‘Knew what?’ I ask, feeling my heart race, wondering if she is referring to our own buried connection — if it’s possible she remembers me from decades ago — or something else altogether, a secret about herself I can’t begin to imagine.
She shakes her head. ‘You asked the wrong questions. How do you think you can write my life? You have nothing but a skeleton of facts, which you will flesh out with your own conjectures. I have shown you nothing. Because you now think that you know why, at one period in my life, I might have violated my own elaborate ethics, you will paint a pad of muscle and skin, and say, “That is who she is, there, as I’ve drawn her.” ’
She takes the photocopied report and places it back in the green folder. ‘You are caught under that green bushel, lighting up what? Nothing. A dark empty space. My greatest secrets are left unillumined. You cannot see me from underneath that bushel. I was ready to show you demons. But that is work you have left for me to do, if I should choose to do it.’
This is how she appears to me, and these are her words, as I recorded and transcribed them, but when I reread them I find I’ve lost who she is: that system of continuous small explosions, contained in a tall pouch of skin.
Absolution
Since it was going to be cool over the weekend, Marie suggested they go for a drive.
‘To the beach?’ Clare asked, and then thought better of it. ‘No, not to the beach. There will be a wind.’
‘To Stellenbosch, then?’ Marie said.
‘Yes, all right.’
‘And perhaps you would like to stop at the cemetery, to see your sister’s grave. We haven’t been there in such a long time.’
‘Yes, very well. Perhaps it’s time I paid another visit to check she hasn’t unearthed herself.’
Clare’s parents were not so easily visited; they had both been cremated, their ashes scattered in a high wind at the tip of the world, falling in eddies around her head and into the air above the waves where two oceans meet.
Marie drove them from the house and along the N2, turning off at Baden Powell Drive, going through Stellenbosch, and then up into the vineyard-covered slopes and around into Paarl.
The cemetery felt unnaturally white, headstones of white marble surrounded by whitewashed walls, the graves tended by fat white men with burned skin, replacing the faded white lilies on Nora and Stephan’s graves with fresh ones every day, at private expense. The wild fig was still there, outside the walls, covered in vines, and the language monument was now visible beyond the tree. Nora’s grave was in a place of honour next to her husband’s, adjacent to an eternal flame, which, it was rumoured, had lately been allowed to go out at night. But on that day it was burning, blue-gold under the leaden clouds, stark against the white crosses that faded into invisibility against the white wall that surrounded the acre of dead, the burial farm.
It was a space of such whiteness that Clare, in black for fashion rather than respect, looked like an intruder. And then she noticed that there was another intruder as well, black and small and round, nestled against the base of the monument that marked Nora’s grave. Clare knew what it was before she had seen it clearly; she knew at the first dull metal glint of black, half-revealed, itself half-concealing the eternal flame. It was her father’s black tin box. She felt cold in the heat, and put her hand on Marie’s white-sleeved arm. When they reached the grave, Clare leaned over and took up the box in her hands.
It was impossible; it was too horrible to find it there. It was somehow exactly what she had been expecting. She opened the lid. The wig was there, and she imagined for a fractional moment that her father’s head was there as well, tipped up, staring at her, though this was impossible, for his head was in ash, scattered to the sky. Clare thought she heard herself scream. She knew that they knew. She knew who they were — Stephan’s family, his brothers, his cousins, nephews and nieces for all she knew. It was clear what the wig meant, clear to her that her own complicity was known, that someone wished to remind her that she was not above the law, and not above the claims of history.
Surprising herself, Clare found a small white stone and placed it on her sister’s monument. It was not the tradition of her own family’s religion, but somehow it made sense, the stone as a private acknowledgement of a feeling she was unable to describe. It would have been too much to say that she grieved for her sister, and certainly she had no fond feeling for her brother-in-law, but there was a turbulence in her heart that, for a moment, the movement of the stone from the ground to the monument put to rest. When Clare was finished, she asked Marie to drive her home.
‘Would you not like to go for lunch somewhere?’ Marie asked, sounding hopeful.
‘Not now, no, I’m sorry. We can stop for a sandwich if you’re hungry, but I’ve quite lost my appetite.’
Later that day Clare realized that she should phone Ms White. It was near the end of the month. When had the invasion occurred? The beginning of December a year ago, or the end of November a year before that? The dates were fuzzy in her head. It seemed as though it had still been spring, only just warm enough to have had the windows open at night. Ms White was perfunctory on the phone.
‘Well, that is good. You have found the wig. I guess the case is closed.’
‘What of Jacobus and his so-called gang?’
‘You pressed no charges against them, so we have let them go.’
‘Is it as simple as that?’ Clare asked, incredulous.
‘As simple as you make it, madam.’
‘And what of the invaders? Are there no clues?’
‘Invaders?’
‘The people who broke into my old house, of course.’
‘But we had him, Jacobus and his gang, and you said it could not be them, madam. I do not understand. Is it now your wish that we should charge them with robbery?’ Ms White sounded truly perplexed, as though she could not begin to understand the nature or logic of Clare’s intentions.
‘It was not Jacobus, but I need to know who it was. I only wish to know, exactly, who did it — the invasion, the theft. I can tell you only that it was someone from the past. Someone from my brother-in-law’s family. His associates, his brothers, or even his sisters. They wish to punish me.’
‘If this is a family matter, madam, then why did you ever bring the authorities into it? If you knew who it was, why have you wasted our time?’
‘It is not that simple.’
‘Perhaps you should take over the investigation. You are so good at finding. You found your father’s special wig. That is good. Perhaps you will find the intruders. And then you will phone me if you wish. And we will come fetch them for you.’ Like a ball, or a stick, Clare wanted to say. Intruders that were only playthings, a wig, a tin box, two women of a certain age. ‘Or you will settle the matter as it should be settled, madam, as a family.’
But they are not my family, Clare wanted to say. They are nothing to do with me. They know what I have done. They are sending me signs. They are terrorizing me.
Clare
There is something I have never told you, Laura, a thing about me that makes us more alike than you might imagine. While I have many regrets — in particular about the kind of mother I was to you, and the kind of mother I never managed to be — I have no greater regret than this: that I failed to tell you the darkest truth about me when you were present to hear it, that I failed to show you, when you needed it, how alike we were. This is my true confession. To confess is all that I can do for you.