The Impostor (4 page)

Afterwards he stayed away from this place too. He kept to himself, and drank on his own at home in the evenings. But he was lonely, and there was too much time on his hands.

One day, to keep himself occupied, he took a drive out of town, heading towards the mountains. He wanted to see the new road and the pass for himself. As he left the buildings behind, he passed the spot where the old road went away on the right. It had been sealed off with barricades and screened with a row of trees, but he could still glimpse it from time to time, wandering over the landscape in the distance. He supposed that it continued to meander like this till eventually, much further on, it found a way to skirt around the mountains, or else petered out in some other godforsaken little
dorp
somewhere.

The new road, by contrast, was clean and big and blue. It had a forward-looking air of purpose. The land here was open and untrammelled and, except for the trucks, there wasn’t much to slow you down. It was only after twenty minutes, just before the first slopes lifted, stark and sudden, out of the plain, that the way was abruptly blocked.

There was a toll booth, a heavy metal boom across the road. A woman behind a window confirmed what a painted sign informed him: that he would have to pay fifteen rand if he wanted to go any further. He had wanted to drive up into the mountains, maybe park in a spot where there was a view, look out over the plains below and think about things. But he was too poor right now to pay fifteen rand in both directions just to while away a few hours in contemplation. He pulled over to the side and watched a series of trucks going through, the drivers handing over their cash, the boom lifting to let them pass.

It took him a while to notice another sign nearby. ‘
This toll road is a proud project of Liberty Vision
.’ He didn’t know who or what Liberty Vision was, but somebody was making a lot of money out here in the sticks. He felt dully, uselessly angry, but the feeling faded. No point in protesting; he would just have to turn around and go back.

Behind the toll booth, almost part of the background, was an odd collection of buildings. It was like a tiny township, with rows of replicated houses, except that care had been taken over appearances: there were tarred roads and rudimentary gardens. The houses themselves were built in imitation Cape Dutch style, which couldn’t disguise the fact that they were small and very basic. It wasn’t quite poverty, but something close to it, dressed up as gentility and correctness–an impression deepened by the name on a board at the turn-off to the settlement:
Nuwe Hoop
. And in a certain way, the place did seem new and hopeful. But the human figures moving between the buildings looked leaden and aimless.

It was very curious. There was no explanation for this peculiar settlement, sprouting here in the middle of nowhere. As Adam watched, there was a change of shift at the toll booth. The woman he’d spoken to climbed out of the little box and was replaced by a man who’d come plodding over from
Nuwe Hoop
. Both of them were wearing khaki uniforms. She hurried off to where the man had come from and became one of the nameless figures moving between the houses.

There was a knock at his door one late afternoon and when he went to answer there was a man outside, in white shirt-sleeves and a necktie. He was younger than Adam, with a fresh, aggressive energy. It was obvious that this man was of a different order to the ragged people who usually knocked on the door, looking for work. He was quite possibly collecting donations for the church.

‘I noticed somebody had moved in,’ he said. ‘I thought I would stop and have a word. Your garden is a mess, sir. It is against municipal regulations.’

‘Yes, I…yes. Actually, this isn’t my house.’

‘We have been writing to the owner. Repeatedly. To date, we’ve had no answer.’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘I can show you copies of the letters. They are all on file.’

‘It’s my brother’s house,’ Adam said. ‘He lives in Cape Town.’

‘That may be. But you are resident. I’m sorry to inform you, but it’s now your responsibility. The place is an eyesore.’

‘And you are…?’

‘I am the mayor, sir.’

‘
You’re
the mayor…?’ Adam said. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this small-boned, big-eared man, with his intense manner. He’d imagined somebody more in the city mould, with vestments and finery.

‘Yes,’ he said, looking Adam in the eye. ‘I am the mayor.’ He seemed to be staring down all the derision and rancour that his appointment had stirred up.

A day or two before this, when he’d gone to apply for a telephone line, Adam had passed a group of protesters outside the municipality. They were coloured people from the township and they were making a big clamour, dancing and singing. He’d thought the days of protest were over; he couldn’t make out what they were angry about. When he was inside, he asked the pimply white girl behind the counter what was going on. She vibrated under her martial hairdo and said, ‘They always want something. Whatever you give them, they want something more.’

‘But what is it they want?’

‘No, they want houses. They are upset because there is this new place,
Nuwe Hoop
, out on the highway. They say those people got their houses quickly, and they are still waiting. They want the council to give them houses right now, like this.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘But what can we do?
Nuwe Hoop
is a private development. Here we do not have money. We are waiting for the government to give us money.’

This conversation, and the song-and-dance outside, had renewed Adam’s interest in the mayor. He seemed to be the figure on whom all this commotion was centred. But the man in front of him now looked too ordinary for all this excitement.

He said, ‘Right. Well. Yes, I’ve been planning to get rid of the weeds. It’s just…I’m alone, I have to do the work myself.’

‘It’s not only the weeds. There are unwanted aliens in your front garden that have to come out.’ When he saw Adam’s expression of confusion, he went on: ‘I’m speaking about those trees there. They are not indigenous. Under new government regulations, they must go.’

‘Okay,’ Adam said. ‘I’ll attend to it.’

‘Let me point out which trees I mean, sir.’

While the offending trees were being shown to him, Adam felt his resentment grow. This fervent little man, with his rules and regulations–who was he to give out orders like this? He made Adam feel like an unwanted alien himself.

But at this point the mayor softened, became personable. He seemed to notice Adam properly for the first time. ‘You’re alone here, you say?’

‘Yes, I moved here recently from the city.’

‘You’re doing all the labour yourself? All right, listen. As long as the place is cleaned out in the next two months, I won’t take action. But tell your brother he’s lucky. I could have fined him.’

‘I’ll pass that on,’ Adam said. ‘And thank you.’

‘What work do you do?’ The mayor’s tone had lost its insistent edge; he was making friendly conversation.

‘I write poetry, actually.’

‘Oh,
ja
? Listen to this.’ He pulled himself very upright, his arms at his sides, and began to declaim stridently. The meaning of the harangue passed Adam by, though the angry hectoring rhythms were inescapable. As suddenly as he’d begun, the mayor broke off and said, ‘That was one of mine. I used to write poetry myself. I was a well-known people’s poet. You may have heard of me.’ But when he said his name, it meant nothing to Adam.

‘And do you still write poems?’

‘Not any more. I wrote resistance poetry, to make my contribution to the struggle. But then I realized it was useless. We needed guns, not poems! So I went into exile for ten years. I was with Umkhonto in Tanzania. And when I came back I got arrested. I spent three years in jail, under the state of emergency. What about you?’ he asked. ‘What kind of poems do you write?’

‘Uh, lyrical, about nature, I suppose.’

‘Nature?’

‘Yes, animals, you know, trees…’ He faltered, then added, ‘Beauty!’ too emphatically, like a gun going off.

The mayor smiled and nodded blandly. ‘Yes,’ he said illogically, ‘I have put poetry behind me.’ He said this proudly, as if he had outgrown some childish activity.

Adam was left disturbed by this conversation, with a lingering sense of accusation hanging over him. When his first collection had come out, he’d been astounded by one especially vitriolic review, which had charged him with deliberately avoiding the moral crisis at the heart of South Africa. He’d had no ideological project in mind with his pursuit of Beauty, and he’d been stung at the suggestion that he was indifferent to suffering. But in his weakest moments he reflected privately that maybe it was true; maybe he didn’t care enough for people. Maybe he shied away from history. When he looked at the state of the world, he always shrank away in helplessness and horror; it seemed almost a duty, an artistic obligation, to replace politics with aesthetics. The fact that his life was empty of protest could feel like redemption at certain times, and at others–such as now–like a cause for guilt.

Yes, the mayor had got him stirred up; but he was troubled in any case by his inability to write. The poems just wouldn’t come. He tried; he really did try. He forced himself to sit at the desk by the window. He resolved that he wouldn’t move until he had the solid beginning of a poem. Just one would be enough. But there was always the skeletal presence of the windmill outside, with its blades and struts, its weird minatory noises. When he drew the curtains he could still hear it. He moved the desk to the back room. But from there he was disturbed by the sounds of the blue man in his workshop, cutting metal.

It was the windmill, that was the problem. Or it was the blue man, he was the problem. But when everything did go quiet, he sat down at the desk, pen in hand, and the poems still wouldn’t come.

He lacked inspiration. That was it. He had moved out here to the country so that he could write about what surrounded him. Yet he’d spent no time in nature since he’d arrived. He needed to steep himself in the natural world.

He started taking himself for walks into the
veld
on the edge of town. Just a few steps, and all the signs and trappings of human settlement fell away. But it was the wrong time of year for this kind of wandering. The season had passed from spring into summer: the stony earth was exposed to a burning sun. He stumbled around among the
koppies
, gazing at the desolation, trying to take its emptiness into himself. But it didn’t work: instead of inspiration, he brought a headache and sunburn home with him. He could see, in theory, how beautiful this landscape was, but it remained outside him, resistant to poetry.

It was the wrong landscape, that was the trouble. He had come here with an idea of what poetry should be, but it was based on the landscape of his youth, the part of the country he’d grown up in. Against that backdrop of fecundity and plenty, buzzing with life, his early poems had poured spontaneously out of him. He responded to lushness and growth, not all this arid spikiness. The past pulled at him through the memory of steamy green forests: that was his heart-landscape, the place where he truly belonged. He was starting to hate this parched, hostile place he’d landed up in. But what could he do? He had made such a show of his poetic mission that he couldn’t backtrack now; Gavin would never let him forget it. He had to get on with things, make his peace with the Karoo, find a way out of this impasse.

He decided to set himself a task. He would take an object–any natural object his eye fell on outside. He would force himself to sit and focus on that object. Then he would write about it, however ineptly; a few lines of doggerel, even, just for practice. Afterwards he would go and find another object and do the same thing again. He had lost confidence; his technique had rusted up. Well, that wasn’t so surprising: he’d had a twenty year break from it, half a lifetime. What he needed to do was start slowly, sharpening up, a little bit every day.

He picked up a stone outside the front door. It was a jagged lump about the size of his clenched fist. When he’d carried it in and put it down on the table, he sat and looked at it for a very long time. But the stone remained mute. There were things he could say about it; there were metaphors he could apply. But the lyrical ease floated high above the ground, while he stayed earthbound in a self-conscious tangle of anapests and spondees and iambs. Describing something in obvious metaphors–that wasn’t poetry.

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath.

Poetry was time made audible.

Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history.

Poetry was language free from habit.

Poetry was beyond him
.

He recoiled from this last thought, jumping up from the table and striding around the room. It wasn’t true! It couldn’t be true–he knew, all the way down to his innermost being, that he was a poet. It was how he had always thought of himself–it was why he had come here. He shouldn’t push himself. It was bad to force anything, especially something as abstract and delicate as a poem. If he was patient, if he just bided his time, the spirit would speak when it was ready.