A Fork in the Road Read online

  WHAT ABOUT SARIE’S MOLE?

  A few days later a reply arrived:

  HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW ABOUT SARIE’S MOLE?

  I still do not know the answer.

  It remains a footnote to those two years in Paris: so many things were still unanswered, unresolved. It had been a long experience of questions, rather than answers. Some were tantalising and rich and rewarding in their own right. Too many others simply remained unfinished business. Politics was among these issues. After my early disillusionment and nausea following Sharpeville I went through many fluctuations of conviction and irresolution. There were even moments when I began to wonder whether there was not, after all, something heroic in the stance of Afrikaners against the world, some redeeming value in their fierce beliefs. To my shame I must admit that one of these moments came in 1961 when a horde of Afrikaners from all over Europe converged on our embassy in Paris for a rugby match between the Springboks and the French, and in that wave of atavistic patriotism there was a terrible surge of melodramatic enthusiasm for a lost cause. But more often than not I was depressed by the shockwaves from Sharpeville that still persisted, in thoughts by day and dreams by night. My decision to go back filled me with self-hatred – it was a return prompted not by any deep conviction or worthy cause, but by something as banal as a lack of money.

  The pervading mood was of going back to a world already lost – and deserving to be lost. I did not want to go back. I loathed the very notion of South Africa. I knew I could not, after what I had seen and lived and discovered in France, write about South Africa again. If I continued to write, it would have to be something radically and emphatically different. But how? And what? The future seemed one unending space of bleakness. The only resolve I was conscious of, the only promise I dared to make to myself, was that I would be back. As soon as I could afford it, I would come back to France. And this time I would stay.

  In a strange, submarine way, what tugged me back was the memory of an afternoon at the Sorbonne. As I shifted into the uncomfortable seat in the amphitheatre where I usually sat during Professor Dédéyan’s lecture on the late nineteenth century, I noticed an inscription on the desk in front of me. It was very simple, very direct:

  MOI

  And it hit me like a blow in the face. The simplicity, the starkness, but at the same time the outrageous affirmation of it. The cry of birth. The wellspring of all art.

  I was here. I am.

  CAPE OF STORMS AND GOOD HOPE

  THROUGHOUT MY CHILDHOOD places changed all the time, each merging disconcertingly into the next: Vrede, Jagersfontein, Brits, Douglas, Sabie, Lydenburg, Potchefstroom, Bothaville. New people, new friends, new teachers, new schools, new everything, every four years or so. But there remained one constant to which we could return as a surrogate home at the end of every endless year. Cape Town. But I still hesitate to explain its magical hold on my mind. A love that can be explained is not love.

  My love for the Cape involves both Cape Town and the region it nestles in. But it involves lifetimes too. My own, to start with. And also the whole biography of the town, from its infancy, with flocks of fat-tailed sheep and herds of long-horned cattle grazing along the lower slopes of Table Mountain tended by their Khoi herders, to the aggressive signs of early middle age in today’s vista of skyscrapers, freeways and flyovers (one abruptly halted in mid-flight), billboards, traffic snarls, concrete aspirations, failures – and, admittedly, a few rare successes – of the architectural imagination, hospitals and apartment blocks like malignant growths, the brown clouds of urban pollution.

  In spite of growing up in that string of small dun-coloured villages in the deep interior, Cape Town has been in the background of my life all the time, brooding like a huge hen over my early years. For at the start of the summer holidays every year, we would pile into my father’s grey 1938 Hudson and head south. When my friend Christie went on this same kind of trip with his family – which included three boys – their father would stop after every hundred miles and give each of the three boys a hiding: even if they hadn’t done anything wrong he knew that punishment would be appropriate soon. My father was more long-suffering: we only stopped to pee or have a picnic, including hot coffee from a flask smelling of tea, and cold water smelling of the canvas of the bag draped over the radiator. For two days, sometimes three, we would mark our grim progress across the plains and ridges of the interior followed by billowing clouds of dust, until we would draw up on the last rise below the Boland mountains to behold the sprawl of the city wedged between its two dark blue oceans and know that we had, again, arrived.

  When we did not travel by car, we took the train. There is an enthralling quality about today’s great trains of Europe – nothing quite as unique as the TGV in France, but even the more modest ones have a charm beyond the reach of any other means of transport. That soundless, almost imperceptible, fluid transition from immobility to motion; the suave, whispering seduction of near-silent speed, the landscape beginning to streak past on either side – is like entering a different kind of existence altogether. How different were the trains of my youth! The noise, the swaying, the sensation of dangerous speed, of lurching forward through the night, the inevitable mote lodged in an eye, the farty smell of coal, a veritable ode to joy that may have nothing in common with Beethoven, except the feeling of touching the sublime. The smell of the green leather upholstery of the bunks, the sound of the conductor’s key rapping on the door, the gleaming lustre of the woodwork, the swirl of the water in the washbasin, the dark blue of the blankets and the stark white of the crisp sheets at night. Above all: seeing the world around you fading under a sky erupting in the flame of a Karoo sunset, everything darkening mysteriously until only the sound of the train remains in silence and space, and the glimmer of the stars high above – and then to wake up very early in the dawn of a new day and see everything changed, changed utterly, from the stark expanse of the deep interior to the luxuriant blue mountains and billowing green vineyards of the Boland, as if the world has been reinvented overnight. Made strange and wonderful and exhilarating, a new experience of seeing, and hearing, and smelling. The whole year peeled from one like the slough of a snake, the everydayness of home and school terms and familiar faces scraped away to reveal a new bright tenderness beneath the surface, a holiday quality which the rest of the year does not have, and in which everything is abundant with untellable possibilities.

  This annual month in the Western Cape was the single unwavering point of reference of my youth. A place of holiday, of blustering wind and blistering sunshine, of fighting with male cousins like the scowling Pieter or even the ever-grinning Willem, and falling in love – at a very safe distance – with their female counterparts, nut-brown Annatjie, black-haired Stella, freckled Miemie, evenings with storytelling uncles and cushioned aunts, days of fruit and grapes and the taste of Oom Jannie’s forbidden wine, excursions to the Mother City, flooded by images of shopping in towering places with staircases that moved magically by themselves, of consuming ice cream and pancakes in the Koffiehuis, meeting strange strangers known only to one’s parents at Fletcher & Cartwright’s, or feeding squirrels in the Company Gardens, or taking cable car rides up to the portals of heaven, or swimming in the dark blue ice-cold seas of Melkbos. A world so remote from the space in which we lived inland that it seemed as foreign and imaginary as Jerusalem or Gomorrah or the Baghdad of Scheherazade.

  It was the one point in my youth where all the loose strands and threads used to be drawn together and where, at long intervals, the far-flung relatives from my father’s and my mother’s side of the family could meet and be more or less merged.

  We loved my maternal grandmother, who was small and rotund, with thick round glasses and a bosom made for comforting small children. Sadly, we never came to know her very well, as she also died much too early. My main memory of her is the family ritual of undertaking, every Sunday after coffee, a small pilgrimage to her already-dug grave, which was covered by a
sheet of corrugated iron next to my grandfather’s headstone. Visiting ‘Ouma’s hole’ during our visits to Bedford in the Eastern Cape where she lived, is one of the abiding memories of my childhood. There was nothing macabre about it. On the contrary, to us, it was a reassuring reminder of the presence of death in life, the inescapability of it; and when at last she died, there was something wholesome about knowing where she rested, in her grave next to that of the Oupa we’d never known.

  There was one delicate matter which endeared Ouma to me. When I was very small, I was allowed to share her bed: not an ordinary bed, but one that featured a huge, billowing bulsak stuffed with goose feathers that nearly overwhelmed one with suffocating warmth, so that it was almost impossible to breathe. But my problem wasn’t so much breathing as emptying my bladder. It was quite impossible to extricate myself from that bulsak to reach the chamber pot in time. The consequences were predictable. But I still remember with gratitude that Ouma never divulged this to the rest of the family. She would merely mention quite casually at the breakfast table that the nights were so hot that they caused me to sweat quite inordinately.

  Most of my mother’s family remained unknown to us, and for several of them a detour had to be made to the Eastern Cape. There had been thirteen children, some of whom we never even met; my mother herself, born when her oldest sister, Aunt Johanna, had already left home, barely knew her older siblings. Many of these, especially the uncles, also had the disconcerting habit of dying. And so there was always something mysterious about that part of the family. One morning I woke up early from a commotion in the bathroom. I must have been about ten. In front of the mirror stood a bald man I hadn’t set eyes on before in my life, shaving. I tiptoed to my parents’ room. ‘If you’ve come about the stranger in the bathroom,’ said my mother, ‘it is your uncle Piet.’ I never saw him again. I believe he died about a month later.

  Among the aunts, a few survived to leave a more lasting memory, mostly because of their robust sense of humour, their tendency either to erupt in boisterous peals of laughter, or to sit in corners trembling in silent convulsions of mirth like round jellies enjoying the mysteries of jokes we could never fathom and more often than not were not even allowed to hear. The most colourful of the aunts was Auntie Sally, who lived on a farm on the West Coast; our holidays there were among the most memorable we spent as a family. One summer she took us to the resort of Strandfontein which is now overrun by the nouveau riche, a pretentious collection of architectural monstrosities; but in those days it was an idyllic backwater with hardly any permanent buildings: only during the Christmas season the farmers from the area would converge there to set up primitive but highly effective reed-mat houses that allowed the sea breezes to move through unhindered, while the swelling of the reeds in times of rain assured a beautifully cosy interior when needed. The technique, presumably borrowed from the Khoisan inhabitants of the coastal region in early centuries, is still a reminder of a long past when survival depended on tuning in very naturally to the whims and vagaries of the seasons.

  I remember the long twilights following the outrageous splendours of the sunset (the spectacle Ingrid once described as ‘God’s little vulgarities’), when families would gather on the beach for games, or horseplay, or storytelling, and lovers would wander off in the dusk and try to imagine themselves invisible.

  These were the times when Auntie Sally would have everyone in stitches with her stories about the past or her comments on all and sundry. She once cut a particularly vain political opponent down to size by voicing her opinion – she was, among many other things, a midwife – that for someone like him it would be better to stay out of public life. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked with an aggressive sneer. ‘Because,’ said Auntie Sally, ‘it is quite obvious that at your birth they buried the baby and raised the afterbirth.’

  Auntie Bessie and Auntie Frances were also colourful people, the former more morose, the latter as expansive as the huge farm in the semi-desert over which she ruled. And then there was Auntie Dollie, an unsettling mixture of the generous and the narrow-minded. Her greatest asset was her husband, Oom Jannie, one of the first South Africans to study abroad. He went completely off the beaten track: not to Holland, or England, or even Germany, but to heathen France. To study viticulture. Along the way, as far as we could glean from the rare unguarded remark when there were no women around, he was not, during his study years, impervious to the charms of the odd mademoiselle. I used to believe that he must have married Auntie Dollie to inflict upon himself the direst punishment he could think of for some barely imaginable transgression whose name could not be spoken, even though the outrageous memory would still, occasionally, twinkle impishly in his impossibly blue eyes. A man of wit and erudition, but above all of passion, and an uncontrollable love of life. On her own, Auntie Dollie also had a generosity of spirit, a laugh that could erupt at unexpected moments, a love of good food. But something had blighted her spirit and turned her into the impersonation of a blast of icy wind on a summer’s day, dour, stern, scolding, disapproving, dissatisfied – Goethe’s Geist der stets verneint. For some reason, all her negative feelings were concentrated in one laser beam of virulent hatred against alcohol. And as Oom Jannie, one of the ablest vintners in the country, had chosen wine to express his whole zest for life, their collision course was staked out from the beginning. Or was there, perhaps, in the early days of their love, a shared interest, a shared passion? But what could have happened to twist it into something so awfully different? I have still not solved the mystery. There lurks a book. Oom Jannie inspired one of my favourite characters in Before I Forget, the father of the bewitching girl Driekie with whom the protagonist shares an unforgettable summer’s afternoon in a mulberry tree.

  Auntie Dollie’s crusade against the deadly sin of alcohol abuse led to the uprooting of every single vine on Oom Jannie’s farm, destroying his very raison d’être, everything that had made life worthwhile to him. Regrettably, all the orchards she’d instructed him to plant after uprooting the luscious vineyards, turned out a huge success, and they prospered more than ever before, which she interpreted as a sign that God was on their side.

  Most unfortunately their only daughter, Bettie, was no Driekie, and she also died young, as did Willem, my favourite cousin among their four sons. He’d inherited his father’s incorrigible joie de vivre. No farmer, he. He studied drama, which his pious mother could not have approved of. And in November 1956 he took the outrageous decision to travel to Austria and join an international brigade of young workers in a schloss on the Hungarian border to receive refugees from the Soviet invasion and help them in the hazardous transition to a new life in the West. Afterwards, I spent hours listening to Willem’s account of those midwinter weeks in the schloss and their aftermath – the excitement and the dreariness, the hard work and the adventures, the shy young Hungarian girl who briefly shared his narrow bed in the high round tower where the helpers were lodged, the intrigues and subterfuges, the exploitation and bullying and chicanery, the moments of hope or despair, of caring, of cruelty and betrayal, of unexpected generosity, the brief eruptions of passion. Much of this information was later transposed into the life of Philip, the film-maker in The Wall of the Plague; because ultimately, in writing, nothing is left unused.

  My mother’s side of the family certainly provided enough colour, stimulation and drama to keep those times acutely alive in my memory. But it was my father’s family that formed a narrative backbone to those memories. They were more tightly knit – not thirteen siblings, but only five, all of them sons – and we saw more of them than of the rather shapeless, chaotic though redoubtable Wolmarans clan my mother represented.

  In the centre of my father’s clan, as was only fit and proper, were my grandparents, two of the most loveable people I have ever known. Biblical too, one might say. But they sprang more evidently from the New Testament side.

  Oupa was a clerk in a grocery shop in Malmesbury. But he had had his day, as I fou
nd out when I discovered the book he wrote about his experiences in the Anglo-Boer War, which he wrote in a thick, hardback ledger, in beautiful copperplate, and in High Dutch, which at the age of twelve I dutifully translated into Afrikaans. To no avail; no publisher was interested. Perhaps it was not all that surprising. Oupa’s war was not exactly a series of heroic feats. I turned it into something of a tragicomedy in the history section of Looking on Darkness, and plundered it much more extensively for the passages about daily life on commando in An Act of Terror. Oupa had a sense for the observation of the everyday, the ordinary face of war behind the masks of gore and glory. Had he been less scrupulous about respecting the reality of his experiences, and with a tad more imagination he might have conjured up a Good Soldier Svejk. But there was something endearing about his dogged determination to get through the war. Afterwards he even had one of his five sons christened in the name of General Christiaan Beyers. And I worshipped him for it.

  When peace broke out he married Miemie Kotzé, the fiancée he had left behind before going off to war against the British. She was a distant scion of the illustrious Kotzebue family, and my tenuous claim to a French connection. They settled in Malmesbury and bought a house at the very top of Hill Street. He got the job in the grocery shop, and they lived happily ever after.

  In many of our games over the Christmas holidays in the Western Cape, we emulated Oupa’s war exploits – that is, his meanderings across the lush hills of Natal and the barren high veld of the Transvaal. When Elbie complained about being compelled to be my batman or agterryer, I proceeded into my dreams on my own. And one variation of the game became particularly pleasurable. The stoep of Oupa’s house ran the full length of the facade, and if one hooked an arm over the railing at the end of it and hung over the edge, it was easy to imagine oneself one step up from a horseman on commando, that is, as a train driver. Which caused me from an early age to dream of becoming just that. Unable to realise that ambition, which I still feel as a lack in my life, I turned to writing, which is just another way of travelling. Is not any story an image of the journeys in the Odyssey, or Gilgamesh, or the Divina Commedia, or Don Quixote, or Voyage Au Bout de la Nuit?