Before I Forget Read online

‘Asleep?’ I whispered.

  ‘Come and see for yourself.’

  ‘It is dark in here,’ I said when we came into the bedroom. I realize d that I was trembling all over.

  ‘It’s light enough to see,’ muttered Rogozhin.

  ‘I can just see—the bed.’

  ‘Go nearer.’

  We both stood beside the bed. By now my eyes had already become used to the dark, and I could make out the bed; someone lay on it in a completely motionless sleep. I didn’t have to ask him what had happened, nor how he’d done it. Put out the light, and then put out the light.

  At this point Dostoevsky chooses two tiny details to make the event one of the most unforgettable moments in the literature of the world. No one who has read it can remain unaffected by the death scene of Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova. He describes a fly which, awakened from its sleep, started buzzing, and after flying over the bed, settled at the head of it. And he describes (something which reassures me that he shared at least one of my sweeter fixations), amid the bedclothes and a crumpled heap of lace, the tip of a bare foot protruding, as though it were carved out of marble, and dreadfully still. A small foot which I know I have seen and kissed innumerable times in my life. A foot like yours, that early New Year’s morning under the multicolored spread, or that morning in the hospital, protruding from the sheet that covered your lifeless body.

  ***

  During that night when I had my first meal with you and George, the Don Giovanni night, the matter of my Girl Friday vacancy was again discussed. It was, in fact, George who brought it up.

  ‘Rachel tells me you have offered her a job.’

  I couldn’t help feeling a little bit embarrassed. But since he’d raised it in such a straightforward way, it was easy to respond in kind. ‘I really need somebody, yes. But I told Rachel I couldn’t possibly take her away from her work. It’s a rather lowly job, after all. Not really suitable at all for a sculptor who has a Ph.D. in mathematics.’

  ‘I know she’s been eager to find something. Just to take her mind off all this –’ he gestured towards the little figures all around us, a reinvented and phantasmagoric Lilliput—‘because she needs to get rid of the cobwebs from time to time. And it will make me happy too, as I’m away so often and I don’t want her to be alone all the time.’

  I turned to you. ‘It’s for you to say.’

  ‘You make it sound like a solemn vow,’ you laughed. ‘But yes, the answer is yes. With all my heart.’

  ‘Perhaps it is predestined,’ George concluded. ‘I firmly believe that if something is meant to happen, it will happen.’ I had reason to remember his words much later; like much else besides.

  And on the first Monday morning after that George brings you round to my house. No special reason, he says, like an embarrassed boy; he just thought he’d like to see me again. Which adds a seal to the friendship—if anything like that is still required. His only worry is that he has an engagement at lunchtime, but I assure him there is no need: I have to drive past Camps Bay to an appointment just after two (which is, strictly speaking, not true) and can drop you off.

  After he has turned on the ignition he still lingers behind the wheel for a while to talk. You wait in the background, a hint of amusement on your face. He is clearly reluctant to leave, although he turns down my invitation to tea. We arrange to meet over the weekend, go to Newlands for a cricket match, come home for a braai together.

  We turn to go up the red steps to the stoep. You are soberly, casually dressed in a brief white T-shirt which leaves your navel exposed, and jeans and newly cleaned sneakers. I approve of the flexing and unflexing of the tight muscles of your bottom as you move up ahead of me. The steps are steep. Already I can foresee a time when I will have to move out of this place which has been a protective shell to me for thirteen years. Perhaps I should move in with Mam in her old-age home. We might even share a room, complete the circle. She’s good for another century.

  ‘George has taken a real liking to you,’ you remark when we reach the top. Your breath comes deeply, smoothly. It has a sweetness in it, muskily masked with smoke.

  ‘It’s too early to tell.’

  ‘I can tell.’

  ‘Well, it’s mutual.’ From the front stoep we look out over the city bowl towards the clutter of the harbor, and beyond, past the innocent-looking brown blob of Robben Island across the leaden-blue Atlantic where cargo ships and a few tugboats and yachts and trawlers lie awaiting their turn to come or go. ‘Shall we go inside and have a look around? There is still time to change your mind.’

  At the front door we are met by my major-domo, Frederik Baadjies, a small and mournful man of uncertain age who has lived with me ever since I moved into this house sometime before the first free elections. Frederik comes from Lamberts Bay on the west coast, from an old fishing family, but his demeanor is that of a butler in a stately mansion. Originally he was hired as a gardener, but it soon became evident that he was destined for higher things: somewhere along the winding road of his long life he had learned to cook, and although his ambition sometimes outstripped his ability, he was clearly to the manner born. As the house is much too big for me, most of it taken up by the books and paintings and sculptures I have accumulated over a peripatetic lifetime, I invited him to settle into a couple of the spare rooms. But plagued by what appeared to be an uncomfortable class consciousness he firmly refused, and moved into the staff quarters. Seven years ago, when Mam chose to move out of the comfortable garden cottage at the back to the old-age home (she, too, had declined to share the house, as she had no wish, she said in so many words, to cramp my style in the matter of dealings with young ladies of various descriptions and inclinations on the premises), I prevailed on Frederik to occupy the flat. From there he rules the household with an unobtrusive yet iron hand, doing the cleaning, the washing, most of the cooking, and expressing largely unsolicited opinions on the acceptability or otherwise of what he discreetly refers to as ‘house guests.’ The only part of the house he refuses to take any responsibility for is my library, my study, and my bedroom. Those spaces are, by his own choice, not only off-limits but non-existent.

  Frederik condescends to take the hand you offer him, and offers a brief nod of the head. No smile. I have never seen him smile; he might as well be an undertaker. But the nod is already a sign of approval.

  ‘So will it be tea or coffee?’ he asks.

  ‘I’d be happy to make it,’ you say.

  ‘Breakfast, Earl Grey, or rooibos?’ enquires Frederik, pointedly ignoring the offer.

  With a touch of contrariness you say, ‘I prefer coffee, if it isn’t too much trouble.’

  I was sure it would faze him (in Frederik’s book, coffee is taken in the afternoon, in the morning it is tea), but with the merest inclination of his head he indicates amused approval, before withdrawing to the kitchen.

  ‘I don’t know how you managed it,’ I tell you gravely, ‘but you have just been weighed, counted, and accepted. Not everybody is so fortunate.’

  ‘I shall mind my step,’ you assure me.

  After I have shown you the study and the library and explained what has to be done, you give me a wry smile. ‘When did your last Girl Friday leave?’

  ‘Four, five months ago.’

  ‘This is criminal negligence, Chris.’

  ‘I know. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? But I won’t blame you if you decide to leave well enough alone and get the hell out.’

  ‘No, I’ll do it.’ You sweep another critical glance across the mess. ‘But I want you to get a new computer. This one probably came over with the first British settlers. Unless the Khoisan people used it as a totem.’

  ‘But my old one still serves my purpose perfectly.’

  ‘Then God have mercy on your purpose.’

  ‘We can talk about it later.’

  ‘When I wa
s small my father used to say that. Meaning it would never happen.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I will.’ You promptly sit down in the middle of the floor and start undoing the laces of your sneakers. Looking up at me you ask, ‘I hope you don’t mind my taking off these. I can’t work unless I’m barefoot.’

  ‘I prefer that too. I mean for you.’

  ‘Oh dear. I hope you’re not a fetishist?’

  ‘Just short of.’

  Leaving the sneakers right there, you reach out for a hand; I pull you to your feet.

  ‘So where do I start?’

  ‘Let us have our tea and coffee first. My guess is that it will be served in the dining room today.’

  ‘Won’t it be cosier in your kitchen?’

  ‘It will. But Frederik will insist on the dining room. If you are allowed in the kitchen at a later stage, you will know that you have become a member of the family.’

  ‘So today it’s the full treatment, right?’

  ‘Just because it’s the first time. From now on you’ll be manacled to the desk from nine to one.’

  You heave an exaggerated sigh. ‘Don’t tell me you’re into bondage too?’

  At the dining table, washed bright by the morning sunlight falling without any subtlety or compromise through the large sash windows, as we have our tea, the banter easily glides into more substantial talk.

  ‘Isn’t this light beautiful?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s more than beautiful. Without it we would simply not be here,’ you say pensively, staring at the window.

  ‘This cup is very much here,’ I counter, holding my large white teacup up to the exuberance from outside.

  ‘Not without the light,’ you insist. ‘It’s the most perfect sculptor in the world. And the most enthusiastic. What would this be without the light?’

  ‘A blind person can still feel its shape and weight,’ I object.

  You nod slowly. ‘All right, I’ll grant you that. But without the space surrounding it—and space is light, isn’t it?—it cannot exist. Sometimes I think it’s the in-between spaces that are more important than the objects, the things. I read a story once—you probably know it too? it’s by Abraham de Vries—about a man who didn’t care about trees and buildings and stuff, all the clutter that fill up the world around us. To him, all that mattered were the spaces that reach down from above, in between: like tree trunks of light, stems to carry all that space above. Everybody thought he was mad. But they just didn’t know how to look.’ You finish a scone. ‘That’s why I prefer making small sculptures: they make the space around them seem larger. And I think the really important things in life, the things that make the rest livable, the good moments which you can never forget, are like those surrounding or in-between spaces, the delicate stems of light. The moments we think of as “happy.” The moments when we discover something, become aware of something else, something more. Eating an apple. A good glass of wine. Love.’

  ‘I prefer to think of love as something more substantial than that.’

  ‘Really?’ You almost sound commiserating. ‘But love isn’t something heavy and solid, is it? If it’s worthwhile, it brings space, air, light. And then the solid chunks of dreariness and ordinariness, the blocks of wood and glass and concrete that make up our buildings, become bearable again.’

  ‘But love is not all ethereal and airy-fairy, Rachel!’ I protest. ‘It’s not just agape. What about Eros? If that is what you think, then get thee to a nunnery. Where does the body come in?’

  ‘What I don’t like about your way of arguing is the either/or,’ you say quietly. ‘If I think of the relationship between George and me: it’s not a matter of his body there and mine here: what I’m interested in is the in between, where there is neither a solid him or a solid me, but an us that dissolves in light.’

  ‘And if one makes love?’ I challenge you.

  Your eyes do not flinch. ‘The same. Even more so. Surely it’s not all the heaving and sweating and heavy grunting that you remember—I don’t deny that it can be fun, and good in its own way—but that’s not where it ends. Perhaps that is only the beginning. What matters is the closeness, the sharing, the being-together, don’t you think? The quiet moments that you can feel and see and sense and know and believe in, behind all the thrashing about.’

  ‘And the moment of coming? Is that not defined by the body?’

  ‘Only if it’s a very poor orgasm,’ you counter very firmly. ‘Don’t tell me you’re one of those orgasm collectors, Chris. Some men, I have heard, collect the knickers of the women they fuck, or curls of pubic hair, or whatever. Some collect orgasms. I would have thought you were beyond that.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate the lowly orgasm,’ I insist.

  ‘Of course not. Not ever.’ There is defiance in your dark eyes. ‘But what is that moment? Surely not just a series of contractions. Don’t ask me to describe it. To me it’s precisely what you can not describe, not put into words, that matters. But of course you’re a writer, for you I suppose words are necessary?’ Before I can answer, you go on: ‘Even so! I told you that for me a sculpture in itself is just the body-thing, the physical, substantial thing, that makes space happen. It activates and electrifies space. Don’t you think it’s the same with the words you write? Isn’t each one of them just put on the page in order to make the reader aware of what can not be said—all those blanks that surround them and curl right into them…? That’s how I think about love too. The moment of coming, when you dissolve, when you lose all solidity, you become air, you become nothing, you expand into space without end…’ Then you abruptly check yourself. ‘Sorry.’ But you don’t seem sorry at all. ‘Sometimes I just get going.’

  ‘Into pure space.’

  A slow and radiant smile. ‘You do understand, after all.’

  For a long time we sit in silence. The cups have gone cold, but we are not interested in drinking any more. And at last I push back my chair and say, ‘Let’s get some words onto paper.’

  ‘Let’s first clear some space.’

  ***

  At night the TV screen keeps opening up to the black space that lies beyond: the endless desert in which the American advance through southern Iraq seems to have become irrevocably bogged down. There is no longer just a monotony but an endlessness about it which is petrifying. As if the real, specific war has become a metaphor of itself—the darkness and endlessness of violence, in which everything else—we, our histories and stories, our loves and memories and hopes—is mired. It is not a sequence of events, but a fate of deadly monotony. Recently, they have been showing what was reportedly the crossing of the Euphrates at Nasiriyah—but the same bridge has now been crossed eleven times, and will undoubtedly be crossed again.

  What keeps me awake is thinking about George. Where would he be at the moment? In Kuwait or Syria? I doubt it. He has never been one for the sidelines, witness those photographs he has shown us of Rwanda, the Congo, or—earlier—Somalia and Afghanistan. I have little doubt that he is somewhere in Iraq itself: stubbornly on his own, not ‘embedded.’ He wouldn’t even know that you are dead. Perhaps that is not a bad thing, for either of you. After all that has happened. You used to be so proud of him, Rachel. So much of your own dreams you lived through him. Although, significantly, that never prevented you from giving shape and substance to your own life.

  Time to put off the light. They have just crossed that bloody bridge again. Won’t they ever get it right?

  ***

  So many bridges I have crossed in my life, so many burnt behind me. This one came in 1952, the year the whites in the country, more particularly the Afrikaners, ‘my people’, celebrated the tercentenary of the first Dutch settlement at the Cape. To most of them this was the beginning of history—no matter that Khoisan peoples had lived there for hundreds or even thousands of years.

  God did not
seem to approve of the celebrations, as the climax of the festival in Cape Town was nearly washed out by torrential rains. But that could be, and was, of course also interpreted as a sign of divine approval—showers, showers of blessings. I attended some of the festivities, but not in much of a celebratory spirit, and mainly to keep Father happy. I was then in my late twenties, but within the family he was still the patriarch, the representative of God Almighty. Over the previous few years, ever since I completed my law studies at Stellenbosch, I’d worked for my father’s small firm of attorneys. At the time it was flourishing in Somerset West, where we’d moved from Graaff-Reinet. From the outset his authoritarian style had bothered me; before long, it was rankling in my mind like a burr in a sock. He ran the firm like a personal fief, which was the direct cause of some of the most able members of staff, including Father’s partner of many years, Oom Hennie Faure, moving out. I had already been designated as Father’s successor, but at sixty-two he was still in robust health and clearly had many years of intractable patriarchal rule ahead of him. So I suppose the groundswell towards some kind of blow-up was beginning to take shape.

  I know from long observation, and now from personal experience, that a man’s sixties are a dangerous decade. In many respects one is at the height of one’s powers. Some physical decline may have begun to set in, sure, but if the body has been properly taken care of this should be negligible. Father never frequented a gym as I used to until fairly recently, but those interminable vigorous daily walks and the pride he took in pushing his body to physical extremes (carrying heavy bags of manure for his garden, digging and shoveling to keep his vegetables and his rose garden in prime condition, moving boulders from one rockery to the other, outdoing Sisyphus) kept him fearsomely fit. What does happen at this age, however, is that intimations of mortality begin to manifest themselves. More often than not, and again I speak from experience, one goes out of one’s way to demonstrate one’s sexual prowess. That can change everything one does; and the way one sees the world. Everything is touched with the awareness of an ending. A certain desperation sets in. And the conquest of women is a way of showing death the finger.