The Impostor (17 page)

‘I shouldn’t have,’ Adam says miserably. ‘I should have stayed at home.’

‘Isn’t it awful? I hate all this too.’ He looks around. ‘Come on. Let’s get out of here.’

Adam follows Canning out of the courtyard. The irony isn’t lost on him, that he came here hoping to sneak off with Baby, and has ended up leaving with her husband instead. Canning takes him to a passageway with a closed door, on the other side of which is a darkened staircase; at the top of the stairs they are in another carpeted passage, edged by a railing on one side, from which they can look down on the courtyard below.

‘There,’ Canning says. ‘Now we can see without being trampled. Drink?’ He holds out a bottle of wine, which he’s gripping by the neck; when Adam refuses, he swigs from it himself. His face is flushed and sweaty, his tie and top button are undone. ‘Look at this lot,’ he says. ‘All the beautiful and powerful gathered together. How I’d love to fire-bomb this place.’

Adam scans the heads and foreshortened bodies down below, looking for Baby, but it’s hard to recognize anybody. From this perspective the whole scene has altered shape. A few minutes ago they were down there, in the throng; now they are like pigeons or gods, not part of the world they’re watching. His attention takes a few seconds to focus on the warm circle of light, with its brighter green circle of fake lawn and flag. A few figures are on the platform. The man in front, who is speaking through the microphone, is the famous golfer. He seems to belong up there, among the camera flashes and synthetic colours; his gleaming grin is like part of the set. He is making a joke, something about an Irishman and a caddy, and the answering laughter and applause rise buoyantly to the hidden watchers like a warm gas.

Then the golfer turns serious. His voice becomes low and confiding. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, friends and colleagues…How often in a lifetime can we say that the Good Lord gives us the chance to do something we’ve dreamed of since we were six years old? Yet that’s the sort of chance I’ve been given. To design my own golf course, to see it take shape in front of my eyes–well, it’s more than a sinner like me could hope for…but now it’s time,’ he goes modestly on, ‘for me to hand over to the man who’s
given
me this chance, the head honcho himself, the mover and shaker,
Mister
Liberty National, our friend and host tonight…Nicolai Genov.’

‘
Oh
,’ Adam says. The exclamation is involuntary: he is startled to recognise the older man Baby was speaking to earlier, the one he’d thought was a butler. And Mr Genov doesn’t entirely lose the self-effacing reserve, even under the hot lights. He is clearly used to making speeches, but he would obviously prefer, at the same time, to be elsewhere, in the background; and he brings something of the background with him, nebulous and indistinct, to the microphone.

‘My friends…I am not going to speak for long…This is a party, after all, and we shouldn’t let business get in the way of a good time…’

The accent is hard to place: partly Eastern Europe, but overlaid with other inflections. It is an international accent–the voice of a man who has lived in many different places. He seems to set each word down deliberately, like ornaments arranged on a windowsill.

‘…I want to say, if you look around you tonight…is it not good to see so many different people in one room–all different colours, different cultures, everybody mixed…this really is a new South African party!’

The banal phrase sounds like one of Canning’s. There’s a spatter of appreciative applause–people congratulating themselves–and from his vantage point Adam is briefly caught up in the picture: saris and business suits mingling with African fabrics and Arabic robes. Accents and languages twine companionably together; skins and beads rub agreeably against silk. Even the waiters, in their neutral tuxedos, are a harmonious mixture of black and white and brown. It really is like an advertisement for the new country.

‘As all of you know, just a few years ago this would not have been possible…but I’m proud to be part of it, my new mother country that has been so very good to me…’

More clapping, a whistle or two. Despite himself, a warm feeling expands in Adam; the impulse to belong is very strong. But at the same time he remains outside; he knows he’s here on sufferance, and there is something unreal about this gathering. It’s what’s absent, what
isn’t
here in this house, that Adam feels truly part of, and which makes him afraid.

‘…and this whole venture, our golf estate, is a reflection of this new, multi-cultural spirit…our partners are a mix of colours and backgrounds, like the faces in this room…’

At this moment, Adam sees Baby. He has been looking for her in the wrong place, among the crowd, when she is actually up on the platform, off to one side, half in the spotlight. The tension in her body is keyed up, in a different register to her normal state. He wonders what she is doing there, as if she’s about to make a speech, and that thought leads him, by association, to the man standing next to him.

‘What about you?’ he whispers to Canning. ‘Don’t you have to speak?’

‘Me? No, of course not.’

‘But why not? Isn’t this your project?’

Canning shrugs impatiently. ‘For God’s sake,’ he says. Down below, Mr Genov is handing over to somebody else, the dapper black man, Enoch Nandi, whom Adam had met at Gondwana over Christmas. On that occasion Canning had been deferential and polite towards him, but now he murmurs snidely, ‘There’s the black empowerment camouflage.’

‘I thought you liked him.’

‘Where’d you get that idea? No, I despise him. I despise all of them. It’s just a game–a game you have to play.’

Fronts and public faces: power hiding in the shadows. And something comes to Adam in this moment: for the first time he understands that it is exactly the quality in Canning which evokes pity and contempt–the blurred, smudged quality, the invisibility–that most defines him, and is his greatest strength. In his oblique way, he is the moving force that set this whole thing ticking; it’s because of him that all these people are in this courtyard tonight, yet almost nobody here knows his name or recognizes his face.

Adam turns his head to look, almost wonderingly, at his friend, but at this moment Canning is staring downward with an expression of sadness and spite and longing. He seems to be focused on the crowd, but then he says, in a small voice, ‘See that. In front of everybody. She doesn’t care who knows.’

‘Knows what?’

Canning says dispiritedly, ‘That man has been her lover for the past six months.’

‘Who?’

But then he sees. It’s Baby that they’re both looking at, as she leans toward Nicolai Genov with the same air of heightened excitement that she’s worn all evening, whispering something to him behind her hand, and in the tilt of their bodies towards each other, the casually possessive way he is holding onto her elbow, it is blindingly obvious. In some way, Adam realizes, he’s known it since the first moment he saw her tonight, and yet the shock is like something new and freshly minted, opening out under his rib-cage. The numbness that follows, the hollow absence of emotion, is like a kind of feeling in itself. He does the calculation: six months–more or less when he’d first met her.

‘That dirty Eastern European scumbag,’ Canning says, then glances at Adam with a rueful smile. ‘There. Now you really know all our secrets.’

The formal part of the evening is breaking up below. Enoch Nandi has finished his speech; the applause has faded; the lights are going down. But it’s as if the glow is still on the little party down there–her and the old butlersatyr, and the attentive acolytes around them. Adam and Canning are stranded meanwhile on the cold, dark edge of the arena, both holding onto the railing as if it will keep them from falling.

‘Fun’s over,’ Canning says. ‘Now we can really get drunk.’ He notices Adam’s expression and puts a slack arm over his shoulders. ‘Don’t take it so badly,’ he says. ‘It’s nothing serious, just a little affair. That’s how she is. I don’t mind too much. As long as I don’t lose her.’

‘Maybe you don’t mind,’ Adam says. ‘But I do. Very much.’

‘Oh, Adam. Still my loyal friend and protector, after all these years.’

A cold voice behind them says, ‘Sir.’

They turn. The man is elegantly dressed. He looks like another guest at the party, but a coarseness in his broad, flat face signals something else. A real butler, maybe–but what kind of butler wears a gun? Adam can see the holster under the man’s jacket as he says, ‘This is a private area. You shouldn’t be up here.’

‘It’s all right,’ Canning says. ‘I know Mr Genov very well.’

‘And you are…?’

‘My name is Canning. Kenneth Canning.’

The man’s eyes are dark and depthless, like two pebbles pressed into putty. He shakes his head contemptuously. ‘Never heard of you,’ he says. ‘You’d better go back downstairs.’

When Adam gets back to the flat, he’s full of a leaden desire to sleep. The last thing he wants is more talk, but Gavin has waited up. He’s in front of the television, watching reruns of sports highlights, but he switches it off when Adam comes in. ‘How was your party?’ he says.

‘It was all right,’ he says, hovering near the door.

‘I checked up on your friend,’ Gavin tells him balefully. ‘Your Nicolai Genov. I thought his name sounded familiar.’

‘I don’t want to speak about him.’

‘He’s only a big player in organised crime. Internationally, mind you. Nothing to be concerned about.’

‘I’m not concerned. I don’t even know him.’

‘He ran from prison in Europe about ten years ago. Jumped bail in a big Mafia trial and came here. He made friends in the old white government, spread a lot of money around. He changed his name, got his citizenship sorted. Now he’s in with the new crowd. He’s riding high these days, but he can’t travel to a lot of countries in case he gets arrested. A very dangerous customer.’

Adam has taken in too much tonight; he has no room for amazement. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ he says.

‘You don’t think you should be worried? You’re in with a bad bunch. Genov owns a lot of stuff–hotels, casinos, a wine farm or two. But my contacts tell me he’s still connected with his old pals in Europe. The business stuff is a front. There’s a lot going on, Ad. Money laundering, drug smuggling, maybe human trafficking. You don’t want to get involved.’

‘You’re right, I don’t,’ Adam says, but then he remembers something Canning told him. ‘He’s had a bad press,’ he says, moving towards the door. ‘I’ve got to sleep, Gavin. I’m leaving early in the morning.’

‘Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘I won’t. Good-night.’

‘Good-night,’ Gavin says, his voice shot through with outrage. But when he comes to the door of Adam’s room a minute later, his tone has changed again; now he sounds plaintive. ‘You can’t get me in with these guys, can you?’ he says.

16

He doesn’t get the early start that he wanted, and it’s close to midnight when he descends at last into the valley. His house, unlit, obscured by trees, looks like a place where nobody has lived for a very long time. Yet when he steps in through the front door, it’s into a warmth and a slight staleness, as if the rooms are inhabited.

Ah, the prodigal returns.

Lying in bed with the light off, the form of his interlocutor shows in sharp silhouette against the glow of the streetlamp outside. Sitting at the window, head tilted at a curious angle. It doesn’t help to know that it’s his own clothes he’s seeing, piled up suggestively on the back of a chair.

Don’t take it so hard. You knew it couldn’t last
.

‘I trusted her.’

Trust is an unfortunate word. Under the circumstances
.

‘But she wanted me. It was her idea that I…that we…get rid of him.’

She might’ve done the same to you afterwards
.

‘I don’t believe that. I know who she is!’

Maybe not, my friend. You might be better off like this.

‘How can I be better off? I’m suffering, can’t you see?’

And it’s startling, in fact, how much it does hurt. It’s been years since he’s felt this, the pain of dispossession, a blade cutting into the root. When he wakes in the morning, it comes over him again; he sits on the edge of the bed and weeps like a child. Loss connected to every other loss before, reaching back to some elementary core.

When he pulls himself together he goes out into the yard with his gloves and his pick. Better to subdue this thing through toil. The day is brilliant and clear and cold, and he throws himself into the labour with single-minded intensity. There’s been a lot of rain recently and the ground is soaked and soft. By nightfall he’s done. Standing at the bottom fence, with the view open at last all the way to the house, the ultimate brown enemy hanging starkly in his hand, he feels no sense of triumph or achievement. All he can see–though their growth is slow because of the winter temperature–is the fresh round of green shoots starting to poke their heads above the surface.

He piles the dead weeds on top of the others in a heap behind the house. He has to make several trips back and forth, and on one of these return journeys he sees his neighbour, the blue man, lurking near his work-shed. Before he can think about it, Adam raises his hand. ‘How’s it going?’ he calls. But Blom looks sharply away and turns his back: another gap, another silence. Adam is alone.

He doesn’t go out to Gondwana that weekend. It’s the very first time since he met up with Canning that he’s stayed away. He imagines that his absence will resound–that it will matter terribly. But the days pass without the phone ringing once.

He must keep moving now, he cannot become idle. There is danger for him in stopping. Perhaps he should write–for the first time in weeks, poetry seems possible again. A sense of loss and bereavement: isn’t that what sets the music free? But when he sits down at his desk, the page outstares him every time.

He takes to walking, striding up and down the streets of the town, or following the line of the swollen river up the valley. But the backdrop of bare trees and low skies and cold-hardened ground reflects his own condition back at him. He knows he must leave this place soon; he must return to the city.

It’s on one of these walks, when he’s going aimlessly up and down the main road, that the cavalcade goes past. There are seven of them: massive flat-bed trucks, loaded up with earth-moving equipment. They are strung out in a line, evenly spaced, like peculiar animals travelling in migration. The whole procession bypasses the town with monumental indifference, grinding slowly towards the mountains.

The local people who live along the road have come out of their houses to gawk. Adam overhears one woman saying to her friend, ‘I wonder where that lot’s heading.’

But he knows exactly where.

He goes out there the next day. He knows that it’s a mistake, but he cannot help himself: he wants to see this monstrous progress in action. And before he’s even through the gate there is evidence of the work happening inside: one of the trucks that he’d seen passing, the bulldozer off-loaded from the back, is parked at the
Nuwe Hoop
settlement. There is a small crowd of people gathered nearby, listening to a foreman reading something from a piece of paper. As Adam watches, the crowd breaks up and starts to climb onto the back of the truck.

The truck is in front of him as he passes through the gate, and then again on the dirt road on the other side. Through the shuddering clouds of dust that its wheels throw up, he can see the indistinct shapes of men and women holding on, all wearing their khaki uniforms. Casual labour, he presumes, for the massive job in hand, and now he understands clearly what Canning meant when he said he’d be using them in the future. An anger starts rising in Adam: a delayed anger, an anger put on hold, with a paralysing helplessness at its heart.

Just before the turn-off into the
kloof
, the truck heads off on a road in the other direction, across the plain towards where a hazy column of dust is rising, like a stain on the sky. Adam follows, but after he has lurched and jolted down the track for a kilometre or two, the scene that confronts him is unexpectedly aimless. The trucks, the equipment, the workers stand about on the intact earth; the dust is being raised by movement, but the digging hasn’t begun yet.

Adam has been here before, to this very spot, on a day when he and Canning were the only human figures in sight. Just down there is the little cave where Canning and his first friend–his black playmate from childhood–had carved their initials into the rock. And when he looks in that direction, he notices Canning himself at the overhang, hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped. He seems to be sunk in melancholic reverie, and even here, at the centre of his grand design, he is still an invisible outsider.

Adam parks and walks down there. But even after his name has been spoken aloud, it takes a full minute for Canning to register. He is staring at the weathered initials in the rock, a vexed frown on his face, as if he’s trying to decipher some arcane code, but eventually he shakes himself and looks around. ‘Oh, hello,’ he says. ‘I didn’t expect you here.’ There is no surprise or pleasure at the sight of Adam today.

‘I didn’t plan to come. But I saw this whole entourage go past…’

‘Yes, it’s quite a circus, isn’t it?’ He glances around at the flurry and commotion. ‘It’s happening,’ he says. ‘It’s actually happening at last.’

He has spoken in a flat voice, quietly, without heat, more to himself than Adam. But there is somehow a deep feeling in his tonelessness. It would be hard to say what the feeling is: not pleasure, or triumph, or satisfaction. It seems closer to sadness, though that is surely unlikely.

Adam points at the rock art, with its ancient figures fixed in their panoramic hunt. ‘What about this?’ he says. ‘You’re surely not going to just bulldoze it…?’

‘I thought of removing the whole boulder,’ Canning says. ‘But it’s quite a job.’

‘It would be worth it, Canning. This is an important record.’

‘Only to me. Who else cares? Let them plough it under. The past should stay past, especially mine.’

At first Adam doesn’t understand. Then he does: Canning is talking about his own childhood signature, not the San art. The cryptic, colourful figures don’t even exist for him.

‘Want to go on a helicopter ride?’ Canning says now, his tone brightening. ‘Come along, there’s somebody I want to introduce you to.’

This somebody turns out to be the famous golfer. He is still craggy and toothy and fatuous, just as he was at the party, with no memory whatever of having seen Adam before. ‘How are you, old buddy,’ he yells, shaking hands. ‘Good to meet you!’ And he treats Canning–the man whose name he didn’t know–with the same bluff, enthusiastic indifference. They are all his buddies, and tomorrow he won’t remember any of them.

They ascend into the sky with him. The helicopter is behind a low ridge, away from the main area of activity. The pilot is the famous golfer himself, who appears to power the engine with his own self-regard. Adam has never flown in a helicopter before and the unfamiliar motion, right from the moment of lift-off, unnerves and frightens him. He’s not used to the peculiar angles of flight, the way it stops and tilts in mid-air. It’s a tiny machine and the metal base, topped by its enclosing transparent bubble, is like nothing so much as a soup plate, skidding around the sky.

The purpose of the flight, it rapidly becomes clear, is to survey the proposed layout of the course from the air. Everything looks different from up there. Adam can see the meandering blue line of the river, with its narrow contiguous band of green. He can see the hills and rocks and trees, reduced at this height to a series of formations and patterns. And when Canning and the golfer, both sitting up front with scrolls of plans spread out on their laps, shout to each other above the thudding of the engine about this dog-leg here, or that fairway there, it’s as if they are discussing something conceptual and abstract too. Nothing real. From far up above, the land ceases to be the subject of poetry: it becomes something else, a series of formulations, a mathematical problem to be worked out. And with the army of labourers and the battery of machines down below–also looking toy-like and diminished–the problem will certainly be solved.

He has a moment of such detachment himself. At one point, after they have flown up the length of the river to the place where it emerges from the
kloof
and starts its long journey across the plain, he looks out the window and sees the lodge. He sees Canning’s father’s cottage behind it, up against the base of the mountains. There are human figures moving down there, neutered and nameless; one of them might be Baby. And for a few seconds, the height from which he views this picture becomes his own. This is how it must be for a god to look at the earth: no connection, no conflict, no yearning for things to be otherwise. No emotional confusion to cloud the mind. For just that moment he is an empty eye; a perfect witness.

It comes to him that time is the great, distorting lens. Up close, human life is a catalogue of pain and power, but when enough time has gone past, everything ceases to matter. Nothing that people do to each other will carry any moral charge eventually. History is just like the ground down there: something neutral and observable, a pattern, a shape. Murder and rape and pillage–in the end, they are just colourful details in a story.

Afterwards he drives behind the two of them up to the lodge. Baby is there and for a brief moment, when she catches sight of Adam, her face tightens. Canning’s attention is elsewhere, he doesn’t notice, and she is almost instantly her polite and distant self again, though she disappears soon afterwards, going outside to the
rondawel
.

The three men eat in the restaurant, a lunch filled mostly with the gassy chatter of the golfer. Canning has barely put down his fork when he’s on his feet again, wiping his mouth on his wrist. ‘I’m going back down to the site,’ he tells Adam. ‘They’re about to start work. I want to be there for the big moment. You coming along?’