A Fork in the Road Page 51

  It may be argued that the fact of such malpractices still being investigated, and that a free press is openly reporting on them, is in itself proof that all is not yet lost. At the same time one should not – once again – be deluded by false optimism, as I have been for so long. South Africa is in a mess. And the old divisions between Black and White are still at the core of it. This was brought home quite sickeningly by an incident at the University of the Free State that came to light only recently, in February 2008. It concerned an ‘initiation ceremony’ arranged at the Reitz Residence on campus by white male students who made black cleaners, some of them elderly, eat a bowl of what seemed like dog food on which one of the students had urinated. Perhaps worse than the revolting event itself was the fact that the perpetrators subsequently attempted to shrug it off as ‘a harmless student prank’ – and that they were vociferously supported by parents and sympathisers. It is true that such practices have persisted among white students at several Afrikaans universities until recently and that there are indications that such ‘traditions’ may still survive clandestinely at some of them. But the overt racial context of this event, and the fact that it followed months of campaigning by a political party from the extreme right, the Freedom Front Plus, against attempts by the university to open residences to all races, suggest that blatant racism still plays an active role in the country. It would seem that only a small minority of retrograde whites still cling to such expressions of a troglodyte past; but the support they continue to enjoy from their parents and a much wider community is both nauseating and very, very disturbing.

  What is particularly depressing is the explanation of good intentions offered in all naïvety by the young R. C. Malherbe, the self-styled ‘urinist’. The video had been made purely for entertainment, with no intention to humiliate anybody: ‘It had to be somehing that the guys would find funny.’ It is the measure of some people’s ‘fun’ that is so appalling. And then the well-meaning prankster proceeds to place the event in the context of what he regards as good relations and cameraderie: ‘We come from farms, so it’s easy for us to bring meat and mealies, especially when we go on holiday. Everything that’s left over, we give to them. It’s a good relationship. Rather friendly.’

  Everything that’s left over, we give to them. This, it seems, is what ‘a good relationship’ between white and black in South Africa is still based on. After fourteen years of democracy.

  The only heartening aspect of the whole sorry event is the near-unanimous outrage and condemnation with which it was received by South Africans of all races, all groupings, all ages.

  And then the other side of the coin: one expected black students on the campus to react with rage and fury and protest. That at least a modicum of violence occurred in the protest marches and demonstrations was perhaps inevitable. What I cannot accept is that a group of black students marched to a residence for white female students and threatened them that they would all be raped in retaliation. Yes, it was done in the heat of the moment. But this goes beyond rage and revenge. This digs down into a level of barbarism that simmers on the other side of silence. Perhaps it is part of that excess of violence that has always marked black/white relations throughout the dark years of colonialism. But are we really still trapped in that stifling spiral? Are we still not able – even after Mandela, after all the suffering that has characterised our slow movement towards a new dispensation – to arrive at a level of human reason and tolerance? Rape. That is not just vengeance. That is an act which denies the basis on which humanity rests. We still have so very far to go.

  As a country, it seems, we have come close to betraying the ideals of Mandela and of Tutu. And yet there may still be individuals and organisations in South Africa that care enough to get involved in order to ensure that something can be salvaged before the rot has gone too far. The response in the country to winning the latest Rugby World Cup revealed emphatically the potential for unity among the races and classes – but at the moment this huge potential is not allowed to develop naturally.

  It may seem as if there is not much a writer – a mere writer – can do against the sordidness and the evil of the world. Yet writers have prevailed in the past, as that conference in Salzburg, and the legacy of writers over the centuries, have demonstrated. The word is an insignificant thing in itself, a little gasp of breath, no more. Yet it is in and through the word that we first reach awareness of our humanity. And as long as we have the word, we can reach out to others in a chain of voices that will never be silenced. That is our one, small, lasting guarantee in the world, and against the world.

  As long as that is possible, I cannot, and will not, be silent. And for as long as there are forks in the road I shall be happy to join the heretic Don Quixote and take them.

  POSTSCRIPT: A LETTER TO KARINA

  MY DEAREST KARINA,

  This letter comes near the end, but it really concerns a beginning – the beginning of this memoir. It started with a train journey in December 2004, when you came to meet me at the airport in Vienna and escorted me to Salzburg for the conference on South African literature which you had helped to organise. By now that initial journey has grown out of all proportion, continuing in many different directions. And that is why what I have been writing here is taking this form.

  I have persistently refused to yield to publishers and friends and strangers who asked me, over the years, to write an autobiography. I have always felt uncomfortable with the artificiality and the self-centredness of such a project. Besides, my life has been shaped by so many people who have shared parts of my itinerary, whose confidence I cannot betray. Their trust, or simply the privacy of those travels, sometimes short and simple, more often long and convoluted, should remain private. On the simplest level, I am not interested in kissing-and-telling. But it goes far beyond that.

  I remember how, in the course of an exuberant night on the Danish island of Møn, a year before Günter Grass published Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, he regaled us with stories from his life and I pleaded with him to write his autobiography. ‘Never!’ he exclaimed through a cloud of pipe smoke. ‘That is something I shall never do. I lie too much.’ Fortunately for us, he relented and afterwards shared his magnificent stories with us after all. And taking a cue from René Magritte, I can now confirm: This is not an autobiography.

  The endless conversation which began on that train between Vienna and Salzburg, and still continues, has made me acknowledge a need in myself to account for some things in my life I have not yet faced or probed sufficiently; many things I still do not understand; many things that have hurt or surprised me or given me joy and pleasure, and for which I have simply never had, or made, the time to explore, or even properly to savour. It has brought home very forcefully the awareness of the long and many journeys each of us had travelled before that meeting: journeys from and across different hemispheres, different time zones, different cultures and peoples, different mental spaces, different understandings of the world, and its past and present and possible futures. All of this has grown between us – like a drop of water in a tap, that grows and grows until it has acquired the weight it needs to fall – and has taken shape in the many letters we exchanged at the beginning of our relationship, and now in this book.

  That first journey you and I took together was never even supposed to happen. It came at the end of an exceptionally busy year, filled with more travelling than I could really cope with. There was Mali in February, followed by Guadeloupe and Martinique in April and May, then Paris, in itself a return to origins. There was Glasgow in June, to celebrate South Africa’s first ten years of democracy, a strange occasion haunted by elderly people from an anti-apartheid struggle already almost lost in history. There was the paradisiac island of Møn off the south-east coast of Denmark in August, in a small castle in a forest at the edge of a lake. There was, again, Scotland and England in October, wending my way down from Edinburgh, past Norwich and Cheltenham to London, with festivals and celebrations and
lectures and discussions.

  And so I was exhausted by December. But I had already accepted an invitation to Salzburg, for a joint conference on South African literature organised by the university and the seminar housed in Schloss Leopoldskron. I could hardly think straight by then. But Salzburg had already become a special place, a region of the mind, a state of mind. There had always been Mozart; then there was that conference following the fall of the Berlin Wall; and after that there had been the other visits to the schloss, most notably in 1998, that conference on drama with Arthur Miller, Ariel Dorfman and others. So how could I not accept the invitation to this conference in December 2004?

  The obstacle to overcome was not only tiredness but the fact that the arrangements for travelling to Salzburg and back were mired in bungling and misunderstanding. At one stage I gave up and asked my hosts to cancel the trip, but the arrangements were too far advanced, and so I went. The only pinpoint of light in the whole murky business was when Dorothea Steiner of the Salzburg University, indefatigable in her efforts to salvage something out of the mess, assured me that someone on the organising committee had volunteered to meet me in Vienna to ease the last part of the way to Salzburg.

  And when I stumbled out of the plane at Vienna airport, there you were, Karina, tall and beautiful and confidently smiling, your long dark hair in a thick braid behind your head, waiting.

  ‘Now you can relax,’ you said. ‘You can sleep on the train if you want to. I’ll get you to Salzburg safely.’

  And you did.

  On the way we tumbled headlong into that breathless conversation which has still not, as I’m writing this letter, subsided or paused.

  There was a feeling, by the time you dropped me at the schloss in Salzburg, that something, somewhere, had shifted. There is a passage from the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (in the first edition, from the sixties; afterwards it was, sadly, omitted), which has returned to me at crucial moments in my life and which, every time, has marked a fork in the road. It comes from a letter written to Cleaver while he was in prison, by the lawyer who defended him, Beverley. For them the situation was impossible: he black, she white, at a time of racial madness in America. But they succeeded in transcending it.

  Beverley writes:

  What an awesome thing it is to feel oneself on the verge of the possibility of really knowing another person. Can it ever happen? I’m not sure. I don’t know that any two people can really strip themselves that naked in front of each other. We’re so filled with fears of rejection and pretences that we scarcely know whether we’re being fraudulent or real ourselves.

  To this he replies:

  I seek a lasting relationship, something permanent in a world of change, in which all is transitory, ephemeral, and full of pain. We humans, we are too frail creatures to handle such titanic emotions and deep magnetic yearnings, strivings and impulses.

  The reason two people are reluctant to really strip themselves naked in front of each other is because in doing so they make themselves vulnerable and give enormous power over themselves to one another. How awful, how deadly, how catastrophically they can hurt each other, wreck and ruin each other forever! How often, indeed, they end by inflicting pain and torment upon each other. Better to maintain shallow, superficial affairs; that way the scars are not too deep, no blood is hacked from the soul. You beautifully – O, how beautifully!! – spoke, in your letter, of ‘What an awesome thing it is to feel oneself on the verge of the possibility of really knowing another person’ and ‘I feel as though I am on the edge of a new world.’ Getting to know someone, entering that new world, is an ultimate, irretrievable leap into the unknown. The prospect is terrifying. The stakes are high. The emotions are overwhelming. In human experience, only the perennial themes can move us to such an extent. Death. Birth. The Grave. Love. Hate (…)

  Then follows the passage I later used as a motto for An Instant in the Wind:

  We live in a disoriented, deranged social structure, and we have transcended its barriers in our own ways and have stepped psychologically outside its madness and repressions. It is lonely out here. We recognise each other. And, having recognised each other, is it any wonder that our souls hold hands and cling together even while our minds equivocate, hesitate, vacillate, and tremble?

  For the moment, we did not, could not, acknowledge it. But the awareness was there. Even though we carefully, very carefully, managed to hide it even to ourselves, as the conference started and wore on, and we played our appointed roles: you, one of the organisers and facilitators, I one of the invited writers and critics. I remember how impressed I was by the paper you read on Nadine Gordimer: the lucidity of your thoughts, the depth of your understanding, the structured unfolding of your argument.

  There was only one occasion when we came close to breaking through the barriers: I was exhausted at the end of one session and asked to be taken back to the schloss. You took my arm, and led me from the conference hall, around the cathedral, to a taxi rank from where I could make my escape. I thanked you, and gave you my hand. And then we both held on, and could not let go. As if that clasp was a lifeline.

  But of course, in the end we did let go and you returned to the conference while I wended my way to the merciful asylum of the schloss.

  Then came the final session. It was a long evening. But everybody had a feeling of satisfaction, even of elation, after a spell of impromptu readings recorded for the English Department by your brother Krystian. There was no way of prolonging it any more. I began to take my leave of the last departing visitors. Very formally and correctly I kissed each woman on both cheeks. Saving you for last. Left cheek, right cheek. And then I dragged myself upstairs, along that endless broad spiral.

  When I finally drew the door to my suite shut behind me, I leaned back against it, reluctant to admit that I was alone again. After a while I turned back and grasped the handle. The urge was almost overwhelming to open the door, to go downstairs again. Perhaps you would still be there. But I did not. Leaning with my forehead against the cold painted wood of the door, I could not move. Only then did the thought – not even a thought, a mere intimation – rise to the surface that I might be turning my back on something that could have been vital to my life, could have changed the course of things. But still I made no move.

  Only much later, you wrote to me about how, while I was standing pressed against the door from the inside, you were waiting downstairs, battling the urge to come up and knock on my door, without any idea of what you might say if I actually opened. Like me, you couldn’t move. Like me, you didn’t dare think about what might have happened.

  I responded to your e-mail. You wrote again. Everything that had remained unsaid before – everything we might have sensed but had so scrupulously repressed – came tumbling out. Not long after that, we met again in Paris, where I had to lecture at the Sorbonne and the Bibliothèque Nationale. And then again in Egham outside London, and in Wales. Soon afterwards you came to Cape Town for my birthday. In due course we travelled together to your village of Geretsdorf in Austria and you introduced me to your parents, Roma and Jacek, who are now my parents too. Which is a delightful if most unusual situation, as I now happen to be older than both of my in-laws; and you are younger than all four of my children.

  Today you are my wife. And still the journey continues. We have been to Scandinavia, on a boat trip along the fjords of Norway all the way to Kirkenes, and to Switzerland and France and Germany, and of course many times to Austria, and to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and to Croatia, and to Mexico, and you have taken me to Poland to show me all the places that had circumscribed your youth: the lovely Jelenia Góra, where you were born, and Kowary, near by, where your grandparents used to live and where your aunt Iwona now keeps the family hearth burning, where you visited in your childhood and where you played in the forest and made little houses under the trees and lived in a magic land beyond the reach of grown-ups; and Wroclaw with the reflections of its many-coloured houses in the
river; and of course the beautiful city of Kraków where Copernicus sat in the carved wooden seats of the ancient university, and where horse-carriages ply the route between the town square and the castle with its battlements on the high hill and the cathedral with the huge bronze bell in its tall steeple, and the synagogue with its graves under leaves that never stop falling.

  This is why what I am writing now – about the long road that lies behind, and all its many forks – is a mere continuation of what has gone before. To trace again some of the many highways and byways of the past. Perhaps to learn to see more clearly, to understand a bit more. But by no means everything.

  There is so much more I could have written, and might have wished to write. But there is a certain sense of propriety in deciding where and when to stop.

  So these notes are not answers. Attempts, at most. To explain some things, but not simply to settle scores. Perhaps a way of saying thank you. To so many people – women, men, children, lovers, friends, acquaintances – whom I have met along the way, exchanging a look or a mere glance, clasping a hand, touching a shoulder, sharing a gesture of encouragement, or a caress, or days, or nights: not all, but at least some of those who, for better or for worse, have made me what I am, and helped to bring me here. My father, and my mother. My children. My brother and my sisters. Music. Painting. The many beauties and joys of the world. The world itself, for offering us the space to be, and some time to do so.