by Andre Brink
I’d been working on a take-over contract that night when the telephone rang on the corner of my desk: the private number known only to Elise and Bea and one or two of my staff. Mechanically, as I put out my hand, I glanced at my wrist-watch. Twenty to twelve.
“Martin? Thank God you’re still there. I tried to reach you at home.”
“What’s the matter, Bea?”
“Will you pick me up at the witchdoctor place?”
“The witchdoctor place?”
“Don’t you remember? I took you there once.”
“But what are you doing there at this time of the night?”
“Will you come straight away, please?”
She rang off without waiting for an answer.
In all my years in Johannesburg I’d never bothered to stroll through Diagonal Street on foot before the day she’d taken me there. I might have expected it of her. The witchdoctor shop with its muti, its vulture eggs, the skins and hair and nails and horns and unmentionable excretions, its useless whorl of incense; and the Indian owner glaring at one like a dark wooden mask. Outside, the din of street vendors and penny-whistles, the pimps and contacts and con-men; the sinister characters pretending to stand dozing against pillars covered in graffiti and peeling paint. It was bad enough in broad daylight. At night it was inviting swift and certain death.
Annoyed and worried I pushed aside my work – another half-hour and I would have been finished – and went down to the parking garage in the basement. Emerging like a shadow from behind a pillar, the nightwatchman shuffled to the entrance to remove the chain barrier.
“Thanks, George. I may be coming back.”
The streets were warm and wet. Not the sort of rain to end a drought: a dirty little drizzle, just enough to make everything filthy and unpleasant, the musty February heat clinging stickily to the dark buildings; the lamp posts surrounded by dull spheres of murky light.
Diagonal Street. I slowed down, making sure the car doors were locked. A few empty fruit carts stood abandoned in the gutter, some of them covered with tattered canvas. All the windows were protected by bars and railings and steel-mesh, with glimpses of mysterious and certainly malodorous wares behind them. Just as well the whole street was due to be demolished soon.
I stopped at a safe distance from the kerb, very reluctant to risk it outside. Something moved behind a pillar. I kept my foot on the accelerator, ready to drive off fast. Someone approached in the dull drizzle. A woman, slightly crippled. Not Bea: this stranger appeared elderly and stocky.
Was it a trap of some sort? Had someone else been imitating Bea’s voice on the phone? But it had been unmistakable, the Italian roundness of her vowels, the slight pause on double consonants. I had no doubt at all that it had been she who’d phoned me.
Turning the window down a few inches I called: “Where’s Bea?”
“I’m taking you to her,” said the woman in a curious falsetto voice.
Something was wrong somewhere. However, my anxiety about Bea forced me to lean over and open the door on the passenger side for the stranger to get in. She brought with her a smell of wet feathers.
“Will you please tell me —”
“Let’s get away from here first.” This time it was a male voice. I was paralysed.
“Don’t worry, Martin,” the stranger assured me. “It’s quite all right.”
I refused to believe it. In such a night, in such a place, one could expect any sort of treachery, if not witchcraft.
“Don’t tell me you really didn’t recognise me?” By that time we were several blocks away. The woman was fumbling with her hat; a wig was removed.
“Bernard!”
I would recognise that chuckle anywhere.
“Just drive out of the city first.”
Aimlessly, in a daze, I turned up and down all sorts of streets until I could start thinking coherently again. Along an old abandoned road I drove out to a mine dump. There were trees on either side, frayed and miserable in the drizzle. The wipers were buzzing to and fro, evenly, unobtrusively, monotonously. At last we stopped. The drops running down the side windows seemed to insulate us like fish in an aquarium.
“Where do you come from, Bernard? Where have you been all the time? Where’s Bea?”
“At home and quite safe. She couldn’t tell you more on the phone, one never knows whether it’s tapped.”
“But where have you been? What have you been up to?”
“I need your help.”
“How? With what?”
“I’d like a cigarette first.”
“You never smoked before.”
“One gets used to many things.” He took the cigarette. I pushed in the lighter and waited for it to jump out.
“Now you must tell me everything.”
“Not everything,” he said, keeping the smoke in his mouth for a while, without inhaling, before he blew it out again.
“Why did you escape from custody last year?”
“Had no choice. I had to finish a job.”
“What job?”
“Business.” I guessed he was smiling in the dark. “Don’t ask too many questions, Martin. Just listen to me. I don’t want to keep you out of bed for too long.”
“Well, go ahead then. Tell me.”
“You must help me to hide for a while. They’re hard on my heels.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The SB infiltrated one of their men into our organisation.”
“So there is an organisation?”
“Of course.” He pulled at his cigarette again. “I never trusted the bloke completely, but I couldn’t find anything to put a finger on. Then, last month, I found irrefutable evidence that he was a plant. I couldn’t confront him with it, of course. I didn’t dare to let him find out I knew, so I had to keep up the façade. You follow me? While he thought we were working in a certain direction we were really involved in something quite different. But it’s nerve-racking. And I believe he’s now got wise to it. They’re watching our place near Pretoria. I can’t go near it. But if I can disappear for a week or two, I’ll get them off the track completely. It’s absolutely vital to shake them off.”
“But how can I —”
“You needn’t know about anything. I don’t want to drag you into it. Just give me the key to your apartment and let me stay there for a fortnight. Then I promise you I’ll disappear from the face of the earth.”
“But why come to me?”
“Who else is there to go to?”
“Jesus, Bernard —” I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“You remember that night, three years ago, during the Terror Trial?” he suddenly asked. “The night we started talking in the apartment and then you went to Aunt Rienie’s party?”
“What about it?”
“There was something between us that evening – I may have been mistaken, but I felt I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to make a clean breast of it so that you could help me. I was beginning to have doubts. Everything seemed to be heading for the rocks. I was wondering whether I hadn’t made a terrible mistake —” He broke off. “But that’s beside the point now. I don’t want to burden you with particulars.”
“Was that why you were so insistent that I had to come back after the party?”
“Yes.”
“And then I —” Everything came back to me. I felt sick.
“Don’t worry, it’s all long past now. The very fact that we weren’t able to talk it out helped me to make up my mind. For better or for worse. At least I had more than enough time, that night, to sort things out for myself.”
“And now you’re asking me —”
“Just the key, no more. You needn’t go near the place. For all you know I could have broken in there.”
“Why didn’t you just go ahead and do it?”
“Too dangerous, I suppose. But above all” – in the dark the strange elderly woman was looking at me – “above all I have to be fair to you. You’ve got t
o make your own decisions, I can’t impose anything on you.”
“It would have been better if you hadn’t told me.”
“I only told you enough to help you make up your mind.”
“Suppose I refuse?”
He shrugged.
“Bernard, do you realise the risk I’m exposing myself to if I —”
“Everybody gets a chance to decide with open eyes,” he said. “And then there comes a day – or a night – when it’s too late.” The familiar teasing tone was in his voice when he asked: “Well, what will it be?”
“Bernard, if I’d been free like you —”
“Isn’t it up to yourself to decide on the measure of your own freedom?”
“I’m married. I have children. I have a responsible job. Don’t you realise —”
He said nothing.
“My God, man, you know very well that if there’s anything I can really do to help you —”
“You can let me have the key and then forget about it. That’s all I’m asking of you.”
“And if anything goes wrong?”
“Then you deny all knowledge of it. I’ll take all the blame.”
“You must have known all the time that sooner or later you were bound to get caught if you got involved in – well, in whatever it was.”
“Don’t start moralising. I didn’t come here to go on my knees to ask your favour.”
“But I’m going on my knees before you. Please, Bernard, why don’t you drop the whole wretched thing?”
“Now you’re being very naïve.”
“If you gave yourself up – you could turn State witness – I’m sure —”
“Is that what you think of me, Martin? After all we’ve gone through together?”
“Well, if that’s your attitude, you can’t expect me to —”
“I don’t expect anything of you any more.” He turned down the window. The miserable night air came flapping into the car like a moist rag. He flicked away the dead stub of his cigarette and closed the window again. “Let’s go now.”
“I can’t take you back just like this.”
“Then I’ll get out right here.”
“Don’t be stupid, that’s not what I mean.”
“I don’t care a damn about what you mean or don’t mean. Just drive on.”
Never before in my life had I felt such a burning urge to talk and talk, but there was nothing I could say.
On the outskirts he asked me to drop him.
“Can’t I take you somewhere?”
“No. I don’t want you to take any risks.”
I couldn’t make out whether he was being sarcastic or whether he really felt concerned about me. I stopped and involuntarily thrust my hand into my pocket, touching with my fingers the cold metal of my keys. But he’d already closed the door and gone off, without a word. In the rear-view mirror I saw him for the last time: the tired old woman with the drooping shoulders and the wide hat, in the drizzle sifting down over the sordid world.
Two days later he was arrested.
In any case I bear no ill feeling to anyone, and I blame no one, whether friend or policeman. They all did what they regarded as their duty. Those had been his own words. So why should I go on brooding over it all? It was done. No one could have expected me to get involved in such a business. I had duties and responsibilities of my own. Surely it would be ridiculous to suggest that I’d been responsible in any way for what had happened. He’d made his own choice, years ago and without me.
There is so much I still have to write down. I must come to grips with Dad, with Louis, and with Bea. But at least I’ve finished with Bernard. Thank God. I’d been reluctant to attempt it, but now it is out of my system. Now his name need never be mentioned in this document again.
The night was cold but under Ma’s eiderdown I was snug and satisfied. I could hear mice scuttling in the attic above the heavy varnished beams of the ceiling. On the front stoep one of the big dogs stirred and groaned in his sleep. Floor-boards creaked from time to time. And from outside came a sound straight from my childhood and still inexplicable: like a bucket scraping on stone. Some nocturnal bird or small animal? I’d never been able to find out. It was something unearthly, belonging to the night.
Here I was back on the farm, surrounded by all the familiar and good and comforting things I’d known from childhood; my people sleeping, in canopied bed or graveyard; an entire history. I ought to feel safe and protected. And yet I knew – or rather, writing here in London, I know in retrospect – that, just as the doors were unlocked and the windows left open to the night, I too was vulnerable and exposed, unable to escape from anything any longer. And succumbing to sleep, it felt as if I were sinking, sinking into mud and water; and soundlessly I cried for help, but no one came towards me from the bank.
SATURDAY
1
AND HAVE NOT love. I have just looked it up in the hotel Bible again, but somehow it seems pale and meaningless compared to the sonority those words had when I was small. Everything about my suspended existence here in London, however immediately I am involved in it, appears as pale and unreal beside the intensity of my memories. I have embarked on this project, trying my hand at writing, not without a sound measure of cynicism. Now I cannot but go on. It is disturbing, and yet the mere act of writing down everything has become, in a sense, compulsive.
And have not love – in the booming voice of my grandfather, his reading spectacles on his nose, the table lamp placed beside the large Dutch State Bible with the brass buckles (now an ornament on the bar counter in my lounge): every syllable emphasised separately. When we were very small, evening prayers at table meant abandoning oneself to the grown-ups’ ritual of reading and praying and singing. I didn’t understand a word of it, nor did it even occur to me to try to. Yet there was something profoundly reassuring about the experience of great words thundering past one, protecting one like a solid wall of sound from the night outside. But from the day we turned six, first I and then Theo, it was required of us to repeat to Grandpa something we’d memorised from his reading. From that day religion ceased to be something dark and comforting and became, instead, something terrifying. In a state of panic one would desperately try to clutch some phrase drifting past in the slow and steady current of Grandpa’s reading; paralysed with fear if you discovered you’d lost a word and had to grasp at something new. Even if it were only a series of meaningless names: Adam, Sheth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalaleel, Jered. It wasn’t necessary to understand anything of what one had memorised: the mere act of remembering was enough. In our minds it made the difference between heaven and hell: and high on the dining-room wall behind Grandpa sat the picture of The Broad and Narrow Way in confirmation and admonition, the fierce Eye of the Lord burning above.
The first time it happened, Grandpa pounced on me without warning. As always in our farm holidays I’d been sitting at table, subjecting myself to the flow of his slow, thundering voice, anticipating the warmth of my bed, when suddenly, the Book still open before him, he looked at me over the top of his glasses and demanded:
“Well, Martin, can you remember anything I read?”
“Grandpa?”
“I want you to repeat something I read tonight.”
Dad tried to intervene: “But you didn’t warn the boy to prepare himself for this.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, Wim. Well, Martin?”
I looked at the lamp burning steadily on the table; and beyond it at the Eye staring down on me.
“Can’t you remember anything at all?”
I started trembling. For the first time in my life I felt exposed to a grown-up world of ruthlessness and confusion, all my early certainties beyond my reach.
“The Lord will be deeply hurt by this, Martin.”
I gulped.
“I hope you’ll do better tomorrow night. Let us pray.”
We moved back our chairs; I pressed my face against the leather thongs of the seat as the steady waves of
Grandpa’s prayer began to break over us. But it wasn’t comforting as before; it was a judgement condemning me to hell.
The next evening I hardly touched my food. From the moment Grandpa opened the Bible I sat in a sweat trying to memorise one phrase after the other, as if they were pieces of flotsam drifting past me on Noah’s flood. One by one they sank away from reach again, until I managed to grasp that one line and hold on to it in desperation. And when once again he put down the Bible and looked at me, I recited stuttering:
“And have not love, Grandpa.”
I was saved. But that night I had one nightmare after the other, and at irregular intervals I woke up with those words burning in my mind like fire and brimstone.
From a lifetime of confused memories that was the phrase to come back to me when I awoke from a restless sleep to hear Ma’s strong, flat voice singing the morning hymn the way she’d been doing it all the years. And have not love. The words were so real that, momentarily, all the dead returned to me: Grandpa and Grandma, and Dad himself.
It must have been from sheer fatigue that I’d slept so badly. In addition, I couldn’t shake off the thoughts of Bernard. And I was irritated by Louis’s deep, regular breathing. It was still dark when I heard the first sounds of the servants from the kitchen; outside the cocks were crowing. I turned over and tried to sleep on. There were at least another two hours before breakfast; even more, considering that I’d come to have a proper rest on the farm. But then, hearing Ma’s voice, I knew I wouldn’t be able to doze off again.
It was an eerie sound, that voice singing in the dark in painful exultation; yet there was something deeply reassuring about it at the same time – the resolute and invincible quality of it, affirming her ability to survive in spite of suffering and loneliness and death itself. Pushing myself up against the pillows I sat listening to her, thinking about her and the way she’d kept us together all those years without one bitter or reproachful word about Dad’s lovable but unpractical ways. She’d always been so much more positive and self-assured and strong than him, but she’d been careful to keep her place behind him and never to take control openly. From the shadows she kept him going, even though he must have driven her to despair more than once. Her way of managing our affairs had been so unobtrusive, in fact, that one only really became conscious of it after his death – from the way she began to grow and blossom like a tree which suddenly, after many years of mere existence, started sprouting new branches and leaves as if the roots had struck a deeper layer of fertile earth below.