Before I Forget Read online

  During the last hectic weeks before the elections, when any available body was roped in to work for the party and keep the Sappe (and the coloreds) out, I came to know her better. Even began to find her attractive, with her rippling light brown hair and green eyes and full breasts and the feline grace of her body. But that was that. She was too old for me; she would never give me a second look. And anyway, I was much too timid and inexperienced even to contemplate a move of my own, especially since several of the more senior party workers had made no bones about the fact that they were interested.

  During the day following the elections, as one result after the other was proclaimed over radios in every house and shop and office in town, an atmosphere of muted hysteria was building up. And by nightfall on the second day, when the improbable news of a Nationalist victory was a fait accompli, madness took over. There were huge festivities in the town hall, which spilled outside into streets and squares and vacant lots, with bonfires, fireworks, dancing, and carousing into the small hours. All of which remained no more than a distant backdrop of noise to my own celebration.

  What happened was that Father had charged me with the chore of locking up the party offices in the late afternoon, after all the organizers and helpers had filtered out to join the revelry; but I had got so caught up in it all that I quite forgot about the matter. It was only when, some time after eight, I jostled my way into the town hall to listen to the speeches (it was, after all, still the party of my own choice, and I was sharing in the collective flush of triumph) that from a distance I saw my father on the platform with the dignitaries and realized that the offices had not been locked. There was no need for alarm—in those days crime was not really an issue, and almost everybody was in the town center for the celebrations; but I knew how fastidious he was about the right way of doing things. So I fought my way back through the crowd again and walked into the cool but bracing late-May night.

  The offices were dark, and my first impulse was simply to lock up from outside and wend my way back to the town hall. But for some reason I decided to go inside first and make sure that everything in the building was in order, all the windows closed, the furniture in place, just as I knew my father wanted it. When I opened the door to his office—the very door through which he would emerge four years later to confront Bonnie and me—there was a sound. I froze. A burglar? A vagrant? A marauding cat? I switched on the light at the door.

  Anna was behind his desk, her body crumpled over it, her hair disheveled. There were telltale signs that she had been crying. She looked up when the light went on. Which of us was the most startled was difficult to tell. She uttered a small cry, and I mumbled a confused apology: ‘I’m sorry… I didn’t know… I wasn’t expecting to find anybody here… I just…’

  By that time she was on her feet, straightening her hair, wiping her face with the back of her hand. ‘No, it’s my fault, I didn’t mean to be here, I…’

  ‘Why are you not at the town hall?’ I asked.

  ‘I didn’t feel like being in a crowd. It’s… ag, sommer…’ She took a deep breath and became more composed. ‘I suppose I was just tired after these last few days, the last few weeks.’ It was only some time afterwards that I learned how, after all her tireless work for the party, Father had forgotten to invite her to the celebration, and much later before I came to the obvious conclusion that she had secretly been in love with him all along, perhaps even since before her involvement with the hunters.

  ‘But you belong there, Anna. After all you’ve done.’

  ‘I don’t belong anywhere,’ she said in a tone of self-pity. ‘Nobody cares about what I’ve done anyway.’

  I looked hard at her. This did not tally with the impression I’d had of her during the time we had been working together: the ever-competent, ever-smiling, indefatigable secretary who could joke with the men, expertly ward off all the predictable attempts at sexing up to her without making the offender feel a fool, do whatever she was asked to do and then come back for more; and who often brought plates of home-made beskuit or meringues or milk-tarts to the office to liven up our tea and coffee breaks.

  ‘I caught you at a bad moment,’ I said. ‘Do you want me to go?’

  ‘No, stay. I was just tired. All the pressure was getting a bit much. I think I’ve had enough of people for a while, especially of some people…’ She left the sentence trailing.

  ‘Like my father?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘It wasn’t necessary. I know him well enough.’

  ‘You don’t know half of him.’

  ‘Top half or bottom half?’ I joked.

  She smiled. The tension was broken.

  ‘Shall we go for a walk?’ I proposed.

  ‘As long as it isn’t downtown.’

  ‘We’ll go where there’s nobody else.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ said Anna. There was a kind of molten fire in her eyes I hadn’t noticed before. There was actually a lot about her, I realized, with a tingling warmth spreading through me, which I hadn’t noticed before.

  I put off the light. We went to the front door together. I let her out and locked it behind me. When we came outside she took my hand, an easy, spontaneous gesture. My face felt warm, and the light autumn breeze was chilly against it. I’m not sure how far we walked. I tried afterwards to find the place again, but could never be quite sure that it was the right spot: there was a vacant plot overgrown with long grass and a clump of trees. There we kissed. And then she took off my jacket (I was still formally dressed for the celebrations), skillfully removed my tie, and with slow precision, obviously knowing exactly what she wanted to do, undid the buttons of my shirt. I took off her blouse, and she helped me with her bra. There was some light from a street lamp on the corner and I remember the yellowish sheen of it on her breasts, and the small dark shadows of her nipples, puckered and taut in the cool night air.

  Far away, downhill, there were fireworks going off, rockets streaking through the air in multicolored arcs and parabolas, exploding in showers of fire; but we were engrossed in our own fireworks. There was no need for me to initiate or direct anything; Anna took over. It was like diving into a churning millstream.

  But I was too overwhelmed by it all, in too much of a hurry, and when I came I heard her moaning against my neck, ‘Too soon, too soon.’ But she smothered it in her own wet kisses as her body continued urgently, demandingly to undulate against mine, while high above us the dizzying spectacle of lights continued, and I slowly became conscious of the perspiration on my back turning cold in the light wind.

  We got dressed again and she took me home to the rather ugly new building where she lived, not far from there. There were people coming home from the festivities and we didn’t want to be seen; so she whispered her flat number in my ear, 303, and went up first, and I followed five minutes later.

  This time I did not come too soon. I stayed the night. Both of us had heavy, snotty colds in the morning (which, mercifully, was Saturday), and that wasn’t romantic at all. But our lovemaking amply made up for it. Anna was a wine that had gathered in its body all the generosity of deep earth and a Cape climate, years of maturing in wood and darkness, with all the munificence of sun and summer and cleansing wind, and the deep secret growth of rainy winters.

  It was the beginning of a few exceptional months in my life. Anna taught me more than all my previous eager or laborious but rather impetuous explorations in the past. First of all, she brought home to me the virtue of patience. And I learned about a woman’s needs and delights—her needs and delights—and about possibilities that would never have occurred to me on my own. She was a woman of baffling contradictions: always correct, even conservative, at work (although her imperturbable good mood and her gift of laughter prevented it from ever becoming staid); she even taught at Sunday school; but in bed she was a virtuoso, her resources and inventiveness a constant source of
marvel and discovery. She showed me little tricks to revive passion within minutes of the most depleting orgasm; and she brought a sense of fun to it which caused us, many times, to collapse in laughter even at the moment of coming. Together, we would try out every imaginable variation of the Kama Sutra or the Ars Amatoria and a selection of more obscure, and more titillating, manuals she had stowed away in a navy-blue suitcase under her bed. One Sunday, after she’d come back from church, she spread a towel on her bed and we shaved her mound and every little fold and curve and crinkle between her legs. In the winter months she let the black hair under her arms grow, because she discovered that it gave me a kick. (The combination of shaven sex and tufted armpits was particularly exhilarating.)

  On Anna’s instigation, we even introduced some experiments with violence into our lovemaking. Nothing really heavy, that never turned me on. But she soon proved to me that paddling her bottom with a wooden spoon was invigorating to both. And she could be taken to extremes of pleasure by kneeling on the bed, head buried in the pillow, legs spread wide, encouraging me to flagellate, at first very lightly, but with increasing vigor, the thick-lipped length of her sex, sometimes with the same wooden spoon, a few times with a broad belt, while she would moan and cry out and thrust her buttocks higher and higher to receive the blows and her wetness trickled down her thighs. Or she would lie on her back, her knees planted on either side of her head, raising her tantalizing sex to receive my blows, until neither of us could bear it any longer and I would plunge into her from above like a diver in search of abalone.

  It was not only Anna’s body I came to worship during the time we were together: she taught me, to my own amazement, more about my own than I had ever suspected. And she was always eager to discover more, to probe further, to explore beyond custom and tradition and myth and taboo. Love really only began on the other side of all that, she insisted. The starting point was not to hold on any more, but to let go—of all inhibitions and prohibitions and blocks and brakes, to go beyond frontiers and boundaries. And I suppose the very fact that in her everyday life she was such a model citizen and secretary made it that much more exhilarating.

  When we were not making love in her flat, we would drive to secluded places where we were not likely to be discovered or recognized (we were both obsessive about keeping it secret): small farm roads and tracks in the mountains and valleys around Stellenbosch, Franschhoek, Paarl; or to stretches of the coast which, in those days, were still largely unspoilt—Macassar, Steenbras, Kogel Bay, Rooi Els, and beyond. It was idyllic, Edenic.

  We spoke about everything under the sun and moon. Even about politics. To my surprise she was not such a staunch supporter of the party as I had thought. In fact, as time went on and the party revealed more and more of its real intentions, she lost all faith in the official line. My own gradual drift away from the safe and trusted world in which I had been brought up undoubtedly dated from that time. It was all the more decisive for the intense personal life she shared with me. In the beginning, at least, I would probably have swallowed hook, line, and sinker whatever she said, simply to make the good sex last; but slowly it filtered in more deeply than that. I was discovering, in every way, that there were more things in heaven and earth than I had dreamed of in my severely circumscribed little philosophy. And those things were never theoretical, abstract, distant: in the miraculous reality of her body it all became flesh. It came to define my life and then to set me free.

  It had to end. Not just because of the intensity, or the ever-present need to keep it secret from Father and our colleagues, but quite simply because Anna had to move on. I could never expect her to find her be-all and end-all in what was then still a callow youth. (It was time, too, for her to prepare a return to the hunter-lover who was by now ready to make a comeback from the obscurity into which he had faded after the ‘accident.’) After a year she told me, with what I can only call compassion and generosity, but very firmly, that it was time for me to leave. I had graduated from her school of love. It had to happen before I became irrevocably hooked on her; what I now needed, she made clear, was to stand on my own feet and meet the world on my own terms. It was devastating. And yet she’d managed to explain it all with such warm, even humorous, understanding, that I could not feel bitter or rejected. I know now that much of what I wrote in my novels, later, after Sharpeville, really grew from the first stirrings of insight provoked by my relationship with her—its beginning, its tumultuous middle, and its end.

  She was, I now think, my Scheherazade. I do not say it lightly, or with any narrow understanding. The more I reread the Thousand and One Nights, the more I believe that it is perhaps the greatest Art-of-Love the world has produced: much more extensive, profound and subtle than anything formulated by Ovid or the authors of the Kama Sutra. And it is even more remarkable because its focus is not the production of male pleasure, or even communal pleasure, but the role of the woman. (It is pretty practical too: How to get your man and keep him.) That young girl, seventeen or eighteen years old (assisted, indeed, by a little sister wise beyond her years), knew how to tame a king bent on violence and revenge, and a hater of women, and transform him, not into a slave of love, but into a creative and fully human man. How to expand his experience and his knowledge of his world, by exposing him to diversity. And all of that through inventing and telling stories, for hundreds of nights, for weeks and months and years, for a lifetime. Stories about kings and queens and magicians and merchants, about sailors and beggars and fishermen and peasants, about voyages by land and sea and into the depths of the spirit and its desires: in order to extend the boundaries of the known, the familiar, the everyday, to explore realms of mystery and delight and danger and magic and passion. And so it becomes a gigantic, multifarious, astounding allegory of love and lovemaking, all of it embodied in the largely untold but continually present story of the love between Shahriyar and Scheherazade. Through them, lovemaking and narrative become interchangeable. For is not lovemaking a form of storytelling?—our bodies telling each other the most intimate stories about themselves. Each of the individual nocturnal tales can be read as a commentary, even as a manual, on the unfolding relationship between this man and this woman; and what they learn about love is all rooted in the wisdom she—a young virgin to start with!—imparts through her stories.

  Scheherazade does not simply postpone death by enthralling the king in her storytelling: she engages with death. After the first few nights it no longer matters if a story is left unfinished at the coming of dawn: it is through the intricacy of the story (all those embeddings: Scheherazade telling about a fisherman telling about another fisherman telling about yet another…), and the processes of its telling, that she ensnares Shahriyar. Some of the tales are images of—or refutations of, or challenges to—his own relationships with women: but it is seldom simple or straightforward. What Scheherazade does is to show him an infinite variety of possibilities: a thousand and one different ways to rule, a thousand and one different ways to negotiate absence, or to deal with others, or to face the self, a thousand and one different ways to make love. In this way she releases him from the trap of narrow or absolute definitions about life and love, about right and wrong, about transgression and punishment and revenge and forgiveness. Her stories—her love—teach him how to be wise. If he is wise as a king, he will be a good lover; if he is a good lover, he will rule wisely, over others as well as himself. And this, I realize in retrospect, is what Anna van der Watt set in motion in me.

  I continued to see her over the following years: in the party office where she stayed on as a secretary, and later as the wife of Ockert Grobler, the hunter-murderer. They had children. She became a matron. We never spoke about the ‘old days.’ But she would sometimes, when we met at this or that social occasion, give me a very secretive smile from which I knew that the more she appeared to be a model citizen, the wilder and more magnificent she must be in her dreams, and in bed. I could only hope that Ockert Grobler
could do her justice. In my own bed, when I masturbated, or in moments of pleasure with other women over the years, I would continue to render homage to the Scheherazade I had known.

  ***

  I mentioned that other watershed election of my life, in 1994, after Mandela had come out of prison and for four years the country had gone through the convulsions of transition and negotiations. As the date of April 27 approached, we were all struck by apprehension: there were explosions all over the place, right up to the morning of election day. Among white conservatives there was a sense of doomsday approaching. Cellars were stocked with tinned food and candles, paraffin and petrol, many women sewed black clothing for their families in case they would be called upon to flee under cover of darkness from the forces of evil, while the ANC was toyi-toying in the streets of towns and cities and along rural roads. As it happened, the day turned the whole country into a carnival of celebration in which, briefly but miraculously, three and a half centuries of colonization on the palimpsest of history were suddenly obliterated by a new layer of joyous meaning.

  I was with Andrea at the time; she was colored, and we’d been together since before Mandela strode from prison in February 1990. (I shall return to her later. As she’d become more and more involved in the ANC structures preparing for the coming dispensation, we’d had less and less time to spend together—although we’d kept promising each other that things would soon be different: after the next meeting, the next demonstration, the next conference; certainly after election day…)

  We woke up very early, before five; in fact, we’d hardly slept at all. For Andrea, it would be the first time in her life she could vote in her own country; for me, the first time I was prepared to do so since 1948. We were going to separate polling stations—she was part of a monitoring team of the ANC who would be traveling all over the Western Cape to keep track of what was happening; I had just started working on a book, Return to Sunrise, and had selfishly decided to go to a station where the queues were not expected to be too long. After checking on the radio, I chose Mowbray. A mistake, as it turned out: busloads of voters from elsewhere, Khayelitsha in particular, had just been disgorged at the station when I arrived, and the queue at the gym hall that had been converted for the occasion must have been almost a kilometer long. And the rain was coming down in grey sheets that almost wholly obscured the mountain. It was going to be a long day. I was seriously tempted to go home, to tune in to the radio again and choose another polling station.