A Fork in the Road Read online

  I had gone to Dachau twenty years before, to research an article for the German magazine Stern. I was given carte blanche. But because it was 1986, in the middle of the states of emergency that marked the darkest circle of the hell of apartheid, I could not resist following, step by macabre step, the rise of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s march to his ultimate madness and death. Not that it was easy: except in Bavaria, I found people curiously reluctant to talk about that past; in Nuremberg it was almost impossible to find the Zeppelin Feld where the great rallies had taken place, and the court of justice on the Fürthertstrasse where the post-war trials had been held. There followed the unsettling discovery in the courtroom – once we’d located the crucial number 625 which seemed to have been deliberately misplaced – that all courts of justice, from the ones in which my father had presided in my childhood, to the one in Pretoria where Breyten had been tried, to this one in which Goering and Hess and Kaltenbrunner and Donitz and their accomplices had been herded together, have the same smell. Dust, and wormwood, stale tobacco, and old sweat, and perhaps fear. An overwhelmingly human smell.

  Then on to Dachau. Most of the barracks have been demolished – unlike in Auschwitz, where they have been left intact. As a result, what dominates in Dachau is one’s exposure to space. To openness, blankness, emptiness. It comes as a shock, and yet it is so utterly logical, to discover that during all the years when the camp was in use there was a ban on leaving a mark of any description anywhere – wall or beam or bunk or chair or table. Is it not one of the most basic urges that define us as human, the need to make signs? Is it not the last and most definitive of our needs, when everything else falls away or is stripped from us: to leave a mark? To say I was here? When that is taken away, we are deprived of the very last possibility of recording our presence and our passage.

  It is all the more shocking in a place like Dachau, to be forced to face the proliferation of graffiti from our own time in the camp. The silence of that past – the cacophony of today. And in the midst of all the other obscenities, in one of the two restored barracks on the site, marked with the bold statement of a date, 28.6.86, a mere two months before my visit, the final blasphemy, a swastika.

  Moving through the museum, one is confronted, every inch of the way, with huge photographs documenting every step in the process that led from the exuberant early demonstrations of nationhood and rediscovered identity after the devastation of 1918, via the celebrations of law and order, of rules and laws and regulations, the terrifying logic of the System – every little ramification of it replicated in the South Africa of my own time – to its culmination in Nuremberg, and in this place. It soon becomes overwhelming. It is nauseating. Yet there is no escape. When I become claustrophobic, physically and morally unable to face another photograph, another torture rack, another torn piece of clothing, and try to escape to a window, to breathe, to see fresh air and open space outside – all there is to see is the place itself, the stark and very simple reality of the space where it happened, where each of those atrocities took place. Inside, the mementoes, the records, the representations – outside, the real thing.

  Everything must have looked so different then. From all the records, all the photos, the overwhelming impression is of bodies – thousands upon thousands of them in the workplace, at the roll calls, in the mass graves, inside the barracks: the three-tiered bunks, so narrow that it would seem too small for a single person, but with three, four, five, six of them crammed into each. And now this sudden emptiness, this sham of serenity that shockingly reminds one of a Buddhist stone garden, in which the past reverberates without end.

  But there is no resolution. What is the ‘sense’ of torture, of atrocity, of a place like Dachau, or Auschwitz? Suddenly, remembering all this, I recall a later visit to Prague, to the stark beauty of the Jewish cemetery, to the small museum with its documents of the children transported from here to Treblinka: the pictures drawn by those children in the camp; the one that will forever remain unforgettable: a bright butterfly, drawn by a small Dutch boy – accompanied by a phrase in a childish scrawl: Hier heb ik geen vlinder gezien. Here I have seen no butterfly. Could this, in any way, perhaps, point towards the elusive ‘sense’? Is torture, as it is generally argued, the final denial of the humanity of the other, because without such denial, surely, it cannot be done? Hence, the initial ‘branding’ of the other as non-human, as deviant, or miscreant, as Jew or Black or whatever? Or could it also be the opposite – by doing something inhuman to the other, I confirm the humanity within myself and express my disgust with it? Because I know what pain means, I can torture another and thereby relish the fact that it is not being done to myself? Is that why, in an act or a system of torture, there always lurks an ideal of the absolute, of purity, of something greater than ourseves: an ultimate justice, Christianness, Aryanness, Whiteness …?

  Some individuals can rise above this, or break out of it. I thought about it – how could I not? – when Karina and I recently visited Mandela. The opposite of what Barbara Masekela’s husband Henry said after his release from prison and torture: The only thing that suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering. There are many who think and react like that: they are the ones who arrive in positions of power, later, and take their revenge for what they have not learned. Because to them suffering is useless, they can inflict it on others. What makes Mandela not just different, but the opposite, is that suffering has opened a space within himself in which he can discover the deeper humanity in which he can be with others. One also experiences this with Desmond Tutu. That is why, every time one comes away from him, even after a short moment of sharing, there is a sense of being more fully human, of having glimpsed what ‘being human’ may truly and fully mean. In Mandela’s case by having personally plumbed the depths of what he suffered with others; in Tutu’s case by having so deeply shared the suffering of others that he has assumed it as his own.

  And Auschwitz takes and tests the measure of suffering, the limits and the possibilities of pain. Of endurance. Trying to take in everything that can be seen in these neat, precise rows of barracks – the Nazis were nothing if not meticulous and tidy; they must all have been very obedient as children – is of course impossible; the mind cannot compass it. What remains fixed in the mind are details. In Dachau it was the bunk on which prisoners had been tied, spreadeagled, to be flogged; and the splintered remains of a cane lying on it. In Auschwitz, because of the way in which all the people who had passed through there – women, children, men – are now represented by the most banal of objects, things: mountains of shoes, of children’s clothing, of spectacles, of combs, of chamber pots, of small suitcases with names written in bold capitals, of hair spilling from canvas bags. Of all the things I will remember from Auschwitz, this is what will haunt me until the end of my days: one small pink shoe; a single long, thick, blonde braid hacked from a woman’s head. Only last week, looking for something else, I came across a magazine from the seventies about the house in Grahamstown in which our family lived at the time. It ends with a glimpse of Sonja: Little Sonja Brink went tripping off there in her pink shoes. She twinkled at us, refused to talk or to be photographed, and disappeared.

  Here, too, a small girl once twinkled and went off, leaving a single pink shoe behind. On the way, possibly, to the gas chamber. Still refusing to talk, seventy years later. And yet, how eloquent the silence of that small pink shoe. I remember a philosopher once talking about ‘the interminable silence of things’. And of one blonde braid, which must have been the crowning glory of a young life. Silent now. Collecting dust, yet shining through the gloom.

  Through two small objects, two mementoes of a world once real, a world once lived, small lost moments of joy, of being, of existing, Auschwitz has gathered, for ever, all the unbearable lightness of being. A child’s shoe, a girl’s braid.

  What remains in the end is aways – and only – words.

  I remember Rilke:

  Aber weil Hiersein viel ist, un
d weil uns scheinbar

  alles das Hiesige braucht, dieses Schwindende, das

  seltsam uns angeht. Uns, die Schwindendsten. Ein Mal

  jedes, nur ein Mal. Ein Mal und nichtmehr. Und wir auch

  ein Mal. Nie wieder. Aber dieses

  ein Mal gewesen zu sein, wenn auch nur ein Mal:

  irdisch gewesen zu sein, scheint nicht widerrufbar.

  In the translation of J. B. Leishman:

  But because being here is much, and because all this

  that’s here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely

  concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Just once,

  everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too,

  once. And never again. But this

  having been once, though only once,

  having been once on earth – can it ever be cancelled?

  THE UNDISCOVER’D COUNTRY

  I SUPPOSE IT is inevitable that as one grows older, the progress of one’s life is marked by deaths. When one is young, these deaths are a mere hiccup in the flow of life. Moments, occasions where the unforeseen, even the unthinkable, breaks into the ordinary and places it in another light, a new context. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, they become more and more seamlessly integrated into the flow of life itself. I must confess that on my travels I never miss an occasion to visit a graveyard, to read the tombstones and wonder and fantasise about the people resting below them.

  What remains a shock is news of the deaths of lovers: a body that has been so close to you that its contours become part of the lines that define yourself – and suddenly it is no longer there. It is like losing part of yourself, a limb. And its phantom will continue to haunt you. For me, Ingrid, inevitably, was the first. I haven’t been to her grave for many years. I may not even find it today. But the day of her death I can never forget, and how I went blind, and how the world suddenly became a strange place, as if a huge, invisible hole had opened up somewhere to let in a cold wind from elsewhere, which nothing could keep out any more.

  In due course she was followed by others. Sometimes I only learned about their passing much later, months, even years. Stephanie with her wide smile and her freckled shoulders. Paddy and her drawings in the sand; and how we fell asleep at the fringe of the sea and only woke up when a small wave came rippling across our feet, and the shape of her hands and the music of her voice. Elisabeth brilliant and luminous, always arguing, always questioning, never content with easy answers; shivering in the wind that carried the sweet smell of the pine forest, as her thin thighs turned blue in the cold. There must come a time when one is surrounded by more of the dead than the living. Until, gently or violently, one is gathered up with them. The congregation of the dead. Not all of them lovers or loved ones. Just friends, casual acquaintances, even enemies. People who used to be there and no longer are. There may be some among them of whose passing I haven’t even heard yet. And others of whose deaths I’ve learned, somehow, somewhere, only to find out much later that the news was false. It can be unsettling. I remember at least one person, quite recently, of whom I’d already taken leave in my mind; and then, out of the blue, one day, there he was again, among the guests at a lecture or a launch or something, as if nothing untoward had happened; and it was so unexpected that when he came to me and I shook his hand – not a cold or bony hand at all, but warm and sweaty exactly as I remembered it – before I could stop myself I blurted out, ‘But I thought you’d died long ago!’

  There are other deaths that will never fade from memory. In October 1993, I was telephoned by the frail-care centre in the old-age home in which my father, then eighty-eight, resided. He had suffered a series of small strokes and was in a coma. I flew up to Johannesburg and from there drove to Potchefstroom, where I found him in a sorry shape. Since his late fifties he had suffered several heart attacks – once I had to rush back from Finland because we thought it was the end – but he had always managed to recover. But this time it seemed serious. And during the week I spent in the old-age home, sitting at his bedside most of the time, I was aware that this was a final goodbye. He never regained consciousness, so there was no chance of exchanging some last words – and what would we have said if it had been possible? He did feel discomfort and pain, however, or so it seemed to us. And it was a harrowing experience to see him suffering and struggling, but unable to do anything about it. From time to time I took one of his hands in mine. Gnarled and burnt by years of sun, compulsively working in his garden, they seemed so out of place on those stark white sheets: more talons than hands. He never gave any sign of being aware of my presence at all. Except once, very briefly, when he did open his eyes and looked at me, and it seemed the mere shadow of a smile appeared on his face, but that might have been wishful thinking. For the rest, he just lay there, sinking, sinking slowly, and clearly suffering, but unable to go.

  It became unbearable. And then the moment came, one morning when I went down to the frail-care centre from the flat where my mother still lived. The door of his ward was closed, but I opened it from the passage, to find two nurses working with him, washing him and changing his pyjamas and his bedclothes. I turned away towards the passage so that they could finish their ministrations. My father had never had any self-consciousness about being naked in the house; if my mother had always maintained a sense of propriety, he could not care less. But there was something about the scene that morning that pierced me to the quick. His helplessness in the hands of the nurses. Reduced to just a body. Not even a body, just a wretched bundle of bones covered by a parchment of skin. Curled up like a foetus, wholly defenceless, moaning almost inaudibly as they handled him with brusque efficiency.

  It did not last for more than a few seconds. Then I found myself back in the passage, leaving the nurses to finish their sad little task. As soon as they had done, they came out, smiled at me and motioned at me to go in.

  I went to stand by his bedside. He was lying on his back now, his rough farmer’s hands like the claws of a big bird involuntarily clutching and unclutching on the white sheets, his eyes closed, the hint of a grimace on his lips, and that ceaseless low whisper of a moan coming from somewhere deep inside him.

  In a slow but unstoppable way my whole life with him and my mother came reeling past me. The way he held me against his body when I was small. How strong and reassuring his sinewy arms were. How he had taught me to swim. And tennis. He’d never been a demonstrative person. When I had done well at school, he might touch my shoulder briefly; and even that was excessive. But the smallest hint of satisfaction, let alone pride, was enough to make me feel light-headed. All my life I’d been searching for a clear sign of affection. It had happened from time to time, but rarely, and always muted, restrained, never unambiguous.

  Over all the years there had been a distance and a reticence. There were occasions, especially when the family had gone on holiday, when we could all laugh or sing together. But when there were only the two of us, we couldn’t find the words or gestures to express our closeness. It may be an exaggeration, but I believe I can trace it back to my very first conscious memory. We were still living in Vrede. I could not have been much older than two and a half, because my mother was still pregnant with Elbie, who was born shortly before my third birthday. That was why she couldn’t catch me, one day when she wanted to give me a hiding and I ran away. Through the garden and the red earth of my father’s vegetable beds, under a wire fence, across a couple of streets, to the red-brick building of my father’s office, where a black policeman was standing outside warming himself in the sun. He wanted to know what I was looking for. I glanced back over my shoulder, saw my mother approaching from a distance, and grabbed him by the arm: ‘Where’s my father? I want my father!’

  ‘Come with me,’ said the policeman and went on ahead of me, down a long bare passage to the office.

  I was saved!

  But it was a pyrrhic victory. Yes, my father welcomed me, smiled, even – if I remember correctly – briefly fo
lded me into his arms.

  But then he told the policeman to take me back to my mother.

  Which was only to be expected. What else could he have done? But that compound feeling of safety and betrayal has remained with me for the rest of my life. Mostly I forgot about it. But there were a few times in my life when the memory did return, most lucidly a few years ago when Athol Fugard asked me about my earliest memory. That was when I realised how that subaquatic memory had remained with me all the time. And I presume it also came back on that terrible, unforgettable day when the black man came to our house to ask for help after he’d been assaulted by his master and by the police; and then my father had come home from his game of tennis and told him that he couldn’t help, he had to go back to the police – the very police who had assaulted him.

  There were so many other things that were unscrolled in my mind as I stood beside the freshly made bed: my father on a hunt, or skinning a springbok with long, precise strokes of his sharp knife; my father on his high magistrate’s bench, copying the evidence on his foolscap pages; my father digging or watering in his vegetable garden; my father in the fowl run, while I sat on a nest teaching the hens to lay eggs; my father smashing a lob on the tennis court; my father, wearing his floppy little sun hat, on one of his compulsive walks, ten or fifteen kilometres every day: was he trying to clear his thoughts, or was it meant as exercise, or perhaps – a depressing suspicion from later years – as a way of getting away from home?; my father in his black tailcoat and hard white collar among the elders in church; my father on one of our Sunday afternoon family walks, squatting to shape a small dam on the dirt road for my sister Elbie to pee in; my father under the reading lamp in my room checking my Latin declensions and conjugations; my father telling us bedtime stories with wonderful codas and cadenzas that could leave us limp with laughter; my father with the newspaper on his lap in front of the fire; his endless patience, his unexpected quips and straight-faced jokes. All of it now reduced to this small bundle of dry skin and bones.