Before I Forget Read online

  The silence persisted for three weeks. It was just after Mam’s birthday on the 23rd, when I went to your house for tea one Sunday morning—a miserable rainy day, as it happened—that I noticed how the balcony had been completely secured with iron bars. An attempt to soften the effect with some ornate curlicues actually made it worse. I could not hide my shock, but when I looked at you, both turned such set faces in my direction that I decided to shut up. Not that this lasted for long: we knew each other well enough not to keep on dissembling.

  As I might have expected, it was you who brought it up. You looked most desirable, if I dare say so, in a chunky sweater, corduroys and thick orange woolen socks. But your body language said unambiguously: Keep off! In the middle of one of the unusual silences that punctuated our conversation, you made a sweeping gesture towards the balcony. ‘What do you think of my new view?’ you asked abruptly.

  ‘An awful grey day,’ I tried to sidestep it.

  ‘The weather suits me perfectly,’ you said bitingly. ‘I feel exactly like that.’

  ‘It will clear up, Rachel.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Rachel,’ said George in a cajoling tone.

  You opened your mouth to snap at him, but then stopped yourself. ‘How can anyone expect me to work in a place like this?’ you asked after a while, more composed, but with a flat bitterness to your voice that sounded completely unlike the Rachel I’d known.

  ‘We have to make compromises to survive,’ I said cautiously.

  ‘Bullshit,’ you responded.

  ‘I’ve also had to put up security bars and top my garden wall with spikes,’ I pointed out.

  ‘But you can look at the sea over them. These things hem me in completely. Just look at them…!’ Your eyes were brimming with tears, one of the saddest sights I’d seen in the eight months I’d known you.

  ‘Please, my love,’ said George, slipping off his chair to go on his knees next to yours.

  ‘If only you’d asked me first,’ you reproached him. ‘But just to confront me with it like this!’

  ‘It is to keep you safe. Because I love you, dammit.’

  ‘Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater,’ you hissed at him. ‘I’m not going to live here any more.’

  ‘We’ll need security wherever we go,’ he pleaded.

  ‘I really don’t care,’ you said.

  ‘Let us all try to be reasonable,’ I said. ‘I’m sure we can find a solution. Right?’

  ‘You mean you want me to be reasonable,’ you snarled at me. ‘Because to you I’m the one who is unreasonable. I am the woman, aren’t I?’

  ‘I can’t deny that you’re a woman,’ I said, trying to sound as cheerful as I could. ‘Vive la différence and all that. But this is a dilemma and I’m sure we can face it together.’

  ‘I’m going to cancel my exhibition,’ you unexpectedly said with a cold firmness that cut through my guts. ‘There’s no way I can work in here.’

  ‘What are the alternatives?’ I asked. ‘Let us start working from there.’

  ‘I prefer to start with this house as it is.’ You corrected yourself: ‘As it was.’

  ‘In the country we live in…’ George began.

  ‘The country we live in is ruled by shit,’ you cut him short.

  ‘Then we have to learn to live with shit,’ he said calmly. ‘If the choice is between surviving with some dignity, and being killed or raped…’

  ‘I’d rather be raped than live with this!’ you cried.

  ‘Now you’re being…’ I bit my tongue. I couldn’t go on.

  ‘Go on, say it,’ you sneered. ‘Say it. I’m being childish—or stupid—or a bitch. Underline what is most applicable.’

  ‘You’re being grossly unfair to yourself,’ I said.

  ‘Then please be so kind as to make me see the light.’

  How on earth had we got there? It seemed as if our very friendship was beginning to cave in. And for the time being we were paralyzed, trapped in it, unable to find a way out.

  ‘Just a wild idea,’ I said at last, in trepidation. I looked into your smoldering eyes. ‘Start by taking away these bars. Use them in your hedge, or as a trellis in the garden, or wherever. Grow tomatoes or passion fruit or pumpkins on them. Even donate them to Pollsmoor Prison. Then you design something new. A grille you can live with.’

  ‘I cannot live with a grille.’

  ‘But you can try.’ I did my best to turn it into comedy. ‘See it as a challenge to your creativity.’

  ‘The monkey decorating the bars of her cage,’ you said. But the viciousness was out of it.

  ‘While you’re at it, you can start making some sculptures of creatures trapped in little cages. Monkeys, humanoids, toads, reptiles, anything under the sun or the visiting moon.’

  Slowly, slowly we returned to a semblance of reason and good-natured mellowness. By the time we decided to prolong the morning into a meal at one of our favorite haunts in Green Point, we could begin to find some fun in the world again.

  ‘I can see why you’ve been successful with women,’ you said, without anything leading up to it, sometime during the afternoon.

  ‘I don’t agree with the observation,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to hear the reason. Is it because I’ve been so good at putting them behind bars and in cages?’

  ‘No, I think you have a way of taking them out of their cages.’

  ‘I wish it were true. Sometimes, when you get somebody out of a cage, you land her in worse shit than before.’

  Why was I thinking, at that moment, of Tania?

  ***

  She was, indeed, one of ‘them’—the seemingly infinite liquorice allsorts of girls and women surrounding our Amandla project in Paris, largely hand-picked by Siviwe Mfundisi. But Tania was different. She was not, in Siviwe’s terminology, a tissue to blow your nose in and throw away. To begin with, she was not a groupie; she was a dedicated member of the project, and not there just for the fun and the fucking, but because her whole life was tuned in—but gaily, brightly, not gravely—to the idea of going to South Africa one day and being part of the shaping of a new country. What she had in common with the rest of Siviwe’s corps de ballet, was that she was beautiful. Dark, delicate, petite, perfectly shaped and surprisingly young, twenty-three, with sloe eyes and a mouth like a pickable plum, long slender hands, toes like pomegranate pips, and a fountain of laughter somewhere inside her, always ready to bubble over.

  Siviwe himself presented her to me. That made me wary, as I knew from experience his very smooth habit of disposing of exes by handing them down, with a show of generosity, to his comrades when he needed to clear his bed for the next incumbent. I think Tania had the same apprehension, and when we went home to my place from the bistrot where we’d been introduced, we were still, in a manner of speaking, sniffing at each other like two dogs that had just met on a corner and were not sure which one was going to snarl first. But as she had just been thrown out of her digs, she didn’t have anywhere else to go right then; and I had invited her on the explicit understanding that she could park in the bedroom while I took to the couch—which was how any number of my other affairs had started. It was my last year in Paris (although I did not know it yet), and I had just moved from the rue des Filles du Calvaire into a charming if still somewhat sparsely furnished apartment high up in the rue Vieille du Temple.

  On the way there, as we approached the corner of the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, she suggested that we have another drink on a terrace. It was a hot night in July, and most of Paris was on the streets; there was music pulsing everywhere, the night sky was an impossible shade of inky blue, and one had the impression of sleep-walking, wide awake, a few centimeters above the ground. So her proposal was quite understandable—it seemed like a sin to turn in early. But I had an idea that she wanted to work up some courage first, before faci
ng a strange man in a strange apartment, even if her attitude and the easy flow of her conversation did not betray any tension. My suspicion was confirmed when she started drinking several gin and tonics in quick succession. At any rate, the combination of the alcohol, the free-flowing summer night, the music (a violinist and an accordionist, resembling the cat and the fox in Pinocchio, came down the street and played at our table), the carefree talk, the theatrical sky above, all helped her to relax, and by the time we got up and shouldered her bundles and picked up her large suitcase to face the rest of the journey home, we were chatting and laughing like old friends. We had so much fun as we staggered up the scrubbed wooden stairs, waking most of the neighbors along the way, that we both collapsed in a heap on the floor when we arrived. And it was immediately clear that the couch would not be needed for the night.

  But what seemed to seal it was when, with half her clothes strewn about us on the floor, I turned my attention to her navel, which was one of the most perfectly shaped, and certainly the deepest, I had ever had the good fortune to come across. I waxed lyrical about it. ‘This needs a celebration,’ I said. ‘I must drink from it.’

  Unfortunately there was no appropriate drink available, so I proposed returning to the last bistrot and buying a bottle of champagne. Tania was amused, but tired too, and the whole thing was nearly wrecked when I wanted her to put on at least some of her clothes so that she could go with me. No, she said, that was taking it too far. If I really wanted to go, I could go on my own. I did. But the bistrot was closed, and I had to traverse half of Paris before I found what I wanted. By that time I was pretty exhausted too. And when at last I stumbled back into the apartment, Tania was fast asleep, right there on the floor where I had left her.

  For a while I stared down at her sleeping face, very pale against her dark hair, a thumb in her mouth. How could I possibly disturb her? But as I kneeled beside her, she stirred, and mumbled something, and smiled, and I gently pulled away the drape she had drawn across her, and saw that she had taken off the rest of her clothes. She was lying on her back, one leg drawn up sideways, the foot resting against the knee of the other. Well.

  I started kissing her navel, probing it with my tongue, very gently. I have had some rather disappointing experiences trying to wake up a sleeping woman to make love. But this time it worked. She thought, she said later, that it was a butterfly fluttering its wings against the gentle swell of her belly. And once she was awake, I poured the champagne over her, the way Nastasya had taught me to do it, just a trickle, which foamed in the deep hollow of her navel and spilled over the sides, and ran down towards the dreaming double fold of her sex. Her mound was smooth and free of pubic hair. In some women the shaven mound seems to expose the sex too obviously, too relentlessly, too brazenly, dare I say too in-your-face. In some, the lips are too busy and overstated, unnecessarily elaborate, like those flesh-eating flowers from foreign jungles. In Tania everything was perfect. It was neat and precise and small, like the slice of a mandarin. Its promise was interiority and fulfillment. It invited the unfolding, the probing, the discovery from which no traveler returns unchanged.

  We did not think of sleeping before mid-morning. It was the beginning of six months of honeymoon. Most of the time we spent in Paris, but we also traveled together to Amsterdam, to Geneva, to Rome, and through many regions of France. She was a magnificent travel companion, a born explorer. It was her idea to walk along the Gorges du Tarn. Hers, too, to spend several weeks during the harvesting season in the Bordeaux region, near Saint-Émilion, picking grapes and then treading them in huge vats—divested of our clothes, to prevent them getting stained.

  After our stint on the farm, Tania had to go back, while I stayed in the region for a few more weeks to attend a course in tasting and build on the knowledge I’d acquired, so many years before, from Uncle Johnny. But I couldn’t wait to return to her. Back in Paris, there was no end to Tania’s initiatives, or to the pleasure she took from sex—and brought to it. It was fun, above all: exuberant, frolicking fun. What she loved, was to find unusual, and preferably risky, times and places for making love, where we might be discovered at any moment. In the Bois de Boulogne or even an alley of the Jardin du Luxembourg among the statues of dead poets. On the back seat of a car, with friends in front. In a plush box in the Théâtre des Champs Élysées, listening to a performance by the Berlin Philharmonic (not really her cup of tea, which was why she chose to make love instead). In a telephone booth in the boulevard Montparnasse. Below the grandstand of Roland Garros during a match. Even, once, in a confessional in Saint-Sulpice which had just been vacated by a priest. The most daring, which I’m sure could have landed us in prison, was a quickie on Napoleon’s imperial throne in the palace of Fontainebleau. And when we were home, she would find other diversions to spice it up. If I was on the telephone, she would calmly unzip my pants and start fellating me. Or while I was on her, making love, or between her legs probing her folds and depths, she would dial a friend and try to reach orgasm while talking.

  ‘So that I can remember you when you go,’ was her laconic response whenever I tried to question her.

  ‘I won’t go anywhere without you, Tania.’

  ‘When the time comes you will leave me.’

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘I’m not blaming you, Chris. I’m only saying what’s true. You must know it too.’

  ‘I don’t know it and I don’t want to.’

  ‘Then you’re a coward, and I don’t sleep with cowards.’

  ‘I’m happy with you.’

  ‘I’m happy with you too, but that doesn’t mean it will last.’ (When so many years later you said almost the same words, it was like Tania’s voice speaking through you.) And then she placed her head between my hips, resting her cheek on my temporarily flaccid penis—we were on the kitchen floor, I think—and said, ‘One thing you must know: I will never be a burden to you. If you feel you have had enough of me, you must tell me, and I’ll go.’ There were times, like this, when she sounded incomparably older than her tender years.

  ‘I’ll never have enough of you, Tania,’ I assured her.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Of course you will. You have other things to do in the world besides being with me. One day you must go home to the Struggle. You have your writing. I can never come between you and any of that.’

  Which was, I suppose, good reason not to be upset when she left. Yet I had no idea that it would be permanent when it happened. I thought she’d gone to visit friends in the country; she had often talked about them, a farmhouse near Moulins, which she’d wanted to see in spring, among the almond trees in blossom. For a few weeks she had been off-color, dispirited, lethargic, with dark circles under her eyes. She often threw up. My God, I should have read the signs. But she had always been so conscientious about taking her pill.

  She wasn’t sure for how long she would be away. ‘A few days,’ she said when I asked. ‘Perhaps a week. Or even two. Depends on how I feel. I shall phone.’

  ‘Stay for as long as you need to,’ I assured her. ‘I want you back in blooming health.’

  But she did not telephone. And when I tried the Moulins number she had scribbled down for me, it was out of order. Even then I did not get unduly worried: I thought she’d made a mistake writing it down.

  After a month I realized that something was very wrong. That was when Siviwe phoned. ‘Sorry to upset you, comrade,’ he said. ‘But Tania won’t be coming back.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I couldn’t believe what he’d just said.

  ‘She is dead.’ He explained, with what was, for him, quite unusual sympathy. It was all very basic. Tania had had an abortion. She’d thought she could take it in her stride, but there were complications. By the time she contacted him it was already too late. He’d pleaded with her, but she didn’t want to ‘impose’ on me and had made him promise to convey the message only after the funeral. />
  It was almost impossible to believe. Worst of all was to come to terms with the fact that she hadn’t told me. She should have known that I would never have given her up. Nor the child. I had always had very strong convictions about abortion—probably the atavistic Calvinism with which I’d grown up. The idea was unbearable.

  ‘That is probably why she just went ahead,’ said Siviwe. ‘That little Tania had her feet on the ground. She certainly knew that a child would be an impossible complication in her circumstances. And in yours.

  So…’ There was an eloquent silence. ‘Both of you fucked up by that country over there.’

  ‘I loved her.’

  ‘I know she loved you too, Chris. She often spoke to me about it. But for that very reason she could not go on with it. She was that kind of person.’

  That kind of person, I thought. My God, I had lived with her, shared almost every day and night with her for six months; yet I did not know what kind of person she was. I did not know enough to have foreseen this. I did not know enough.

  What I did know, blindingly, was that my time in Europe had run out. This was the decisive moment. I could no longer stay away from the place that had made me the person I was. For better or for worse. I had to go back.

  ***

  The decisive moment—certainly the most spectacular of the war so far has been the toppling of a six-meter statue of Saddam in Baghdad. After seeing it happen forty or fifty times (I must confess to having sneaked some looks during the day as well), it does become somewhat déjà vu, but what the hell. A telling observation: the first reaction from the US troops was to hoist the American flag on the statue. Then, presumably, somebody in authority intervened and hastily replaced it with an Iraqi flag. But the Freudian slip had already showed. And it was the stars and stripes. America, America über alles. The one thing it has always excelled at is putting on a good show.