by Andre Brink
“I’m not so sure,” said Charlie with a straight face. “He hasn’t even offered us a drink yet.”
I laughed more loudly than was necessary. “Well, what would you like?”
Then Elise came in.
Bernard kissed her, held her at arm’s length to examine her critically, then pulled her close to him for another kiss before he turned her round to face Charlie. On her beautifully made-up face I saw the momentary expression of shock, but she was much too civilised to lose her poise so easily. She took his hand. Soon afterwards she went out to the kitchen.
When we sat down to dinner, she brought in the dishes herself.
“But isn’t Evelyn —?” I started.
“Do sit down,” she interrupted me pointedly.
Charlie wanted to go to the bathroom first and Bernard went to show him the way. In the brief spell when she and I were alone, she said angrily:
“For God’s sake don’t ask such stupid questions again.”
“But what’s happened to Evelyn?”
“I gave her the evening off, of course. You can’t expect her to serve while he’s here.”
“I can’t let you serve him!”
“It was you who invited him.”
“It wasn’t. It was Bernard’s idea.”
“What am I being blamed for now?” asked Bernard from the door, coming back to join us.
“You might have warned us, Bernard,” I said.
“About what?”
“Where has he gone to?” asked Elise.
“Charlie? Oh, I went to say hello to the children and Ilse wanted a story, so she annexed Charlie. The Moon and the Mantis. Do you know it? His mother used to tell it to us when we were small.”
“But how can you let a – I mean, you can’t let Charlie sit there with Ilse while we’re waiting to have dinner.”
“He won’t be long. He’s marvellous with kids.” Unperturbed, he unfolded his napkin.
Five minutes later, after Elise had kicked my shin a couple of times, I excused myself and went to have a look. Charlie was sitting on Ilse’s bed and she was shaking with laughter.
“Food’s waiting,” I said, rather coldly I’m afraid.
He got up immediately. “Tell you another when I see you again, O.K.?” he promised Ilse, pressing her hand.
In blonde innocence she lay under the floral quilt looking up at him (how old was she then? eight or nine, I think). “You must come back soon,” she demanded.
“Right, I promise.”
As I stood to one side to let him go out, she asked: “Daddy, is he an uncle or an outa?”
For a moment I was completely at a loss for words.
Charlie burst out laughing, doubling up and wiping the tears from his eyes. “That’s quite a problem, hey?” he said at last. “I think the best is just to call me Charlie. How about that?”
“Yes,” she agreed, blowing kisses to both of us.
Back at the table it was he himself who repeated the story. Elise cast down her eyes. Bernard glanced at me briefly before he, too, began to laugh.
“When I had to shake hands with a Black man for the first time,” he said, “I felt I couldn’t touch food with my hand again.”
“Don’t worry,” said Charlie. “Same here. When the first White man shook my hand in Cambridge I went out to buy a bottle of Dettol to disinfect myself.”
“When we swam and fought bare-arsed in the dam,” said Bernard, “we didn’t even know that Dettol existed.”
Something was easing up in the conversation. Soon we were talking and laughing so loudly that Louis peeped in to find out what was going on. He didn’t unbend as easily as Ilse had, but towards midnight, hours past his bedtime, he and Charlie had become great friends.
Not that all was merriment and laughter that night.
“Why did you come back to South Africa when you were doing so well overseas?” I asked him – the question I was to repeat so often in the years to come.
“Because I’d left part of me here, man,” he said. He laughed, but behind his thick lenses his eyes were serious. “You know, ever since I first went to school my whole life was one long denial: of my people, my culture, my language, the lot. I had to learn to look after myself through the White man’s eyes. His history changed me into something different from what I’d been. Even at university. But sooner or later I had to come back. To try and find that part of me I’d had to deny all the time.”
“What makes you think you’ll ever find it again?”
“Oh, it won’t be easy, I know. But I’ll get it, all right. I’ve got to – else it just won’t be worthwhile going on.”
“We all have to keep going on,” I said. “After all, Sisyphus is supposed to be the symbol of our age.”
“Ah, but don’t forget: to a Black man Sisyphus means something different.”
“Not existentially.”
“Especially existentially,” said Charlie. “Let’s put it this way: your White Sisyphus operates in the dimension of metaphysics. My dimension is social.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“It’s the social which determines the nature of my task, the nature of my rock. On my way downhill to pick up the absurd rock again, I don’t see anything metaphysical: what I see is my social condition, my oppressors. You may think in terms of suicide, if you wish to stick to Camus. Not I, because I exist socially. I’ve got to make the jump from suicide to murder. And I don’t think either of us can still start with innocence. To hell with William Blake.”
“Dad,” said Louis, “what does ‘existentially’ mean?”
“I think it’s time for you to go to bed,” I said sternly.
After he’d gone out, Charlie said: “You won’t be able to evade him all the time.”
“Who evaded whom?”
“You didn’t answer your son’s question about existentialism.”
“Good Heavens, he’s only fourteen. What does he know about existentialism?”
“What do you or I know about it?” he asked.
I got up, smiling: “What we need,” I said, “is some more wine.”
“Indeed,” he said. “Since we are involved in the Great Evasion.” Adding with a smile: “The latest version of the Great Trek.”
“Now you’re moving towards metaphysics,” warned Bernard. He winked at me: “This invariably happens at about midnight. Like Frankenstein.”
“You won’t murder us in our beds, will you?” Elise asked Charlie.
There was a slight drizzle when we went outside in the small hours to see them off. I shook Charlie’s hand. Bernard embraced Elise in mock passion and kissed her. Then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, Charlie went to her to kiss her too. For a moment I saw her stiffen and I held my breath. Then she calmly offered him her cheek, and he and Bernard got into the car. The doors slammed, the tyres swished down the driveway. The red tail lights disappeared. From a shrub near us large drops were falling singly, with a small spattering sound.
She was the first to return to the stoep, where thin lines of rain were trembling in the light. I went to shut the heavy gates. Holding the cold metal in my hands I remained there for some time, dull and drowsy, more tired than I’d realised.
In retrospect the evening seemed to have been balanced precariously on a wave of excitement, on the edge of an extreme. Now it came washing past, leaving only a flood of dark water all round.
It was cold and wet and very quiet. It was like years ago, the sort of night in which I would find myself alone after a long evening of waging a seemingly endless offensive against a desired girl, breaking down her resistance, getting her to bed in the end; and then returning home in the small hours, hands deep in my pockets, whistling, the way one would in a cemetery. I had “conquered”. I’d had “my way”. But had I really? Or had I merely exposed something unbearable in myself, something I would have to cover up again as soon as possible by finding another girl, mounting an offensive against her, break
ing down her resistance —?
Who’d mentioned Sisyphus? And who was it who’d said: Nothing is more responsible for this weariness of life than the repetition of the passion of love?
But what the hell did it all have to do with love, for me to think of it in such terms?
I had to go inside. It was getting colder and wetter all the time.
In the semi-darkness of the front entrance Elise said: “He turned out to be a very pleasant person, don’t you think?”
“Did you like him then?”
“Didn’t you?”
“Of course I did.”
I wanted her to say something else. I would have liked to find something else to say myself. But why, really?
“Do you know the story about the Moon and the Mantis?” I asked her.
“No. Why?”
“I just wondered. I don’t know it either.”
She gave a small laugh. “You can say such silly things, Martin.”
She was already on her way down the dark passage to our room.
I closed the heavy front door, trying to shut out the night.
8
QUEENSTOWN. THE LONG row of lights merely served to expose the desolation of the town at that hour. Garages, shop windows, here and there an open café, a group of people emerging from a hotel and talking on a pavement. The wide bridge on the far side of the town. The lights were farther apart now. In passing, they flickered across Louis’s face like skins shed by a luminous snake. He crossed his legs, still staring ahead of him. A train approached, small squares of light in the dark, disappearing behind us. There were deviations in the road. Once we were forced to drive in the dust of a truck for several hundred yards. The Black driver deliberately tried to prevent us from passing. Bastard. Probably derived a sense of power from knowing he could block my way. In the end, accelerating suddenly and swerving dangerously, I managed to pass; then it was my turn to force him off the road before leaving him behind for good.
“Now there’s only Cathcart left.”
Louis said nothing.
The landscape, starkly beautiful in daylight – wide yellow plains and blue table hills in the distance – had a fantastic aspect in the moonlight. Perhaps it was just as well, softening the scars of drought. In a recent letter Ma had written: “The Eastern Cape has never been so dry before even the aloes are beginning to shrivel up I always knew the Lord was going to punish us one day.”
Every week her letter came, unfailingly through all the years, even when she was ill: not that that happened often – Ma had the constitution of an ox and all the fierce strength of will inherited from her French and Dutch ancestors.
If she got it into her head to block the sale of the farm, there would be trouble. But I tried to reassure myself: in the past I’d always succeeded in getting round her, perhaps because we were so similar by nature. Theo had always been different, something of a softy like Dad. Of course, if Dad had lived, there wouldn’t have been any problem persuading him to sell. He would have been only too glad to get rid of it.
Or would he? When it mattered least, during his last illness, he’d suddenly showed an illogical affection for the place, insisting he wouldn’t be buried anywhere but there.
Bernard’s parents had also been dead for a long time now. It must have been at least ten years since his mother had died peacefully in her sleep one night. And her husband – that magnificent old man, lord and master on his domain, undaunted by drought or floods, locusts or depression, war or rumours of war – he couldn’t survive the death of his frail wife and followed her within six months, of a broken heart the doctor said.
But it was perhaps just as well they’d died in time, to be spared the upheaval and agony of Bernard’s trial. I doubt whether they would have been able to come to terms with it. Of course, one shouldn’t underestimate them. He’d often said and done things which must have shocked them, yet they’d never reproached him or lost faith in him or altered in their love of him: they would pray for him, but never reject him. Even so, the trial might have proved too much for them.
Useless speculation. Equally useless as wondering whether I could have changed the course of events.
Still, there had been one night, during the Terrorism Trial in ’73 (when his clients had been the men who later turned out to be his accomplices and subordinates). I hadn’t even realised that anything special was involved in our discussion that night: it was only afterwards that he told me, and by then it was too late.
That time when, as a child, I’d been so ill – the night the lampshade tinkled against the wall and the doctor said: “Don’t worry, he’ll pull through” – I’d never even known how serious it had been. By the time I realised it, the crisis had passed. Perhaps it generally happens that way. In which case that night in ’73 may have been the true moment of crisis.
What happened had been decided by totally insignificant events. For instance, it would have been quite different had Bernard stayed with us at home as he usually did, with the exception of that early marathon trial – but at the time Elise’s parents were visiting us. We had more than enough room for him as well, but he didn’t want to intrude and so I’d put him up in my private apartment.
Or: if I hadn’t gone to Aunt Rienie’s birthday on that night of all nights. Or: if Bernard had accompanied me as we’d planned. Or: if Bea hadn’t been there. All those ifs.
It was soon after the court case had started and we hadn’t had much time together yet. On that particular Monday afternoon I came from work rather late (the auditors were working on my books); I was flaked and not in any mood for a party, so I decided to go round to the apartment first and have a drink with Bernard. Perhaps he would agree to go with me. He’d always been fond of the old lady, since the time when, in my final year at university, I’d rented a room in her old eighteenth-century house in Dorp Street. Aunt Rienie had been born and bred in Stellenbosch; for five generations her family had been living in that house and nobody had ever expected her to move. But both her daughters had settled in Johannesburg and the only way to be close to her grandchildren was to sell her house and move north. In her flat in one of the rambling old buildings in Parktown she tried, perhaps with too much obvious effort, to keep her spirits up by clinging to everything that constituted life for her: music, people, laughter, poetry. Slowly wasting away as she pined for oak trees and mountains and water furrows beside the streets and the laughter of young people, she tried to cover up by assembling a salon around her. I doubt whether I ever visited her without finding strangers in her flat, people she’d picked up in buses or museums or at exhibitions or in restaurants and brought home with her to overwhelm them with love and attention. Petite and delicate as she was, Aunt Rienie could be a most demanding old lady, always ready to take control of one’s entire existence. What she loved above all was to act as matchmaker and plan marriages for all her young friends. Bernard was the only persistent recalcitrant: which was why she tried harder with him than with anybody else.
The climax of her social life was her birthday every April. Then all her friends and acquaintances were assembled in her cramped little flat to celebrate and drink and run amok until daybreak; and invariably, in the course of the wild night, she would take up position in the middle of the floor, her silver hair specially “done”, her ears and wiry little neck adorned with pearls, her eyes as lively and intensely blue as cornflowers – and then she would start reading poetry to her guests.
It was on that particular day of the year, that Monday afternoon, that I went to Joubert Park to see Bernard. The pleasant, peaceful, elegant apartment furnished and decorated to my own taste, on the top floor of the tall modern block, where at night, relaxed in the double bed, one could lie listening to the leaves of the plane trees outside. One always remained aware of the city – moving, dynamic, a never-ending throbbing presence on the threshold of one’s consciousness – not as a threat or an intrusion, but familiar and intimate, an affirmation of life.
Bernar
d had just taken a shower when I knocked, and he came to the door wearing only a towel round his waist.
“Am I in the way?” I asked. “Are you going anywhere?”
“Not at all. Come inside.” On the way back to the bedroom he took off the towel and began to dry himself. I remember thinking, as I followed him, that although he was five years older than me, his body looked younger.
“How do you manage to keep so fit?” I asked, not without envy.
“Play squash. Drop in at the gym once a week or so. Nothing much.” He threw down the towel and started dressing. “But if you neglect your machinery” – his familiar smile – “well, then you tend to lose respect for yourself and for others, don’t you agree?”
“I’ve come to pick you up for a party.”
“Good. Where?”
“Aunt Rienie’s birthday.”
“Oh my God, yes, I’ve forgotten.”
“She heard you were in town, so she insisted I bring you along.”
“I suppose she’s found just the right wife for me again.”
“How did you know?”
“Every year she finds a girl ‘destined’ for me. Poor old thing, I’ve broken her heart so many times. But never say die.” Picking up his shoes and socks he came to the door. “Let’s have a drink first. I suppose there’s time enough.”
“Sure. We needn’t go before eight, or even later. You know she never stops before dawn.”
“Will you pour or shall I?” He was standing beside the old Cape yellowwood jonkmanskas which I’d changed into a cocktail cabinet.
“Go ahead. You know the place as well as I do.”
“Gorgeous set-up.” He opened a bottle. “Haroun al Raschid.”
“Not quite.”
“Matter of degree. Do you ask the girls to tell you stories?”
“No, usually it’s I who spin the yarns.”
He handed me my whisky and sat down with his, still barefoot. “Cheers.”
“Up yours.”
“I wish you would start telling stories again,” he said unexpectedly. “I can still remember the stuff you brought me years ago.”