A Fork in the Road Read online

  Disappointing as the floods and storms of Paris might have been, there were enough memories to cherish, enough indelible impressions on which to base a very firm decision to return as soon as I’d finished my studies in South Africa. And arriving there again, in October 1959, was not just like returning to a place already familiar from memories and dreams, but like coming home for a second time.

  * * *

  Not that this ‘home’ was in every respect a happy or a reassuring place. France was in the middle of the Algerian War; every fifty metres along the Champs-Élysées soldiers were lined up with machine guns; already there were signs that even de Gaulle (who in my mind, ever since he had so majestically announced that he was ready to assume the powers of the Republic, had become a new Napoleon) might not be able to staunch the wounds. I had married my first wife, Estelle, barely a fortnight before flying off to Paris; and only a few months after our arrival, news from South Africa became so dire that it no longer seemed far-fetched to imagine our own cities, Cape Town, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban, transformed into military zones like this. And from that moment on Paris became for me the flipside of the South African reality: a persistent image of what the country might become, but for the grace of God.

  The sense of living on borrowed time, of being strangers in a world that was not-quite-real, of living from day to day without seeming to be going anywhere, turned even moments of almost sublime beauty, discovery or happiness into glimpses of mortality, of absurdity. I no longer needed to read Camus, or Sartre for that matter, or even Marcel (I was still very religious), to understand what existentialism was all about: I was living it every waking and sleeping moment of my life. Everything I had discovered, in awe and wonder, in L’étranger, or La peste, in L’homme révolté or Le mythe de Sisyphe before I came to Paris, now took on the appearance of reality. I could no longer be sure of anything I had taken for granted in my life; I no longer knew who I was. At university, and in South Africa in general, I ‘knew my place’: even if I cautiously rebelled against the prevailing ideologies I was accepted. But here in Paris the city could not care a damn about who I was; or even whether I was there or not. It had no need of me. Inevitably, I was driven to existential questioning of myself.

  And then Camus, who had been my Bible, my vade mecum, died in that absurd car accident, at Pont-sur-Yonne, just north of Sens, on the highway to Paris, at 13:54 on 4 January, 1960. Just when the gloom of depression which had surrounded him ever since he received the Nobel Prize, and even before, seemed to be lifting; just as he seemed to be finding his way back into writing; just as life seemed to be becoming, if not meaningful by any means, but worthwhile again – that is, an absurdity worth living for – a wholly gratuitous death had the last word. For me, in those circumstances, at that moment in my life, nothing could have confirmed the significance of Camus in a more definitive – a more final – manner as his death. It lent a solemnity, even a profundity, to every reading and rereading of Camus I made over the nearly fifty years that have passed since then. It meant that for the rest of my life I would never be without his shadow, or the shadow of his light.

  Seventeen years later another man died, with much the same devastating effect on my mind and my life, even though the manner of it was totally different, and the circumstances incomparably so. This was Steve Biko. And in a curious way there was a line running from the first to the second.

  Late in March 1960, while I was still stunned by the death of the man who had defined Paris and France for me, news came of the latest atrocity from South Africa. I have often told the story of how on that morning I was sitting on a green chair near the fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens with a bright yellow copy of Comte’s Philosophie Positive on my lap. But the book was a mere pretext. My thoughts were very, very far away from that green garden. They were circling, like bees, around a reality 10,000 kilometres away to the south, a reality where, in a place I had never heard of before, Sharpeville, sixty-nine black people had been killed and many wounded when armed police opened fire on a crowd of peaceful demonstrators who had converged to protest against a new law that extended the obligation to carry a pass (previously applicable only to men) to black women.

  I had grown up amid violence of all kinds; my generation were the heirs to a centuries-old history of violent encounters between individuals and peoples, specifically between black and white. But this massacre went beyond the customary and, in the context, beyond the imaginable. Compared to the bloodbaths and convulsions of history – the Holocaust, the British in India, Cortés and Pizarro in the Americas, Julius Caesar at Munda, the good King Leopold in the Heart of Darkness, Lothar von Trotha in German South-West Africa – this was a mere hiccup. But in the modern experience of South Africa, in the unfolding of apartheid, this was the most massive, the most cold-blooded, the most pernicious event we had yet had to face. There was something apocalyptic about it, and it was aggravated by occurring at a moment when the emergence of Africa from centuries of colonial bondage was in full swing and the eyes of the world were on South Africa. The West was anxious to exorcise its own lingering racial guilt feelings by projecting these on a scapegoat. And South Africa was so much more than a scapegoat: it was prepared to offer real atrocities, not just the semblance of bad faith. Its commitment to racism was total, and genuine. And nothing, until that disastrous moment, had demonstrated it with such conviction, such abandon, such staggering arrogance.

  The shock of the event, for me, was aggravated by a strange sense of recognition, a feeling of: Yes, this is it. Of course. This is what we have really been waiting for. An early intimation came a month after our arrival in Paris, when for the first time we went to the reading room of the South African Embassy to catch up on the newspapers from home. It was not a matter of following events from day to day, blindly, a collage of disparate, disconnected moments. Now, all of a sudden, after a month, their randomness replaced by coherence, they fell into a pattern and a plan, revealing a discernible, predictable direction. An array of ‘immorality’ trials. Riots in the town of Paarl. Most obviously there was an unfolding court drama in Pretoria where a policeman, Sergeant Nic Arlow, was appearing on twenty charges of murder, after he had become something of a hero with 14,000 arrests to his credit. All his victims were black. Even more sickening than the crude facts was the way in which the huge public – white – interest in the case was reported. Subscription lists had been opened for the thousands of people who wanted to contribute to the legal expenses of the accused. Behind all of this, with unexpected clarity, lurked white South Africa’s fear of blacks, fear that could only be expressed as hate. What became unmistakable, was a sense of panic, of which I’d been unaware before coming to Paris. Panic, terror, a spasm of death. How almost desperately I tried, in the diaries I kept through those convulsive months, to discover something heroic in the struggle of a small nation finding itself with its back to the wall, confronting the mounting rage and incomprehension, of the whole world. But Sharpeville broke through all attempts at justification. And as it happened, judgement in the Arlow trial came at almost the same time as the massacre. The heroic sergeant was found guilty, not of murder, but on thirteen counts of manslaughter. He was given a fine of £75, which was collected rapidly among the many people who regarded him as a hero. In the same newspaper reports, the possibility of a film on his life was mentioned.

  All of this was milling and whirling through my head. I found it hard to concentrate on the news, on what was happening, in my country. I had the feeling that everything was in free fall, that an anchor, a hint of fixity, had given way and that, ten thousand kilometres from where I was sitting in that park, the place that had shaped me and the people I had known and trusted for so long, were sinking, sinking into the quicksand of history.

  And for me, as I sat on the green chair in the Luxembourg Gardens in that early spring morning, the event was not something out there: the murderers were my people; the regime which had not only made this possible but had active
ly and enthusiastically orchestrated it, was the government to which I had, only a few months before, eagerly sworn allegiance by joining the Ruiterwag.

  How strange, now, to think that one of my first thoughts that morning was: if my country is indeed destroying itself and going to hell, if that wretched, despicable, irredeemable old ship was indeed sinking, then I had to rush back and go down with it. I felt in need of an all-encompassing apocalyptic cleansing which might be achieved only by total obliteration. Of the country, the people, and myself.

  Among the notes I jotted down in my diary in those dark days was this brief entry: It is bad enough to belong to a people that is facing extinction – but it is pure hell to belong to a people which deserves extinction.

  On that morning in the Luxembourg Gardens I was saved from this fate by an incident both grotesque and utterly banal, when I was approached by an old crone in black who put out a gnarled hand to demand payment of thirty centimes for the use of the rickety green chair. As far as she was concerned, undoubtedly, my country could indeed be wiped out in a cataclysm, provided she got her thirty centimes. In a fury completely out of proportion to the moment, I refused to pay. In that case, she said, I had to get up and go. Promptly. Sur le champ.

  Coming at a moment when I felt my whole life was in the balance, this intrusion was so totally absurd that I instantly lost my temper. But there was nothing I could do. In the background a policeman in a black mantle already seemed to be aiming in our direction and I knew that on the slightest provocation the old witch would summon him to support her. And that was how I left the open space surrounding the fountain and went to a sturdy brown – and free – bench among the chestnut trees, where I was reborn.

  It is difficult, now, to summarise what that rebirth really involved. Undoubtedly, it included the horror of discovering what ‘my people’ had been doing all along, on what atrocities and perversions our proud white civilisation had constructed its edifice of Christian morality and enlightenment; I had to move towards an awareness that I would have to define my own position in the morass. I did not, could not, go into denial. Things had happened and were going on happening; at some stage I would have to decide how to shoulder the burden of my own responsibility. But for the moment, all I could do was to admit the devastation of the discovery and try to learn to live with it. At least, for the moment, there was no need to go back; I was in Paris, I could start by exploring all it had to offer – the newness of my marriage and all the discoveries that brought with it, my research at the Sorbonne, the music and art and philosophies and insights exploding all around me and inside me – and gradually try to probe the full meaning of what Sharpeville had made me see.

  And all of this was exacerbated when the first letters from our families after the explosion started trickling through: Things over here are not nearly as bad as they are made out to be. All the firearms in town are sold out, but there is no occasion for alarm: everything will soon be back to normal.

  What I knew that morning was that the point from which I looked at the world, had shifted: it was no longer there, in faraway South Africa, but definitively here, in Europe, in Paris.

  Barely two years later, back in South Africa, when I first wrote about that morning of illumination, I approached it simply as an impressionistic piece about an hour in the early spring sunshine of the Luxembourg Gardens, the delicate mood disrupted by the old woman in black – with no mention at all of what had driven me to the Luxembourg, of the shock of discovery, of Sharpeville. Because at that stage I no longer wanted to have anything to do with South Africa. I was, simply, too ashamed to face it.

  Would I have reacted differently if I had not gone to Paris – if I had been in South Africa when Sharpeville happened? Clearly I should hope that it would have hit me just as hard. Yet who knows how many defence mechanisms connected to being an Afrikaner in the midst of such events might have restrained, or at least delayed, a reaction? Certainly, there was one dimension of experience in France that had already begun to have a profound influence on my thinking even before Sharpeville, and had motivated a shift inside me which at the very least had prepared me for the event. In itself, it might have seemed very insignificant, yet its effect turned out to have been momentous. It had to do with our experience of student restaurants in the Latin Quarter.

  The first month of our stay we were lodged in a big room in the PEN residence, a somewhat dilapidated old apartment with a posh address just off the Champs-Élysées, of all places. But afterwards we moved into a very small, ill-lit, over-furnished room above a noisy schoolyard on the rue d’Assas, at the southern corner of the Luxembourg Gardens. It belonged to a students’ ‘home’ run by a diminutive old spinster – a word much frowned on nowadays, and with good reason; but Mademoiselle Domecq was everything of the archetype implied by it. She was strait-laced and severe, wholly devoid of humour or human warmth, attended by two morose femmes de chambre who could detect the smell of a clandestinely cooked chicken two storeys away. The old lady allowed us one carefully measured bath a week – not included in the rent – and nearly had apoplexy when for reasons both of economy and sinful delectation we insisted on sharing it.

  In order to live as cheaply as possible, Estelle and I took at least one meal a day at a student restaurant, using coupons issued to me as a boursier, a student studying with a bursary from the French government. The food in these restaurants, especially the one in the rue de Vaugirard which we frequented most regularly, was a far cry from Gallic gastronomy, and varied between so-so and abysmal, relying – like several establishments immortalised by Zola and Balzac – largely on overcooked cabbage, greasy pork and spinach that looked and smelled like cowshit. But going there was a wonderful opportunity for meeting other students. Even for two tongue-tied strangers like us there was an undreamed-of world to be discovered at these otherwise dreary meals. There were students from Spain and England and Germany and Scandinavia, from South America. From Africa. For the first time in my life I sat down to share a meal with black people. It was a cultural shock so great that during the first evening I was barely able to eat.

  But amazingly quickly it changed. Not only did the strangeness wear off within days, but there were other – delightful – shocks to get used to. I had no great illusions or pretensions about my academic standing. But after seven years at university in Potchefstroom, I had come to assume – or at least to hope – that if there was one subject I knew something about, it was literature. Now, suddenly, I found that many of my fellow students knew incomparably more. And many of them were black. This discovery was not only shattering but also invigorating. And the real significance of it had very little to do with academe: it lay in something extremely obvious, yet stunning in its implications. It had to do with the simple fact of our shared humanity. And even if, quite often, this was expressed in no more than complaints about the food, or the weather, as autumn slowly descended into winter, the similarity in our reactions and comments bolstered a new-found sense of camaraderie. It no longer mattered that we were black or white. We were all strangers in a strange land. We were all battling for survival. We were all struggling against le cafard. We were all eager to face the new challenges. When someone received bad news from home, we would all commiserate. When someone had a birthday, we would all drink to it.

  As a consequence, when Sharpeville happened it was impossible to think neutrally of those sixty-nine people killed as sixty-nine blacks – as one would of necessity have thought back in South Africa. They were sixty-nine people. Skin colour had become irrelevant. They could have been sitting in that dingy, foul-smelling restaurant in the rue de Vaugirard with me, any evening.

  This kind of experience was often repeated during those early months. In January 1960 there was a huge rockfall in a mine near Coalbrook in Natal, trapping 404 people almost two kilometres underground. Journalists from the major newspapers flocked to the scene to interview the four women married to the white miners killed in the disaster, publishing photos a
nd life stories of each of them, while mentioning very briefly, in passing, that 400 black women were also mourning the loss of their husbands. The Salvation Army arranged two prayer meetings – one for the whites, a separate one for the blacks.

  Black and white; black and white. How many variations of this scenario did I witness? – a scenario that had been ingrained in my life in South Africa: yet it was only now that it began to acquire a weight and a coherence, an insistence, which had previously escaped me. Perhaps nothing went as deeply, and persisted as pervasively, as our Saturday evenings with Grandpère Maurice.

  At the office of the boursiers, there were always small notices advertising items for sale, or weekend bus excursions, or accommodation for rent, or opportunities for meeting French people in their homes. This one, written in an immaculate copperplate which immediately caught my attention, was an invitation to lonely strangers in need of a family, a home-cooked meal and friendly conversation to contact Monsieur Maurice Perceval at 93, rue Lemercier, in the seventeenth arrondissement. I discussed it with Estelle and we decided to risk it – mainly because in the wake of the Sharpeville explosion we felt miserable and in need of some homeliness. After hesitating for another few days, I telephoned in my still very broken French, and the very next Saturday evening we took the Métro to Brochant station, near the place de Clichy, not knowing what to expect. It was a turning point in our lives, and over the next two years we hardly missed a single Saturday evening meal. A grandfather, we soon discovered, was exactly what we most needed.