by Andre Brink
“Ben does a lot to help you. I’ve noticed. Especially with the children.”
“Yes. Of course.” She returned to the table and we sat down again. “Why,” she asked suddenly, “why does one allow oneself to be reduced to a domestic animal? Don’t you think I also want to do something, make something, create something?”
“You have lovely children, Susan. Don’t underestimate your creativity."
"Any bloody dairy cow can produce offspring.” She leaned forward. Once again I was conscious of her breasts. “Did you know,” she asked, “I had a miscarriage?”
“No, “I said.
“Two years after Suzette. They thought I wouldn’t be able to have another baby after that. I had to prove to myself that I was, well, normal. So I had Linda. It was hell. The full nine months. I resigned myself to being maimed for life.”
“You look more beautiful than ever.”
“How do you know? You didn’t really know me then.”
“I’m convinced of it.”
“And in five years I’ll be forty. Do you realise what that means? Why must one be condemned to a body?” This time she was silent for so long I thought it was the end of our conversation. We drank again, in silence. When she finally spoke it was much more restrained. “I’ve always had this feeling, ever since I started ‘developing'.” She looked straight at me. “There was one time, when I was fifteen or sixteen, when I believed in castigating my body like some mediaeval nun. To rid myself of evil desires. I would tie a knotted rope round my waist and wear rough underclothes. Even tried flagellation in a mild way. In the hope of setting myself free from my body.”
“Did it do any good?”
She gave a short laugh. “At least I’m no longer wearing the rope.”
“What about a chastity belt?”
Once more that unflinching gaze of her steady eyes, but she didn’t reply. Was it defiance or invitation, confirmation or defence? Between us was the table with the burning candles, the treacherous light.
“And Ben?” I asked deliberately.
“What about Ben?”
“He loves you. He needs you.”
“Ben is very self-sufficient.”
“He wanted you to go with him tonight.”
Another of her brief surges of passion. “I’ve brought him where he is today. I wonder what would have become of him if it hadn’t been for me. Probably stuck in Krugersdorp giving alms to the poor. He should have become a missionary. It’s up to me to keep the family going.”
“Aren’t you trying too hard, perhaps?”
“What do you think will happen if I let go? I married him because I believed in him. So how can he – “ She stopped; then spoke in a more subdued tone: “I don’t think he really needs me. Or anyone. What do I know about my own husband? If only you knew—”
“What?”
Her blue eyes were dark behind the candlelight. Absently one of her hands was toying with the shoulder left bare by the dropped strap. Then, still looking straight at me, she replaced the strap and pushed back her chair: “I’m going to make us some more coffee.”
“Not for me.”
She stayed away for a very long time. And when she came back she was distant and formal. We moved to two easy chairs and drank our coffee in silence, and while we were still sitting like that Ben came home. She poured him a cup too, but didn’t enquire about his evening out. Later he rose to go to the bathroom. She arranged the cups on a tray, then suddenly stopped to look at me:
“You must please forgive me for losing my self-control tonight.”
“But Susan —”
“Forget what I said. I had too much wine. I’m not usually like this. I don’t want you to think I’ve got anything against Ben. He is a good husband and a good father. Perhaps I don’t deserve him.”
She went out, to the kitchen. The next day she gave no hint at all of having the slightest recollection of our conversation. As if everything had been cancelled, obliterated, just like that.
Imperturbable and benign, Ben went his way. Getting up at dawn for a jog round the block, followed by a cold shower, off to school at half-past seven, back at lunch, then an hour or so of preparation or marking, and off again to school for tennis coaching or something; home at five, withdrawing into the garage to occupy himself with his hobby, carpentry, until it was time to bathe the children. On Sundays they all went to church: Susan impeccable in a two-piece costume, the girls in frilly dresses and white hats, their blond hair plaited so tightly as to leave them sloe-eyed; Ben in his black tails – he was a deacon. An ordered and patterned life, with a place and time for everything. I don’t mean that he meekly or slavishly followed his schedule, only that he seemed to derive an indispensable sense of security from his routine.
He was amused by what he regarded as my “unsettled” nature–I was in Johannesburg to explore the possibilities of a move to the North where one could count on more rapid progress and success – and he took my ambition with a pinch of salt.
“Surely you would also like to get ahead?” I asked him pointedly, one afternoon when I’d joined him in the garage where he was working on a doll’s house for the children.
“Depends on what you mean by ‘getting ahead',” he said gently, holding a piece of wood up to his eye to check its evenness. “I tend to be suspicious of mathematical minds with their straight lines from A to B to C.”
“Don’t you want to become a school principal one day, or an inspector?”
“No. I don’t like administrative work.”
“Don’t tell me you just want to go on doing what you’re doing at the moment?”
“Why not?”
“When we were at varsity you had such definite dreams about a ‘happy society', a ‘new age'. What’s become of all that?”
With a grin he resumed his planing. “One soon finds out there’s no point in trying to reform the world.”
“So you’re happy to stay out of it?”
He glanced up, his grey eyes more serious than before. “I’m not sure it’s a matter of staying out of it. It’s just, well, I suppose some people are more private than others. Rather than trying to take the world by storm I think one can achieve more by doing quietly what your hand finds to do in your own little corner. And working with kids is a thankful job.”
“Are you happy then?”
“Happiness is a dangerous word.” He started marking the piece of wood for cutting dovetails. “Let’s say I’m content.” For a minute or so he went on working intently, then he added: “Perhaps that isn’t true either. How shall I put it? – I have the feeling that deep inside every man there’s something he is ‘meant’ to do. Something no one but he can achieve. And then it’s a matter of discovering what your own personal something is. Some find it quite early in life. Others drive themselves to distraction trying to find it. And still others learn to be patient and prepare themselves for the day when, suddenly, they’ll recognise it. Like an actor waiting for his cue. Or does that sound too far-fetched?”
“Are you one of those?”
He started tapping the chisel into the first joint. “I’m just marking time.” Shaking the hair from his eyes. “The main thing is to be ready when your moment comes. Because if you let it pass – why, then it’s gone, isn’t it?”
“In the meantime you’re making doll’s houses.”
He chuckled. “At least there’s some satisfaction in making something with your hands, in seeing an ordinary piece of wood take shape. And seeing the children’s faces when it’s finished” – he sounded almost apologetic – “well, it makes you realise it’s been worthwhile.”
“You’re really devoted to your children, aren’t you?”
“'Devoted’ sounds too easy, too mushy.” He obviously regarded my question much more seriously than I’d intended it. “You see, when you’re a child, you tend to live blindly. It’s only afterwards, once you have your own children, that you look back on yourself through them. And for the first
time you begin to understand what happened to you, and why it happened.” And then he confessed what he’d hidden from me before: “That’s why I’d love to have a son, you see, even though it may be selfish of me. I feel I cannot really come to grips with all my former selves unless I can relive it through a son. But of course that’s out of the question.”
“Susan?”
A brief sigh. “Well, she had a bad time with Linda and I cannot expect her to go through all that again.”
There was something cruel about pursuing my questions, but I did. Why? Because his contentment, his serenity struck me as a criticism of my own restlessness, a challenge to my way of life? Or because I refused to accept that one could really be so phlegmatic and at peace with oneself? Whatever it was, I asked him in a tone of deliberate provocation: “D’you think this is the ‘happily ever after’ I write about in my novels?”
“Probably not.” He made no attempt to evade me. “But there’s no point in sulking about what one hasn’t got, is there?” Using a small wad of sandpaper he began to smooth the wood. Then, with his apologetic chuckle: “I know Susan used to have other plans for me. She’s still dreaming her dreams.”
“Have you given up?”
“Of course I still have dreams. But I have the advantage of having learned, from a very early age, to make allowances for damn hard facts.”
“Meaning?”
“Don’t you remember then? I’m sure I told you long ago.”
It came back to me; and he filled in what I had forgotten. His father, who’d had to take over the farm of his wife’s family in the Free State. Not without a humble measure of success. Then came the Great Drought of Thirty-three, when Ben was nine or ten years old. They had to trek with the sheep, all the way to Griqualand West where, according to reports, there was some grazing left. A fatal mistake. When the drought closed in on them in the godforsaken district of Danielskuil, there was no way out.
“By that time I had some ewes of my own,” said Ben. “Not many. But every year my father had marked a few lambs for me. And that year the first lambs of my own were being born.” He fell quiet for a long time. Then, abruptly, angrily, he asked: “Have you ever cut the throat of a new-born lamb? Such a small white creature wriggling in your arms. Such a thin little neck. One stroke of the knife. Every single new lamb that’s born, because there’s nothing for them to eat and the ewes have no milk. In the end even the shrubs disappear. The thorn-trees grow black. The ground turns to stone. And day after day there’s the sun burning away whatever remains. Even the big sheep have to be slaughtered. When you look up you see the vultures above you. God knows where they come from, but they’re there. Wherever you come or go, they follow you. At night you start dreaming about them. Once you’ve been in a drought like that you never forget it. Just as well Ma and my sister had stayed behind on the farm. I don’t think they’d have been able to stand it. It was only Pa and me.” His tone became aggressive. “We had two thousand sheep when we set out for Danielskuil. When we came back a year later we had fifty left.”
“So you had to give up?”
“Yes, that was the end. Pa had to sell the farm. I’ll never forget the day he told Ma the news. He’d left the house very early that morning, not saying a word to anyone. We saw him walking to and fro on the dry fields, it seemed like hours. Then he came back. Ma was waiting in the passage as he came in from outside with the sun behind him. And on the stoep – what makes one remember something so ridiculous? – on the stoep our old servant, Lizzie, was standing with a chamber pot in her hand, on her way to empty it outside. When she heard Pa telling Ma we had to go away she dropped the pot. Scared to death she was, because Ma had a hell of a temper those days, but that morning she didn’t even scold Lizzie.”
“And then?” I prompted Ben when he stopped.
He looked up as if, for a moment, he’d forgotten what we had been talking about. Then he said laconically: “Then we left the farm and Pa found work on the railways. Later became a station master. We children loved it, my sister Louisa and myself. Those long train journeys every Christmas. But Pa had lost his spark. And Ma didn’t make it any easier for him. She carried on moaning and complaining, whining away year after year, until in the end she died. And Pa couldn’t get on without her, so he also died.”
He turned his back to me and went on with his work. There really was no more to be said.
The only other memory of my visit to them is of the last night. I stayed at home to baby-sit: Susan was rehearsing a radio play for the South African Broadcasting Corporation and Ben had gone to some meeting or other. When he came back we went to his study for a game of chess which went on for longer than I’d anticipated. So it was very late before I left him to enjoy his customary pause of solitude and silence. It was drizzling faintly as I walked across the yard to the kitchen door. Tiny insect soundsin the wet grass. A fresh earth-smell. When I came into my room the coffee tray was already waiting placidly on the bedside table, brightened by the inevitable little flower-pot. I was disappointed, having got used to the late last chat with Susan at night. I’d probably spent too much time with Ben.
I was already in bed when she came, after all. An almost inaudible knock. When I called, not quite sure that I’d really heard something, she came in. As always, she left the door open. A light summer gown. Her hair soft and curly on her shoulders. The scent of a woman who has relaxed in a warm bath. A scene from any of my best-sellers.
She sat on her usual place on the foot of my bed while I drank my coffee. I have no recollection of what we talked about. But I was intensely aware of her mere presence, sitting there, like that.
After I’d finished my coffee she got up to take the cup, leaning over me. Deliberately, or entirely by accident, the front of her gown fell open, revealing briefly, behind the sheer material, her breasts, vulnerable and white in the soft shadow, and the light-brown aureoles of her nipples.
I put out my hand and folded my fingers round her wrist.
For a moment she froze, looking straight at me as I still clutched her. What I saw in her eyes was fear. Of me, of herself? An expression I would have no trouble in describing in one of my love passages but which I can define only with difficulty now that I must try to be true to what really happened. “Naked anguish"?
I let go of her arm, and she kissed me briefly, nervously on my forehead before she went out and closed the door.
The real shock came much later. Nine months later, to be exact, when she gave birth to their son Johan.
Within the framework of our three lives, jointly and severally, that fortnight’s visit is an insignificant episode. But there is so little I can rely on now that I have to write about Ben that I had no choice but to explore it at some length. I’m not sure I really found anything; but I had to try. For the rest, I am left with the jumbled papers he dumped on me. The press cuttings and letters and photocopies and journals and scribbled notes. A passport photo of a girl with a sweet provocative face. The other photograph. Names. Gordon Ngubene. Jonathan Ngubene. Captain Stolz. Stanley Makhaya. Melanie Bruwer. And the possibilities suggested by my often misused imagination. I have to immerse myself in it, the way he entered into it on that first fatal day. Except that he did not know, and had no way of knowing, what was lying ahead; whereas I am held back by what I already know. What was unfinished to him is complete to me; what was life to him is a story to me; first-hand becomes second-hand. I must attempt to reconstruct intricate events looming behind cryptic notes; what is illegible or missing I must imagine. What he suggests I must expand: He says-he thinks – he remembers – he supposes. With my assortment of probabilities and memories and his disorganised evidence I must forge ahead against the dull obstacles of worry and confusion, trying to maintain at least a semblance of confidence or certainty. This is the burden I must take up, the risk I must run, the challenge I must accept. Trying to reconcile the calm and self-contained man I knew with the paranoic fugitive I met in town that day.
I
n a sense I owe it to him, or even to Susan. Report me and my cause aright! At the same time I have to grasp at him in an effort to write myself out of my own sterile patch. A complicating and aggravating factor.
Perhaps I would still have found it possible to accept that he deliberately walked into the passing car that night to lend suicide the more respectable appearance of an accident. But there was something amiss. I couldn’t put my finger on it, yet I knew something didn’t quite make sense. Now that final letter has arrived, a full week after his funeral, placing everything in the balance again. Now I have no choice. And it’s no use trying to blame him, for he is dead.
ONE
1
It all really began, as far as Ben was concerned, with the death of Gordon Ngubene. But from the notes he made subsequently, and from newspaper cuttings, it is obvious that the matter went back much further. At least as far as the death of Gordon’s son Jonathan at the height of the youth riots in Soweto. And even beyond that, to the day, two years earlier – represented in Ben’s papers by a receipt with a brief note scribbled on it – when he’d started contributing to the schooling of the then fifteen year old Jonathan.
Gordon was the black cleaner in the school where Ben taught History and Geography to the senior classes. In the older journals there are occasional references to “Gordon N.” or just “Gordon"; and from time to time one finds, in Ben’s fastidious financial statements, entries like “Gordon – R5.00"; or “Received from Gordon (repayment) – R5.00", etc. Sometimes Ben gave him special instructions about notes on his blackboard; on other occasions he approached him for small personal jobs. Once, when some money disappeared from the classrooms and one or two of the teachers immediately blamed Gordon for it, it was Ben who took the cleaner under his wing and instituted inquiries which revealed a group of matric boys to be the culprits. From that day Gordon took it upon himself to wash Ben’s car once a week. And when, after Linda’s difficult birth, Susan was out of action for some time, it was Gordon’s wife Emily who helped them out with housework.