Absolution (7 page)

‘And if one reads the censor’s reports on your books, they’re all judged too “literary” to pose any risk of fomenting unrest among “average” readers.’

‘By this they mean the majority. I have read the reports. Books and pamphlets in simple, polemical language, books that outlined in undisguised terms the realities of this country under the old government – those were the books the censors were most inclined to ban, not mine. They could have condemned my books, found them “undesirable” in that peculiar erotics of the language of their censorship, on any number of grounds: indecency, obscenity, offensiveness to public morals, blasphemy, ridicule of any particular racial or religious group, being harmful to the relations between races or a threat to national security. Instead they found them “not undesirable”, which is not to say that they were judged in any way “desirable”, only that they were not offensive enough to be actively
undesired
. They were tested and found, simply, passive things, hanging in the liminal space between desire and repulsion, want and rejection. It is a curious way to think of literature, particularly for people – the censors I mean – who so naively fancied themselves sophisticated arbiters of the literary. But all of that does not mean I was immune to the effects of censorship.’

*

On Greg’s suggestion I went to Robben Island on my own yesterday to see the former prison buildings. He thought it might help me ‘reconnect’ with the country. It was overcast and the views of the city were obscured by cloud and mist. I couldn’t see anything beyond the boat, and visibility was even worse on the island. After disembarking we were loaded onto a tour bus and a young man, tall and thin with dreadlocks, began giving his prepared speech. He showed us the settlement, the Maximum Security Prison, the old leper colony, the house where Robert Sobukwe had been isolated, the quarry where prisoners did hard labour, and where we spent far too long because a visiting American senator was having a private tour and holding us up.

With only twenty minutes left of our allotted time on the island, we were allowed to walk around the cells with a former political prisoner as our guide. Greg told me this would be the most moving part of the visit, but our guide was reticent. When people asked him pointed but polite questions about the movement, he became defensive and parroted the party line. Whatever the leaders said was right must be so. I began to feel ill.

The most famous cell moved me only insofar as it represented the place where so much of one exceptional life had been spent, but it was difficult to feel the trace of any presence there. It is bleak and small and cold. It contains no life or spirit of its own.

I paused to photograph the office where the prison’s censor read all the inmates’ incoming and outgoing correspondence. I tried to imagine the experience of receiving a letter that might begin with the normal salutation, in the hand of the beloved, only to discover two lines later that the body of the letter has been deleted by the censor’s hand, that the very words meant to give succour in a time of enforced isolation were judged too great a risk – or to know that anything one might write to those on the outside could itself be obliterated, that attempts to reassure, console, answer what could not be answered because of the censor’s obfuscations, would be blacked out anyway.

We were hurried back to the boat. I hoped the fog and mist would clear, but everything was grey and all the passengers hung around inside sulking.

‘It was disappointing,’ I told Greg that evening. ‘I wanted it to be moving.’

‘You can’t buy catharsis,’ he said, feeding Dylan spoonfuls of yogurt. ‘To think you can is perverse. The tour guide, the bus driver, the ex-prisoner, all of them, they spend every day there. They have an endless stream of people like you wanting to hear the stories, expecting to be moved, to be made to feel less or more responsible, depending on who you are and where you’re from.’ He catches a drip of yogurt before it rolls from Dylan’s chin to his
shirt. ‘
You
complain about not being moved. Imagine what that must do to them. Maybe it was an off day. Maybe they spent all their energy moving people yesterday and didn’t have anything left to give but the automatic narrative. Maybe they spent all their energy on the lone American dignitary. Think what that means to the local people,’ he said, shaking his head. Dylan squirmed in his chair and reached for his cup of juice. ‘For them the island isn’t just a tourist site but a place of pilgrimage, and their one visit, maybe the only one they’ll ever make, was ruined by an American. Don’t get me started. For foreigners it’s just atrocity tourism. We can’t rebuild a society on atrocity tourism. I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t have told you to go. I feel guilty that you’re not as connected to this country as I am, and jealous, too, that you’ve been free of it for so long.’ Dylan drank his juice, ate another spoonful of yogurt, and his eyes began to droop. Greg lifted him out of the chair and handed him to Nonyameko, who took him off to bed. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said, ‘I’m thrilled you’ve finally come home. It’s just a shame you and Sarah are going to live in Jo’burg.’

We sat for a while in front of the fire, drinking a cheap bottle of pinotage that would cost four or five times as much in New York. Greg has been more or less single for as long as I’ve known him. There’s never been anyone else permanent in his life until Dylan. I know the boy is biologically his, but I don’t know the other details. The mother was either hired, or a friend I don’t know.

I think of our first meeting, at a depressing drinks event for new graduate students at NYU. Greg stood out in a pink sweater with his tattooed hands and black hair that had been dyed a shade of blue so dark the colour appeared only when the light hit it, making him look like an eccentric superhero. Discovering we had something more specific in common than mere foreignness, we spent the night talking in the corner and soon became close friends. A year later, he returned to Cape Town while I stayed in New York, finished my doctorate, married Sarah, and taught
part-time at three different colleges, running up and down Manhattan until I was senseless with fatigue. When I was commissioned to write Clare’s biography I knew it was the opportunity I’d been looking for to do something different and, more importantly, an opportunity to try coming back home.

Absolution

They saw only one house, and it was so obviously perfect that Marie looked as though she had decided Clare would buy it even before they went inside. Clare was not as certain. The estate agent, a sunburned man with an overhanging stomach and a voice like curdled cream, met them at the entrance to the driveway, opened the gate with a remote control, and indicated they should follow him. The perimeter wall, half a metre thick, was topped with barbed wire wrought and painted to resemble ivy, with a staff of electrified wires above. It was self-effacing security for people embarrassed to think they needed it.

‘You’ve got all the security features here,’ the agent said, stepping from his car. ‘Cameras watch the exterior of the house, the entire perimeter wall, the gate, all the time. These guys are the best,
primo
. If they could smell the intruders they would, believe you me.’

They stood in the front garden, in a paved courtyard overlooking the steep terraces of the lawn falling down towards the street and the electric gate, now shut again, enclosing the three of them and their two shining cars. A group of gardeners, arms lax with fatigue, unloaded from a truck across the road, spilling out and trudging to the properties they were paid to tend, each announcing himself at a residential intercom, then waiting until the doors or gates opened, allowing access. It was the kind of neighbourhood in which Clare swore she would never live: a warren of celebrities, foreign dignitaries, and arms dealers. Perhaps it was fitting that she and Marie, scarcely less foreign in their way, possibly more dignified, should retreat to the company of such rabble.

‘So I should be paying for the privilege of being surveilled.’

‘Huh? Ja, well, they’ve got dogs, too, fully armed response with semi-automatic weapons and there are panic buttons in every room of the house, even the bathrooms and cupboards, in case of real emergency, but they’re disguised, so the attackers won’t know, and they’re not an eyesore, not red like some are.’

‘Then how should we be able to find them if we panicked?’

‘Ja, well, absolutely nothing to worry about. At least as long as we got rule of law. God knows how long that lasts, though, hey?’

The
real emergency
, he suggested, was that one might flee in stark terror to the interior of a cupboard and be trapped, quarry awaiting a hunter. But who would get past the wall in the first place? Inside, the house itself was, without question, splendid, and Clare could imagine being happy in it. With space enough for Marie to have a proper administrative area, Clare would be able to remove herself entirely from all external concerns, should she so wish. There was a vast garden, too, and no neighbours to the rear, save the slopes of the mountain and the occasional hikers who followed its trails – and they, it seemed certain, would never attempt to scale her deadly ivy. The trees were tall enough and the wall itself so high that there was no fear of being overlooked, even outside, swimming in the pool, except perhaps by the neighbour on one side. Still, she disliked the idea of paying for her own imprisonment, paying to be watched by a security firm likely as not to turn over its surveillance to a branch of the government, or perhaps even worse, to a corporation that would compile records detailing her daily habits, her food preferences, her alcohol intake, her sleeping and waking, and sell such data to other companies wanting to market their goods to her, goods made by the wives, daughters, and sisters of the petty intruders against whose incursions she would be employing the security firm to protect her. There could be no protection against the currents of history.

Marie was ecstatic. The windows were equipped with remote-controlled metal shutters manufactured by a company called Tribulation; these could be closed at night, entombing them in
reinforced steel. There was a special ventilation system with a reserve generator. What would happen in the case of a fire or an electrical failure? Would they ever escape? The alarm could be set to exclude their bedrooms and bathrooms at night, while motion sensors in the rest of the house would respond to something as innocent as a cushion resettling itself on a couch or a spider crawling across the wall.

‘Once the alarm is set,’ the man said, ‘nothing must fall down, nothing must drop, nothing must stir, or you’ll have the guys down here in no time. Guaranteed response is five minutes max, but they’re just around the corner anyway, so it would be more like two for you. Not much can happen in two minutes. You can go to sleep at night feeling nice and secure.’

Clare wondered if the estate agent, blond and fat as he was, knew what could really happen in two minutes. Anything was possible within two minutes, but perhaps with a panic button the two minutes could be rendered inconsequential, the response always already responding, the dogs always slavering for battery-acid blood and orange disinfectant skin. She guessed that the estate agent, let her call him Hannes, had a wife and daughter, and that he had recently had cause to fear for them both on some horrible occasion – and fear, too, what intruders with a will and no conscience, no system of moral principles, might commit.

When she heard it, the price was astounding, although she could easily afford it. Her knowledge had not kept pace with the property market and she was still thinking in rates of nearly five decades past, when she and her husband bought that vulnerable house on Canigou Avenue, her house with a gaping wound in the wall of its master bedroom. She wondered if the estate agent recognized her name. It seemed more likely that he did not read, and would not like what he read if he opened one of her books.

‘You two ladies will be very safe here. And it’s that kind of neighbourhood, if you know what I mean, where people don’t mind what two ladies do.’

Marie looked at Clare. There was no reason they should correct his misunderstanding. Clare had never imagined herself as anything but feminine, even if feminine at one-and-a-half times life size. But her very size made men – and for all she knew, other women, too – speculate about the alignment of her affections.

‘Yes. The rich don’t care
what
two ladies get up to. I’m sorry you thought it remarkable,’ Clare said, smiling down on him, and she could tell from his flinch that she had been ungenerous. He was only trying to be cosmopolitan, a man of the world.

Clare expected that her invasion and subsequent move would make news, appearing in the headlines and on the nightly broadcasts, off and on, for several weeks. There were only a small number of national celebrities and she liked to count herself amongst them. The media, she thought, would enjoy gloating over the apparent retreat of a champion of an open society into a fortress of personal security. Reporters would deliver dull updates from outside her new home. Editorials would wonder if she herself kept a gun, suggesting that one should know the business of one’s own house; guns were anti-progressive. Marie might have killed one of the invaders, but there was no way to know. As far as Clare knew, no one had turned up at any hospitals complaining of gunshot wounds that matched the calibre of Marie’s elegant little arm – then again, the police had not been in touch to tell her one way or the other.

In the event, Clare’s move went unnoticed. But if the press ever did come to call, she knew what she would say:

‘My fortress is the envy of the president; he says all old ladies should be so lucky. He speculates that I shall die here. Do you think that’s a veiled threat or an acknowledgement? An admission of guilt? Never mind, the fortress will protect me. I do not keep a gun, though I know how to use one. That is the legacy of frontier life, knowing how to care for and fire a gun, knowing what a gun
will do. Have you ever fired a gun? No? Ever held one? No. Oh, someone once had a gun in your house, but he was a guest, a policeman, and unloaded it, and placed it on top of the refrigerator, to put you all at ease while you ate your dinners, as if that would put you at ease. No, that is not the same thing as knowing how to handle a rifle, which I am entirely capable of doing. We had ours hidden in a safe in the floor. My father learned to shoot a gun as a boy. His father, my grandfather, was a farmer who thought it sensible that his sons should know how to protect themselves in the bush. He taught my father and his brother to shoot, and when they grew up into men, they taught my sister and me and my cousins to shoot, frail English girls shouldering guns nearly as long as our own bodies and taking aim at nothing to start with, the usual nothings (tins, bottles, trees), then being encouraged to take aim at more horrible targets. The first thing I killed with a gun was my cousin’s horse, because she could not kill what she had loved. To the men it was just my cousin’s horse, and it was injured – I cannot recall the nature of the injury – and nothing could be done for it, and this, my irresponsible grandfather and uncle and father thought, should be my initiation into killing. It took five shots; I had such bad aim at first. The first two struck nowhere near the head, and I nearly shot off my father’s foot, and the poor horse had to be settled again, and then three more shots until it was dead. They should have let me kill a dog first, because a dog is only a dog, it degrades itself hourly, but a horse is something more than human. It was like killing a god rather than an animal, and I did it badly. What does that do to the mind of a child? Today they would put my father in prison on charges of child abuse or endangerment, but at the time he thought he was instructing me in the ways of our country. He was a man of the law, not of the land. How was he to know the harm he was doing? Of course he should have known.