A Fork in the Road Read online

  Then came Picasso and shocked me out of the torpor. And I plunged in. The book was originally called Naakfiguur, kers en ruit (Nude, candle, windowpane). Not a good title. And when I turned it into a radio play, it was changed to Lobola vir die Lewe (Lobola for Life: lobola meaning the bride-price paid, in some black societies, by a young man for his bride-to-be). My publisher, wisely, insisted on retaining it for the novel it eventually turned into. I felt like a man possessed. It took a fortnight to write, and then I was exhausted. Afterwards it went through several more drafts, and getting it published became a story in its own right. But at that moment I didn’t even care whether it was good or bad: all I knew was that I had to write it. Whether it would ever find a publisher was a different matter: for the time being I simply knew that I owed Picasso a kind of dowry for my own life, and this was it.

  Of course I knew that I would return to ‘normal’ prose after that, although I was to find out the hard way that ‘normal’ language can be incomparably more difficult to write than experimental prose. Back then, all that mattered was that for the first time I really knew that writers are not made by the stories they carry within them, their themes or ideas or beliefs or whatever, but by their intimate relationship with language. And this was my exuberant and defiant and adventurous and terribly intimate engagement with the angel of language. Since then, even in the most restrained and ‘ordinary’ piece of writing, this sense of adventure has always remained part of me. If ever it were to become dissipated, if the adventure were to go flat, then very quietly and very resolutely, like the lover in the wonderful cummings poem, petal by petal my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly, and I will cease to be.

  Art in Paris, during those two years, did not consist only of paintings and sculptures and exhibitions and museums. There was a whole world surrounding the discoveries that enthralled us. A world of artists, of people. A close friend at the time was an English painter from Wolverhampton, Frank Ward, whom I met over lunch in a student restaurant one day, when we both left the place in disgust about the bad food, and caught each other’s eye, and burst out laughing. He invited me for coffee in his tiny sixth-floor apartment in the rue de Condé.

  From the first day I loved his work: most of it based on street scenes in Paris – market stalls, town squares on festive days, or disconcertingly voided of people, the outlines of bouquinistes on the Seine, the flea markets at Clignancourt or Kremlin-Bicêtre – but all of it highly stylised, stripped of redundancy and coincidence, to the verge of abstraction, with clear architectural symmetries and planes of clean, uncluttered colour: blues, dark greens, browns, an occasional shock of vermilion. A sense of space. A few portrait studies, the occasional stylised nude. I soon came to recognise in several of these studies his girlfriend, the dark-haired Margith with a shocking white face and stark red mouth and large black eyes, who unceremoniously entered his life when in the small hours of the night he was awakened by a knock on his door and found her standing on his doorstep, dishevelled and shivering with cold, having been quite literally thrown out by her boyfriend, divested of most of her clothes. Frank invited her in for a drink, and she didn’t leave before noon the next day, with borrowed clothes.

  Once, while we were sharing a frugal meal from a stall on the trottoir below, there was a hint of movement in a window opposite, diagonally down from Frank’s little loft. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I’ve wanted to introduce her to you. Now watch.’ A girl appeared from the dark interior of the room behind her. She was wearing only a misty white petticoat and a black bra. We looked at her. She looked back. Then moved her hands up behind her back and calmly undid the straps of her bra. Flung it back into the room, and leaned forward, her elbows resting on the balustrade in front of the window. For a long time she was motionless, except for an occasional toss of her head to fling back the dark hair from her face. Then, almost gravely, with a sense of ceremony, she moved her hands down, with almost unbearable grace, and removed the petticoat. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. From across the street the small black triangle of her crotch was visible. She resumed her pose, leaning on her elbows. I had no idea how long she stood there, facing us. Then, with the merest hint of a gesture, like waving goodbye, she turned round and disappeared.

  ‘That’s all for today, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Frank with a straight face.

  I did not realise it that afternoon. But from the combination of Frank’s apartment in the rue de Condé, and the girl opposite, the central character in The Ambassador, Nicolette, and something of her life, was conceived.

  It was only about a week before Frank’s bursary ran out and he had to return to Britain. He was in a rage: ‘If I look at some of the people who get bursaries, and have them renewed, and who fuck around doing absolutely sweet blow-all, this is bloody outrageous. Look at what I’ve done these last few months’ – a sweeping gesture through the dirty little room with the unmade bed, the floor covered with stacks of paperbacks, and every square centimetre of space crammed with paintings and sketches – ‘Think of what I could still have done! And now I must go back to that bleak, godforsaken place and try to paint without any spark of inspiration …!’

  On the appointed day he left. At the harbour in Calais he bought three or four bottles of whisky for friends back home, but in his rage he started drinking and didn’t stop before there was nothing left. Then he fell into a stupor, and by the time he arrived in Dover everything he’d brought with him – his clothes, his wretched kitchen utensils, his books, every single sketch and painting – was gone. He arrived in London with nothing.

  But Frank had the invincible spirit of a young revolutionary – L’audace, de l’audace, toujours de l’audace! – and within a few months he’d set up a new studio in Wolverhampton with a group of energetic young painters, sculptors, actors and musicians, and started working furiously to bring art to the working classes. When I saw him again, in London, some months later, he was all fired up. Not just by the work, but by a wild affair he had going with one of the top writers in England. However, I’m sorry to say that not long afterwards he stopped painting. And when I met him again, years later, in Stockholm, he was in the wine trade, and married, and with a family.

  Whatever Frank’s peregrinations after the few months we shared in Paris, what he left behind has become part of my life through The Ambassador – perhaps the closest to a roman-à-clef I have ever written. I remember how nervous I was when my friend Broder came to visit me and Estelle in Grahamstown soon after the book was first published, because the parallel between him and the character of the third secretary Stephen Keyter in the book was difficult to deny. And within minutes of his arrival at the airport in Port Elizabeth, he started talking about the book and what a frenetic process of mixing and matching it has caused in our embassy in Paris as every staff member tried to identify themselves in the story. Some of the attempts at identification were rather unpleasant, as happened when one female secretary insisted on recognising herself in all the most negative and grotesque characteristics of Anna Smit in the novel. What was more uncomfortable, was when Stephanus du Toit, the ambassador at the time of my stay in Paris, confided to close acquaintances that I must have used him as a model for my Paul van Heerden. To my mind, van Heerden was a much more sympathetic character than the real ambassador, an uncouth rhinoceros who had left some rather muddy tracks through his career in the diplomatic service.

  What initially surprised and secretly pleased me was that Broder, who hugely enjoyed the consternation of some of his colleagues upon ‘discovering’ themselves in the book, assured me, perhaps too emphatically, of his own relief about what he saw as a conscious decision on my part not to implicate him in any way – while my own main concern had been that Stephen Keyter in the story might have resembled him too closely for comfort. But not long afterwards the whole thing took a dark and unexpected turn when Broder appeared to have taken his cue from Keyter, who commits suicide in the book – by shooting himself in the presence of his ow
n family. Life can sometimes imitate art in the most unsettling ways.

  In a somewhat lighter vein, although it brought some chilling moments of its own, was the reaction of South Africa’s then minister of foreign affairs, the redoubtable Eric Louw, in instituting an official inquiry into alleged ‘leaks’ of classified information in the novel. Much of my knowledge about the workings of our foreign service, and particularly about our embassy in Paris, obviously came from close observation of the members of its staff from 1959 to 1961, particularly those individuals with whom I had regular contact, either personally or through Estelle while she worked in the embassy. But one thing I really had to invent for myself was the kind of top secret official business with which my ambassador could have occupied himself during the crisis of Sharpeville and its aftermath. What I devised, was negotiations with the French about clandestine arms deals – not knowing for one moment that this was exactly what South Africa and France were indeed involved in at the time. Eric Louw must have had good reason for his worst suspicions. But fiction can be truer than fact.

  The key character in The Ambassador is, of course, the somewhat disreputable, defiant, free spirit Nicolette, and in its early drafts the book was named for her. (In German it was later published as Nicolette und der Botschafter.) And there was indeed a real Nicolette in Paris at the time, who worked as a model with Dior before she faded into more shadowy, and no doubt more interesting, recesses of the city. I first learned of her through what Broder told me about the tempestuous on-off affair he’d had with her. Born into a very rich family, she’d drifted to Paris at an early age after a childhood about which she chose never to speak, and merged into an intriguing world of bright lights and dark shadows. Broder first met her when she came to the embassy to discuss some minor consular business. At the time, the embassy was still situated on the avenue Hoche, before moving, some years later, to the Quai d’Orsay. And thereby hangs another tale. It happened in the darkest and direst days of apartheid; and on the appointed day an armed truck arrived to transport, in the greatest secrecy and under armed escort, all the classified documents of the embassy to the new address. But instead of arriving at the Quai d’Orsay, a mere few hundred metres away, the truck got lost. Disappeared. Like a needle in a haystack. And only arrived at its destination the next day. Where was James Bond when one needed him?

  Broder dealt with Nicolette’s negligible little enquiry in a few minutes. But the next day she was back with another trivial query. Although she was not beautiful in any conventional sense, he found her striking, and provocative; and he invited her to dinner. There seemed to be something in the air, but she was often accompanied by a fiancé, about six different ones over a period of two years, and so matters did not seem to lead anywhere. But one day, in a frisky mood most unbecoming to a budding young diplomat, Broder thrust his hands rather too deeply into the large pockets of her overcoat, and she gave him a resounding slap. He lost his temper, sat back on his desk, drew her down on his lap – all of this in the presence of the current fiancé – and proceeded to give her a brisk spanking. The fiancé was wickedly amused, but Nicolette stormed out in a rage. Outside in the courtyard she looked up at Broder’s window, blew him a kiss, and called out, ‘See you at the Christmas tree!’

  Only a few weeks later, Broder went to London for a weekend, to find upon his return at midnight on the Sunday the front door to his apartment completely blocked by a mountain of suitcases and bags and boxes of every description. While he was still standing there surveying the scene in a mounting rage, the door to the apartment opposite opened and Nicolette appeared.

  ‘Oh you’re back at last,’ she said blithely.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m moving in with you,’ she said – the neighbours listening wide-eyed – as if that was the most normal announcement in the world.

  Within two weeks his apartment was in total chaos, the floor strewn with half-opened baggage, littered with stockings, skirts and dresses, flimsy underwear, lipstick, nail polish, tampons, shoes and sandals, handbags, scissors, ribbons, crumpled paper, and torn glossy magazines. She had taken over, without any thought of his needs or comfort. She could loll in the bath for hours, then wander over to a mirror to study her reflection, naked, half-clothed or clothed, experimenting with drapes and scarves and feather boas and whatever garments she could lay her hands on. There were days when she never left the bed, and others when she put on whatever was within reach, and went out, staying away for hours, sometimes for days, driving him crazy with uncertainty and jealousy and worry, and without a word of explanation when she returned, sometimes at noon, sometimes in the late afternoon, or at three or seven in the morning.

  From time to time she would get an urge to read – magazines, popular novels, manuals for make-up or carpentry or welding, once, unlikely as it may sound, a massive encyclopaedia on the great philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche, which she read from cover to cover. When he dared to ask her about it afterwards, she shrugged and said, ‘Oh they all thought they knew all the answers, but they didn’t, did they?’

  Sex? She would turn her head sideways, or suck a strand of her long dark hair, and say nonchalantly, ‘Oh I rather like a good fuck. Sometimes I even like a bad fuck. But you know, I’d take a game of tennis any day.’ Eventually, when Broder actually invited her for tennis, it turned out that she didn’t even have a racket, and had never had one. She could devise, and perform, the most outrageous things in bed. But she also had unnerving spells of chastity, when she refused even to be kissed. Which did not prevent her from teasing and provoking him precisely when she had no intention of satisfying his rampant lust in any way. And often, when she did consent to intercourse, she would bring an apple to bed with her and lie back munching it while he was bucking and thrashing above her, and insist that he stop the moment she’d finished the apple.

  No wonder that after a few weeks he couldn’t take any more and threw her out. She demurely packed all her possessions, and he helped her to load everything into the taxi he had ordered; she left, again chewing an apple. And was back within a few days. He exuberantly welcomed her and they had their best sex ever.

  Once, during her second or third stay, Broder arranged for them to see a film with two other couples. Nicolette arrived with another man in tow, whom nobody else in the group had ever met. Broder refused to let the stranger go with them. Nicolette merely shrugged and went off with the man on her own. A week later she returned with the news that she’d married him. When he lost his job, she moved in with him, his mother and his grandmother. In due course a little girl was born. Soon afterwards Nicolette left the baby in the care of her mother-in-law and returned to South Africa to live with her parents, who had previously cut off her ample allowance.

  It was at this stage that Estelle and I arrived in Paris and met Broder. He was still emotionally off balance as a result of the affair. It was clear that he remained totally infatuated with the woman and that he would not recover easily. Perhaps his vulnerability was the main reason why I could not help feeling sympathetic to him; we even became friends. Estelle and I may well have been the only friends he had in Paris. In so many respects he was a very, very difficult person to get along with. His hang-ups and fixations about religion and sex, his obsessive nature: talking non-stop for hours, or retreating into a sulk for days; his habit of seeing some films – like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – twenty or thirty times, and then discussing them compulsively, quoting long passages of dialogue from memory, with every syllable and inflection fixed forever; above all, his habit of locking himself into his apartment for whole weekends, listening to all of Hitler’s recorded speeches day and night and at full blast … All of this wore down one’s defences and one’s patience. And yet he was such a lost soul, and when he was on a high he could be so generous and humorous and eager to share, that one couldn’t help wanting to reach out to him and help assuage his terrible loneliness.

  At some stage, while we were in Pa
ris, Nicolette came back. No one knew what had happened to her husband, or ex-husband, or her child. Broder became more and more of a recluse, and more and more offensive and preposterous in his outbursts. And once he even arranged for us to meet Nicolette. That was a mistake. I had formed such a clear idea of her dangerous allure, her tantalising moods, her teasing and her provocations, her intriguing nature, that meeting the real person behind the image inevitably turned out an anticlimax. Her conversation was uninteresting, even boring, she gave the impression of deliberately trying to offend with her loudness, her chain-smoking, her drinking, the plastic-and-neon quality of her clothes and her make-up. This could not possibly be the person who had so completely turned Broder’s whole life upside down and paved the way for his shocking death. And perhaps, inspired by Simenon’s Yvette in En Cas de Malheur, by Simone de Beauvoir’s brilliant philosophical evocation of Brigitte Bardot, by the effusions of Henry Miller, and by some of the lyrical inventions in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, in writing The Ambassador I was going in search of an image that had got lost along the way: an image not only of a woman, but of a city; of a woman-as-city, of a city-as-woman, situated in the dark heart of Dante’s Sacred Wood, somewhere between heaven and hell.

  In Paris, most of our monthly budget went into concerts. Like theatre, music provided a refuge and escape from the world, but just as importantly an enhancement of the world. In many ways music became even more indispensable than drama. Already at university Christie was the one who acted as my guide and interpreter, and after I’d taken over from him as chairperson of the Music Society the passion both widened and deepened. The variety was stupendous, ranging from singers like Seefried or Schwarzkopf to pianists like Kempf or Brailowsky or Rubinstein or Arrau, from ensembles like the Pasquier Trio or Karl Münchinger and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra to conductors like Markevitch or Cluytens or Furtwängler or Kubelik or Karajan. At that stage of my life, my belated period of Sturm und Drang, it was probably inevitable that the man who marked me most deeply was Herbert von Karajan. Flamboyant, yes; a showman, yes; an egomaniac, yes. But from the moment he appeared on the podium, without a score, and dramatically closed his eyes to the outside world in order to gaze, as he must have calculated very deliberately, upon an inner landscape without boundaries, he held me, and it seemed most of the audience, in thrall. I had the impression that he was not so much conducting an orchestra as incarnating the music, from the delicate, serene, ineffable quality of the Andante in Beethoven’s Sixth, to the passionate, incomparable, sustained glory of the Ninth. He came to Paris twice while we were there: once, with the Berlin Philharmonic, working through the entire cycle of Beethoven symphonies; and once, in the heart of winter, with the Vienna Philharmonic, in a programme of Dvorak, Richard Strauss, Beethoven, Mozart and Schumann. This, I believed then, was the ultimate in music. I could not wish for anything more, I could not think of anything closer to the sublime.