Absolution (20 page)

On Wednesday I walk all the way up Long Street until it runs into Kloof. I drop off some dry cleaning and go to a movie in the middle of the afternoon. As I’m coming out of the cinema and waiting to cross the street, a young man approaches me. He’s polite, well dressed, but his clothes are dirty and he smells.

‘Excuse me sir, I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Derek,’ he says. Derek isn’t like the woman we saw the other evening. There’s no trace of privilege in his accent, and little education.

‘I’m sorry I don’t have any change,’ I say.

‘Thank you, sir.’ As he begins to walk away I call out to stop him.

‘Listen, I’m not going to give you any money, but I’ll buy you some food. What do you want?’

‘Some bread and some sugar and some coffee,’ he says. ‘That’s what we need most in the shelter. Bread and some sugar and some coffee.’ He says this like he’s said it before. His body falls down around itself. His eyes are clear. He hasn’t been drinking. He looks listless with hunger.

I tell him to wait and I go into the KwikSpar up the street. I choose a loaf of vitamin-enriched brown bread, half a kilo of sugar, and then look for the coffee. There’s no coffee for under 50 rand, so I decide to skip it. The bread and sugar come to 18 rand, a little over two dollars at the current exchange rate. Less than I’d pay for a cappuccino. I know that I have to stop comparing, that soon dollars will mean nothing to me, that I will measure my life once again in the currency of my childhood.

Derek has come to wait outside the shop. I give him the loaf of bread and sugar. He looks disappointed with the bread, as though I’ve chosen the wrong kind. I tell him I didn’t have enough money for the coffee, which is true in a way, since I wouldn’t have had enough cash to pay for it.

‘Thank you sir,’ he says, and walks away.

On Thursday, as I’m going to fetch my dry cleaning, I see Derek again: even from the short distance across the street, he looks almost prosperous, or, if not prosperous, then not on the skids. And then he pushes up his sleeves, puts down the plastic bags he’s carrying, and begins to search through a trashcan.

*

Greg called out to me a moment ago to say he was setting the alarm, which means the kitchen, dining room, and lounge are all out of bounds until morning. I have nearly a wing of the ground floor to myself, including my bedroom, its adjoining bathroom, and Greg’s study – a room that would have been intended for a live-in maid when the house was built. There aren’t any outer doors in this section of the house and motion-sensing beams operate all along the perimeter fence, at the doors, and at each exterior corner of the building. Greg and Dylan sleep marooned on the upper floor, and the stairwell off the kitchen, which ends at the back door, is also alarmed. The dogs stay upstairs with them.

It’s easy to become paranoid about noises. The house settling or weight on a floorboard? Wind in the chimney or a window
opening? I know that no one could enter the house now without triggering the alarm, unless they were more than petty burglars. They’d need whatever technology is necessary to disarm the system without any of us being aware of it. Greg isn’t anyone of real importance, and I’m definitely not, so I know that we have nothing to fear except petty burglars, and even then the fear is more about confrontation than loss of property. Confrontation, pain, and death.

I’m nearly asleep when the electronic howl pulls me up, eyes throbbing in time to the siren. I haven’t felt like this since I was a child. My heart’s in my tongue, every part of me vibrates with fear. The alarm echoes down the corridor and I slip out of bed to the door, crack it open, but can see only darkness. I sprint back across the room to the windows and edge the shutters open. The garden is dim under its night lights and my breath comes out quick and shallow. The dogs are silent. And then the alarm stops all at once, pulled into a vacuum of silence, and Greg calls from the end of the corridor. He can’t see anything outside. It must have been an animal, or a power surge. The dogs aren’t concerned. The alarm company phones to be sure that everything’s okay, and Greg gives them the password that indicates it is, that we aren’t being held at gunpoint – there’s a different password for that – and we all go back to bed.

I begin to drift into sleep again when the dogs go crazy and seconds later the alarm splits my ears open. I run into the hall without thinking and see a face at the kitchen window, a palm flattened against a pane of glass. Greg comes down the stairs with Dylan in his arms. He sees the man at the window, gives Dylan to me, and orders me upstairs into the bathroom. It locks from the inside and doesn’t have any windows. The handle of the back door rattles and Greg pounds the panic button in the kitchen.
Our number is up
, I think,
our number is up
. I run up the stairs with Dylan, who’s crying now, and lock us in the bathroom. Downstairs Greg shouts into the phone, ‘There’s a man on the property, he’s
trying all the doors and windows.’ I hear glass shatter below, then silence and more glass shattering somewhere else. I think of the sliding doors in the lounge, which don’t have burglar bars. I hold Dylan’s head tight against my chest, rocking him back and forth. It’s quiet for a long time and then the sirens come and feet stomp around downstairs and upstairs. Greg is at the door. It’s okay, he says, and he gives me the password that tells me it really is okay, that he’s not being held at gunpoint. ‘Chocolate sundae,’ he says, ‘we’re all clear.’

The intruder is on the ground in the garden, spread-eagled, with the security company guards holding him down at gunpoint. He looks tiny, half as big as Greg. It’s the man who was here before, claiming to be a tinker. He doesn’t resist or protest.

Saturday morning. After sweeping up broken glass everywhere, we eat fruit salad and French toast on the patio with the dogs circling and whining for scraps. They go wild when a hadeda lands on the lawn and the bird shuffles back into the air. A glazier is coming to replace the windows and the security company will be here later to check the whole system. Greg has decided to install a gate outside the sliding glass doors. ‘It’s going to ruin the room,’ he says, ‘but what can you do? It’s either enjoy the view and pretend this is paradise or sleep soundly at night. I’ve been thinking of moving to one of the gated communities, up in Constantia or Tokai. Not for my sake, but for Dylan’s.’ Greg says what I thought last night. ‘I was sure our number was up. It’s only a matter of time.’

For a while, before he had Dylan, Greg was living in a rambling old house in edgy Observatory. One day while he was at work an intruder beat his five dogs to death. ‘You can almost get over that. At least I wasn’t there,’ he says. ‘But when you face the man who wants to take everything from you because he doesn’t have anything himself, and sees us whiteys living like pharaohs, I don’t know how to get over that. He didn’t even have a gun. Just a knife.
The police said he was high, probably on
tik
. I locked myself in the study. I cried in there, thinking I might die without saying goodbye to Dylan, or thinking that the man might get to you and Dylan first, and I’d have to live with that. I was too terrified to confront him. What does that say about me? I think maybe it says we shouldn’t live here any more. We don’t belong here now. But I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I could never live in New York again. I don’t know how you did it for so long.’

As happy as I am to be home, I can’t help wondering what kind of place I’ve come back to, and what sort of country and life I’ve convinced Sarah to move to. I’ve tried to forget the reasons I left, all the history of my own life that I left behind, but it keeps coming back, like a chronic illness.

*

Nearly four months have passed since the first interview. My work on Clare’s papers is as complete as it can be for now, and anyway, she tells me there’s nothing more she’s willing to share. The personal correspondence that I’d hoped to see hasn’t and won’t appear. I leave next week for Johannesburg.

‘We could have a final series of conversations, if you like,’ she tells me today. ‘Not that I mean to suggest finality. You may contact me in future, if the need arises, but since you are here, why don’t we cover anything you may have been holding back. I am not easily offended. I’ve begun to think you rather hide your lamp under a bushel. You are cleverer than you like people to think. There is something both endearing and unnerving in that. Why don’t you kick off that bushel these last few days? Ask me the unaskable. Give truth the reins.’

I have to stifle a laugh. It seems such an unlikely, even absurd thing to say after everything she’s said in the past, what with all the hostility at the beginning, when even the most basic question seemed exactly that:
unaskable
. I think – how can I help but think? – that she’s already guessed the questions I have to ask, what this
whole project is really all about, assuming she has any idea who I am. It’s like being allowed to ask your mother anything about herself, and finding that a million questions suddenly spring to mind, each one even less possible to formulate than the last, even when you’ve been given permission.

The weather has grown warmer and we take the opportunity to sit in the garden. I return to some earlier points, clarifying questions of authorial intention, which she bridles against – ‘You are poisoning me,’ she complains – and larger thematic links, details about her family, her childhood, her relationship with her sister, which she is more willing to discuss than at our first meeting. She seems to brighten, in fact, when I mention her dead sibling.

After three days of this kind of discussion she again loses patience.

‘You are still hiding under that bushel. I have dared you to join me, but you go on screening yourself. Come out into the daylight. I am inviting you. Stop prevaricating.
Neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad
,’ she says, and I know I should be able to recognize that – a quote from which of her books? ‘Listen Sam,’ she says, now more like a mother than ever, ‘you won’t know whether I’ll refuse until you ask, and you know me well enough by now to know that I
will
refuse if I don’t wish to answer. I won’t bear you a grudge for any question you choose to ask. This is what you are here for after all, darling.’

I don’t imagine the
darling
. It makes me shiver. Marie suddenly interrupts with a plate of biscuits and a pot of tea. She says nothing and leaves as quickly as she came.

I try to pull my thoughts back into focus, but the flutter of courage I felt at
darling
has gone. Of course I have two questions in mind: the askable question and what remains the unaskable one. So I go with the former, and know I’ll regret it.

‘There
is
something else.’ The trick is to set up the question in such a way that I don’t deceive, and don’t present myself as being
ignorant of the answer, which I already know, so that when the question comes she won’t feel betrayed. I don’t want to corner her; I just need to see how she answers. ‘In the first few meetings – I can’t remember which now – we spoke about the process of writing under the threat of censorship.’

Her face draws to a point. She has something else entirely on her mind. I’m disappointing her again.

‘Yes. I remember that conversation.’

‘You mentioned a few cases of writers who had worked for the Publications Control Board as advisory readers.’

‘Yes. Some were true believers. Others naively thought they were defending literature from within a hostile system.’

‘Did you know any of them personally?’

‘I knew them as colleagues of a sort, yes, as fellow writers do. But they were not close friends. Why don’t you come to your point?’

‘When it became known that I was going to write your biography, lots of people sent me letters offering anecdotes about you. Most of them I ignored, because most were, frankly, libellous, never backed up with any evidence. Someone, however, and I don’t know who, because he or she acted anonymously, sent me a photocopy of a document,’ I say, handing her a folder. ‘I’ve been to the State Archives to look for the original, but files from the period have been lost. I was hoping you might be able to tell me if this is genuine or not.’

‘I think I know what I am going to find inside.’ She opens the green flaps and removes a slim stack of photocopied pages, stapled together, bearing her initial and surname at the top of the first page. There’s nothing to prove she actually wrote it; some enemy might have wanted to put her name to the advisory report that argues in the most legalistic style on what grounds a novel, summarized and analyzed in the pages therein, might be banned under the country’s old publication control laws. She skims the pages and sets the report to one side.

‘It’s genuine,’ she says, the corners of her mouth turning up. ‘That’s my handwriting, my signature, my words throughout. You want me to offer some kind of defence for my actions, but I won’t. I will say only that I did it as a challenge to the system, believing I might be able to subvert it from within, or prove that there was nothing high-minded about its aims. Then one day, they simply stopped using me, and no more books were sent in my direction; notably, it happened after I wrote this very report – coincidence or not, I don’t know, nor do I care. If you were to read all the reports I wrote, of which there were perhaps twenty over a period of two years in the early 1970s, this one, the one you have, is the only one that advocated banning, and I argued for banning on strictly legal grounds, as you can see. Whoever kept the report knew what they were about, or at least they thought they did. I assumed I had the only surviving copy. The author was totally unknown, and the book,
Cape Town Nights
, was quite obviously written with the express purpose of challenging the publication control laws; it was obscene, blasphemous, and openly ridiculed the government and the police, all of which were forbidden. The small press that risked publishing it made a habit of these sorts of crude attempts at challenging the system. It had a certain futile nobility. In every other case, the books upon which I reported were ultimately made available to the public without change or emendation, as far as I know.’