by Damon Galgut
But before this can happen she’s back in the clinic again. She is still suicidal, she’s still a mess. She weighs fifty five kilograms and is starving herself. She is burning and cutting herself again. A lot of her friends still won’t have contact with her, and some who do have a secret compact with death themselves. She has acquired an otherworldly halo, both attractive and repellent, she has gone beyond some fatal threshold and managed to return.
She writes again after a few weeks have passed. She’s out of the clinic once more and has realized, she says, that whenever she feels suicidal she needs to get help. She sounds calmer now, more composed, or perhaps it is the flatness of depression. Jean is with her and they are touring around. We get on really well, she says, I’m delighted that he has come to visit. There seems to be a future for us as a couple. She adds that she will be going back to work in a couple of weeks and ends by saying, take care my friend and hope one day you find it in your heart to forgive me.
He doesn’t reply, simply because he can’t. There is no desire to punish her, any more than a means to forgive her, what happened has put them beyond that. He doesn’t know why she can’t see it herself. They are in a place where language has no purchase and, whatever happens, he doubts that this will change. The closest he can come to Anna is in speaking to her partner, which is how he still thinks of her, although technically she isn’t that any longer. She still loves Anna very intensely, but while Jean is in town she is keeping away. He asks what will happen once Jean has gone. Will you try again with her.
I don’t know, she says. I don’t know what she wants. I don’t think she knows herself.
Even in these conversations language will never be enough. What she’s been through is a special kind of heartbreak. She has looked after Anna, taken care of her, for almost eight years and there is no doubt that without her Anna would have died long ago. Yet now she has been sidelined, shoved into the wings, by Anna herself and by others allied with her. Anna’s family, who have never liked the idea of her being with a woman, have seized on this alternative future with a man and are pushing it delightedly. But I saw how it was with Jean and I know there’s nothing there, no future and hardly any past.
How little future will soon be revealed to everybody. The message comes just a few days later. He has known for a while now, since she made her attempt in Goa, that she will kill herself one day, and only the time and the circumstances are uncertain, and yet when he reads the words they still hit him like a physical force that propels him backwards in his chair. Anna is dead. On the day after Jean’s departure she took a massive overdose of pain-killers while she was alone in her apartment. Her sister became concerned when she didn’t return phone calls and got a locksmith to open the door and found her lying on her bed.
There is more, but the words are blotted out by the fog that has filled the room, erasing time. The last two months never happened, she is sleeping on that bed in Goa, he has just seen the medicine wrappers on the floor and realized what she’s done. He jumps up in shock and rushes out into the street. It’s as if he has somewhere to get to, something urgent to do. He wants to call for help, he wants to grab hold of somebody passing and tell them to find the doctor, he wants to keep her alive. It takes him a moment to understand that the news is irrevocable, it cannot be undone. Not now and not ever, because the dead do not return.
Even then his journey isn’t over, though in another sense it ended long ago. He considers returning to South Africa, but in truth he doesn’t want to, and what would be the point. So he continues travelling, or running away, up into the high mountains, to Ladakh. He only does return home, in fact, a month or two later, when there is a genuine threat of nuclear war between Pakistan and India, and his fumbling, half-hearted exit feels like a fitting conclusion to the story.
So he is not in Cape Town to see her body laid out for viewing in an open casket, or the huge service that overflows from St George’s cathedral, all the spectacle and public grief that she so ardently wanted, and that she seemed to think she’d be around to witness. He hears about these things, of course, and they evoke a sad, angry dread in him, like the news of an earthquake on the other side of the world. But the closest he comes to her again is a silent confrontation with a bag of ash and bones, all that’s left of her after the cremation. This is at her girlfriend’s house, the first time he goes to visit. He stares at the bag and pokes it with his finger. Shakes his head in amazement. It seems bizarre, to the point of bitter laughter, that a human being can be reduced to this.
A couple of years later, when he’s travelling in Morocco, he spends a night in Agadir and takes a taxi the next morning to a dusty hillside outside town. He has intended to buy flowers but hasn’t managed to find any, so he arrives empty-handed. The day is burning hot, he hasn’t slept properly the night before, he has a bad headache. You want me to wait, the taxi driver asks him. No, come back in half an hour. Is it enough time, half an hour. Yes, it should be enough.
He imagines he will easily find the spot and pay his respects and leave, but it doesn’t happen as he imagines. The taxi driver has dropped him in the wrong place, so he has to walk part-way down the hill. When he finds the European cemetery the gate is locked and he has to shout for somebody to let him in, and once inside he’s lost. The graves spread chaotically in all directions, with no clear logic, no plan. He stumbles up and down rows of headstones, names swimming past, and more than forty-five minutes have gone by when he arrives by chance at the one he’s looking for. It’s all exactly as Caroline told him, the cracked slab with its inscription, its final enclosing dates. Next to it, on the left, is a nameless brown hump of earth, the grave of a woman, a friend who was killed in the same accident. Her family didn’t have the means to bring her body home or to memorialize her properly.
Maybe it’s only the heat, or his headache, or the tiredness, but he finds himself suddenly, unexpectedly, sobbing. He tries to stop the tears, but they keep on coming. A huge emotion is welling up in him, unattached to the scene, he doesn’t know either of these people, after all, and they died a long time ago. But it seems unbearably sad that a life should come to rest here, on a sun-blasted hill above a foreign city, with the sea in the distance.
Caroline’s story from the beach is with him again, memory and words inseparable from each other. But it takes him a while to realize who he’s really weeping for. Lives leak into each other, the past lays claim to the present. And he feels it now, maybe for the first time, everything that went wrong, all the mess and anguish and disaster. Forgive me, my friend, I tried to hold on, but you fell, you fell.
The moment seems to drag out for hours, but it’s probably only a minute or two before he pulls himself together. He feels awful, but also relieved somehow, emptied out. By now the taxi driver is hooting impatiently outside. The day is wearing on and he has a bus to catch, a journey to complete. It’s time to go. He dries his eyes and picks up a tiny stone from the ground, one like millions of others all around, and slips it into his pocket as he walks towards the gate.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Stephen Watson, Tony Peake, Nigel Maister, Ben Williams, and Marion Hänsel. My especial gratitude to Philip Gourevitch and his fine team at the Paris Review, where these pieces first appeared.
The quote on page 46 comes from William Faulkner.
Copyright © 2010 by Damon Galgut
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Galgut, Damon, 1963–
In a strange room: three journeys / Damon Galgut.
eISBN: 978-0-7710-3598-2
I. Ti
tle.
PR9369.3.G34I5 2010 823’.914 C2009-907146-0
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
Published in South Africa by Penguin Books (South Africa) Ltd., and in Great Britain by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
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v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Part One: The Follower
Part Two: The Lover
Part Three: The Guardian
Acknowledgements
Copyright