Imaginings of Sand

by Andre Brink

  Now the marriage. I’m afraid there was neither glamour nor romance involved. It was an eminently practical solution to several irritating problems. First, after the rather sleazy beginning with the fake attorney, I withdrew, for quite some time, into the safety of celibacy; but natural inclination, and an exceptionally cold winter, prompted reconsideration. There was a fair amount of fucking going on in the circles into which I’d moved, and as the temperature dropped and nocturnal loneliness became acute, I availed myself of some of the opportunities on offer. Not bad; not particularly good either, and certainly not earth-moving. For a while it served its purpose in making friends and influencing people; but in due course – in the ‘medium term’ as the bright and eager political analysts around me would say – it also created enemies, and there was a hint of the vicious circle about the whole exercise. While I’ve always tended to agree with Ouma Kristina that only a person who dares to make enemies deserves friends, there was little sense in gratuitously accumulating resentments. Also, quite frankly, I discovered, to my bemused reassurance, if not entirely without alarm, that I am at heart more monogamous than I’d thought. And as I happened to find myself, at that time, in a reasonably pleasing relationship with one of the AAM leadership, I proposed marriage and was accepted. Jean-Claude Thompson was his name, JC in the inner circles, a name stuck on him by a doting French mother. This connection might have contributed something to his prowess as a lover, notably in the oral department; I shall not deny that it pulled some weight in my decision, which really was not taken quite as lightly as it may sound, but the primary consideration was that matrimony provided the readiest access to a work permit.

  If this sounds callous, I should argue that there was no deceit between us, both knew exactly what was involved; above all, it was a strategy for survival, and at that time this was what being in London was about. I obtained my qualification; I plunged into teaching, first in a maddening comprehensive in Hackney where all-out war characterised the milder days, later in a somewhat more manageable school in Camden Town, and finally in one near Paddington (which made the flat in Sussex Gardens particularly useful); and I tried to do my bit for the Struggle. It hardly amounted to much more than taking part in demos and drives, getting involved in fund-raising, doing some public liaising (JC proclaimed that my backside could make the difference between a two-hundred- and a five-hundred-pound donation; and this was why I eventually gave it up), acting on committees dealing with women’s issues. Enough, certainly, to keep me occupied for forty-eight hours a day. Its real reward lay in the knowledge that with every action I was striking my little blow against everything my father represented.

  Life changed when I fell pregnant. Both JC and I were caught, in every sense, unprepared; the urge had overtaken us one summer weekend in a field of grass near Stowe-on-Wye, JC had done his reputation proud, and there it was. I must try to be as matter-of-fact as possible. Am I – still – scared I may not be able to handle the emotion? Perhaps it is just a natural aversion of melodrama, in a family that has seen more than enough of it over the years. I made no scene then, at least not publicly; I shouldn’t now.

  But why did it leave me with such a feeling of devastation? Perhaps it began on the day, a week over my time, when I took the test. It was like having been caught out in some minor misdemeanour, no more; but when, affecting nonchalance, I communicated the result to JC that evening, his only reaction, without even looking up from his paper, was, ‘So when are you going?’

  There was no reason at all to turn it into an argument; but his total lack of concern – his automatic assumption that there would be no discussion – provoked me.

  ‘Going where?’ I asked.

  ‘To have it done.’

  ‘To have what done?’

  ‘Are you daft or something? The abortion.’

  We’d agreed, long before, that we never wanted children; that was not the issue. It was the way he took for granted that it would be done, as if I had no choice at all, as if it should concern me no more than an in-growing toenail or a bunion.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he asked with a touch of irritation, ‘Don’t tell me –’

  ‘I’ll make an appointment for some time next week,’ I said, and left the room.

  That week, and the weeks after the brief impersonal visit to the clinic, were the only time I felt a pang of missing my family. No, not my family. My sister. And of course Ouma Kristina. For some reason it was Anna I chose to write to. Ouma, I knew, I could talk to on one of her nocturnal visits. To my parents, in due course, I would only mention that ‘I’d lost the baby’. But what I was in need of now was sisterly closeness. In a way it served me well, if not right, when no reply came. It finally made me accept, as if there’d ever been any doubt, that I would – could – never go back. Nothing, not even the deliberate burning of my bridges through my involvement with the anti-apartheid cause, had been so emphatic in driving home to me just how irrevocable my decision had been.

  All that I could absorb. What was more difficult to deal with was the loneliness of my nights, JC sleeping peacefully beside me; or feeling my stomach contract whenever, in bus or tube, or walking past a block of flats or a green enclosed garden in an oval square, I would hear a baby cry. The kind of sentimentality I’d never have given myself credit for. I actually became weepy, for several months. I had bad dreams. I even went for therapy for a while. In the end, an end that was not very long in coming, it caused JC and me to split up. I accept my share of responsibility. But what got me in the guts was the way he became distrustful of me, as if the experience had revealed a lack of substance and dependability, even of credibility, in me; a kind of female instability that somehow threatened his male certainties, even the range of future choices available to him. So I told him, in as businesslike a manner as I’d once asked him to marry me, to fuck off; and we went through the necessary legal rigmaroles, and one particularly pleasant late September day we were divorced.

  JC was considerate enough to move to the Paris office, or perhaps it was simply a better offer. What mattered was that his move made it possible for me to continue with my political activities, even though ‘dabbling’ might be a better word. There was some necessity for it, a need to persuade myself, perhaps, that there was a larger destiny involved; most importantly, I needed the sense of involvement, of solidarity, of a ready-made circle of friends to stave off loneliness; in due course I could come to terms with what had happened, life does have a way of going on; but I doubt that I could have faced the humiliation of admitting, to my family, that the move abroad had been a failure. There remained an urgency to prove that I could make it.

  Contact with the family in South Africa (I could no longer bring myself to think of it as ‘back home’) tailed off to the perfunctory card at Christmas, the brief scribble for birthdays. Only with Ouma did I carry on a more regular, if by no means substantial, correspondence – a letter of two or three pages, perhaps four, a couple of times a year. She made it clear that she missed me, but she never exhorted me to come back; if that had to happen, as she believed it should, it would. She knew me too well, and herself too well, to insist. And in her wise, unflappable way, in a handwriting that grew steadily larger and more erratic over the years, crawling across the page like the irregular footprints of some unclassified insect, she sustained me in whatever I undertook, without ever presuming to enquire precisely what it was.

  More important than her letters were her visits. Shifting sands, these, I know; but among all the quirks of our family this one, perhaps, is not so outlandish. Others would call it dreams; I knew they were nocturnal visits, in the course of which she would allow me to unburden myself and then offer the simple but profound reassurance of her solidarity. She might not always approve, but she was always there. ‘If that is what you really want to do, then by all means do it.’ And if it appeared mad or irresponsible to others, she couldn’t care less, ‘You’re the only judge, Kristien. Go for it.’ That, more
than anything else, kept me going for eleven years.

  There is not much more to tell. The odd affair, some quite fulfilling in their way, others considerably less so; the unavoidable occasional one-night stand, ranging from the hilarious to the briefly ecstatic to the unsavoury. Then settling down, if such a phrase dare be used, with Michael, whose worst demonstration of eccentricity, during the three years of our shared life, was waking up with a muffled scream one night, explaining that he’d seen a footnote crouching at the end of the bed.

  The only exception to it all was Sandile Hlati. For once in my life – so far the only time, although I reserve the right to be surprised again – I was in love. Unquestioningly, unconditionally, un-whatever-elsely, proverbial head over real heels. If we didn’t have to leave so early on the first morning after the first night, I’d have hung out the sheets. Sandile was in the ANC office, he’d just recently been posted there, after a spell in Prague. A beautiful man; but let me not wax lyrical. He was considerate, he discussed everything with me, he cared for my opinion, his laughter was infectious, his enjoyment of life brought a glow of embers to the stomach; thank God he was also human, which means that he could be, at times, headstrong, infuriating, overreacting, pedantic or suddenly morose; we could talk for eleven hours without stopping for a break, and then make love for – I never counted. I just know how surprised I was, without fail, when it was over, at how incredibly late, or early, it had become. Sandile was a source of constant wonder. He could be endlessly attentive; yet when there was work to do nothing, not even my most provocative attempts at distraction, could succeed. He was dedicated. He was passionate. He loved my feet. He was left-handed, like me. He was, secretly, a poet. He was brilliant. He was, above all, married.

  I’m not particularly proud of any of my relationships with men. But I had always, out of an old-fashioned, perhaps atavistic, sense of propriety, meticulously steered clear of married men; and I had an unfailing instinct to detect matrimony. In another life I might have been a customs officer’s drug-sniffing dog.

  When I first met Sandile, at a drab office function on a drab day that suddenly lit up, all the signs were there; and he made no attempt to dissimulate. Even when, as Ouma Kristina might phrase it, the wetness came, I was resolved to steer clear. We very quickly became good friends. It would be, I resolved, as it had been with Jason, if for quite different reasons. But even Jason would have been no match for Sandile. I’m not going to blame the stars, or destiny, or poor old God. It was us. After a certain cape had been rounded we refused to resist any more. And we didn’t try to find excuses or explanations either – the pressures of work, the reality of the threats under which we lived (even in London there were agents and killers about; recently, in Lusaka, a whole ANC safe house had been blown up), the misery, real or imagined, of exile, the shortness of life, or whatever other pretext that had served its purpose in the course of human events – but, when the time came, acknowledged our love, for love I maintain it was, and plunged into it as one would dive, naked, into the cliché of a fathomless pool.

  Even so we were extremely discreet about it: it was the very condition of our love, and I don’t think anyone ever had the slightest whiff of suspicion.

  It lasted for five months, seventeen days, and thirteen hours.

  Then I met his wife. Nozipho. She had just returned from an extended visit to her family who’d travelled to Botswana to be with her since she was, obviously, barred from South Africa. He had spoken to me about her; I had asked. We had never pretended that she didn’t exist. But meeting her, with two bright-eyed small children in tow, six and four years old respectively, was different. Nozipho was slight and very well dressed, not particularly beautiful, but with a wide and wholly trusting smile, and eyes that showed a deep contentedness with the world, however horrible it was. She had a relaxed manner with the children; an even easier way with Sandile, the easiness of a body that has no secrets for another, yet has retained its core of mystery. If that doesn’t sound too corny.

  We spent only an hour or two together; there were several of the other ANC people with us. It was a very curious experience. For the first time – and that includes the bad cramps I’d suffered after the abortion – I discovered what it really means when one’s womb contracts, a pain more acute than anything merely physical. Yet at the same time I felt incredibly aloof, distant, detached, knowing with unflinching clarity what I should do. And when he kissed me good-night as I left the party, I pressed his hand; and he acknowledged it.

  The real hurt, the tears, his and mine, came afterwards. But the worst was already over. And we were both strong enough to see it through. To say that it was for the sake of his family makes it sound sanctimonious, or trivial, if not both. There was no feeling of doing a noble or a lofty thing; only the inevitable thing. What they had, in that family, should not be jeopardised by anything as selfish and private as passion. He made it easier, after a few months, the blackest and most desperate few months of my life, by asking to be posted elsewhere. The executive was reluctant; they needed his skills in London. Also, since he couldn’t divulge the real reason for his request, it wasn’t easy to persuade them. But Sandile went to see the president himself, and I presume that speaking man to man he was able to confide the full situation to him, for his request was granted and he was sent to Washington. We’ve been in touch since then, not all that regularly, our letters marked by the restraint our memories necessarily imposed on us. And eventually, as it does tend to happen, alas, the fierceness of the passion subsided into a dull ache, until even that seemed resolved – except, rarely but preciously, in an unguarded moment.

  I continued to work for the ANC, over weekends mainly, but gradually the early enthusiasm wore thin. Without my wishing to admit it, the time for stocktaking and soul-searching had come. There was nothing wrong with the Struggle; on the contrary. Its issues were real, urgent, clear-cut. But that was part of my problem. I suppose the context of British politics, so prosaic and predictable (at least on the surface), drained some of my enthusiasm, made me dubious about any issue where manichean choices appeared possible. More importantly, there was the growing feeling, right or wrong, that I was nowhere near anything like the eye of a storm, but floundering somewhere on the sidelines, part of a support system, not the real thing, doing manageable womanly things, expected to toil selflessly in the shadow of the men. In the distance, in the far south, under the fulminations and shaking finger of a demented president, the convulsions of a white regime in its final, dangerous agony sent dark and desperate waves across the world: massacres, assassinations, disappearances, torture, detentions, corruption, necklacings. To all of that we had to find answers, drawing up plans and programmes, devising counter-attacks and infiltrations, arranging conferences and clandestine meetings. I felt myself more and more of a futile appendix, no vital organ. If there was a rainbow of hope, ever, I belonged to that other, mistier, hazier shadow-image of the true rainbow in its full spectrum of glory. Blame me; not the ANC. There were women in the forefront. But I was never one of them, and gradually my enthusiasm waned. History had passed me by; at best, I’d been relegated to a kind of easy alternative. After the news of Father’s death I stopped altogether. There was nothing dramatic about it; I just couldn’t see much sense in it any more, it had gone on for too long. I couldn’t see it ever ending – those terrible states of emergency, one succeeding the other, murders, raids on neighbouring countries, the whole subcontinent appearing to be spiralling down a drain of mindless violence. Had I become a traitor to the cause? Hardly. I just didn’t have enough energy left to go on hoping, believing; unlike those who’d dedicated their whole life to the Struggle, I was gently spilled on a sandbank and left behind, a bit weary, a bit cynical, a bit guilty, nothing really profound.

  The last time Sandile wrote to me, already well over a year ago, was to say that they were going back, going home. There was no need to stay away; the exiles were returning, amnesty had been accorded, he was to be part
of the transitional processes leading to these elections, next week, everybody is expecting with so much uncertainty, spoken or unspoken. Not a word since then, although his name has often cropped up in the newspapers, sometimes his photograph. Sandile, my love. Part of the entire unresolved past. No, Anna, I do not travel lightly.

  6

  WE ARE SITTING in a tea room in the main street, our business accomplished. I look around, invaded by memories of coming here on Saturday mornings, with the family or with Ouma, on summer visits to the farm; of arguments between Anna and me over ice-creams and milk shakes, while Father and Mother sat staring past each other, having run out of conversation years before; or of animated discussion and uproarious laughter with Ouma when the two of us were alone. (This was where we celebrated the acquisition of the bra at Shapiro’s emporium: I was already wearing it – feeling unspeakably dignified and mature – under my T-shirt, where it must have shown up at best as an untidy bandage.) The place has undergone the predictable renovation: knotty pine, Formica, red curtains draped on brass rails in home-made swags and tails, huge laminated – and already fly-stained – menus.

  Just after the tea and scones have been flung down before us by an inept but well-meaning waitress in a stained pink uniform with a frilly cap, I catch sight of Anna’s face as it pinches up into a fixed gaze; looking in the direction of her stare I see a stranger approaching from the door, Tall and lean, almost gaunt, sun-tanned, in rolled-up shirtsleeves and jeans, he appears to hesitate when he notices her expression; but he is already committed to the approach.