A Dry White Season (45 page)

Alone. Alone to the very end. I. Stanley. Melanie. Every one of us. But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly: is that not the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this world?

How strange, this rare stillness. Even this winter landscape, bared of humanity and with the vultures circling over it, is beautiful in its own way. We still have much to learn about the subtleties of God’s infinite grace.

In the beginning there is turmoil. Then it subsides, leaving a silence: but it is a silence of confusion and incomprehension, not true stillness but an inability to hear properly, a turbulent silence. And it is only when one ventures much more deeply into suffering, it seems to me, that one may learn to accept it as indispensable for the attainment of a truly serene silence. I have not reached it yet. But I think I am very close now. And that hope sustains me.

5

Surely, if Ben had not been quite so exhausted, so close to the limits of his endurance, he would have suspected something. And if he’d known in time he might have taken some precautionary measures. But there is no point in speculation. After all, she was his own child, and how could one expect him to look for ulterior motives in the disarming sympathy she so unexpectedly offered him?

On the Sunday he and Johan drove to Pretoria to have dinner with Suzette and her family. Not that he was at all eager to embark on the journey, but she had insisted so strongly on the telephone that he couldn’t refuse. Moreover, he felt an overwhelming need to be with someone he could talk to.

The car windows had not been replaced yet and he was worried about being stopped by traffic police, but fortunately nothing happened.

“What on earth has happened to the car?” Suzette asked, shocked, the moment she saw him. “It looks as if you’ve been to war.”

“It was something of the sort.” He smiled wearily. “Fortunately I came out of it unscathed.”

“What happened?”

“Just a mob beside the road, few days ago. “He was reluctant to go into particulars.

After the sumptuous dinner, prepared by Suzette’s full-time cook, Ben felt more relaxed. The good food, the wine, the tasteful interior decoration straight from the pages of her own glossy magazine, the chance of playing with his grandchild before the boy was taken away by his nanny, everything added to a new and cherished feeling of ease and warmth. Suzette led him outside to recline on deck-chairs in the gentle late-autumn warmth beside the pool, where their coffee was served. Chris, in the meantime, had taken Johan to the study to show him something. Only afterwards did it occur to Ben that it might have been deliberately arranged.

She referred to the state of the car again. “Please, Dad, you really must be careful. Think of what might have happened! One never knows these days.”

“It’ll take more than a few stones to get rid of me,” he said lightly, unwilling to be drawn into an argument.

“Why didn’t you have it repaired? You can’t drive around like that.”

“Nothing wrong with the engine. Anyway, I’ll have it fixed this week. Just haven’t had the time yet.”

“What keeps you so busy?”

“All sorts of odds and ends.”

She probably guessed that he was hedging for suddenly, her voice warm with sympathy, she asked: “Or is it a matter of money?”

“Oh no, not at all.”

“You must promise me you’ll tell me if there’s anything Chris and I could do to help.”

“I will.” He looked at her, smiling slowly: “You know, I still think it’s incredible, the way the two of us used to be in each other’s hair all the time – and now, these last few weeks—”

“Sometimes it takes a jolt to open one’s eyes. There’s so much I’d like to make up for, Dad.”

She had the sun behind her. A slender, elegant, blond young woman; every hair in its place, no sign of a crease in her expensive, severely simple dress, undoubtedly from Paris or New York. The firm lines of her high cheekbones, the stubbornness of her chin. The very image of Susan, years ago.

“Don’t you find it unbearably lonely at home, Dad? When Johan is away to school—”

“Not really.” He changed his legs, avoiding her eyes. “One gets used to it. Gives me time to think. And there’s all my papers and stuff to sort and bring up to date.”

“About Gordon?”

“Yes, that too.”

“You amaze me.” There was nothing bitchy in her voice; it sounded more like admiration. “The way you manage to keep at it, no matter what happens.”

He said uneasily: “I suppose one just does what one can.”

“Most other people would have given up long ago.” A calculated pause: “But is it really worth your while, Dad?”

“It’s all I have.”

“But I’m concerned about you, Dad. That bomb the other day. What if Johan hadn’t been there to put out the fire? The whole house could have burned down.”

“Not necessarily. The study is well apart from the rest.”

“But suppose all your papers had been destroyed? Everything you’ve been collecting about Gordon?”

He smiled, putting his cup on the low table beside his deck-chair; he was feeling quite relaxed now, in that lazy-May sunshine. “Don’t worry,” he said, “they’ll never lay hands on that.”

“Where on earth do you keep the stuff?” she asked casually.

“I made a false bottom for my tools cupboard, you see. A long time ago already. Nobody will ever think of looking there.”

“More coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

She poured some for herself, all of a sudden curiously energetic. He looked at her fondly, enjoying the luxury of her attentiveness, indulging himself, abandoning himself to her sympathy, and to the caressing of the autumn sun, the dull afterglow of the red wine.

It was only on the way back, late that afternoon, that he thought in sudden panic: What if Suzette had had something very specific in mind when she’d questioned him so carefully, with so much studied nonchalance?

Angrily he rejected the thought. How could one think that of one’s own child? What sense would remain in the world if one no longer had the right to trust one’s own family?

He wondered whether he should discuss it with Johan. But the wind made such a noise through the broken windows that conversation was almost ruled out. Without realising it he was driving faster and faster.

“Watch out for speedcops! “Johan shouted.

“I’m driving my normal speed,” he grumbled, easing his foot off the accelerator. But he was impatient now, brooding, deeply perturbed.

Even though he despised himself for his own suspicions, for harbouring the mere thought, he knew he would have no peace of mind before he’d done something to allay his fears. Andwhile Johan was away to church that evening he unscrewed the small trap-door in the wooden casement of the bath and transported all his documents to the new hiding-place, meticulously screwing the lid back after he’d finished.

One night later that week the garage was burgled so cautiously and professionally that neither Ben nor Johan was disturbed by the slightest noise. It was only when he came to his car the next morning that Ben discovered what had happened. The entire tools cupboard had been methodically ripped apart and the contents lay strewn all over the garage floor.

EPILOGUE

Very little remains before I arrive back where I started with Ben’s story. A senseless circle – or a spiral moving slowly inward after all? Almost lightly I clutched at another man’s life to avoid or exorcise the problem of my own. I discovered very soon that no half-measures were possible. Either evasion or total immersion. And yet, with almost everything written down, what have I resolved of the enigma that tantalised me so? Ben: my friend the stranger. The disturbing truth is that even as I prepare to finish it off I know that he will not let go of me again. I cannot grasp him: neither can I rid myself of him. There is no absolution from the guilt of having tried.

I am left with a sense of hopelessness. In my efforts to do justice to him, I may have achieved the opposite. We belong to different dimensions: one man lived, another wrote; one looked forward, the other back; he was there, and I am here.

No wonder he remains beyond my reach. It is like walking in the dark with a lamp and seeing blunt objects appearing and disappearing in the narrow beam of light, but remaining incapable of forming an image of the territory as such. It is still a wilderness. But it was either this – or nothing at all.

Immediately after discovering the burglary in his garage Ben drove in to town and telephoned me from a booth at the station. An hour later I met him in front of Bakker’s bookshop. The strange, thin, fugitive creature so different from the man I thought I’d known.

The rest is mostly guesswork or deduction, in which I may be influenced by the same paranoia he had written about; but it must be told.

He posted his papers and notebooks from Pretoria. And I like to imagine that, for once, he allowed himself a touch of irony by first telephoning Suzette to say:

“Please do me a favour, my dear. Remember those notes we spoke about – all that stuff in connection with Gordon, you know: well, it’s just occurred to me it may not be so safe with me after all. Do you think I could bring it over so you could store it forme?”

One can imagine how she would try to suppress her excitement, saying eagerly: “Of course, Dad. But why take the trouble of bringing it here? I’ll come over to collect it.”

“No, don’t worry. I’ll bring it myself.”

In that way, of course, he would eliminate the risk of being followed: knowing that everything was to be deposited with Suzette they wouldn’t bother to tail him to Pretoria. And an hour or so later, quiet, pale, content, he would hand in his package at the parcel counter of the post office in Pretoria and then drive out to Suzette’s home on Waterkloof Ridge.

She would come out to meet him. Her eyes would eagerly search the car. Slowly her face would drop as he explained casually: “You know, I thought about it again. I’ve landed so many people in trouble that I’d rather not compromise you in any way. So I decided I’d rather burn the whole lot. I must admit it’s a load off my mind."

Of course she wouldn’t dare to give away her feelings; her lovely make-up acting as a mask to her shock and anger.

A few days later the parcel was delivered at my house. And then he was killed.

That, I thought, was the end of it.

But fully one week after his funeral his last letter reached me. Dated 23 May, the night of his death:

I really didn’t mean to bother you again, but now I have to. Hopefully for the last time. I have just had another anonymous call. A man’s voice. Saying they would be coming for me tonight, something to that effect. I’ve had so many of these calls before that I’ve learned to shrug them off. But I have the feeling that this time it’s serious. It may just be the state of my nerves, but I don’t think so. Please for give me if I’m troubling you unnecessarily. But just in case it really is serious I want to warn you in time. Johan isn’t here tonight. And anyway I wouldn’t like to upset him unduly.

The caller spoke English, but with an Afrikaans accent. Something very familiar about it, even though he was trying to smother it, probably by holding a handkerchief over the receiver. It was he. I’m quite convinced of it.

There have been two more burglaries at my house this past week. I know what they’re looking for. They are not prepared to wait any longer.

If I am right in my suspicion it is imperative that you know about it.

One feels a strange calm at a moment like this. I have always liked endgames best. If it hadn’t happened in this way, they would have found another. I know I couldn’t possibly have gone on like this for much longer. The only satisfaction I can still hope for is that everything will not end here with me. Then I shall truly be able to say, with Melanie: “I do not regret for one moment a single thing that has happened.”