Absolution (22 page)

I did not know it was supposed to be a secret, or that their arrangements were for my ears only, that my sister, in trusting me, was trying to extend a hand of friendship, even of reconciliation.

You are right to protest.

Without doubt I knew. I knew the delicacy of the information I held. I chose to forget. I have spent the rest of my life speculating why.

I imagine the moment of horror, the two of them caught by the intruder in the room of the guest house. Nora and Stephan were in bed together, sheets slick with hair oil, sticky with him, socks on the floor, cold and sharp, sour in the hot room. Woken by the sudden opening of the bedroom door, pushing her body upright in bed, damp with perspiration, seeing the figure outlined in the intruding light from the corridor, she must have wondered,
Where are the guards?
It must have seemed
impossible that they should find themselves bargaining for their lives. Logically, Nora would have expected her husband to intervene to save her, but she must have known there had never been much evidence to suggest he would do anything to endanger himself, to put anyone’s interests above the instincts of his own self-preservation.

I have read the testimony. My sister’s assassin reported that she threatened to scream, to call the guards, to wake the entire guest house. Why, I wonder, at that most crucial hour, did she threaten but fail to act? She looked to her silent husband clutching the bedclothes in terror, and the smell of shit filled the room. (The police, the coroner, they confirmed this.) The intruder went first for my sister while her husband pleaded for his own life, on his knees in the bed. And then it happened. He moved, but not towards the assassin; he scrambled from his bed to the open window, trying to escape, and in the instant in which his legs planted themselves on the floor and his bare white back turned against his wife, the gun moved from her eye and fired into her husband with a soft
pffft
. She did not scream, or move, but looked at the assassin, who was, the man said, surprised by her silence.

When I saw their bodies the following morning I thought,
I have done this. I have made this happen
. I delivered the assassin to my sister’s door. I was not shocked by their deaths or the violence done to their bodies. I knew what bullets fired at close range could do to living tissue; I had done it myself, to my cousin’s horse. The only thing that shocked me was my own capacity to give away the very information that led to my sister’s death and to feel, in the aftermath, no remorse. They were, I told myself at the time, on the wrong side of history. About that, at least, I was right. About my own role, I can no longer be sure.

You see, Laura, how I played my own part – not as brave as you, but as wilful and headstrong, anxious to make a difference,
or at least to appear useful to people more involved than I. Was I callous? Were we both?

In your last letter to me you write:

You know that I don’t ask for absolution, since that’s something you don’t believe in and therefore can’t give, or won’t give. I only offer this document as my version of the truth, a truth among many. Bernard’s truth would be different, but he can’t speak. Sam’s truth would be different still, and he may yet speak. If you refuse to absolve me, will you also refuse to judge me, or does judgement belong to a different order of ethics?

Come back. Come back that I may say it all to your face, that I may rethink my ethics, beg for absolution from you, prostrate myself in the name of reconciliation and love. You are all that I love now. I want only you.

*

As the earth spun you out of the eye of the sun, Lionel directed you to a point he recognized in a folded shadow of the Nuweveld Mountains. The clinic was a long low building in a tiny settlement of whitewashed plaster houses surrounded by a grove of acacia. Lights were on inside and a radio played. Timothy knocked at the largest of the houses, and his mother opened the door. She was a much older woman than you were expecting, short, in a neat smock dress. She kissed her son on both cheeks, then turned to Lionel with the same greeting.

‘Mother,’ he said, ‘this is Lamia and Sam. They gave us a ride.’

‘And they’ve come all this way with you? Shame! Are you sick, my dear?’

Inside, the house was bright and incongruously modern. Timothy’s mother, Gloria, poured you tea and said that you could sleep in the clinic. ‘There are no patients now, and plenty of beds. You’re welcome here for as long as you need.’

‘Perhaps a night. Just to rest. I can pay,’ you offered.

‘That isn’t necessary. You’ve given the boys a ride. That’s payment enough. Won’t you have another slice of malva pudding? It’s always nicer the next day, I find.’

‘We won’t stay long. I’m taking Sam to Beaufort West tomorrow. To his aunt.’

‘Of course,’ Gloria said, as if Beaufort West were a town peopled solely by aunts awaiting the delivery of prodigal nephews.

Like Gloria’s house, the clinic’s rustic façade masked an up-to-the-minute interior equipped with consulting and waiting rooms, an operating theatre, and a dormitory with sixteen single beds. Gloria and Timothy helped you make up two of the beds, showed you the toilets and showers, the kitchen with facilities to make tea and coffee, and invited you to return to Gloria’s house for breakfast in the morning. Left alone, you put Sam to bed and looked at him square in the eyes.

‘Perhaps we should have a talk,’ you said. ‘Do you know where your aunt lives in Beaufort West?’

‘If I saw it. I don’t know the name of the street, but I’ve been there before. I know the way.’

‘And you’re sure she’s still living there?’

‘I think so.’

‘When I take you to your aunt, I’m going to leave you with her. And after that I’m going away. I’m leaving the country.’ Sam screwed up his face and kicked his feet against the bed. ‘People will ask you questions about what happened to Bernard. You must tell them what I did to him, the way I killed him. Only give me perhaps three days after I leave you, before you say anything.’ Sam looked up at you again. ‘Do you understand?’

The next morning, you left your notebooks and the last letter, every document important to you, in Timothy and Lionel’s care, telling the young men, these strangers you trusted, to deliver the papers to me in person when they could.

*

Between the clinic and Beaufort West there was only a dirt track that twisted through hills the colour of dead skin. It stopped a kilometre from town, north of the national route, so no one who did not know what to look for would ever find it. It appears on no map and does not exist today.

From the clinic approach, the white spire of the church appeared first, rising in defiance above the dusty trees. You arrived in town on a street of depressed storefronts and a petrol station where you parked alongside other rigs, glinting bright and aggressive in the summer heat. At a phone booth across the street you paged through the slim Beaufort West directory, looking for the name Sam gave you. When you found it, you phoned the number and after a single ring a woman answered.

‘Yeeees. Who’s this?’ The woman sounded suspicious.

‘Do you have a nephew named Sam or Samuel?’

‘Yes. What is this about exactly? Who is this?’ It was not a voice that seemed to care about a nephew.

‘Sam is with me. I wondered if I could bring him to you. His guardian is dead. Bernard – he’s dead. We’re here in town.’

‘No kidding,’ the woman said, with a flatness that surprised you.

‘May I bring him to you?’ You looked down at Sam, who had wedged himself into the phone booth next to you. He was playing with the cord, twisting it into an unnatural shape, and staring across the street at a fruit and vegetable vendor.

‘Who are you? Who is this?’ the woman snapped.

‘We’ll be there now.’

Sam’s aunt lived in a single-storey house with a broad covered veranda. She was standing on the steps as the two of you approached eating peaches, juice dripping down your arms. You hoped the woman would run out to embrace Sam, but instead she just stood waiting under the canopy, slouching in a pair of blue
jeans and a dirty white shirt, arms crossed over her breasts. She had Sam’s sharp features, the same peaked nose and narrow eyes, but with a shock of ginger hair.

‘Sam? Is this your aunt? Is this the house?’

Sam looked at you and looked at the house and looked at the woman.

‘Don’t you know your auntie, Sam?’ the woman asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t you want to come see your auntie?’

You watched Sam climb up the three shallow steps and stand in front of his aunt, one hand holding the peach to his mouth as he sucked the flesh from an exposed hemisphere of pit, the other dangling at his side. The woman put a hand on his head, smoothing his unruly hair. ‘Are you his guardian now?’ she asked, squinting. ‘Are you some kind of friend of my sister?’

‘No. I happened to find him. He said his parents were dead. He said you were his only relative.’

‘I guess that’s right. How do you know that bastard Bernard is dead anyway?’

‘I saw his body. I saw him – I mean I saw him dead. I was hitchhiking and came upon the truck and Bernard’s body. Sam was hiding in the bush. They were hijacked.’ You knew the hijacking story was plausible, hijackings being not so uncommon. And in a way, it had been a hijacking.

‘So much the better. I mean Bernard dead. Not the hijacking. Would you like a cup of tea or something?’ the aunt asked.

‘I should be getting on,’ you said, anxious to get moving. ‘You’ll look after Sam?’

‘You mean you’re leaving him with me?’

‘He’s your nephew isn’t he?’

You stared at each other. The aunt’s lips spread and flattened against her teeth.

‘I guess I have to take him, then.’ Sam had finished the peach and turned back to you, rolling the stone around in his mouth, eyes
confused. You thought again of taking him into the wilderness, renewing him, as you thought of it, calling him
Samuel
. But you knew this was impossible. ‘You’ve dropped a real burden on me,
Miss –
what’s your name?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Sam’s aunt rolled her eyes and snorted. ‘I don’t mind saying I think there’s something funny about all this. Just turning up with nothing. I don’t mind saying I think it’s
strange
,’ she said, grabbing Sam, pulling him towards her and clasping him against her faded jeans. He shuffled his red shoes, trying to squirm out of the woman’s grasp, but she held him closer, her arms tightening around his chest. ‘That’s right. I think this woman is strange.’ She coughed, a deep productive cough that pushed her off balance, freeing the child.

You studied Sam with the same intense focus he had once turned on you. After all the unwanted embraces, the grabbing and clinging, you found yourself desperate to be held by him, to hold him, to feel that heat again around your waist. You reached out three dry fingers to touch his cheek. He did not flinch. You wanted him to throw out his arms and cling to you, cry out not to be abandoned, force you into doing what you could not.

But he had nothing to say.

Of course I remembered him at once. Not just here. I knew him immediately in Amsterdam. And finding him suddenly before me, it was like being faced with my own assassin. I wondered if he had come to exact his pound of flesh. But he has only ever been charming.
What does he want?
I ask.
Why can he not say what he has come to say?

1989

It wasn’t chance that Laura and the boy knew each other already, before she found him there in the dark, in the truck, with Bernard lying dead on the ground. The only chance was them being in the same place at the same time. When his parents blew themselves up with three other people outside a police station the only person in the world the boy had wanted to see was Laura because she was as close to a mother as any he had left in the world. He put his hand out to her and she took it and drew his head against her arm and for a moment he couldn’t remember whether she’d only appeared after Bernard was dead or if she’d been there earlier. They sat in silence for a while looking out on the darkness. The boy wanted to ask Laura if she could be his mother, now that his own mother was dead, but he didn’t. He knew it was impossible.

There was a roadblock on the way, but she showed her ID book, as well as the boy’s, and explained she was going to meet his uncle, the owner of the truck. The boy wondered what would happen to them if the police opened the hold and discovered what was inside. But they were lucky. The police sent them on their way and told them to be careful.

Laura drove almost until dawn to a farm outside Beaufort West where she found her associates waiting for her and there the boy met Timothy and Lionel for the first time. Laura told the boy he must trust the men but that she had to leave – there was something she had to do. It was possible she might see him again and she promised to look for him and said he should look for her and if they were both looking they would find each other someday. She told him to go to her mother, to look for her if he
ever needed anything.
My mother is a good person
, she promised.
My mother won’t fail you
.

The boy watched her leave in a car with a man, but he didn’t know who the man was and never saw his face. He only knew that Laura and the man had something important they had to do and that it was too dangerous for him to go with them. He never saw Laura again. If she was going to come back she would have done it by now.

She left behind the truck that was the boy’s inheritance and in the coming days he watched Timothy and Lionel and other men dig graves for all the bodies, Bernard included.

Timothy stripped the truck of its identifying marks, put on new number plates, and one of the other men left with it. The boy never saw the truck again but he didn’t care any more.

At first, when he asked them what was going to happen, Timothy and Lionel would laugh and say,
You’re going to be our mascot
. But as the weeks passed they didn’t know what to say and the boy reminded them that he had an aunt in Beaufort West and for days everyone talked about whether or not they should take the boy to his aunt or if that was too risky, and wouldn’t it be better just to let him stay with them because he had been born into the movement and shouldn’t he grow up in it since he was already almost a man who could be taught to shoot? Lionel said it would be wrong, that it wasn’t fair to the boy, and they should take him to his aunt.