A Fork in the Road Read online

  Sublime, Edith Piaf was not. But unforgettable in her own way, extending the range of music in a completely different direction. We saw her in one of her last concerts at the Olympia. Barely able to walk, a hobbly stick insect who appeared at the back of the huge stage, caught in the spotlight like a dying moth, standing there on wobbly legs, her face a stark white, her mouth a red bleeding gash, the waves upon waves of applause breaking over her. From behind the back curtain one could make out the outline of hands almost frantically clutching her, steadying her, trying to hold her upright, and then pushing her forward and letting her go. For the eternity of several seconds it seemed inevitable that she would fall, crumble into a wretched little heap of bones. But then she reached the microphone at the front of the stage, and caught hold of it. The too-loud music began. The insane thunder of applause began to die away. And Piaf began to sing. The old favourites. ‘Milord’. ‘La vie en rose’. In a voice like a shout from a tomb, a triumphant bellowing of sound, unbelievable, impossible, coming from such a frail and rickety body, the voice of life itself, refusing to die, refusing to be silenced, the voice of humanity itself, ineradicable, inextinguishable. Non, je ne regrette rien.

  In the moveable feast of Paris the sublime was often hidden away in unexpected corners and recesses. Going down the rue Lepic from the place du Tertre on the butte of Montmartre we were attracted to a display window filled with a colourful collection of ceramics: plates and bowls and mugs and ashtrays splashed with nostalgic or bawdy French songs, ambiguous rhymes and delightfully reckless illustrations. Inside it was dusky, with an inner door leading to a studio flickering with bright orange flames in the fireplace, the walls covered with antique bric-a-brac – wooden crucifixes, a death mask of Beethoven, glassware, dilapidated woodcuts, religious paintings with iconic images almost disappearing behind the patina. And in the middle of it all, hunched up in a large ornate chair like a throne, the lord and master, the artist, with a weather-beaten face like a decayed masterpiece, old Platon Argyriades.

  He was a great talker and raconteur, and it didn’t take much prompting to get him going. When he heard that we were from South Africa, his surprisingly bright blue eyes lit up with memories from a distant past: he could remember the World Fair of 1900, when as a child he’d joined the crowds in the streets to cheer the old president of the Transvaal Republic, Paul Kruger, venerable with his white beard and his tall top hat and a golden ring in his ear.

  He’d always lived in close contact with all the successive movements washing like tides through the sea of the arts: Fauves and cubists, expressionists and Nabis and abstractionists, he’d visited the young Picasso when the painter was working in his studio in the Bateau-Lavoir here in Montmartre; he’d been a close friend of Modigliani, with whom he’d spent many nights in conversation when the young man had fled the wrath of his stepmother and found refuge in the Argyriades household; he’d known Gide and the young Malraux, and later the flamboyant Saint-Exupéry and the taciturn Céline; before the Second World War he’d even briefly met the expatriate American Fitzgerald. Talking to old Platon was like opening the whole of the twentieth century as if it were a great illustrated book. Art and literature and history were no longer subjects to be studied, but a real and deeply lived world, a train that had set off on its journey long before either of us had stepped on to it at some forgotten station and would continue long after we had left it again.

  During our many visits following that first encounter, he often took a book of poetry from one of the dark shelves in that inner sanctum to read us some random stanzas from Ronsard or Verlaine or Valéry; then his mouth would start trembling, and his blue eyes would become misty with tears like Grandpère Maurice’s. He was a true Romantic, in his own way the last of a generation, a way of life. He introduced us to his wife, a small bird of a woman, with a black bonnet drawn tightly over her grey hair – but she was an unsympathetic little creature, and I think an unworthy companion: brazen and impatient and businesslike. More than once, when Estelle or I picked up one of the old man’s ceramic plates or boxes to study an inscription, she would rudely snatch it away, snarling, ‘Don’t bother, you’re a foreigner, you won’t understand.’ And after she’d gone out to attend to other customers or feed the fire, he would pick up the object again to explain, unhurried and smiling, a pun we’d missed or a phrase we hadn’t properly grasped. The irony was that she was the one, I often suspected, who was out of place there and hadn’t understood what her old husband was really about: his love of shaping things with his hands, taking his time, moulding them not just from clay but from love and understanding and patience and a wisdom accrued through generations and centuries. A world which Proust understood, and which exists beyond sentimentality or nostalgia.

  They had no children. ‘Après moi,’ he often sighed, ‘c’est fini.’ He was referring, I think, not only to his family, but to an old Montmartre, an old Paris, an old world, slowly ebbing away, leaving only progress and industry and technology in its wake. We, Estelle and I, had missed the last heyday of the bohemian age ranging from Picasso to Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, but how lucky we were still to live in the twilight of that world, pick up some of its lingering scents, catch in our ears the last echoes of its fading melodies.

  Our time in Paris was running out. Early in January 1961 there was a curt note from the university to say that my bursary, now already in its second year, would not be renewed at the end of the academic year. Estelle had resigned from her temporary job at the embassy. Suddenly the sense of an ending pervaded everything we did, everything we could contemplate. We were back to the existential angst of the early months – even though this time, at least, we had the relative space and comfort of our spare flat under the slanting rooftop of the old building on the rue Vieille du Temple. We did what we could to fight cafard, but our efforts were not always successful. There was less and less money for theatre and music, which meant that in the most literal sense we had to take to the streets for entertainment. Lolita was still there on the wall, of course, to provide some flimsy reassurance – but in weak moments, when it was not so easy to fend off the truth, she already seemed to be more of a chocolate box than an immortal work of art.

  There were Sundays, especially in spring and summer, when we did not go to the Louvre but chose to stroll from one open space to another – squares and concourses, even street corners, where amateur performers appeared from their secret chrysalises like strange moths to spread their wet wings. The swallowers of swords or flames, the breakers of chains, the escapists, the jugglers and conjurers and magicians, the tightrope walkers, the trainers of dogs or monkeys or rabbits or parrots or fleas.

  I remember an early spring afternoon on the carrefour de l’Odéon when a burly, red-faced, middle-aged man performed in the centre of a large, ragged circle. Beside an unsteady green table on which a small glass aquarium had been placed, stood a weary young woman anxiously avoiding all eye contact with the crowd, as if she found the scene just too humiliating to face. When enough spectators had gathered the man announced that he required fifteen fifty-franc pieces to commence his next act. The woman did the rounds with a floppy hat in her outstretched hands. It took quite a while, the spectators were not particularly forthcoming with their contributions. Some simply tossed the coins in her direction, forcing her to stoop to pick them up. I could not bear to look at her haggard face, which must have been beautiful once.

  At last the man took a full bottle of water from the table, and turned to his small aquarium. The crowd pressed inwards, craning their necks. In a deft movement the man retrieved a green frog from the bowl and plunged it into his mouth. Doing the round inside the circle he briefly half-opened his mouth a few times to allow us glimpses of the frog kicking out its long hind legs. Once everybody was convinced that the little amphibian was indeed inside, the man took a few large swigs of water from a bottle, and opened his mouth wide to demonstrate that the frog had disappeared.

  The process was repeated twi
ce more, with two new frogs, after longish intervals during which his sad companion went round with her floppy hat for more contributions. By this time the response from the audience was slightly more encouraging. To round off the first act of the show the ceremony was repeated with three small fishes. Once again a collection was taken by the pale, expressionless woman with the crumpled hat. Quite an enthusiastic response, this time round.

  Then followed the climax: returning the inhabitants of the glass bowl to their habitat. There was only one, obvious, method: they had to be regurgitated back to life. This was done rather boisterously, with such motions and sound effects that several members of the crowd could not help gagging and retching too. And it didn’t go very smoothly either, so that the man was forced – now quite breathless and his face a deep purple, with a network of throbbing veins on his temples – to imbibe another large bottle of water. But in the end the last of the little creatures, wriggling much less energetically than before, was restored to the bowl. One little fish hadn’t made it. But the others seemed more or less alive.

  A final round of collection, but by now most of the crowd had dispersed. The day was turning cool. The exhausted woman poured all her coins into a small trunk under the table. All around them the ground was drenched with water. In the little aquarium the fishes and frogs were swimming about with surprising vitality; only the one unfortunate fish was floating belly up on the surface.

  On another occasion a large gorilla of a man, stripped to the waist to expose his once impressive pectorals and bloated stomach, was ordering a tiny wisp of a boy dressed like a clown through his paces: riding a bicycle seated backwards on the saddle, standing on his head in the man’s hand, doing a handstand on his flabby biceps. After each act the boy stood to attention, mechanically – like a ventriloquist’s dummy – saluted the spectators, his face drawn into a tight grimace of concentration under the huge red clown’s lips painted on his thin trembling mouth, the ludicrous red blob of a nose skewed and smudged, his eyes staring fixedly at the big man. At a nod of the trainer’s head, the little one grabbed an old top hat to collect the alms, then stowed it in a box and returned for the next round. Everything performed without the hint of a smile. One almost expected his batteries to run out at any moment.

  Dusk was closing in by the time we left. In silence we walked down to the Seine, watching the first lights appear through the messy pencil lines of trees against the dull flatness of the water. Notre-Dame was a black blotch against the pale orange glow of the sky where it lay smudged across the rooftops, fading gradually into a dirty lilac higher up. The tall arches of a bridge were reflected in the dark green water, the red reflection of distant traffic lights stretching and shrinking on the surface.

  It was the time of day when all the old and deformed or decrepit people of the city seemed to emerge on the streets like sad, angular insects drawn by the evening light. An old man bent almost double, carrying a small pail of milk; a shuffling old woman with tousled hair, brandishing a broken umbrella; a cripple hobbling along like a crushed cricket.

  And at last we were home again in our small, overheated, over-furnished room with Lolita’s straight young back defiant and vulnerable in her ornate frame on the wall, the bright blue ribbon in her hair. Hot chocolate steaming from two big bowls. The delicate spattering of raindrops against the window. And then the welcoming billows of our big bed.

  * * *

  There was one enterprise in which we were prepared to invest whatever little money we still had to spare, and that was travelling. We had no idea of how many years might go by before we could afford another visit to Europe, so whatever could be packed into this stay in Paris simply had to be done. When Estelle’s mother came on a visit with a touring group, we swallowed whatever reservations we had about organised tours and joined her on a bus trip to Spain. Not a very wise decision, but there were good moments too, especially after we’d left the group to spend some time on the Costa del Sol with good friends from South Africa. Another trip took us to Germany, but this ended after a most unfortunate incident in the cathedral of Cologne where Estelle and I were walking along a dark aisle hand in hand, in a mood of fervent religiosity, when a fat priest with flapping black surplice descended on us like an avenging devil from hell, grabbed us by the arms and violently jerked us apart. He hissed so furiously that we were showered in spittle, ‘Das ist keine Promenade!’ Which for many years effectively kept me out of Germany, and also became a turning point in my already tenuous relationship with the Church.

  Altogether more memorable was our long journey through Italy in the spring of 1961 on a train ticket that allowed us to get on and off as we wished. Much of the love affair I’ve had with Italy over the next forty years was inspired by that first visit.

  We were also able to fit into our travel programme two visits to Provence, one along the Route Napoléon, past Serres and Sisteron and Grenoble and Castellane to the Mardi Gras festival in Nice, the other to Avignon, Nîmes, Arles, and Saint-Rémy de Provence, which over the years came to represent for me the France I loved above all other regions.

  We often crossed the Channel too, once on an extended drive through the Scottish highlands, but mostly to visit the man who was then my best friend, Naas, and his wife Sarie, in London. We’d first met at university, after which he’d joined the diplomatic corps and was appointed private secretary to our high commissioner in London. This not only gave us a foothold in England but opened up a new dimension of theatre, ranging from Chekhov to West Side Story, and from Shakespeare to Pinter. Especially after Godot in Paris, The Caretaker made something click in my mind to steer my own interest in drama in a more clearly defined direction. It also helped to shape the novel I wrote after the Picasso exhibition, as the title role enabled me to visualise more clearly the sordid, down-and-out old man who became a catalyst in the main storyline of Lobola for a Life.

  Naas was one of the first people I approached to read Lobola for a Life when it was still at a very vulnerable stage. Later, when I started putting together all my notes and memories of Paris, he was the one who helped me to make sense of it all. When he noticed that I was intrigued by the diplomatic world, he made sure that I would meet as many diplomats as possible – some brilliant, some dumb, some consumed by ambition, some by women, some by dedication (misplaced or not), some by frustration, bureaucrats and technocrats and hawks and doves, chancers and careerists and schemers, plodders and inventors, men of action and men of dreams: in those days there were no women in the corps yet. I owe to him the dubious pleasure of meeting a sweet and stupid woman married to a sweet and stupid third secretary in Berne, who once plunged into a very intense discussion about the resurgence of anti-Semitism by offering her own considered view: ‘You know, I have given this a lot of thought, and I believe that anti-Semitism has a lot to do with the feeling against the Jews.’ I also owe to Naas an introduction to the South African high commissioner in London at the time of Sharpeville: a portly old Boer who at the height of the anti-apartheid protests, with Trafalgar Square a seething mass of screaming demonstrators, would come to Naas’s office of a morning to ask him, ‘Ag man, can you please get me another bag of those oranges you got me last time? They were so sweet.’ Or who would leave the dining table during a reception at Buckingham Palace and go to the kitchen to admonish the staff who were keeping him waiting with the next course. Inevitably, Naas was a key informant and consultant in the writing of The Ambassador, as he later was for some of my other books. I could count on him for wit and wisdom, for spotting the smallest mistake of spelling or style or information; and for applying to it the salt of his wry understanding. ‘The price of intelligence,’ says Carlos Fuentes, ‘is disenchantment.’ And yet perhaps Naas’s most striking quality is his ability to be disenchanted without ever denying the romantic in himself.

  Not long after our return to South Africa, during my involvement with Ingrid, Naas’s only comment was, ‘I can understand why any person might decide at a given moment t
o get divorced. But for the life of me I’ll never understand why anyone would want to remarry.’ And when Karina and I announced our wedding, Naas sent an e-mail entitled The Triumph of Hope Over Experience. In the text he commented that our enterprise was like Mandela swimming back to Robben Island.

  Still, however strong his own opinions were on any given person, any given subject, he would allow me to draw my own conclusions. And that whole sojourn in Paris – including our many visits to London, and his and Sarie’s to us in Paris – was coloured to a very large extent by this defining friendship.

  It brought its own mysteries with it too: after one visit to London I came across a small piece of paper on which I’d scrawled a note, a bad but indispensable habit most writers suffer from. This particular note read: Sarie’s mole. It must have been scribbled after an evening of serious imbibing, as I did not have the faintest recollection of how or why this had happened. But it was so intriguing that it kept on plaguing me for days. At last, frantic with curiosity, I sent Naas a telegram: