Before I Forget Read online

  Because of the moonlight (as ghostly and deceptive as that night, so many years later, when Daphne was to dance for me), everything seemed totally unreal. I would prefer to think that it was a hallucination, or a dream that had overwhelmed me just as I was ready to climax on the narrow little bed up in the attic. Because surely the whole thing was too perverse, too far-fetched to be true? Five staunch young girls from a God-fearing family…? No way. And yet I should perhaps have been forewarned by Driekie’s games in the fig tree; and even more so by the shocking story she had told me there with such unsettling, dark glee to draw me into her spell: about David, and their sinful Sunday swimming, and the punishment they had watched with such mixed and deeply troubled feelings.

  Had they conceived of this night, in fact, as some very strange and very twisted response to David? Or was it their collective retribution for what Driekie and I had been up to in the tree where, I know now, I had my first taste of the forbidden fig and acquired, for the rest of my life, what the French call le goût du Paradis, the taste of Paradise? Or was it simply an irrational outgrowth of the collective excitement of our day?

  Whatever it was, there was something terrifying about that place in the night, with its very stark contrasts between pool of light and surrounding darkness.

  I was still trying to escape. But by now they were holding hands in a very tight circle around me. And they were all still wearing their festive clothes, the long-beaked kappies, the full-length skirts that swept the dusty floor, sending up small puffs of very white dust; but they were barefoot now.

  ‘Oh come on,’ I tried to reason with them when it became clear that they were not going to let me through. ‘We’re all tired. I want to go to bed.’

  A small, high-pitched wavelet of laughter rippled through them. The circle was still very tightly drawn.

  Then I tried to plead. ‘Please, just let me go. What do you think you’re doing anyway?’

  No go.

  I was getting angry. ‘Stop it, this is enough. You’re being very silly.’

  Another little spasm of laughter.

  ‘If you don’t let me go, I’ll have to use force,’ I threatened, hoping that might intimidate them. I was much stronger than any of them. But of course there were five of them, and they knew it. More importantly, it had been inculcated in me from the time I could walk, and they must all have known it, that a boy dared not lay hands on a girl. God would shrivel up your hand or smite you with some other form of dire punishment.

  Every time I tried to make a dash at what seemed to me a potential weak link in the chain of arms, the circle would draw closer. I could feel their hot breaths on my face. I tried to grab some of the small hands surrounding me, to tear them apart. That merely increased their glee. In desperation I grabbed a forearm between both of my hands and gave it the feared ‘donkey-twist.’ There was a single high-pitched cry, immediately muffled in a sound of sobbing. But the girl, whoever it was, did not let go. And this turned out to be a turning point. Now I really was the enemy, to be stalked, to be enclosed, suffocated, attacked, wounded.

  The circle of dancers became a tight huddle of vengeful young girl-bodies, pouncing on me from all sides, jumping on me, bringing me down, pinning me down. They were all over me, like a swarm of rats with sharp little teeth and pinching hands and raking nails and pointed knees and elbows. I had to smother my moans of rage and fear and pain: how could I possibly give in to a coven of demented girls?

  Since I couldn’t very well shout out aloud and run the risk of attracting the grown-ups to the scene, which would make my humiliation incomparably more terrible, I tried to hiss at them the most wicked of insults and curses. ‘Fuck you!’ I snarled.

  Somehow that merely added to their merriment.

  I was driven to such an extreme that suddenly the most taboo of words broke from my lips: ‘Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!’

  The viciousness of the attack increased. So did their suppressed laughter. And in the process, the nature of the attack changed. They were no longer trying just to pin me down, to suffocate me with the accumulated weight of their wriggling and twisting bodies: they were trying to strip my clothes off me. I held on for dear life, but both my pajama top and trousers were so loosely fastened that it was hopeless to hold on. I heard and felt the buttons of the top being wrenched from their buttonholes. There was a tearing sound as one of the sleeves was ripped off. Then they tackled the cord of the trousers. By now, regardless of every rule, I was kicking and hitting out, grabbing at anything soft, twisting, even biting. Several of them were gasping and moaning with pain. But it only made them more reckless. The trousers were stripped down to my ankles. I was dragged by my feet into the white pool of moonlight, where I tried to sit up, to huddle in a ball, to protect my privates from their vicious hands and peering eyes. But they kept on unfolding me, rolling me over, stretching me out. And laughing at me, taunting me, prodding me with their feet. Then one of them spat on me. The gob hit me on the chest and trickled down to my stomach. The rest of them followed her example.

  And something awful happened. In spite of my rage and humiliation, I could feel a hard-on growing in my groin. My God, not this, not in front of all those taunting, peering eyes. Once again I tried to roll myself out of reach; once again they grabbed hold of my hands and feet and stretched me out as on a medieval rack.

  What were they really avenging? Something that had been done to them, or to one of them? Something of which they had learned, somewhere, somehow? Something they could not even articulate but which they sensed darkly, looking ahead into a future of which as yet they knew nothing? I don’t know. I don’t know.

  At some stage I got to my feet again. Immediately the circle reformed around me. I began to charge at them, head lowered, aiming at the thin but deceptively strong arms that were trying to contain me; then going straight for them, crashing headlong into them, trying to wind them, to break them down. All I could remember, for a long time afterwards, was the madness of their dance continuing, the inarticulate, primitive chant with which they mocked me and insulted me and jeered at me. The swinging and flaring of their wide long dresses, the bare feet dancing or kicking out. And at last, somehow, perhaps because they’d had enough, or were too tired to go on, or took pity on me, or just got bored, they allowed me to drop down in a wretched little heap, off-center in the barn, in the darkness away from the relentless spotlight of the moon; and all of a sudden they were gone, melted like shadows into the endless shadow of the night.

  Somewhere in the dark I found what was left of my pajamas and tried to cover my body with the tatters. Up in the attic, panting, dazed, I flopped down on the rustling mattress. And fell asleep, assaulted by an erratic succession of dreams, and half woke up at the first light of day, and discovered from the sticky mess about my crotch that I’d just had the first wet dream of my life. I had just become a man, as Driekie had so recently eased into womanhood in the fig tree.

  ***

  Iraq may well be Bush’s big wet dream, his passage into his own warped notion of manhood. It is sickening to behold. Yet I cannot stop watching, night after night. A kind of paralysis seems to have settled in. There is, they say, a drastic need for reinforcements. Right now it would appear that the war may in fact continue for many months. I’m beginning to think that even if the campaign may totally overrun Iraq, even if all the military objectives were realized, that would still be no more than the beginning. The real war may go on for years, for a lifetime. In a certain sense it may never stop again. Is this—this violence without end—what underlies our efforts and achievements, even our loves? For as long as we believe we must ‘prove’ ourselves. For as long as we have the need to define our maleness, perhaps our very humanity, in terms of our ability to conquer and to destroy.

  ***

  The macho thing. I think the first time I really saw it naked, and regrettably I mean naked, was while I was at university, in my final y
ear. There was a party in one of the men’s residences. Must have been the end of the year, just before swot week and the final examinations. It began unremarkably enough. Dancing in the dining hall, which had been stripped of its usual furniture and ‘decorated’ by a merry invasion of girls. The theme had something to do with ‘our ancestors’, and those in charge had decided to revert to the era of Cro-Magnon. Men with clubs and Tarzan loincloths, long-haired girls in skimpy skins strategically draped and safety-pinned. A boisterous lot, but that was par for the course. Very soon we were all totally, hopelessly pissed. And that went for the girls too. (In those days they were all, still, girls. Not ‘women.’) After midnight, when the official festivities had to stop as the Sabbath was nigh, groups of inebriated males and females spilled into bedrooms. All highly irregular, but that was ‘tradition,’ and tradition at Stellenbosch was, as I believe it still is, revered above rules and regulations.

  The girl I was involved with at the time was a Wagnerian beauty, and her name, fittingly enough, was Isolde. Thinking back now, I am pretty sure that this was not her real name, but that because of her stunning Nordic looks I had designated her as Isolde in my mind; and this is the name that has stuck. I was, as usual, and unavoidably, star-struck, and head over heels in lust with her. But she was like a blank wall. A solid ice wall in some inhospitable northern clime. An iceberg, a glacier. I tried and tried, but she would only smile condescendingly, or at the rarest of moments, literally offer me her little finger to suck. And I took it. God, how I took it. It was not that she was a tease, or in any way misled me: she was always utterly frank in the intonation of her No. (Just hearing her voice saying No was enough to make me come in my pants. I’d never masturbated so much in my life; and that is saying something. Even in my wettest dreams I could, at most, behold a stalactite of pure ice slowly thawing, causing drops of crystalline moisture to run chillingly down the beautiful, frigid sides.)

  Isolde found herself in a peculiar position on campus. Most of the girls seemed suspicious of her because of her stunning looks, but once they realized that she was not really interested in men and unlikely to become anyone’s rival, they were more prepared to accept her, even if they remained somewhat wary of her. (Was she a lesbian? The thought struck me only years later. Those were the forties; to most of us the thought would not even occur. I can remember once having a long conversation with a close friend, Johann Koch, when we’d heard for the first time about a phenomenon called homosexuality. We found it highly improbable; the mechanics baffled us. As for something comparable among women, we laughed it off: sex meant penetration, did it not?, so the question could not even be posed. And at that stage, with little more than some basic and rudimentary fumblings to rely on, we did not even know about the existence of the clitoris. As for the use of the tongue, Johann found the very thought disgusting, while I preferred to keep to myself my little dangerous knowledge as it seemed to me a purely personal predilection.)

  Most of the men were drawn to Isolde; she was the subject of much foul-mouthed male speculation at teatimes, and undoubtedly of a welter of male fantasies. Many tried to approach her, but were unceremoniously rebuffed. The fact that I seemed to be the only one vaguely acceptable to her, even though it was common knowledge that I’d made as little inroad on her redoubtable aloofness as any of the others, caused them either to envy me in secret or sneer at me in the open.

  What both men and women held against her, and used more and more jeeringly against her, was that her family were Sappe, members of the South African Party, the governing party of Field Marshal Smuts. At an overwhelmingly Afrikaner institution like our university, this was tantamount to treason: how could any self-respecting person support Britain in the war against Germany when the collective memory still nursed the suppurating wounds inflicted by the Anglo-Boer? Not only was Isolde’s family on the side of Smuts and England, her father was actually in North Africa fighting the Germans. All this while Afrikaner extremists, most of whom were not necessarily pro-German but ferociously anti-British, were revered as national heroes, and a fair number of activist leaders of the so-called New Order were indeed interned in concentration camps at remote places like Koffiefontein because of their enthusiastic promotion of the Nazi cause. So it was easy to revile Isolde as a traitor to the Afrikaner Struggle, a useful smokescreen for the grudge at having one’s amorous advances rejected.

  I tried to keep politics out of it, but that was hardly feasible. When I asked permission to bring her home with me for a weekend, Father first made some not-so-discreet enquiries and then summarily vetoed it. Instead, I was summoned home forthwith. He told me in no uncertain terms what he thought of the latest avatar of ‘joiners,’ descendants of the vile breed of Boers who had betrayed their own people by siding with the British a half-century before; and then, changing tactics, confided in me the truth behind a small trickle of strange and mostly bearded men who, over the previous six months or so, had regularly turned up at our house after dark to be lodged, in the utmost secrecy, in the recently refurbished attic for anything between one night and several weeks. Those men, he told me in a conspiratorial whisper, were all members of the New Order, in hiding from the government’s police, either before or after the perpetration of heroic acts of sabotage on railway lines, post offices, and the like. When I cautiously expressed a measure of doubt, he became nearly apoplectic; then managed to control his fury in order to plead, in his most eloquent courtroom manner, for understanding. These were the real heroes of our time, he impressed upon me, the true descendants of the intrepid patriots who had left behind, a century ago, the land of milk and honey the English had established at the Cape, to open up the barren interior and spread the gospel among the heathen; and of the handful of Boers who, fifty years later, had taken on the full might of the greatest military power in the West and nearly brought it to its knees; and of those God-fearing men and women who, ever since, had borne the cross of poverty and humiliation in anticipation of an opportunity to rise again, with the help of God Almighty, against the imperial enemy who was still trampling us underfoot in the country of our birth. Et cetera, et fucking cetera. If I had any regard for the greying hair of my devoted parents, I would never again mention the mere name of the traitor-woman Isolde who was sullying a noble Nordic name with the godforsaken actions of her despicable father. Et cetera once again.

  After that, I tried to circumvent the increasingly thorny issue by taking her for a few days of the September vacation to the farm of Aunt Bella and Uncle Johnny. To my great joy, he immediately warmed to her and they struck up a surprisingly hearty relationship marked by a good deal of wine drinking and uninhibited laughter. I hadn’t seen Uncle Johnny quite so jolly before; and as for Isolde, I read in her carefree demeanor the signs of a thawing which could only be to my advantage once we were back on campus. But I had reckoned without the way in which politics were beginning to infiltrate our family relationships. Whether the move was initiated from home or, more likely, by Aunt Bella becoming more and more uptight about the signs of sinful imbibing that marked Uncle Johnny’s reception of the immaculate Isolde, I was called to the telephone on the third or fourth day of our stay. Father was on the line. I had to get ‘that scarlet woman’ off the farm and present myself to my parents before the setting of the sun on that unholy day.

  She wanted to go with me, but I could not take the risk. Just as well, because when I arrived home that night the message from my father was stark and simple: if I were to have any contact with Isolde ever again, I would be disinherited; already the shame I was threatening to bring upon my parents’ heads was almost irreparable. Did I want to send them straight to a premature death? If not, I should defer to the Fifth Commandment. Not only the future of our family, as far as I could gather, but the survival of our nation was at stake. I had to choose, here and now, before God.

  What could I do?

  From then on I shunned Isolde. But I had a shrewd suspicion that even if I hadn’
t, she would not have had anything further to do with me anyway. Such was the state of affairs on that witches’ sabbath in October in the men’s residence when we were all staggering about drunkenly and noisily, in search of something to vent our pent-up energies on. At some stage, it must have been close to three or four in the morning, when few of the revelers were still on their feet, I landed in a bedroom on the top floor. There must have been fifteen or twenty boozy men around. The girls had all gone. (I believe a spoilsport female warden, more intrepid than most, had irrupted into the residence an hour or so earlier and herded her resentful little flock of innocent lambs out of the den of iniquity.) All that remained to be done, it seemed, was deeply serious drinking.

  And then, at five minutes past four (I checked), Isolde entered the room. ‘Entered’ is not the right word. The door was violently kicked open from the outside and she was half carried, half pushed through it. It was she, no doubt about it. But it was not the Isolde I knew. For a start, she was completely drunk. She was also completely naked. The man who was pushing and carrying her, had her underwear draped over his head. He was holding her from behind, his hands under her arms and one knee raised under her buttocks, so that her breasts and hips were thrust forward. I shall never forget the shocking contrast between her ice-white body and the dark mat of pubic hair of her mound which neither I nor anyone else in that room had ever seen. The man was pushing her forward with considerable force, so that she was half sitting on his knee, her legs akimbo and her feet jerking in desperate little kicks to reach the floor.

  In the total silence that greeted their entry—only the music was still blaring through the room and the rest of the building—the man dropped her to the floor and said, gasping for breath, ‘Here you are, boys. Now’s your chance with the fucking Sap bitch.’

  It was one of those scenes where you want to close your eyes, and yet you cannot, because they seem to be forced open from inside.