Rumours of Rain

by Andre Brink

  “Once you flushed it down the toilet.”

  “Never mind. You had talent, all right.”

  “But now that I’ve become a man – how does the phrase go? – I’ve put away childish things.”

  “Like faith, hope and charity?”

  “I’m still going strong on the love bit.”

  “I’m not talking about fucking.”

  “What makes you so evangelical tonight? One would almost think you were the one with a clergyman father-in-law, not I.”

  “Don’t mock him, he’s a good man.”

  “Having regrets?” I asked lightly. “About the snows of yesteryear?”

  “Not the snow. The droughts perhaps.” Suddenly he was very serious. “Those wonderful, terrible droughts that stripped the veld so you could see the very bones of the earth. Like a sheep’s skeleton. Until you arrived at a point beyond despair and cursing and fear, in a stillness you’d never known before. I remember there was something so utterly clear and pure about the feeling. And only then, usually, the rains would come.”

  “You’re in a sentimental mood.”

  “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  Dusk was gathering outside. Inside the apartment it was getting dark, and the outlines of furniture and paintings became blurred. Neither of us moved to put on a light. After some time he got up and refilled our glasses, then stopped at the record-player and switched it on. There was a record on it already. The Mozart, of course.

  We entered into another of our wordless conversations, phrased in the metaphors of music, the clear and precise sounds of the piano which didn’t hesitate to spell out the simplest of truths.

  The years in between didn’t matter any more. For the time being I’d also put away the things of a man, purified by the music in the way he’d talked about drought. A sweeter, gentler, more considerate way, but not, in the final analysis, less inexorable. Returning to beyond faith and hope and charity, to the truths of sun and stone, in a land where rain was no more than a rumour or an intimation of mortality.

  That holiday on the farm. Elise. (Never seen a girl before?) The nights in his room, in the dark, heavy with the smell of wax after the candle had been put out, and exposed to the sounds filtering in from outside: frogs, crickets, bats, a night-owl, a dog sighing or moaning in its sleep or licking its balls; the eerie howling and laughter of jackals; a voice calling from the huts; the gnashing of the windmill straining against its chain in a sudden gust of wind.

  “Sorry, man,” said Bernard after the record had stopped. “I suppose it’s this case I’m working on which depresses me.”

  “I don’t understand why you keep on getting involved in that sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing?” he demanded.

  “Defending people like that.”

  “What do you know about ‘people like that’?”

  “I know enough of you.”

  “Do you really know me?” He was staring at me in the dusk.

  “Only too well,” I insisted. “I know you’re trying to free yourself from your own Afrikaansness, but you won’t ever succeed.”

  “Really?”

  “You’re still prompted by all the same motives.”

  “What do you mean, Martin?”

  “Well, you’ve spoken so often of the Afrikaner’s ‘masochistic ecstasy’: his way of drawing inspiration from his sense of standing heroically and alone against all the world. But aren’t you doing exactly the same? You’re standing alone against the establishment you’ve rejected. The ‘ecstasy’ is unchanged. The ‘masochism’ too. Your position continues to be determined by the group you’ve tried to break away from. And so you’re really only confirming what you’re trying to escape from.”

  “Is that your diagnosis?”

  “Yes. There are other symptoms too, of course.”

  “Please tell me the worst, Doctor.”

  “I’m serious, Bernard. You’ve chosen the role of rebel for yourself. Fair enough. But you’re forgetting something: in history, the only rebels able to succeed have been young men. A young man can afford to rebel, he has nothing to lose, he can go all the way. But in this country most of our rebels have been in their thirties, if not in their forties. They’re people who run the risk of losing a lot. And so they can never go far enough. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Yes, I agree. But suppose you do come across a man of thirty or forty prepared to sacrifice the lot? Like the ones I’m defending at the moment: people who are ready to risk everything one normally associates with the ‘good life’?”

  “It just can’t work. It goes against nature.”

  “Do you really think it can’t work?”

  “If it happens, it’s absurd. It’s sick.”

  After a while he got up. It had grown quite dark inside. I could see his silhouette against the dull glow of the city at the window.

  “Martin, these people I’m talking about: they would also like to relax in this lovely flat and have a drink. Some of them have wives and children.”

  “Then they’re grossly irresponsible.”

  “Don’t you think a man, especially if he’s a highly sensitive and intelligent man, can be driven to the point where he sees violence as the only solution for a situation in which he has become expendable?”

  “Surely it’s no excuse for becoming as evil as the thing you’re opposing? Then your man begins to regard his opponent as equally expendable. That’s the basis of terrorism, isn’t it? – the conviction that the end justifies the means. How can any revolution succeed without extremism and an aesthetic of violence for the sake of violence? And how can you defend that in the name of ‘humanity’? You’re glorifying an ignoble cause, Bernard.”

  “And then you pretend to know me,” he said from the window. He was looking at me but his face was too dark for me to see his eyes. “Martin, I want to talk to you. I’ve been meaning to for a long time now, but it’s so seldom we are together like this.”

  “What’s the matter, Bernard?”

  “What we need is to spend a whole night talking, as in the old days.” His voice sounded dull all of a sudden; there was a vulnerability in the frame of his shoulders. He looked up. “I think I need you. Just to help me to see clearly again. To regain my faith. One reaches a stage —”

  I wanted to go to him, but something about the tone of despair in him inhibited me. I wasn’t sure how to handle him. In the past I had been the one to go to him for help. It was unnerving to discover that he suddenly needed me.

  “Don’t be so depressed,” I said. “Let’s go to Aunt Rienie’s party. That will cheer you up.”

  “I can’t face a party just now.”

  “But I thought you said —”

  “That was when you came.” He walked away from the window, approaching me in the dark. “Please stay here with me, Martin. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “But she’s counting on me.” I got up and moved towards the door. “Do come with me.”

  “No, I’d rather stay. Perhaps it’s a good thing to sit down and think about it all on my own.”

  I opened the door. Blinding light filled the room from the landing. He looked up, startled.

  “Please come back soon, Martin,” he said. “Give Aunt Rienie my love, enjoy yourself for a while. But then come back. I’ll wait for you.”

  “All right.” I smiled. “We can talk about it when I’m back. Don’t be so morbid. We’ll sort it all out, whatever it is.”

  But of course it didn’t go as we’d planned, and the conversation never took place. It’s senseless, as I’ve said before, to speculate on all the ifs. Things happen the way they do because they’re meant to happen like that. If we deny that certainty we’ll all inevitably end up with blue circles round our navels.

  I may add that there are some things which appear to go against nature, against one’s natural urge to live safely, protected by the security of a career, a house, a wife, children. But once one has made the discovery that there are
millions of others living in one’s own country, deprived of those basic elements through laws enacted by one’s own people, one can no longer claim that way of life as a “right”. Then one is forced to free oneself from the security and the bliss of ignorance. In my own case, if I may be subjective for one last time, it demanded of me to sacrifice even my own marriage before it could turn into bondage for myself and the woman I loved – at the expense of the lives and the happiness of others.

  I couldn’t understand it at all, much as I tried; and my incomprehension was aggravated by the fact that I’d never known his wife, which made it impossible to conjure up an image of Bernard as a married man. There was no visual context in which to project him in order to understand him “in situation”. Perhaps that was why neither his marriage nor his divorce touched me very deeply – until the day she arrived at my office.

  There hadn’t been any warning before their wedding. As I might have expected of Bernard, the first I heard of it was when he phoned to say: “I thought you’d like to know I got married this morning.”

  “Bernard! I don’t believe it.”

  “I’m a normal red-blooded male.”

  “That’s not what I mean. But – out of the blue like this?”

  “I’ve never been one for trimmings. Veni, vidi, vici. Except that, in this case, the vici turned out to be vicimur. Anyway, we’re both as happy as can be. And firmly resolved to grow old together.”

  But only months later, just before he came up to Johannesburg for the conspiracy trial, they were divorced. He didn’t want to talk about it when I saw him, and I respected his privacy. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that, for the very first time, a gulf had come between us: for something momentous had happened in his life which he hadn’t shared with me and of which I had no grasp. Was it that feeling of being out of touch which paved the way for those other, later, silences in his life to which I found I had no access?

  It was more than a year later, as the trial was drawing to its close, that she turned up at my office. The name, Reinette Franken, meant nothing to me; I was intrigued only by her refusal to mention to my secretary the reason for her visit. When she came in, she made an immediate impression: not only because she really was beautiful – tall, blonde, athletic, tanned, with wide blue eyes – but because of her undeniable “presence”. Very young, she couldn’t have been more than twenty or twenty-one, but nothing about her suggested girlhood or ignorance: she was unmistakably, and disconcertingly, a woman.

  “How do you do?” I said. “Please sit down.”

  She hesitated. “You are Martin Mynhardt, aren’t you?”

  “Of course. What can I do for you?”

  “Didn’t Bernard – I mean —”

  “Bernard?”

  “Aren’t you the Martin Mynhardt who was at university with him? He always spoke about you.”

  “It’s me, all right. But —” Suddenly it hit me. “Good Heavens, are you his wife?”

  “I was.” With a slight, sad twitch of her mouth.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Why should you be? It had nothing to do with you.”

  “No, but he’s always been very close to me and I was awfully pleased when I heard about the marriage last year. Then, suddenly, well —”

  “Are you very busy?”

  “Not at all. I’m very glad to meet you at last. Shall I order us some tea?”

  “No thanks.”

  Now that she’d come and I knew who she was, she suddenly seemed less confident of herself. In obvious embarrassment, she explained that she’d made up her mind to come and talk to me about him. Everything had happened so quickly. Perhaps he’d had time to think about it again. Perhaps they could – but she didn’t want to upset him in any way. At first she’d thought the mere surprise of coming back to him would be enough, but then she’d realised how childish it was. So she’d decided to first discuss it with me.

  “Please forgive me,” she said. “I won’t bother you any longer. I’ve just realised how presumptuous it was of me to think that anyone else —”

  “I’m not ‘anyone else’. Bernard and I have always been completely frank with one another.”

  “Did he say anything to you? I mean – while he’s been up here in Johannesburg?”

  “No. In fact, your marriage was the only thing he never discussed with me.”

  “Then I must have hurt him very deeply.” There was nothing emotional in her attitude: she was simply stating a fact.

  She took out a cigarette. I got up to light it for her.

  “Thanks.”

  There was something disturbingly familiar about the way she raised her head when she blew out the smoke: as if I’d watched her do it for years.

  “He never blamed you for anything.”

  “If only one could be sure.” She inhaled smoke and held her breath for a while before blowing it out. “You see, I had the impression we were very happy. He never looked unhappy. He was so relaxed and full of life. Then, quite unexpectedly, he just said —”

  After another minute she got up resolutely, with a firmness which, once again, appeared disturbingly familiar. “I didn’t mean to burden you with it,” she said. “If you could only tell me quite honestly: Do you think I should go to him and discuss it, or will it upset him too much? At this stage of the trial – but perhaps it might help him. What do you think?”

  “I wish I could be sure. You’ve caught me totally unprepared.”

  “I’m in no hurry.” She added, with cool and quiet emphasis: “There’s a whole lifetime ahead, isn’t there? I wouldn’t like to fuck it up by doing anything rash.”

  The crude word startled me – like another, years ago. And suddenly I realised why so much about her appeared familiar. It was of Elise herself that she reminded me. Not the Elise of the present, but the defiant and positive young woman of many years ago. The girl who, one Sunday afternoon, had calmly taken off her Sunday hat and gloves and her Sunday clothes to dive, naked, into the concrete dam. Something about the discovery made me breathless.

  “I’ll phone you again tomorrow,” she said. “Or whenever it suits you.”

  “Why don’t you have dinner with me tonight?” I suggested, wondering whether she had noticed anything. “Then we can talk about it unhurriedly and at length.”

  After a brief hesitation: “All right. What time?”

  “Eightish. Where are you staying?”

  “The Carlton.”

  “I’ll pick you up.”

  “Thank you very much, Martin.”

  “I should thank you.”

  “Why?”

  “Just, well —” I took her hand. “Because you came.”

  For a moment her eyes were watching me, keenly but unperturbedly.

  “Goodbye,” she said.

  “See you tonight, Reinette.”

  As I closed the door behind her I discovered that my hands were damp. I didn’t feel like work. Instead, I went to a window and stood looking out over the smoky city.

  “All I wanted to do,” she explained when, long after dinner, nearly midnight, we were enjoying a final drink on a terrace, “was to make him feel at home, to give him peace and quiet, and children in due course. He’d always been so restless, always in search of something. So I thought —”

  “Perhaps he’d waited too long before he got married. He’d got too set in his ways. He’d become used to being his own boss.”

  “Some people get married even later than he did, and they’re happy.”

  “Bernard’s is a different sort of independence.”

  (I felt like saying: “If you’d been less like Elise, it might have worked out better.” But I didn’t.)

  “So you think I should rather go back without seeing him at all?”

  “How can you expect me to give you a straight answer? How can you expect me to take responsibility for your whole life?”

  She sat looking down at the glass she held on her lap. “Perhaps that was the mistake I
made in the first place,” she said. “Leaving it to him to take responsibility for both of us.”

  “You must give me a chance to broach the subject with him,” I said. “I won’t tell him you’re here. I’ll just try to find out how he really feels about it.”

  “Will you do that?”

  When I went home, she impulsively kissed me.

  It wasn’t that I deliberately postponed discussing it with him even though I saw him every evening. But in those final weeks of the trial he was very excitable and I didn’t want to wreck it all by choosing the wrong moment. So it was about a week before I brought it up. He was worn out. Perhaps that was why, his defences down, he unburdened more readily than he’d done before.

  “You wouldn’t have been so tired now if you had a wife to look after you,” I said as lightly as I could.

  “Maybe I would have been more tired. Having to give everything I’ve got on two fronts at the same time.”

  “I’m not sure you gave your marriage enough chance to prove itself, Bernard.”

  “What do you know about it?” he asked quickly.

  “I’m just drawing my own conclusions. A year isn’t long enough for a marriage to get going.”

  “I don’t think time has anything to do with it. It’s a matter of knowing clearly enough that you made a mistake. For some it takes a lifetime; for others it happens sooner.”

  “Didn’t you love her?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “When you phoned me that day, you said you wanted to grow old together.”

  He looked past me. “I can’t think of anything I’d like to do more than just that,” he said after a long pause. “But for a man in my position, with the choices I’ve made, marriage is pure selfishness. It’s an escape. I allowed myself to be blinded temporarily. My God, don’t you think I’d love to settle down and have a normal family life? But I can’t think of myself only.”

  “Have you ever thought of Reinette?”

  He looked at me: “I’ve thought mainly of her.”

  I didn’t want to make him suffer any more. It was obvious how deeply the conversation had perturbed him. For my own sake I would have liked to find out more, but I couldn’t do it to him.