“We read in the newspapers that white South Africans are leaving the country en masse,” Zelda says, changing the subject. “Is that something you too are thinking about, Mr. Van der Merwe?”
Zelda’s husband shoots a dirty look at his wife for her lack of tact.
“I don’t think so,” Kurt replies wearily. “For once, I might just go with the flow and watch the insanity of it all. At my age, I guess I’ve earned the right to simply be a political voyeur. As I said, we Africans are masters at putting up unforgettable shows.”
Again, Zoe doesn’t miss the sarcasm in his reply.
“Sorry to interrupt, Kurt; if you don’t mind, I’d like to introduce our friends here to the new mayor,” Cyril says, gently pushing the couple away as he scowls at him. Kurt returns his friend’s glance with an expression of mock contrition.
Now that they’re alone, Zoe has the impression whatever she says will be the wrong thing. Yet, she doesn’t want to behave like those women who in front of a famous writer abdicate their power of speech. Unlike her, he is famous, and with an exemplary personal story to look up to.
“Are you always so abrasive with people you don’t like?”
“What makes you believe I don’t like you?”
She looks awkwardly at her arms folded across her stomach as if they could protect her from this man’s brazenness.
“You well know I was referring to the Americans.”
“Africa is something different and you know better than I do. They wouldn’t like Africa so much if, after a day of safari, they couldn’t take a proper shower.”
Zoe glances down at her glass and smiles feebly.
“You know what it feels like talking to you?”
“You tell me.”
“That naiveté is a crime. And whoever shows it doesn’t deserve your sympathy.”
As they talk, she is able to observe him. Even though Zoe wears high heels, he’s a half-head taller than her. His ashen-streaked hair is cut very short; only his forelock is kept long and seemingly ungovernable, concealing, though partially, a scar running sideways across his forehead. His jaw protrudes rather unnaturally below a sharp and sun-scorched nose almost as thin as his lips. He wears a very short, well-trimmed beard and moustache of a dusty dun colour. The left corner of his mouth seems to be permanently turned down, conveying that peculiar air of covert sarcasm. What a formidable shield.
“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you at the Drostdy. Besides, I’m ashamed to admit I don’t remember reading any of your books,” she says.
“Unforgivable.”
“Still writing in the desert?”
He takes his time to answer, licking his lower lip with the tip of the tongue.
“Not in the desert. But of deserts. Moral deserts. It’s a story about shame.”
Zoe shrugs involuntarily, looks around and sees André gesturing to join him.
“Excuse me,” she quickly says indicating her brother. “I guess I’m not done with introductions yet.”
“You must be missing your safe cocoon in the Kalahari,” he says with a half bow.
She briskly crosses the room to join André and his guests.
“Zoe,” André says putting his arm around her waist, “let me introduce you to the Director of FirstRand Bank in Cape Town.”
As she smiles amiably at the new guests, she feels she’s slowly slipping away, as if trapped in a water bubble. She sees people open and close their mouths but can’t make out what they are saying. She’s still thinking about the writer, the way he seems to gain access to people’s minds.
Later, Cyril approaches her again.
“Kurt is rather moody. I hope his ways didn’t make you run away; that’s what usually happens with him, especially if it’s women.”
Zoe turns towards him with a knowing smile. “Still trying to save him from himself?”
“A lost cause,” Cyril says with a snort.
“Have you known him for long?”
“We grew up in the same house. My mother was the family’s maid.”
The lights have been dimmed. The couples are gliding across the old wooden floor, which groans in annoyance. Zoe leaves the room and heads for the garden, strolling across the lawn. The screening area is deserted. She sits on a nearby bench, leaning her elbows on her knees, face propped on her hands, and watches that memorable scene in Casablanca: “Play it, Sam. For old times’ sake.” The footage stops as Bogart — impeccable in his smoking suit, a cigarette dangling from the mouth — stares into his memory.
“The inevitability of fate and the pain of love renounced,” Kurt says. He’s standing in the darkness not far from her, Zoe realizes with a little start.
“Love lived as a sacrifice rather than as a possession,” she says feebly.
She sees his shadow moving closer and then the white starched cuff of his dress shirt. He’s offering her a smoke. She declines with a slight shake of her head. When Kurt flicks the lighter for his cigarette, Zoe’s emerald pendant becomes alive.
“A teardrop from the sea. Very beautiful.”
“I inherited it. From a woman considered to have loose morals, to put it mildly.”
“A soft spot for a bad seed?”
“Not brave enough to be one, perhaps.”
She bites her lip. What’s she doing? Why is she revealing herself like this?
He lets her off the hook, leading the conversation towards less slippery surfaces.
“Cyril had started telling me about your expedition to the Kalahari, but we were cut short.”
“There’s not much to say. Not much luck, thus far.”
“It mustn’t be easy for you up there.”
She shudders, thinking back to the fight among her workers, but doesn’t say anything.
“How long are you planning to be in your desert?”
“Well, as Professor Kuyper says, until I haven’t found my ... Homo.”
She hears him break into a laugh.
“One thing I’ve learned for sure,” she says. “How easy it is to retreat from the world and how difficult it is, then, to return to it. Tonight, people were quoting movies, TV programs, new book titles, their kids’ favourite pop songs, and I felt left out. An alien.”
Kurt keeps quiet.
Talking about herself again, sharing her feelings. What a mistake.
“How silly of me, telling you such things, after what you’ve been through ...”
Even in the semi-darkness, Zoe feels him stiffen, but she pretends not to notice. Going against her nature as she did with Sam in the Kalahari, she forces herself to ask the question.
“What did you miss most when you were ... well, you know, when you were behind bars?”
The silence becomes even thicker. Were it not for the red glow of the cigarette, Zoe might be led to believe that the thief of stories is gone. Until, finally, she hears his low, laconic voice again: It seems to come from distant lands, even though he’s no more than a few feet from her.
“The sea. Its smell, its salt on my skin. I never swam so much as in those seven years in jail. Every day I imagined myself doing a steady, slow crawl, theoretically endless, with the ocean yawning at me from below. I practised that mental swimming like a Zen monk, almost in a state of trance.”
“The sea as a black masseur,” she murmurs, trying to remember the exact title of a book Dario gave her to read.
“Haunts of black masseur: The swimmer as hero,” Kurt says, coming to her aid. “An unconventional read. I’m impressed.”
Now that the screening has come to an end, the music flows clear and sweet out of the dance hall, along with the clinking of glasses and the soft chatter.
“I suppose all this seems to you disarmingly banal,” she says, making a vague gesture towards the ballroom, the orchestra, the flower arrangements, the candle lights.
“Not necessarily. Beauty and lightness have their advantages.”
“Even when they border with superficiality?”
“Prison taught me a lot, including things I wouldn’t want to learn. Helplessly witnessing torture, death, the loss of human dignity, the abyss of bestiality our fellow humans can fall into. All this destroys something inside you — something that shouldn’t even be touched. That’s when superficiality shows its benefits. It can even prove cathartic.”
Kurt inhales his cigarette deeply; in the incandescent glow, she catches a glimpse of the writer’s troubled expression. He too has exposed himself. He too regrets it.
The band is now playing “Killing me softly.”
Another long silence between them, as they both listen to the music.
Kurt’s voice reaches her almost in a whisper: “Would you care to dance?”
Asking this question must have cost him considerable effort, she senses. How would he take no for an answer? For a moment, the gnarled confidence with which he seems to keep his life under control cracks and Zoe peers, unseen, into his loneliness.
She won’t dance with him, she will decline the invitation politely. The party is almost over, only a few of André’s friends will stay behind. The thief of stories will soon be gone too and, most likely, she will never see him again.
But she doesn’t say no. And when he gently takes her hand, she doesn’t stop him. He leads her out of the grass and onto the tiled terrace, close to the music, then turns. She leans towards him and they drift together into that sad song. His hand presses slightly against her back; she follows this invitation and lets her body adhere to his, feeling his nervous tension as if it were a second invisible skin. He tilts his head towards hers, almost touching her cheek. She feels the music waving through her conscience as she dances with this famous stranger, a thief of stories who worships ocean swimming.
The song is over.
He holds her there for one long moment. Then he lets her go.
Extending her gloved hand, Zoe hastily takes leave of him. She is eager to go back to her desert, preferring its desolate harshness to the danger she has just shunned.
24
SONGS OF THE SIRENS
AFTER THE OFFICIAL announcement that Cyril Kunene was made a partner of the Finistère, the estate has been stormed by local and foreign reporters. Everyone, it seems, wants to interview and photograph the first black businessman who has managed to make inroads into this historic stronghold of Afrikaner power: the Cape winelands. André, too, gets dragged into the whirlwind of interviews, phone calls and public appearances. At one time, overwhelmed, he tries to engage Zoe as well. But she is adamant: He can’t ask more of her public persona. When the press guys are about to arrive, she invariably slips away, burrowing herself into the reading room or taking Jolly for long rides.
With a contrasting mix of fascination and loathing, reading to Georgina the statements Cyril and André give to the newspapers has become a daily pastime. In truth, anything is better than having to prepare a less than exciting report for Professor Kuyper.
“Listen to this, Ouma. from the Cape Argus: ‘When I was a buyer in the U.S., I refused to taste South African wines,’ Kunene says. ‘I waited for the fall of apartheid and the liberation of Nelson Mandela to acknowledge their dignity in the free market.’”
“What a loudmouth!” Georgina cries. “If it weren’t for men like your grandfather or great-grandfather, he wouldn’t even know what wine is and where it comes from ...”
Zoe smiles feebly at her aia’s comment. For so long has she tried to strip any sense of honour from her ancestors’ past. But the Afrikaners have been called in front of History’s tribunal, at last. And they have pleaded guilty. The infamous deeds and barbarous injustices for which they are responsible will be righted. If not totally, at least partially. Most of all, publicly. And rightly so. Only a long, excruciatingly honest, cathartic journey will set her people free from a shameful past. But now that the age of atonement has begun, that her volk’s wrongdoings will be exposed and purged, she can allow herself to feel a hint of pride for what those early Huguenots in the Cape and their descendants were able to accomplish.
She leafs through the pages of another newspaper.
“Here is André’s interview to Business Day: ‘We shall export most of our production. The best restaurants in the world, from Lespinasse in New York to Clarke’s in London, already include in their wine list a Pierre Jourdan Brut or a Glen Carlou Chardonnay. Both wines are produced from grapes grown in the only wine region on the planet that enjoys the breezes of two oceans. The vineyards that have put Franschhoek, Stellenbosch, Paarl, Constantia on the map of great wine regions would never grow without their moist breath. Being the oldest of the New World wine countries, South Africa has the potential to compete with Californian and Australian wines.’”
“Are you making fun of us, ousus?” André catches her by surprise walking into the kitchen followed by Cyril. The two men are beaming with self-satisfaction. Like the sun and the moon — different, yet somehow complementary.
“More than winemakers you look like pop stars,” she says.
“It’s marketing, my dear,” André says, stealing her last biscuit.
“You should be pleased with him, Cyril. The kid is learning quickly.”
“No doubt,” he says as he leans forward with both hands on the edge of the table, slightly tilting his head to peer at the title of the book lying among the newspapers. His forearms shine smooth and vigorous under the rolled-up sleeves of his white shirt.
“I see you’re reading my friend Kurt.”
“It’s the least I can do, after letting on I had never read his work.”
“Well, what do you think of his writing?”
“I’ve only gone through three of his books so far ...”
“Enough to get an idea. Go ahead, I can bear criticism on his behalf.”
“Ruthless. Bleak.”
“He certainly doesn’t spare anyone. Not even himself.”
“Evocative, nonetheless. Such a contrast: the dreariness of his stories, the hideous truths, and the luminous quality of his wording. As if the only hope for salvation lay in a perfectly crafted sentence. In that austere beauty.”
“Once I heard a critic say that some of his passages can produce little awakenings. Let’s not forget he’s above all a poet. Though Kurt says very few people nowadays would stop and listen to how a verse resonates within them. By the way, he called this morning; he spotted the first whales of the season in Gansbaai.”
André pops up. “Enough with you two acting like snotty intellectuals. Let’s go whale watching, instead. We’ve been toiling away like crazy these last weeks. We surely deserve a day off.”
“That’s fine with me,” Cyril says grinning at her brother across the table.
The two men glance at Zoe at once.
“I’d rather stay home,” she says too quickly. “I still have to write my report for Kuyper.”
“Come on Zoe, it has been ages since we opened the whale season. I remember dad taking us there on a chilly day, picnicking on the beach, the wind feeling like a whetted knife.”
She senses the story is being retold not for her sake but for Cyril’s and dismisses it with an impatient gesture. No need to share with him intimate moments of family life. She goes back to her newspaper without saying a word.
“Ousus ...” André whispers close to her ear passing his fingers across the reddish pruning of her hair, as if to brush away her unruliness.
They probably think she’s a spoilsport. How is it that some people can tackle life with such indomitable zest, living it down to the core, giving no chance for future regrets? Is one born with it or can it be acquired? Perhaps there are ways to be initiated into such a state. But she is going off track. The issue now is: Can she help André revive a beautiful memory?
“At what time were you thinking of leaving?”
“Now,” André says, beaming. “Before you change your mind.”
“I’ll ask Georgina to help me prepare some sandwiches for our padkos.”
“I calle
d Kurt,” Cyril says as he gets into the car. “He’ll meet us at the pier.”
She should have expected this. Who knows, perhaps she even secretly hoped for it, despite her resolution never to see the thief of stories again.
“You two grew up together?” Zoe asks after a while as André drives them out of Franschhoek.
“Not really. He’s ten years older than me. When I was a child, he was already a young man busy with his craft. We got to know each other better only later in life, after his release, when we were both living out of the country. I was eighteen when he was arrested. That day, I swore to myself I’d do everything to leave South Africa.”
Zoe sticks one arm out of the window, feeling the breeze, trying to hide her impatience. She longs to know more about the man behind the writer.
“What was his father like?” she asks turning towards Cyril, who is sitting in the back seat.
“Afrikaner to the bone — very strict, very religious,” Cyril says. “A brilliant magistrate. He could have easily become a judge at the Supreme Court. But when his son was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment his professional fortunes faded away.”
“Kurt was in Pollsmore, wasn’t he?” she asks again.
“Ja. His father knew the hell he would go through in there. He personally wrote to the President asking for a pardon. The request was rejected. Kurt got only two years off for good behaviour.”
“What was he charged with exactly?” she asks.
“High treason. Subversive action against the state. He returned to South Africa from his self-imposed exile in France to re-establish a series of clandestine contacts within the ANC. They caught him four days after his arrival. Someone, probably from his close circle of comrades, betrayed him. He’s adamant about that.”
“Willem was at his wit’s end when he found out that Van der Merwe had been invited to the reception,” André says interrupting the barrage of her questioning. “I’d say he took it even worse than the news of Cyril’s partnership.”
The Afrikaner Page 14