, it was nothing elaborate, but still needed some attentive preparation. We interrupted the cooking for the presents to be opened. You fell in love with the skirt, as I had hoped you would. And promptly stripped down to your bra and tiny white knickers before me, to try it on. I briefly felt an old, familiar flush come over me. I went over to you and kissed you. For a moment you hesitated, then you kissed me back. You briefly rested your head against me; looking down I noticed, almost absently, as once before, the streaks of grey in your hair, added like an afterthought. Then you deftly twisted out of my reach. But you laughed, and I saw light in your bitter-chocolate eyes.

  Minutes before I was ready to dish up, you discovered that you had run out of cigarettes.

  ‘Can’t it wait?’ I asked.

  ‘No. It will only be a minute anyway. Just up to the little supermarket.’ Your smile was suddenly generous and carefree. ‘Where I found you that first New Year’s Eve, remember?’

  How could I not remember?

  I offered to go for you, but you were adamant that I should remain to keep an eye on our dinner in the kitchen.

  You kissed me again, a wise little kiss on the cheek, that left me light-headed. You skipped out of the kitchen. I heard the tinkling of your keys as you picked up the bunch from the small table in the hall. Heard the front door slam and your car pull out. And heard no more at all.

  ***

  Mam died yesterday. The old-age home telephoned just after four in the afternoon. I don’t know whether they meant to be considerate, or whether it was sloppiness, but by the time I got there she—now referred to as ‘the deceased’—had already been taken away by the undertakers. My last visit had turned out to be a farewell. Perhaps it is better that way.

  The matron was eager for me to remove her ‘effects’; I had the impression that they already had someone else waiting to occupy her room, although all her fees had been paid until the end of the month. The formidable woman appeared upset when I told her I would come back in a week or so, but she could not very well have pressed me to hurry up.

  I asked to be left alone and sat in the room by myself for some time. The empty space was oppressive. I felt like an intruder, although I’d come to know that severe, pale green room so well over such a long time. Absence can weigh more heavily on one than presence. The place still smelled of her. Yardley’s talcum powder, some cheap scent (I’d often bought her perfume, but she never used it and persisted with what she’d been using for nearly a century), mothballs, and pee.

  Every time I tried to think of Mam, you were the one who came back. It was perhaps not so baffling: it is with such intense concentration that I have been avoiding that morning in the hospital. I am still not ready for it, although I know the time is fast approaching. What I have been writing in these notes over the past month—it is just about a month now, since the outbreak of the war—has been as much a grasping at straws from the past as an avoidance of that terrifying moment. Everything I have written has been penned by virtue of that silence which I have tried to postpone for as long as possible. Even now. Especially now.

  The matron interrupted my thinking with a cup of tea. Was it an act of kindness or a gentle reminder that it was now time to go?

  I stayed. I have age on my side.

  Much later, without bothering to tell the matron I was leaving (in case she tried again to persuade me to clear
out the room), I went out through the side door and drove to the undertaker’s place in Woodstock. A run-down old Victorian building with flaking paint and graffiti on the walls. It was already closed but there seemed to be movement inside, so I knocked. There was no response, but I distinctly heard something. I knocked again. This time a small shutter in the door was opened and a disembodied red eye looked out. Then heavy bolts were drawn and the door was pulled open from inside without anyone appearing. It was a Dickensian encounter. In the dusky passage stood an unbelievably thin, cadaverous man with a completely bald head, like a shiny pink skull. His feverish eyes were ringed in red, and he had no eyebrows. He was dressed in a very old black suit, with a wilted white carnation in the buttonhole and some remains of his lunch on his lapels.

  ‘You are too late,’ he said in a low, half-mournful, half-accusatory voice. ‘We are closed, sir.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said acidly. ‘I should have asked my mother to die earlier.’

  ‘Oh.’ The disapproval on his miserable face was displaced by professional commiseration. ‘My condolences, sir.’ He put out an inordinately long bony hand. The fingers were cold. ‘Now who might be your late mother?’

  ‘Mrs. Minnaar,’ I said sternly. I gave him the name of her old-age home. ‘You collected her before I had time to see her off.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ He sighed, emitting a blast of very old, very cold air. ‘That is most untoward.’

  ‘Very,’ I agreed.

  ‘Come through,’ he said, as if inviting me to a beheading. ‘I was just busy with a cadaver. Excuse me.’

  Involuntarily, I thrust the hand with which I’d greeted him into my pocket and tried to wipe it. For a moment I had a sickening presentiment that the cadaver he had been working on might be Mam’s; and I wondered, obscenely, what his ‘business’ with the dead entailed. Perhaps he had a solemn habit of fucking his corpses to see them off. He took me past a closed door on the right, behind which I thought I could hear movement. It could be an assistant finishing off his job on the cadaver. Unless his business on the corpse had been so invigorating as to have revived the dear departed. In this place anything was conceivable.

  But the chapelle ardente to which he led me was less intimidating than he’d led me to expect. It was gaudily decorated, with plastic flowers and fake electrical candles, like a Christmas gone wrong. There he made me wait while he went to a room at the rear, and after a while he wheeled in a trolley on which lay a very small bundle covered by a stained sheet.

  Again he said, ‘Excuse me, but I wasn’t expecting you, so I haven’t had time to do her yet.’

  Thank God, I thought; I wouldn’t like to see her after he’d done her. As it was, I didn’t think I’d want to see her at all. I had already taken my leave a week ago, and she’d been dead enough for me then.

  I placed my hand on what I presumed to be her head, like one of Aunt Mary’s small gem squashes, through the sheet; but drew it back. It was so cold, from the refrigerated room in which she had been meekly awaiting her turn. I remember, on Uncle Johnny’s farm, the cool room behind the kitchen, where all the meat and milk and butter were kept. The outside walls had been covered with a netting of chicken wire, holding in place a layer of small charcoal pieces, watered down once a day to keep it cold. That would have been a good place to keep one’s dead waiting to be ‘done,’ or for eventual resurrection; I was grateful for not having thought about it at the time.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘I’d rather not look at her again.’

  ‘A man needs closure, sir,’ he said in a prissy sort of way, with solemn emphasis. ‘But it is entirely up to you.’ (Your own choice, his demeanor suggested: heaven or hell.)

  ‘I prefer it this way. I have already said goodbye. I just came to discuss the arrangements with you. I’d like to have her cremated.’ (I couldn’t help shuddering; it was like a macabre lunch order: I’d like her parboiled—sunny side up—well done—crisp on the outside.)

  ‘I see.’ He seemed genuinely disappointed, but resigned himself to the inevitable with what must have been encrusted grace.

  Half an hour later (nothing could hurry this man, acclimatized to death and eternity), I left again, having this time pointedly overlooked his outstretched bony hand. I drove around in the deepening winter dusk for more than an hour, unable to face the silence of my house. (Frederik would be in his cottage, but I would not want to disturb him.) When at last I returned home, I went to the study and poured a glass of port, but took only a single sip. Peach and elegant toasted oak… Then put it down, almost with distaste, and just remained sitting. I did not even attempt to smoke. Since the night of your birthday when you’d gone out to buy cigarettes and did not return, I have definitely given up smoking. I just sat, through the night, a very silent wake. Sometimes I sits and thinks and then again just sits. I may well have dozed off from time to time, but I was not really conscious of what was happening. Perhaps I was already drifting away slowly, like Mam. None too soon.

  In the morning, this morning, I drove away. Inasmuch as I had any thoughts in me, I felt the impulse to drive to Camps Bay, to resume my silent sitting in your studio. But I could not do that. Moving from one death to another. I drove on, the long way round, to Cape Point. It was not a conscious decision, but I suppose I felt a need to find myself at a geographical extremity. Although I knew, of course, that this was not the southernmost promontory of Africa, it looked like an ultimate outcrop, it had the feel of an end and an ending. Hard earth under me, sea in front of me, sky above. Only fire was missing, but that I could supply from my mind, where Mam already burned. I needed this elemental severity, the cleanness and unclutteredness of it. The absolute aloneness of the moment, made even starker by the turbulent weather. A cold, blustery wind, masses of dark, banked cloud, a restlessly heaving and crashing sea, blue-black, wine-dark, with the smell of all the women I have known in my life. Years ago, on this same spot, I had met a girl in the wind. What was her name? Kathy, I think. Yes, Kathy. Today there was no one. But the urge remains. Always the urge to return from the dead to the living.

  Now I am back. I haven’t worked on these notes for days now. It is time to take them up again. A man needs closure, sir. Yes. Let us set to work on our cadavers.

  ***

  The desperate need to find a human face in war. For several nights now, in between the spectacle of destruction and carnage and madness, there has been footage on the twelve-year-old Iraqi boy Ali Ismail Abbas who lost most of his family—father, pregnant mother, brother, aunt, three cousins, three other relatives—in the war. He also lost both arms. From a landscape far beyond emotion he stares into the camera. Not understanding. That above all. Not understanding.

  But is this really for the sake of the human face, or is it just a huge propaganda coup aimed at the hearts and minds not yet petrified with cynicism or shattered by violence? Is it not yet another form of betrayal, more subtle than the war, but in its own way more deadly?

  ***

  What followed my betrayal by Abbie—the solitary confinement, the interrogations, the threats, the sounds of beating and screaming from elsewhere in the building, the pangs of hunger, the release at last—was of decisive importance for my life; but not necessarily for my relations with women. And so I shall not dwell on it here. It was hell: that is the short description. Yet I tried to fall back on what I’d learned during my years abroad, all the little strategies of survival, of not losing my bearings, of trying to make the best of even the worst situation. It turned out to be much more excruciating than any simulation Siviwe and the other instructors in Paris had ever conceived. In the long run (and thank God it turned out to be not such a long run after all, six weeks; otherwise I might not have made it) my salvation lay, not in anything I had been taught or trained to do, but in a device of my own, derived from writing.

  I imagined myself in a story, in a play. That imposed a distance between m
yself and what was happening to me. Taking that one step back to observe myself, as it were, as over the years, even in the most intimate moments, I had always been conscious (often infuriatingly, sometimes desperately) of a double vision—for argument’s sake: me, here, making love, moving towards the climax; but at the same time, me, there, observing, reminding myself to remember this, not to forget that. And sometimes, literally, making notes afterwards.

  It was less unsettling, more constructive, in prison. In the beginning, in Caledon Square, where I spent the first ten days; and afterwards in Oudtshoorn, where I was taken one night—undoubtedly the worst part of the whole experience, as a hood was drawn over my head and face (there was the constant fear that I might suffocate), so that I had no idea at all of where I was going. It was only when they released me at the end of it, without prior warning, and simply turned me out on the streets, without any information about where I was, with no money, filthy (I had not been allowed to wash or change my clothes for six weeks), half hallucinating from loss of sleep, that I painfully established my whereabouts. At least it kept my imagination going by imagining the lives of the two-dimensional characters who brought me food or interrogated me, to devise a plot into which I could insert them, to find plausible solutions to an utterly implausible situation. There were times when I faltered; times when I felt so totally forsaken that it was as if my whole world was caving in on me. But I battled with every pulse of energy I could summon, not to lose my grip altogether, not to let them have their way, not to give in. Every fiber of my body was taut with the memory of Antigone’s eternal cry: No. No. No.

  When I was not working on the fabrication of my own story, I lay on my bunk bed or on my cell floor, or sat when I could, or stood when I was ordered to, often for uncountable hours, trying to turn my memories into narrative. Most intriguingly, most successfully, my memories of women. Rather than lament the loss of all I had known, I tried to reimagine every love that had ever come my way, trying to discover the structures and sequences, the moments of illumination, the set pieces as it were; but also the lesser moments, the links and bridges—between one woman and another; between the different memories that constituted a single woman. Her looks, her sounds, her touch and smell and taste, her face at the moment of orgasm or in sleep, or simply relaxed, or tense with expectation, or flushed in anger, convulsed in laughter.