Before I Forget Page 19

  The first time she told me about it, I did not take it very seriously. So much so, that I cannot even recall exactly what triggered it. Something to do with her dead brothers. She had religiously clung to an annual commemoration of their death, putting flowers on the graves; and that year, for some reason, the uncle was otherwise occupied and could not take them to the graveyard. Whereupon she threatened to hitch-hike her way there on her own. A very banal situation, but it soon escalated out of all control. What it came down to was that he’d laid down the law, and she had refused to comply. Not surreptitiously at all, but quite openly, as if confrontation was what she wanted. The outcome, no doubt, of a lifetime of conflict, starting at the time when her father had still been alive. This, she resolved, was the day of reckoning.

  ‘This time he went too far,’ she told me. ‘I’ve always tried to be reasonable, but now he’s being deliberately perverse. This is something that concerns me alone, not him. And I won’t let him take decisions for me.’

  ‘He can make life pretty miserable for you if you resist,’ I warned her.

  ‘So what? It’s miserable enough as it is.’

  ‘Perhaps he, too, is just trying to be reasonable. Can’t you sit down and talk to him? Perhaps you can come to an understanding.’

  ‘I don’t want to understand,’ she flared up. ‘I just want to say No.’

  ‘That won’t bring you very far. Whether we like it or not, our only hope is to compromise.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I want all or nothing.’

  ‘I’m just trying to help you find a solution.’

  ‘Nothing that is based on compromise can ever be a solution to me.’

  ‘There’s no sense in demanding the impossible.’

  ‘You’ve got it wrong.’ There was something like madness in her

  now. ‘Don’t you understand, Chris? Only the impossible is worth demanding.’

  ‘Please, please. You’re making a very big mountain out of a very small molehill.’

  ‘If you think it’s just a molehill, there’s no point in talking to you any more.’

  ‘Try to take a step back. Look at it. Think about it. It’s a matter of your will against your uncle’s, not life or death.’

  ‘If life means always giving way to that man, then I’d rather take death any time.’

  How sickeningly did I remember those words afterwards. At the time I took them to be a mere show of bravado. After all, really, what was at stake? All right, she might have had reason to feel upset, angry, frustrated. But all that was needed was a little perspective.

  No way. I remember that during one of our arguments at the time she melodramatically pulled out a white paper flower she must have hidden in her shirt. It was pretty crumpled, and limp with sweat. But almost triumphantly she threw it in my face. She was breathing deeply, almost too perturbed to speak. All she could say was, ‘What about this? Does this mean nothing to you?’

  ‘What is it supposed to mean?’ I asked cautiously, not wanting to upset her even more.

  ‘This was my brother’s,’ she said. She was crying now. ‘When I was ten, the two of them went out one night. They only came back at dawn. I hadn’t slept all night, I was too worried. Then, when they came back, my younger brother, the one I really cared about, saw me hiding under the stairs. And he kissed me and gave me this flower. It was just a playful, almost teasing way of bonding with me. But it touched me so deeply that I’ve kept the flower all these years. This is the flower I wanted to put on the grave. And now that miscreant wants to stop me.’

  ‘Now, now, that’s no way to talk about the man who’s done his best to give you and your sister something in life.’

  ‘He can stuff his life up his backside!’ she cried. ‘I told you I’d rather die!’

  ‘This is madness, you know,’ I pleaded as gently as I could.

  ‘Then just leave me alone with my madness,’ she declared histrionically.

  Was it really worth it? How could it have been worth it? Twenty years old, her whole life before her. The little dark one: with all the makings of a real beauty-to-be. And then to take her own life like that. Nobody expected it: we all thought her threats were teenage bravado, nothing really serious. And in such a melodramatic way. A rope from a beam in an outroom.

  Antigone, Antigone, all these years the enigma of your death has haunted me. The ferocity of that No you have been hurling at the world, indefatigably, unremittingly. Not just at your uncle Creon, but all of us, all the men, even those of us who loved you, but who have failed to understand. And my relationship with you—as with Nastasya Filippovna, or Dulcinea del Toboso, or Lucy of Lammermoor, or Anna Karenina, any of a host of other women from books—has hardly been less passionate, and less formative, than those with Anna, or Tania, or Nicolette, or Jenny or any of the other women who have shared my bed and the history of my time.

  ***

  My nightly incursions into Iraq have become more hectic again, after the suggestion of a lull a week ago. The invaders appear to have changed their minds and there is a new urgency about the attack, which makes one think that they are once again calculating in terms of weeks, not months. The US Third Infantry Division is now fighting on the outskirts of the holy city of Najaf, while in the north another holy city, Karbala, is being targeted. This one, they say, is where Mohammed’s grandson Hussein lies buried. No holy stone will be left unturned. The whole enterprise reminds one of nothing so much as an unscrupulous man intent, by hook or by crook, on ‘getting’ a particular woman. When he finally overpowers her and is pounding away in the dark, he discovers that he has made a mistake: it is the wrong woman. The choice before him is to go through with it, or pull out. A murky situation. All one knows for certain is that somebody is getting fucked.

  ***

  As my ‘wife-sitting’ continues, our relationship has settled into an easy rhythm. The electricity of the first night has dissipated and we are indeed behaving like good friends (like an old married couple?). In the mornings whoever wakes first makes breakfast: never an elaborate affair, but at least I have succeeded in weaning you from the three or four cups of very strong coffee which you told me used to be your staple diet. Now you are happy with one. How you have managed to remain so healthy, and so beautiful, with your pernicious lifestyle is beyond me; you must have an exceptional constitution, or a special cohort of angels taking care of you.

  After breakfast the one who hasn’t prepared it washes the dishes. And then you go to your studio while I return home (except for the two days a week you accompany me to do your Girl Friday stint, to which Frederik appears to be looking forward as much as I). Towards evening I drive back to Camps Bay and we go for a meal, or cook up something for ourselves; much later I retire to bed, or settle into a big armchair in the studio to read or occupy myself with my notes while you work on your sculptures. When there is a firing to be done, we stay up the whole night. I find it enthralling to watch through the peephole every hour, every half-hour, towards the end every ten minutes or so, for the small white cones to start wilting and bending over. Then follows the twelve-hour wait before the door can be opened to reveal the transformation the sculpted figures have undergone. Pure alchemy.

  ‘One wouldn’t think you were—what did you say?—seventy-eight years old when you peep through that hole,’ you say, watching me in open amusement. ‘You look a small boy.’

  ‘That’s what it makes me feel like.’

  ‘Now you must go to bed,’ you order me very sternly, very motherly.

  ‘Not if you’re not going too.’

  ‘I’m not sleepy.’

  ‘Nor am I.’

  ‘Then let’s talk.’

  And we do. What you often come back to is my marriage, which seems to hold a special fascination for you.

  ‘There is nothing more to tell,’ I object. ‘You must know it all by now.’

&n
bsp; ‘Not everything.’

  ‘Must you know everything?’

  ‘Unless I do, there will always be something about you that escapes me.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘What was the best thing about your marriage?’ you ask.

  It is a question that comes up many times, and the answer is not always the same. This time I say, ‘I think it was when Helena was pregnant. To see her growing bigger, her navel turning inside out, her breasts swelling. To have her hold my open hand against her belly, or to press my ear against it, and feel the baby moving inside and responding. It was hers, it was mine, it was ours. I never had such a feeling of sharing with anyone again. Sometimes we played music for it. We didn’t know whether it was going to be a boy or a girl –’

  ‘What did you want?’

  ‘A girl, of course.’

  ‘The possessive male. Just as well it turned out to be a boy. You would have smothered a girl.’

  ‘I’ve always smothered the women I loved most.’

  ‘But this one you played music to.’

  I smile at the memory. ‘It was incredible to see the different ways the baby reacted to different kinds of music. Beethoven set him jumping with joy, kicking and churning about…’

  ‘Perhaps he hated Beethoven.’

  ‘Chopin caused a kind of gentle, rocking motion. I always had the impression he found it amusing and was chortling with laughter. And Mozart made him serene and sleepy.’

  ‘And once he was born?’

  ‘A very strange feeling. While he was inside Helena he felt so much part of us. Now, suddenly he was a stranger, someone neither of us knew, with his own wants and needs and comforts and—very strongly—discomforts. It seems an awful thing to say, but he was something of an intruder.’

  ‘A difficult child?’

  ‘Not more difficult than others. Actually, he was usually very good. But he was—strange. And suddenly his needs were more urgent and immediate than mine. The old story.’

  ‘You were jealous?’

  ‘Yes, I was. Unashamedly. It was just something I couldn’t come to grips with.’

  ‘But you saw it through. You stayed with Helena, you were faithful to her. For how many years…?’

  ‘We were married for six years.’ I sit looking down at my hands. Why am I so obsessed with them nowadays, so horrified? I move my fingers, studying, as so often in recent years, the gnarled joints, the blotches on the skin. How much joy have they not caused and known over the years? What is left of all that?

  To my surprise you put one of your hands on mine. ‘Don’t look at your hands with such disgust, Chris. They are so wise, they know so much.’

  ‘They have forgotten much.’

  ‘Hands do not forget,’ you reprimand me. ‘Bodies don’t forget.’ Your fingers still move across mine, caressing them like a touch of butterfly wings. ‘All the women you have ever loved are here.’ A pause. ‘Helena is here.’

  ‘I wasn’t fair to her, or perhaps to anyone.’

  ‘You’re too hard on yourself.’

  ‘How can you say that? You don’t know, Rachel.’ I sigh and shake my head. ‘You don’t know.’ I look you in the eyes, the full mystery of those dark, almost-black eyes. ‘Least of all about Helena.’

  ‘But you stayed married to her for six years. That must count for something.’

  ‘I’ll mention that to St. Peter at the gate.’ I enfold your hand in mine. The smoothness of the skin, the firmness of bone underneath, the nails cut very short. ‘He won’t absolve me, Rachel. I was not faithful to Helena.’

  ‘What happened?’

  In the dark—we are at the dining table among the remains of our long meal, there is only a single candle burning, the rest of the house is in darkness; from outside, through the open French doors, comes a glimmer of light, and the sound of the restless sea—in the dark I yield easily to the temptation of confession. Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea.

  ‘The first time was just a few months after Pieter was born,’ I say. It all comes back to me, a tide coming in. There was a writers’ conference in Durban. A hectic turmoil of days and nights. At the end of the closing session on the last day, we were besieged by a mob of autograph hunters, eager students, groupies. It took the best part of an hour to work through all of them. Among the last stragglers—the inevitable and ubiquitous old ladies, bespectacled young men, matrons with an ingrained look of frustration, pale bluestockings, chatty youngsters, all of them eager to score a final point or garner a final word of everlasting wisdom—was a striking blonde girl with a single thick plait down her back, standing somewhat apart as if annoyed by the presence of the others, but embarrassed about coming forward too boldly. I had already noticed her in the audience, crammed in among the rest of them, yet somehow strangely set apart. How could I not notice her? During my intervention in the panel discussion our eyes had met a few times. It was as if silent messages were being passed to and fro. And at last, as the remaining bunch began to unravel, I blatantly forced a passage through them, turning a deaf ear to last-minute comments and questions, and went right up to her, fired by adrenalin, but also conscious of the reaction setting in: weariness, resentment, a need now to be left alone, for God’s sake.

  ‘You’ve been waiting long enough,’ I said, making sure no one else could hear. ‘Come, let’s go.’

  She did not even seem surprised, as if she had been expecting just that all along. Together, we went off into the balmy star-mad night.

  And then I couldn’t find my car. I remembered exactly where I had parked it, but it was gone. For what seemed like most of the night, we wandered up and down several blocks in the parking lot, into side streets and back.

  At long last she asked in a patient, serene voice, ‘What does the car look like?’

  ‘A red Peugeot.’

  ‘Number?’

  I told her.

  ‘Did you drive up all the way from Cape Town?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course not, I…’ And then it struck me that, of course, I’d rented a car at the airport. We went to the exact spot where I’d parked it, and found it, and I opened the door for her.

  Only when I turned the ignition did she burst out laughing, with such merry abandon that I couldn’t help collapsing too. It felt, suddenly, as if we’d known each other for years.

  I didn’t know Durban very well, but drove in the general direction of the sea. Somewhere, in the wee hours, we found a deserted stretch of beach. When we got out we kicked off our shoes and left them in the car. I put out my hand and she took it. We walked into the dark, fragrant with invisible tropical flowers and stars and ozone. Neither of us spoke. Far away from everything we stopped and kissed, and took off our clothes, and made love on the sand. She was still a virgin, and it hurt. But when I wanted to pause, she put her hands on my buttocks and drew me back into her. ‘Don’t stop, don’t stop, please don’t stop,’ she said.

  We lay there, together, for a long time, reluctant to return to the world. By the time we went back naked to the car, the first hint of daylight was gleaming dully on the sea and the stars were fading.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said with almost amusing formality. ‘I’ve been waiting for a long time for this to happen.’

  ‘What is your name?’ I asked.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ she said.

  She directed me to the sprawling house where she lived, stuck in a wilderness of purple bougainvillaea and red hibiscus in a remote suburb I would never be able to find again. Before I could get out to open the door for her, she was already out. She blew a kiss at me. With an acute awareness of loss I looked after her. She was carrying her green sandals and her knickers in her hand.

  ***

  ‘And that was that?’ you ask after a long silence.

  ‘I wish it was. It should have been.’


  ‘But…?’

  I have no choice but to tell you the rest. A month, two months, later I had a letter from her, sent to my publishers and forwarded by them. There was no address at the top and no name signed at the bottom, but the three pages in impeccable calligraphy gave a surprisingly humorous report on the aftermath of our escapade. Little details, startling yet quite endearing, of the painful discovery of grains of sand inside her, and the excruciating effect of sea salt on the mucous membranes. Followed by a rather more unnerving account of how, the morning after, her father had come upon her while she was soaking her blood stained underwear in the bathroom, and how she’d brazenly, in open defiance, responded to his furious interrogation by announcing that she’d slept with Chris Minnaar, and what about it? And how he’d threatened to take a plane down to Cape Town to beat the shit out of me, and then toned it down to a resolve simply to write to my wife and inform her of the event, until at last he’d been prevailed upon to give it up, and settled for a week of moping. At the end of all this there was a quiet moment of reflection: Now when the hurly-burly’s done, and the battle lost and won, I know it was worth it and I’d do it again any time. In fact, I wish we could.

  It was maddening to leave it at that. But there was nothing I could possibly do. I felt some trepidation at the thought that an irate parent might yet materialize on our doorstep; but as time passed, the prospect faded. And life returned to what passed for normal. Even though I would still wake up some nights with a throbbing erection, but also with an inexplicable feeling of dread, and a much more explicable feeling of guilt.

  And then a second letter came, about a month after the first. And this time there was a name. Marion de Villiers. Which did not suit her at all, not at all. How could that night-girl, that salt-water-girl, that first-blood-girl bear a name like Marion de Villiers? My first thought was: I don’t want to know this. It changes everything and spoils everything. What was more, this time there was an address on the back of the envelope.