Thacker’s connections in the horticultural society turned up a young trainee gardener who was looking for extra income and was happy to work under Adam’s direction. ‘A team,’ Clare thought, ‘I have a team of gardeners where once I needed only one. How many more will I need? Who else? A pool boy. The pool water is turning green. Window washers, too. The windows are becoming glazed with dust.’
Months passed and the forms of the garden remained unchanged. The seasons moved through their cycles, rain beating through winter until spring came again. Clare became anxious for a vegetable patch, for the enjoyment of picking her own tomatoes, growing her own basil, cooking food she knew had been grown without pesticides, things one could not get so easily in the stores, even in the warehouse-like chain of produce markets. When she broached it with Adam, he again shook his head, said it was not such a good idea. She had never encountered this kind of resistance — not in Jacobus, not in Marie, not in any of the various women who had at times come to clean her house — and she had no idea how to deal with it except to accept it mutely and then plan behind Adam’s back. The young apprentice, Ashwin, who was now working every weekday morning and two afternoons a week (it transpired that the previous owners had employed one full-time and two part-time gardeners year round just to keep the place in order), was alone one afternoon when Clare approached him with her plan. She explained where the beds should go, how big she wanted them, and asked him to come over the weekend at double pay to create them.
‘With Adam?’ he asked.
‘No, on your own. Tell me what equipment you need to get it done and I’ll hire it. Rototiller, plough, whatever. I want a vegetable patch and a herb garden. I don’t think it is so much to ask, but this garden means something to Adam, you understand. It has a certain importance to him. But in the end, it is my garden now. I must be allowed to grow what I like. Will the beds work here? Do you think there’s enough sun?’
Ashwin looked around, made some calculations, and agreed to the plan.
That weekend he cleared the lawn, enriched the soil, and planted what Clare requested. On Sunday evening, with the new beds laid out in aggressive rectangularity against the otherwise fluid forms of the garden, Clare looked at the clean black furrows and mounds, the promise of cabbages and tomatoes, beans and squash, melons and lettuces, protected and nurtured under shimmering white lengths of floating cover, and felt at last that she might grow to love this new house, with the mountain glowering over her, a trailing cloth of mist cascading down its iron-grey flanks.
When Adam arrived on Monday morning, she watched his reaction from her study. She could not have wished for a better effect. He started physically, paced around the new beds shaking his head, and went to the back door of the house. A few minutes later Marie came to the study, explaining that Adam wished to speak to Clare in person.
‘It is not a good thing. These plants will not grow.’ He looked grief-stricken and Clare felt sorry for him, if not for what she had done. ‘You cannot grow these things here. They will not grow. And it does not look good.’
‘We’re going to try it this year,’ Clare said, trying to make herself sound resolved at the same time that Adam’s vehemence opened up a fissure of doubt in her mind. ‘If they don’t grow, we’ll turn them into flowerbeds next year, or back into lawn. But for now, we do it my way.’
‘It is a bad thing.’
‘It is not a bad thing. It is merely different. You will see. And if you are right, then I shall see. But you must let me grow what I want, Adam, otherwise we will only come to grief, and in the end I should have to ask you to leave. It would not be pleasant. Everyone would be unhappy. This way, I shall be happy and you will have to wait to see how unhappy these new beds will make you, and how much upset they will cause in my garden. But give them a chance. See if they will flourish.’
Clare
The TRC transcripts are all accessible now. I have printed out only some of them, and these run to hundreds — no, thousands — of pages, several toner cartridges. I read through the ones I think relate to you in some way, Laura, to your case, your activities. I reread the official submissions from the ANC and other bodies; I look for your name, but it occurs only rarely, often misspelled — Lara, Lora, Laure, even Laurie, only sometimes Laura. Welt, Wal, Wêreld, World, and finally, in the last one I read, Wald, and sometimes, even in that one, Waldt and Weldt. Often your name is not there at all, and I have no choice but to infer your involvement in the events described: the opening of a letter bomb at a government office, the aftermath of an attack on a refinery.
Your actions are indecipherable to me. Could you have done that? Can I understand why you did it? I look again for correspondences in your notebooks, in the archive of you I have assembled, but I find myself overwhelmed. I cross-check and collate and decide I must try to build a portrait of your movements for the relevant period, a portrait and a map. You were here then, there later, back home a few days after. In the end, it is mostly guesswork. I can guess where you might have been, what you were doing, what you were thinking, what compelled you. I keep hoping your former colleagues will come to see me, give me whatever information they might possess, if there is anything yet that has not been revealed to me. I would be polite, I would accept it with gratitude, I would not ask too many difficult questions, nor sit in summary judgement, either of you or of them, for your failures of communication, for their failure to speak of you and for you, to me and to others. I would be hospitable. I have studied hospitality. Thank you for telling me where my daughter was on that day, I would say, for at least now I can imagine with certainty what that day, whatever day it might be amongst all others, was like for you. It is not a story they are eager to tell, even in private, you understand. You horrify them. A woman is not supposed to ___________. Fill in the blank. You did everything a woman is not expected to do, is not supposed to do. You horrify because in action you appeared more man than woman, and more woman than man in every other respect. Neither one thing nor the other.
I sit in this new garden, which is now no longer new to me, but one you never knew, belonging to a house you would have scorned as a betrayal of familial principles. You have sold out, you would tell me, always courageous, but I no longer need you here to tell me what I already know about my choices. You are entirely within me now, voice echoing always, a million different voices, all you, borrowed from moments when I heard you as you wanted to be heard, moments you did not realize anyone was listening, perhaps in particular me. These are no substitute, they are all that I have, those million necromanced fragments of you, summoned around the pit of fire yawning between my ribs. Would that I had a sorrowful song to sing, un sí pietoso stile, to win you back, as Orpheus did Eurydice. I offer you the cup to drink, a song of prayer, wish for you to cohere again, Etemmu, the wandering soul. I pour milk and nectar on the fire, wine and water, sprinkle white corn meal around, grind it against my flesh, cut my throat to summon you, sacrifice myself to body you forth, but you will not rise. If you will not rise, you are not dead. I have seen no remains. It must be thus.
I have tried to learn this garden like a book, interpret it by reading its lines, studying to understand its form, its four discrete zones, its moments of horticultural mirror-gazing, the nature of its construction, its constructedness, its absence of irony and humour, or is that absence my misreading? There is a long lap pool that stretches away from the house, acting also as a reflecting pool for the garden itself and the mountain above it. I push through the water each morning, my long old body, otter in a tank, the underwater lights blinding me at first in the darkness of dawn. What does this pool say to the garden, what is its dialogue? I ask it and myself. What do the woodland, the perennial borders, the indigenous specimens, the exotic interlopers, and my own aggressive vegetable plot, carved rectilinearly into the fluid forms, irrupting into formal life, say to each other when I pause to listen? I lurk at the end of the pool, fingers curling over the smooth concrete edge, peering up, nostrils just above the surface, dead hair fanning out from a dying head, floating on the surface, as I gaze on the wonderland around me, a landscape of fantasy. I have thought of tearing out the lawn and replacing it with a carpet of succulents, impossible to navigate, organic, left to themselves, a fortress of life, ramparts pregnable only by flat stones spaced close enough to leap between them. It is tempting.