Absolution (21 page)

‘And the author of the book you reported against?’

She smiles and shakes her head. ‘You already know her.’ Having been unable to trace the author of the banned novel, which was embargoed and nearly all the copies apparently destroyed, never to be republished, never published abroad, I’d assumed the man, for the author was a man, Charles Holz, was dead.

‘You banned your own book?’

‘I thought perhaps you would be sympathetic, since you are, like I was, an intellectual – or a kind of intellectual – trying to survive in a time of madness.’ She smiles for a moment only
and then purses her lips together, sticking them out, as if to kiss. ‘What will you do now? Will you tell the world that the woman who argues so fiercely against censorship collaborated with the censors, became one of them, and worked against herself? Do, if you wish. I won’t stop you. I cannot. It will change no one’s mind. If you present it fairly, as I know you will, being yourself of a highly legalistic frame of mind, then those who hate me will go on hating me, and those who do not hate me will merely think this new information adds to my complexity. It is a shame that this is all you could come up with, this impotent little squib. I thought you had caught the real scent. I was sure you knew,’ she says.

‘Knew what?’ I ask, feeling my heart race, wondering if she is referring to our own buried connection – if it’s possible she remembers me from decades ago – or something else altogether, a secret about herself I can’t begin to imagine.

She shakes her head. ‘You asked the wrong questions. How do you think you can write my life? You have nothing but a skeleton of facts, which you will flesh out with your own conjectures. I have shown you nothing. Because you now think that you know why, at one period in my life, I might have violated my own elaborate ethics, you will paint a pad of muscle and skin, and say, “That is who she is, there, as I’ve drawn her.” ’

She takes the photocopied report and places it back in the green folder. ‘You are caught under that green bushel, lighting up what? Nothing. A dark empty space. My greatest secrets are left unillumined. You cannot see me from underneath that bushel. I was ready to show you demons. But that is work you have left for me to do, if I should choose to do it.’

This is how she appears to me, and these are her words, as I recorded and transcribed them, but when I reread them I find I’ve lost who she is: that system of continuous small explosions, contained in a tall pouch of skin.

Absolution

Since it was going to be cool over the weekend, Marie suggested they go for a drive.

‘To the beach?’ Clare asked, and then thought better of it. ‘No, not to the beach. There will be a wind.’

‘To Stellenbosch, then?’ Marie said.

‘Yes, all right.’

‘And perhaps you would like to stop at the cemetery, to see your sister’s grave. We haven’t been there in such a long time.’

‘Yes, very well. Perhaps it’s time I paid another visit to check she hasn’t unearthed herself.’

Clare’s parents were not so easily visited; they had both been cremated, their ashes scattered in a high wind at the tip of the world, falling in eddies around her head and into the air above the waves where two oceans meet.

Marie drove them from the house and along the N2, turning off at Baden Powell Drive, going through Stellenbosch, and then up into the vineyard-covered slopes and around into Paarl.

The cemetery felt unnaturally white, headstones of white marble surrounded by whitewashed walls, the graves tended by fat white men with burned skin, replacing the faded white lilies on Nora and Stephan’s graves with fresh ones every day, at private expense. The wild fig was still there, outside the walls, covered in vines, and the language monument was now visible beyond the tree. Nora’s grave was in a place of honour next to her husband’s, adjacent to an eternal flame, which, it was rumoured, had lately been allowed to go out at night. But on that day it was burning, blue-gold under the leaden clouds, stark against the white crosses
that faded into invisibility against the white wall that surrounded the acre of dead, the burial farm.

It was a space of such whiteness that Clare, in black for fashion rather than respect, looked like an intruder. And then she noticed that there was another intruder as well, black and small and round, nestled against the base of the monument that marked Nora’s grave. Clare knew what it was before she had seen it clearly; she knew at the first dull metal glint of black, half-revealed, itself half-concealing the eternal flame. It was her father’s black tin box. She felt cold in the heat, and put her hand on Marie’s white-sleeved arm. When they reached the grave, Clare leaned over and took up the box in her hands.

It was impossible; it was too horrible to find it there. It was somehow exactly what she had been expecting. She opened the lid. The wig was there, and she imagined for a fractional moment that her father’s head was there as well, tipped up, staring at her, though this was impossible, for his head was in ash, scattered to the sky. Clare thought she heard herself scream. She knew that they knew. She knew who they were – Stephan’s family, his brothers, his cousins, nephews and nieces for all she knew. It was clear what the wig meant, clear to her that her own complicity was known, that someone wished to remind her that she was not above the law, and not above the claims of history.

Surprising herself, Clare found a small white stone and placed it on her sister’s monument. It was not the tradition of her own family’s religion, but somehow it made sense, the stone as a private acknowledgement of a feeling she was unable to describe. It would have been too much to say that she grieved for her sister, and certainly she had no fond feeling for her brother-in-law, but there was a turbulence in her heart that, for a moment, the movement of the stone from the ground to the monument put to rest. When Clare was finished, she asked Marie to drive her home.

‘Would you not like to go for lunch somewhere?’ Marie asked, sounding hopeful.

‘Not now, no, I’m sorry. We can stop for a sandwich if you’re hungry, but I’ve quite lost my appetite.’

Later that day Clare realized that she should phone Ms White. It was near the end of the month. When had the invasion occurred? The beginning of December a year ago, or the end of November a year before that? The dates were fuzzy in her head. It seemed as though it had still been spring, only just warm enough to have had the windows open at night. Ms White was perfunctory on the phone.

‘Well, that is good. You have found the wig. I guess the case is closed.’

‘What of Jacobus and his so-called gang?’

‘You pressed no charges against them, so we have let them go.’

‘Is it as simple as that?’ Clare asked, incredulous.

‘As simple as you make it, madam.’

‘And what of the invaders? Are there no clues?’

‘Invaders?’

‘The people who broke into my old house, of course.’

‘But we had him, Jacobus and his gang, and you said it could not be them, madam. I do not understand. Is it now your wish that we should charge them with robbery?’ Ms White sounded truly perplexed, as though she could not begin to understand the nature or logic of Clare’s intentions.

‘It was not Jacobus, but I need to know who it was. I only wish to know, exactly, who did it – the invasion, the theft. I can tell you only that it was someone from the past. Someone from my brother-in-law’s family. His associates, his brothers, or even his sisters. They wish to punish me.’

‘If this is a family matter, madam, then why did you ever bring the authorities into it? If you knew who it was, why have you wasted our time?’

‘It is not that simple.’

‘Perhaps you should take over the investigation. You are so good at finding. You found your father’s special wig. That is good.
Perhaps you will find the intruders. And then you will phone me if you wish. And we will come fetch them for you.’ Like a ball, or a stick, Clare wanted to say. Intruders that were only playthings, a wig, a tin box, two women of a certain age. ‘Or you will settle the matter as it should be settled, madam, as a family.’

But they are not my family
, Clare wanted to say.
They are nothing to do with me. They know what I have done. They are sending me signs. They are terrorizing me
.

Clare

There is something I have never told you, Laura, a thing about me that makes us more alike than you might imagine. While I have many regrets – in particular about the kind of mother I was to you, and the kind of mother I never managed to be – I have no greater regret than this: that I failed to tell you the darkest truth about me when you were present to hear it, that I failed to show you, when you needed it, how alike we were. This is my true confession. To confess is all that I can do for you.

It is a story about sisters: my sister Nora, and me.

Perhaps I never told you, but even as small children, Nora teased me mercilessly. I was
Giraffe Girl, Goosey, Noose-neck. I’m going to hang you high, Noose-neck
, Nora would scream, threatening me with a length of rope. And then when I cried she would clasp me to her and say she didn’t mean it,
No offence, Clare
, it was all just joking, that’s what sisters did. I stopped loving her when I was eight, after she cut off all my hair while I was sleeping and burned it in the garden. I stopped thinking of her as my
dear sister
before I ever came of age, even before I was a teenager, long before Nora left home.

At sixteen, Nora was always threatening. She threatened our parents that she would marry that great bullock Boer, Stephan Pretorius, with or without their permission. She once threatened me with a hot griddle from the stove, chasing me through the house and screaming
I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!
after I used her lipstick. She threatened the cats with drowning and switches. She threatened our parents that she would never see them again if they refused to attend her wedding. She threatened to elope, never to let them meet their grandchildren (a blessing, perhaps, that there
were none). She threatened too much. Why, I wondered, was she so unlike me? How do two people become opposites in every way while being raised by the same parents in the same house with the same values and rules? I hardly have an answer today. They were stricter with her, but not in a way that should have produced a tyrant. My father used to say the ghost of his grandmother, whom he remembered with terror, must be haunting Nora, for how else could one explain her wickedness? There were times when I wondered if you had inherited that haunting, Laura, if the echo of Nora’s name in your own betokened some generational curse.

Even as a child, I understood why she would marry Stephan. It was not about love. He was older than her, a man already – a man to replace our father, who was a better man by half. (I know you will protest – that I, too, married a man to replace my father, a man of the law like him, to take his place. Unlike Nora, I was conscious of my folly, and your father was – is – no monster.) Nora’s husband, so unlike our father, had a strong, stout body, florid with health and indulgence. What could our parents say but
Yes, we give our blessing
? And even though his was, if you like, a parallel branch of the same Christian tribe (if we can still speak of tribes these days), the Pretorius family seemed as foreign to my parents as we must have seemed to them. On my sister’s wedding night I heard my father weeping in his study in a way that he wept only when he remembered the dead.

One of our father’s clients loaned us a limousine for the day, and we paid the gardener extra to drive us to the church, then to the banquet, and then home afterwards. On the way to the church, the gardener was so excited by the car that he tested the windscreen wipers but could not discover how to turn them off, so we arrived in the blazing sun at the church in our borrowed limousine with the wipers screaming over the dry glass, and even when the car was turned off, the wipers kept screeching back and forth until the car’s battery died. After the ceremony, we had to
walk through town to the wedding banquet because there was no room in the limousines that my brother-in-law’s family – dozens of them – had hired to carry themselves. Or perhaps they simply did not wish to risk such intimacy with us. My sister had become one of them, embraced their church, turned her back on our quiet Methodism. Stephan had caused scandal by choosing an outsider, but he stood his ground. He said he loved her. And who could not? She looked like Marilyn Monroe in those days, blonde and flawless as a goddess.

We arrived at the banquet sweating and covered with dust while my sister and her new family were dry and cool, already eating their chilled soup. There had been a ‘mistake’ with the seating arrangements, so that my parents and I were not at the long head table with the wedding party and my brother-in-law’s parents and six brothers and sisters, but at a separate table just to the side, with my aunt and uncle and cousins, a knot of slender, pale bodies, suffocating under all that beef. We were not in any of the wedding photos, except those taken by my uncle, with my sister and her husband out of focus in the background, chewing their
braaivleis
.

In the months after the wedding, when they moved to his grandparents’ farm, into the long white house outside Stellenbosch, Nora learned the ways of her new tribe, the formalities of the language with all its cloying diminutives,
the little pot, the little sister, the little mistress
. In private, our mother asked my sister if her new husband’s family was treating her well. My sister did not answer at first, then said, too brightly,
Yes, Mother, they treat me well
.

When we were visiting her I upset an antique plate hand-painted with delicate blue flowers, breaking it on the dung floor that was polished with ox-blood and studded with peach pits, perhaps imagining how my sister’s mother-in-law would react.

Years passed. By the time I returned from Europe my brother-in-law was something important in the National Party. My own
politics had been, as is so often said these days, ‘radicalized’ – chiefly by my time in England, and the people I met there, the books I was suddenly allowed to read without fear of discovery or sanction. On returning home, I met your father. We found each other through like-minded friends who arranged for us to meet, and, liking each other well enough, we decided to get married. I had your brother Mark, and as your father became more cautious, more concerned not to jeopardize his newly won place in the university, I became more radical, writing and publishing and attending meetings the wife of a professor should not have attended. It was enough to get me noticed by people on both sides, and at a meeting one night I let slip that my sister and her husband were going to be in Cape Town for a few nights. One of my associates asked, as casually as you please, if they would be staying with me. Don’t be ridiculous, I said. My sister’s husband would never accept my hospitality. They’re staying at some fancy guest house. Did I know the name? The name of the guest house? Of course I did – and let it trip from the end of my tongue.