The Reckoning

by Chonghaile, Clár Ní;

  There on that hill, I rebuilt myself and prepared for another life. I didn’t realise it at the time but with every word I typed, I was saying goodbye to Stijn, Kenya and Africa. Every chapter, every sentence, every change and every edit was leading me to another place. I finished Under the Canopy and immediately started The Ultimatum. I still had no specific plan to publish anything. I just knew that I needed to be writing. I must write all the time.

  Else and Wilhelm grew closer and a month or so later, he moved into the farmhouse. They never made me feel anything less than welcome but I knew it was time to go. I booked my flight back to England in late May. Else drove me to Nairobi to spend my last night in a hotel in the centre of town. It was a subdued, strangely awkward farewell – a last meal in a too-bright restaurant with bland food and canned music designed to make tourists feel at home. We sat in a corner and found little to say. After so many years together and the shock of Stijn’s death, there was too much between us and so we said nothing of consequence. But really, who does have consequential conversations at such moments? It can only happen in fiction when the author eschews authenticity in favour of the deeper, more meaningful truths that we rarely manage to voice in the real world. Yet another reason to love fiction, Diane: it elevates the mundane to the extraordinary by pretending that we all manage to say what should be said at critical moments.

  We discussed where I might live in St Albans, my hopes that I would keep writing and my tentative plans to seek an agent. Else told me she would try to keep the farm going, with Wilhelm’s help. The flower business had been hit hard by the global recession but she thought they could hang on.

  “It’s not just loyalty to my father. That would be futile. He is no longer here so pretending to do something for him would be foolish,” she said. The tremor in her voice belied her words but of course, one can hold both pragmatism and a kind of idealistic love in the same heart.

  She promised to come and visit and I believe she meant it and I meant it when I said that would be wonderful. But seated in that half-empty restaurant under a lumbering fan with twitchy-eyed waiters poised to grab our plates as soon as we paused eating, it was hard to imagine either of us in St Albans. Our mutual promises shone too bright under the fluorescent lights, like puddle mirages on a straight hot road.

  We drove to the airport early in the morning, speeding through streets where the sun’s scalpel carved slivers of light into the night’s shade. Men, women and children walked in tidy lines on either side of the highway. In the rising sun’s rays, they were faceless, austerely beautiful silhouettes, like the polished ebony statues sold in craft markets. Sometimes, we can be more than we are and we don’t even know it.

  “I won’t come in, if you don’t mind,” Else said as we drew up outside the terminal. “Now, it is time to say our goodbyes. Otherwise, we will end up wishing our last minutes together away. We will be uncomfortable and then we will be grateful to be alone and that would not be true to how we feel.”

  We parked and a porter grabbed my two suitcases and typewriter. He looked on impassively, the straps loose in his hands, the bags limp on the pavement, as we hugged, letting all the emotion of the last weeks finally break free in the most absurdly public place. Maybe we needed the eyes of others to allow us to let down our guards without falling to pieces.

  “He really did love you,” Else whispered.

  “Oh darling, you don’t have to tell me,” I said. “I know that. I always knew that.”

  “And I loved you too. I love you now,” she said. “But I understand why you are going. If it were not for Wilhelm and the farm, I might do the same. I would look for a new world where he had never been.”

  I tried to smile.

  “You don’t have to leave, Else. You are already in the world without him and you are still standing. It will be painful but you have your life here. He would not want you to go. But I must leave because I do need a new world. Stijn was my life and this was his world. Without him, I feel like a boat cut loose on a foreign sea.”

  I stepped away and the porter shouldered my bags with an ostentatious grunt. I almost smiled. He was earning his tip even though my bags were so light I could have carried them myself. I hadn’t taken much. Everything Stijn and I bought together belonged at Ol Mlima. How could it be otherwise?

  “Do you think it was our fault? Did we do this by calling him back?”

  Else was clutching my sleeve. She had been working up to this question – it was in the bags under her eyes and the new lines that had etched themselves into her forehead. With a jolt, I realised she wasn’t a girl any more. In that moment, the 10 years I had spent in a kind of happy daze in Kenya caught up with me. Else was no longer a girl, I was beyond middle age and Stijn was gone. His death would be a permanent epilogue to this part of my life. It really was over.

  Else was waiting for an answer. She might be a woman now but she needed me to be the adult, to banish this bogeyman and I was ready. I had asked myself the same question many times: in the still, terrifying hours before dawn, in the oppressive silence before drifting into oblivion in my empty bed and as I walked around the waterhole, my hand reaching for one that was no longer there.

  “Who do you think was responsible for me meeting Stijn at that garden party?” I said. “Was it my fault for stopping to rest by that tree or his for pausing to talk to me? Why did he go to the coast? Was it his fault or the suppliers in Mombasa who invited him down? Did he need a break from me, from us? Was he bored and if so, who was to blame for that? Why did I choose to come to Kenya after Paris? Can we place the blame for all of this at my editor’s door? After all, he approved my request to move. We could. He’s dead. He won’t mind. But if we are to be honest, Else, and you know Stijn would have wanted us to be truthful, we must acknowledge that we can no more assign blame for what has happened than we can decide who makes the rain fall. In the end, there can be no pure reckoning, no accurate appraisal of what we have done and what we have failed to do. Since we cannot know for sure, it is better not to speculate. Trust me on this, my dear. This is not my first time on this particular merry-go-round.”

  I stroked her hair and turned to go but she still looked confused. I tried again. I had to remember she was new to this game.

  “I don’t know why Stijn died, Else. However, since things cannot be different now, since nothing we do or say or think can change what has happened, we cannot indulge in guilt or regret. They diminish us because they make more of life than it is and that makes less of us and of what we endure. His death was one of the things that happen. No more, no less. Like finding a coin on the road. That is all, no matter how much we want to believe in something else.”

  I left then, knowing I had not really managed to banish her doubts. She might carry them to her grave. Some truths we each have to discover for ourselves.

  It took me a while to find my feet in St Albans. I hid in a hotel for a week, barely leaving my room, sleeping and crying and watching television. It was a kind of hibernation and although I was not reborn, I did not die. Again. A few weeks later, I bought the house I now live in. It’s near the centre of St Albans, a few streets behind the medieval clock tower. I did look at some properties on Folly Lane but everything had changed so much. In the end, I decided that it made no sense to park myself on a road that bore no resemblance to the street where we had lived. Proximity would only have increased my sense of displacement.

  In those first months, as I told you earlier, I was lost, unable to find my feet in this town that had known another me. I could not truly imagine that I might have the energy to start again. To be honest, I doubted I had enough time to try. Stijn’s death brought mortality knocking at my door. I believed I was on borrowed time. I am of that generation, Diane. We still think 50 marks old age. We are not wrong but where we fail is in our inability to understand that there is so much old age to be lived now. I told you about walking my way back into a kind of sanity and through all those lost months, I never stopped w
riting. It was my saving grace. I edited Under the Canopy, completed my first draft of The Ultimatum, wrote short stories and poems. I tamed my despair and my loneliness by refusing to live in this world, by seeking other shores and inventing my own certainties. Eventually, I realised my writing was more than just therapy, more than just a hobby. It was good. Ambition rescued me again.

  I found an agent and then a publisher and from there, I was able to construct another Lina Rose, the woman the world believes I am still and the woman they will mourn when I die. I am pleased: she is my finest creation and if she lacks my faults, we share her writerly virtues. She is witty and erudite. She is arrogant and supercilious, but that is permissible because she is a literary heavyweight and art can excuse anything. Lina scorns the festival circuit but will occasionally write a thoughtful piece on a modern literary trend for the broadsheets. She uses the same photo for all of her dust jackets. It is shamefully outdated now – more sleight of hand – but glamour sells and it is one of my favourites.

  Stijn took the picture on Lake Naivasha in 1965, I think. I am in a rowing boat, squinting slightly into the sun. My hair is up in a loose bun and tendrils frame my face. I am neither young nor beautiful but I cut a striking figure with the water and bush behind me and the sun lighting my face, smoothing the wrinkles. Most of my readers will know that I am older now but I was that woman too and she is the one who decided to write. That Lina was the one who discovered, as Stijn said, that she was born to write.

  I wrote steadily for nearly 20 years. I then stopped after I published The Starfish and the Pearl in 1991. After addressing our relationship, however obliquely, I found I had no more stories to tell. For the past six years, I have produced very little beyond filler pieces for newspapers’ book sections; some reviews of books that seem increasingly bound to disappoint me, and a handful of short stories that I freely admit are trinkets, all sparkle and sass but with very little substance. It’s not that I suffered from writer’s block. I never felt frustrated. It was more like a natural winding down, a diminution of desire. I turned 70 and I felt increasingly outpaced by the world. I still do. This is the only story I could imagine writing.

  You may wonder what I have been doing since 1991. What could an old lady like me, a woman who rejected all the codes and conventions, be doing in the winter of her life? I wish I could tell you I have been living in painful solitude. There would be some relief for you there, perhaps. If I could tell you that I’ve been lonely for years, that my success meant nothing in the dark of the night, would that make you happy? It is the worst kind of hypothetical question because I have not been alone. Lonely, yes, sometimes, but not alone. I should have been. I know.

  What I am going to tell you now, Diane, will hurt, perhaps more than everything else. I know I promised the truth and what I have told you here is the truth. It is just not the whole truth. I needed to keep some secrets until now. I was playing a high-stakes game and unfortunately I lost. You did not come. But I knew the odds and I knew the risks and in the end, I expected to lose.

  I told you I was not dying and that is true, insofar as I can tell. But death is not the only thing to fear. I forgot that as I patted myself on the back for ageing so very productively, for seizing the winter of my life by the neck and forcing it to yield to the talent I was born to display.

  Remember I said I craved oblivion. Be careful what you wish for, Diane.

  I am losing myself. Soon, very soon now, I will not know who I am, what I did or what I failed to do. I will remember none of the stories I have told you in this long, long letter. My ghosts are already fading. It turns out their immortality depends on the living. We are their keepers. Without us, they die again too. I trust I have saved some souls by bequeathing my ghosts to you.

  I didn’t expect it to be like this. I expected to die, to vanish. At one time, I craved the end. What I didn’t plan for is this living death. It is perhaps my due. But it does seem a little harsh, my darling.

  A little harsh and bitterly just. I will finally forget all the things I hid for so long. It is, in the end, the only way I can forgive myself. Forget to forgive, that is my Fate. The only absolution I can offer myself comes at the price of losing my mind.

  You remember I spoke before about parallel universes, those galaxies where our other possible lives run along on the tracks we did not choose. It is a handy way to come to terms with what is about to happen to me. I will be here but not here. I will be me but not me. I wonder if somewhere the real Lina will live on, wandering down another path, while this one falls down the holes that gape like ravens’ jaws inside my own brain.

  If you decide to come now, at this 11th hour, I will likely not recognise you. I didn’t write these words just a week ago. The temporal gap between us has been an illusion. I have been sneaky until the last, I’m afraid, but this deception was born of love, I hope. I had to do it this way to prove to myself that I was really doing this for you and for you alone. Or at least, mostly for you because there is no such thing as pure altruism. I simply can’t believe in it.

  You were always behind the curve, darling. It was the only way. If you had come when you got that first letter, in June, I would have still been here but I am nearly gone now. Or at least the woman who wrote these letters is no longer running the show.

  What you have been reading is history and I, dear Diane, am also history. When I concocted this plan in the long, dark days of January at home in St Albans, I did intend to send the letters each week, as I said I was doing at the start of this exercise, but my Alzheimer’s had other plans. I started to deteriorate faster than expected. I had been told this was a risk. I was given a list of the symptoms, the warning signs they call them, although I cannot see the point of a warning if there is nothing that can be done. My prognosis was initially good, although some of the long-haired young doctor’s upbeat analysis was probably a result of his belief that I had already lived a good life and that every day was a blessing. I forgave him his chirpiness because I liked the way his green glass earring flashed at me while he talked. He too will have to learn that a long life is never long enough while a short one is always too long.

  Just before I came here to this cottage on the beach, I could feel myself losing my grip on reality. Everyday words were disappearing. I stumbled and bumped into furniture that hadn’t moved in years. I struggled with simple concepts. I forgot appointments. I could not remember how to use the television and I got lost walking home from the corner shop. It is a terrible thing to watch the world slipping away, to feel yourself drifting from the shore and to know that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, you can do to get back.

  I realised I had to change my plans. I arrived here in April, not June, and in writing this in the way I have, I have bent time so that what you think is the present is in fact the past. This voice you hear in your head, my voice, has already probably been silenced by a disease named after a German psychiatrist who died of heart failure during the Great War and who probably never realised how his name would become a byword for the worst kind of living death. As confusion sought to take a firmer hold of my faculties, I wrote faster, furiously, sometimes all night in those first weeks here. I did not send you the first letter immediately because I was concerned that I might not be allowed to finish, that this story would be half-told, unresolved. What is a story without resolution? It is simply chaos, a tale with no end and no beginning; in short, a life. I refuse to leave such a mess behind. I will have my literary reckoning. I insist on my right to sculpt the sands of my long life.

  In those early weeks here, some days were worse than others. Some days the memories came but the words did not. Some days I could not write for crying.

  As the present faded, the past became more real to me. As though I was being allowed to say a final goodbye, allowed to take a last long look at the stage before the curtain came down. I wrote like a woman possessed and I suppose that is what I will be soon. I will be possessed by another Lina, an emptier, quieter, perha
ps even a happier one. I cannot call her my creation though. She is not the work of Brahma but of Shiva.

  I need to move fast now, to write more than ever before and yet, for the first time in my life, the deadline is not motivating me the way it should. Or rather it is not motivation I lack but the means to turn that drive into typed pages. The words are there, lurking in the corners of the sun-filled lounge or up in the branches of the trees outside. I can see their silhouettes on the periphery of my vision. But they do not come willingly any more and it takes me so very long to catch them.

  By the time you read this, the dementia will likely have taken over, flooding my brain with waves of confusion so that even on my best days, I will be constrained to hop anxiously between islands of lucidity. I know what is coming but finally I am ready. I have finished my story. This is the last letter and all the others have been placed in addressed and numbered envelopes so that my helper knows which one to send when. You will look now and you will see the tiny numbers written in red pen in the left-hand corner. Did you wonder why they were there? Maybe you thought it was to help you organise the letters. I wish that was why. It would have been a nice idea.

  As I write this, it is the 12th of June. I cannot guess what date it is for you. Already our worlds have diverged. I’m on that parallel path, Diane, and there is another fork in the road, very soon. Today, it has taken me five hours to get these lines down. I can no longer use the typewriter. I simply cannot make sense of it. The positioning of the letters has no logic and I forget what I am supposed to do to make it work. It looks familiar and sometimes I remember to place my fingers on the keys but then, I wonder ‘what next’? So I have had some help and this, my dear, is the last revelation.

  Else is here with me. In fact, Else has been my companion now for several years, ever since she left Kenya in 1990. Her life was upended when a pick-up truck speeding from Meru to Nairobi with a cargo of the narcotic plant miraa hit a pothole, swerved across the two-lane road and slammed into Wilhelm’s car. She buried him beside Stijn on the hill overlooking the waterhole. She tried to keep the farm going but she could not face down powerful rivals from Kenya’s ruling elite, who knew they could force her out. When she left, she came to St Albans – her mother was already dead and the years she’d spent in Africa meant she had no other close family. Wilhelm’s parents – ageing and isolated on a flat farm in Friesland – only met Else once and they had never understood their son’s decision to live in Kenya. They didn’t so much cut him out of their lives as simply forget about him. When she turned up on my doorstep, she said: “You are the only one now who knows who I was, who can talk to me about them all. I think we must stay together for a while.”