A Fork in the Road Read online

  It was the indignity, more than anything else, that overwhelmed me. Even at times when we had found it hard to communicate, even when there were great distances between us, I had always been in awe of his gravity, his composure, his quiet dignity: the very fact of being unable to reach out and touch him, had always confirmed that he was someone special, someone literally set apart. And all that had now been eroded, broken down to this pathetic little heap, mercilessly exposed to the eyes of the world.

  I still don’t know how it happened. But at a given moment I found myself standing over him with his pillow in my hands, preparing to push it down on his face. He might put up a struggle, brief and weak, I knew, but then he would succumb, and it would all be over. I could not bear it any longer. I was sure that if I were to ask him and he could respond, he would beg me to help him out of this into the peace of death.

  I was ready to do it. There was no one else near. In a minute or two I could go out and find a nurse and they would confirm that he was, thank God, dead. Nothing and no one stopped me. And yet I could not proceed.

  I dropped the pillow. I was trembling all over. I was crying. But I did not do it.

  An hour or two later I left. The nurses had confirmed that he was ‘stable’, that he might well remain in that state for days, for weeks. I could have spared him that, but I hadn’t. I drove back to the airport, caught a plane back to Cape Town. When I arrived home, there was a message from the old-age home to say that he had died. Not even died: just slipped quietly out of reach. The next day I flew back to attend the funeral.

  How often, in the years since then, have I recalled that moment of decision, trying to probe its silence, trying to explain to myself what had happened, what not; what had driven me to that moment – and then held me back.

  I think, now, that if our love had been straightforward and uncomplicated, I would probably have gone through with it. For his sake. To make it easier for him. To rid him of his pain and of the indignity. But if I had done it, it would also, at least to some extent, have been for myself. Because I could no longer take it. There might even have been bitterness in it. Resentment. Or shame. Perhaps, however preposterous it might seem, revenge. For what had not been accomplished between us. For what, between father and son, had not happened, had not been said. And all of these impulses made it impossible to go through with the deed.

  It made me realise, forced me to acknowledge, that I could commit a murder if it came to it. That I was capable of it. But I also knew that there were boundaries inside myself which I cannot cross. Boundaries which, ironically, my father himself, with his strict code of justice, of right and wrong, had inculcated in me.

  My sister Elbie – known to South African readers as a wonderful writer of juvenile books, Elsabe Steenberg – died three years after my father, when she was not yet sixty. She’d suffered from multiple sclerosis for many years. For me, the most lasting memories of her go back to our childhood. All those games in which she had to fetch and carry, serve and sustain, warn and watch. All those secrets she was expected to keep. All the paths on which she was supposed to follow me. But only for as long as it pleased her. Pushed too far, she was sure to rebel and tell me exactly where to get off. She could be as calm and reasonable as my father, but she also had his wry sense of humour, and she could laugh with unbridled joy if something really tickled her.

  She certainly could write. By the time she was fifteen she finished her first novel. Not far-fetched, blood-curdling inventions like my own early efforts, but adult stories about relationships and quiet fulfilment and loss. She turned to me for help, after she’d contacted a secretary to type the manuscript of that first novel, and only then discovered that she would not be able to pay the professional fee from her pocket money. Our parents were furious about her rashness, but I stepped in quietly and typed out the whole thing during my matric examination. When it was returned by the publisher she started on her second manuscript without missing a beat. She had a will of forged iron.

  When we were kids, the only way of resisting her when she put her narrow foot down, was by playing the invented game of ‘Auntie Paya’. It was more my invention than hers, and I still find it amazing that she ever consented to it. This consisted of her putting on a hat and a dressing gown of my mother’s to play the role of a munificent mother figure who was to be approached only in dire circumstances, in which case she could not refuse any request, no matter what was asked of her. I shamefully turned it into a way of getting anything I wanted; and because she had a holy respect for rules, she would grimly hand over whatever I begged for. A doll, chocolates, a favourite pillow, sometimes even money, of which I somehow was always short. But in mitigation I should add that when I knew that she really wanted something very badly, it would make me glow with pleasure to surprise her with it when she least expected it.

  After my return from Paris, we sadly began to grow apart, mainly because of strong differences on politics and religion, and on matters like divorce and remarrying. And as her illness progressed and in sheer desperation she turned to all kinds of unscrupulous quacks and con men, the distance between us grew – smoothed over only on very special occasions, as when a small group of close friends learned of her wish, when she was already bedridden, to reach one last time the summit of a mountain near the family’s holiday home in the Eastern Free State, and achieved the near impossible by carrying her up in a wheelchair. It happened not so much because they had made the decision, but because Elbie had believed it to be possible. And her ferocious faith at times even inspired a sceptic like myself.

  Curiously, she never read my work and I never read hers; yet each would fiercely defend the other whenever there was any need to unite against the world outside. And deep down, there was a blood link that held us together, even when it became impossible to talk openly about our differences. And then, in the last years of her life we recovered the early, innocent trust in each other that had made our childhood such a miraculous place to live in and return to.

  My mother died quite recently: when I started writing this memoir she was still alive, and we were waiting, not solemnly but serenely, for her hundredth birthday. About a year before that, she’d woken up one morning and told the nurse who had come to tend to her that God had come to visit her in the night and had told her that he would soon be back to fetch her – there were just a few bits of business he still had to wrap up. I was in Johannesburg at the time and when the matron of the frail-care unit telephoned my sister Marita with the news we drove down to Potchefstroom to say goodbye. With her one could never know. We couldn’t take God on his word – he’d failed her so many times – but just in case.

  She was in a lucid and happy mood when we reached the home, and she didn’t seem depressed or even sleepy. In fact, the nurse on duty told us that when she’d come into the ward early that morning with her coffee tray, my mother was content to be moved into a sitting position; and when the nurse momentarily turned her back to attend to the patient in the next bed, she quietly pulled away the back of the nurse’s slacks and poured her whole cup of coffee into the gap. Quite a light-hearted leave-taking it turned out to be, as she happily slurped up the cup of yoghurt she always enjoyed with such relish on our rare visits. The whole day seemed to be bathed in a gentle and smiling light.

  But it was not the end. God must have jumbled the message – he must also be getting on in years – but whatever it was, he did not turn up for the appointment. And then, months later, when everything had settled again, and it had been tentatively agreed among all of us that nothing would happen before 16 October, when her century was full, she very quietly, mischievous as always, sidestepped God and slipped away before he could show up.

  But tonight, writing this chapter, there are three deaths that somehow remain particularly painful to come to terms with. The first was Rob Antonissen. He was Flemish, and head of the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch at Rhodes when I arrived there on a miserable August day in 1961, after the two years i
n Paris. Rob very nearly didn’t make it to the station in time: he’d been working on an article and waited till the last minute to rush to the station, and the train was only an hour late instead of its usual two or three, so there was a wild race, and Rob made it by the skin of his teeth before the boom slammed down over the railway line. The stationmaster and several of his sidekicks came running to berate him, whereas Rob, flustered and frantic, his long overcoat flapping in the wind, gesticulated and apologised and tried to explain while Estelle and I heaved our luggage from the compartment on to the platform. It took quite a while to sort everything out and then we all collapsed with laughter. I’d been rather diffident about accepting the post at Rhodes, as all I’d known about Rob was his reputation as the fiercest literary critic in South Africa, but I’d desperately needed a job and was prepared to make the best of it for a while, until I could land something less daunting. But in the end I stayed for thirty years and Rob became one of the dearest and closest friends of my life. A man of dazzling erudition who could read eight or nine languages, Greek and Latin among them, loved music and painting and sculpture, was passionate about the theatre, and dreamed about becoming a conductor.

  And there was his sense of humour, which could be as expansive and ribald as anything ever thought up in Flemish painting or writing. Bosch and Bruegel and Ensor were in that laugh, and Timmermans and Streuvels and van de Woestijne. I can still hear – and see – him laugh, folded double, his eyes streaming with tears and his glasses misted up, his nose changing shape, every pore in his face exuding joy. Only someone who had suffered deeply could feel fun so profoundly.

  His family was adorable too. His lovely and lively wife, Liesje, and three daughters, Rike and Helga and little Elsje. There had been a boy too, Dirk – the first son born in the family for a generation, and the only one to pass on the Antonissen name. He’d been born soon after their arrival in South Africa, and the whole family in Belgium had been living for the day when they could see him. It took several years before Rob was able to go on his first sabbatical and they boarded a ship to Europe. On the day of their arrival every member of the family, even distant cousins and uncles and aunts, were on the quayside to meet the four-year-old little Dirk. But there was no little Dirk. He’d died during the voyage and had to be buried at sea, and communications in those days, just after the war, being what they were, it had not been possible to transmit the tidings to the family. Not one of them ever recovered completely, even though the depths of their Catholic faith helped them to bear what many others would not have managed to.

  From the first days of our years in Grahamstown Rob and I were friends. To me, it was like discovering the world anew. The depth of his feeling about the good and the bad of it, was unfathomable. He was one of the only people I have ever known who could make me think that there must be something about religion after all.

  He read every manuscript I produced in those years – with an acuity and an understanding that never ceased to amaze me. He never pulled his punches. He wouldn’t allow a suspect comma or full stop to pass without thorough motivation and explanation. At the same time he could be generous in his praise. But what mattered was never the praise or the condemnation, but the understanding. More often than not he made me understand what it was I’d really been trying to say. And what he shared was not just his insights into literature, but the fullness of his humanity. In the eleven years and one month I knew him I may have learned more about writing, and about living, than in the whole rest of my life.

  And then he died. Cancer. He was fifty-three years old. Don’t try to tell me there is justice in the world.

  At one stage, as so often happens, the cancer went into remission. The doctors pronounced him ‘clean’. There was no sign of the malignancy left. We arranged a small celebration at our home to welcome him back to life. All his closest and dearest friends were there. A week later the cancer was back. From then on the descent was steep and brutal.

  When the brief September holidays began, Alta and I went to her parents in Gordon’s Bay. I visited Rob just before we left. He was shockingly frail. But his bed was littered with music scores and when he spoke about Bach and Mozart, his eyes were still bright.

  About four or five days into the holiday I woke Alta up in the night.

  ‘Rob has died,’ I told her.

  ‘How do you know?’ she asked, aghast.

  ‘Because he’d just come to me in the night,’ I said. ‘To say goodbye.’

  It was not a dream. It was much too clear for that. I knew that he’d been in the room. And there had been nothing sad or dark about the visit. He had to go, he’d told me. And he didn’t want us to mourn. It was a good thing to go.

  Later in the day Liesje telephoned. He’d died at precisely the time I had awakened Alta.

  Then there was Daantjie. A larger-than-life man. With a larger-than-life laugh. Daantjie could speak ten or twelve different accents without any trace of a language. A gourmet of the female sex. And a lover of words. No one I have ever known could turn language inside out as Daantjie could. If he couldn’t find an existing word for what he wanted to say, he would invent one – or three, or seventeen. Nothing in his life was done, or said, in half measures. He was a specialist in crudeness and fulmination. At the same time he was passionate about literature, and he could quote from Shakespeare or Donne or Whitman or Dylan Thomas or Joyce or Zola for hours; literally for hours.

  In his young days, when he drove a ‘book bus’ through the country, he’d regularly summon up the help of these writers to lure girls into the cramped but welcoming space of his bunk.

  Daantjie was a lover, most especially, of physical activity. Walking, cycling, swimming. A lover of the sea. A lover of mountains too. He took me along to the Cederberg once. There wasn’t a peak or a slope or a rock formation he didn’t know by name. He was as strong as a bull. And he lived life fully and recklessly.

  I remember him telling me once about a walk up Jonkershoek Mountain outside Stellenbosch, one Sunday morning, with his son Neel. How, on the way down, his foot had caught on a protruding tree root and how he’d started falling.

  ‘I fell,’ said Daantjie, ‘and I fell and I fell and I fell. It went on forever. I remember thinking, if I had a book with me now I could finish reading it before I hit the bottom. And still I fell. At a given moment I could see my arse coming wheeling down past my ears. And still I fell. I think, if you consider it properly, I haven’t stopped falling yet. I’m still falling.’

  There was nothing he wouldn’t do for a friend. I’m sure his family often suffered because of his unbelievable generosity towards others. What he couldn’t stand was hypocrisy and pretence. Then he would be relentless. Apartheid and its practitioners he hated with a very particular virulence. And why shouldn’t he? He was immensely proud of being a descendant of the first mixed marriage ever performed at the Cape of Good Hope. To hear him talking to a group of brown fishermen at Hout Bay, or a team of builders in what remained of District Six after the coloured inhabitants had been expelled and their houses bulldozed, was to rediscover not only a language but all the human joys and sorrows and excesses that went with it.

  Then the cancer got to him too. He put up a fight as ferocious as any in his life. But in the end he succumbed. To see him waste away – pale for the first time in his life, I’m sure – struggling to find words, keeping his eyes closed when the light became too bright, was to learn the saddest thing about death. One’s only consolation is that his ashes were scattered in the Cederberg. And that something of the spirit of Africa was kept alive by a man who could live, and love, as deeply as Daantjie Saayman could.

  The third death was very different. This was not someone who had lived long and fully. It was a child of only a few months old.

  In those days, the early seventies, our very special friends, Gerrit and Marina Geertsema, often came down to the Eastern Cape to visit us. Sometimes we would all go down together to the not very comfortable beach house we t
hen had at Kleinemonde, about fifty kilometres from Grahamstown. At other times they went on their own. On this occasion they brought their two little boys with them, Luka, then about four, and the baby, also Gerrit, whom we hadn’t met before. They’d been looking forward to this trip enormously. Gerrit was a great fisherman, which he still is; and they had a few hectic months in the theatre behind them. They needed this break.

  But early on the third or fourth morning they came back from the sea, and needed a doctor. The baby had taken ill. I took them to our doctor, who decided immediately that they should rush him to the hospital. I had to go off to a lecture. When I came back, the child was dead.

  There are things the mind cannot grasp. Not even with hindsight.

  I remember going to the undertaker’s in the afternoon, with Gerrit. Mr Inggs was a collector of vintage cars, and the entire backyard of his tumbledown premises was crammed with the carcases of ancient vehicles. We had to pick our way around, and past, and over the remains of long-dead cars, and then go up a crumbling staircase, to a back porch stacked with coffins that seemed as decayed and second-hand as the cars. When we knocked, there was a long silence. Then the door was opened on a chink. And a very pale, very round face emerged at roughly the height of my navel. The whole conversation that ensued took place between Mr Inggs and my midriff. There was something Dickensian about him: he was small and rotund, with an expression of chronic sadness applied to his face, and he was dressed all in black, with a black bowler hat on his head. He had no voice, but spoke in a sibilant whisper.