Before I Forget Read online

  What she never knew was that on those secret outings to Cape Town he would fill the boot of his massive old Chevrolet with bottles of the best wine he could find, mostly French, which he would smuggle from the securely locked and bolted garage into his little room at night, where he could taste them in peace.

  This was how I found him on that memorable day while Aunt Bella and her daughters, in a state of collective hysteria, were arguing about female blood, the curse of womanhood, and the will of God the Father. Uncle Johnny was drinking from an exquisite crystal glass. He hadn’t thought of locking the door as everyone knew it was his sanctum and no one (except on the rarest of occasions, after God had personally spoken to her, Aunt Bella) would ever dare to go in there. I had no idea of what to expect. For all I knew this might be a worse option than facing the female fury in kitchen or bathroom.

  In total silence we stared at each other. It was the first time in years that I had seen him: I must have been six or seven when he went into seclusion; I was thirteen now.

  Then, to my utter surprise, a smile flickered across his pale face. ‘So,’ he said. ‘And who are you?’

  ‘Ch-Chris,’ I stuttered, ready to turn on my heel and flee.

  ‘You’re Hendrik’s son, are you?’

  I nodded, spilling some coffee into the saucer.

  ‘Your father chose himself a handsome woman.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  ‘What brings you here?’ he resumed.

  ‘It’s… well, you see, Driekie and I… I mean, in the big fig tree there at the back… we didn’t do anything, really… it’s just…’ And then I gave up. ‘Oh shit,’ I said.

  ‘I’m absolutely sure you didn’t do anything,’ he said, still smiling. ‘Shall we celebrate?’

  ‘Celebrate?’

  ‘There’s always something to celebrate,’ he said jovially. ‘Today we shall celebrate whatever you didn’t do in the fig tree.’ Very slowly he drained the glass, held it up, filled it halfway, then offered it to me.

  I hesitated, gulped, then took the glass and swallowed it all, still in a state of shock.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Uncle Johnny. ‘That’s not the way to do it at all. Allow me.’

  He showed me how to hold the glass, how to sniff at the rim, to tilt and lightly twirl it, to sniff again, and then to taste with almost religious devotion. I learned about the mystery of the caudalie produced in the mouth within exactly thirty-six seconds of tasting a good wine.

  But my tongue was blunt and stupid. What I do remember is the patience with which he persisted.

  At one stage I said in despair, ‘I don’t know how!’

  Out of the blue he asked, ‘Out there in the fig tree, did you get a taste of Driekie?’

  My face was burning. I couldn’t get a word out.

  ‘Uncle Johnny…?’

  ‘I just want to know if you got a taste of Driekie. Can you remember what she tasted like?’

  By this time my whole body was on fire. ‘Like… like sherbet, Uncle Johnny.’

  He frowned, then broke into laughter. ‘That’s a beginning, I suppose. But I can see we still have a long way to go.’

  ‘Yes, Uncle Johnny. I’m sorry, Uncle Johnny.’

  ‘Listen to me, Chris. What I’m trying to teach you is for your whole life. Do you understand?’

  ‘No, Uncle Johnny.’

  ‘A man who cannot taste his wine properly will never understand a thing about women. Will you remember that?’

  ‘Yes, Uncle Johnny.’

  ‘Right, let us try again.’

  Exactly what I tasted on that first afternoon, I really cannot tell today. I had no idea at all what to look for. Uncle Johnny kept mumbling about gooseberries or guavas or straw or, yes, figs, ripe and green.

  At the end of our long session he said, ‘All right. Enough for one day. Come back tomorrow.’ During the rest of our visit I was invited to his hideout every day, and my education in tasting slowly went its way.

  The idea was that my course was to be resumed the following summer. But such a long interval was most unsatisfactory. Later, by the time I went to study at Stellenbosch, and during the five years I spent there, he regularly summoned me for weekends and holidays. Aunt Bella came to dislike me thoroughly. Whether she mistrusted the nature of our clandestine dealings, or perhaps still nursed a lingering suspicion about what had or hadn’t happened between Driekie and me on the day of the blood, I could never be sure. The problem was that she couldn’t very well confront me openly about the nature of my arcane dealings with Uncle Johnny. (Certainly, however exuberant and thorough my initiation may have been, he took great care never to make me drunk.) Oh, she did her best to waylay me whenever I approached the study or came from it, offering whatever bribery she could think of to find out the subjects of our discussion. But I just told her cryptically that we were doing Bible study. I’m not sure that even she always believed it. But in the end she was given no choice. And at least she had the grace to know when she was defeated. She withdrew, with God in tow (He, too, obviously knew when to desist); and as time went by, I had the satisfaction of knowing that I had brought a little ray of light to the darkness into which Uncle Johnny had been banished; while he, in turn, took pleasure in opening a worthwhile new corner of the world to me.

  By the time I reach the end of my story we are ready to start on George’s main course, a delectable seafood dish of prawns, mussels, and an astounding variety of subtly interacting fish textures and flavors, for which a new bottle is opened, tasted, commented upon (George is hilarious in inventing bouquets and aromas no tastevin has ever dreamed up), and consumed. And with the dessert, clean and slightly tart on the tongue, there is a Vin de Constance, many years old and probably as good as anything exported in the early nineteenth century to please the palates of Napoleon in exile, Jane Austen at her not-so-private escritoire and, later, Baudelaire amid the flowers of evil.

  ‘I once took a photo of Driekie,’ George announces unexpectedly.

  We stare at him in surprise.

  He smiles. ‘Well, perhaps not your Driekie,’ he says. ‘But a little girl in a tree, peering through the leaves. Terribly sentimental, I’m afraid—it was in my early years—but we all go through our phases.’

  ‘Some of us never get past them,’ I assure him. ‘At least, that is what people tend to say about me.’

  ‘My little girl looked like Lewis Carroll’s photos of his Alice, dressed up as a beggar waif. Wait, I think I can find it.’ And off he goes to what I presume must be his studio.

  ‘He must have millions of photos,’ I comment to you. ‘He cannot possibly find the one he’s looking for.’

  ‘George has a great system,’ you smile, with obvious pride. ‘And it’s all on computer now.’

  ‘When did he find time for that?’

  ‘That was my contribution,’ you admit. ‘Took me the better part of our marriage. Which is four years old today.’

  ‘You never told me.’

  ‘It was meant as a private celebration. But too good an opportunity to pass by, don’t you agree?’

  ‘Then I’m deeply honored. By both of you.’

  You raise your glass; the dessert wine gleams a deep amber against the light. ‘Let’s drink to many more.’

  George comes back as we clink. He gives us a quizzical look.

  ‘We’re drinking to your marriage,’ I explain. ‘And lots of children.’

  A cloud briefly passes over his large face. ‘No such luck,’ he says. There is a momentary uneasy silence. Then he laughs, seemingly carefree, and makes a cutting gesture with the edge of one hand across his crotch. ‘Unfortunately, I took some too exaggerated precautions against the hazards of my job. Quite a few years before I met this one.’

  ‘Now, George,’ you gently reprimand him. It could have been a quite
embarrassing moment. But somehow you manage to turn it into a subject of banter, and soon only the merest shadow remains in the background of the conversation.

  He puts a photo on the table in front of me, obviously a printout he has just made. ‘Isn’t this Driekie?’ he asks, beaming.

  The girl looks very different, but the atmosphere is perfect: the strong contrast of light and shadow in the abundant foliage, the suggestion of depth behind the leaves, and the small figure huddling in the shadows, only one naked shoulder and half of her face visible, staring straight into the lens, impish and challenging, yet strangely grave for such a small child. As if in that fleeting instant from a childhood now for ever lost she already possesses all the consciousness of womanhood, of its suffering and its silences, its fears and uncertainties, its unabashed affirmations and exultations. Little Alice indeed.

  ‘You have a wonderful way of using the light,’ I say.

  ‘Any photographer can use light,’ he replies with a grin. ‘What I am trying to do is to provoke the light.’

  ‘You also provoke the spectator.’

  ‘If I couldn’t do that I should put away my cameras.’

  ‘Does this photo have a title?’ I ask, almost reverently.

  ‘Eve. What else?’ And then, in his characteristic way, he bursts out laughing. ‘Only seconds after taking it I lost my balance—I was sitting on a branch right opposite—and fell like a rotten apple. Which I probably was. And broke my leg. And very nearly my camera too. A leg can be mended but a Leica cannot be replaced. I tell you, photography is a hazardous business.’

  ‘I gather you always head for the hot spots—war, disaster, God knows what?’

  ‘Like you in your books?’

  ‘Touché,’ I admit. ‘But isn’t that inevitable? Somehow the dark things reveal more about us. The light is less interesting. Even your little Eve lurks in the shadows.’

  ‘Ah, but only the light can discover her.’

  ‘You are a creature of light,’ you say, placing your hand adoringly on his. The contrast etches itself into my mind: yours so slim, the line of the fingers clean and strong, as if they can register the lightest vibration; his large and broad and powerful, the fingers stubby and thick. (Yes, I can imagine those fingers…)

  ‘But you do go in search of the dark and terrible places,’ I persist.

  ‘Only because it is necessary for someone to report: I was there, I saw it, it happened. The tree falling in the forest and all that. The unrecorded life.’

  ‘Do people pay attention?’

  ‘That is their responsibility. Mine is to make sure it is recorded. Otherwise it is just too easy for people to say they didn’t know.’

  And from there the conversation meanders across some of the most dramatic experiences of his career.

  ‘I think the toughest moment of all was in the late eighties,’ he says, smiling with boyish pleasure at the recollection. ‘I was on the way back from a funeral in Soweto. In those days…’ He shakes his head. ‘In Orlando I stopped for a moment to reload my camera. And suddenly my car was surrounded by a crowd of demonstrators on their way from a gathering. I only found out later that they’d been attacked by police less than half an hour before. Several youths had been killed. And they were in a foul mood. Blocked me in from all sides and started rocking the car. It felt like a ship tossed on a bloody stormy sea. I saw some of them bending down to pick up stones. This is it, I thought. I’m not going to get out of this place alive.’

  ‘Then what happened?’ I ask.

  You are staring at him in admiration; you’ve obviously heard this story before.

  ‘I had one secret weapon,’ he beams. ‘I was never without it. Always in my breast pocket. So I rolled down my window and took this photo out and flashed it at them.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘A shot taken by a colleague, of Winnie Mandela and me. Her arm round my shoulders. And she’d inscribed it. To George Lombard, with fond wishes, Winnie.’

  ‘That did it?’

  ‘You bet. It was like the Israelites marching through the Red Sea. And the rage turned into jubilation. I waved my clenched fist at them, and shouted, Amandla! And off I went at speed.’ He becomes reflective for a moment. ‘Ja, in those days… There was only one person in the world who could have saved me that day, and that was Mama Winnie. Her name was magic.’

  ‘And today…’

  Briefly, he becomes deadly serious. ‘How sad. How terribly, terribly sad. All those years while Madiba was in jail, she was the one who carried the flag.’

  There is a silence. Then you say, ‘And then she had to learn to walk in the shadow of a man.’ Another pause. You add, ‘It’s always the women, isn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t seem to be suffering too badly,’ I gently mock.

  ‘Ah, but George and I walk together,’ you reply. ‘I’m not carefully stepping in his footsteps.’

  ‘You seem loving and caring enough,’ I insist.

  ‘Surely love and care are not ruled out!’ you say sharply, leaning your head against George’s shoulder that looms like a comfortable and comforting mountain beside you.

  George gives you a laborious hug; I wince as I think of bones crunching. ‘Never underestimate this one,’ he warns me, winking. ‘You know, she was the one who asked me to marry her.’

  ‘Only because you would never have made up your mind,’ you tease.

  ‘My mind was made up long before you asked me,’ he protests. ‘I was thinking about you. I’m still not convinced you knew what you were letting yourself in for.’

  ‘You’re having regrets now?’

  ‘I’m just not sure about your sanity. Everything else is okay.’

  ‘Perhaps two mad persons make one sane one.’ You take one of his hands in both of yours. ‘Shall I tell Chris why you held back for so long?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right, then I will.’

  ‘You may invite retaliation as soon as I’m alone with you again.’

  ‘I’ll hold you to it,’ you promise. And then proceed to tell me about his first marriage, which lasted for seven years. (‘So we’re not out of the danger zone yet, you see.’) His wife, Louisa, used to be his darkroom assistant, taking over more and more of his administrative duties and responsibilities. But above all she insisted on accompanying him on his trips. ‘We’re a team,’ she would say whenever he tried to object. ‘You need me, I need you, right? So stop complaining.’ Then, one January, came their final, fatal mission, to a region in Mozambique ravaged by freak floods. George didn’t give personal safety any thought; when he was working, his only concern was the photographs he had to bring back. On that particular afternoon a whole village was swept away by the churning flood. He paid no heed to the warnings of police and safety personnel, venturing to the very edge of the raging waters. Four or five members of a family, most of them small children, came past, swept along on an uprooted tree stump in the orange-brown torrent. Georgev was transfixed by what he could see in the viewfinder of his Leica. Louisa became hysterical. ‘You can’t just stand there taking photos!’ she screamed at him. ‘Those are people! We’ve got to help them.’

  ‘There’s a whole cordon of police just a hundred meters downstream,’ he shouted back. ‘They’re equipped to help. We’ll just kill both them and us in the process.’

  But she was beyond reasoning. By the time he realized what was happening, she had already thrown herself into the flood, trying to swim to the family on the tree stump in the swirling waters. Without stopping to take off his boots or anything he rushed in after her. At the next bend in the river, as he’d told her, there was a team of helpers tied to ropes, ready to help. All but one of the members of the embattled family were brought to safety. So was George. But Louisa had gone under. They could only presume that her head had hit against a log, or a submerged rock. Her body wa
s never found.

  ‘For more than a year after that he didn’t take a single photo,’ you tell me quietly.

  He merely looks at me, with such pain in his eyes that I have to turn my head away.

  ‘Until I realized that my duty to bear witness was more important than my own grief,’ he says at last. ‘Certainly more important than silence.’

  ‘And that is why, to this day, he doesn’t want me to go along when he goes on a shoot,’ you say.

  ‘Can you blame me?’ he asks.

  ‘Nobody ever blames you for anything, George.’

  ‘Perhaps that is the problem,’ he says wryly.

  And after that? I’m no longer sure about what came next. (After I went home that night, I stayed up, listening to music, making notes, as is my wont, about our whole conversation. I need to hold on. My safety rope, I suppose, in the swirling waters of my own life.) I know we had more to drink. Cognac, I seem to recall; but perhaps we returned to wine. And then, presumably apropos of some turn in the conversation, he wanted to listen to Don Giovanni. Wasn’t it too late? you asked cautiously. Wouldn’t that be asking too much of your guest?

  ‘Don Giovanni isn’t asking too much of anybody. Chris, of all people, should know that.’ (Whatever that might mean.)

  And so we listen to Don Giovanni, all two hours of it—after a long argument about which recording to choose. (He has at least five of them.) In the end it is the Colin Davis, with Kiri Te Kanawa—though George has reservations about Martina Arroyo’s Donna Anna. ‘That’s the problem with Don Giovanni,’ he argues. ‘In an opera with so many plum parts, you’re bound to be dissatisfied with one or two. But Kiri’s Donna Elvira will do it for tonight.’ (Let me state for the record that I did not agree with George about Arroyo: especially in the final scene, she is sublime.)