A Fork in the Road Read online

  But in my childhood there was, for us, only the museum in the Gardens, where I spent hours making drawings in a small notebook of all the stuffed mammals; and then stared in awe at the Bushmen in the display cabinets, firmly believing that they, too, had been stuffed and propped up in disconcertingly lifelike postures.

  But more timeless, more solid, altogether more majestic than any building, is Table Mountain itself. The exquisite terror that gripped one on a first ascent by cable car. The dassies on the top boulders. The triumphant feeling when a few of us boys could briefly evade the surveillance of parents to pee over the edge and watch the thin spray evaporating in the wind. The harbour with its ships and cranes and its promise of sailing out to the farthest unknown reaches of the earth. The coastline, an indolent painting in blue and white. The undulating mountains, past the Twelve Apostles to Cape Point, the petrified monument of the titan Adamastor punished for all eternity for his arrogant attempt to seduce the eminently seductible sea-nymph Thetis. And although one knows that Agulhas reaches further south into the ocean than this spindly coccyx of the continent, this feels like the end of the earth, the meeting point between two angry oceans, one warm, one cold, where everything is reduced to the elements of earth and air and rock and sometimes, in summer, fire too. There is no obstacle, for thousands of kilometres, between our uncertain here-and-now and the distant icy Antarctic.

  But ultimately Cape Town is not an assemblage of places and monuments, of sites and historical spaces: it is an entity defined by its people, a kind of Comtean gathering of all who have gone before, all who are here now, all still to come in the future. The pioneers, the Great Men, the achievers, the illustrious, yes. But also, and especially, the hosts of the ordinary, the humdrum, the mundane: those who, by and large, do not make history but undergo it, as immortalised in Brecht’s poem ‘Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters’ – ‘Questions from a Worker who Reads’.

  Here in Cape Town, not only the early inhabitants of the old castle live in the memory, but so many others too. The shepherds of fat-tailed sheep, the burghers trying to eke out a living along the Liesbeek; the Khoi victims of colonialist expansion, and the colonial victims of Khoi retaliation, the mothers of many children: those who survive, or try to survive, in the wind and dust of the Cape Flats and in shacks along the dunes; the street children with big eyes and snotty noses and cupped hands who can curse blue lightning bolts from a clear sky; the bergies pushing their Shoprite or Pick ’n Pay trolleys to gathering points in subways or in parks, smelling of Blue Train and woodsmoke, of mortality and humanity. All of those, countless and nameless, who ensure that the Cape survives. And all of those who bear the names of my family, from the first Andries Brink who arrived from Woerden in Holland, after an earlier migration from Denmark, and still earlier and earlier migrations back to the dawn of humanity, to a Garden with a man and a woman and an apple that should have been a fig. In this place the footprints of the larger history merge with those of our family, private and personal, sometimes proud and often despicable. Men who cultivated fruit farms and men who raped their slave girls and sold their own children to plant a new nation, brown under the sun. Those who were recorded in history books and those who survive only in memories. Aunt Sally’s laugh. Oom Jannie’s blue eyes as he looks at the orchards where his vineyards used to grow. The home-made boat in which we rowed on the farm dam one Sunday afternoon when I was supposed to lie on my bed reading an unbearably uplifting book, and then the boat capsized and we were all thrashed because we had desecrated the Day of the Lord, Stella with her sleep-heavy eyes that morning when we didn’t kiss each other goodbye. Elbie falling from a plum tree and breaking her arm. An entire youth in a handful of memories. The history of an entire nation in a city under a mountain. Beautiful and hideous, dangerous and comforting, disconcerting and reassuring. The Cape. The fairest Cape in the whole circumference of the earth.

  BLACK AND WHITE IN CRISIS

  MY RETURN FROM Paris towards the end of 1961, even though the arrival in the country was marked by the brief ecstasy of acknowledging, in the exuberant voices of the coloured labourers in the Cape Town harbour, the reality of being home again, remained clouded by the overwhelming resentment I felt against South Africa following the massacre of Sharpeville. And that feeling persisted. Basically, I did not want to be here. Certainly it showed in my writing: that is always a reliable barometer. In The Ambassador I remained firmly ensconced in Paris, with South Africa still very much present. All the characters, even Nicolette, are South African, but their roots remained somewhere in the background. The experimental Afrikaans novel Orgie (Orgy) was set in Cape Town, but the setting is almost coincidental: the story was very narrowly focused on the doomed relationship with Ingrid. If there was a wider frame of significance, it came from ancient Sumerian mythology. We were all, in one way or another, myth-mongers in the sixties. In Miskien Nooit (Maybe Never) I returned to Paris, based on an unfulfilled relationship from the summer I spent there in 1966. This time the mythological frame came from Scandinavia. But for me the most significant piece of writing I did in the sixties was a novel which was mercifully never published, although in many ways it paved the way for much of what came later. It was first called Ninety Days, a reference to the draconian new legislation that was passed in the early sixties, in the wake of Sharpeville, and which permitted detention without trial for a period of ninety days with the option of prolonging it with further periods of ninety days each, for as long as it pleased the state.

  In a second, completely rewritten, version in 1967 the novel was renamed The Saboteurs; and in a third draft that followed soon after, the title was once again changed, this time to Back to the Sun. I have no copy of this final version: in 1968, I left it with Breyten in the hope, fortunately unfulfilled, that he might one day read and comment on it. But he had a friend at the time, a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist architect who opted out of his very successful career to become a bricklayer, carpenter and handyman, and in exchange for many meals and a temporary roof over his head – although most of the time he slept in his seriously unroadworthy combi – he started renovating Breyten and Yolande’s apartment in the rue Malebranche. A brilliant job he did, except that he allowed practically no space for books. ‘No house,’ said Jean with stubborn proletarian conviction, ‘needs more than twelve books.’ So he fashioned a small shelf in the wall of the living room, on which one could fit exactly twelve medium-sized books, beginning with Das Kapital. Everything else in the bookish line, including my only manuscript of Back to the Sun, was disposed of.

  The immediate trigger for the novel was the arrest of a group of very young people – mainly students – in Cape Town on charges of planning sabotage and, through the transparent logic of the security police, the overthrow of the state. There was the brilliant young lawyer Albie Sachs, who was closely involved with the group of accused and later married the fiercely rebellious, headstrong Stephanie Kemp. I briefly met Albie at the time, having initially been fascinated by the story of his father, Solly Sachs, who for years had played cat and mouse with the government in their witch-hunt on communists and suspected communists; later, in London, I spent more time with him and Stephanie – who, in the flesh, I found as captivating as she had seemed in the earlier newspaper reports. For a long time I had grappled with the image of the rebel as a young woman: her special kind of absolutism, her readiness to sacrifice her comforts, her world, even her self, for what she – irrationally and madly, but with single-minded passion – believes in. I still do not know whether that was what she ‘really’ was. But that was what she personified for me. And often, in writing, perception is all. There was also Spike de Keller, whom I never met personally, but who had much impressed me in the press coverage: unlike some of the others, he had seemed to approach the plan very realistically and rationally, weighed the pros and cons, and decided to risk it – and then paid the price in prison. Many years later I came to know his mother and got a touching insider’s view of the man. And ther
e was Adrian Leftwich, who ultimately broke under police torture and betrayed his friends – after he had previously, in simulated situations, withstood pressure much better than any of the others – and was branded a coward and a sellout by many, including the relentless judge Andrew Beyers, a technicolourful, larger-than-life and in many ways frightening character. Twenty years later I met Adrian in Australia and immediately felt attracted to him as a person of deep feeling and lucid thinking, a man who through personal sacrifice and suffering had placed his life at stake – and lost. But had he ‘lost’? What is the meaning of winning or losing in such a situation? Even an atheist can find truth in the Bible: and for me Adrian was a demonstration of the profound question raised in St Mark: For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Adrian Leftwich became for me a man prepared to give up the world and save his soul. And the soul of the cause he believed in. That he did not betray. In his own way he came, who knows, to define that difficult concept, the ‘hero’ and forced one to rethink all one’s early preconceptions and prejudices.

  What was it in that group that mesmerised me and inspired me to write a novel about this kind of experience? The characters, undoubtedly. But also the profound philosophical choice they illustrated: in a country like the South Africa of the apartheid years, what was there a young white woman or man could do to take on the massive, blunt, violent power of the state? There was much courage and heroism demonstrated by innumerable young blacks who took up the challenge, and who gave their lives in the struggle for freedom. But without in any way whatsoever misreading or underestimating the sacrifices they were willing to make, and actually made, what they were doing was to fight for their own freedom, their own lives. Whereas these young activists, romantic or ‘misguided’ as they might have seemed, were prepared to make the supreme sacrifice for others. They could simply have continued with their own lives of comfort and protection and prosperity. In a country like South Africa, they had everything going for them. They were white.

  That was what I tried to grapple with in my book. I wanted, in the process of writing, to find out what drove them, what made their decisions and their actions possible, what – in this country, at this time – made them possible.

  The book was a failure. I think I was simply not equipped to understand its real challenges. I had not lived or felt or experienced anything deeply enough to work through that situation. But what it did effect, for me, in me, was to make me deeply conscious of the dilemma of being white in a land like this. It problematised my own existence for myself. Sympathy, even empathy, was not enough. I needed more experience. Which was why I had to confront it again, forty years later, in Before I Forget. And quite possibly I didn’t even get it right the second time round.

  Certainly, what Ninety Days – The Saboteurs – Back to the Sun made me discover was the significance of failure. Which so often, in the personal sense, is infinitely more of a discovery and a revelation than success.

  And it was more than a writing experience. It was also something deeply felt, and lived. Which may well be why, in the years between 1960 and 1970, in the context of exploring whiteness and blackness – or rather: whiteand-blackness – seen from the outside, my life was relatively calm, without much drama, perhaps even without much ‘progress’. But below the surface, I know now, I was probing and evaluating, or simply trying to understand, something more about this extraordinary difficult country. Not even by ‘experiencing’ much, but simply by being there. For future reference, as it were.

  The one who played the most decisive role in shaping and structuring my political conscience, especially in the way it defined my perception of racial matters, was H – as all her friends called her. From the moment we first properly met in Grahamstown in October 1966, after the early fleeting encounter in Jan Rabie’s house the year before, we both sensed – even though she tried very resolutely in the beginning to resist it – that this would change the course of our lives. It took months before our relationship broadened and deepened into love; but after that there was no possibility that my life would ever be the same.

  I was simply not ready to face South Africa when I had to come back. Even in spite of the momentary elation upon arriving in Cape Town, I returned with a grudge. I wanted to go back to France at the earliest opportunity. Which I did at the end of 1967. But in the meantime I had to go on living and partly living, as Eliot had phrased it.

  The South Africa I returned to, was that of Rhodes University, English-speaking, and with a long tradition of liberalism; interestingly enough, the people who impressed and influenced me most, were Afrikaans-speaking: they included my head of department, a Belgian, Rob Antonissen, one of the most erudite and humane persons I have ever met; the philosopher Daantjie Oosthuizen, a confidant of Beyers Naudé, who became such a thorn in the flesh of the establishment; the professor of German, Helmut Erbe, who had once, upon re-entering South Africa after a sabbatical abroad, been stopped by customs who confiscated from his luggage a set of photographs of Michelangelo sculptures which they took to be pornography; a teacher, Laurie Graham, who had read and travelled widely. All of them had long ago broken out of the Afrikaner laager. All of them loathed apartheid and actively supported viable initiatives for significant opposition, notably Alan Paton’s Liberal Party. They interacted easily and naturally and enthusiastically with black friends, something unthinkable in my previous life. Friends like these made the transition not only bearable but often exciting and stimulating. They provoked my mind into thinking through matters that my stay in Paris had introduced but not developed far enough. Through them, for the first time in my life, I made real friends with some black people.

  The fact that I did not have to return to the Afrikaner world that had first defined my image of the country, made it easier in many ways – although in other respects it created distances and barriers between me and ‘my people’ that nothing would ever fully resolve. I lived an in-between existence – between Paris and Paris. Which meant that I brought back many changed notions about what was happening in South Africa, but without any wish to get involved. Not only because of my immersion in existentialism, but also for all the practical reasons that had to do with making a living, I remained an outsider. And perhaps this suited me. In a way it was what I had been preparing myself for since the time of being a student in Potchefstroom: I enjoyed living ‘against the grain’ of the place.

  Yet the mere fact that in my writing, the ultimate lithmus test, I still could not identify sufficiently with the country to write about it, but kept on turning like a sunflower to the defining sun of Paris, meant that I still had a very long way to go. I still did not belong. Nor did I wish to.

  And this was the background against which H entered my life, newly arrived from London, with her uncluttered look at South Africa, her uncompromising beliefs in justice and equity, in truth. For her, notions like ‘freedom’ were not theoretical or ideological, although at the time she held quite strong Marxist convictions, but grew out of the lived experience of real individuals. At the same time she was not doctrinaire or opinionated: she came to the world with a generosity, a readiness to learn and to probe and to understand, a youthful exuberance and joy which nobody seemed able to resist. Everybody who met her, male or female, fell in love with her. One felt better about oneself for knowing her. She could be merciless, scathing, devastating in the face of hypocrisy or falseness or lies or bad faith, which was why she loathed apartheid and its perpetrators. But in her deepest self she was warm and loving and caring, with an irrepressible sense of humour. She had real enthusiasm. She had real joy. And she was only, when we met, twenty-four years old!

  Oh she had fears and uncertainties and insecurities and prejudices as well. She had scars, and chips on her shoulder too. This was mainly because of her upper-middle-class upbringing – though I have rarely met anyone who could break so convincingly and exuberantly free from the rest
rictions of a specific social and political background.

  H had absolutely no baggage about colour. Nor about class. She could sit down on a kerb and chat with a black beggar as readily as with a revered professor or a stern white priest. Which never meant looking either down on some or up to others. And this, in the South Africa of the sixties, still reeling from Sharpeville (and already, although no one could of course have known it yet, beginning to prepare itself for the Soweto of 1976), was something of a miracle. Precisely because she brought no conditions or preconceptions with her. She would love someone, black or white, because she related to that person as an individual. She could also hate someone, black or white, in the same way. No feeble liberal covering up or smoothing over or pretending because of colour. An individual, male or female, black or white, could be a marvel or a shit – or anything in between – without colour ever entering into it.