A Dry White Season Read online

  “Not really.” He changed his legs, avoiding her eyes. “One gets used to it. Gives me time to think. And there’s all my papers and stuff to sort and bring up to date.”

  “About Gordon?”

  “Yes, that too.”

  “You amaze me.” There was nothing bitchy in her voice; it sounded more like admiration. “The way you manage to keep at it, no matter what happens.”

  He said uneasily: “I suppose one just does what one can.”

  “Most other people would have given up long ago.” A calculated pause: “But is it really worth your while, Dad?”

  “It’s all I have.”

  “But I’m concerned about you, Dad. That bomb the other day. What if Johan hadn’t been there to put out the fire? The whole house could have burned down.”

  “Not necessarily. The study is well apart from the rest.”

  “But suppose all your papers had been destroyed? Everything you’ve been collecting about Gordon?”

  He smiled, putting his cup on the low table beside his deck-chair; he was feeling quite relaxed now, in that lazy-May sunshine. “Don’t worry,” he said, “they’ll never lay hands on that.”

  “Where on earth do you keep the stuff?” she asked casually.

  “I made a false bottom for my tools cupboard, you see. A long time ago already. Nobody will ever think of looking there.”

  “More coffee?”

  “No, thank you.”

  She poured some for herself, all of a sudden curiously energetic. He looked at her fondly, enjoying the luxury of her attentiveness, indulging himself, abandoning himself to her sympathy, and to the caressing of the autumn sun, the dull afterglow of the red wine.

  It was only on the way back, late that afternoon, that he thought in sudden panic: What if Suzette had had something very specific in mind when she’d questioned him so carefully, with so much studied nonchalance?

  Angrily he rejected the thought. How could one think that of one’s own child? What sense would remain in the world if one no longer had the right to trust one’s own family?

  He wondered whether he should discuss it with Johan. But the wind made such a noise through the broken windows that conversation was almost ruled out. Without realising it he was driving faster and faster.

  “Watch out for speedcops! “Johan shouted.

  “I’m driving my normal speed,” he grumbled, easing his foot off the accelerator. But he was impatient now, brooding, deeply perturbed.

  Even though he despised himself for his own suspicions, for harbouring the mere thought, he knew he would have no peace of mind before he’d done something to allay his fears. Andwhile Johan was away to church that evening he unscrewed the small trap-door in the wooden casement of the bath and transported all his documents to the new hiding-place, meticulously screwing the lid back after he’d finished.

  One night later that week the garage was burgled so cautiously and professionally that neither Ben nor Johan was disturbed by the slightest noise. It was only when he came to his car the next morning that Ben discovered what had happened. The entire tools cupboard had been methodically ripped apart and the contents lay strewn all over the garage floor.

  EPILOGUE

  Very little remains before I arrive back where I started with Ben’s story. A senseless circle – or a spiral moving slowly inward after all? Almost lightly I clutched at another man’s life to avoid or exorcise the problem of my own. I discovered very soon that no half-measures were possible. Either evasion or total immersion. And yet, with almost everything written down, what have I resolved of the enigma that tantalised me so? Ben: my friend the stranger. The disturbing truth is that even as I prepare to finish it off I know that he will not let go of me again. I cannot grasp him: neither can I rid myself of him. There is no absolution from the guilt of having tried.

  I am left with a sense of hopelessness. In my efforts to do justice to him, I may have achieved the opposite. We belong to different dimensions: one man lived, another wrote; one looked forward, the other back; he was there, and I am here.

  No wonder he remains beyond my reach. It is like walking in the dark with a lamp and seeing blunt objects appearing and disappearing in the narrow beam of light, but remaining incapable of forming an image of the territory as such. It is still a wilderness. But it was either this – or nothing at all.

  Immediately after discovering the burglary in his garage Ben drove in to town and telephoned me from a booth at the station. An hour later I met him in front of Bakker’s bookshop. The strange, thin, fugitive creature so different from the man I thought I’d known.

  The rest is mostly guesswork or deduction, in which I may be influenced by the same paranoia he had written about; but it must be told.

  He posted his papers and notebooks from Pretoria. And I like to imagine that, for once, he allowed himself a touch of irony by first telephoning Suzette to say:

  “Please do me a favour, my dear. Remember those notes we spoke about – all that stuff in connection with Gordon, you know: well, it’s just occurred to me it may not be so safe with me after all. Do you think I could bring it over so you could store it forme?”

  One can imagine how she would try to suppress her excitement, saying eagerly: “Of course, Dad. But why take the trouble of bringing it here? I’ll come over to collect it.”

  “No, don’t worry. I’ll bring it myself.”

  In that way, of course, he would eliminate the risk of being followed: knowing that everything was to be deposited with Suzette they wouldn’t bother to tail him to Pretoria. And an hour or so later, quiet, pale, content, he would hand in his package at the parcel counter of the post office in Pretoria and then drive out to Suzette’s home on Waterkloof Ridge.

  She would come out to meet him. Her eyes would eagerly search the car. Slowly her face would drop as he explained casually: “You know, I thought about it again. I’ve landed so many people in trouble that I’d rather not compromise you in any way. So I decided I’d rather burn the whole lot. I must admit it’s a load off my mind."

  Of course she wouldn’t dare to give away her feelings; her lovely make-up acting as a mask to her shock and anger.

  A few days later the parcel was delivered at my house. And then he was killed.

  That, I thought, was the end of it.

  But fully one week after his funeral his last letter reached me. Dated 23 May, the night of his death:

  I really didn’t mean to bother you again, but now I have to. Hopefully for the last time. I have just had another anonymous call. A man’s voice. Saying they would be coming for me tonight, something to that effect. I’ve had so many of these calls before that I’ve learned to shrug them off. But I have the feeling that this time it’s serious. It may just be the state of my nerves, but I don’t think so. Please for give me if I’m troubling you unnecessarily. But just in case it really is serious I want to warn you in time. Johan isn’t here tonight. And anyway I wouldn’t like to upset him unduly.

  The caller spoke English, but with an Afrikaans accent. Something very familiar about it, even though he was trying to smother it, probably by holding a handkerchief over the receiver. It was he. I’m quite convinced of it.

  There have been two more burglaries at my house this past week. I know what they’re looking for. They are not prepared to wait any longer.

  If I am right in my suspicion it is imperative that you know about it.

  One feels a strange calm at a moment like this. I have always liked endgames best. If it hadn’t happened in this way, they would have found another. I know I couldn’t possibly have gone on like this for much longer. The only satisfaction I can still hope for is that everything will not end here with me. Then I shall truly be able to say, with Melanie: “I do not regret for one moment a single thing that has happened.”

  At about eleven o’clock that night he was run over by a car. According to the newspaper report the accident occurred when he was on his way to post a letter. But how could th
e reporter have known it, unless Ben still had the letter with him when it happened? And if he had, then who posted it afterwards? And why?

  Would that explain the week’s delay before it was delivered? Of course, it may quite simply be due to Johannesburg’s notorious postal services. On the other hand it is possible that having found it on his body and perused it they decided I should receive it. In which case they could have had only one motive: to keep me under surveillance; to follow the trail from here.

  They cannot be so obtuse as not to realise I would be suspicious about the delayed delivery. If that is so, they deliberately intended it as a warning or a threat, by making sure that I would be conscious of being watched.

  Then why did I go ahead by writing it all down here? Purely from sentimental loyalty to a friend I had neglected for years? Or to pay some form of conscience money to Susan? It is better not to pry too deeply into one’s own motives.

  Is everything really beginning anew with me? And if so: how far to go? Will one ever succeed in breaking the vicious circle? Or isn’t that so important? Is it really just a matter of going on, purely and simply? Prodded, possibly, by some dull, guilty feeling of responsibility towards something Ben might have believed in: something man is capable of being but which he isn’t very often allowed to be?

  I don’t know.

  Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I am entitled to, is no more than this: to write it down. To report what I know. So that it will not be possible for any man ever to say again: I knew nothing about it.

  1976.1978–1979.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born to a South African Dutch family in 1935, André Brink was one of a group of South African writers who, in the 1960s, helped to break down national taboos on the treatment of sex and religion in fiction. In a highly charged atmosphere he insisted on the need for confronting the social and political realities of his country. In 1967 he moved to Europe but later returned to South Africa to, in his words, “accept full responsibility for everything I write—not as a member of a small white enclave, but as a writer belonging more to Africa than to Europe.” Although he has received the CNA Award, South Africa’s most prestigious literary prize, three times, two of his novels, Looking on Darkness and A Dry White Season, were banned in South Africa. André Brink is currently a Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. In addition to his many other honors, he has received Great Britain’s Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for the literary work best reflecting the ideas to which Dr. King dedicated his life, and in 1980 Mr. Brink was awarded France’s Prix Médicis Etranger. In early 1983 the French Government made him a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. His work has been published in twenty countries. His novels include A Chain of Voices and Imaginings of Sand.

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  Copyright

  Nothing in this novel has been invented, and the climate, history, and circumstances from which it arises are those of South Africa today. But separate events and people have been recast in the context of a novel, in which they exist as fiction only. It is not the surface reality that is important but the patterns and relationships underneath that surface. Therefore, all resemblance between the characters and incidents in this book and people and situations outside is strictly coincidental.

  First published in Great Britain in 1979 by W. H. Allen & Co. Ltd.

  First U.S. edition published in 1980 by William Morrow and Company, Inc.

  A DRY WHITE SEASON. Copyright © 1979 by André Brink.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780062031433

  First Harper Perennial edition published 2006.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN-10:0-06-113863-0 (pbk.)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-06-113863-8 (pbk.)

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