‘Biding his time, madam, waiting for the right moment to strike, a viper,’ Ms White said, sniffing again. ‘He waited until after your husband left you, didn’t he? You are lucky you came away with your life.’
‘And what about my stolen property? Do you mean to say that Jacobus is in possession of my father’s wig?’
‘Oh no, madam. He has disposed of the property already. A very clever thief. No doubt he sold it for a high price on the black market.’
Clare felt the room spin and slant. The woman made her feel nauseated and unsure of everything she knew to be true. ‘This is madness. The wig is all but worthless to anyone but me. You are very mistaken. This is all a mistake. I want it to stop.’
‘But you have put it in motion, madam. It is a serious crime. We go until it is finished,’ said Ms White, opening and closing the binder with a final tap of her fingernail.
Clare
I have been experiencing recurring dreams of such vividness I would be certain they were reality if not for the fact of your presence in them, Laura, and even that makes me wonder if you have not reappeared, or I have slipped unwittingly into a space where the impossible is routine. Each time, Marie wakes me out of a deep sleep in which I have been dreaming another dream — these other, prior dreams are the only things that change, and they are almost always banaclass="underline" cows in a field, me on the farm as a child, or in a boat off Port Alfred, memories conjured up out of darkness. In the recurring part of the dream it is always half-past six when Marie wakes me, and she says, You have to get ready, you have to be at the studio. I am making an audio recording of my new book, doing my own reading. This is what makes the dreams so real, because this week, in my waking life, I am in the process of recording the new book, Absolution, a volume of fictionalized memoirs (although it is nothing like the memoir the publishers truly wanted, hence the official biography). In the dream, I thank Marie, go to have a shower, dry off, all very deliberately. I choose black slacks and a black shirt, tie my hair back with a black satin bow and rub moisturizer into my face — always the same actions in every dream, in the same order. Marie has made me a light breakfast — no lemon, no dairy, nothing to constrain or confuse the vocal cords. Hot tea, a soft roll with honey. In the car, Marie tells me this is the last day of recording, and after that we can get back to the usual routine, the humdrum that keeps us happy. I remind her of my biographer’s presence, remind her he may continue to visit daily for months to come, except when I tell him, as in this week (and as in the real week happening now), that other things keep me busy and we will recommence after a break of ten days. (I know it is cruel the way I play with him, both in dreams and in reality. He knows nothing about the actual contents of this forthcoming book. It is embargoed.)
We arrive at the drab glass and metal building that houses the studio. A girl who always mispronounces my name greets us warmly at reception and escorts us upstairs. In the dream I sit down at a desk in the studio, and the production team smiles at me through the glass window of the control booth. They are waving … waving fondly I think, fondly because there you are, Laura, one of them. Not just one of them, but the boss, the head of the team, the one calling the shots. You lean towards your microphone and tell me just to let them know when I’m ready and they’ll begin recording. You show no sign of recognizing me as anyone other than the writer in your studio, the semi-celebrity who can walk down nearly any street in this country without being recognized, who is only noticed on the campuses of a few universities, and even there by a mere handful of students and professors. Abroad is a different matter. In the dream you appear unaware of — or wish to conceal — our kinship, and I sit there bewildered. Why should you be so pleasant but so distant? Is it a matter of not knowing? Are you not the daughter you appear to be, but her doppelgänger? Or are you ashamed of me, wishing for your colleagues not to know that you are the child of the monster who sits before them to read into a microphone, all the voices of her mind merging into a single furious shriek, for there is so much anger in the pages of this book (both the real and the dreamed, though they are different texts, telling different stories, equal in their rage) that in the dream (as well as in the real recording sessions this week) I have memories of previous sessions (dream memories of the real recording sessions, I presume) in which I have come to the point of shouting, screaming, breaking down in tears. My urbane New York editor will be unhappy with this. In his fey voice he asked for tension and suspense in my oral delivery, but controlled, modulated, made safe for the ears and feelings of my auditory readers. In the dream I look down at the transcript of the book, open the cover, and find nothing but blank pages. Go ahead, you say to me, coaxing, smiling, Go ahead, whenever you’re ready, just speak clearly into the microphone. But there are no words on the page, I protest, holding up the transcript. There is nothing here to read, and I cannot remember it, I don’t remember the words, it doesn’t work like that, a memoir, even a fictionalized one, is a work of memory on the page; the individual words might lodge in my brain, but I cannot summon the text complete in my head. The text I have written does not reside within. You smile at me, looking patient, rather indulgent, and nod your head. Take your time, you say, there’s no rush, we have the studio for the whole day, and you should just let us know when you’re ready to begin. I page through the script, thinking perhaps I missed the text, that it will be there if I look again, but it remains obstinately blank. I cannot read from a blank book, I say. I cannot pretend there are words here when there aren’t, you must bring me the text that I used yesterday and the day before. I don’t have time for games, for these kinds of April Fool’s jokes. I am an old woman with feelings, and this is a serious business, the reading of one’s life. Suddenly you look cross, push back your chair, and stomp into the studio. You stand over me, pointing your finger, your face twitching as it used to when you were consumed with your own anger, but magnified a hundredfold, blocking out the rest of the room. Leaning over, you hiss at me, You will read now, old woman, and you will read until you are done. (Not until you have finished, but until you are done, dead, kaput.) We don’t have all day, you whisper between clenched teeth. This is a very expensive studio to hire and you’re wasting our time and money. On your body I catch the scent of wildness, of rage. I begin to tremble, and it is invariably at this point that I wake up, covered in sweat.
Waking from this dream and its multiple iterations over the course of the week, I have turned each time to your notebooks or journals, I know not what to call them any more, because they are as much plans and appointments and random thoughts, all apparently giving nothing away that would be of use to anyone but me, the person in the position of the grieving parent, as they are a record of your life before you disappeared. (Am I not the grieving parent? I grieve and I was your parent, but I cannot fit my own position and my feelings with the image I have when the phrase grieving parent is pronounced: the sobbing woman with white hair, in a babushka, holding a broken body in her arms. I have not sobbed, there has never been a body to hold, the babushka my mind has borrowed from photos of disaster zones, wars, and battlegrounds. I could never be that woman I see, searching for her unburied dead.)