by Andre Brink
To him, I think, history became a metaphor for everything he couldn’t understand about the world around him. And the day he was forced to abandon his career and take over the family farm something began to wither inside him. He went on reading as much as before; every week loads of books were carted from the town library to the small outbuilding on the farm which he’d converted into a study, and whatever was unobtainable there he ordered from elsewhere. But there was no longer anything he could do with it, no one he could convey his knowledge to; and it was beginning to press heavily on him. In the end cancer sent him to his grave. But to my mind that was mere coincidence. If it hadn’t been cancer it would have assumed some other form. The real cause of his death was the farm itself, that fertile valley in the Eastern Cape with its aloes and its pale-blue plumbago, its dark thickets and blood-red earth. Amazing how immediate it all returns to me here at such a distance.
“Our” farm. No longer, of course. All I have now is the well-kept suburban garden protected by the six-feet-high stone walls topped by broken glass, and the double wrought-iron gates with the spikes on top. Guarded by our dogs, our two magnificent Alsatians, as gentle as lambs with the children but wild wolves to any stranger. Ma can’t stand them. Quite understandably, of course, because she still misses her three unruly farm-dogs. The Alsatians would have torn them limb from limb, so all I could do when she came to live with us was to have them put down. It was in their own best interest, after all.
Thinking back now, in this luxury hotel with its plush and velvet, blue-grey and gold, its Victorian prints on the walls and – I swear to God – Sir Joshua’s Age of Innocence above my bed, it appears to me, however distant in this setting, that all my life I’ve been surrounded by violence. Not in the way any of my quite long line of pioneer forefathers experienced it, leaving their velskoen tracks through history – the uprising of Graaff Reinet, Border Wars, Great Trek, Boer War, Rebellion, or the Ossewa-Brandwag underground movement of the Second World War. Without exception they were themselves the agents, the doers, and often the victims: men who landed in the Dark Hole of the Castle, who were killed by the spears of Kaffirs or the bullets of Englishmen, or who found their farms raided and their houses burnt, so that every time they had to start again from scratch (which, somehow or other, with the Bible on their hearts, they managed to do). My experience is different. I am surrounded by violence, yet untouched by it myself. Unlike my ancestors on their via dolorosa as Dad liked to call it, I realise only too well that I have always gone scot-free. (With the exception of that one afternoon with Bea.)
It is a strange thought, in view of some of the things which have taken place before my eyes. I have often wondered, not without cynicism, whether perhaps I have a “gift” for this, acting almost as a catalyst for violence which breaks out all around me yet leaves me unscarred.
Would that convict have run away and got himself killed if I hadn’t been standing there in the back door eating my bread and golden syrup? A preposterous thought, admittedly – if it had been an isolated incident. But it wasn’t. I can recall at random: Theo and I playing a Tarzan game in the pepper tree; after jumping from a high branch I dare him to follow me, which he does, breaking his leg. A group of boys playing in the river which skirts the village. One of them is scared to dive from the top of a willow. “Come on, don’t be a cissy!” I shout at him. So he dives into the muddy water and doesn’t come up again. His head has struck a submerged log. We manage to haul him out and his life is saved, but he remains paralysed from the waist down. The most gruesome and at the same time the most comic episode: in my third year at university I was standing beside the road, just outside Bellville, hitchhiking to Cape Town, when a lorry came past, loaded with building rubble, a couple of sheets of corrugated iron protruding on one side. A motorcycle swerved out to pass from behind but the poor bastard probably never noticed the iron sheets. And when I became aware of what had happened, a headless man came whizzing past me on his cycle, a red fountain of blood spouting from his neck.
There was Greta, my varsity girlfriend, riding past me on her bicycle just a week after we’d broken off. As she sat up and turned round to call to me, the bicycle swerved and struck a tractor pulling a trailer piled high with boxes of purple grapes.
Charl Kamfer, brilliant lecturer (History of Art), witty and cynical and homosexual. The night I phoned him on a sudden impulse to ask whether I could come round; the house blazing with light when I arrived, all the doors and windows wide open; and his naked body lying on its back on the carpet in the lounge, wrists cut, and a neat blue circle painted round his navel.
At Park Station, the woman jumping in front of the train a moment after she’d asked me the time.
After the mine riots, the bits and pieces of human bodies washed from the road with fire hoses, the way one would clean gnats from a windscreen; like rain trying to wash out the scars of drought (but something always remains).
And I suppose I should add the murder on the farm, that weekend. And perhaps, if one thinks of it, even Bernard; even Bea. Or am I going too far?
In a sense that whole weekend had been conceived and born in violence. Perhaps it was the first presentiment of an apocalypse. I’d better write it down: it makes a good situation for a novel.
I hadn’t slept much the previous night. Normally I would have set out by six in the morning for it’s nearly five hundred miles to the farm. But I had to go to the Supreme Court in Pretoria first. In the early stages of the trial it had still been possible not to go, but in the end – except when the riots at Westonaria forced me to stay away – I felt a compulsion to attend every session. Only the conclusion still lay ahead, that Friday. I’d told Elise that there was some work I first had to finish off, as I somehow found it impossible to discuss anything about the trial with her. With Louis I’d arranged that I would meet him at the parking lot in Pretoria. For some reason he’d gone there several days before. I hadn’t even tried to question him about it, having got used to his stay-offishness ever since his return from Angola in February. The very fact that he’d agreed to accompany me to the farm had been surprising enough. I would have preferred to go on my own. But I’d promised Elise to be careful. “In my condition.” Also, I suppose I had a parental duty.
Everything looked wild and strange so early in the morning. It might have been another continent, a different planet. It was long before sunrise and very cold; here and there something suddenly appeared through the thick fog: a building, traffic lights, a row of scraggy trees. The Ben Schoeman highway, a wide barren lane in the mist without any glimpse of the yellow highveld landscape; only, from time to time, the dull flare of headlights approaching in the opposite lane and disappearing soundlessly. The turn-off at the Monument (remembering the day with Bea!); the buildings of the University of South Africa like the hull of a vast ark stranded on a hill. Followed by the louring presence of the city. Traffic lights at empty crossings, caught in a senseless routine of green, yellow, red; green yellow, red. Trucks. Putco buses belching out hundreds of black shapes; moments of noise and movement, then the thick silence of the fog again. Early cafés where boxes and stuff were being carried in or out; shutters and railings removed from doors and windows. The hiss and clatter of milk carts. Sudden whiffs of fish-and-chips; shreds of newspaper fluttering in the gutters.
I parked my car on the empty lot in Vermeulen Street. Recognising me, the caretaker approached, a shapeless bundle in his army overcoat, offering a flamboyant salute before he gave me my yellow ticket. I set off in the direction of Church Square and the Supreme Court, my feet stung with cold, my face burning. On the way I stopped to buy the papers from a sullen man huddled beside a black drum of glowing coals. Without a word he immediately resumed blowing on his clenched hands. His eyes appeared bloodshot and feverish. Last night’s skokiaan. Following the small white puffs of my breath in the cold, I walked on. There was still time for coffee at a café counter, served by a Greek with dirty fingernails.
Ther
e were a few others in the café: a hobo with a stubbly face; a gaunt fellow absurdly out of place in black evening suit and bow-tie; three labourers in blue overalls, clutching food-tins; a Black who sent the Greek into a rage when he offered a note to pay for a loaf.
“Where you think I get change for two rand, bladdy fool?”
“I know you got change in that till.”
The Greek came from behind the counter, coarse hair showing like a coir mat through the gaps of missing buttons on his cardigan and check shirt.
“You look for trouble, hey?”
“I want my bread.”
“Go get the right money first. Now fuck off.”
His client refused to budge. The Greek came nearer. But as he tried to grab the Black he was thrown off balance and sent stumbling against the counter, knocking a glass jar to the floor and scattering the multicoloured sweets all over the place. He swung round, to find the Black crouched in front of him, knife in hand.
The workmen in overalls all moved at the same time, as if it had been arranged long before. One pinned the Greek’s arms behind his back as the others went for the Black. There was a brief, violent struggle during which the glass front of the counter was kicked in; then, in a swift twisting movement, their victim broke loose and fled. The Greek and his clients all stormed out, but it was too late to catch up with him.
“I phone the police,” said the Greek, panting like a man suffering from his heart.
“Leave it, man,” said one of the men in overalls. “If you don’t watch out they’ll come and arrest you. A White man’s word isn’t worth anything any more.”
The Greek started dialling – wrong numbers, most likely, for he was too angry to notice the holes into which he was poking his blunt fingers. “You all see it,” he said over his shoulder. “You witness for me.”
“I’m off,” I announced, counting out my coffee money in the cracked saucer beside the till. There were more than enough other witnesses. After all, it wasn’t all that serious. And I don’t like getting involved in that sort of thing.
The incident did cast a certain gloom over the day. And it was deepened by the last few hours in court.
Bernard, thinner and paler than I’d ever seen him (without any obvious reason I remembered his sinewy, brown back in the canoe ahead of me in the raging white torrent); but he seemed imperturbable and composed all right. There was a churchlike atmosphere in court, a hushed sense of awe, when finally the judge began to speak. No other sound at all, except for the ball-point pens of the journalists scratching on their pads, a doorframe creaking when a Security Policeman leaning against it shifted his weight without moving his eyes from the crowd.
And then the shock of the Black spectators rising to their feet and breaking into song the moment after the sentence had been pronounced. Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika. Interrupted by the judge’s hammer and the orderlies shouting: “Clear the court! Clear the court!” And the police jumping over the balustrade.
I didn’t go down to say goodbye to him. Perhaps they wouldn’t have allowed me to, anyway. And what was there to say? Still it kept on worrying me. Perhaps I should have made the effort. But with Nkosi sikelel’ in my ears I really was much too upset to face him, even though it would probably have been for the last time.
On my way back through the streets, now overflowing with impatient traffic and pedestrians, I found it hard to concentrate. Time and again I bumped into people. Once I even sent a woman’s parcels flying over the pavement, so that I had to bend down and pick them up while she kept on asking: “Can’t you look where you’re going, hey?” So I didn’t immediately realise what was happening when I was stopped by a crowd blocking the entrance to the parking lot. Only when I discovered that it was impossible to get through did I become conscious of horns blowing, a police car braying, people shouting.
Nine or ten storeys up a building in the process of construction a Black man was sitting on a narrow ledge, his legs dangling over the edge. All the windows were crammed with people leaning out to watch him; below, in the parking lot, a crowd was jostling round a small circle cordoned off by constables standing arm to arm.
“What’s he doing up there?” I asked a man next to me.
“Been up there since eleven, they say he wants to jump.”
From a window overlooking the ledge a police officer was trying to talk to the Black man. It was too far away to make out what he was saying. The Black pulled up his legs, tautening his whole body, obviously preparing to jump.
The crowd on the pavement and among the cars in the parking lot suddenly started shouting:
“Jump! Come on, jump!”
I could see him hesitate, balancing himself on the very edge. Turning his head. Even at that distance I could see the terrified whites of his eyes, like an animal’s.
“Jump, man! Jump! Come on, jump!”
He was trembling on his narrow ledge. For a moment he leaned back, resting his head against the concrete wall. Perhaps he was dizzy.
Above him, the officer was once again talking to him. He showed no sign of hearing a word.
“Jump!” roared the crowd. It sounded like a rugby match. “Come on! Now! Now! Now!”
Up there the man moved again, shuffling a foot or so closer to the corner of the building. Below him the crowd opened up a new circle for him. He pushed one foot over the edge like a man testing the water with his toes before diving in to swim. A few women’s voices screamed ecstatically. He pulled back his leg.
“Jump!” thundered the crowd.
He was crouching on his haunches now. The ledge was so narrow that his toes protruded over the edge. He was barefoot, his shoes standing a few yards farther along the ledge.
He leaned forward. I couldn’t make out whether his eyes were shut or open.
A new roar went up from the crowd. And then he jumped, right into them. It was some time before they realised that it was all over. Then it slowly grew quiet, so quiet one could hear a fruit vendor a block away shouting: “Bananas! Bananas!”
I began to push through the crowd. Only when he took my arm I looked up and saw him.
“Louis! How did you get here?” But of course, we’d arranged to meet here.
“Did you see what happened?” he asked.
“Yes. I’d just arrived here when he —”
I looked into his eyes in search of – what? That day beside the pool when we’d caught each other watching the girls I’d discovered something defiant in his strangeness. He was no longer a boy, the son I’d fathered, but a stranger I couldn’t handle because he was too much like myself; a rival. Since that day months and droughts and deaths had come between us. Now, suddenly, startlingly, we were once again involved in the same thing, branded by the knowledge of what we’d shared. With a surge of vehemence I no longer expected from myself I wished he hadn’t been there and seen what he had. (Ridiculous: after all, he’d lived through a war.) Or if he had, I should have wished him not to have seen it with me. Perhaps, with a touch of old-fashioned and unreasonable sentimentality, I would have preferred one of us to remain innocent, unblemished by our presence in that crowd.
“Let’s go,” I snapped without looking at him, as if it was his fault. “We have a hell of a long drive ahead.”
Innocence. It was something many people associated with Bernard. It’s difficult to formulate, but I suppose what it comes down to is that, in spite of his incisive intellect and all his sophistication, Bernard primarily struck one like, well, a sort of elemental force, something as natural and basic as wind or water. (Is this a regression to the terminology of my Early Romantic Period? My writing seems inexorably to drive me back to that. All right, then. Whatever wants to get out must be said even if it tends to carry me away from time to time. It is a normal risk, I presume, when one takes to the typewriter.)
In his grey suit and blue tie he could be the polished man of the world, comfortably at home among the diplomats; in his legal robes, in spite of his shock of unruly blonde hair,
he showed a dignity reminiscent of the courts of a bygone world, like the Florence of the Medici. Even then he retained the air of the “noble savage”. And it became even more obvious when he was relaxing or taking part in sport: on the tennis court or in the swimming pool, on that canoe trip which decided so much between us – one of the boys; the boy.
On women he seemed to have an electrifying effect. Even Bea admitted: “I don’t know what it is, but when he looks at one it’s as if your stomach contracts and your legs go all watery.” Bernard could pick and choose. And he did, too. Not that he ever gave the irritating impression of being a professional chaser, a Don Juan in search of security in one bed after another. He didn’t boast about it either. But invariably, in discussing this girl or that, it would transpire that he’s already, as it were, “taken stock” of her. His innate courtesy must have been some sort of a passport to his success in this field. But above all, Bernard had the rare ability of intimating to all the people he came across, male and female alike, that he was deeply interested in them, that they were important to him, that they were in fact sharing a special adventure with him.
