In that last letter to me you wrote, For your sake, I hope you are okay. Is it true? Would you really have been worried about my feelings, my well-being, in those terrible few days? Apart from yourself, did you not care for me least of all people?
No, that is unfair.
I know that you’ve never approved of my decisions, you wrote, or the kind of life demanded by my activities. But I don’t regret. What I’ve done is what I feel has to be done.
I knew all that. You did not need to tell me.
As Bernard drove, humming along to the radio, you forgot for a moment what had brought you to this point, and, staring at yourself in the rear-view mirror, you wandered through imagined confrontations with him. You beat him to death when he tried to force himself against you, and then you fled with the child into the wilderness, living on scrapings from the bush, deserting sleepwalking civil society for the full consciousness of hermit life. You would raise this boy, Sam — Samuel, you would call him, renewing him — alone in a cave, teaching him the world, the names and uses of plants, how to steal eggs and trap birds, the best ways to disappear into the landscape. Or perhaps you would fail to overpower Bernard and he would imprison you in his own remote fastness, teaching you a different vocabulary of power, until you escaped, a serpent prophetess entering the man’s mouth in his sleep, consuming him from the inside, heart first.
The sonic jolt was so strong that the truck swerved off the road to the unpaved shoulder. Bernard clutched the steering wheel, veering back onto the tarmac as a thundering wake thudded through the truck, rattling the windows. Tiger began to howl and Sam woke, grabbing at your waist. You felt the hairs on your body quiver and isolate. Sam’s hands were hot on you and you tried to push him away but he held fast, dumb with fear.
Bernard was trying to catch his breath while a man whined through the radio’s speakers: pure love, it’s pure love, it’s our love, baby, my love.
‘Jeez. Must be the power station. Or the gas works. Look at the sky.’
Behind you the horizon was bright with an orange fire. It backlit isolated trees ascending the line of the mountains and the ragged heads of dense forest along the highway.
Tiger pushed his body against Sam, who cringed and whimpered himself, holding tighter to you. ‘The whole coast will be dark. It won’t be safe to stop until daylight.’
At the next crossroads the streetlights had gone out and an abandoned car was ablaze, tendrils of flame leaping into the air and igniting the trees. Ten minutes later a caravan of ambulances and fire trucks passed, sirens droning, strobe lights picking out the trees on either side of the road. Bernard slowed, pulling aside to let the convoy pass.
There had been similar blasts, other kinds of sabotage — you and Bernard both knew what this explosion meant, though your knowledge was more complete than his.
‘Maybe just an accident,’ you said.
‘I wouldn’t bet on it. We’ll see in the papers tomorrow.’
‘I wouldn’t trust the papers.’
‘You’re not one of these sympathizers are you?’
‘No. Not a sympathizer,’ you said, knowing you should stay awake as he drove, listening to the radio, waiting for a news report that would not come, while further convoys of ambulances and fire engines passed, dispatched from the closest city and other neighbouring towns.
Bernard clucked. ‘If it’s them, well, you can bet they’ll be hitting other places, too. Lucky I’ve got a full tank. We’ll be okay until it’s light. Can you stay awake to watch the road? Sometimes I don’t see so well at night.’
‘Then why drive at night?’
‘Less traffic. But more risks of course. Hijackings. And what happens if I get a blow out? Then I’m really fucked. Hasn’t ever happened, but I’d be in God’s hands if it did, I’m telling you, you know what I’m saying? That’s why I always bring Tiger.’
‘And your boy?’ Sam was falling asleep again, arms constricting your waist, his head wedged up under your breasts.
‘Ag, he’s used to it now I guess.’
‘Not easy.’
‘Naaaa. He likes it,’ he said, like a man insisting a woman enjoys being knocked around. ‘You have any kids?’
‘No.’
‘Husband?’
‘I’m going to my mother’s. She lives near Ladybrand. You can see the peaks of the Malotis from her back door.’ I know you said this, a fact I can count on, me as the excuse, the point of destination. But I lived nowhere near Ladybrand. Is it ungenerous for me to think I was always a convenient excuse for you?
‘I’ll take you as far as Port Elizabeth, but you’ll have to find your own way from there.’ Bernard began to hum along to another song, a woman lamenting the loss of three husbands. He knew it by heart, anticipated each note, could not resist mouthing the words, then singing himself. ‘Your mother know you’re coming?’
‘I’ll phone her when we stop.’
‘That’s if the phones are working.’
*
My biographer pretends to be American now, but there is something unfinished about him that I know like my own breath. Of course, I remembered Sam at once. Rather, in Amsterdam I half-recognized him, and in the weeks that followed learned to trust my memory of him. How could I forget? I do not acknowledge this to him when he sits so uncomfortably before me, squirming on the couch in my study, his palms sweating in this room that I always keep cool. It would be a lie to say I remain silent about our connection because I wish to torture him. I have no such wish. In truth, I am terrified of what may yet be revealed.
So call it, my dear daughter, my Laura, a kind of restitution — my letting Sam in, at long last, much later than I should. I have been tardy in so many things, terrified by so much else. Perhaps in letting him in, I will begin to understand why you did what you did.
But as the days pass and he asks ever more intrusive questions, I begin to see, just barely, the magnitude of what I have done by allowing Sam to come here, to sit in judgement before me, as my auditor, interlocutor, and elegist. I have summoned my own judge, perhaps even my own executioner — executioner of spirit and will and certainty if not in fact of life. I find it toxic to explain myself, but this is the bargain I have made — the mistake I’ve made at being intrigued by him, at recognizing someone I should have forced myself to forget, for my own sake, ignoring whatever his own needs might be, whatever my debt to him, real or imagined, might yet prove to be, and how it will be settled. What is it he needs? I sense it is not just one thing. I want to say How dare you? and know I cannot, because all this turning over of my old soil, hoping a poppy might emerge, was my idea. I wanted it, I agreed on him, which means he is, by my hand, not just conjured, but authorized. I will not be one of those who invite and then refuse to accept the consequences of that hospitality. He is my guest and I his hostage. I have invited him into my life because I was curious, because I thought, foolishly, that on my terms meant in my control. But he is always coming from more than one direction. He does not himself know what he thinks of me. I suppose there is a kind of power in that, but I am too exhausted for an exercise of power.