Absolution (14 page)

‘The judge has been very good to me,’ he said, jerking his head towards Mr Thacker’s property.

‘I could pay you more than what you receive now from him and me combined.’

‘No, no, it is not that.’ Adam looked away from Clare and she realized he was not trying to drive a deal; he was only being honest. ‘Maybe if we could have one other person, not every day,
only two or three days a week. Ten days a month. And I could train him as my brother trained me and if there is more to do sometimes he could come in the afternoons when I am at the judge.’

‘Do you recommend someone?’ Clare asked, suspecting this might be the real ploy, to hire a relative or a friend. But Adam shook his head.

‘Most of the gardeners here, the ones I know, they are not so good. They do not work so hard like I do. Maybe the judge knows someone,’ he said and shrugged. ‘But it would be good, because I don’t want this nice garden of yours that my brother made to turn into a forest. It would be good to have one other person sometimes.’

Without wishing to, Clare went next door to Mr Thacker’s house the following week, to thank him for recommending Adam and to ask if he could make enquiries. She herself knew no one else in the neighbourhood, and had no friends with gardeners, or at least not any gardeners they could spare.

‘It’s no problem at all, Mrs Wald. I’m a member of the Horticultural Society. I’ll ask around,’ Thacker said, looking pleased to be asked. ‘Failing that, you could always enquire at the Botanical Gardens, see if they have any staff looking for extra work.’ He was walking her around his garden, which might have been an extension of her own, but almost half the size, packed with indigenous shrubs and trees, punctuated by colourful exotics that flourished in the microclimate. What looked extravagant and only remotely menacing on Clare’s own property was unseemly in Thacker’s tighter plot – too mannered, too ostentatious for such a small space, everything out of scale. The garden was as overstuffed and florid as the man himself.

Thacker’s connections in the horticultural society turned up a young trainee gardener who was looking for extra income and was happy to work under Adam’s direction. ‘A team,’ Clare thought, ‘I have a team of gardeners where once I needed only one. How
many more will I need? Who else? A pool boy. The pool water is turning green. Window washers, too. The windows are becoming glazed with dust.’

Months passed and the forms of the garden remained unchanged. The seasons moved through their cycles, rain beating through winter until spring came again. Clare became anxious for a vegetable patch, for the enjoyment of picking her own tomatoes, growing her own basil, cooking food she knew had been grown without pesticides, things one could not get so easily in the stores, even in the warehouse-like chain of produce markets. When she broached it with Adam, he again shook his head, said it was not such a good idea. She had never encountered this kind of resistance – not in Jacobus, not in Marie, not in any of the various women who had at times come to clean her house – and she had no idea how to deal with it except to accept it mutely and then plan behind Adam’s back. The young apprentice, Ashwin, who was now working every weekday morning and two afternoons a week (it transpired that the previous owners had employed one full-time and two part-time gardeners year round just to keep the place in order), was alone one afternoon when Clare approached him with her plan. She explained where the beds should go, how big she wanted them, and asked him to come over the weekend at double pay to create them.

‘With Adam?’ he asked.

‘No, on your own. Tell me what equipment you need to get it done and I’ll hire it. Rototiller, plough, whatever. I want a vegetable patch and a herb garden. I don’t think it is so much to ask, but this garden means something to Adam, you understand. It has a certain importance to him. But in the end, it is
my
garden now. I must be allowed to grow what I like. Will the beds work here? Do you think there’s enough sun?’

Ashwin looked around, made some calculations, and agreed to the plan.

That weekend he cleared the lawn, enriched the soil, and planted what Clare requested. On Sunday evening, with the new beds laid out in aggressive rectangularity against the otherwise fluid forms of the garden, Clare looked at the clean black furrows and mounds, the promise of cabbages and tomatoes, beans and squash, melons and lettuces, protected and nurtured under shimmering white lengths of floating cover, and felt at last that she might grow to love this new house, with the mountain glowering over her, a trailing cloth of mist cascading down its iron-grey flanks.

When Adam arrived on Monday morning, she watched his reaction from her study. She could not have wished for a better effect. He started physically, paced around the new beds shaking his head, and went to the back door of the house. A few minutes later Marie came to the study, explaining that Adam wished to speak to Clare in person.

‘It is not a good thing. These plants will not grow.’ He looked grief-stricken and Clare felt sorry for him, if not for what she had done. ‘You cannot grow these things here. They will not grow. And it does not look good.’

‘We’re going to try it this year,’ Clare said, trying to make herself sound resolved at the same time that Adam’s vehemence opened up a fissure of doubt in her mind. ‘If they don’t grow, we’ll turn them into flowerbeds next year, or back into lawn. But for now, we do it my way.’

‘It is a bad thing.’

‘It is not a bad thing. It is merely different. You will see. And if you are right, then I shall see. But you must let me grow what I want, Adam, otherwise we will only come to grief, and in the end I should have to ask you to leave. It would not be pleasant. Everyone would be unhappy. This way, I shall be happy and you will have to wait to see how unhappy these new beds will make
you
, and how much upset they will cause in my garden. But give them a chance. See if they will flourish.’

Clare

The TRC transcripts are all accessible now. I have printed out only some of them, and these run to hundreds – no, thousands – of pages, several toner cartridges. I read through the ones I think relate to you in some way, Laura, to your case, your activities. I reread the official submissions from the ANC and other bodies; I look for your name, but it occurs only rarely, often misspelled –
Lara, Lora, Laure
, even
Laurie
, only sometimes
Laura. Welt, Wal, Wêreld, World
, and finally, in the last one I read,
Wald
, and sometimes, even in that one,
Waldt
and
Weldt
. Often your name is not there at all, and I have no choice but to infer your involvement in the events described: the opening of a letter bomb at a government office, the aftermath of an attack on a refinery.

Your actions are indecipherable to me. Could you have done that? Can I understand why you did it? I look again for correspondences in your notebooks, in the archive of you I have assembled, but I find myself overwhelmed. I cross-check and collate and decide I must try to build a portrait of your movements for the relevant period, a portrait and a map. You were here
then
, there
later
, back home a few days
after
. In the end, it is mostly guesswork. I can guess where you might have been, what you were doing, what you were thinking, what compelled you. I keep hoping your former colleagues will come to see me, give me whatever information they might possess, if there is anything yet that has not been revealed to me. I would be polite, I would accept it with gratitude, I would not ask too many difficult questions, nor sit in summary judgement, either of you or of them, for your failures of communication, for their failure to speak of you and for you, to me and to others. I would be hospitable. I have studied
hospitality.
Thank you
for telling me where my daughter was on
that day
, I would say, for at least now I can imagine with certainty what
that day
, whatever day it might be amongst all others, was like for you. It is not a story they are eager to tell, even in private, you understand. You horrify them. A woman is not supposed to ___________. Fill in the blank. You did everything a woman is not expected to do, is not supposed to do. You horrify because in action you appeared more man than woman, and more woman than man in every other respect. Neither one thing nor the other.

I sit in this new garden, which is now no longer new to me, but one you never knew, belonging to a house you would have scorned as a betrayal of familial principles.
You have sold out
, you would tell me, always courageous, but I no longer need you here to tell me what I already know about my choices. You are entirely within me now, voice echoing always, a million different voices, all you, borrowed from moments when I heard you as you wanted to be heard, moments you did not realize anyone was listening, perhaps in particular me. These are no substitute, they are all that I have, those million necromanced fragments of you, summoned around the pit of fire yawning between my ribs. Would that I had a sorrowful song to sing,
un sí pietoso stile
, to win you back, as Orpheus did Eurydice. I offer you the cup to drink, a song of prayer, wish for you to cohere again,
Etemmu
, the wandering soul. I pour milk and nectar on the fire, wine and water, sprinkle white corn meal around, grind it against my flesh, cut my throat to summon you, sacrifice myself to body you forth, but you will not rise. If you will not rise, you are not dead. I have seen no remains. It must be thus.

I have tried to learn this garden like a book, interpret it by reading its lines, studying to understand its form, its four discrete zones, its moments of horticultural mirror-gazing, the nature of its construction, its constructedness, its absence of irony and humour, or is that absence my misreading? There is a long lap pool that stretches away from the house, acting also as a reflecting pool
for the garden itself and the mountain above it. I push through the water each morning, my long old body, otter in a tank, the underwater lights blinding me at first in the darkness of dawn. What does this pool say to the garden, what is its dialogue? I ask it and myself. What do the woodland, the perennial borders, the indigenous specimens, the exotic interlopers, and my own aggressive vegetable plot, carved rectilinearly into the fluid forms, irrupting into formal life, say to each other when I pause to listen? I lurk at the end of the pool, fingers curling over the smooth concrete edge, peering up, nostrils just above the surface, dead hair fanning out from a dying head, floating on the surface, as I gaze on the wonderland around me, a landscape of fantasy. I have thought of tearing out the lawn and replacing it with a carpet of succulents, impossible to navigate, organic, left to themselves, a fortress of life, ramparts pregnable only by flat stones spaced close enough to leap between them. It is tempting.

*

Sam tucked his knees under his chin, and turned from you to stare at the highway. The weather report said the rain was localized along the coast and it would be dry in the mountains. You would follow a road that, while longer and slower than the coastal highway, would take you up into the interior, away from wherever Bernard had been going. A backtrack and then a sharp turn north, over passes, heading towards your destination, which was at least twelve hours’ drive – but surely more in those days, in that truck, say sixteen hours to Ladybrand if you were lucky, and what then? There would be roadblocks long before you got anywhere near there. You thought it strange there had been none already, but put your faith in providence, knowing its unreliability.

You knew a town where you might stop for the night without attracting attention. In the dark, it would be easy to masquerade as Sam’s mother, even if your hair was fair and his dark. Lightning filled the sky behind you as the truck laboured up into the pass that would
take you over the mountains and out of the storm. Oudtshoorn, the first town after the Outeniquas, was at least an hour away, waiting flat and feathery against the red soils of the valley.

Near the top of the pass you left the rain behind and were high enough to look back on the dark mass of cloud. Where the rain fell the earth looked black.

‘I want to go home,’ Sam whined.

‘Where is home?’

‘Woodstock.’ Frame and plaster houses, their paint flaking, with curtains made from old sheets in floral patterns, all faded from the low-swung sun. Inside, there would be the ubiquitous collapsing picture rails, holding cheap frames with family photos or pastel illustrations of gods and saints, mimeographed prayers, disembodied heads torn from dolls or icons, suspended in effigy over oily beds pushed against stained and cracking walls whose paper or paint had begun to disintegrate from the floor up, new continents forming in exposed plaster, glaciers pushing up from the warped floorboards. It was a place of houses inhabited but already half-abandoned by people only partially there.

‘But do you have a home any more?’ you asked, unable to say,
I’ve killed the man who gave you a home, any home you have has been lost
. ‘Do you have any grandparents?’

‘I have an aunt.’

‘Where does she live?’

‘Somewhere. Away.’

‘Away where?’

‘In the Karoo.’

You were trying to concentrate on the hairpin turns that forced the truck into a jack-knife waltz with the precipice. At each corner you blew the truck’s horn, terrified you might surprise a vehicle coming from the opposite direction. ‘Do you know the name of the place?’

Sam clutched at the door handle, bracing himself against the erratic movement of the truck. Beaufort West, he said, across the
Little Karoo and beyond the Swartberge, black mountains that reveal their reddish-brownness only once you are on top of them. It was on your route, the one you were inventing as you went. There was luck in this, or perhaps no more than coincidence.

You decided to push on, grinding down into the valley and racing past Oudtshoorn, then rising again into the fertile ribbon of land south of the black mountains. You stopped for petrol near Kango, breathed the cool dry air and bought sandwiches and biltong from the shop. The two of you paused to eat, feeling for a moment like an ordinary mother and son on a holiday excursion to drive the seven passes on that dirt road made by convicts. And then it was time to go. Night was brisk and total, and you took the truck up the unpaved road of the pass, the lights picking out the precipice edge. Going slowly, you prayed to your body to make deliberate movements, be alert, know the curve of the road by instinct, sense how it would bend, know where it would end, because the slightest wrong movement, a flick of the wheel too far to the left, even a whisper too much acceleration, and it would be tickets for both of you. You could not look at Sam in those minutes. Time wound into a single moment of tension that unspun itself into all the years of your life. Your muscles ached, your head throbbed; Sam’s breathing drummed in your ears and the higher the truck climbed the more aware you became of the burden you had taken upon yourself by your own actions. He had become yours, you his.