Absolution (46 page)

‘Don’t be ridiculous. You know I don’t mind,’ I would say, wishing you’d had the courage and grace to ask me, or to ask both of us together. I would have given it then, given whatever you asked. If we did not know with certainty what you were doing then we suspected. The law-abiding are not so cagy, so circumspect. We imagined the danger you must have been in and the imagining drove us mad, until, tormented by our worries about you we would find ourselves lying together at night, both awake, unable to sleep because every slipping into unconsciousness was a fall into nightmare visions of you come to grief. What did I fail to do to make you understand that I loved you more than anyone else,
would have done anything for you? Why did you set me up as your adversary when all I ever wanted was to be your champion?

Looking at your other notebooks for that period, I see now that your entries become ever more cryptic. On the rare occasions when you record what people say in conversation, you no longer provide named attribution. In place of names are, at first, single initial letters. Later, in the absence of initials there are different colours of ink: red, black, blue, green – a code legible only to you, for which you alone held the key, now lost. Who was black? Who green? Were you yourself red, the most prominent colour, a blaze running across the field of white pages?

In the end even snatches of conversation go. In their place are only dates and times, written in one colour or another. Instead of people, the colours seem to represent locations. It is only in the final notebook that you return to the fluidity of prose, telling the story of your last days, knowing, I now feel certain, that you were not walking merely to some indistinct sense of your own fate. You knew you were crossing the frontier – not to freedom, but to your death.

1999

As the holidays approached, Sam knew that Sarah would want to be with her parents.
You don’t have to stay
, he said.
You should go home now. I’ll come back as soon as I can
.

He promised he would see her again in January, and everything would go on as before. He asked Sarah if he could send a few boxes of Ellen’s things to her apartment – photographs and mementoes, the books by Clare Wald that had given him a map to his own self as a boy, all the things he wanted to keep. Ellen’s house was already on the market, the furniture would be sold or donated, the life he had known dispersed once again.

You don’t have to ask
, Sarah said,
send anything you want to keep
.

He knew what this meant, that everything he owned in the world would be with Sarah, in a country that was not his own.

The police continued to assure Sam they were following up leads and would notify him if there were any developments. They promised they were doing all they could. They suggested there was no reason for him to delay his return to New York since he had not been present at the crime and therefore could provide no evidence that might help their investigation.

On Christmas morning he woke alone in his aunt’s house. There was no television to watch and no radio to listen to. He had donated the food in the freezer to the church, which had promised it would be distributed to a needy family. One of the members from the Women’s Federation had brought him a plastic bag full of pastries, half of which he ate for breakfast, listening to the silence and the bells pealing across town and the shriek of eagles shredding the air.

He made a salad for lunch and spent the rest of the day sorting through closets and boxes and files, putting those things he was going to throw away in Ellen’s bedroom, and all that he wanted to keep in his own. No one had been to view the house, but he felt he should begin to put the place in order.

Late in the afternoon there was a knock and when he answered, dragging open the heavy front door and looking through the bars of the wrought-iron gate that was supposed to protect the house from burglars, there was a stranger standing ten centimetres from him.

What do you want?
Sam barked. The man stepped back, looking as though he’d been hit in the chest, and Sam immediately regretted his tone. The man would only want food or money, and would have a long story about his family and his hunger and it being an expensive time of year.

Are you Mister Leroux?
the man asked. He had a thin moustache and shook when he spoke. Sam realized he was only a teenager in a man’s body.

Do you have some business with Ms Leroux? If you do I’m afraid she’s dead
.

Are you not Miss Leroux’s son?

I’m her nephew. What is this about?
Say whatever it is you want, Sam thought, just tell me what you need so I can tell you
no
and send you out of my life.

I’m very sorry to disturb you, sir
, the young man said, reaching into his back pocket and retrieving an envelope whose corners were bent. He handed it to Sam, who took it as if it were alive.
I was one of Miss Leroux’s students. I was still at university when there was the funeral, and I wanted to say I was sorry to hear that she died. I wanted to offer her family my condolences
.

I’m her only family
.

Then I offer you my condolences, sir. She was a very good teacher and a very good person. She wrote me references. I was so sorry –

The young man shook his head and turned his back to Sam.
Across the street a neighbour was at her window, watching them, a phone in her hand.

Thank you for the card
, Sam said. Despite what he felt rationally, he could not bring himself to trust the man. It was possible he was lying, was himself the perpetrator, the murderer with the gun that produced ghastly red inkblots, come to see if there were any other women to rob or rich relatives to fleece. Or he was an emissary of the perpetrators, a scout sent to see if the case was likely to go away or be hounded to conclusion by the survivors.

But no, Sam thought, this man is innocent. If he wanted to do right by the man, whose card – Sam ripped it open – was sincere and elegantly phrased, he should invite him in and give him tea, and perhaps even a token by which to remember his teacher. That’s what Ellen would have wanted. Indeed, Sam was sure that’s what Ellen herself would have done, and she would have done it with far less hesitation.
That’s very kind of you. Thank you again for the card
.

I’m so very sorry
, the young man said.
Thank you for your time, sir. I would wish you a happy Christmas but I cannot imagine that it is a happy day for you. So instead I’ll just wish you peace
, he said, putting his hands together.

Sam wondered why this kind of exchange, which should have been so natural and appropriate, was something he could not bring himself to do properly. If the man had been white he would not have thought twice about letting him in. He could not think of himself as a racist, he was sure he was not, but one had to be careful. Everyone must understand that one had to be careful.

The house was his although he knew he could never again call it home. He could not live in this town or inhabit these rooms. Let someone else have it. He didn’t know where he belonged. He was not even sure he could live in this country again.

The house sold faster than he’d expected it would, to a young couple expecting a baby. Like his aunt the woman was a teacher.
The man had just been hired at the prison. Looking at the scrub-bare hills to the north and listening to the grinding of trucks on the route between Johannesburg and Cape Town that passed through the middle of town, Sam couldn’t imagine wanting to start anything there, let alone a family. It was impossible to drive from one end of Beaufort West to the other without passing the pale walls of the prison built in the middle of the roundabout on the national route. Sam knew what kind of place put a prison at its heart. He notified the neighbours and the church that the house had sold and he would not be coming back. It hadn’t been his choice to come here in the first place, and if he belonged anywhere in the world it was not in the middle of these plains, yawning wide their hunger for more lives.

He thought of trying to find the place in the hills where Laura had taken him. He remembered the graves dug and the bodies going into the ground. The country was caught in a spasm of memory. Perhaps others would find the graves, and among the bodies they would find the crushed remains of Bernard. And the truck? What had happened to Bernard’s truck? He could think of nothing that would connect him to the crime other than the truck.

He knew there had been hearings about his parents but at the time he had made the decision not to come forward. It was his choice and no one could force him to testify if he did not wish to do so. Silence was his territory.

Maps revealed nothing. Maps were a tracery of lies. The place where he thought the farm should have been was in the middle of the Karoo National Park, which had been founded nearly a decade before the events he remembered. Impossibility layered on impossibility. One afternoon he drove high up into the Nuweveld, but could find nothing that resembled what he remembered. There were no buildings, only acacia and a troop of baboons that rained down the cliffs, a shower of cinders. In places the dirt road looked as he remembered it should, and then
he would round a curve to see a new vantage that failed to fit his memory of the place. If the gravesite were ever to be found, he would not be the one to find it.

He’d made a room in his mind where such information could live. Bernard lived there, and now his aunt did too. Parts of Sam lived there as well.

Home was a place he wanted to be and one where he knew he could no longer stay. The sun was too close, the earth too dry, the land itself all too familiar, a terrain telling stories he did not want to remember, stories about himself, and his past, and the life he might have led.

He would tell Sarah everything about his past and his parents. He would hide nothing so there could be nothing to hide. He would tell her about Bernard, everything about him, what he had done and how it had felt.

It would be impossible to tell her anything.

One day he would tell her everything.

Sam

Sunday. When I arrive at her guest house Clare is waiting outside on the yellow front porch, leaning against one of the white pillars. The sun is flashing off the pale green paint of the metal roof. She looks younger, almost as she did twenty years ago on the porch of her old house.

‘Since it’s a nice day, I was hoping we might go for a walk,’ she says, stepping down into the gravelled parking area at the front and taking my hand as if I were a beau picking her up for a date. ‘What we need to say is not for note-taking and audio recording. Do you agree?’

‘Yes. Today is not for the book.’

We head west, back into town past the university. Clare moves with surprising agility and at times I struggle to keep pace. At Ryneveld we turn south, as I did yesterday, and Clare pauses in a café for a coffee and pastry. ‘I am learning to indulge myself,’ she says. ‘I think indulgence is not such a bad thing at my age. My son says I am too thin and should eat more. He did not stipulate what I should eat.’

As we approach the intersection with Dorp Street, standing for a moment outside an old whitewashed house with a single elegant gable over the door, I thank her for the text she gave me yesterday. I don’t know what else to call it, so I refer to it as the letter, her letter to Laura.

‘Letter, yes,’ Clare says, ‘it’s a letter of sorts. More like one half of a diary I’ve been keeping since you arrived last August. Your coming occasioned it.’

‘Of course, Laura must be dead. You say as much in the book, after all.’

‘Logic would say so. No contact, no word, no sign – at least, no
natural
sign. There is another me, one afflicted by nightmares, who is not so convinced – the me who is suspicious of certainties, who still clings to the hope of mysterious things in heaven and earth. Miracles and resurrections and hauntings. But we are dodging the main point of the letter. Were you not surprised that I remembered you all this time?’

‘In all our meetings you’ve never given any indication that you knew who I was. For ages you acted as though you didn’t even recognize that I was South African. So yes, I was very surprised.’

‘Cruel of me, I know. But then you have played a kind of game as well, keeping your cards hidden, or at least you thought they were hidden. Little did you know that I had dealt the deck.’

‘I can’t help feeling that everything might have been easier if one of us had said something in the first place.’

‘Or it might all have fallen apart. I might have snapped, or you might have taken flight. Listen, I know I am not an easy person to deal with. Truth be told I have cultivated my difficult persona. But then
easy
is not necessarily
good
, as any philosopher will tell you. Part of me felt you needed to earn that recognition. And also, there was a significant part that feared what you might do if I admitted to remembering you. I was afraid of your anger.’

Stopping to finish her coffee, she puts the empty cup in a bin with great attentiveness, as though wanting to credit the cup and its disposal with as much significance as our conversation. She brushes crumbs from her fingers and takes my hand as if picking up a small bird. ‘Did you think you got this job on the basis of your intellect alone, on supreme good luck, the quality of your work, and the references of a few scrappy scholars who think themselves gods?’

‘I supposed that I had. I thought it was chance that brought me back to you. And my own talent.’

‘A flattering rationale, but no. I chose you. I commanded your presence. I said to my editor, “If you’re going to insist on this
project, for the sake of book sales after my death, then I get to choose my biographer.” And I chose you, which pleased me a great deal more than my editor, who had half a dozen much higher-profile writers just waiting to do the job. Seeing you in Amsterdam was terrifying but also something like a gift. You were the answer to my problem. I knew immediately who you were: the boy at the door.’