Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  Inevitably, much of my time went into rethinking the relationship with Abbie. In the beginning I recoiled in revulsion and refused to dwell on it. But I could not possibly evade it. Her betrayal became the point of convergence of so many liaisons of my life. Betrayals committed by others, and most excruciatingly (often even unwittingly) by myself. Only, hers was worse because it was so flagrant, and all the more so as it was so completely unexpected. I had trusted her all the way. How could she, a colored woman, have been lured into infiltrating the UDF and spying on us for the apartheid government? Endless questions, all futile. All that mattered was the stark fact of it. This was what, after days and nights of searching all the recesses of my mind and memory, brought me to make some kind of peace with it. I couldn’t ever forget it; if one day in the future I ran into Abbie again, I might yet explode in rage and feelings of revenge. But as time went by, I remembered it no longer as an unnatural or incomprehensible act. On the contrary, it became all too familiar, domesticated. Betrayal was woven into the tapestry of my time, my country. Look at me, I thought: here I am, the outcome of the history and the space of this land. Every turn and convulsion and shiver of history over the last century, I could mark with the memory of a woman. I bear them upon my body like scars and bruises—from the Great Drought that brought Katrien to my bed, past Anna in the elections of ’48 to Abbie in the convulsions of the present states of emergency.

  Through Abbie and her betrayal I reached out towards all those who had preceded her. I tried to be as precise in my memories as I could: Katrien’s wriggling warmth; Driekie among the sandpapery fig leaves, the red stains left by my hands on her thin white thighs; Daphne’s crazy dance in the moonlight; Bonnie thrashing her head to and fro on the office floor; Melanie covered in sea spray; Helena in her Madonna pose, holding little Pieter’s small naked body against her after they had come from their bath and I approached them with a soft white towel to wrap them in; Marion on the beach by moonlight, and in the harsh morning light at the door to her parents’ bedroom; Nicolette on a Paris morning in a shaft of sunlight; Tania naked in a wine barrel in Bordeaux; Nastasya Filippovna as white and still as marble in death, with the fly buzzing over her bare foot and prone body under the sheet to settle at her head… Enough to feed on for a lifetime, let alone six weeks.

  Being in solitary confinement actually made it easier. Hell is other people. Not that I myself was necessarily good company—I was not even strictly predictable; often in those days I discovered with horror, but never without some fascination, that I had become, or had always been?, a stranger to myself—but it was preferable to the irritations, the invasions, the depredations, the sheer boredom of the company of others. Which was something my captors had not bargained for; I did not readily respond to any of their meticulously assembled stereotypes. Also, I was no callow youth. Two months earlier I had turned sixty-three (what a birthday celebration Abbie had laid on for me, the little traitor). I’m sure I wasn’t indulged in any way because of my age or—shamefully—the fact that I was white (that had not prevented them from murdering Dr. Neil Aggett not so long before); but it might just, at least occasionally, have prompted some tiny forbearance in one or other of my tormentors. Most pertinently, I had by then seen enough of life to be at least in some measure prepared for whatever they could come up with. How many scenes of detention, incarceration, torture, even judicial murder, had I described in my books over the years? It was almost salutary to compare my fictions with these new, lived facts. Material for a new book…?

  Certainly, being there, being held by them, was in some ways easier to bear than the long years of constant anticipation and fear, all the maddening questions about when it would happen, and how it would turn out. Here, at least, my life was clear and hard and circumscribed within the four dirty walls of my cell. Even the graffiti on them were a source of entertainment and intrigue.

  But this makes it sound almost flippant, far too easy. There were indeed days, hours, moments when I came close to breaking. If only they had known. But the last vestiges of some kind of savage pride helped me to conceal it. Another month, another week, perhaps only another day, might have taken me beyond the point of no return, beyond the thin red line the Americans in Iraq were so obsessed with; but something was working in mysterious ways to ensure that they stopped short of the coup de grâce, without even realizing it themselves. And so I was decanted on an unmercifully white-hot day on the streets of Oudtshoorn, shaken, but not broken. I found my way to a bookshop where I could count on being recognized (even in spite of my filthy and disheveled appearance), and ask for help, and be offered a temporary home to sleep, a friendly place to recover in, eventually even a lift to Cape Town.

  What had made them give up? They could so easily have kept me for a year; for however long it pleased them or their mad master. I heard afterwards about protests and petitions, not just locally, but by PEN, by Amnesty International, by publishers’ associations in Europe and the US. But that neither guaranteed nor explained anything at all. In the past such actions had often had the opposite effect. It is more likely that the delicate negotiations the imprisoned Mandela and the apartheid government were engaged in at that very time, without anyone outside as yet suspecting it, might have contributed to a general softening of attitudes. I still have no way of telling. I don’t even know whom to thank. I had my life to get on with. I had a book to finish (my manuscripts had been restored to me soon after my liberation); I was a driven man. Before the end of the following year—that momentous year when the demented old emperor was laid low by a stroke and his eager successor, desperate to shake off his right-wing reputation and become the blue-eyed playboy of the Western world, prepared to mount the horse of change already saddled by others—the drastically rewritten A Touch of Yesterday was published. Then, for the first time, I could catch my breath. Then, for the first time, I realized just how exhausted I was.

  It was in that state of exhaustion that I met Andrea.

  ***

  During the year between my release and the publication of my book at the end of 1989 I had lived as close to a monastic life as I knew how—an experience I should never wish to repeat, although, ironically, I believe it did me some good. There were a couple of brief and superficial encounters, but after having been bitten by Abbie I was too diffident about any real involvement; and one of those, with the blonde Jessica, ended dismally in a humiliating show of impotence, after which, despite her eagerness to help me through it, I was too crestfallen for some time to try again. But with Andrea, wholly without warning, the old frisson of the spine was there again. For that very reason, remembering Abbie, I held back. Not again. It was, however, such an extraordinary time, those last months of 1989, that I could not steel myself for long. It was the time of the great marches. With P. W. Botha out of action, hopefully for good, there were massive demonstrations all over the country, an outbreak of wild enthusiasm for a new beginning—fired, indeed, by what had been happening in Europe, in Prague and Warsaw and Budapest and Leipzig and Berlin. Everybody took to the streets, in a local re-enactment of the ’68 student revolts all over the world, when—however briefly—all the old clichés and rules and taboos were swept away by youth and rage and joy.

  That was how we met, in the first great march in Cape Town, thrown together by the frenzied, jubilant crowd, when suddenly nothing seemed far-fetched any more. The same flame which has illuminated every new love in my life—that moment of elation, of discovery, of acknowledgement, of celebration—was burning in that march, and in all the other outbursts of public passion that followed. And, out of the blue, Andrea was in it with me. One moment there was just the exuberant jostling of the crowd; the next she was right beside me, striding along—Andrea never walked, she strode with long-legged ease and conviction. We were swept up in song, we waved our arms and shook our fists—Amandla! Amandla ngawethu! Viva! Viva! Viva!—in a wave of joyful madness that made me feel fifty years younger. At some sta
ge we discovered that we were holding hands. And later, after the seething streets had come to rest under the benign and unshaken mass of the mountain, we were washed out by the day’s waves in the small cottage where she lived in Observatory.

  She made something to eat—curried chicken, I seem to remember—and we drank much too much cheap red wine, and laughed and talked into the night. (Through all these years, the relationships that stand out have been those in which we could travel through days and nights in conversation.) We did not go to bed; I don’t think it even occurred to either of us. There was too much to catch up with. And she was so beautiful that I felt it was, for the moment, enough just to look at her: those very dark wide-apart eyes with an almost Oriental slant to them, her long dark hair (she told me of the battle, every weekend in her childhood, to strain it into curlers), her tall lean body, her long legs, her bewitching hands. She was in her late thirties, with all the radiance of a fully mature woman happy in her body.

  Perhaps the trigger was the discovery that she, too, had lived abroad, in France, in Paris. For something like eight years. I listened spellbound—she was a wonderful storyteller (a gift she got from her fisherman father, she said)—to her account of those turbulent years, the early ones of which actually overlapped with mine. There was nothing strange about our ways never having crossed there. ‘I just didn’t want to have anything to do with South Africans those days,’ she said. ‘I’d run a mile to avoid them. Even after I shacked up with a South African. He was a writer too, like you. Paul Jordaan. Quite a name, I found out, especially in the film world. But he steered clear of politics, which suited me, because I’d had enough of that.’

  She had left the country, it transpired, with a young English lecturer at UCT with whom she’d had a passionate affair. But then they were caught for Immorality: Andrea was brown. They wanted her to testify against her partner—Brian, if I remember correctly—but she refused, even when they threatened her with prosecuting her younger brother, a very angry young political activist. In the end, presumably because of pressure from the British Foreign Office, Brian was deported and she was given an exit permit.

  She told me a harrowing story of their last journey from Cape Town to the airport in Johannesburg. The agony of saying goodbye for ever, which was what she believed it to be at the time; the numbness of rage and pain which made her take her leave of everything she saw along the way, everything she had ever seen, or heard, or smelled, or touched, or tasted. And then the sad, slow crumbling of their relationship, once they were safe in France. Their desperate lovemaking. ‘The thin man with the big cock,’ was how she described him. ‘He just wanted to get deeper and deeper into me, to be more and more violent, to hurt me more and more. As if that would vindicate everything. I once told him—that was the lowest blow of all—that he’d never cared about me, he’d only started the affair with me to strike at the underbelly of apartheid.’ She shook her head. ‘Poor Brian. He really meant well, you know. He just couldn’t take the pressure.’

  ‘And then you met your writer?’

  ‘Quite a few years later. I tried my best to avoid him, precisely because he was South African. But –’ she gave an eloquent shrug—‘in the end I gave way.’ She sounded almost apologetic. ‘He was a wonderful lover. But you know what…? I think he never really knew anything about love. The only thing he ever loved was his writing. His films.’

  ‘That is a terrible accusation.’

  ‘But it’s true, I promise you.’ A long, searching look. ‘Do you think all writers are like that?’

  ‘There’s only one way to find out,’ I said lightly.

  ‘Oh no.’ She smiled, but I could see she was very serious. ‘I shall never have anything to do with a writer again.’

  I took the blow in the balls; but there was so much about her that captivated me, and all I knew was that, particularly after the relatively lean years I had behind me, I wanted to be with her.

  ‘How did it end with your Paul?’ I asked. ‘I’m fascinated by beginnings and endings.’ These were the two questions that always intrigued me most: How did it begin? Why did it end?

  ‘Well.’ She seemed to think it over before she answered: ‘Paul was pushing me to get married. And I knew my time for having children was running out: I was just turning thirty then and didn’t want to put it off for too long. And I really wanted children. Lots of them. But I knew that if we got married, I would never again have the choice of coming back here. Before that, I never thought I’d come back; but it was my choice. Now my throat seized up at the thought of never having a choice again. You must remember, those were very dark times.’

  ‘So you decided to give up the children and rather come back?’

  She shook her head very emphatically. ‘It wasn’t as easy as that. No, what happened was that I met another man. Mandla, a black South African. Actually, it was Paul who introduced me to him, and in the beginning we couldn’t stand each other. He was an activist in the trade unions, I didn’t want anything to do with politics. That made him furious. I remember how he would put his arm next to mine and say, “We’re the same color, sister. How can you deny that?” But then…’ Her dark eyes held mine in their spell. ‘We fell in love. And then he was killed.’

  ‘Killed?’

  ‘We never found out how. But there was reason to suspect that the South African Security Police had a hand in it. They were active all over Europe at the time, particularly in France.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I just knew, when he died, that I couldn’t go on living in a kind of splendid isolation with my white lover, ten thousand kilometers away. Always, all my life, as a colored person, I’d felt in-between. Not white, not black. Mandla made me realize that I had to make a choice. That was when I came back.’

  ‘Do you still think you made the right choice?’

  ‘Today I’m certain, yes. At last. But Jesus, it has taken me eight years. Of hoping against hope. It wasn’t easy…’ Her voice trailed off. Only later, in our subsequent conversations, did she consent to talk about it. The first tough years, trying to find a foothold. The suspicion from both sides, white and black. Until finally she became accepted in the UDF, throwing herself into it with the kind of total passion I soon came to admire in her. Driven by something she remembered as a favorite quote of Paul’s: The worst crime is to do nothing, for fear that we cannot do enough. And how it landed her in detention during the first state of emergency. That was something she still wouldn’t talk about. All I knew was that she was tortured. Very badly. But after two years in detention, without trial, she was released. Probably because she was in such bad shape—one of the consequences was a hysterectomy—that they thought she would either go home to die, or be so scared that she would never dare to get involved in political action again.

  They obviously did not know Andrea Malgas yet.

  Not all our conversations were depressing or dark or serious. What she loved was to take me on trips of discovery and rediscovery to the places she’d known as a child or a young girl. She had an obsession with District Six, where she’d been born. We could no longer establish exactly where their house would have been, but she could make some informed guesses, based on what she could remember of her father—she called him Dedda—and the route he would follow from the harbor, when his fishing trawler came in, from pub to pub, zigzagging uphill all the way to the Six.

  She had memories of being perched on his shoulders as he carried her, singing at the top of his fish-bugle voice, to the Gardens, to the harbor, to the museum (where she was horrified by the plaster casts of Bushmen, which she thought were real people, stuffed like the animals), or on bus trips to Hout Bay, to Kalk Bay, to all the places of the Cape. She took me to Onrust, where Brian had taught her to skindive, and to Steenbras where they had made love in a smelly shallow cave, and to Cool Bay where she had nearly drowned as a little girl, running away from the police who had arriv
ed with dogs to clear the beach of colored ‘intruders’ on a holiday. She could tell endless stories about Dedda with his smell of sweat and drink and male animal. And of his death at sea. And the funeral wake they had for him, with the whole of District Six turning up to celebrate uproariously right through the night.

  Her eyes were ablaze with light when she spoke about her youth. She was really the Prodigal Daughter, returned to rediscover what she had once given up. And taking me with her on these trips, through her astoundingly acute memories, was like discovering my own city for the first time. There was a life and a liveliness in her which seemed to offer me, too, an elixir to guarantee eternal youth. And when we kissed or embraced, she was almost greedy in her expressions of passion. But she would not consent to make love. It might have been my whiteness which, after her lover Paul, interposed itself between us. Or, just as likely, her suspicion about my being a writer. Both, I urgently reasoned with her, could, surely, be overcome. But there was no part of Andrea’s No that could not be understood.

  For months it went on: the constant joy of our journeys of discovery, our breathless conversations; and the never-ending hidden battle to find a way past, or through, her No.

  Until that day. We were watching TV together on February 2, 1990, when parliament listened, in a state of shock, to the announcement of a new deal that would relegate every vestige of the old South Africa to the rubble of history. (At last, after decades of hell, the much vaunted ‘winds of change’ had swept through everything in their way.) We kissed, and embraced, and laughed, and cried together. And drank ourselves into the kind of stupor her father had been famous for. But that was that. For the moment.