by Andre Brink
“Why did you go through with it?”
“I had to. What else?”
“And now?”
“Now I’m trying to go it alone. One has got to stand on one’s own feet. I don’t need any crutches. And I want to look the world squarely in the face.”
“I’ll help you.”
“No one can help me.”
“I shall. Just give me a chance.”
We kissed for the first time. In that brief touch – for it was very light and almost fleeting, as if both of us were scared of what might happen – I knew it would be worthwhile.
We went back to Aunt Rienie’s building. The noise had subsided somewhat in our absence and a number of guests had left, but the party, I knew, would continue until dawn. Unlocking the car, I opened the door for Bea to get in.
“Wait for me. I’ll be back in a moment.”
From Aunt Rienie’s flat I telephoned my apartment (there were so many people around, no one paid attention to me). Bernard answered.
“Have you gone to bed already?” I asked.
“Of course not. I told you I’d wait for you to come back.”
I was silent for a moment.
“Listen, Bernard, we can find some other time. Tomorrow, any time that suits you.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t hear the disappointment in his voice. “Aren’t you coming back then?”
“Yes, I am. But I’m bringing someone with me. Do you mind moving into the spare room?”
He said something I couldn’t hear; then he rang off.
Avoiding Aunt Rienie’s crowded, smoky lounge I hurried outside again, down to my car.
The hands of the clock on the dashboard gleamed on a quarter to three.
As we turned into Joubert Park, she said:
“My flat is in Berea.”
“Stay with me.” I looked straight ahead. “Will you?”
She uttered a small sigh, but said nothing.
There was a parking place a block away from my building. In the ghostly neon light of the foyer we stood waiting for the lift. On the way up neither said a word.
Only the reading lamp was burning in the front room.
“Would you like to have a bath?” I said. “I’ll make us some coffee.”
“All right.”
I put a Mozart on the record-player, the sound turned down low so as not to disturb Bernard. It struck me as very strange that he should be there, behind the closed door of the spare room. After all, if he’d gone to Aunt Rienie’s with me, he would have been the one introduced to Bea. It would have been they who escaped into the night. To him she would have told everything she’d now confided to me. She’d been “meant” for him. In a sense I was only standing in for him, his surrogate. We’d changed places. Now he was asleep next door.
Half an hour later she came from the bathroom wearing my dressing-gown, barefoot, her hair damp. We drank our hot coffee in silence, listening to Mozart. From time to time, at very long intervals, a car passed outside. In a low, almost inaudible drone the innumerable lives of the city hummed on. Through the open window the night breeze came in, an almost unnoticeable stirring in the curtains.
When I came from the bathroom, later, she was already in bed.
“Put off the light,” she said as I lifted the sheet.
I moved in beside her and began to stroke her. Once again I heard her sigh.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Don’t you want to?”
She didn’t answer. She only took my hand and placed it between her legs. There was something wry about the gesture, a compassion which moved me. As if, in doing so, she wanted to say: What else have we got to share? It may as well happen.
All the time we were making love I was conscious of Bernard next door, hearing her gasps and moans, and her wild cries as she lost all control in a wildness which both amazed and excited me.
Outside, the leaves of the plane trees began to stir, rustling. I fell asleep. When I woke up – the sun wasn’t out yet – the bed beside me was empty. For a moment I groped for her in a daze. Then I sat up. She was standing at the door, already dressed, looking round in bewilderment as she heard me.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Nowhere. I —” She looked like a cornered animal. “I didn’t realise you were awake already.”
“Stay here, please.”
She shook her head. “I’ve got to go. The buses are running already.”
“I can take you home any time. Why are you in such a hurry?”
“I didn’t want to wake you up.” She had a helpless, hopeless look on her face.
“But why did you want to go away?”
“It’s all over, isn’t it? It can’t go on.”
“You know it isn’t over, Bea. It has only started.”
“Oh no. Please. Not again.”
“Don’t be so scared. Nothing will happen. After last night —”
“No!” she interrupted me vehemently. “Please forget about it. There’s nothing that binds us. Don’t let’s start with anything now. It’s over.”
In the other room a door clicked. Then came a sound of running water.
Startled, she looked at me: “Who’s next door?”
“A friend. He’s using my apartment.” I looked into her eyes. “The Bernard Aunt Rienie wanted to introduce you to.”
“I don’t want to meet him.”
“You’ll like him.”
“I don’t want to meet him. Not now.”
5
MY MYOPIA WAS as bad as a swarm of gnats on the windscreen. Worse, actually, because in the smudge of the gnats there had at least been clearer patches: now everything was uniformly dull. I could see enough of the road to know where I was going, but all particulars were blunted. My reactions were determined by memory and intuition, not by what was really happening from moment to moment. And as we went on, a headache began to press on me more and more heavily.
Cathcart, Queenstown, Jamestown.
On the way down it had been dark on this stretch; now the sun was shining, sporadically obscured by masses of drifting clouds; but it didn’t make any difference to my vision. And in submitting myself to our progress I gradually became conscious of a curious impression of driving in against myself, against my own past. If only I could see more clearly, I felt, I would be able to see myself coming on ahead on my way down to the farm. From time to time I caught myself leaning forward and screwing up my eyes, as if I actually expected to see myself emerge from the obscurity ahead.
Monday was moving in against Friday. Nothing was isolated or concluded. All that was required, was a fractional shift in dimensions: then I would be back in that crowd in the street below the building where the man had been sitting on the ledge, and I would hear them shouting ecstatically: “Jump! Jump!” And he would come tumbling down like a bundle of old clothes. And Louis would come up from behind to touch my arm again, looking at me with the darkness of knowledge in his eyes, as on that other, more innocuous, day beside a swimming pool rippling with barely nubile nymphets. A small shift, and a little girl would once again be skipping on a pavement, her dress flying up, revealing everything. One saw without looking. Everything I had begun to see anew, in spite of a dull desire to remain in ignorance.
I seemed to be on my way back to everything I’d momentarily discarded: Charlie pulling off his clothes to prance naked, like a savage, at the head of the angry mob, and shattering my windscreen with a brick. Stag parties with stripped and shaven writhing girls. Smart soirées, Prof Pienaar and his collected poems; the meticulous aesthetics of his wife’s menu, the oracles of Koos Cunt. Rev. Cloete on the brown bench in the charge office. A disturbance in the backyard, a man hurled into a police van: But Baas, it’s my husband: behind her the open servant’s room, the iron bed supported on bricks, high enough for the tokoloshe to pass under.
And, inevitably, Bernard. His blonde hair and brown back in the canoe ahead of me, sweeping dizzily past rocks and boulders, and spinning
past the lethal vortex of the pool. (And Elise losing her baby a week later. Nothing wrong organically, assured the doctor, mainly nervous tension. Next time, Mr Mynhardt, you really should try to stay with her during the first few months. It upset her terribly to be alone – but my God, you can’t blame me for it! It was Bernard who’d insisted.)
Bernard on the farm. Behind the dam, that Sunday afternoon. Her knees touching my chest, her mouth filled with pomegranate seeds. And years later, late one night in a half-dark room, a woman with her hand outstretched to receive a glass: two faces in profile, an eternally incomplete moment. My body still bruised by the girl Marlene; deep inside me the awareness of distances confirmed for ever. Between her and me: between him and me. Everything just as absurd as a body with a blue circle painted round its navel.
The courtroom with its panelling and dusty curtains, and the fan swinging crookedly from its stiff rod. Were I to ask forgiveness today I would betray my cause and my convictions, for I believe that what I did was right. The people rising to sing Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika. His pale, tense face. So totally different from the seedy old woman who’d entered my car that drizzly night and suddenly addressed me in his voice.
It was on her birthday in September that she took me to Diagonal Street. What made her do it? So often I found her motivation incomprehensible. (Why did Charlie take me to Soweto?)
A bewildering little street, with the fruit vendors’ carts heaped with bananas and tomatoes and late oranges and early strawberries. The small Black boys shouting their heads off to advertise their wares. The dingy little stores. Second-hand junk shops, exotic wares, items from a lost world (yokes and harnesses for ox-wagon teams, whips of rhino or hippo hide, quaintly plaited sjamboks).
“Why did you bring me here?” I asked her. “I’ve often driven past here.”
“But you don’t know it. You never notice anything when you whizz past like that. I want to show you something of your own city. My birthday present to you. We may never have another chance: one of these days they’re sending in the bulldozers.”
“High time.”
“Come on,” she said, putting her arm through mine to lead me to her “witchdoctor place”. The incredible, dark, stinking little shop specialising in herbs and muti, anything from dolosse to musk-cat fur, dried ostrich heads and monkey tails, the skins of porcupines and snakes and iguanas, shrivelled beaks and nails and claws and unrecognisable inner organs, under the morbid surveillance of a large shapeless Indian in a cloud of incense behind the counter. It was a visit to a world just as extraordinary, and just as preposterous, as that of the old man in the wood, months later. Only more disconcerting, since it occurred in the heart of the city I thought I knew so thoroughly.
Bea had a hearty greeting for the sulky old Indian, as if they knew each other well. And towards her he did warm up for a moment: but in front of me he maintained his surly, frowning, suspicious silence.
“What are we looking for?” I asked, overcome by the stench of the place.
“Shall I buy some muti to put in your coffee?” she suggested blithely.
“Do you want to get rid of me for good?”
“No, it may make you fall in love with me.”
“Don’t you think I’m in love with you already?”
“I doubt it.” On our way out she turned to wave to the morose shopkeeper. “I don’t think you really know what ‘love’ means.”
In the dazzling street light, amid the web of sound woven by pennywhistles on the pavement, I stopped to look at her. “What do you mean, Bea?”
In the same light, bantering tone she went on: “You think ‘to love’ means ‘to have’. Isn’t that so?”
“I’m very sorry if you really think so.”
“Martin, Martin, you’re incorrigible.” She restored the dark glasses to her nose: quite surprisingly she’d taken them off in the shop.
“I don’t understand you,” I said gruffly.
“It’s not me you don’t understand, it’s yourself.”
“I know myself perfectly well, thank you.”
“Grumpy.” Putting her arm through mine she started whistling a tune the pennywhistles had been playing.
Earlier that morning, when I’d given her my present, she’d reacted just as unpredictably. It had been a small golden locket – very simple and old and expensive – which she’d admired in a jeweller’s shop before. I’d expected her to be enraptured. Not that she’d been disappointed or ungrateful: her reaction had just been strange, that’s all.
“You shouldn’t have given it to me,” she’d said.
“But the other day you said it was beautiful.”
“It was beautiful without having it. Don’t you understand?”
“Now it’s yours.”
I must have looked crestfallen, for she’d put her arms round my neck and kissed me. And it was then she’d said: “Come, I want to give you something too,” and had taken me to Diagonal Street.
“Do you know the shopkeeper in that witchdoctor place?” I asked her, back in the familiar streets of the city centre.
“Not very well.”
“He looks like a bloody criminal to me.”
“Possibly. He has a very kind heart. I once helped him with a case. They planted stolen stuff on him.”
“And you believed his story?”
“I helped him.”
“You sound more like Bernard everyday.”
“Bernard also rather liked him,” she said flatly.
“How did he meet him?”
“I once went to show him the street.”
“Bea.” Once again I stopped on the pavement. “Do you see Bernard often?”
“Only from time to time when he’s up here.” She made no attempt to avoid my stare.
A moment of fear and suspicion. (Reinette.) But I pulled myself together angrily. My God, I knew Bernard well enough; I knew Bea. Neither of them would ever – the mere thought was absurd and unworthy. I trusted him. I trusted her. Without that conviction everything would become intolerable.
“What’s the matter, Martin?”
“I was just wondering.”
“You know I like Bernard very much. I see him seldom enough. Surely you don’t think —”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
Something gloomy had settled on the spring morning. But on our way to her flat, driving in against the Saturday morning traffic, the old trust between us was restored. She knew well how to handle my occasional moods. And back in the chaos of her flat, while she was bustling about in the small kitchen, humming to herself, I soon relaxed.
“D’you realise I’m a Virgin?” she asked playfully as she brought in a tray and I rose to take it.
“How do you manage that?”
“I was referring to the sign of the zodiac.”
“You don’t believe in such nonsense, do you? I thought you were an academic and an agnostic.”
“Right. But it still doesn’t make a computer out of me.”
“How silly can you be?”
“I’m no ordinary Virgo either. I was born on exactly the ninth day of the ninth month, do you realise?”
“And what does that make you?” I asked patiently, the way I would treat Ilse in similar circumstances.
“According to the old Mysteries it makes me a hermit.”
“Not far wrong,” I conceded.
“And a prophet.”
“That sounds a bit exaggerated, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I agree. But one never knows.” In the confusion on her shelves she immediately found the book she wanted. Obviously I didn’t try to memorise what she read out to me. But, paraphrased, the gibberish boiled down to the fact that nine was the number of prophet-hermits, generally despised if not actively persecuted, and making their appearance “on the eve of great disasters”. That phrase I do remember. On the eve of great disasters. She looked almost smug when she pushed the book into the shelf.
“What do you think of t
hat?”
“Suppose it’s harmless enough as long as it remains a game.”
“It’s not harmless. It’s extremely dangerous.”
“Why don’t you stop it then?”
“For the same reason which makes me love Diagonal Street. Do you know one is in danger of one’s life if one goes there after dark? You can be zapped in the back any moment. It’s dangerous even by car.”
“I hope you never go there after dark!”
“Not really. You needn’t be afraid.”
Exactly the same words she’d said that morning after she’d first met Bernard. You needn’t be afraid.
When he came from the bathroom with just a towel wrapped round his waist, we were having tea. He stopped for a moment. His face looked tired and tense, as if he hadn’t had much sleep. But when he saw her, he smiled spontaneously:
“Miss Livingstone, I presume?”
She also smiled, in spite of herself, and said lightly: “You should be grateful to Martin. He’s saved you from a fate worse than death. According to Aunt Rienie I was meant for you, not him. Destined, if I understood her correctly, since the beginning of the world.”
“Hm.” With an amused frown he looked from her to me, and back again. “Oh well,” he said, with exaggerated feeling. “Trains passing in the night and all that. Too late, for ever.” His boyish grin. “Anyway, glad to meet you.”
“I’m sure you would like to get dressed,” I said coolly, noticing Bea’s eyes on him.
He immediately withdrew to his room, joining us again a few minutes later – but not for long, as he was in a hurry to confer with his attorneys before the day’s proceedings.
