And yet you, Laura, went on writing your stories about high-achieving child prodigies and exceptional housewives. Perhaps, you wrote in the notebook, they will eventually trust me to do something more important.
Yet no promotion, no greater freedom ever came. You met with Peter and Ilse and their circle of friends and associates. In private, you compiled further notes on Rick Turner, and when you had exhausted that topic, finding no answers and not knowing where else to turn in search of the truth, expanded your scope. I read it with horror: Unsolved deaths. Robert Smit. Rick Turner. Stephan Pretorius. Nora Boyce Pretorius. From an individual you shifted to a theme, became obsessed with the dead, whatever side they might be on.
But unlike Smit or Turner, whose deaths have remained, objectively, unsolved and unexplained, the deaths of your aunt and uncle had their day in court. A man confessed and was found guilty. Nonetheless, something about the resolution did not satisfy you, as if you intuited that the story of their deaths was only a cover, obscuring the real story, the one beneath and behind the cover story.
On the phone, you spoke with ‘X’ about your frustrations at the paper.
‘I want to do something more significant. They give me no latitude. If I come up with an idea, I have to get their approval first. Mostly they give my ideas to other reporters and leave me with news that doesn’t matter. I told them I wanted to write an in-depth investigative piece on the Turner murder and they laughed. It was old news, ancient history no one wanted to hear. I haven’t made them trust me.’
‘If it’s not working out perhaps you should quit,’ said ‘X’. ‘Find a more direct way to be involved. Go to work for one of the alternative papers. Get Ilse to make an introduction, to Grassroots or the New Nation or South. Perhaps the Record is too tame. We should have known they wouldn’t give someone like you a long enough lead.’
The following week you turned in your resignation to the Record, as if you had been waiting for the permission of that man, that former lover, a consent for you to slip from the back rows of safe respectability and slide into the orchestra pit, to take up your sticks and play.
Not knowing where else to turn, you went to Peter and Ilse and told them, ‘I’m ready. I want to do something more.’ Ilse took you in her arms and though you were still unsure of her, still felt that tickle of anger at the freedom with which she lived her life, expecting other people to clean up her messes, you believed that together the two of them pointed to the road you were destined to follow.
*
Dear Sam,
Thank you for your generous message about Absolution. I am glad you think it — rather politely, I fear — a not wholly uninteresting foray into that well-charted country of life writing that I claimed to revile and mistrust. You see how unreliable I am.
Regarding the speaking events in May. Either such things are now beyond one’s power to police, or I am simply too fatigued to fight in the way I once could. My woman of business says it is the only way for one to operate these days — by this she means that no one but those regarded as the truly exceptional, the recluses (all of them male, I note, most of them dying or dead), can get away with saying no.
For the Winelands Festival we shall spend two nights at a hotel in Stellenbosch, as the organizers have roped me into a reading, a book signing, a panel discussion, a pantomime as well for all I know, spread over the course of three days. My woman of business wanted me to go to America but I demurred. I am too old and too frail, I said, and this she seemed to accept. Such excuses don’t wash at home. The truth is I hate travel, and all the administrative bumf (nasty word for nasty things) that inevitably goes with it these days: travel is, more and more, paper chasing paper. In a moment of weakness, thinking I was being too difficult, too precious about my health, I looked at the visa application to visit your adopted country and discovered its demand that I provide my tribal name. I was minded to invent one and submit the form for sport, then thought better of it, fearing it might get me arrested or detained or rendered to a secret base.
As busy as the Festival is bound to be, I shall nonetheless have ample time for you, please do not fear (I have this hunch that you spend a great deal of your life in states of fear; is that unfair?). What I mean is, almost the only thing about the trip I look forward to is the promise of seeing you again.
Yours,
Clare
1999
Because their flight arrived after dark and they’d been warned that the road into the city was unsafe at night, they stayed over at the airport hotel. The room was small but serviceable and the bellhop put down their suitcases with a flourish that felt out of place in the utilitarian setting. Sarah tipped the man a hundred rand and all at once he looked grateful and astounded but also suspicious, as if the money must be some kind of trap. Sam gave him a confidential nod to indicate it was okay, he should take it. Never mind that five or ten rand would have been plenty.
They watched the news and Sarah was surprised that she could understand what was being said. I thought it would all be more foreign.
Wait till the Xhosa news, Sam said, poking her in the ribs. You won’t understand a word of that.
She tried to sound out words in Afrikaans on signs in the room and he couldn’t help laughing at her mispronunciation, so endearingly wrong with its hard consonants and rounded, musical vowels. Flat, he told her, the vowels should be flatter, and the ‘g’ is a ‘ch’ like in ‘Bach’ or ‘loch’.
Bahk, she said. Lock. He was surprised that she couldn’t hear the difference.
The next morning he watched her at the buffet in the lobby. There was juice in plastic containers, stale croissants, individual boxes of American cereal brands, eggs that looked as though they had been cooked the day before and reheated and then forgotten about and fried in grease to reheat them again. The coffee tasted like it had been two hours on the boil by 8 a.m. A fresh fruit salad was the only truly local thing available, but at least it was good. Sam felt embarrassed by the meal while Sarah ate without complaint, giving no sign that she thought anything was lacking.
This is not representative, he said. South Africans are usually good with food. This is pretty dreadful.
It’s fine, Sam. I feel like I’m back home.
He thought of the breakfasts his mother and aunt had once made, the habitual parade of courses: first juice and cereal (porridge in winter), then fruit, followed by an egg and sausage and sometimes slices of fried brinjal, ending with toast and home-made preserves and a pot of strong tea. The hotel breakfast was a poor introduction; he wanted Sarah to love his country even though the point of the trip had nothing to do with entertainment or amusement or being a tourist falling for a new place. There was nothing amusing about what had happened, and as he thought about it he felt more on edge, recalibrating his reactions, expecting threat rather than hoping all would be well. A victim was complacent, a survivor vigilant. He had grown up in something like a state of war, and it was difficult to remember that was no longer the case. The potential for danger was everywhere. At school in Port Elizabeth he had been taught how to identify limpet mines and that knowledge and the reflex attached to it had never gone away. Every time he approached a vehicle or entered a building, a part of his brain did an automatic scan for the telltale outline. For the sake of survival and self-preservation, one had to retune the dial, pay attention to the emergency frequencies, receive all incoming communications, and ignore nothing that might tip one off to the presence of danger. Pay attention to the Morse code, the signal fires, the sounds of distant voices and the thunder of feet, and one stood a better chance of staying alive.