Absolution (29 page)

You were so observant, it is not impossible that you knew – not just about your father and Ilse, but about what all of us were doing in ways we thought would be illegible to a child.

You prefaced your account of this meeting with a line I do not know how to interpret:
Succeeded in meeting Ilse
. I feel a chill at the base of my spine when I reread it, as though, from the start, you had contrived everything that followed, setting the players in motion by placing yourself in their midst.

*

Dear Sam,

God what a ninny I sound! Much as you might have enjoyed the process, your careful transcription is a sad and salutary reminder to me not to agree to face-to-face interviews in the future. The things one says off the top of one’s head! Yes, for the sake of your book, I shall attempt to reconstruct the garbled passages and, with your permission, revise what I say elsewhere, maintaining the conceit of the conversational so far as I am able. What know I of politics? I fear I shall have to do some research and recast my feeble political opinions in a more sophisticated light if this is destined to find a place in your work of record. Now that I think of it, you must let me see the other transcripts – all of them, in their entirety, whether garbled or not – that I may work to make myself better understood.

I am also sending something to you, although I have little idea of how long it may take to reach Jo’burg. (By the way, why swap New York for Egoli? I should have thought the former could not be beat, but perhaps you are a masochist, coming back to Africa.) The woman at my local post office shrugged and said something about unpredictability and instability and the like. I asked her if she thought the country any less stable now than it had been at any time before and, wise woman, she said she feared it might be. You see what a pessimist I’ve become, but perhaps now that you’ve been here for an extended period you will understand why I have actually given up despairing of this country’s postal system and instead console myself with hoping that what I send will reach its intended recipient before I die so that I might, at the very least, have some acknowledgement. No doubt that is why we now communicate in this improbably sterile way, which is to me, in my old-fashioned training of penmanship (
there
is a term, if ever there were one, that
demands deconstruction†), a markedly inelegant, impermanent, and cumbersome one.

This ‘thing’ I send – a proof of my new book,
Absolution –
will not, I hope, upset you. In any event, it will be available in bookshops in May. It does not, I feel strongly, risk usurping the position of your own work, but will provide a kind of augmentative prelude
avant la lettre
. Moreover, in sending it to you now, you will have time to consider and incorporate it into your surreal portrait of this old woman. As for the why and the wherefore (
why
I did not tell you,
wherefore
it came, etc. – since every why hath a wherefore, and one must take nothing for granted), let me say only that I tell no one of or about my work apart from my woman of business and my editor in London, and between the two of them they put the pieces in motion and effect the kind of result people expect every two or three years, and only once
everything
is in place do the publicity people take the reins and by then there is no stopping the machine. Chug, chug it goes, whirr and buzz and out plops the tome.

This is all to say that I hope you find something of interest when the parcel finally arrives and that you will not judge me too harshly for the secrecy and deception that has become my default mode of engagement with all but those I have known for years.

Yours,

   Clare

†I consult my dictionary.
Penman
may refer to a clerk (which suits this writer’s sense of her own vocation), a recorder of scripture (scrivener of the divine, if you like), a calligrapher, an author, but also, from the 19th century, a forger (a counterfeiter, a criminal) remembering that
forger
did not always bear the negative sense it now does. Ecclesiastes 11.5:
God, that is forgere of alle thingus
. I like this idea, God as creator whose creations are all perhaps no more than counterfeits of lost originals which probably no longer exist, if ever they did.

1989–98

Life with his aunt Ellen was the beginning of something like a normal life, a life of memory, a life the boy – that is, Sam, in other words me, or some version of me – would remember fully and not just in fragments of odour and light and noise.

That is not to say it was a particularly happy life, or even an unhappy one. Ellen adopted him, took away the name of his father’s family, Lawrence, and gave him her own name, Leroux, without asking whether he wanted it or not. Like the loss of his house, its contents, and the money from his parents’ estate, it was another kind of disinheritance. He had always been Sam Lawrence and now, with the filing of papers and a series of signatures, he was not.

Once, when Ellen went out to the shops and left Sam alone, he phoned the number that Timothy and Lionel had given him. There was no answer. A few days later, he phoned it again. The number had been disconnected.

At first Ellen wanted to know what had happened, asked him dozens of times to tell her exactly how he had come to be at her door.
There was a hijacking. And the hijacker killed Bernard while I hid. And then I hitchhiked. And the last people who gave me a lift were in a hurry, so they left me at the end of the street before they went on their way
. It was the story he’d rehearsed with Timothy and Lionel, and after hearing it enough times Ellen finally stopped asking, though Sam knew from the way she squinted and turned to look at him out of the corner of her eye that she didn’t really believe him.

Well never mind then
, she said.
You’re safe here now and we can forget about the past
.

If she called the police to report the hijacking and Bernard’s death, Sam never knew. He remembered there was evidence, in the form of Bernard’s watch and signet ring, that there might be another story, another explanation for how he’d come to her. A hijacker would have stolen a ring and a watch. Sam kept them rolled up in a sock hidden at the back of the bottom drawer in the dresser of the room that became his. Every night he checked to see if the sock was still there, rolled just in the way he remembered rolling it.

I’m sorry I didn’t send for you in the first place
, Ellen said several weeks into his life with her, but she didn’t sound sorry, not at all. He had hoped she would be like his mother, or even like Laura, that she would allow him to hug her, that she would treat him something like her own child. But she did not hold him, nor did she indulge him when he slipped into long silences, staring out the window, sitting in the garden, lying on the couch and looking at the ceiling.
Stop mooning now
, she would say, sounding like the teacher she was. Sam remembered his mother complaining about her family, about Bernard and Ellen.
We have to pull ourselves together and move forward
, Ellen said.
You’re not a little boy any more. You’re practically a man, even if you don’t look it. Find something to do with yourself. Read a book
.

The few books Sam had managed to keep with him were, he knew, nothing more than children’s stories. He understood that he was no longer a child, or not in the same way he had once been. If he was practically a man, then he decided it was time to read adult books. At the end of the central hallway off of which all the rooms of the house opened, there was a bookcase with four shelves. He started with the bottom shelf and its half-dozen volumes of
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books
, speeding through them in a week, and feeling afterwards as though he’d eaten too much cake. Next there were bibles in English and Afrikaans, hymnbooks in both languages, too, but these he ignored. Mysteries followed – Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh – less
like cake than the condensed books, but still not very nourishing.

When Ellen enrolled him at the local school, he had less time for his own reading, but began to jump around the bookshelf, teaching himself what he could without realizing it was an education. He read Schreiner and Millin, FitzPatrick and Bosman, Paton and Van der Post. These were all stories he could read and have no trouble understanding: the story was exactly what it claimed to be. He exhausted the contents of the bookcase, and then, as the autumn began to close in and the days shortened, he discovered another collection of books in the lounge, hidden behind stacks of
National Geographic
magazines. Why, he wondered, were these books hidden? They were not hidden as carefully as his parents had hidden books, with some of their covers removed and brown paper pasted on in their place, secreted in plastic packets under the floorboards. Ellen’s hidden books were still intact, with their covers and all their pages, but they were tucked out of the way, where visitors could never chance to see them. Sam began with a book called
Dusklands
, which at first appeared to be one kind of story – a story unlike any he’d read before – and then turned into another kind of book altogether halfway through. He wasn’t sure what it all meant, but as he read it in his room at night, with a torch under the covers of his bed, he felt a kind of thrill that no other book had given him before. There were others by the same author that confused and excited him even more than the first. From there he moved to another writer whose stories he found still more confusing:
The Late Bourgeois World
he had to read with the dictionary open next to him, but he became convinced that such books were teaching him, both about the country and himself.

The last of the books hidden behind the stack of
National Geographic
magazines were by Clare Wald. When he’d first discovered the cache, he hadn’t noticed her name, and now, picking up the first of Wald’s books,
Landing
, he wondered if
she could possibly be Laura’s mother. He opened the book to the back flap and looked at the photo of the author holding a baby cheetah, its tongue sticking out. He had only seen Mrs Wald twice in his life, but he knew it was Laura’s mother, the woman who had stood in the background at his parents’ funeral, and who later slammed the door in his face. He tucked the book under his shirt and read it through the course of a single night. And though it made even less sense to him than all the other books he’d read, slipping into Laura’s mother’s words was like discovering that the house he had lived in with his parents had other rooms – and not just rooms but whole floors and staircases and wings of space that were at once in keeping with the architecture of the small house he knew, but at the same time made it something else altogether, so that he understood the original space in a new way. He read the other books by her –
Cacophony, Dissidence, In A Dry Month –
and began to understand that Wald’s stories were not only spaces to inhabit as real as the house he lived in with his aunt, the house he might have hoped to live in with Clare herself, but they were also keys that opened the library of his memory.

Sometimes, at night, he would hear Ellen on the phone.
It changes everything
, she would sigh.
All my own plans are finished. But what can I do? There’s no one else to take him now that Bernard’s dead. If I could, you know, I’d leave in a heartbeat. Maybe he’ll be hit by a truck. No, of course I don’t mean that
.

There was something about his family, Sam began to think, that was careless of life. His mother had it, Bernard certainly had it, his aunt had it too. And Sam himself had it. He knew he did.

You need a better school
, Ellen said when the winter holidays arrived.
It’s time to set our sights higher
.

With Ellen’s tutoring, he won a bursary to a school in Port Elizabeth and moved there the following year.

Life at school was normal boarding-school life. Holidays were normal holidays, mostly at Ellen’s, sometimes with trips to the
coast. He read other books from other countries, but kept coming back to his own, and especially to Clare Wald’s.

Ellen suggested he try to forget the years before he came to live with her.
It’s better that way
, she said.
You can remember your parents but try not to think of those times. Your parents didn’t know what they were doing, in so very many ways. The poor fools. Better to forget everything they ever did
. Sam didn’t know how to separate events from the people involved in them, and once Clare’s books had given him the key to his own past, he did not want to close that door again.

He moved to Grahamstown for university, voted for the first time in 1994, finished first in his class, read for an MA and finished first in that class, too. All the while, he read and reread Wald’s books. Every time a new one was published, he bought it the first day it appeared in the bookshop. If he could not actually live with Clare, he could live in the house of her words.

*

When Sam first arrived he went straight from the airport to the high-rise that had been converted by the university into a student dorm. It was around the corner from Bellevue Hospital so he heard sirens at all hours and couldn’t sleep without earplugs. He had thought of Cape Town as a city, but he knew after only an hour in Manhattan that this was something else entirely. Trees were stunted and corralled into holes surrounded by concrete. He strained to see a large expanse of sky. Everywhere he looked the space was crowded with buildings that dwarfed and enclosed him. It had not occurred to him that he might miss the great openness of the Karoo, an openness that had often felt claustrophobic and oppressive in its own way.

Once his phone was working he called Ellen to tell her he was there safely. She believed that phone calls were not for chatting but for the brief communication of essential information. They promised to write to each other and hung up after two minutes.
Sam would have liked to talk for longer, only he didn’t know how to keep her on the line.