Absolution (48 page)

‘Some might call that moral relativism.’

‘Indeed. Should you have killed Bernard?’ she asks in a matter of fact way, as if weighing the options. ‘No. Objectively you should not because that kind of killing is an evil act. But if you wanted to survive, did you have any choice to act except as you did? Again, I
suspect the answer is no. You killed in self-protection. And if we want to satisfy the rigid moralists, we might say that, young as you were, you did not appreciate the consequences of your actions.’

I open my mouth to disagree but she raises a hand to silence me.

‘In fact it doesn’t matter. What matters, I think, is that there are still things you are hiding, and that are hidden from you. I have felt this since the moment you walked in the door last August. Here, I thought, is a young man who does not yet know himself. I look at you now and I know there are things you are not yet telling me, that you may never tell me.’

*

Monday. While I see Clare again Sarah finishes her story on the Festival. On Sunday afternoon the Australian author got drunk with a group of students and punched a former fan who had accused him of selling out.

Setting aside the more recent past, Clare fleshes out the details of her time in Europe as a young woman, her return to South Africa, her marriage, the births of Mark and Laura, and the beginning of her work as a censor. We speak once again of Laura and she shows me her daughter’s notebooks and final letter, in which Laura takes responsibility for Bernard’s death. My false confession, I realize, made no difference whatsoever.

‘I have no further use for these,’ Clare says. ‘And anyway, I have kept photocopies for myself. The originals are yours to keep. Marie will confirm that I am compos mentis and witness the gift, lest my son should ever dispute it. Perhaps one day you will get something else as well, something like what you truly deserve.’ She takes a breath as if about to say more, but then shakes her head. ‘I myself cannot wholly make up for the way you were denied – denied by myself, and also perhaps by others. What different lives we might have led if I’d had the courage and generosity to take you in, a second son. Will you tell your wife, now that you have told me? Will you tell her everything about your past?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s something I can bear for her to know.’

Clare holds my hand, gripping it in a way that my mother used to, holding it so hard it hurts. ‘I understand that reluctance. Perhaps you are right. Some things are better left hidden. But if you want my opinion, I think you should trust her. Give her a chance.’ She draws herself up to her full height and takes my other hand. ‘So, we must say goodbye, but only goodbye
for now
, because I have no doubt I will see you again, perhaps even in Johannesburg. I trust you will be as honest as you feel able to be, and write me as you remember me. Let others judge. But perhaps I may be allowed an afterword.’

Clare

The garden is closing into winter, the tomato plants have been pulled up and the Cape gooseberries and lemons are beginning to ripen. Everywhere there is the smell of wood smoke, which rises off the Cape Flats and suspends itself in a band that half obscures the mountains above Stellenbosch. On the worst days the outline of the sun is distinct to the naked eye, a flat red disc.

Inside the house there is no dust on any surface, no fingerprints on the cupboards or appliances in the kitchen. Every cushion and rug in the lounge is square.

Nosipho is too conscientious to be lax even when this old cat goes out prowling. The silver has been polished and the crystal treated in some magical way that makes it appear newly cut. I open the tin containing my father’s wig and find that it also looks refreshed, as though rewoven with the hair of a pony.

‘You have outdone yourself,’ I tell her, and she smiles, showing a gap in her teeth that was not there before.

‘What has happened to your tooth?’

‘It had to come out.’

‘We must get it fixed. Tell Marie I say it must be fixed. She will make you an appointment with my dentist.’

Call it penance of a kind. It is too little, I know – too little sent in the right direction and the wrong direction at the same time. I have made a resolution to find Stephan’s family, whoever may remain, and make my confession to them. The dead cannot offer absolution.

The time away seems to have done me good. The insomnia is gone, even if you are not, Laura. I know now that you will never entirely go, that I must accept your comings and goings
and trust they will be unpredictable and that I can always rely on them.

*

During an appearance at the Book Lounge the other day a man asked me how you had died, since
Absolution
refers to your death in the context of your activities, which I allude to in only vague terms. I told him I did not know how you had died because your remains had never been recovered, but death had to be assumed. I told him I had no death certificate and that none of your colleagues, apart from two men who themselves came looking for you, had ever been in contact with me, even to express condolences or thank me for the sacrifice that you made. During the obligatory book signing the man came up to me and, in the way of a surprising number of young men today, was so overcome by emotion that he put his arms around my shoulders without asking permission. At first I was shocked, and then found myself comforted as I could not have expected to be. ‘You’re so brave,’ said the man, ‘so very, very brave.’

‘It’s only fiction after all,’ I told him, turning over the book to point at the label on the back, just above the barcode. Language makes the world around us, and all that we encounter. If I call it fiction, then fiction it is.

The man looked at me quizzically and said, ‘But that’s not fiction, is it? The stuff about your daughter, that’s not all fiction? All of the family stuff, that has to be real,’ he said, very determined that I should agree. He was right of course.

‘No, that is not fiction. Most of it isn’t,’ I said, ‘but some of it is. According to the book itself, it is nothing but fiction, even the family histories, and even my dead daughter.’ The man shook his head and, looking as though he might cry, walked away. I had not given him what he wanted. I had nothing to give but what I gave. It cannot be one thing or the other, black or white. It is both and neither and something else, something in between.

The book, whatever its life in the world may yet prove to be, has been an important personal achievement for me, no less than this diary. It and the diary have been my exorcism, my casting out of demons, and at last I feel that I may stop mourning for my failure to mourn properly all these years over my unburied dead. I mourn for you now, Laura, for the loss of you. Not only for you, but for my parents, and for Nora, too, all the parts of you four that remain abroad in the world, clinging to the living.

*

I go to Johannesburg to facilitate the series of lectures about literature and the law arranged in conjunction with the Constitutional Court, with no minor assistance from Mark, who has been more generous than most would imagine in allowing me to use his identity and his own history in the way I have. Before seeing Sam again, I phone your father to ask him if he remembers Sam’s parents, Peter and Ilse. Oh yes, he remembers them, all three of them, and wants to know how to contact Sam. I ask him to wait, not to do it yet, to give it time, until the biography is finished and off to press.

Even less than my own book, Sam’s will not, I fear, please Mark, but there is little he can do to stop it. He knows better than to cross me. While there is nothing libellous in the draft Sam has shown me, he does say things I wish might have remained hidden, although as more time passes I know that revelation should rather come while one is alive and able to rebut any unwarranted claims. Sam makes no such claims, but, reading what he reveals, others will leap to conclusions I may yet wish to police, or even deny. At least he has given me the chance to offer my perspective. Others will say what they wish.

*

I saw Sam several times in Johannesburg over the course of that week, and in those days I stopped seeing him through your words,
Laura, as he appeared in your final notebook, and stopped seeing him even through the distortion of my own memory: as a child on my doorstep, a child younger than he was, a stray with no voice or energy, no family and no history, nothing to give and everything to take, a mere husk. I knew I had to stop seeing him as a vessel that you and I were intent to fill with our words and ideas, our own narrative of who he was. At last, without any distractions, indeed after having surrendered your notebooks to him, as only seemed right, I felt I could begin to see him as he actually is, or at least as he actually was with me, remembering the truism that each of us shows different aspects of ourselves to different people. I do not see him as he is when alone with his wife, or with his students. Perhaps he is with me as he is with senior colleagues. Or perhaps he behaves with me as he behaves with no one else in the world. It would please me to think that our relationship is unique for us both. In those few days I tried to treat him as I would ideally have treated you, Laura, or your brother, but never managed to.

We kept meeting at the university, shivering in the winter sun, pacing around in front of the main building, going to gape and laugh at the murals in the Cullen Library, eating ice cream despite the cold. I went to dinner at his house, enjoyed the company of his charming wife. I did everything I swore I would never do. He offered to introduce me to his new colleagues but I demurred. I was no longer interested in business or books. Rather, those days felt like an ideal version of the reunion between the adopted child and his birth mother, brought together after years of searching for each other. We both recognized that our relationship was at once less profound and more complex than that metaphor suggests. If there is a biological connection it is through the soil of our country: the dust underfoot, rich with life, and the dirt of decay that sticks to us all.

What astonished me more than anything was that I began to see you in Sam, in his hardness and determination and watchfulness:
the predator who knows what it is to be wounded, and hunts with the knowledge that he may yet be the hunted. His eyes are your eyes, his smell part of the same blend that pulsed from your pores and still flows from the pores of your brother.

I told him I felt that he had been stalking me all these years, and at last, when the strength was leaving me, and his own was just beginning to wane, he’d chased me to ground. He laughed and said he’d been feeling the same way. I do not think he was lying.

There is no guile about him. And that, I know, is the quality of the greatest of liars. I am prepared for the biography, when it finally appears, to bear no resemblance to the drafts he shows me. I hope that will not be so, but as much as I have – almost despite myself – come to love him and believe all that he tells me, to want to keep him close and put him in the place where you once stood, I do not trust him, and never shall.

Acknowledgements

Clare Wald’s arguments about censorship are informed by J. M. Coetzee’s
Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship
, and Danilo Kiš’s ‘Censorship/Self-Censorship’, collected in
Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews
; quotations are from John Milton’s
Areopagitica
. I am indebted to Peter D. McDonald and his book
The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences
for clarifying certain details of apartheid South Africa’s censorship regime. The following books were also usefully consulted: Gerald Shaw,
The Cape Times: An Informal History
; Keyan Tomaselli, Ruth Tomaselli, and Johan Muller (eds.),
The Press in South Africa
; Les Switzer and Mohamed Adhikari (eds.),
South Africa’s Resistance Press: Alternative Voices in the Last Generation Under Apartheid
; Gerald B. Sperling and James E. McKenzie (eds.),
Getting the Real Story: Censorship and Propaganda in South Africa
; Gordon S. Jackson,
Breaking Story: The South African Press
.

The quotation from Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground
uses Constance Garnett’s translation.

For various forms of support, and encouragement, many thanks to my parents Gail L. Flanery and James A. Flanery, and also to Ben Arnoldy, Rita Barnard, Glenn Breuer, Rebecca Carter, Dirk Klopper, Michele Gemelos, Michael Holtmann, the MacLeod family (Marti, Alasdair, Kirsty, Catriona and Annabel), Peter McCullough and Thomas Knollys, Stephanie Nolen, Kimberly Ochs, Ann Pasternak Slater, Goran Stanivukovic, Cynthia Stone, Michael Titlestad, and Marlene van Niekerk. I owe a special debt of gratitude to family and friends in South Africa, most especially to Nan and Eddie van der Vlies, Sandra Willows and Camel du Plessis, Natasha Distiller and Lisa Retief and their son
Jesse, Undine Weber, Deborah Seddon, Angela Rae and Justin Cornish, Lucy Graham, and Wendy Jacobson.

I am deeply grateful to my agent Victoria Hobbs and her colleagues Jennifer Custer and Kate Rizzo Munson, as well as to my agent in America, George Lucas. Many thanks are also due to my editors Margaret Stead, Ravi Mirchandani, Sarah McGrath, and Michael Schellenberg.

This book would not have been possible, or ever come to exist in the first place, without Andrew van der Vlies.

P
ATRICK
F
LANERY
was born in California in 1975 and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. After earning a BFA in Film from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts he worked for three years in the film industry before moving to the UK, where he completed a doctorate in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Oxford. As well as publishing scholarly articles on British and South African literature and film in a number of academic journals, he has written for
Slightly Foxed
and the
Times Literary Supplement
. He lives in London.