When Sarah spoke of his exotic childhood he feared that she meant not just foreign but also strange and barbarous, spiced and scented, a childhood glamorous in its outlandish landscape, creatures, and customs, tribal and tropical, though tropical was far from accurate.
He told her his parents were dead and that after their deaths his aunt had taken him in and that although he would now see her once a year when he returned home for the holidays he was otherwise alone in the world. He said nothing at first about Bernard. He said nothing of the way his parents had died. He realized later that he’d spoken of their deaths in a way that didn’t invite questions.
Or perhaps Sarah asked him how they died, and he said only, They died. They’re dead.
And after they died, she said, as if understanding that he wasn’t ready to speak about them, what can you tell me about those years?
As he began to recount his life after going to live with his aunt, he realized that the memories were all folded into the books he had been reading, the books he had inhabited in order to make sense of his life, in order to unlock the earlier memories — Clare’s books. His memories were as much his own as they were scenes from the books he had been reading at the time the events occurred. In each case, the story he told Sarah began as his own and then, without intending it, changed into something he hadn’t experienced that was derived from one of Clare’s novels.
There were stories from school. Stories of pretending to be sick to escape revelation that he had bribed a group of boys to vote for him in a school election by promising to give each of them a chocolate bar every week for the rest of the year — and then of being discovered by a black member of the cleaning staff, and insisting in front of the headmaster that the black man was lying. Stories of listening to records in the bedrooms of dayboys whose parents drove him back and forth from school to play at suburban homes with high walls and swimming pools, gardeners and maids — and of discovering an elderly relative of one of the maids hidden in a garden shed, covered in perfectly round suppurating wounds that he knew had been made with a lit cigarette. Stories of finding a scorpion in his shoe — and watching as the scorpion turned to stare at him, lowering its metasoma, its tail, and its aculeus, its sting (words that could only, he knew, have come from a book), and retreating from conflict. Stories of sneaking out of the residence and back into the school and playing piano in an empty room at night.
What did you play? Sarah asked, examining his fingers.
Schumann, he said, knowing that mostly he had played Chopin’s Études. One of Clare’s characters, Sam remembered, was a pianist and Schumann scholar.
He told her stories of an Afrikaans teacher who fell in love with him and gave him a book of C. Louis Leipoldt’s poems.
Did you report the man?
He left the school the next year. I never saw him again. No one ever told us where he went. In fact the teacher had stayed at the school, and nothing more was ever said about the gift.
Stories of holidays with Ellen spent at Bushmans River and the blue-green waves of the Indian Ocean crashing like terror — the mist coming off the foam that rushed around tortured outcroppings of rock, directing the waves into mesmerizing eddies and swirls, and him running in fear to the grassy crest of the dunes to get away from the shore, inhaling and exhaling rapidly, his chest rising and falling under a thin cotton T-shirt. He had never been afraid of the ocean.
What colour T-shirt?
Green with gold sleeves, he said, thinking it might have been blue and orange.
When they had been together just over a year he finally told Sarah something about Bernard, although he spent days building up to it, playing the script he was writing over and over to be sure he would know how to answer the questions that might come.
After his parents died there was a brief time before he went to his aunt, he said, when he was looked after by a guardian, an uncle, a half-uncle really, and the guardian, this half-uncle, had disappeared with all the money from his parents’ estate, the little there was, and all their belongings, even his toys.
I had a few books and a few clothes and that was about it.
And this guardian, your half-uncle, he just disappeared? Sarah sounded more sympathetic than anyone ever had except his own mother.
He dropped me — he abandoned me and then my aunt took me in. He abandoned me with her. He left me there. At her door.
God, Sam, that’s terrible. You poor thing. She looked wounded and tears welled up in her eyes as they flared red at the ducts. She wiped them and put her hands on his and held them as if to squeeze truth from his fingers.
He could hear the engine gunning and then feel the bump like a boulder rearing up from the earth and the black-headed gearshift in his small hand, and then the other bump that collapsed into a crunch, and another softer crunch, and then seeing the body deflated and covered in roses like water in the lights from the truck. For years he had taken pains to be sure he felt nothing about that moment and how it made everything in his life change from one state of things to another. He knew he had made the change happen even if it was an accident. There was no question it was an accident. His parents had died because of an accident. That was how everyone had explained it to him. He tried to remember who had first told him about his parents being dead — it must have been the police or Mrs Gush, the old toothless woman — but there was a gap, as if the film of his memory had been cut and entire days of footage lost and burned up in a broken projector, bubbling yellow and black into whiteness.
Accidents were always happening. He had come from a country of accidents. He tried to understand what this meant. It seemed to mean that no one was ever responsible for anything if only you could tell the truth and most of all if you could say you were sorry. But he had not told the truth and he was not sorry.
There was no way to explain all this so he said nothing for a moment and tried to think of an explanation that would make sense in his head. By some movement of grace he had found this woman who seemed to like him, and now that he had found her he could not imagine being without her, but to tell the truth about everything would risk too much. He could not trust that she would understand, he could not trust that she would keep his secrets. He could sense her hunger for strangeness and story, for the hidden and the scandalous, and he knew that hunger was insatiable.
It just happened, he said, shaking his head. I don’t remember how it made me feel. I missed my parents. That’s what I felt.