When we finish dinner Sarah excuses herself again, explaining that she’s trying to finish a story before she goes to bed — we agreed in advance that she’d give me space to talk alone with the men. There is no story to finish, no late-Friday deadline she has to meet.
Left alone, silence again overtakes us. They ask me nothing about myself, about my life in the years since I last saw them. If I don’t ask questions, the men don’t speak — I think of them as men in a way that I don’t think of myself. There’s a raw hardness and danger about them, a lack of domestication and care, as though they might break a chair or smash a glass if the fancy struck them, thinking nothing of the consequences. It’s not the way I remember either of them.
‘Is there nothing you can tell me about Laura?’
I’m perplexed by their hesitation and wonder if this is just a particular kind of South African awkwardness that I’ve forgotten — the unwillingness to speak, the filling of silence with small talk, or talking all the way around a subject without ever landing on it.
‘Just what is it exactly that you think you want to know, my friend?’ Timothy asks, smiling in a way that is not remotely amused.
‘I’d like to know what happened to her.’
‘Ag, no, you wouldn’t, really,’ he says, shaking his head rhythmically, each turn to the left or right punctuating a syllable.
Lionel shifts in his chair, fiddles with his glass, clears his throat. ‘You can’t just leave it at that,’ he says to Timothy. ‘You should tell Sam what he wants to know.’
‘I don’t have anyone else to ask,’ I say. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t know who to approach or where to begin. You understand that I’m not asking so much for the sake of the book, as for my own curiosity. Laura was a friend. She was almost like a mother to me then.’
‘No man, this is all ancient history,’ Timothy says, waving his hands, shooing the past back into the lounge. He stands and paces round behind his chair, still shaking his head. Lionel looks embarrassed, raises his eyebrows at me and gives a pained smile as Timothy reaches over for the bottle of wine, pours himself another glass and drinks it in loud slurps. He takes a book on Johannesburg from the shelf and cracks it open. It’s obvious that he knows something about Laura.
‘If you’re not going to tell Sam—’ Lionel begins, but Timothy interrupts him.
‘We’ve been through the resurrection of the dead already, all that poring over the past, the reading of bones. It was exhausting for all of us. It did no good, either. There’s nothing more to say about it, Sam. You don’t want to be asking these questions.’
‘I just want to know what happened to her. You don’t have to tell me anything, I accept that I can’t force you to, but if you know where she ended up …’ I’m aware of the pleading in my voice, uncomfortable because it reminds me of myself as a child, the way I pleaded with Laura, the ways I used to plead to my aunt, teachers, anyone who failed to give me what I wanted.
‘You want to know something?’ Timothy sighs, replacing the book on the shelf and turning to me, pointing with his glass. ‘What I can tell you is that Laura was on the wrong side of history. That’s what I can tell you.’
I don’t understand what he means. What he’s suggesting seems impossible. ‘You mean she was too militant?’
Timothy snorts, sips at his drink. ‘God, you really have no idea, do you?’
‘Come on, Tim, there’s no reason he should.’ Lionel edges forward on the chair as if he’s about to say more, but then Timothy puts out his arm and Lionel slides back into place.
‘She was on the wrong side, Sam.’ Timothy sits again; his voice is softer now, as though he’s making an effort to measure his tone against my expression. ‘She was on the wrong side and someone found her out. That’s all I know.’
‘But nothing like that came out in the TRC—’
‘The TRC was imperfect. It was incomplete. It does not represent the totality of late-apartheid history. Listen,’ he says, bringing his hands together like a preacher, ‘she was an embarrassment. No one wanted to talk about her — not us, and not the other side. There was, I don’t know, some kind of cover-up, and that doesn’t happen from the bottom. A cover-up needs a mandate, if you see what I mean. The family, thankfully, never pushed the case. If they had, who knows what would have emerged. We might actually know what happened to her.’
‘Then you don’t know?’
‘I only know that she went away with one of the others, and she never came back. The man who took her, he died not long after, killed by a letter bomb in Mozambique. If anyone knew what happened to her, and where she ended up, where she might be buried, he did. But he can’t tell us. So effectively she disappeared.’
The information comes at me like an invasion or an explosion. I feel assaulted, shattered, interfered with. I want them out of the house. It was a mistake to contact Lionel in the first place. I make sudden excuses, say that Sarah has an early morning. Lionel looks embarrassed and I hear Timothy say something under his breath like, ‘I told you it would end this way.’ Watching the car reverse down the driveway, all I can hope is that I won’t ever see them again. I don’t want to know their version of history.
Back inside, I tell Sarah what Timothy said. As I speak my hands and arms shake and I begin to lose my voice. I manage to tell her that I don’t know how to understand it. She holds on to me, listens as I heave and rant. Laura was supposed to be a friend of my parents, and all that time, I choke, she was deceiving them. Sarah doesn’t tell me to calm down or ask me to try to forget about it.
‘Is it possible,’ I say, seeing red everywhere I look, the room beating and buzzing around me, ‘that she sabotaged my parents?’ Sarah shakes her head. It’s a question she can’t answer.
*
Monday morning. Sarah flies to Angola for the week. I take her to the airport and then barricade myself in the house where I turn to Clare’s new book, which arrived today and is, perhaps ironically, the very distraction I need from thinking about Laura. I have difficulty believing what Timothy told me, and no reason to believe he’d lie. And yet it seems impossible that Laura would have been on the other side. It makes no sense, and at the same time it seems to make perfect sense — not just of her disappearance, but of the way my parents died.
I turn away from these thoughts, churning in a crazy cycle, almost sick with nausea, and hope to find solace, perhaps even insight, in Clare’s words.
Absolution has a tasteful matte cover with an image of a whitewashed Cape Dutch farmhouse in summer, surrounded by trees with a mountain rearing up behind it, all of it viewed through a broken windowpane with a snail creeping over shards of glass along the sill that frames the scene. If it weren’t for the distorting effect of the window, the image of the house in the landscape would almost be kitsch, a stereotype of the South African pastoral setting, a second-rate Pierneef, but I suppose that might also be intentional. With the framing device, however, it invites us to speculate on the nature and ownership of the house with the cracked window, and the person or persons who occupy it, who might be looking through the rippling broken glass, past the snail, at the elegant house in the distance. It could be a worker’s cottage on a wine estate, draughty and ill-lit, poorly maintained, close enough to the big house to have a good view of it without encroaching on the idyll, the goats on the lawn, the ducks in a shaded pond, squirrels and oaks imported from England. The text itself has nothing to do with the image, or at least nothing obvious. As I read I know that I’m hoping to find something, even an oblique reference, a whisper or a silence that might refer to me.