A Fork in the Road Read online

  In my final year, a few months before I left for Paris, it briefly seemed as if the official path had triumphed. One day I was called in by the rector, an unsmiling granite-faced man known to the students as Stone-eye, and invited to join a very select, very secret group of young men, hand-picked as ‘leaders of the future’ and known as the Ruiterwag, or Cavalry Guard, generally accepted to be the junior branch of the Broederbond. On the appointed evening a small group – no more than five or six of us – were assembled on the lawn of the rector’s home and called in, one by one, to appear – blindfolded? – in the middle of a circle of senior professors, where during a most solemn ceremony we were inducted into the ranks of the country’s political elite, to assume responsibility for the future of our people, that small band of Israelites surrounded by a dark sea of heathens.

  Of the others called up for this kind of higher service, I can remember only one individual. It was F. W. de Klerk, the future state president.

  At the time, although I believe he was already chairman of the SRC, he did not cut a particularly impressive figure. His most obvious characteristic appeared to be a desire to please, and a readiness, even an eagerness, to stoop quite low to achieve it.

  One of the first things I did when I returned from Paris two years later – after Sharpeville had happened and it seemed as if the country was set to change, to change utterly, was to write a letter to de Klerk outlining the events in France that had led me to revise everything I had previously taken for granted. I proposed that a meeting of our Potchefstroom branch of the Ruiterwag be called to discuss the possibilities of a New South Africa, and assured him of my readiness to take part in such a meeting. I never received a reply to my letter.

  FRANCE

  I FOUND MYSELF in Paris long before I ever went there. It started with a passionate love affair with Jeanne d’Arc when I was not yet fourteen. I can no longer remember how and where I first met her, but it was many years before, as a homage to one of the most meaningful women in my life, I introduced her into On the Contrary and, more sketchily, into some of my other books. In due course I read and reread her story in many different forms, but some of the key moments remain indelibly fixed in my mind. The early encounters with the Voices, of course, which did not seem at all far-fetched to me, as from a very tender age I had the habit of wandering about the veld and talking aloud to thorn trees, rocks, scaly lizards and the odd slithery snake, and imagined their replies. The long journey to Chinon to receive her first official engagement. Cutting off her long hair and donning men’s clothes to join the roughest soldiers in the kingdom on her way to Orleans.

  These details of her journey were reinforced in my mind by an old story from the Boer War, no doubt apocryphal, which I could also not resist working into On the Contrary, and which retroactively contributed to the process of shaping a clear image of Jeanne in my mind: it concerned a girl of seventeen or eighteen who wished to accompany her father and brothers on commando against the English. But obviously this was summarily rejected. However, she bided her time and at the very first opportunity she cut off her hair, put on her youngest brother’s shirt and corduroy jacket and trousers, stole a Mauser from the rack in the passage and made her getaway on the only remaining horse on the farm. She joined the first group of Boers she came across, only to discover that life on commando was not really the adventure she had expected. It was a bore. And also unbearable, in heat and cold and mud and misery. But she kept doggedly on. The turning point caught everybody by surprise. One evening the whole commando was having their meagre supper in a wide circle around the campfire. As usual, they were all squatting on their haunches. At first she did not notice that the elderly man opposite her was staring very intensely into the V of her open legs, so voraciously that he never even realised that his pipe had burned out. What she did not know was that her trousers had split right open along the seam. It was only after a while that she became uncomfortably aware of the old patriarch’s stare. But not wanting to attract any undue attention she dared not move. At last she could no longer contain her discomfort. ‘What’s the matter, Oom?’ she asked with a show of annoyance. ‘What are you staring at?’ He shook his head, then began to knock out his pipe very slowly and deliberately, without taking his eyes off her crotch. ‘Opperman,’ he said, ponderously chewing on the stem of his cold pipe, ‘Opperman, you must forgive me for saying so, but I have never seen a man with such a long arsehole in my life.’

  How Jeanne emerged unscathed from her long marches with the army, was a miracle. I followed her all the way, from Orleans, to Patay, to Reims where she witnessed the coronation of Charles VII, to Paris, to Compiègne, to the tall tower in the castle of Beaurevoir from which she tried in vain to escape, to the confinement of her grey dungeon and the cruel interrogations by Pierre Cauchon, at last to the stake on the old market square in Rouen. When she was burned by the English, the traditional enemies of my people, the intimate bond between us was sealed forever.

  Once fired, my imagination would not let go of France again. My love of history – after a number of years of repetitive lessons on the South African past – was first kindled by a teacher, Mr Rousseau, who in my first highschool year miraculously turned history into story in much the same way as Herodotus had first done, and who taught us, with all the feeling of a man who spoke from personal experience, about Socrates and Xanthippe. During the nearly three years I spent in his classes he took us on a guided tour through ancient Egypt, Sumeria, Palestine, Greece and Rome, all the way past the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Holy Roman Empire, early modern Europe, to the French Revolution and Napoleon. When he discovered how passionate I was about Jeanne d’Arc, he began to ply me with books on France. These not only fascinated me in their own right, but stimulated an immensely rewarding discovery which has remained crucial to almost everything I myself was to write in the years to come: the discovery of how many variants of the same story could coexist. Each new book on a given topic (Jeanne d’Arc, say, or Napoleon, or the pyramids) adding new facts to the others, relativised them, turning history into an infinitely variable collection of accounts and possibilities, instead of the rigid and unimaginative repetition of the same version of South African history we had been confronted with, in Standard 2, in Standard 3, in Standard 4, in Standard 5, and then again, so help me God, in Standard 6. In this way I learned to look at the past through what was once felicitously called ‘the multiple eye of the fly’. With these books and the energetic discussions that accompanied them, Mr Rousseau guided me through the Wars of Religion and the Night of St Bartholomew, the glory of the Sun King and his repulsive lack of personal hygiene, the sad, big-nosed Louis XVI and his flighty Austrian princess, the writers who changed the world – the wise and humorous Montaigne, the learned Montesquieu, Voltaire with his wit and wisdom, the romantic and inventive Jean-Jacques Rousseau addicted to his secret vice … (about the vice I only learned years later, by which time I had already discovered it for myself, when I immediately began to make up for lost time). And then the explosion of the Revolution. The humourless and merciless ascetic Robespierre, the audacious giant Danton, Marat in his bath, Charlotte Corday a predictable successor to my Jeanne. Followed at last by the Avenging Angel, Bonaparte, who started with nothing, rose to unimaginable glory and ended again with nothing on the island of St Helena – except possibly a few bottles of Vin de Constance from our own Cape. Today, Napoleon may be one of the worst reasons for admiring France, but as an adolescent I was an unrepentant fan. Under the influence of Mr Rousseau, and for several years afterwards, I lived through a quite protracted phase of adulation for Great Men. At university I was swept off my feet by Carlyle. And the landscape of this phase was largely inspired by France.

  Literature was indeed decisive for my love affair with France too. As it happened, a number of French classics were translated, very badly, into Afrikaans during my high-school years, and my parents were happy to feed my voracious appetite. A few others, not available in Afrikaans
, I read in English. And during my first year at university, as soon as I had mastered the rudiments of French, I plunged into the originals. Each one of those books helped to fill in details of the image of France, and more specifically Paris, that was taking shape inside me. Even today, when I close my eyes, I can recall the smell of those books, and recite lines or whole passages that formed the collage and palimpsest of images that came to constitute Paris, and France, in my mind.

  There was Hugo who made me aware of the unspoken, often unspeakable, subconscious dimensions of a place, whether stowed away in secret alcoves and passages of a cathedral, or submerged in the sewers of the city. There was Balzac, who unfolded the whole human comedy to my eyes and taught me to respond to the challenges of Paris with, ‘À nous deux maintenant’. There was Zola who initiated me, through the whole constellation of the Rougon-Macquart family, to the very entrails of Paris and provoked, through Nana, some cherished secret erections, while never ceasing to surprise me with the understanding smile with which, from behind all that wretchedness, the writer could contemplate the small foibles and follies of his characters, or the sudden shock of liquid light as the sun came out over a wet and shimmering street. These novels were to me the perfect accompaniment to the paintings of Monet or Le Nain. I read and reread the poems of Baudelaire and Verlaine, and knew that the Paris of spleen, like the Paris of ecstasy, was where I really belonged. I savoured the ironies and the wryness of Simenon, the vagabondage of Colette, the adolescent rebelliousness of Françoise Sagan, the lost innocence illuminated by Anouilh, the lucent prose of Gide. There were also plays and short stories by Sartre, who appealed to me intellectually but with whom I could never empathise.

  And then there was Camus. Who promptly became, and still is, one of the Baudelairean phares of my life. I do not merely admire Camus, I love him. And one of the most profoundly moving pilgrimages of my life, more than twenty years after first reading La peste, was to Lourmarin in the Vaucluse, to stand at the simple slab of his grave overgrown by rosemary in the uncompromising sun of Provence. Camus: the indefatigable persistence of Sisyphus, the revolt-without-end, the struggle, literally to death, against injustice, against the lie, against unfreedom. He provided not only a map for my explorations of Paris, of France, but a blueprint for the rest of my life.

  This was the mindset I found myself in when, like a castaway on a distant beach, I arrived in Paris, curious and intimidated, driven by all kinds of urges and desires to which I could not yet assign a name – in early October 1959, in time for the new academic year at the Sorbonne.

  Paris. Already described during one of the debates in parliament during the Revolution as ‘the most beautiful city in the world’, and ‘the fatherland of arts and sciences’. I had been there once before, at the end of my second year at university, when my parents offered to send me to Europe with a small touring group led by a Flemish-born Johannesburg teacher, Jacques van Oortmerssen.

  For me, the decisive factor was that my best friend, Christie, also managed to persuade his parents to let him join the tour. And a very mixed group it was, ranging from a wealthy farmer from the arid north-west and his family to a few young teachers and a handful of students. There were also a couple of girls just out of school; and one of them, an impish, vivacious, shorthaired, pretty but rather spoilt city brat, Jeannette, with whom both Christie and I almost immediately fell in love. A recipe for disaster. It certainly put our friendship to the test. But friendship was what prevailed in the end. In the middle stages of the tour Christie and I had a long discussion and negotiated a strategy: each of us would have two days at a time to try our luck, after which the other would take over for the next two days. ‘Trying our luck’, I should hasten to make clear, might involve at the utmost a brief holding of hands, not even the shadow of a kiss. And at the end of every day he and I would get together – we usually shared a room anyway – to discuss our progress and prospects.

  What particularly touched me was that he agreed in advance, knowing how I’d been dreaming about Paris for most of my life, that our programme would be devised in such a way that for our few days in that city Jeannette would be ‘mine’. I had feverish visions of a walk along the Seine at night, a kiss on the Pont des Arts, a Mass in Notre-Dame, a lavish ice cream on the terrace of the Café de la Paix, a boat trip along the sewers. These visions turned out to be rather unrealistic. It was midwinter, early January, the Seine was in flood, rising to the underside of the roadway across the Pont Neuf and causing the Pont des Arts to be closed to pedestrians. All the quays were submerged. Our sightseeing programme ruled out the possibility of attending Mass in Notre-Dame. The sewers were off limits. The Café de la Paix was, of course, open for business, but there was nothing romantic about its glassedin and fogged-up terrace and the ice cream was most unimpressive and bloody expensive. I had an allowance of £60 for the whole two-month trip through England, Holland, Belgium, France and Italy, so that towards the end of the holiday I had to flog some of my prized acquisitions to other tour members to afford a haircut in Florence, an oversweet sugared pineapple ring in Pisa, and the odd espresso in Venice. And Jeannette had the sulks. After the first day I invited Christie to join us; and from then on, in spite of everything that had gone wrong, Paris became as magical as it had been in my dreams.

  We had been well prepared for Paris, and for the other cities and towns of our journey. Mr van Oortmerssen was a charismatic lecturer, and during the fortnight of our voyage from Cape Town to Southampton he had given us talks on the history, the art and culture of all the countries on our itinerary. Those lectures were usually the high point of our day. But there were many other unforgettable moments on that dark-blue voyage streaked with the silvery lines of flying fish, as our ship, the Dutch immigration liner De Groote Beer, waded ponderously through the swell. Much fun and laughter too. Meals where a Tom Jones could have feasted to his heart’s content. And dances, extravagantly enjoyed by the young teachers and some of the other students. There was also a group from some posh girls’ school on board, a source of unbridled randiness among most of the younger men in our group; and most of them turned out to be seductive and provocative on the small, crowded dance floor. But Christie and I, stupid wet blankets, remained on the fringes – although we could not muster the conviction to stay away altogether: apart from anything else, Jeannette was on the floor. Our university, I’m ashamed to say, not only frowned on dancing but rated it as just about the worst sin in Christendom. There was a common saying in those days that at this university sex in a standing position was prohibited, as it might lead to dancing.

  Not everything on the boat trip was fun and games. One night there was even high drama. I was woken some time after midnight by a persistent hammering on the partition that separated our cabin from the next one, which was occupied by six or eight of the sirens from the girls’ school. The hammering was accompanied by what sounded like muffled female voices shrilling in the background. Befuddled with sleep, I unfolded myself from the top bunk where I was sleeping to wake Christie. Unsure about what was happening next door, all we could agree on was that something must have gone drastically wrong. We tried to respond to the persistent hammering by knocking on the partition from our side. For a moment there was silence. Then the hammering resumed, with what seemed to be more urgency than before. And this time we were pretty sure that we could make out from the chorus of dull shouts and screams next door several individual voices articulating, ‘Help! Help!’

  Leaving Christie behind to deal with the emergency as he thought fit, I ran, barefoot and in my pyjamas, through the almost pitch-dark ship towards the section where Jacques van Oortmerssen and his wife and child were sleeping in rather more salubrious accommodation than ourselves. In the labyrinthine underbelly of the ship it took a while to find the section I was looking for. Minutes later, an equally befuddled van Oortmerssen joined me to go in search of the ship’s sole policeman. And then the three of us, the policeman dressed in vest and underpants but w
earing his official cap, and wielding an outsized baton, returned to the suspected scene of crime, where total chaos awaited us.

  Only after the event could all the pieces of the jigsaw be fitted together. Among the passengers on the ship were four pretty unsavoury-looking Germans who had been deported from South Africa after having committed a series of violent crimes. But the authorities had neglected to alert the captain and his crew, as a result of which nothing had been done to restrict their movements on board or even to keep them under surveillance. Only now did we learn that the foursome had been pestering the girls in various ways during the first week of the voyage. In the course of this night, they had tried to force the door to the girls’ cabin, but the girls had managed to barricade themselves inside. Whereupon the miscreants had got hold of a hand-axe and had begun to break a hole into the partition between their own cabin and the girls’. Just about the time the policeman, with our tour leader and myself pale and trembling in his wake arrived on the scene, the four Germans succeeded in breaking through the last obstacle and tumbled headlong into the cabin next door. In a flurry of flimsy short nightdresses and bare limbs the girls came pouring, shrieking and hysterical, from the cabin into the passage, where Christie and the other occupants of our own cabin were trying to set up an ineffectual barrier.

  This lasted for about five seconds. Then the policeman went into action. At the first blows of his huge baton the Germans tried to scamper up the short flight of stairs leading to the next floor. But the policeman overtook them with two or three improbably large strides and managed to await them at the top of the stairs. There he grabbed hold of them, one by one, delivered a series of thwacking blows to each, before kicking them downstairs again, where they landed, dazed and bloodied. In a flurry of movements the policeman managed to handcuff them all together. Afterwards, the four men were taken to the ship’s cells, where they were kept for the remainder of the journey. From that night there was a new camaraderie among us, and it was with real regret that upon our arrival in Southampton the two groups parted company – the girls heading towards Scotland, we to London, and the Low Countries, and then Paris.