by Andre Brink
“How about dinner tonight?” I asked wretchedly.
“No.”
Nothing surprised me any more. I turned back to my desk.
“I have another suggestion,” she said behind me.
“What?” I remained with my back to her.
“Are you going to your apartment after work?”
“No, I didn’t plan to.” I turned round. “Why?”
“It just occurred to me that if you were there I might come and spend the night with you.” And before I could open my mouth to say a word she’d closed the door quietly behind her.
Nearing the fork in the national road, Louis decreased his speed.
“Shall we go back via Winburg?” he asked.
It was the route I normally followed; the route I would have come if I hadn’t accidentally taken the road to Westonaria on Friday. But this time there was no doubt in my mind.
“No, we’re going back the same way we came,” I said laconically.
It was a trifling matter; yet it felt like a momentous decision. Was I yielding to the same hidden powers acknowledged by Bea in her addiction to astrology? Ludicrous. But dusk was falling and Brandfort lay ahead, where we’d stopped at the garage to have the gnats washed from the windscreen, and where the little girl had been skipping on the dusty pavement: and somewhere ahead, invisible but inescapable, we were approaching ourselves. The point of encounter couldn’t be very far away. And what would happen then? A moment of illumination, or the apocalypse? Neither. I wasn’t really so naïve. And yet I refused to consider the alternative route for one moment. I wanted to go straight on, upstream against whatever was awaiting me, denying nothing, refusing nothing, avoiding nothing.
(Was I really thinking all this on my way back, or am I projecting it on that journey from my isolation in this London winter? I’m not sure that I thought anything on that journey. So it has really become a novel after all, nothing more. History reduced to story. It is no longer accurate. And yet in a way it seems more true to me now than it has been before. All I can do, is go on; all I can do, is to finish.)
“I met one of your employees yesterday,” she remarked casually. “Charlie Mofokeng. Remarkable man.”
“What’s so remarkable about him?”
“To have come all this way, starting as a farm boy. Studying abroad and all that.”
“I’ve come the same way.”
“You’ve had everything on your side. Charlie is black.”
“He had Bernard on his side.”
“He’ll be a great help to me in Soweto,” she said, ignoring my remark. “He’s like a fish in water in the townships. You must come with us one day.”
“No thanks. I have no desire whatsoever to see the place.” (I didn’t know yet what was in store for me.)
“Charlie spoke a lot about you.”
“I can well imagine. We argue all the time.”
“I had the impression he was feeling quite paternal towards you.”
“Paternal?” I couldn’t help laughing. “Towards me?”
“Yes. He thinks you still have a lot to learn. I tend to agree with him, you know.”
“How did you run into him?” I asked.
“I run into lots of people all the time.”
I found it disturbing, the mere fact that she knew him. Perhaps Bernard had had something to do with it. But she refused to answer my question directly. And Charlie was just as evasive when I confronted him with it a few days later. I came close to losing my temper.
“Let me warn you, Charlie: you’re trying to influence Bea. And I don’t think you realise what you’re doing.”
“Bea is more than capable of making up her own mind.”
“But she tends to get emotionally involved, and then she over-reacts.”
“Thank God for people still capable of reacting in some way!” he burst out. “Look at the bloody mess the land’s in already – just because nobody seems to care.”
“You can’t hold me responsible for everything happening in the country.”
“Of course I hold you responsible. You and every White in the country.”
“Now you’re being unreasonable, Charlie. I inherited this situation exactly as you did. Neither of us can be blamed for what our forefathers did.”
“That’s not what I’m blaming you for. What gets me is that history didn’t teach you anything at all.”
“My history provided me with the means to survive in this land!”
“That’s what you think. All your history taught you was to mistrust others.” Etcetera.
“It’s a matter of survival, Charlie. I’m not trying to defend the methods of history. But what else could my people have done to survive?”
“Do you expect me to approve of survival achieved at the expense of others?”
“You’re just generalising as usual, Charlie.”
“Jesus, Martin: your people started as pioneers. I respect them for it. But that you still haven’t shaken off the frontier mentality – there’s the rub.”
“What do you so glibly call a ‘frontier mentality’?”
“Protecting your identity so frantically. My God, the very phrase gives me a cramp in the arse. Because the only way you’ve managed to maintain your identity was by fucking around my people.”
“Things are improving every day. Look at yourself: ten years ago you wouldn’t have been able to get a job like the one you have at the moment.”
“So what?” He glared at me through his thick glasses. “You know, when I came to work this morning, down there in Sauer Street, the van stopped beside me. ‘Kaffir, where’s your pass?’ I gave it to him, but I said nothing. I don’t speak to people who can’t even read properly – let alone the writing on the wall. He looked at my book and threw it down on the pavement. ‘Pick it up!’ he said, laughing.” Charlie involuntarily put his hand into his breast pocket again as if to retrieve his pass-book. “What the hell’s the use of this job of mine you’re bragging about? Is this what I swotted for, here and in London? Is it this I’ve come back for? Sorry, man, I told you before and I’m telling you again: in my book Sisyphus isn’t metaphysical, he’s straightforward social. And on the brink of my abyss it’s not suicide that awaits me, but murder. It’s as simple as that.”
It had been Bernard who’d introduced her to Charlie, as I’d suspected. It was on the Day of the Covenant she admitted it. The memory is absurd. But she insisted on going to Pretoria for the day to attend the annual panegyric in commemoration of the victory over the Zulus. The Voortrekker Monument, and all those women in their long Voortrekker dresses, and the men in their corduroy jackets and checkered scarves. We stayed to the very end of the solemn festivities, through the long-winded opening speeches and the historical tableaux and the choral singing and the interminable prayers and the Ministerial speech: “In these troubled times we as a nation rediscover the presence of Blood River in our midst. On our borders, once again the forces of darkness are gathering as in the time of our fathers when the full might of the Zulus was massed against them. Once again our future is at stake. But as on that great day when the Lord delivered the enemy into the hands of our fathers, He will once again provide salvation.”
She insisted just as firmly that, afterwards, we visit the Monument itself and explore it from floor to roof: the marble friezes and the tapestries and the granite sarcophagus – We for you, South Africa! – and up the endless steps, into the hollow depths of that vast, heartless edifice. “I don’t want to be spared any iota of it,” she said, with that grim little smile on her lips, that peculiar stubborn tension of her jaw. “For this is the heart of your Afrikanerdom, isn’t it? Perhaps it’ll help me to understand you better.” And when we emerged at last, she added quietly: “You know, this is my idea of hell: exactly on the scale of this Monument and this festival.”
“And Beatrice, of course, doesn’t belong in hell,” I said facetiously. “Well, are we going home now?”
“No, take me to the
zoo first. The other one. The real one.”
She enjoyed it with the abandon of a small child, walking from cage to cage, dawdling in front of every one, eating icecream; even popcorn, so help me God! Teasing the crows and feeding the monkeys, pulling faces at the chimpanzees, with the same exhilaration she’d shown in Diagonal Street.
“I’d love to live close by;” she said impulsively when we finally left. “To hear the lions at night, and the hyenas and things. Just to remind one that this is still Africa.”
“You have a nineteenth-century idea of Africa. Don’t forget about the skyscrapers of Nairobi or Lusaka or Lagos.”
“I’m not forgetting them. But I won’t forget the lions either.” And, getting into the car: “It’s as real as Soweto. I was there again yesterday.”
“Why did you go?”
“There was a journalist Charlie wanted me to meet.”
“I don’t like this sudden closeness with Charlie, Bea!”
“Bernard doesn’t easily misjudge people.”
I looked at her: “So it was Bernard who introduced you to him?”
“Of course.”
“You didn’t want to tell me when I asked you before.”
“Didn’t I? I really can’t remember. In any case, what does it matter?”
Her words acquired a new nuance when the telephone rang that night and Charlie informed me that Bernard had been arrested by the Security Police.
Sitting beside Louis on our way back to Johannesburg, I realised it was time I took another hard look at Charlie. It had been on Bernard’s recommendation that I’d originally employed him. Of course, I’d also been prompted by the fact that he’d reminded me so strongly of Welcome Nyaluza; and I’d kept him on because he’d proved to be a brilliant worker, and because, in spite of our many arguments, I couldn’t help feeling fond of him. But I could no longer take Charlie for granted. I had to know why Bernard had really brought him to me to start with. Only to find a job for the playmate of his youth? Or had there been more subtle and more sinister reasons? Was it coincidence that Charlie had been the first to know about Bernard’s arrest? All right, he’d explained that: a journalist had told him, he’d said; and I knew he had all sorts of friends. But after what had happened to Bernard he was becoming a risk to me. Bernard’s stigma was now attached to everyone who’d been associated with him.
I might have been prepared to give Charlie another chance – in spite of his questionable role in the Westonaria affair – but with Bea in the picture too, the implications were growing too serious to ignore. All those years I’d based my survival on the efficacy with which I’d succeeded in separating all the components of my life. Charlie; Bernard; Bea; Elise; my parents; my work; even Louis. Now it was becoming more and more obvious that there were subtle undeniable links between them, threatening me. I had a group of companies to attend to; I had a family; through many years of meticulous planning and hard work I’d attained a certain status in my society. I couldn’t afford to risk the loss of all that.
I’m sorry, Charlie, I thought. I’m really deeply sorry. But when I get back to my office tomorrow morning I’ll have to call you in and sack you. You needn’t worry: you will receive adequate compensation. As long as you realise that I really have no choice. You yourself have made it impossible for me to decide otherwise.
7
A LIGHT DRIZZLE was covering the windscreen with a brilliant, trembling smear. The clouds which, all day, had been drifting through the sky in large restless masses, were accumulating in a solid bank overhead, darkening the bleak landscape. It was oppressive, threatening. And the wipers were still out of order! What would happen if the rain grew worse?
Louis had already switched on the lights. And suddenly, while I was still thinking about possible remedies, he put out his hand to turn on the wipers as well. To my amazement they responded immediately, swishing to and fro in mechanical precision.
Louis looked at me. With a smile of satisfaction he said: “I fixed them on Saturday when I washed the car. Just a loose connection.”
It was a sensation both of relief and singular humiliation. As if he had finally and independently taken control himself. Much more decisively than when I’d handed over the car to him. More damning. I knew I had to act before his threat to my authority could go much further. I would put an ultimatum to him. As soon as we were back home. Tomorrow. He would have to stop his idleness forthwith and start doing something constructive – otherwise he’d have to move out of the house. I was still in charge; it was up to me to do what I regarded as necessary. Whatever the price. (I anticipated Elise’s reaction.) One had to be prepared to make sacrifices.
The rain was coming down with greater urgency, but Louis’s wipers kept the windscreen clear. There was something brewing, more than just an ordinary shower. The dry grass, barely visible in the deep dusk, was flattened by the increasing wind. Still, the big Mercedes was solid, fast, heavy, invincible. Not entirely infallible since Friday. But at the moment our progress was perfect and controlled.
It was much worse than the drizzle on the night when I’d picked up Bernard in Diagonal Street. The sturdy old woman in the dark alley beside Bea’s witchdoctor place. And then the deserted mine road, the hissing wipers, the impossible conversation.
And it had been Bea who’d called me that night. She’d known about Bernard: they must have arranged the meeting between them. Only one day after he’d met Louis in town.
She hadn’t attended the trial. (“There’s nothing one can do for him there. And simply to go there to watch him would be like spectators staring at an accident. I can’t take it.”)
How had he got in touch with her during his spell underground? Why had he gone to her of all people, and what had prompted him to endanger her life so blatantly? My God, didn’t he know what he was doing?
I’d asked her about it immediately after his arrest. Three days after our meeting in the drizzly night. But she’d been in a state of shock and refused to discuss it.
“What difference can it make, Martin? All that matters is that they caught him. Why didn’t you help him?”
“It was out of the question. There’s no need even to discuss it. Use your common sense.”
“There’s no point in recriminations, Martin.”
“But I can’t understand why in God’s name he should have gone to you. Suppose he was followed? How could he have exposed you to such danger? One simply doesn’t do it to one’s friends.”
“What makes you think I was drawn into it against my will? Don’t you think I could have chosen freely not to see him?”
“He must have known how easy it is to make use of you.”
“That’s not much of a compliment, is it?”
“You can’t deny it.”
“I’ve never entered blindly into anything in my life.”
“Not even with your prof at the time?” I asked brutally.
“No.” Behind her dark glasses her eyes were invisible. “Don’t you think even then I knew what I was doing?”
“Bea, really—”
Irritable, she interrupted: “The only thing that matters at the moment is that Bernard has been caught. We’ve got to decide whether there’s anything we can do for him.”
It was the pattern of most of our conversations in that period. There were times I felt like resorting to physical violence to force the truth out of her. But I knew only too well she would refuse to discuss what she regarded as either irrelevant or too private. And perhaps I was afraid too. In the same way as, after Dad’s death, I’d never dared to discuss her ultimatum about a divorce again, I now chose not to press the matter too far. Sooner or later it would have to come into the open anyway. Preferably later. For I knew that such a conversation might be our last; and I couldn’t bring myself to face up to it yet.
Moreover, there was a business trip pending, to the US and Brazil; and even in a temporary, provisional goodbye like that I found unnerving undertones of finality. So I preferred not
to deliberately disturb anything in the precarious balance of our relationship.
The day after my return from abroad I telephoned her. She was occupied full-time, lecturing at Wits and filling in with Afrikaans classes in Soweto; even her evenings, she said, were full until after midnight. I felt hurt that she wasn’t prepared to give up even one evening for my sake, but I knew that Bea would never allow anything, not even love, to come between her and her responsibilities. And so we had to wait until Friday when she had the whole afternoon and evening free. We agreed to meet at “our” place, Dullabh’s Corner.
I wasn’t feeling very well that morning. Some bug I’d picked up in Brazil, I thought. A dull feeling of nausea; a pressure on my chest. If it hadn’t been for the long time I’d been away from her, I would have phoned to cancel the date. But I felt a curiously intense anxiety to be with her again. In New York I’d had a brief affair with the American secretary of our conference; in fact, she’d even accompanied me to Rio afterwards. But she’d been a pastime, entertaining and exhausting at the same time – something of a nympho – and her presence had increased my longing for Bea.
I’d brought her a special present, jewellery from one of Rio’s most exclusive boutiques in a small street behind Ipanema: the kind of place that employed an armed guard to let down the steel shutters after you’d entered and before the wares were displayed.
We met at the hole where the building had been. And to allow her dismay to subside I drove to a restaurant out of town, near Kyalami. She wasn’t very excited about the gift; as on other occasions I had the impression that she was almost depressed by having to accept it; strange. Still, I tried my best – even though I was still feeling rather off-colour – to cheer her up by telling her about Rio and New York. The latter proved to be a less fortunate choice, as it brought back disturbing memories of her childhood in the States and her disastrous return there, after her year’s study in Perugia (and another unhappy love-affair with a French movie producer).
On our way back to town we were both feeling depressed.
