A Fork in the Road Read online

  For some time we kept the embers alive, mainly by working together very closely on the polishing of my experimental novel Orgie, based on our letters, on our love and on Ingrid’s life. It had been scheduled for publication the year before, but political intervention had forced Bartho Smit to cancel the project. Now a new publisher, John Malherbe, was going to bring it out in a particularly beautiful publication in March of 1965. Early in the new year I returned to Cape Town, and together we celebrated the occasion, not realising that it was to be our final farewell. A week or so later there was the customary telegram from her to confirm the onset of her period: once again there was to be ‘no butterfly’. Over the previous two years there had always been a particular poignancy about those notes, a sense of loss and emptiness, each time a new farewell, a loss of hope, a different kind of failure, another small death. But it was also ambiguous, because in our fraught situation expecting a child would have been catastrophic.

  By that time Ingrid had already met the Flemish painter who was to become, or had already become, one of her last lovers. She had spoken in glowing, suggestive terms about ‘my painter’. Perhaps I should have sensed something; but I didn’t.

  Soon after my last visit at the end of March, for the publication of Orgie, in a letter dated 18 April, Ingrid wrote to announce: 28 days on the dot, last Wednesday. That coincided with a holiday I spent with my parents; and from Potchefstroom I went to Pretoria, where I, too, had met someone else. At the end of April, almost two years to the day since our first meeting, I wrote to tell Ingrid about the new love and my plans for the future. We had one last, devastating telephone conversation. It was like a desert landscape. Her reaction was very similar to the one with which she had thrown Nico Hagen out of her flat.

  There are confusing and conflicting accounts of her last few months. About several heady affairs, surrounding the central relationship with the painter. About one or more abortions. About ruptures with friends. About an accident in which she broke her leg. About terrible financial straits, where I had to step in to help her with money.

  On Monday 19 July, 1965, on a visit to Pretoria, I received a telephone call from a close friend, the author Abraham de Vries, who told me that Ingrid had committed suicide by walking into the sea a hundred metres from her apartment. Ingrid, who could swim like an angelfish …! Her body, as she had predicted in poems written since before her sixteenth birthday, and reiterated in many recent letters and telephone calls to friends, diary entries, jottings on odd scraps of paper, had been found ‘washed ashore in weeds and grass’.

  However predictable it seemed in retrospect, when it happened it was unbearable, and unbelievable. I felt the world grow dark in front of my eyes. For the rest of the day I was blind.

  I am Ingrid. Pity, but there it is.

  It was almost impossible to resist the impulse to fly to Cape Town for the funeral; but the idea of facing the world of prying strangers, the knowing eyes of friends and acquaintances, facing Jack, facing the press, was just too much. I could not turn my grief into a public spectacle; it was too private and too deep. And so I missed that ultimate tragicomedy of her funeral, where the dour members of the Jonker family, protected by security police, glowered across the grave at the special friends – writers and artists – gathered on the other side; missed the spectacle of Jack trying to hurl himself into the grave; missed, too, the second funeral, some days later, when the real friends met at the graveside again to read from Ingrid’s work.

  And now, I suppose, she belongs to the ages – and, sadly but inevitably, to the industry that has sprung up around her life and death. Ultimately all the world can hold on to is what she has left behind: the poetry. As for me: a handful of memories, most of them ambiguous, from a few lost and never-lost years in which Dante’s doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca, did hand in hand on the dark wind drifting go.

  There was an unexpected and poignant footnote to Ingrid’s story only a few months ago, when Karina took me to Poland to introduce me to the landscapes of her childhood, from the first ten years of her life, before her family fled from the country devastated by its own tyrannical regime. We went to Jelenia Góra first, the lovely town with its pastel-coloured gabled facades where she grew up; and there we stayed with her aunt Zosia, who was in every respect as lovely and lively as Karina had led me to believe. From there we proceeded to Wroclaw, then to Kraków, and to the house of her aunt Iwona in the sweet-smelling wood outside Kowary, where she had spent so much of her time in those early years – building little secret houses among the trees, consorting with fairies and angels, escaping from dark and dangerous little creatures in the underbrush. On the last morning of our visit, her uncle Boguslaw Michnik arrived with his wife Anna. He brought with him a beautiful little book which his small publishing firm, WitrynArtystów, had published in 1993. It bore on the cover an all too familiar name: Ingrid Jonker. One of the first Afrikaans books, we learned, ever published in Polish translation – the work of a talented and enterprising academic, Jerzy Koch, from the University of Poznan, who over the years has championed the cause of Afrikaans literature in Poland. When, not long afterwards, Mandela chose to read ‘The Child’ at the opening of the first democratically elected parliament in Cape Town, the Polish reading public was ready to embrace Ingrid and her reputation was consecrated in the world of literature. And how remarkable, that through the intervention of Karina’s uncle, this small handcrafted publication, under the title of Tęsknota za Kapsztadem (Nostalgia for Cape Town) was responsible for disseminating it so far from home – while yet keeping it within the family, as it were. Somehow, meeting Boguslaw Michnik with her, was the closing of a very special circle.

  Indeed, the child is not dead, and now become a giant, is still travelling the wide world. Without a pass.

  MY FATHER’S CUPBOARD

  I WAS WORKING on the construction of a small shadouf, the simple but ingenious contraption the ancient Egyptians had devised to scoop water from the Nile and convey it to an irrigation system on higher ground. It was, needless to say, an enterprise performed under duress, as a school project for Olga, our housekeeper’s lovely child, who has a very special place in our lives. Even so, I worked with great gusto and dedication. Not by any means a triumph of skill and professionalism; and Tutankhamen or Ramses would most likely have had me drawn and quartered for shoddy workmanship. But I was trying. Even though I am all thumbs when it comes to doing things with my hands. Not even thumbs: big toes. Elbows. Knees.

  My incompetence has never dampened my enthusiasm or determination. On the contrary. I love carpentry tools. The more expensive and useless the better. From angle grinders, drills, electric screwdrivers or fretwork saws down to the most basic pliers, hammers and chisels, I adore them and respect them and revere them. The only thing is that I cannot use them. In theory, yes. Not in practice. But that has never deterred me.

  Which is why I did not turn my eyes to the heavens or groan in despair when Olga broached the small matter of a shadouf. In fact, I eagerly jumped at the opportunity. And Olga loyally assisted me. Now that it is all over, I can look back and reflect on the experience – now that the shadouf has been finished, and submitted to the scrutiny of the class teacher, who gave us full marks for choice of materials, and for concept and planning, rather less for workmanship, and none at all for functionality.

  I have experienced this kind of thing before. When I was fourteen I turned to keeping guinea pigs for a hobby. If I’d kept the number of rodents under control, it might have worked. But I started too big, and did not quite reckon with the natural proclivities of the little creatures. This meant that the first cage soon became too small. The new one was constructed on a grand scale. It was meant to house about thirty to forty guinea-pigs, and had to be tall enough for me to stand in. It was fitted with breeding boxes, recreation areas, feeding corners, a sick bay and whatever else I could think of. One brick wall was required, and that I built single-handedly. Not entirely perpendicular, but it passed my
own scrutiny and the rather more strict, but still indulgent inspection of my father. He even offered to pay for the cement, and offered me an advance on the chicken wire and corrugated iron I would need. Unfortunately I had neglected to consider the timber that would be required for the large frames, covered in chicken wire, that were to constitute the other three sides of the cage joined to the brick wall. But then, we had a wide veranda running round three sides of the house to keep the fierce heat of the Griqualand West summer sun at bay; and this stoep was surrounded by wooden railings consisting of sturdy beams and trelliswork. If I sawed some of the beams in half, lengthwise, I reckoned, the remaining structure would still support the curved roof of the veranda, while the other half-width lengths would be just what I needed for the scaffolding of my guinea-pig cage. I waited for a Saturday when my father had gone hunting, and started dismantling the framework of the stoep. It turned out to be harder work than I’d anticipated, and I had to call in the help of the teenage girl, Rebecca, who was my mother’s kitchen help at the time.

  Rebecca, true to form, demanded a share of the future profits on the guinea-pig sales, and together we made some laudable, if erratic, progress on the cage. By the time my father came home in the late afternoon, two sides of the cage were already standing, awaiting only their covering of chicken wire. The beams for the last side were already half cut. The veranda, even to my biased eye, looked rather the worse for wear. As did my backside after my father had inspected the site. As the damage had already been done, it was impossible to salvage the framework of the stoep, so my construction could continue. And as a tribute to my father I should add that on the Monday afternoon he actually gave me a hand tacking down the chicken wire to finish the cage.

  Months later we reached the next stage, as orders for guinea pigs came in hard and fast, following a letter to a children’s magazine; I had to spend hours every day hammering together small rickety cages in which the animals could be dispatched by train. After paying for the material for the cages, the costs of dispatching the guinea pigs, and Rebecca, I’m afraid there wasn’t much profit left for myself. That, and the increasingly uncontrollable numbers of pets in the cage, brought about the end of the enterprise. A few score of guinea pigs had to be given away to willing and less willing friends just to get rid of them. And my father stepped in, in a characteristic way, right at the end, by drowning the last ten or twenty without telling me beforehand, in order to spare me unnecessary agony.

  After that, I may add, I steered clear of investing in animals. Apart from a grandiose scheme for establishing an international organisation for the care and preservation of wild animals – but that, thank God, never got beyond the planning stage. I turned to vegetables instead. Once again I was not interested in approaching the project in a modest or even manageable way. Our house in Douglas was surrounded by about ten hectares of barren veld, in which only stones and the hardiest of thorn trees could survive. That was where I decided on planting about a hectare of pumpkins, water melons, mealies, beetroot, carrots, radishes, lettuce and even exotica like asparagus and artichokes. With Rebecca’s help (once again in exchange for payment which, characteristically, turned out to be more than anything I myself ever made out of the deal) that stubborn, steely, hard-as-rock patch of earth was dug up and turned into beds square and rectangular, fertilised with manure – mainly from the cow my father kept at the time – and prepared to become a verdant paradise.

  The problem was water. There was only a single water tap at the back door, apart from a half-corroded red water tank outside the kitchen. But that was not enough to discourage me. Besides, all the hard work had already been put into the layout of the garden, a hundred metres or so behind the house. With the ever-loyal Rebecca’s help, we dug a furrow from the tap, across the gravelled backyard, and into the daunting hectare of newly dug scrub and slate and rock where our garden was to flourish. From there, an entire network of smaller trenches were dug, criss-crossing the garden-to-be.

  It was only at this stage that a slight miscalculation came to light: from the tap at the back door to the garden the earth was actually sloping uphill. Not very steeply. But uphill all the way. No hope in hell of ever coaxing water to trickle up that incline to irrigate the beds and beds of vegetables I had foreseen in my mind’s ever-optimistic eye.

  Well then, the only solution would be for Rebecca and me to lug the water in innumerable buckets, in a wheelbarrow, from the house to the garden. Could that be so difficult?

  Yes, it could.

  Reluctant to abandon a scheme so grandiose and promising, we very bravely battled on – from the moment the school came out until the stars appeared in the evening – trying to water the endless expanse of garden-to-be. And afterwards, my father insisted that I complete all my homework before I was allowed to go to bed. Rules were rules.

  It lasted for about three weeks and the first seedlings were just becoming visible above the dusty, arid earth. And then, without further discussion – except for a whispered reminder by Rebecca about outstanding debts – another vision of paradise was unceremoniously terminated.

  I am sure that, secretly, even when anything seemed doomed to utter failure, my father was hoping it might succeed after all. Because, I suspect, it would vindicate a need in himself. Something he never discussed with anyone, not even my mother.

  It was undoubtedly something in the genes.

  In one way or another these genes persist in my children, and how they permutate and change. In most respects it seems to me they have improved.

  First there is Anton, born in 1962, soon after Estelle and I had returned from Paris. Since his earliest years Anton has been an immensely creative person, particularly visually. It was a sad day when divorce, just after his third birthday, interrupted our closeness. At university, he turned towards science, specifically physics; and after his PhD he became a lecturer in the subject at Wits University. He specialised in image processing and was remarkably good at it. But just when it seemed as if his future was settled, he made a clean and complete break. Deciding that his real passion had always been the arts, he resigned from his post and became a full-time painter – a courageous decision if ever I saw one; and it made me hugely proud. On two occasions after that he obtained scholarships to the Cité des Arts in Paris; and although it was a battle to keep his head above water, the experience brought him a deep sense of fulfilment; and also brought a new closeness between us. After years of uphill struggle he has finally made a breakthrough and his work is now quite sought after. As I am writing this, he has just built a studio outside Grahamstown where he and his companion, Athinà, have moved in after the birth of their first baby, Ilyo. He could build any number of shadoufs without any problem.

  My second son is Gustav, bright and serious, and a born critic. When I came back to South Africa from France at the end of 1968, he was two, and came to visit me, dangerously perched on top of his tricycle on the front seat of the car during the drive to my parents’ home where I was then on holiday. I was working on a play, constantly interrupted by Gustav who insisted on having his nappy changed every half an hour. Once, while I was preparing something in the kitchen, he suddenly fell ominously silent; and when I went to investigate, he was on top of the table where I’d been writing. He had methodically dismembered my manuscript, crumpling up each separate page into a ball, arranging them all in a pyramid, and then perched right on top to perform one of his most basic functions. It was a moment to say, like Sir Thomas Beecham when an elephant defecated on the stage after a bad rehearsal of Aida: ‘Manners abominable, but heavens, what a critic!’

  Gustav’s manners improved immeasurably. He had a brilliant career as a law student, subsequently became involved in investigations of commercial dumping all over the world, reared three beautiful and amazingly talented children with his resourceful wife Marie-Jean, and spends his time rushing from Mexico to Bangladesh to France (he is a Francophile like his father) to Italy and Bosnia and elsewhere in search of dum
ping practices.

  * * *

  There is another glorious potential builder of shadoufs in my family, who is Danie, the first of my two children with Alta. In recent years I have not seen much of him, since he exchanged an ordered existence as a computer expert in South Africa for the joys of the sea, and moved to the Caribbean where he now lives on the island of Grenada. He came home all the way from there to be at my wedding with Karina; before that, I’d last seen him on the island of Carriacou, a tiny pimple in the Caribbean.

  Danie was only ten years old when we sailed on the Stockholm Archipelago with my friend and publisher Bertil Käll who offered Danie the rudder: and to my amazement and immense pride Danie held on and navigated us through a nasty storm. ‘That was the day,’ he told me years later, ‘when I decided I’m going to live on the sea.’ His tenacity and ferocious will has stood him in good stead as he navigated his colourful life past all variations of Scylla and Charybdis.

  He’d grown up quite close to Anton, as we were then all living in Grahamstown. But he was already a few years old when Gustav came visiting for the first time from Pretoria. And the discovery of a new brother came as a revelation to him. For at least a year after that visit, Danie would eagerly point at every boy we passed in the street and ask, ‘Is that also my brother?’

  He is a son to make any father’s chest swell: the way in which he combines great practical skills with his sensitivity, his sense of loyalty, his fierce convictions about justness and fairplay, his concern for others, and his belief in the brotherhood of all men.