A Fork in the Road
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by André Brink
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Foreword
Violent Villages
Words, Words, Words
Awakening to Black and White
The Play’s the Thing
Ingrid
My Father’s Cupboard
Political Stirrings
France
Cape of Storms and Good Hope
Black and White in Crisis
Sestigers, Censors and Security Police
Happy Returns
Back to France
Power in the Streets
Home Sweet Home
Option Clause
Writing the Deep Blue
The Pink Shoe
The Undiscover’d Country
Black and White After the Fall
The Ruins of Sarajevo
Salzburg: A State of Mind
Still Black and White
Postscript: A Letter to Karina
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
André Brink grew up in the deep interior of South Africa, as his magistrate father moved from one dusty dorp to the next. With searing honesty he describes his conflicting experiences of growing up in a world where innocence was always surrounded by violence. From an early age he found in storytelling the means of reconciling the stark contrasts – between religion and play-acting, between the breathless discovery of a girl called Maureen and the merciless beating of a black boy, between a meeting with a dwarf who lived in a hole in the ground and an encounter with a magician who threatened to teach him what he hadn’t bargained for.
While living in Paris in the sixties his discovery of a wider artistic life, allied to the exhilaration of the student uprising of 1968, confirmed in him the desire to become a writer. At the same time the tragedy of Sharpeville crystallised his growing political awareness and sparked the decision to return home and oppose the apartheid establishment with all his strength. This resulted in years of harassment by the South African secret police, in censorship, and in fractured relationships with many people close to him. Equally it led to extraordinary friendships sealed by meetings with leaders of the ANC in exile in both Africa and Europe.
André Brink tells the story of a life lived in tumultuous times. His long love affair with music, art, the theatre, literature and sport illuminate this memoir as do relationships with remarkable women, among them the poet Ingrid Jonker, who have shared and shaped his life, and encounters with people like Ariel Dorfman, Anna Netrebko, Nadine Gordimer, Günter Grass, Beyers Naudé, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Above all, A Fork in the Road is a love song to the country where he was born, and where, despite its recent troubles and tragedies, he still lives.
About the Author
André Brink is the author of several novels in English, including A Dry White Season, Imaginings of Sand, The Rights of Desire and The Other Side of Silence. He has won South Africa’s most important literary prize, the CNA Award, three times and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Also by André Brink
The Ambassador
Looking on Darkness
An Instant in the Wind
Rumours of Rain
A Dry White Season
A Chain of Voices
The Wall of the Plague
States of Emergency
An Act of Terror
The First Life of Adamastor
On the Contrary
Imaginings of Sand
Devil’s Valley
The Rights of Desire
The Other Side of Silence
Before I Forget
Praying Mantis
The Blue Door
Mapmakers (essays)
A Land Apart (A South African Reader, with J. M. Coetzee)
Reinventing a Continent (essays)
To my wife Karina, with love
What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours
William Shakespeare
When you come to a fork in the road, take it
Yogi Berra
Even a heretic must believe in something, if nothing more than the truth of his own doubt
Barack Obama
FOREWORD
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM HAS it that every choice one makes implies the elimination of others: at a given moment in the development of a painting the artist may have the choice of using, say, red, or blue, or green in a given spot. If he chooses to make it red, this choice eliminates the two other colours. One solution, often demonstrated by Picasso, may be, at this juncture, to make a series of paintings – one red, one blue, one green, and so on – and follow the unfolding of each of those options until the next moment of choice arrives, at which stage a new series opens: one exploring a round shape, the second a square, the third something else, once more following each possibility until the road forks again. But even if this leads to, say, 128, or 256 paintings, the choice is still finite. One cannot follow every possibility all the way. It is, after all, not a matter of following numerous choices, but leaving the whole notion of choice altogether open: to imagine all choices as coexisting, forever.
I am reminded of an interview with the artist William Kentridge at the time of his international production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte:
Thought may follow one particular path, but there are all the other paths not taken, and all the other paths still being thought through, or not yet thought of, that language can latch on to at different stages as it goes.
He talks about:
‘a highway of consciousness’ where you have a channel but many different lanes and different things moving in different lanes, overtaking, stopping, leaving the highway.
This idea suggests something about the texture of this memoir. For me, in the writing of it over the last two or three years, each of the components has become a kind of cluster surrounding a set of possibilities, each of which may be thought of as a road or a path. At any moment new thoughts may split off from the one at present under consideration, and invite me to follow them; I know that in due course I will return to the path – but for the moment the other, or further possibilities prompted by any new turn, may lead to the exploration of other directions. And even if it seems bewildering at times, the path – or the paths – are there; and they exist for, and derive their meaning from, the forks that pose new challenges along the way.
What intrigues me is that one need not even choose between the two modes: the path that forks, and the possibility of endless forkings. One choice does not eliminate the others: all the others may well continue to exist, as possibilities, even after an initial decision has apparently been made. I may follow Frost in choosing the path less travelled by, but all the other, travelled, paths continue to exist around and behind the chosen one. Nothing is ever really eliminated. The choices not made continue to exist as surely as do the few that in fact can be said to have been ‘chosen’ – just as the unsaid word persists within the said. It may well be this coexistence that ultimately (inasmuch as there ever is an ‘ultimate’) defines the texture of a life.
And this texture can be further enriched if one brings to it the notion of the heretic, in the original meaning of the word: someone who chooses. As the writer Monique Zerder-Chardovoire explains it:
Heresy comes from the Greek word meaning choice: for heresy to exist, there should be an ideology, a faith, to which a community adheres, and inside this community there must also be people who distance themselves, no longer accepting the received tru
ths, in order to choose for themselves.
Against this background, our fork in the road, the traditional either/or is replaced with an incomparably more complex notion of both/and. It simply leaves no room for straight or conclusive answers. This or that may be true, but at the same time many other things may be just as true. And whenever there’s a fork in the road: take it. What the hell.
VIOLENT VILLAGES
IF I CLOSE my eyes and silently mouth the word dorp, what I conjure up, even now, sixty or more years later, is an image of wide dusty streets, the pavements overgrown with thorns (which we called, with good reason, duwweltjies, little devils), in a predictable grid around the tall spire of the Dutch Reformed Church, that sat brooding over the surrounding houses like a large and somewhat unwieldy hen with outstretched wings protecting her chickens. Twice on Sundays, and on Wednesday evenings for prayer meetings, the congregation would be summoned by the booming of the church bell, and men, women and children would respond – not so much out of conviction as because an empty place would undoubtedly invite ever-expanding circles of gossip rippling through town and district, possibly for weeks on end. After the Sunday service, having reviewed all the most recent news and scandals and secrets of the town, everybody would hurry back to the gargantuan meals prepared by black women on Aga or Dover stoves in kitchens as hot as the furnace of Nebuchadnezzar: roasted leg of lamb, and frikkadelle or meatballs, a joint of venison in winter, or chicken, perhaps a tomato stew on the side, and potatoes and sweet potatoes, yellow rice with raisins, beans and peas and carrots, stewed prunes and peaches, and quinces, pumpkin with cinnamon and sugar, gem squashes, possibly rhubarb, beetroot with sugar and vinegar, bean salad, followed by blancmange and yellow and green and red jelly, and a banana foam, maybe trifle or a vinegar or brandy pudding or roly-poly, or the custardy dessert our family knew as ‘My mad aunt’s sister’, with or without green fig preserve or quince jelly or the grape syrup called moskonfyt, all of it washed down with sweet wine, preferably muscadel or jerepigo. Afterwards, as grown-ups snored in a stupor of overindulgence, and giggling, viciously inventive children went about their arcane business while they were supposed to ‘rest’ on their beds or read edifying books, the same women would clear the tables and wash and stack the dishes, before carrying off the scraps to their own kids waiting in the ‘location’ (but only after the most tasty morsels had been scraped off for the chickens, the dogs and cats, and sometimes a pig wallowing in the backyard).
Near the church would be two or three streets of shops with wide stoeps: a pharmacy, two or three grocers recognisable by large posters advertising Big Ben or C-to-C cigarettes, Lyle’s Golden Syrup, Marmite, Elastoplast, Black Cat peanut butter, shoes, khaki overalls; butcher, baker, a café or two, an undertaker who might also sell books and newspapers and cover his customary suit of solemn black with a soiled white dustcoat to double as hairdresser, a Pegasus garage with handpumps, the bank, and some offices, one or two lawyers. And a hotel – Royal or Masonic or Commercial – with an off-sales where even before the official advent of apartheid separate entrances kept white and black decently segregated. And of course the magistrate’s office, red brick or sandstone, seldom more than a stone’s throw from the police station with its blue lamp and pepper trees, or a couple of scraggly palms, and a long low prison ineffectually camouflaged behind aloes or sisal plants, or even reckless bougainvillea or lantana covered with a layer of dust.
The school would usually be set apart, in a backstreet on the outskirts, the red paint flaking from its steep roof, patches of face-brick, and rickety gutters, surrounded by an interminable expanse of gravelled playground, with separate rows of outside latrines for boys and girls. At the back of each cubicle was a hatch that could be opened to remove and replace the buckets. One night a week Mr Venter’s mule-wagon – later replaced by a tractor pulling a trailer – did the rounds through all the streets of the town. By choosing the right moment, some of the more intrepid boys occasionally managed to lift a hatch behind the girls’ block to trap someone in the act. But if you were caught, it could result in a near-fatal beating and a house visit by the principal, which inevitably invited further action, no less murderous, by the parents of the offender.
The houses, most of them, except for the dingy hovels of the poor-whites below the railway line, were large and sprawling, and set in spacious gardens. If ‘garden’ is the right word for a stretch of largely unspoilt veld in which a few unconvincing vegetable beds had been courageously staked out, dug up, manured, and heartbreakingly coaxed into producing something akin to vegetables; there might also be a patch of mealies, a few straggling pumpkins, or an attempt at flowers: zinnias, hardy orange and yellow marigolds which we called ‘smelly Afrikaners’, perhaps some phlox, even the odd dahlia. But mostly these plots were overgrown with weeds, or more or less abandoned as naked patches of red earth where chickens scratched or somnolent dogs licked their balls. One or two of the plots sported wind pumps, usually with several missing vanes, and making the eeriest of ghostly sounds when an unexpected gust of wind came up in the night. But the majority of the inhabitants relied on round tanks of corrugated iron for watering the gardens. Which was fine for a few months after it had rained. But then they would go dry and succumb to the cancer of rust. In the Free State and Griqualand West rain was a rare phenomenon. I remember how my little sister Marita nearly went mad when she saw rain for the first time. She was then three years old. She danced like a dervish on the dining table and then rushed outside and started rolling in the puddles until even her customary halo of white hair was covered in red mud.
Such events, and family illnesses, letters received or sent off during the week, radio news about the distant war, and various items of spicy gossip, were discussed on the wide red stoeps where families gathered before or after supper, in a leisurely review of current or remote events. One of them I still recall, not because it was in any way exceptional but precisely because it was so typical of a hundred others. Our family are lounged on the front stoep, taking the breeze as holidaymakers would ‘take the waters’ after a ferociously hot day, with a few friends or neighbours who have ambled past in the street and were invited to come in, or had invited themselves. A young barefoot girl with long blonde braids in a recklessly short floral dress comes past in the deepening dusk. She may be the very girl who was seen skipping on a street corner a month or so earlier, revealing her skinny bare bottom every time the brief skirt flared up, hopping her way right into my Rumours of Rain, closely watched by Oom Koot, the Sunday school superintendent who leads our singing in a curiously clipped, staccato manner – the only way to keep his dentures from falling out. And at some stage his wife, Aunt Saar, unexpectedly came out on the stoep and demanded to know in a most intimidating voice what he was looking at. ‘I’m not looking at anything,’ he growled. ‘That thing is like God’s lightning: you needn’t look at it, you just see it.’
On this particular evening, the girl is called over to the front gate by one of the more voluminous aunts.
‘What’s your name, girl?’
‘Nellie, Auntie.’
‘You Aunt Meisie’s daughter?’
‘Yes, Auntie.’
‘And how is she? I didn’t see her at the prayer meeting last night.’
‘She was sick, Auntie.’
‘What was the matter?’
‘It’s her chest, Auntie.’
‘Still that bronchitis thing she had?’
‘Yes, Auntie. But it’s better now, Auntie.’
‘So she’s up and about again?’
‘Yes, Auntie. But the headache is still there, Auntie.’
‘Tell her I’ll send some Grandpa powders over in the morning.’
‘Yes, Auntie. But then there’s her throat too, Auntie.’
‘That woman must take better care of herself.’
‘Yes, Auntie. And then she says her left shoulder is also very painful, Auntie.’
‘Zambok ointment will help.’
/> ‘Yes, Auntie. And the corns on her little toes also hurt all night.’
More sounds of commiseration.
‘And she said her back teeth were bad too, Auntie.’
‘That’s the wages of sin.’
‘Yes, Auntie. And her left knee is still terribly swollen with the water, Auntie. And she thinks her right hip is out of joint, Auntie.’
And so it goes on, an unbelievable catalogue of the innumerable shocks that flesh is heir to. Only when the girl runs out of ailments and the aunties on the stoep out of remedies, everybody says goodnight and with a last fluttering of the skimpy dress the girl is gone in the gathering dark.
The grown-ups are still discussing the information gleaned and comparing it to their own experience of suffering and recovery and disaster, when the girl reappears at the garden gate, out of breath with running.
‘Excuse me, Auntie,’ she says, ‘my mother says to tell you that her back is also giving her trouble, Auntie. She thinks it’s her kidneys, Auntie.’
The conversation flows on, like water irrigating a garden of many beds and patches, making little swirls and eddies along the gossip and the small scandals of the day – what the principal and the school secretary are up to after school hours; what business the sixty-year-old Mr Yanasch, the richest farmer in the district, can possibly have in the hotel after the bar has closed, when the curtains are drawn in front of the windows of my vivacious piano teacher, Marie Jordaan; how come that Katie Venter, the precocious fourteen-year-old daughter of the night-soil wagon driver, has suddenly been blessed with a new baby sister when everybody knows that her mother already started having hot flushes two years ago; how, and by whom, the South African Party candidate at the last elections was tarred and feathered; how two unmarked graves have appeared overnight on the farm of Gert Greyling following an altercation with some of his workers after he allegedly held back their wages; what a coincidence it is that old Oom Hennerik Hanekom, the chief elder, should have died when his car left the road on the very night he spent hours in prayer and Scripture reading with the young Lettie van Wyk while her husband, the mechanic at the Pegasus garage, was in Bloemfontein to find spare parts for his Chev. Small fragments of news and rumour in the larger jigsaw puzzle of the place. Even if there is nothing obvious to link them on the surface, somewhere in the background there always lurks something vaguely sinister or overtly menacing, something violent, something inexplicable. A sense of sin and menace without which no village could survive.