Absolution (42 page)

While Sam was away, Sarah had stripped Ellen’s bed, bundling the sheets into a plastic bag whose seams strained under the pressure.
What about the mattress?
she asked.
I don’t think the stain will come out
.

The women from the church will know what to do
.

If you find me the number I’ll phone them
.

Sarah was better than he could have imagined. She made tea and cooked meals that comforted him with their simplicity: macaroni and cheese, spaghetti and meatballs, stew with kudu meat, an omelette and biscuits. She placed phone calls and came through with money when the accounts were not immediately transferrable to Sam. She ordered flowers for the funeral, helped choose the music, and charmed the women of the church where Ellen, although rarely a churchgoer in recent years, was still a member. She sampled food that was new to her and tried to make Sam happy without ever diminishing the solemnity of the situation. With the help of the Women’s Federation she arranged a brunch following the memorial service and helped Sam set up a fund to pay for a scholarship in Ellen’s name at the school where she’d taught. She phoned her father’s lawyers whose firm had a branch in Cape Town and within days the red tape was cleared, the accounts were in Sam’s name, and the property his to do with as he liked. Everything she did was perfectly pitched – efficient
and businesslike without being unfeeling. It was a way that reminded Sam, not for the first time, of Laura.

Though grateful for everything she’d done, almost despite himself he began to resent the part Sarah was playing so effortlessly – the American saviour with a golden touch. Without thinking, he began to do little things that might alienate her, forcing her to reveal some hidden selfishness. But when he wanted to sleep alone for a night in the room that had been his since he first came to live with Ellen, Sarah made up the couch in the living room and slept there without complaint.

The police assured Sam they would follow up leads.

Sam

I spend the rest of the summer, the sweltering days of February and the cooler days of early autumn – March, April – trying to forget what Timothy told me, and what Lionel did not deny. Perhaps, I begin to feel now, my Aunt Ellen was right: it is better to forget and move on from the past and its people; we’re mistaken in thinking we know them.

During the days I spend in my cell of a university office, I’m either working on the book or preparing for teaching, though the two are symbiotic, one feeding the other. I only have two classes this term, one an honours-level course on contemporary South African literature, the other a Masters course devoted in its entirety to Clare’s books. The students work hard, they’re engaged, they tease me about my Americanized vowels and ask, as the term progresses, whether I’m getting enough sleep. They express concern for my well-being in a way that both touches and alarms me. I go to bed earlier and get up later each morning. I stop resisting the attempts by the domestic worker to do things like launder and iron my clothes. This is what we are paying her to do. It makes no sense for us to do it ourselves.

On weekends Sarah and I go to the malls, out to dinner in Illovo, on a day trip to Pretoria to see the Voortrekker Monument and the Union Buildings. One Saturday, as we’re about to leave the glitzy mall at Sandton, we overhear a child plead with her parents, ‘Do we have to go back to South Africa?’, as if the mall were not just a different kind of social space, but a separate political entity – the post-apartheid version of an independent homeland for the elite, whatever their colour.

Sarah and I cautiously explore the city centre with one of her fellow correspondents, a reporter for one of the wire services, and
while nothing happens, we manage to frighten ourselves back to the northern suburbs. When I tell my colleagues that even the much-lauded Newtown Cultural Precinct felt too edgy for me, most of them laugh. ‘You’ve been in America too long,’ one says, slapping me on the shoulder, trying to be good-natured, I think, but also sounding a little resentful.

Despite these dissonances, I settle back into life in my country. Johannesburg grows on me in a way that I didn’t expect it would. The mania about security mutates into a feeling closer to instinct and reflex. To spend all of one’s life behind one kind of locked door or another, as many locked doors as possible, is simply the way things are, or at least the way Sarah and I choose to live while we’re here. I know my colleagues and my students – perhaps even Greg – would insist there are other ways, perhaps riskier but more alive, more engaged. It’s not a mode I’m capable of embracing.

By early April, as autumn begins to arrive, I finish transcribing my interviews with Clare. I settle on a form and a voice for the book – a rhythm that alternates between the historical account of her life and critical analysis of the novels, unfolding in a voice as closely approximating her own – the cool tone and sometimes angry formality, the dry tease and dismissal – as I find it possible to write. I finish a draft of the first two chapters, one about the English settler ancestors on both sides of her family, and the other about her first novel,
Landing
. I have always thought of
Landing
simply as a book about a woman who checks out of her stultifying Lower Albany farm life to live alone in a series of caves on the Tsitsikamma coast – a feminist refusal of gender norms and expectations, of the husband who forces himself on her, and an embrace of the natural world. Rereading it, I see the book is only superficially about these things. It is, more profoundly, about a refusal to be complicit in the privilege that apartheid bestowed upon and codified for whites. The heroine, Larena, instead embraces an outlaw position, living outside and beyond the reach of the law, invisible to the state, governable only by
her own idiosyncratic sense of ethics and morals. I read it again and imagine Laura poring over those words as a young woman, finding a forward echo of herself, discovering in its pages a map for the route she might follow.

*

May. Sarah has managed to convince her editors that the Festival is worth a feature, so she accompanies me to Stellenbosch (in fact, having heard me talk endlessly about Clare for years, Sarah’s eager to meet her). The events last from Friday through Sunday and I’ve arranged to see Clare in private on Saturday. We fly to Cape Town on Thursday afternoon. The plane is packed with a sports team from a girls’ school in Johannesburg. All of the girls are in the same T-shirts, and most of them act as if they’ve never been on a plane before: they run around the cabin, talk loudly, begin singing what must be a team song. The adult chaperones and the flight attendants do nothing to control them. I complain to one of the chaperones who tells me that I should just calm down and go to sleep. As we begin the descent to Cape Town, the girls all mass on one side of the plane to get views of the mountain and the city. It feels as though the aircraft might not be able to take it, that the poor distribution of weight will be too much and we’ll fall into a tailspin, crashing into my old neighbourhood.

We pick up a car at the airport and drive through to Stellenbosch; after the sprawl and modernity of Johannesburg, the old town appears like an oasis out of historical fantasy, the Disneyland version of the eighteenth-century Cape, with its whitewashed restaurants and cafés and wine bars. I try to relax over dinner, but feel the tension wrapping itself around inside me. This is the chance, I know, to lay everything out with Clare, to put our mutual past on the table, and decide what it means.

Friday. Clare is one of three writers on the bill at tonight’s event, held in an austere modern lecture theatre in the university’s Arts
Faculty building. Of the other two writers, one is an Australian now resident in San Francisco, the other a Zimbabwean who lives in Cape Town. Clare is the last to read and she’s chosen a long passage from near the beginning of
Absolution
.

It’s a strange thing to watch, Clare talking about herself, or some fictional self, in the third person, but I begin to see again the woman I met in Amsterdam, and through the process of reading she becomes someone other than the woman I came to know in Cape Town. Both selves, and the self who is described in the book, if that self is separate, all seem to exist simultaneously. In flashes I think I can see each one of them move across her face, take primacy for a moment, and then recede in deference to one of the others. There’s a dark humour in her reading that I didn’t find in the book when I read it myself. As I listen, I can’t help wondering if she knows the truth about Laura. There are moments towards the end of
Absolution
when she seems almost to suggest, to hint, that Laura was not what she appeared to be.

The audience is attentive if a little bemused by Clare, as if they aren’t sure what to make of the reading. Some have already managed to get a copy of the book and a man further down our row is following along in the text itself, occasionally shaking his head as though the words Clare is speaking don’t match the words on the page.

She reads for nearly forty minutes, longer than either of the others. At the end the applause isn’t as enthusiastic as it was for the Australian, who condescended to take questions from the Zimbabwean while Clare sat apart to one side, waiting for her turn. She stands on her own at the end and the evening finishes with the MC reminding us that all three authors will be signing books in the lobby, where there is a reception with wine donated by one of the local estates.

By the time Sarah and I make our way out of the auditorium the lines are already twenty-minutes deep and stretch outside to the street – the longest for the Australian, the next longest
for Clare. The Zimbabwean has only a few dedicated admirers, alternative student types with Lenin hats and Peruvian cloth bags. Sarah has brought along a first edition of
Changed to Trees
that she acquired as a student.

As we reach the head of the line Clare sees us and stands. Marie, sitting back to one side, nods at me without smiling, but in a way that looks almost confidential, as if we share a secret. I introduce Sarah to Clare, who is more gracious than I expect her to be.

‘Would you mind signing my book?’ Sarah asks, sounding starstruck. ‘I don’t want to trouble you.’

‘It’s no trouble. After all, it’s why I’m here, holding this pen.’ Clare frowns for a moment, turning her face down to the book, but by the time she puts her name to the page and looks up again the frown is gone. ‘And you, Sam, I shall see you tomorrow at one o’clock sharp,’ she says, giving nothing away. ‘So much more to talk about.’

Saturday. After a morning of attending more readings and book signings with other writers, Sarah goes off to conduct interviews with the Festival organizers. Before we part for the day, she kisses me and takes my hand.

‘Try, if you can, to ask her about the past,’ Sarah says. I know she understands how difficult it is. ‘Try to put it to rest, for your own sake. If she doesn’t remember you, she doesn’t, but this uncertainty is going to drive you crazy.’

When I arrive at the guest house where Clare is staying, she orders coffee for us and sends Marie into town to buy a book the Australian writer recommended last night. ‘One of his own,’ Clare explains, rolling her eyes. ‘I told him I was troubled by the Orientalism I detected in his last novel. He retorted by pointing out that all the black characters in
Absolution
are maids or gardeners, and said I should read his previous book, because it would make sense of the one that disturbed me, although they are
not sequels “in any obvious sense”, according to him. I call that impudence.’

A young woman arrives with the coffee and Clare asks me to pour. The table is so low I have to kneel.

‘It’s been a long time since I’ve had a man down on his knee before me.’

At times it feels like she must have a secret twin, and the two of them trade off, taking over the role of Clare Wald for as long as one can stand it, and then passing the part on to the other, one playing Clare as a brittle authoritarian, the other as a solicitous and gossipy flirt.

‘When we last met,’ I begin, taking out my notebook and audio recorder, ‘we were talking about your work as an advisory reader for the censors.’

‘Yes, what I suspect you regard as my complicity in the workings of a brutally unjust and philistine regime. That was the idea, was it not, behind your little
coup de théâtre
: the presentation of my censor’s report?’

‘I have to admit, when I first saw the report on
Cape Town Nights
I thought I had found something extraordinary, because it seemed to run counter to every belief you’ve ever espoused publicly. But the idea that you worked to censor one of your own books – I still don’t know what to make of it,’ I say, thinking all the while of what is really on my mind. Sarah is right. I drive myself mad with hesitation, my inability to be direct and say what I actually think. But the fear of causing offence is so great that it cancels out every other intention.

‘Does it make me less interesting to you?’

‘Not at all. If you had acted to silence another writer, someone you did or didn’t know, then that could have been explained away as necessary if regrettable pragmatism – you feeling forced to do what you did not wish to do. Or even as a momentary lapse, a kind of madness. But to think of all the effort required to produce a text that you knew would in all likelihood be banned, and then
to be faced with recommending the banning of your own work, that’s–’

‘Another kind of madness,’ she says, arranging a pillow behind her back and propping herself in the corner of the couch. ‘To be honest, I had no guarantee that the book I wrote as Charles Holz would be sent to me for review. It was, in that case, pure chance, but then pure chance is responsible for many of the most peculiar weirdnesses of history. Poor Charles – I conjured him only as a sacrifice. He was as much a character as all my others, but the fiction of his being was only apparent to me, and was in many ways my most successful creation, until you came along. He has his own bureaucratic life. You can find the entry for the banning of his book in the
Government Gazette
. His name even appears in a handful of history books and critical studies. One academic has gone so far as to dig up a stray copy of the novel – even banned books found a home in university libraries, as curiosities safe only for academic study – and mentioned it in passing in a larger survey of censored books under the apartheid regime. It makes for entertaining reading, although only, I’m certain, to me. Anyone else could not be very interested in the book. Described as it is – a tale of interracial romance and violence, blasphemy against all three Abrahamic religions, a celebration of Communism, and a sensationalist account of the workings of the ANC and MK – it has only very limited appeal these days. When I embarked on this project of yours it never occurred to me that Charles and his
Cape Town Nights
would even come up. I thought it was all buried, truly. Now I am toying with the idea of republishing it. I have the manuscript, of course, and a copy of the first – the
only –
edition. Who, I wonder, sent you the report? As far as I knew, I was the only one who still had a copy of it.’