by Andre Brink
She shook her head, still laughing. ‘It’s a terribly rude story Aunt Myra told me this morning.’
‘Tell me.’
‘You’re too young for it.’
‘Please, Mam!’
‘I’ll tell you when you’re eighteen.’
‘Promise?’
‘Cross my heart and strike me dead.’
She thought I would forget, but I didn’t. On the morning of my eighteenth birthday I reminded her. She frowned for a moment, then burst out laughing. ‘I know I promised, Boetie,’ she said, ‘but it really is still too rude for your young ears. Tell you what: you ask me again when you’re twenty-one.’
‘That’s not fair, Mum.’
‘Who ever said the world was a fair place?’
I did not forget. On my twenty-first birthday I demanded to hear the story. This time she postponed it to my thirtieth. And when at last, on that day of days, I cornered her to hear the truth, the whole, and nothing but, she gazed at me in bright surprise, shook her head, and said, ‘I’m sorry, Boetie, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
And now it certainly is too late, for both of us.
I lean over and pat one of the small crooked claws on the sheet. Like so many times before I gaze at her: the tiny little creature, crumpled like a piece of paper thrown away because the wrong words have been written on it (that is the problem: we have no chance to revise). How often, since my childhood, have we been at loggerheads. I could never satisfy her that I was working hard enough, and then I would be locked up in my room until Father came home; and he had only one way of dealing with malingering or recalcitrance. But afterwards, when he was working in his study, she would tiptoe into my room and gently rub ointment into the welts and cuts and bruises. It doesn’t matter that she no longer understands. She has her moments of illumination. And even when her mind wanders, she is here for me.
I lean over and say in her ear, ‘I love you, Mam.’
‘I suppose I love you too,’ she says, and closes her eyes behind the monstrous glasses, and dozes off peacefully. But it lasts barely a minute. Then she wakes up and looks around her in bewilderment, almost in fear. ‘Where am I? What place is this?’
‘This is where you live, Mam.’
‘Where is Gerhard?’ she asks.
‘Who is Gerhard, Mam?’
‘Don’t you remember Gerhard?’
‘No. What about him?’
‘And Jeremy?’
‘Who was Jeremy?’
‘And—what was his name again? Michael or Michiel or something?’
‘Mam, I don’t know. Who were these people?’
‘Which people?’
We go round and round. Every now and then there is a glimmer of possibility, I feel myself approaching a likelihood of revelation, of discovery, but then it fades away again. Is this where I am heading also? Will I, too, one day, wonder: Who was Helena? Who was Daphne? Who Nicolette? Bonnie? Freckled Frances? Tania? Who in God’s name was Rachel? I must get on with these notes. Before I forget. Before it all gets lost.
***
There is another woman from my years in Paris I must mention here. I took her home with me, and she spent a night in my apartment: but I do not know her name. All I know is that my notes will be incomplete without her.
I was coming back from a tryst in one of the narrow side streets just off the place de la République. (It was some time after Nicolette had left me and I was living in the rue des Filles du Calvaire at the time.) It must have been two or three in the morning, and this bundle of rags was lying in the gutter. It was raining lightly. As I sidestepped the bundle, it moved. I stopped. It sat up. It was an old woman. She stank to high heaven; and alcohol was the least part of it. Sometime during the night I tried to pin an age to her: seventy, eighty? But one cannot be too sure. She might have been forty, going on ninety.
Why did I stop? Surely I should have known better. Perhaps I was simply immobilized by the smell.
Whatever it was, having stopped I couldn’t just stride off.
‘Do you need help, Madame?’ I asked.
She responded with an obscenity; with it came a blast of breath that nearly felled me.
No, she didn’t need help, she was perfectly happy to die right there.
What could I do?
I painfully levered the old crone into a standing position, offered her what support I could, passing my left arm behind her back and thrusting the hand under her left arm. It came to rest on a sagging breast, like an old calabash in a crumpled bag. She suddenly giggled coquettishly: there is no other way to describe it. I held my breath and grimly staggered on. It must have taken us half an hour to reach my place, and almost as long to mount the worn stairs to my garret. Once home, I thought I should offer her something to eat first, but the stench was too overpowering. I opened all the windows, although the January air was freezing. Then, leaving her on the couch in the lounge, I went to the bathroom to run a bath as hot as a human body could bear, and half dragged, half marched her over the threshold, showed her the bath, nearly shoved her head right into it, and ordered her to clean herself up while I went in search of something she could wear. There were various pieces of female clothing in the vast armoire that dominated my bedroom—shirts and skimpy tops, a variety of filmy underwear, a jersey or two, narrow skirts, fishnet stockings, that kind of thing—but few of them seemed of much use in the circumstances. After a long search I did manage to assemble a weird-looking outfit which would just have to do.
When I knocked on the bathroom door there was no answer. For a moment I was seized by panic: suppose she’d died on me? I pushed open the door. She was lying on the floor, half undressed, snoring, fast asleep. I shook her awake, but it was clear that there was no other way: I would have to put her in the bath and watch over her to make sure she didn’t drown.
She was like a chicken rejected by a supermarket—a chicken as they are sold in France, with the beaked, closed-eyed head still attached to the long floppy neck with its spare stubble of feathers. I washed her. She gave her silly giggle again when I went between her legs, between her scrawny buttocks. I thought of Mam: but that was twenty years ago, and compared to where she is today she was still a hale and hearty eighty-something. Yet it was not revolting. It was like coming face to face with—what? It sounds too easy, even insulting, to say woman. But that was what it was. I thought of all the girls’ and women’s bodies I had caressed over the years of my life, all the way from the giggling little Katrien in the dark, and Driekie among the fig leaves, to those nameless ever-ready ones in London and Paris, and it was as if, somehow, they were all subsumed in this little bundle of bones with its claws for hands and feet, and its sagging head, and the grey crow’s nest between her stick legs which made her look like a rag doll with her stuffing coming out. Poor naked wretch.
I washed her with infinite care, and tried to hold her up while I dried her in a huge spongy towel. The whole place would have to be disinfected afterwards; but I did not think of it then. All that was important for the moment was to get this unbelievable, yet all-too-believable emblem of humanity dried, and dressed, with my own dressing gown to cover up; and then to get some food into her. As she kept dropping off to sleep, I had to spoon-feed her. Much of it dribbled down her chin, and some was splattered on her shrunken chest. But in the end it was done, and then I lay her down on the bed, covered her with every blanket in the place, and withdrew to my lounge-cum-study to read, and make some notes, and to keep my vigil.
It was almost noon when she woke up. She seemed stronger now, and ate a surprisingly hearty breakfast. And then she became hurried and spoke about going. I tried to find out where she might go to, but that made her angry. I had no right to probe into her private affairs, she squeaked at me in a high little voice like a wet rubber glove moving across a polished surface.
Only when she had
already opened the door to go, did she stop. A thought appeared to have struck her. Her face contorted in a rictus, she cupped both hands over her groin and with feverish, glittering eyes—as if she was the one who was doing me a favor—asked, ‘Tu veux? You want?’
No, Madame, I did not want.
And then she left. She would not allow me to accompany her. I heard her stomping slowly down the six sets of spiraling stairs to the ground floor; and then the loud bang of the front door.
Of course I never saw her again. But she is with me all the time. Whenever I am with a new woman. And whenever I am all by myself.
***
A final assault in Baghdad appears to be underway. Suddenly everything is happening at unprecedented speed. My nights are full of sound and fury. The city is now almost completely encircled: the First Brigade holds the airport and the western parts, the Second is in the process of securing the south, the Third holds the north-west, and the marines are in the north-east. The blacked-out capital is dominated by the sound of heavy machine-gun fire, rocket launchers and artillery. No one has as yet reported the discovery of the weapons that brought them here.
The Iraqi Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, insists persuasively that the Iraqi forces are still pushing back the invaders. In fact, he affirms, ‘there are none of their troops in Baghdad.’ We can all sleep peacefully tonight.
And of course, what keeps me awake in front of the small screen in the dark, is knowing that George must also be somewhere there, taking photographs perhaps of the very same events I am looking at. It places me both there and here, a disconcerting simultaneity.
***
If I do think back to that morning with the photographs in your studio, there is a feeling of completeness about it. What had happened, what could have happened, was now accomplished, and we could go on. There was a serene inevitability about it. It was George himself who had said, so long ago, in a moment of illumination, ‘What must happen, will happen.’ And Ecclesiastes: A time to every purpose under the heaven. This may seem a shocking analogy, but I think about it, now, the way I think about your death. For so many weeks, ever since the accident, while you were lying in a coma, I lived in fear, in unspeakable terror. Any moment the telephone might ring and someone would say: She is dead. In the beginning, that was what I most feared to hear: that you were dead. Later, as the slow dark weeks dragged on, what I dreaded was that you might not die. Because it was unbearable and degrading to see you like that, wasting away, going and going, but never gone. I couldn’t sleep at night. I could find no rest. Waiting, waiting. Knowing it might go on for weeks, months, even for years. How could I see that happening to you? To you?
And then, on that morning of March 20, at seventeen minutes to ten, you died. At last it was over. I could rest now. The worst had happened, for nothing could be worse than that. I was flooded by a broad, deep, absolute relief, a peace such as I had never known.
This was something like the feeling I had after we had renounced the possibility of making love that morning. No need to concern myself with questions and surmisings and wonderings any more. I know I had accepted, long before that morning, and you had most explicitly confirmed it, that nothing could ever ‘happen’ between us. Not just for George’s sake, but for ourselves. In spite of this, there had always been the possibility. Even without being conscious of it, there had been the unrealized anxiety: Was it, by any chance, still going to happen even if it shouldn’t? And if so, when? And how? It was debilitating and exhausting. Humiliating too. But now there was no more to wonder about. This was the real peace that passeth understanding.
It meant that, without ever again having to talk about it, we could go on with our lives. That unnatural tension was gone. You could be you, I could be me; together we could face George, and ourselves, and be a threesome as before, only better equipped and more fully than before.
When he came back to Cape Town, we both went to the airport to meet him. And without the slightest ripple the stream of our friendship flowed on, deep and calm. There was a special celebration on my birthday in the first week of August. (Three weeks later there was a much quieter and more private little celebration for Mam in the old-age home; but I did take her a huge cake with a hundred and two candles, which I had to blow out for her while she looked on mumbling about the unnecessary fuss.) It had been your idea, you told me later, to go completely over the top, with streamers and singing minstrels and a cake from which a naked girl would jump; but sanity had prevailed (with some nudging from George, I’m sure) and it became a very classy affair at your home, with you in a full-length black dress (but barefoot) and your light-brown, curly hair piled high on your head, and George and me in dinner suits; and candles everywhere—from the entrance, down the passage, and all over the studio and the lounge, even on the balcony. The weather cooperated: the rain of the previous days cleared up, the wind died down, and the sun put on a dazzling spectacle over a newborn world.
You overwhelmed me with your gifts: George gave me a photograph he’d taken of me, surreptitiously, on our Cedarberg excursion. Yours was a small sculpture, an exquisite little Madonna, so delicately beautiful that I was almost scared to touch it. And the meal, a joint effort, was a gastronomic hymn. George made pan-fried duck’s liver, prepared in raspberry vinegar and served with poached pears; you rounded it off with floating islands. Each of the wines was a masterpiece in its own right—Thelema, Meerlust, Haute Cabrière.
But there was something missing from the evening. Instead of the customary, spontaneous warmth there was an almost studied politeness, a distance that upset me all the more because of the obvious efforts both of you were making to appear your usual brilliant selves.
A disconcerting cooling had already begun. And I knew exactly how and why. The balcony was where it had first surfaced. It had nothing to do with the three of us as individuals, but was imposed on us from outside, which lent an edge of the unnecessary to it. It began, in fact, about a week before the birthday, with a nasty episode two houses down your little street. The owners, with whom you both were quite friendly, had been out to work (he is an architect, she a script person with a film company) when, in broad daylight, at two or three in the afternoon, a couple of strangers had arrived with a huge box on the back of a truck, ostensibly to make a delivery. In spite of the recent burglaries in the area, the housekeeper, Faridah, who had been with the couple for years, suspected nothing amiss and opened the door for them. But the moment they were inside, they overpowered Faridah, tied her up and ransacked the place. The truck was loaded with loot: TVs, recorders, washing machine, the metal gun cabinet, antique furniture, a heavy safe which they removed with angle grinders and blowtorches. And then they returned to rape Faridah. (‘They looked such decent people,’ she sobbed afterwards, when she was interviewed by the police in hospital.)
Both George and you were in shock when, not suspecting anything, I arrived at your home for a drink that evening. The two previous burglaries in the street had been bad enough, but at least had not been violent, and as several months had elapsed since then, calm had returned to the neighborhood. Most days, when George was away on assignments or shootings of his own, you left your front door open. But this, George insisted, would now have to stop. One just could not take chances any more. You agreed, and so did I. But a few days later, when George arrived with two men from a security company, you were up in arms. They started taking measurements. Every door and window had to be protected, a daunting gate operated by remote control had to be installed at the top of the driveway, and the large balcony in front of your studio had to be closed in with burglar bars. Sensible measures, all of them, obviously; but the idea of having your wonderful view of the bay obscured by a grille was too much.
‘I won’t live in a prison,’ you said.
‘A cat burglar can easily climb up the front, on to the balcony, and come in from there,’ George pointed out.
‘Then let him. I can’t work behind bars.’
‘Don’t be unreasonable, Rachel,’ he pleaded.
‘Chris?’ You turned to me. ‘Help me. Make this man see reason.’
He unexpectedly took offense at that. ‘I am not “this man”!’ he protested. ‘I am your husband. I love you. I want to do this for your own safety.’
‘Why didn’t you talk to me first? How can you just turn up here with a truckload of men and start putting up bars in front of my studio?’
‘It’s not a truckload of people, Rachel. It’s just the manager and his assistant.’
‘Well, they can fuck off. I don’t want them here and I won’t be a prisoner in my own house.’
The visitors, deeply embarrassed and not knowing what to do, slunk out of the room.
Once again you turned to me: ‘Aren’t you going to help me?’ you asked angrily. ‘How can you let George do this to me?’
‘I’m sure Chris will understand reason,’ said George, an expression of pure misery on his big face.
‘Are the men now ganging up against me?’ you exploded.
‘Look, chaps,’ I said awkwardly, ‘I don’t think I should be drawn into this.’
‘But you can see reason, can’t you?’ you appealed, your cheeks flushed with emotion.
‘If Chris can see reason, he will understand my concern for your safety,’ said George.
This was unmanageable, and terribly unfair—to our friendship, to me. All I could do was to back out. And leaving everything unresolved, I mumbled my apologies and left. The security man and his assistant were still huddled outside, next to their battered bakkie. They shook their heads at me and shrugged as I came past.
In these circumstances, my birthday only a few days later could not possibly be the celebration we had been looking forward to. Not one of us referred to what had happened, and although I was dying to know the outcome, I dared not ask any questions. Your studied silence made me think—at least hope—that you had begun to resign yourself to the inevitable.