They wandered out into the forest of city in which they were abandoned strangers. The lawyer was guiding them, at their backs. — Let’s go to my office and have some coffee. — What could she have to say to them there? Application for reclassification refused.
They don’t know, but she receives in never-silenced memory her echo of what they are feeling; as a child, a life ago, in a German town called Dortmund she was turned away from school with a yellow star stuck to her dress. — Look, I have experience with these people. — A note taken of the afterthought: ‘Sorry’. —I’m going to see him tomorrow.—
Mr van Rensburg was amiable: you again. Rose from his chair, both sat down. Across the desk from one another, a level of understanding confidentially, professionally assumed. You know, I know. The girl is white. Years ago some other white girl dumped an unwanted infant on church premises. — A church for Coloureds, ja. — Yes. But in those days, you’ll remember, there was a poor whites’ area only a few yards away across the veld. If it’d been a whites’ church, the mother might have been discovered.—
And now he released himself to the assumed level of understanding. — Look. Ag, she’s white, can’t I see it for myself. Of course. Anyone can see it. A nice young man wants to marry her. Jesus, I see what she is. But it’s the law it’s my job. She can perhaps apply again. If you can dig up something from the orphanage or church or whatever she was found. Sorry.—
They’re saving up now. Not to see the Tower of London, the Champs Élysées, Piazza San Marco in Venice, but to go away, for good. That’s how they describe leaving a home they can’t have.
Perhaps they’ve come back since all the laws that decided who she was, who he was, have gone, as the politicians and newspapers like to put it, into the dustbin, the rotten eggshells and beer cans, of history. Years ago now, by the time that is measured when you’re in bodily manifestation. The names of those heroes who made the laws have even been taken off street signs and airports.
I must have been released from her — she must have died, somehow, young: you don’t always keep, know, the moment when you were recalled; how it ended. But of all my Returns that one was unique, there never was anything like it! Because, each time, you are one manifestation, sent back to live out one life. But that Return was in itself two, I had come back twice over in the same enclosure within space that is a planet.
Denise — my pretty name they gave me because I didn’t have one. I’m thinking in the taal; I was so happy among the other kids in the township, our own place, my Mama and Daddy giving me my Barbie doll and all her outfits, even a pearl necklace that broke and Mama threaded again, the prizes I got, top girl in class, the Sundays when the aunties and uncles and cousins came, we kids ran races, turned cartwheels, and stuffed ourselves with sweets and cold drinks. The time when I had grown breasts, still not full like Mama’s but quite nice, and Terry held them and sucked the nipple and put his finger in my hole at the donga we kids roofed over with branches as our headquarters in the veld. His name was Tertius, teacher told us it means number three, but he was first-born, we used to tease him, his parents were stupid. I was in junior choir at our church, with Mama in the ladies’ choir. Daddy — oh he had me with him so many times, we went to watch dirt-track racing, very exciting, and when there was a fun fair set up in our township and a circus he bought tickets for us for the rides and the seats. He held my hand when I was scared that the lion was going to bite the tamer. When I was little I used to climb into their big bed between them and cuddle on Sunday mornings, and when I grew bigger and didn’t anymore they didn’t know about Terry and the headquarters we kids had.
Then — without a death yet, without the proper end — that Return ended. There was Miss Denise Appolis, trainee at the bank. Now it comes to me in English. I live in a flat in the city with another girl. We’re white — well of course, what else could we be? What a question. Like other people who work in the bank or the attorney’s office where my friend is also some sort of trainee. We try out different hairstyles together, have boyfriends we mock and laugh about when we’re alone, we go to parties. But sometimes this Denise Appolis who I am goes, crosses from one self to another, to a place and people, feelings towards these people, that should belong to another Return entirely. So I don’t know what happened to the force that sends me back, again and again, but never as the same being, even if, rarely, I do have a recognition that must come from another life. How can there be two in one Return?
There are no answers.
There is no answer. Only that you have to go back, in whatever form, again and again.
Perhaps there are things people on the planet decree upon one another that would explain this freak Return that once happened.
‘I have been part of it always and there is maybe no escape, forgetting and returning life after life like an insect in the grass.’
I would have been Denis — if she hadn’t pushed her way into the world first. They were expecting me. Hoped for, planned for — a son. So far as you could then; it was before the discovery of tests that would reveal the sex of what was in the womb. They knew only that we were two of us — Gemini — in the biological package.
Still-born. Which means you don’t get a name. Still-born: means ‘still’ in the sense of unable to breathe, to move, to live. So it’s true that my corporeal life outside the shelter, the womb, was only the passage from the birth canal to the hospital incinerator. You have seen a foetus? Head and genitals — that’s it. Both outsize. What is inbetween is dismissable. Because a foetus doesn’t have to eat, digest, evacuate. Head and genitals — intelligence and sex. That’s about what I was; she had hogged the vital juices meant for both of us and she emerged ready to meet the requirements, fully formed. I was the runt, underdeveloped, the feeble heart arrested, not even incubator material, still-born. Never got further than that. Only head and genitals, intelligence and sex as my share of experiencing the world in the flesh the way you do; but never to have your experience of humiliating functions that, from the tangled nuisance of gut and stuff, plague and disrupt these two great powers! You begin to understand? I wonder …
Memory belongs to the corporeal — you have to have lived, to travel your time through the body, to remember. I have no memory of my own beyond that passage from the birth canal to the incinerator. Instead I find I flit about, I experience snatches of corporeal life of any and all of you, as I please. That’s the explanation for my non-existent existence. Of which I have proof to offer in response to your disbelief.
How is it that I think? Know words? Something of history, literature, politics, contemporary life, what it’s all like — as you’ll see. Is it the collective unconscious some of you believe in, others deride? Or do I have, as the ancient religious mystics believed and some of your fashionable novelists resort to for their characters, in invigoration of flagging invention — the ability to inhabit someone’s body, invade his or her experience as incubus, succubus, dybbuk — I don’t know. But I do no harm; the subject isn’t even aware of what I have appropriated and is not deprived in any way; there’s enough for both of us. You’d be surprised if you knew how much goes to waste in your experience; how much you don’t grasp, just don’t get it, don’t (what’s your word) intuit, and how much you don’t want to accept, although it’s been provided.