Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  Less than a fortnight later Mandela walked out of prison. We were there. For hours we waited in the scorching February sun beside the road through the dark green vineyards that surround Victor Verster Prison. And then the unbelievable happened, the impossible came true. Afterwards we joined the tumultuous cavalcade into Cape Town, to the parade flooded by a sea of people.

  And that night, when we reached her little house and closed the door behind us to shut out the raging, jubilating streets, there was only one conceivable conclusion. Mandela had done it for us, just as, so ironically, Verwoerd had thrown Helena and me together a quarter of a century before. They had not just set us free to each other, but had also drawn us, without our asking, even without our knowledge, into the memory of the country.

  She said, when we woke up sometime the following day, ‘You know, Chris, I think I’m home at last.’

  I knew exactly what she meant.

  Some time afterwards, Andrea moved on: by the time the election of ’94 brought our relationship to a formal end—that unreal, miraculous day when both of us found new partners at our polling stations and brought them home—we were already heading in different directions. (In due course she was even elected to parliament, and her life is now too hectic for any long-term relationship, although we still occasionally meet, have a meal, talk for hours.) Still, as through the years since then I’ve moved through what time has remained for me, at a gradually slowing pace, from the unthinking arrogance of full potency to a declining reliance on hope, her taste still dreams on my tongue and my mind.

  ***

  Again, I have not kept my notes for days. I have lost track of the war in Iraq. When I turned on the TV last night, it was just in time for the announcement that the war was over. They were careful not to call it a victory; not yet. But all the trappings of triumph were in place. There was little Mr. Bush with his gimlet eyes, striding out like one of those sad, bad, late-Roman emperors who ruled the world while in secret they shat themselves with fear of all the barbarians lurking in the dark. (The Roman reference is not entirely out of place. If the Emperor Caligula could appoint his horse as a consul of the empire, perhaps America’s choice, in the period of its own decadence, of an ass as president, need not be surprising.) The scene on the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, where he insisted on appearing in a pilot’s uniform. Draped from the bridge of the carrier the banner proclaiming, with crude simple-mindedness, Mission Accomplished. Some mission, some accomplishment. The crowning illusion to a massive invasion masked as an act of liberation, waged by the politics of the extreme right and inspired by pure fantasy. As in Afghanistan, a vast country has been laid waste under the pretense of saving it from itself; and all we can still look forward to is the feeding frenzy of the conquerors.

  The real war lies ahead.

  ***

  What worries me is how I will now spend my nights without a war to watch. It has been the context and condition of my memories of love. My thousand and one nights have ended. The stories now are over, finita la commedia. My darling Scheherazade will have to wrap it up. We must put our precocious little Doniziade to bed. (What has she learned of love from us? What have we learned from her?) Because it was not the war as such that held me in its evil spell, but the telling of it. By all those embedded journalists.

  It is nearly time to wind up. I can feel that it is almost done. Mam has been laid to rest. On the appointed day I went to the crematorium. There were five or six people from the old-age home; she had outlived all her contemporaries.

  The crematorium official in charge, obsequious and rubbing his hands, recognized me from the last time, barely a month ago. ‘Sorry to see you here again so soon,’ he said. His tone of voice suggested, Welcome back.

  That was what provoked me to retort, ‘I burn all my women.’

  He found it difficult to digest, but kept a brave face. It takes all kinds, his attitude conveyed.

  I was supposed to collect the ashes later, but so far I haven’t. I haven’t even disposed of yours. Perhaps I’ll go to the sea, one day, to scatter them all and hopefully choke a gull.

  This is it, then. I cannot postpone it any longer; I am approaching the end. In the beginning, and all my life, I think, I believed that I was writing to hold on, not to let go, not to lose it all for ever. But through Mam’s death—and through yours, which I am now approaching—I know that the opposite is true. We do not write to hold on, but to let go. I am learning, I hope, to loosen my grip, to set memory free, to let myself be: myself and all the women who have allowed me to be what I am now—whatever that may be.

  There is only this last moment and then I can leave it all. No need to write again. This much I have done for you. The rest is silence.

  Viva la libertà! sang the chorus in Don Giovanni, remember? Mozart knew more about freedom and love, after all, than we tend to give him credit for.

  ***

  After you had gone out for the cigarettes I waited for half an hour, then went outside. A peaceful February night. The glow of the city was washed up against the sky from the other side of the mountain. This side the sky was black and clear, dusted with stars scattered like ashes. My car was there. Yours was gone; the garage still stood open. I felt a brief shiver, although the night was warm. Perhaps you’d met a friend or a neighbor at the supermarket, I told myself. I should wait a while longer, hoping the dinner wouldn’t get spoiled.

  After an hour I drove up to the little supermarket where I had first met you. The completion of a circle. (What had I once said, to whom, about circles endlessly covering one another? Such a plausible pretext. But a pretext nevertheless.) The place was still open, but the half-asleep man inside could not remember seeing you; he was more interested in a soccer match on TV anyway. An hour later I went to the police. The constable on duty was busy taking down particulars of a rape from a young woman who was sobbing hysterically. He had problems with his spelling. By the time he had arranged with a colleague to take her to a district surgeon, he was clearly fed up. (‘Why do women always choose such bad times to get raped?’) What did I expect him to do? he asked. I gave him the details of your car, but those didn’t interest him.

  ‘Come back tomorrow,’ he said, obviously fed up.

  I drove up and down Camps Bay, exploring every street and alley and cul-de-sac, but there was no sign of you. Just after two I returned to the police station. The same constable was on duty, and sent me away in the same gruff manner. In your house I put the food away in the fridge, and went to sit in the studio waiting, against all hope, for you to return. I had time to retrace all our steps since that first night. The endless conversations. Meeting George. The things we did together. Our excursion to the Cedarberg: how I had gone in search of you in the night and heard you making love; how we had come down the mountain as a threesome, I hobbling between the two of you, bound together—as it then felt—for life. That morning in the studio, when you had shown me the photos George had taken of you.

  The day was slow in dawning. Before the sun came out I had a bath in your bathroom—remembering those early nights when I would lie awake listening to every sound you made; and how you would later bring me a cup of tea or Milo. I was still expecting you to come back at any moment. How could you not come back?

  Just after nine I returned to the police station. This time there was a new man on duty. He took my statement (at least he didn’t have so many problems with his spelling), and said they would keep their eyes open. But he didn’t hold out much hope of any quick development.

  However, just before noon he telephoned. They might have something for me, he said.

  The car had been found in Khayelitsha, near the turn-off George used to take on his way to his photography workshop. What memories that brought back: George with his brightly colored plastic boxes of food for the boisterous youngsters; the eagerness with which they learned everything he wished to teach them, to equip them w
ith skills for their own lives. (I remembered how I’d once asked him whether he would ever retire; and how he had responded with his bright, boyish smile that he might follow Cartier-Bresson’s example and continue taking photographs even when he no longer needed a camera. With a pang of loss I wondered where he might be now.) For a moment, wholly without any reason, it made me hopeful again. But when I arrived at the station and the constable gave me the details, the last hope evaporated. The car had been wrecked and burnt out. No sign of any occupants. No reports about how or when it could have happened. But there was another piece of the jigsaw to be fitted: the body of a young woman had been found beside the N2, just after the airport, near the turn-off to Crossroads. She was still alive, but in a serious condition in the City Park Hospital. They guessed that she had been thrown from a fast-moving car. So far, they had been unable to identify her. But if I cared to accompany the detectives on the case I might be able to help them.

  Of course it was you. One side of your face barely recognizable. But how could I not recognize you? I spoke to two doctors. They could still not provide any reliable prognosis. Extensive brain injuries by the look of it. They were on the point of doing some scans and taking X-rays. I told them I would wait, no matter how many hours it took.

  In the late afternoon a neurosurgeon came out to talk to me. It was too early to tell with any certainty, he said. But it didn’t look good. In these cases there was always a chance of recovery, miracles do happen; but frankly, man to man, the brain injuries were so extensive that he couldn’t hold out much hope. He put a comradely hand on my shoulder—at that stage, for some reason, he still assumed I was your father—and told me not to give up hope.

  ‘Do you think,’ I asked, hearing my own voice coming to me as from a great distance, ‘the worst may happen?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘the worst is the best that can happen.’

  I stayed there, throughout the night, beside your bed, until a sympathetic but no-nonsense, middle-aged sister firmly ordered me to go home and get some rest. I thought it would be impossible to sleep, but I passed out the moment I fell down on the bed without even taking off my clothes. By the evening I was back. Over the next few weeks they got so used to my presence that I was being treated as an honorary member of staff.

  You were, they assured me, ‘stable.’ They had drilled a small hole into your skull to relieve the pressure on the brain. They had to shave off the hair from a patch on your head. Your face was still unrecognizably swollen, bruised in all colors. (Was this, I thought in a sacrilegious rage beyond shock, what the Rainbow Nation really looks like?)

  Two days later they operated on you. Too gruesome to think about: the top part of your skull had to be removed, like a lid from a casserole, to reach the brain, and then replaced, the surgeon explained in the graphic terminology a layman like me might (but would not) understand. As a precaution, you were attached to a ventilator. But because the brain stem which regulates breathing had not been damaged, he painstakingly made clear, this could be removed after a few days. What remained was a tangle of IV tubes and wires to sci-fi monitors which finally dehumanized you: a small spaceship readied for a moon launch. But you remained in a coma, and I remained at your bedside.

  Three weeks. You seemed to be shrinking every day. I remembered what you once told me about sculpting a horse from marble: chipping, chipping away until everything that was not a horse was removed. If you were marble, I thought, and you were indeed becoming whiter all the time, you would now be very close to being nothing but you. And at the same time, God knows how much weight I’d lost myself. Whenever I happened to pass a mirror, I was shocked by my reflection. It didn’t look as if I’d seen a ghost but as if I were a ghost. All that mattered was to be with you every available moment, watching intently for the slightest flickering sign of life: an eyelid quivering, a finger twitching. Your breath was shallow, but it came evenly. The bruises started fading, the worst swelling subsided. But nothing happened.

  On Wednesday, March 19, they did more scans. Impossible to say anything, the specialist concluded. You might stay in that coma for many more weeks, for months. Your vital functions were, still, ‘stable.’ But the brain…? The doctor breathed in slowly and deeply, and shook his head. ‘I’m afraid the damage is irreparable. Even if she wakes up, she will probably be catatonic for the rest of her life.’

  That night I spent in my bed, propped up against the pillows, watching television. It was the first night of the war. At that moment everything might still have happened. The thin red line was still intact, if invisible. The forces of evil were marshaled against the forces of evil. Tonight, as I sit here writing my last notes, it is all clear, and all but over. With a kind of tortured lucidity I can see it all. But then? The screen was merely a flat surface to focus my eyes: my thoughts were elsewhere, with you.

  I already knew then what I would have to do. But it was not easy.

  This was what it had all come to, I thought, lying back against the pillows, weaving your thin, pale moon-cloth in my mind. Here I was, on the night before your death, in a solitude as utter as anything I had ever lived through. I had no child, no family, nobody. (Mam was still alive then, but already slipping away, out of reach.) I had an irrelevant and irreverent thought: How lucky Don Giovanni had been, to be plunged into hell. And so young. I thought: Can anyone imagine Don Giovanni old? What we know about him is that he can never be old. He can move from youth to early-middle age—it is his in-betweenness that defines his position—but no further. There is a beyondness about being old which cannot be reached even by pain.

  You had once said, I thought, Poor Don Giovanni. And I had replied, or perhaps merely thought to myself, Then you are lost. Once a woman pities a man, she is lost. What had not occurred to me then was that he was lost too.

  I thought: Rachel, I love you. At this late hour of my life I know at last what it means. And what I am going to do is because I love you. But even as the thought moved in me, it reminded me, in a sickening way, of my father, in my boyhood, of the pious words and prayers and readings from the Bible and which would precede the order to uncover my backside so that he could punish me. Because, he said, he loved me and had to hurt me for my own good. What did my words really mean, what did they amount to? Never enough.

  From my vantage point, beyond everything that mattered, there was only one thing I could still do to intervene. The ultimate I-love-you. Could I face that? How could I not?

  And the next morning, very early, when I returned to the hospital, I was incredibly calm. At last everything was clear.

  As I bent over you, at seventeen minutes to ten, holding the pillow in my two hands, I knew that this was the only way in which I could still, possibly, say those dark words: I love you. Even if it seemed like an ultimate betrayal.

  But as I sit here writing this, approaching the end, I know with even greater clarity: We betray those we love by loving them.

  When we love, we transform the one we love into the one we should love to love. That denies the reality of the one we love. And this is the first betrayal which leads to all the others. I don’t even know if this makes sense; but I am beyond sense, as love is beyond it, thank God.

  The moment is still with me and will never let go. It may not be putting an end to your suffering: for all I know, you are not suffering in your coma. But what I can do will at least confirm the urge to restore you the core of your dignity and your humanity. It will confirm that respect without which love becomes a diminished and tattered thing. And if it means that, after everything I have said, everything I have done, I, too, must acknowledge a capacity for violence myself, then at least I hope it will add some kind of dimension to my increasingly painful awareness of myself.

  As I lower the pillow over your face something restrains me. I stop to look at that deathly white face which is no longer yours. I can see no sign of breathing. I bend over to listen very closely. Not the fa
intest hiss or rustle or flicker of life. I reach out to take your hand, to feel your pulse. It is not yet cold, but no longer warm. You must have died mere minutes ago.

  I put away the pillow. It is no longer necessary, it has been taken out of my hands. It was George who said, If it must happen, it will happen.

  But the decision has already been taken. I am as guilty as if I have done it. It is not my fault that I have come too late. Like Rogozhin, I killed the thing I loved.

  I have to stop writing. It is the end. But it is never the end. I must now go on living, that is not done yet. Yet nothing remains as it has been. For the first time I can imagine Don Giovanni old. He is still woman-struck, a man possessed by love and loving. The only difference is that he no longer needs a camera.

  Acknowledgements

  Luigi Malerba’s words come from La Pianeta Azzurro (Milan: Garzanti, 1986).

  The Frenchman who dined well was Jean d’Ormesson’s grandfather, who dies in C’était bien (Paris: Gallimard, 2003).

  The brief comment on war by Chris Hedges is taken from War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York: Anchor Books, 2003).

  For my reading of Nastasya Filippovna, I quite extensively used the David Magarshack translation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1965).

  The image of Antigone was, of course, inspired primarily by Sophocles, but also by Anouilh’s version, from which some lines and the scene of her brother Haemon’s paper flower were borrowed.

  Two of the women in the book made their first appearance in some of my earlier novels: Nicolette in The Ambassador (1983), and Andrea in The Wall of the Plague (1984).

  Thank you to Colette Gordon for her understanding of Scheherazade.