Before I Forget Read online

  He came in, and stopped, then went through to his office without addressing a word to either of us. When he came back, he had the files under his arm. As he came to the desk—we were still standing like two soldiers at attention—he stopped again, and frowned. And suddenly slapped down his bunch of files on the newspaper that by now lay neatly folded between us, and said in the most stinging tone he could muster, ‘An English paper?’

  What was there to say to that?

  After a long silence he picked up his files again and prepared to go. Then, very briefly, his self-control wavered. ‘The two of you…’ He shook his head and said no more.

  ‘Chris was just…’ began Bonnie.

  It was as if he’d been stung by a bee. ‘Chris?’ he snarled. ‘Was that what you called him? Chris?’

  She didn’t flinch. What she said, very quietly, almost in a whisper, was, ‘Yes, Hendrik. That was what I said.’

  ***

  I am with Mam again. I had no intention of returning to the old-age home so soon, but coming from the cremation in Maitland I couldn’t bear facing Frederik’s mournful gaze in my empty house where, I knew, all the disarranged books and unsorted papers would stare at me in unbearable silent accusation. So for you, at least for the mortal flesh, this has been the end. There was a scattering of friends, mainly people whose names you sometimes mentioned and which I could find in your little telephone book in your studio, on one of the rare occasions I ventured back there. You had no relatives.

  Most conspicuously absent, of course, was George. After what had happened, no one even considered contacting him; and he must be pretty well out of reach in Iraq right now. A scary business, but I can imagine him happy, the adrenalin flowing, the old trusted Leica—dented by many wars, the film compartment secured with black masking tape—clicking away. From our special correspondent. If he had known, would he have come? So much has happened since those early days when the three of us were together. The musketeers, he used to joke. One for all and all for one.

  The first time I went to the empty Camps Bay house, just a few days after your ‘accident’ as for some reason everybody continued to call it, to sort through your things in search of the papers the hospital required, there was a feeling of sacrilege about it. Your absence lay like an unbearable weight on the house, on your studio. It was an invasion of the most private nature, a kind of rape. I felt like a man stealing into his lover’s home in her absence in search of incriminating evidence, telltale letters, items of clothing, used condoms, a lipstick message on a mirror.

  However well I knew you, it was like encountering a stranger: during your mornings at my house there was such thoroughness about the way you sorted and classified everything; but your own drawers and cupboards were an unholy mess. Most of the underwear seemed to have been thrust randomly into any available space; the clean and the soiled or crumpled were lumped together, shoes and sandals were stuck in just anywhere, dresses were bundled up rather than draped on hangers. Your dressing table looked like a battlefield, with the toy soldiers of lipstick, tampons, small bottles of perfume, mascara brushes, powder compacts, moisturizing liquids, all strewn haphazardly across the surface; on the bathroom floor discarded clothes and used towels littered floor and bath and basin. (Admittedly, when you’d prepared for your birthday dinner that evening you had no idea that you were never going to come back; you were not, like Mam, always ready to meet your Maker in the night.) I had to rummage through your most intimate possessions (I never knew you took multivitamin tablets, or used vaginal jelly; and I felt I had no right to know), even through your handbag, where I found your Medical Aid card. As soon as I’d located your ID (on the top shelf in the fridge) I stopped searching; I couldn’t bear the intrusion any longer.

  The last time I went there, the day before your death, was no easier, although I’d thought I would be inured by then. Why did I go at all? A kind of leave-taking, I suppose. The small hard fact of your impending death had changed everything. It had not happened yet, but I knew it was coming. There was no hope, and no escape. I opened your cupboard without even meaning to, I felt I should take something, something intimate, not to remember you by as I would remember you anyway, but to keep you close. Perhaps, indeed, a small piece of underwear which I could keep in my pocket. A moon-cloth. I even opened the laundry box in the bathroom. But immediately replaced the lid again. Not because it was too intimate, but because it was too banal. I felt physically sick.

  At a loss, irritable, dejected, I went to your studio. As if bent on stirring up guilt in myself, I took one of your small sculptures. It must have been the last one you had worked on. Before—whatever. I needed something I could hold on to, something which had been exceptionally close to you. It wasn’t finished yet, lacking the extreme finesse you brought to your completed work, the smoothness, the sheen. But I found something haunting in the incompleteness of it. Two little figurines united in a sexual embrace, no more than fifteen centimeters tall. Your work was often erotic, but seldom as blatant as this; though even in its frankness there was an endearing gentleness about it, a distancing, as if the sex were only incidental to what was really happening between the two. A small female with enormous eyes, like some of those ancient Sumerian statues, her perfect little breasts formed by bright glass marbles stuck into the clay torso. She stood bent over, steadying her knees with her hands; and the male was leaning over her from behind, but resting his elbows on her back as if in meditation, as his elongated penis was thrust almost absent-mindedly into her from the rear. She had the head of a duiker, he was crested like a rooster. What struck me was that strange impression of distance between them: however closely they were joined together, the eloquent spaces that separated his body and hers, obtruded somehow, drawing attention to their separateness, injecting a feeling of ineffable poignancy into the whole relationship. (Of course I am now reading into it what you probably never intended. But you had been obsessed by space, hadn’t you?)

  I went home and placed the piece in a drawer of my desk; it did not feel right to exhibit it openly. And the next morning—well, then you died. And this morning you were cremated. The hospital had raised some objections about the uncompleted formalities, the need for consent from a relative. But in the end I had the impression that they, too, were relieved to be rid of you. I signed to grant them indemnity, and they agreed to release the body. That was what you had been reduced to. A body.

  The cremation itself I would have preferred to skip, but there was some unspoken sense of obligation, a need for closure, a send-off to the underworld. Among the small gathering of friends there were only five or six I could remember having met briefly when you and George were still together; we nodded to each other, mumbled something, sat stiffly through the uninspiring mumbo-jumbo spoken by some functionary of the cremation service. (You would have shrieked with laughter; I’m afraid I didn’t find it funny at all.) Some of the mourners, if that is what they were, had brought flowers. So had I, but I’d left the bunch in the car. There was some canned music, and then the coffin was rolled away, through a small imitation of theatre curtains. We have our exits and our entrances. We stood around, tried to find something to say, in the end just wandered off.

  I remembered, most inappropriately, the dissolute gathering following the disappearance of the quite remarkable young German woman Grethe who had come out to Cape Town—how many years ago? twenty? thirty? more—as a leave replacement for a lecturer in the German Department at UCT. She’d been here for six months. I had met her at some party, although normally I shun parties, and there had been a spark; and we became lovers. Then I received a telephone message on my machine in her deep Dietrich voice, in her clipped and correct English, each word enunciated separately, inviting me to come over on the Saturday night. ‘You must be there, Chris, I need you to be there, it is very important. Will you promise to come? You, of all people, will not regret it.’ There was something so seductive and velvety about th
e voice that I couldn’t possibly resist. I tried a few times to call her back, but there was never any answer. You, of all people, won’t regret it. Often over the years I have wondered about it. Why me? Because I’m a writer? Because of our special closeness? Some of our more memorable lovemakings? Grethe had been in a class of her own, no doubt about that.

  So I’d gone. But her flat was deserted when I got there. Admittedly it was a little early. (Perhaps, I’d thought, there might just be time for a quickie? She had been exceptionally good at these kinds of little surprises.) The lights were on, though. And the door was not locked. I went inside. There were snacks on the dining table, and a number of bottles of wine, some opened and breathing. Had she called in caterers, or arranged something with a friend? I have never been able to find out. I wandered around, through the living room, to the bedroom where we had spent some nights of blessed memory, and back. Poured myself a drink. Went to the record player and put on one of our favorites. Reclined in an easy chair, checking my watch from time to time. She was sure to come back within minutes.

  After some time another man wandered in. I knew him vaguely, he was also at UCT, anthropology or something, with a reputation as a stud. And then another. After an hour there were about a dozen of us, all rather uncomfortable, eyeing and circling each other suspiciously, like dogs, becoming more fidgety as time went on.

  ‘I’ve always known Grethe to be punctual,’ someone said at some stage. ‘I do hope she’s all right.’

  ‘Perhaps I could try to find her,’ one of the others said after another five minutes had elapsed.

  ‘But where will you go?’

  ‘I know some of her haunts,’ he said awkwardly, but somehow knowingly.

  ‘You knew her well?’ I asked.

  He hesitated. ‘Well, yes.’ Then he seemed to make up his mind. ‘Well, actually, I may as well say it. Grethe and I have been in a rather special relationship.’

  There was a very profound silence. And then, bit by bit, but gathering momentum both in volume and urgency, it came out that all twelve or thirteen of us had been in a ‘rather special relationship’ with the absent Grethe. Each of us had believed himself to be unique; each had been separately and conspiratorially sworn to secrecy.

  The mood was complicated, to say the least. Some were spoiling for a fight. One or two uttered fulminations against our absent hostess. Others were becoming morbid and withdrawn. Two or three of us started finding it excruciatingly funny and began to titter, to laugh, at last to guffaw. But there was an undertone of gloom to it, like laughing in a graveyard. And in a way, I now realize, that was exactly what it was.

  For later in the evening, the landlady of the building arrived at the door with a message from Grethe. Who, we learned, had telephoned from Germany to say that she had left by plane for Frankfurt the night before, and wished us all a pleasant party. She hoped we would get to know each other better, after all we had something quite important in common. And about a month after that we heard that Grethe had died of cancer; which she must have known to be in an advanced stage by the time she’d left.

  I thought afterwards that if I’d been Agatha Christie, I would have had a murder committed on one of the lovers, and it would be quite a challenge to find the perpetrator. In a good murder story you need guilt.

  That was the kind of mood we were in, the guests at your cremation, after the coffin had begun its descent into hell—but was it Orpheus? or Eurydice embarking on a quest of her own?—and we were left to our own devices in this gloomy morning. A day that had seemed unpleasant from the beginning, a lived-in day, a shop-soiled day, second-hand and down at heel.

  How could I go home from there? Everything was so unfinished, incomplete. And when I got to my car and saw the useless bouquet still on the back seat, I decided to come here, to Mam. She wouldn’t know, I thought, that they were funeral flowers.

  ‘Chris!’ she beams when she sees me on the threshold. ‘After all these years. I have missed you so much, Boetie.’ (That irksome term again.)

  With a small sigh of resignation I go to her, crumpled in the chair that is so much too big for her wasted little flour bag of wishbones. I lean over and kiss her, smell her old breath, put my hand on one of hers. It is withered and prematurely cold.

  ‘Sit right here where I can see you,’ she says.

  But it strikes me that I have once again forgotten the bloody flowers, and excuse myself. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ I promise. ‘I’ve got something for you.’

  Five minutes later I am back, smiling brightly at her from the doorstep.

  Mam looks up, her dull old eyes quickening. ‘Chris!’ she exclaims in her little insect voice. ‘After all these years. I have missed you so much, Boetie.’

  ‘I’ve missed you too, Mam,’ I assure her.

  ‘You’re a bad liar,’ she says disapprovingly.

  I decide not to respond. ‘I brought you some flowers,’ I announce, trying to sound cheerful.

  ‘You never bring me flowers. Why now? Am I going to die?’

  ‘I’ll ask one of the nurses to find a vase for you.’ I approach and press the bell beside her bed. A nurse appears, takes the bunch with a look of severe distaste, and goes out.

  ‘Why are you dressed in those awful clothes?’ asks Mam. ‘You never wear a tie.’

  Why have I come here? I grit my teeth and say with infinite patience, ‘I told you, a friend of mine died. Rachel.’

  ‘Is she still dead?’

  ‘I think she will be dead for a long time, Mam.’

  ‘I’d give anything to be dead,’ she says. And after a moment, ‘Why didn’t you bring your father with you?’

  ‘He’s dead too, Mam.’

  ‘There are people dying these days who never lived.’

  ‘We’re all heading the same way. I’m not getting any younger either.’

  ‘As long as you don’t leave me in the lurch.’ Without changing her tone of voice, she continues, ‘Still, I wish you would bring your father along sometime. I know he’s feeling guilty. But that’s no reason to stay away.’

  ‘What has he got to feel guilty for?’

  ‘Everything. All those women. And colored ones too.’

  ‘Mam!’

  ‘And he’s still after them, I know. That’s not nice, is it?’

  ‘What do you know about that?’ I ask her, with sudden urgency.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The women, Mam.’

  The nurse returns with a hideous green vase in which she seems to have thrust the flowers with some force. She slams it down on the bedside table, straightens her uniform and stalks out.

  ‘My, what a temper she has,’ says Mam. ‘I think she doesn’t get enough.’

  ‘Of what?’ I ask, not sure that I could have understood her correctly.

  ‘Of what she needs,’ she says slyly.

  ‘That’s not a nice thing to say, Mam.’

  ‘It’s not a nice thing to go without.’ She straightens the wrap over her knees, turning a poker face at me. ‘Why are you staring at me like that?’

  ‘Do you know what you just said?’

  ‘You can’t expect me to remember everything.’ She adds without any reason, ‘A real gentleman always sleeps on the damp spot, you know. And he cuts his toenails straight.’

  I briefly shut my eyes to compose myself. Then I try to get her back on track, although I have little hope. ‘You were talking about those women,’ I say with feigned innocence.

  ‘Why do you think your father was so keen on golf?’ she asks.

  I have no idea of what she has in mind, but I grimly try to humor her. ‘Good for business,’ I suggest.

  ‘The golf course is right next to the location, isn’t it?’ she asks cheerfully.

  ‘You don’t mean…?’

  ‘I don’t mean anything,’ sh
e says in a whining tone. ‘But what bothers me is this: when I die…’ Her voice trails off. It takes a while before she resumes. ‘If I ever die, and God asks me about it, what am I supposed to say? I can’t betray my own husband, can I?’

  ‘Just tell the truth,’ I advise her solemnly. ‘Will you?’

  ‘Of course I will.’ She looks at me in sudden consternation. ‘But how will I remember what the truth was?’ A few tears run down her cheeks, losing themselves in the deep wrinkles. ‘But there’s one thing I do remember,’ she says hopefully.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘How we used to play marbles, you and I.’

  ‘And you always cheated.’

  Two small red spots of indignation inflame her cheeks. ‘Chris! I never cheated. I would never do a thing like that.’

  ‘Oh but you did.’

  Now she is crying, sobbing most desperately. ‘I was the one who always kept you on the straight and narrow. Only yesterday, when you tried to cheat poor Aunt Mary out of her gem squashes. I was so ashamed of you, Boetie.’

  ‘Mam.’ Why am I still trying to reason with her, for heaven’s sake? Why is it so important to score a cheap point off the poor old creature who doesn’t even know what she is saying? Yet I press on: ‘That was seventy years ago. I was eight years old, I remember very well. You sent me to Aunt Mary’s with four gem squashes from Father’s vegetable garden.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she says eagerly. ‘And she sent you back with three tomatoes. And you were ranting and raving about how she was cheating us.’

  ‘I didn’t rant and rave. I just pointed out that I didn’t think it was fair.’

  ‘So I said, all right, don’t make such a fuss. If you don’t agree, just go back to Aunt Mary and ask for one squash back. It was a joke. For heaven’s sake, Boetie, it was a joke. I never thought you’d take it seriously.’