Love,
Clare
At first I am simply confused, and unsure what it is I’m reading.
You come out, across the plateau, running close to the ground, find the hole in the fence you cut on entry, scamper down to the road, peel out of the black jacket, the black slacks, shorts and T-shirt underneath; you are a backpacker, a student, a young woman hitchhiking, a tourist, perhaps with a fake accent. Soon it will be dawn. But no, I fear this isn’t right. Perhaps it wasn’t there, not that town — not the one on the plateau, but the one further along the coast at the base of the mountains …
She must have made a mistake. She never would have intended for me to see this. It is far too personal. And then I turn a page and find myself in the text and begin to feel dizzy. But the versions of me and of Bernard that I find in her words are people I don’t recognize, and the events she recounts are not the events as they occurred. She knows and she doesn’t know. As dinnertime approaches, and I’m due to meet Sarah back at our hotel, I come to the end:
You wanted him to throw out his arms and cling to you, cry out not to be abandoned, force you into doing what you could not.
But he had nothing to say.
Of course I remembered him at once. Not just here. I knew him immediately in Amsterdam. And finding him suddenly before me, it was like being faced with my own assassin. I wondered if he had come to exact his pound of flesh. But he has only ever been charming. What does he want? I ask. Why can he not say what he has come to say?
On the final page, in the long lines of her shaky hand, is a brief postscript:
Come back tomorrow afternoon and say what you failed to say in Cape Town. Let us say what we both know is between us. C.
Absolution
Though still shaken by Mark’s abrupt dismissal of her confession, the next morning Clare made an attempt to return to her usual routine. She woke early and swam before her son was up. Adam arrived as she was drying off and she buzzed him in through the front gate. After a long period of negotiation and renegotiation, she and Adam had settled into a routine that suited Clare and that she hoped also suited him. He had accepted her small patch of exotic plants, the vegetables and herbs and flowers, while she had accepted that as far as growing conditions and soil amendments and the indigenous species were concerned, Adam would have to be treated as the authority, and that beyond the imposition of her kitchen parterre, the structure of the garden should remain unchanged, at least for the present.
With Adam’s agreement, Clare ordered two hundred Queen of the Night bulbs, which she had decided should go across the pale front of the house in an unbroken mass, providing a sombre and elegant ribbon of contrast in the spring. ‘We will have to replant them every autumn,’ she told him. ‘Queen of the Night is a fussy, unpredictable tulip, not very robust. If you can make them bloom from year to year, I should be impressed. Would your brother approve of them, do you think?’
‘He did not like tulips so much,’ Adam said, ‘because he thought they are the Dutchman’s flower. But these black tulips, I think he never saw these ones. I think they will make a nice memory.’
‘A memorial. Yes, I think it is a very nice way to think of them,’ Clare said. ‘One fitting for a gardener, always needing renewal.’
When Clare returned indoors, she found Mark in the kitchen, drinking his milky coffee and reading the Mail & Guardian.
‘Have you had time to consider?’ Clare asked. ‘Have you reached a decision, or can you only offer absolution from the instance?’
‘No pleasantries this morning, Mother?’
‘You leave me to sleep on my confession and refuse to pass sentence. I have not slept. I could not sleep, in expectation of what you might say. I have been swimming to try to do something with my nervous energy and my anxiety of anticipation. Don’t make me wait any longer. Tell me if what I did deserves amnesty, if it truly had political motivation, or if you think I did it out of nothing more than personal spite. That is all I am asking, for your opinion.’
Mark closed the newspaper and folded it in half, so that the masthead remained visible. The front-page story was an investigation of government corruption, of backroom deals and nepotism and fraud in the ruling party, of police payoffs and arms deals and trafficking and the silencing of dissent. Smoke and fire, Clare thought, there is far too much smoke. She sat across from Mark at the breakfast table and tried to draw his eyes to hers as he looked down at the paper, at his coffee cup and pale hands, avoiding her gaze. He drank, slurping his coffee, exhaling and inhaling, and exhaling again so loudly that the exhalation could only be called a sigh. He had condescended to play Clare’s game; it struck her as unfair that he should now begrudge fulfilling his role, which would see the process to its necessary conclusion.
‘You want to know my opinion. This is only the verdict of this court, as you clearly like to imagine it. I don’t say that I’m the final authority or that I have any particular moral authority in this case. I feel, perhaps, that I should recuse myself because of my involvement with you, the defendant, and with the victims, although I have no memory of the latter and nothing that I recognize as strong feeling for them. Possibly, though, a small part of me even now wishes that I had been given the chance to know them, and wishes that they had also been given the chance to change, to show themselves more than and less than what you and others thought of them. Change, as you would yourself admit, Mother, is not impossible. The crime you committed — betraying the location of two people whose lives held a symbolic value in this country at the time — is not clear to me. That is to say, it is not clear to me that there is a definite connection between what you said and what happened. We would have to prove that someone — perhaps the man you suspected of being an MK cadre — had reported the information to someone else, perhaps Mr Dlamini, the man who was found guilty and sentenced to death for carrying out the assassinations. Without being able to determine that, I cannot reach a verdict. Let us assume, though, for the sake of this artificial process, that you were responsible in some way, directly or indirectly, which leaves the question of whether your motivation was political or personal — the one being excusable, under the rubric of amnesty that briefly held sway in this country, the other being merely criminal. What I must decide is whether you’ve proved that your motivation was political. My immediate feeling is that you have not. You were not a member of the ANC or the Communist Party, and certainly not of MK,’ he snorted. ‘You couldn’t even bring yourself to become a member of the Black Sash. You were taking orders from no one, so I fail to see how your action was political.’
‘I was a member of the Progressive Party. Give me that at least.’
‘Fine. You belonged to a political party that was a small voice of opposition, but your primary concern, as you yourself have made clear, was personal. You feared I would be taken away from you. Your secondary motivation was even more personaclass="underline" the selfish wish to appear useful to people you respected and feared. Perhaps you now rationalize this as political intent, but in truth it was not. You sat behind your desk and removed yourself from conflict and gossiped with friends and fellow travellers. You might have attended meetings in the early Sixties, but by the second half of the decade you were retreating ever further into your work and your teaching. Don’t deny it.’