by Andre Brink
“It was just after I’d returned from overseas last year: the year in Perugia and the few months in the States. I already told you about it, didn’t I? Anyway, then I met Gary. He wasn’t anyone special. My poor mother would have been terribly upset if she’d still been alive, she’d always wanted me to make a ‘good’ marriage, poor thing. Gary was a mechanic. He repaired my scooter for me. Actually he was just a boy still, ten years younger than me. I don’t know what it was, but right from the beginning – there was something in him – it’s difficult to explain – Bernard often reminds me of him. Oh I know it sounds ridiculous, one doesn’t expect a woman of over thirty to talk like that, I suppose, but there was – well, something very clean about him. Even when he was covered in oil and grease. The first time he slept with me, there were oil marks all over my body. But his body was so very white inside the overalls. We were like two children loving for the first time. I mean: both of us had been with others before, and yet it was as if we were virgins. Everything was so marvellous, so teenage. We went to the movies. We went to the races at Kyalami. We danced in discos. But he also came to listen to records in my flat. He became fond of Mozart. I persuaded him to start reading books with me. He registered at the Tech for evening classes. If I think back now, I know it was just as impossible as the other times: that sort of frothy happiness can’t last. It’s really too much to endure. But we were content. For the first time in my life I didn’t want to ask any questions, I didn’t want to deprive myself of anything. I wanted to dissolve myself completely in him; I didn’t want to be me any more. Oh I know it sounds exaggerated and ludicrous. But I think once in one’s life one has got to love like that, else something inside you remains closed. I suppose it usually happens when one is very young, like Gary was. But I had waited for much longer. I’d always been so ‘sensible’. Only this once I didn’t care.”
“And what happened then?” I asked, moved in spite of myself, but also affronted by it as it excluded me.
“We went for rides on his motorbike. I couldn’t get enough of it. Especially when it was raining and the streets were all wet and slippery and one knew it was dangerous, and yet you couldn’t help yourself: you just wanted to go faster and faster all the time. Then we had a fall. One night in Hillbrow, just as the movies were coming out. There were thousands of people in the streets, in the rain. He swerved to miss a pedestrian, and then he lost his balance. I just slipped off and started rolling. But he was flung through the air, hitting a lamp post with his face. The crowd jostling and shouting. The cars. The lights in the rain. The blood. I got up and ran to him. I wanted to give him mouth-to-mouth. But he had no mouth left.”
For a long time she was silent. With a ripple of its transparent body the small rock-fish reappeared from behind the seaweed, but she made no attempt to catch it. The late afternoon sun lay warmly on her shoulders and her bare back.
“I was three months pregnant when it happened,” she said. “But I lost his child. In the hospital I thought: It would have been better if I’d been killed instantly too. Apart from the baby, I’d escaped without any injuries. It was such a sudden, empty feeling. And once that has happened to one, you’ve got to start thinking in terms of endings again.”
There was a spider in our hut one night, on the wall immediately above the wide bed we’d made on the floor after discarding the two stupid little camp-beds in the bungalow. One of those horrible hairy baboon-spiders. She was just pulling her dress over her head when I noticed the creature.
“Watch out!” I called.
“What?” She looked over the top of her dress, her hands still outstretched above her head.
“There’s a spider behind you. Move over this way, I’ll kill him.”
But she looked round. And without any sign of fear she caught the hideous thing in a corner of her dress and went to the door to throw it out.
“Aren’t you scared then?” I asked, amazed.
She gave a small nervous smile and shrugged her shoulders, before she resumed her undressing to prepare for bed.
“When I was small, I was terribly scared of all sorts of creepy-crawlies,” she said, stepping out of her bikini panties. “I nearly had a fit if anything came near me. It was getting so bad that I had to do something about it. So I started catching them in match-boxes or bottles. I forced myself to handle them. And in that way I got over my fear. I was just as terrified of the dark, until I began deliberately to lock myself into a cupboard every day to cure me of it.”
Lying on our floor-bed, covered with a sheet, I gazed up at her standing over me with legs astride, leaning forward to look into the small mirror as she brushed her hair.
“Was that why you came to me when you got my cable?” I asked playfully. “Because you were trying to cure yourself of being scared of me?”
“Who knows?” The brush was moving evenly through her short dark curls. The white light of the gas lamp standing on the floor touched the bottom of her chin, the tips of her dark-nippled breasts, her small tangle of pubic hair forming a comic goatee below the pink protruding inner lips of her slightly distended sex.
“And now you’re no longer afraid?”
“It’s not a matter of losing one’s fear,” she said gravely. “One learns to control it and to live with it, that’s all.”
“Does it apply to me too?”
“I want to be aware of what’s happening to me,” she said, as if that answered my question. “I want to know about it, every moment.” She sat down beside me. “It’s all too easy to shut one’s eyes and let go. But I can’t.”
“You’re just making it difficult for yourself.”
“I’ve got to know!” she repeated. “Sometimes I envy other people. Girls who become Playmates, or who get addicted to sex, or who get married – just in order not to have to ask questions or to wonder about anything; to drug themselves into accepting that they’re not really alive themselves, but living through others, vicariously. The men they’re married to, the men they sleep with, the men leering at their pictures. But I can’t switch off so easily. I need answers. Which means I’ve got to be prepared to live with all the answers I get, however painful it may be. It’s just no use trying to pretend that things like cruelty or injustice or fear or violence don’t exist.”
“You’re making it almost impossible for anyone else to live with you.”
“Sometimes it’s almost impossible to live with myself,” she said lightly, laughing. “Do you really think I’m such a neurotic person?”
“You’re demanding too much of yourself, that’s all.”
“I’ve got to know, I’ve got to know.” Pulling up her knees she rested her chin on them. “When I flew to LM last Friday I despised myself. I’d sworn I would never allow myself to be ordered around by a man like that. And yet I wanted to come, I wanted to be with you. I hoped – oh it doesn’t matter. In the process I discovered things in myself I’d never known of before. I felt like a stranger to myself and I wanted to get to know myself better.”
“I know you.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t even know yourself, Martin.”
“That’s one thing you can’t accuse me of!”
“That’s the one thing I do accuse you of. You’re on the run all the time. You don’t want to know who you are. It’s a congenital disease with you Afrikaners. At the same time you never stop talking about ‘identity’. It’s like whistling when you walk past a graveyard.”
Far away in the night we could hear the cries of soldiers, vehicles starting up and driving away into the night. Had something happened? Was something going to happen?
Inside it was stuffy, as usual, in spite of the two small gauzed windows allowing a draught of warm air to drift lazily through the hut. And like many other nights we carried our bedding out to the beach. Swimming in the moonlight, trying, chafingly, to make love in the sea and failing; and resuming on the sand where she willingly submitted to my entry and my thrusts, but without coming herself. At my dispo
sal – yet with something held back deep inside her, an invincible, unassailable independence, a secret centre of pain into which she would never allow me to enter. Time and time again the same process was repeated, sometimes almost violently, assaults on that privacy within her: assaults all the more furious because I knew in advance I wouldn’t succeed. Especially not in that way.
Our week came to an end. (As she’d predicted!) Innocent of time and space we’d been together, our movements determined by day and night and the rhythms of the sea; by wind and silences and sudden tropical storms. While all around us the soldiers had gone their way, moving through the bush; and overhead the squadrons thundered past. Suddenly it was all over and we had to leave. We took a solemn vow that one day we would return. But we knew we wouldn’t. There are some places one can never return to. And anyway, soon afterwards the Portuguese withdrew from Moçambique and everything was changed irrevocably. Sometimes I wonder whether the small Black boy is still alive – and whether, in the end, he managed to bring anyone any luck.
3
AFTER BREAKFAST LOUIS and I took Ma’s small van to go to town. I allowed him to drive – not an unambiguous confirmation on my part of all being well between us: basically I just didn’t like to handle the jalopy. At the store I asked him to stop, and he sat waiting behind the wheel while I went in to Mrs Lawrence.
“I’ve come for a coffin,” I told her. “We’re on our way to collect the body.”
“Ag, it’s such a business, isn’t it?” she said with a small sigh. There was a transparent drop suspended from the tip of her nose. “I’ll get a few boys to help you.” In short, hurried steps she went to the back door to shout at a few helpers loitering against the wall in the sun. The coffins were stored with other unmanageable, bulky items in an outbuilding.
“I hope Louis wasn’t upset by the conversation yesterday,” she said apologetically when she returned to her high stool behind the counter. “It must have been a terrible thing to land in a war like that. He’s only a kid really.”
“He does seem to overreact from time to time,” I said.
“And your mother was so upset too. About the rest of us selling our farms and stuff. But surely she understands —”
“It’s all right, Mrs Lawrence. We’re also going to sell.”
“What?” She gaped at me, the pink plastic of her dentures exposed. “You don’t say?”
“Yes, that’s why I came down for the weekend.”
“Well, I never. I wonder what Mr Lawrence will say when he hears that.”
Outside there was a clanging from the van where the coffin was being loaded on the back.
“Well, Mrs Lawrence, it’s time to say goodbye.”
“Ag ja, bless you,” she said, taking a crumpled tissue from the sleeve of her sweater to blow her nose in sudden agitation. “Do keep in touch, Martin. Isn’t it sad the way time just flies? Seems like yesterday when you were children.”
I lingered for a moment, once again conscious of all the smells in the store, and of the dusky depths behind the shelves. Perhaps, when they cleared up the place one of these days, they would discover, among all the junk, a dusty and decayed little pair of girl’s panties and wonder what on earth.
Louis blew the horn impatiently.
“Why did you stay so long?” he asked when I got in beside him.
“Just said goodbye. I don’t suppose we’ll ever see them again.” I laughed self-consciously and tried my best to sound comradely: “You know, in that little store your Dad had his first real clinch with a girl.”
He glanced at me as if I’d said something improper; his eyes quizzical, uncomprehending. And I realised that even though the two of us might fleetingly recognise and acknowledge one another over a great distance, it didn’t mean that we could either understand or forgive. For the rest of the dusty road we didn’t speak. The bare drought-stricken veld swept past in a pastel blur. The naked knuckles of mountains, parched trees, bleak patches of red earth, aloes.
At the police station, from a cell in the yard at the back of the red-brick building, two Black constables brought us the body, not even covered with a blanket, shockingly naked, with the long black cuts of the post mortem sewn up in rough stitches. Without ceremony they dumped it into the bare pinewood coffin; one of them went back for a screwdriver to fasten the lid.
The red-headed sergeant we’d met the day before came down the steps of the charge office to my side of the van.
“When would you like us to bring Mandisi?” he asked.
For a moment I didn’t understand.
“For the funeral,” he explained.
“About eleven,” I said. “We’d like to get it over as soon as possible. I’ve got to be back in Johannesburg tonight.”
“Hell, but you’re in a hurry, hey?” said the sergeant.
“My work is waiting. I only came down for the weekend. On business.”
“Well, see you later then.”
On the way to the farm Louis drove more slowly, and from time to time I noticed him glancing in the rear-view mirror to make sure the coffin was all right. Whenever we came to eroded patches or humps in the road he braked and drove with great care as if concerned about the comfort of the woman in the box on the back.
Dad’s body had been brought out to the farm in the hearse, covered in flowers and wreaths. It was raining too. There was something outrageously morbid about the funeral in the rain. All those black umbrellas, the red muddy water at the bottom of the grave, the mud squelching under the artificial grass around the hole.
Something about Dad’s death had remained unresolved, incomplete. The transitions had been too sudden. The long road back from Tzaneen. The night with Bea. And then the news, and the frantic arrangements, and the flight; Ma, the morgue, the funeral.
Bea had been waiting in my apartment when I returned late that Wednesday afternoon. She had her own key.
We’d spent very few nights in her own small flat in Berea: whenever we’d gone there it had usually been for a stolen hour or so in the afternoon, when the well-worn old building behind the jacarandas would be deserted. A friendly, cosy, messy little flat, lived-in and topsy-turvy and warm. Rather dark, as a result of the trees in front of the window; the kitchen small and uncomfortable and the bathroom pervaded by an old, sour smell; a leaking ball-valve in the toilet. And yet a place in which one could relax completely. Unframed lithos and paintings by anonymous or unfamiliar artists on the walls, dried veld flowers and grass seeds in round clay-pots on the floor, crammed bookshelves made of boards and bricks; sometimes coffee mugs or plates left on the carpet from a previous day; cushions; a couple of cosy armchairs. In the bedroom, scattered clothes on the three-quarter bed with its brass knobs (some missing) and patchwork quilt, on the two straight chairs and the Victorian chest of drawers, or draped over the wide-open doors of the wardrobe; a small medieval Spanish statue of the Madonna on the dressing-table, now used for hanging scarves or bead necklaces; piles of books everywhere, some open and face-down. The whole place was pervaded with her. No wonder, for she’d lived there for so many years–ever since she’d started her LL.B. (after a double B.A. in modern languages). Even when she’d gone overseas she hadn’t given up the flat but sublet it to a friend. It had been the longest she’d ever lived in one place in her life, she used to say. Her only image of constancy and security. It had to be judged against the background of her earlier years: Italy, and the States, and then Cape Town, and one temporary address after the other in Johannesburg. Now, at last, this flat was hers. And it would be difficult to understand Bea without it.
(Why do I so regularly get bogged down in these descriptions, these details? To define what I’m trying to say? To convince myself that I haven’t lost touch with it? Or simply to try and put off what I know I must inevitably come to?)
But my own apartment was safer and more anonymous, better suited to the nature of our relationship. It was where everything had started on the night of Aunt Rienie’s party.
And that Wednesday night, too, we spent there.
She welcomed me at the door like a housewife, and ran me a bath while I relaxed in the lounge with a whisky. Afterwards, as I lay in the bath, she sat on the edge with her glass of white wine. A very mundane conversation. She enquired about my trip; I asked her about her work, listening without much interest to what she replied – there were always so many things she was involved in simultaneously. Not only her lecturing at Wits, but all the rest: the legal clinic she ran with a few members of staff and senior students, offering advice to Blacks unable to afford lawyers. Evening classes to help Black students who were having problems with their correspondence courses at the University of South Africa. In addition, she often drove to Soweto in her ramshackle old Volkswagen, on mornings when she wasn’t occupied at the university, to help out in this school or that. She mostly taught Afrikaans, one of her majors – a choice I’d always found surprising in someone with her background. But as I’d come to know her better I realised it was, in a way, characteristic of her. A variation, perhaps, on the theme of collecting spiders.
A very mundane conversation, I said: yet there was an element of discomfort I couldn’t explain. Not reticence, nothing definite. Just a hint of deliberateness about the polite way in which we questioned and answered one another. I didn’t mention it to her, knowing well enough that she would bring it up herself if she regarded it as important.
When I got up to dry myself she went out to dish up the food: a roast chicken from a Kentucky Fry, salad, bread, cheese. Cooking had never been her line. Afterwards she went to the bathroom with her glass of wine, to have a bath too, while I put a record on the player, carefully sponging off dust and static, and lay down on the divan to listen to the music.
She returned much later, her white muslin blouse still unbuttoned; and as she bent over to refill her glass I could see her narrow breasts. Returning the bottle to the shelf she turned her head sideways, remarking almost noncommittally: “Incidentally, I met your wife.”