A Dry White Season Read online

  But where to go, and who to turn to? Who has not rejected me yet? Young Viviers? The jovial Carelse? Until they, too, have to pay the price. I suppose the Rev Buster may have welcomed me. But I couldn’t face the prospect of discussing the state of my soul with him. I don’t think my soul is really so important any more.

  Tried to work. Forced myself to go through all my notes again, turning the sorting process into some game of solitaire. Then stacked away everything again in the tools cupboard and drove off.

  But the old house with the curved verandah was dark and empty. Walked round it. Cats’ saucers on the back stoep. No curtains drawn but everything dark inside. What room hers? As if it mattered! Simply to know, to draw some solace from it. Adolescent. That’s why older men should steer clear of love. Makes them ridiculous.

  Sat on the front steps for a long time, smoking. Nothing happened. Almost relieved when I got up to go to the front gate. Felt “saved". Dear God, from what? Fate worse than death? Ben Du Toit, you should have your head read.

  Still, much more at peace. Resigned to going home again and facing my solitude.

  But before I’d reached the gate – I really have to fix it for them one day, the slats are falling out – her small car turned into the back yard. I actually felt almost regretful. It might have been avoided so easily. (How can I talk about “avoiding"? At that moment, surely, I had no anticipation, no hope, no conception of what was to happen. And yet it seems to me there must be such subtle subterranean ways of knowing in advance.)

  “Ben?!” When she saw me coming round the corner of the house. “Is that you? You gave me a fright.”

  “I’ve been here for a while. Was on the point of leaving.”

  “I went to see Dad in hospital.”

  “How is he?”

  “No change.”

  She unlocked the kitchen door and unhesitatingly led the way down the dark passage – I stumbled over a cat – to the living room. The murky yellow light seemed to illuminate more than just the room. She was wearing a dress with a prim high collar.

  “I’ll make us some coffee.”

  “Shall I give you a hand?”

  “No. Make yourself at home.”

  The room became meaningless without her. From the kitchen came sounds of cups tinkling, the hiss of a kettle. Then she came back. I took the tray from her. We sat drinking in silence. Was she embarrassed too? But why? I felt like a stranger on a formal visit.

  When her cup was empty she put on a record, turning the volume down very low.

  “More coffee?”

  “No thanks.”

  The cats were purring again. The music made the room more habitable, more hospitable, the book-filled shelves a protection against the world.

  “Any idea when your father will come home again?”

  “No. The doctors seem reasonably satisfied, but they don’t want to take any chances. And he’s growing impatient.”

  It was a relief to talk about him. By discussing him it was possible to say what we had to suppress about ourselves. The first evening in this room. The night in the mountains.

  Another silence.

  “I hope I’m not keeping you from your work?”

  “No,” she said. “There’s nothing important at the moment. And next Friday I’m off again.”

  “Where to this time?”

  “Kenya.” She smiled. “I’ll have to rely on my British passport again.”

  “Aren’t you scared of being caught one day?”

  “Oh I’ll manage all right.”

  “Isn’t it exhausting to go on like this, immersing yourself in one thing after another, never really settling down?”

  “Sometimes. But it keeps one on one’s toes.”

  I couldn’t help saying: “At least you have more to show for your efforts than I’ve achieved these last few months.”

  “How do you measure results?” Her eyes were warm and sympathetic. “I think we’re really very similar in many ways. We both seem to have a greater capacity for experiencing things than for understanding them.”

  “Perhaps it’s just as well. Sometimes it seems to me that to really understand would drive one mad.”

  It had grown late. A warm night with the balminess of early autumn. We spoke less as the evening wore on, but it was easier to communicate. The old intimacy had returned, in that cosy room still bearing vaguely the smell of her father’s tobacco, through the mustiness of books and cats and well-worn carpets.

  It must have been past midnight when I got up reluctantly. “I suppose it’s time to go.”

  “Do you have ‘obligations'?” With light, ironical emphasis.

  “No, there’s nobody else at home.”

  Why hadn’t I told her about Susan before? To protect myself? I’m not sure. Anyway, there was no reason to keep it secret any longer. I told her. She made no comment, but there was a change in her dark eyes. Pensive, almost grave, she got out of her chair, facing me.

  She’d kicked off her shoes earlier, making her even smaller, almost teenage in appearance, a slip of a girl; and yet mature and sobered, illusions shed, and with that deeper compassion either unknown to youth or underestimated by it.

  “Why don’t you stay here then?” she said.

  I hesitated, trying to fathom her real meaning. As if she were guessing my thoughts, she added calmly: “I’ll make you a bed in the spare room. Then you needn’t drive home at this ungodly hour.”

  “I’d love to stay. I can’t really face the prospect of an empty house.”

  “Both of us will have to get used to empty houses.”

  She went out ahead of me, soundless on her narrow feet. We didn’t speak again. I helped her make the bed in the spare room; a beautifully carved old wooden bedstead. All thoughts suspended.

  When we’d finished we looked at each other across the bed. I was aware of the tightness of my smile.

  “I’m also going to turn in,” she said, moving away.

  “Melanie.”

  Without a word she looked round.

  “Stay here with me.”

  For a moment I thought she was going to say yes. My throat was dry. I wanted to put out my hand to touch her but the broad bed was between us.

  Then she said: “No. I don’t think I should.”

  I knew she was right. We were so close. Anything might happen. But suppose it did: what then? What would become of us? How could we possibly cope with it in our demented world?

  It was better, if more desolate, this way. She didn’t come round the bed to kiss me goodnight. With a small, agonised smile she went to the door. Did she hesitate there? Was she waiting for me to call her back? I desperately wanted to. But merely by inviting her I had already gone far enough. I couldn’t risk any more.

  I couldn’t hear which way she went, her feet made no sound. Here and there, from time to time, a floorboard creaked in the big dark house, but it might have been of old age, no indication of her whereabouts. For a very long time I remained there beside the bed with the covers drawn back from the pillows. Taking stock of everything, as if an inventory were of vital importance. The pattern of the old-fashioned wallpaper. The bedside table stacked with books. A small bookshelf against the wall. A dressing table with a large oval mirror. A large Victorian wardrobe with a pile of suitcases on top.

  After several minutes I went over to the window. The curtains were not drawn; one of the side-windows stood open. Looking out across the back garden. Grass and trees. Darkness. The day’s fragrant warmth still lingering in the stillness. Crickets and frogs.

  It amazed me that desolation could be so peaceful. For her refusal and her turning away had sealed something very finally. Something hopeful, however extravagant or presumptuous, which had now been closed gently and serenely before me, like a door clicking shut before I could enter.

  And then she came back. When I turned my head she was standing there beside me, close enough to touch. She was naked. I stared at her in utter silence. She was clearl
y timid; fearful, I think, that I might find her provocative. But she made no attempt to turn away. She must have known that it was as necessary for me to gaze as it was for her to be gazed at. I had become the mirror she’d spoken of before. You look at yourself naked. A face, a body you’ve seen in the mirror every day of your life. Except you’ve never really seen it. You’ve never really looked. And now, all of a sudden—

  All our previous moments seemed to converge in this one. Chronology and consequence became irrelevant. Time was stripped from us the way one removes one’s clothes to make love.

  The candour of her body. Her presence was total, and overwhelming. I feel quite ridiculous trying to grasp it now with nothing but words. How paltry it sounds, almost offensive, reduced to description. But what else can I do? Silence would be denial.

  Her hair undone, loose and heavy on her shoulders. Her breasts so incredibly small, mere swellings, with dark, elongated, erect nipples. The smooth belly with the exquisite little knot in its hollow. Below, the trim triangular thicket of black hair between her legs.

  But it is not that. Nothing I can enumerate or adequately name. What mattered was that in her nakedness she was making herself available to me. The incomprehensible gift of herself. What else do we have to offer?

  Those words of months ago, on the eve of everything: Once in one’s life, just once, one should have enough faith in something to risk everything for it.

  We didn’t pull the sheets up over us. She didn’t even want me to put off the light. Like two children playing the game for the first time we wanted to see everything, touch everything, discover everything. A newness, as of birth. The smooth movements of her limbs. The scent of her hair. My whole face covered with it, my mouth filled with it. The slightness of her breasts against my cheek. Her nipples tautening between my lips. Her deft hands. Her sex distending, opening deeply tomy touch, in wet and secret warmth. Our two bodies mingling on the edge of our precipice. The marvel and mystery of the flesh. Her voice in my ear. Her urgent breathing. Her teeth biting into my shoulder. The hairy bulge of her mound, a fleshy fist yielding under my pressure and sucking me inside.

  But it was not that. It wasn’t that at all. What I was conscious of, what I can recapture now, was what I could feel and see and touch and hear and taste. But it wasn’t that. Not those limbs I can catalogue one by one, trying desperately to grope back to what really happened. Something else, something wholly different. Bodies purified through ecstasy, in light and darkness. Until at last and out of breath we became still again. Exhausted, I lay against her listening to the deep rhythm of her breathing, her mouth still half-open, and behind her moist lips the dull glistening of her teeth, her small breasts bruised, the puckered nipples slack, on her belly the snail-trails of our love; one knee bent outwards, the leg relaxed, and in the dark mat of her love-hair the exposed and mangled furrow, the moist inner lips still swollen with invisible blood. The full frank miracle of her body alive even in that sleep of exhaustion and fulfilment. I couldn’t get enough of looking at her, trying to quench the thirst of years and years in a single night. I had to cram myself with her so that, all five senses replete with her, there would be nothing left of myself at all. The final consummation would be to break right through the senses and plunge into the darkness beyond, into that love of which our passion had been but the celebration and the token. Behold, thou art fair, my love.

  The urgency of my desire slaked, I felt a new serenity. Propped up on one elbow I lay looking at her in peace and awe, touching her, caressing her very gently, still unable to believe my eyes, or my hands, or my tongue. I wasn’t sleepy. It was presumptuous even to think of sleep while I had her there beside me to look at, to touch, to reaffirm the unbelievable reality of her body. I had to keep awake and keep watch, probing every possibility of this brief tenderness while it was so precariously and incredibly ours.

  Happiness? It was one of the saddest nights of my life, an ageless sadness that insinuated itself into the very heart of this new world and deepened slowly into anguish and agony. There shewas sleeping, closer to me than anyone had ever been to me, exposed and available, utterly trusting, at my disposal to love, to look at, to touch, to explore, to enter: and yet, in that peaceful deep sleep more remote than any star, ungraspable, forever apart. I knew her eyes and the inside of her mouth, her nipples in rest and arousal, every limb of her slight smooth body, every individual finger and toe; I could examine if I wished each separate secret hair. And yet it amounted to nothing, nothing at all. Our bodies had joined and turned and clasped, and shared the spasms of pleasure and of pain. But having touched, we were again separate; and in her sleep, as she smiled, or whimpered, or lay breathing quietly, she was as far from me as if we’d never met. I wanted to cry. But the ache was too deep to be relieved by tears.

  It must have been near sunrise when I fell asleep beside her. When I woke up it was broad daylight and the birds were singing in the trees outside. On the bedside table the lamp was still burning, a dull and futile yellow stain on the brilliant morning. What had awakened me was the movement of her hands over me, the way I had caressed her in the night while she’d been sleeping so remotely. There was no haste: it was Sunday, and nothing and no-one required us or made demands on us; and very slowly she allowed me to return from sleep, and once more to cover her body with mine, breaking back into the hidden warmth of her body – a sensation like diving into lukewarm water, as if not only my penis but all of me, all I’d ever been or could hope to be, were drawn into her, immersed in her; until, after the implosion, consciousness ebbed back, throbbing dully and painfully, as I knew once more what it meant to feel and to be alive, to be exposed, and to fear.

  Because I know only too well – and I knew it then, too, in that incongruous light where the lamp was trying so bravely to hold its own against the unmerciful glare of the day – that we love one another, but that neither of us can redeem the other. And that through the love of our bodies we have been drawn into history. We are no longer outside it, but involved in all that is definable, calculable in terms of months or years, manoeuvrable, shockable, destructible. And in that sadness more profound than I had ever known, I went away at last.

  Three weeks later Susan returned from Cape Town. Not quite her old self yet, but more relaxed, more prepared, more determined to try again. Two days after her return, on Thursday 30 March, Ben found, when he came home from school (Johan had stayed behind for cadets), a large brown envelope in the mailbox, addressed to her. He took it inside with his own post.

  There was no letter in the envelope, only a photograph. An ordinary eight-by-ten on glossy paper. Not a very clear shot, as if the light had been bad. A background of fuzzy, out-of-focus wallpaper, a bedside table, a crumpled bed; a man and a girl naked in a position of intimate caressing, apparently preparing for intercourse.

  Susan was on the point of tearing it up in disgust when something prompted her to take a closer look. The girl, the dark-haired girl, was a stranger to her. The man with her was middle-aged, and immediately recognisable in spite of the heavy grain. The man was Ben.

  FOUR

  1

  When he opened the door Captain Stolz was waiting on the stoep. For months on end he’d been waiting for them to come back, assuming that it was only a matter of time. Especially after the photograph had arrived in the mail. Still, his notes leave one in no doubt about the shock he received when it actually happened that afternoon: it was the third of April, a day before Melanie was due to return from Kenya. The officer was alone. That in itself must have meant something.

  “Can we talk?”

  Ben would have preferred to refuse him entry, but he was much too shaken to react. Mechanically he stood aside, allowing the lean man in the eternal sports jacket to enter. Perhaps it was also, in an irrational way, a relief at last to have an adversary of flesh and blood opposite him again, someone he could recognise and pin down, someone to talk to, even in blind hate.

  Stolz was, at least to begin
with, much more congenial than before, enquiring about Ben’s health, his wife, his work at school.

  In the end, pulling him up short, Ben said tartly: “I’m sure you didn’t come here to ask about my family, Captain.”

  A glint of amusement in Stolz’s dark eyes. “Why not?”

  “I’ve never had the impression that you were very interested in my private affairs.”

  “Mr Du Toit, I’ve come here today” – he crossed his long legs comfortably – “because I feel sure we can come to an understanding.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t you think this business has gone on long enough?”

  “That’s for you people to decide, isn’t it?”

  “Now be honest: has all the evidence you’ve been collecting in connection with Gordon Ngubene brought you one step closer to the sort of truth you were looking for?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  A brief pause. “I really hoped we could talk man to man.”

  “I don’t think it’s still possible, Captain. If it ever was. Not between you and me.”

  “Pity.” Stolz shifted on his chair. “It really is a great pity. Mind if I smoke?”

  Ben made a gesture.

  “Things don’t quite seem to be going your way, do they?” said Stolz after he’d lit his cigarette.

  “That’s your opinion, not mine.”

  “Let’s put it this way: certain things have happened that might cause you considerable embarrassment if they were to leak out.”

  Ben felt tense, the skin tightening on his jaws. But without taking his eyes from Stolz he asked: “What makes you think so?”

  “Now look,” said Stolz, “just between the two of us: we’re all made of flesh and blood, we’ve all got our little flaws. And if a man should get it into his head to – shall we say, sample the grass on the other side of the fence, well, that’s his own business. Provided it’s kept quiet, of course. Because it would be rather unpleasant if people found out about it, not so? I mean, especially if he is in the public eye. A teacher, for instance.”