Absolution (32 page)

‘The government should make you head of land reform, Mother. You sound like some kind of radical.’

‘Have you ever thought I was anything else?’

‘I once thought you were a liberal,’ Mark said, stirring milk and sugar into his coffee, tapping his spoon on the mug in a way that made Clare flinch. He had learned the tapping habit from his father. ‘A good old-fashioned white liberal.’

‘That’s a very offensive thing to say. Whatever could have made you think I was a liberal?’

‘It was before I understood what it meant. I was only a child. And then, when I realized you weren’t a liberal, nothing so tame or easy to label as that, I thought you might be a pragmatist.’

‘An even worse offence. What else would you call me? An opportunist? A reactionary? An appeaser?’

Mark laughed and shook his head. ‘Now I see that you’re not only a radical but also a strict non-conformist, if such a definition is possible.’

‘Let’s say that it is and leave it at that. This need not be a pinning down of my politics, which become ever more mercurial. I see ineptitude and shoddiness and for a brief moment think of how efficient things once were. People in this country don’t complain enough when goods or services – services in particular – are substandard. I am of the generation, as are you (more’s the pity), who will be able to say that they lived through two corrupt nationalist governments. The question is whether we will survive the second, some members of which see us as its unfinished business, its potential fifth columnists, and its dormant antagonists. One settler, one bullet. They are the ones who see all whites as parasites, and
they
are the analogues to those of the old regime who saw all blacks as terrorists or idlers. It may only be a matter of time before the likes of me, and you in particular given the nature of your work, are described as enemies of the state. We are the new sleeper cells, the plotters in the dark. To dissent now is to commit treason, in a way that could not even have been imagined by the old apartheid government.’

‘And now you do sound like a racist and a reactionary.’

‘And truly I think myself neither. I know that
I
am the one – one of the ones, one of the few remaining – who is keeping faith with the struggle. Not the men and women who now use their struggle credentials as smokescreens, who pull strings and make magic happen and watch as their speeding tickets and even worse disappear like pixie dust. Your sister would have had something to say. She would have been scathing. She would have spoken as I speak, but even more boldly. We may yet find ourselves relying on her, claiming her legacy as our own political bona fides. I wish Laura had seen fit to trust us more, and that we had given her greater reason to trust.’

Mark wheezed and shifted in the white wrought-iron chair, looking uncomfortable, as if mention of his sister were too painful to bear. It was possible, Clare realized, that there were things about Laura he knew and had never shared.

‘You make Laura sound like some kind of hero – or heroine. I’m not at all sure that was the case,’ Mark said. ‘She was a terror as a child. And not much better as she grew up.’

‘The media has debased and perverted the idea of heroism. Successful sportsmen and women are now almost habitually accorded the status of hero. Laura does not fit that kind of category. What she did, what I assume she did, was both too great and selfless as well as too dishonourable and horrific to be called heroic. The term lacks the necessary ambiguity to describe your sister’s activities – what I know she did, and what I can guess she may have done. She was something more than human, but less than a goddess. Unlike heroes of antiquity, I don’t believe that Laura was a favourite of the gods, or even of one particular god – certainly not the God of Christianity, who was, besides everything else, a god in whom she did not hold much faith. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?’

‘Before she was ten years old she was already terrifying me. I suppose she was a kind of heroine to me, as a child, if not the typical kind. I can’t speak for what she did or might have done as an adult. To be honest, I’ve tried to remain ignorant of the details, to protect my sense of her.’

‘And what sense is that?’

‘As a person of total independence. Like you.’

Clare looked for a smile but Mark was as solemn as if preparing for the judicial chamber; if there were humour or empathy there, another part of him sat holding down the cage that contained them. She wished he were not so inhuman.

‘No one can flatter as a child can flatter. Total independence, for me at least, is long in the past – if I ever had it to begin with. It was to your father that I first ceded control for the routine
manoeuvres required to get myself through life on an ordinary day. Your father hired and fired the staff, managed the household accounts, arranged a cook to be sure we did not starve and a nanny to look after you and your sister when I refused to do so because I was too busy with my work. Your father played all the domestic roles that society, culture, religion, and the state had for centuries ascribed to the wife. That was not, however, the reason for the end of our marriage. About that I want there to be no misunderstanding. There were a great many other women, and I would not be surprised if he had other children besides you and Laura. Don’t look so shocked. What I hope for him now is that he is happy with his new Mrs Wald.’

‘Aisyah.’

‘I am told that is her name.’

‘I’d be lying if I said I had a totally easy relationship with her. She acts as though she expects white people to treat her like a maid, and then she goes and acts like one anyway: lots of milk and
four
sugars in her coffee. She doesn’t like me at all, I think, and can’t stand Coleen or the kids. She dotes on Dad day and night – half-maid, half-concubine. It’s quite disgusting.’

‘Now you sound like the reactionary. If your colleagues could hear you …’

‘You’ve already tricked me into saying too much already. I don’t like it when you put me in the middle. Dad does it too.’

‘I’m surprised he would ask about me.’

‘He wants to know that you’re okay, that’s all. After the robbery he was very concerned, but didn’t know what to do to help.’

‘He always used to know exactly what to do. He eventually reached a level of awareness with me whereby he could anticipate what needed to be done before I had even thought to frame the request. He was truly intuitive in that way – Marie has the same talent. With others – the men I knew before marrying your father, men dependent on me and astonishing in their ultimate indifference – independence was my passport and papers of
freedom. If I could do for myself, then I knew I was free to escape situations that became untenable. If I had enough money in order to eat and to find somewhere warm and dry to spend each night, whether or not that involved sleep, it was enough at the time. These kinds of attitudes are possible when one is young and unattached, unencumbered by issue or the responsibility of relationships made legal, the slow accumulation of things that accrue meaning, endowed with sentiment knowable only to their owner, things that define what one may do, where one may go, what one may risk. I have never been a great one for objects or trifles. As the collection has grown, it’s been the library that matters, and the few belongings from my parents and grandparents that I have chosen to keep.’

Clare noticed Mark checking his watch beneath the table, as if he thought she couldn’t see. At the same moment Adam came round the house from the garage carrying a strimmer. Clare felt the mountain pressing against her back, the sun burning layers from her face.

‘One tells him not to mow and he finds some other way to make a noise. I suppose one shouldn’t fault the industrious,’ Clare said, turning back to her son, who was still wheezing but was too proud to excuse himself. ‘We’ve run out of time. You have your appointments.’

*

‘You are back sooner than you indicated you would be,’ Clare said as Mark let himself in the front door that evening. For a moment earlier in the day she had toyed with the idea of changing the alarm code and the locks, and then realized how unreasonable that would seem to anyone but her. It was one thing to love one’s children, quite another to cede them unconditional access to one’s life, as she unthinkingly had done. In truth, she had no memory of giving Mark a key to her house – neither a key nor the code to the alarm. If only she could undo that breach without offending
him. She knew, however, that he was quick to take offence, to see a slight where none was intended. How he screamed as a child, shouting threats to sue his friends, his teachers, even his parents and grandparents and siblings – how like his Aunt Nora he had been, it occurred to Clare for the first time. ‘I wasn’t expecting you for another hour at least,’ she said, leaning over to be kissed. He did this with dutiful quickness, as though he found the contact almost repellent. ‘Dinner is not, therefore, anything like ready. I suppose you must be hungry. I suppose you expect to be fed all week. Are you staying all week?
Are
you hungry?’

‘I am, Mother, but why don’t you let me do it? I’m quite a capable cook,’ he said, and kissed her other cheek.

‘There’s no cooking to be done apart from turning on the oven and putting the defrosted meal into it. You might make a salad. Or do you eat salads?’ She glanced at his waist, worrying about his heart as she had since he was a child. He no longer spoke to her about his health, though she knew there had been surgeries in recent years. ‘What were you doing today?’

‘As you know, I was meeting with some clients.’ Following her through to the kitchen, he stood watching as Clare took a head of iceberg lettuce and an avocado and two tomatoes from the refrigerator. ‘That avo isn’t ripe, Mother. You should put it out with some bananas in a paper bag.’

Clare looked at his plump hands and the jaw that had lately begun to lose definition, and put the avocado back in the refrigerator.

Out of respect for Mark’s unwavering belief in confidentiality, she had learned not to ask him prying questions about his work. Most of the cases he undertook involved defending individuals’ rights to privacy as enshrined in the country’s new constitution. Sometimes the cases had surprised her, such as one in which the claimant argued that the right to privacy protected his work as a prostitute. Mark had lost the case, but argued passionately on behalf of the young man, who contracted HIV during his brief
incarceration and for want of adequate medical treatment died of an AIDS-related illness not long after his release.

Clare had attended the hearing at the Constitutional Court – her first visit there, still in the court’s early days – and found that she was both moved and bewildered by the physical space and the institution it housed. The building itself, she thought, failed as a piece of architecture, although it had been celebrated in many quarters. It achieved a sense of openness and transparency and consciousness of the country’s history at the cost of monumental gravitas, which it wholly lacked. While it was obvious that the planners and designers wished the central piazza to be a place of casual civic life, of picnics and impromptu social events and community celebrations, it felt instead like what it was, a converted jail yard with the enclosed ruins of two staircases from the demolished block where prisoners once awaited trial. She could not help but compare it with the grandeur and monument of Herbert Baker’s Union Buildings in Pretoria, where the black middle classes now played on weekends, teenagers practising dance moves, adults posing for wedding photos, spreading out in a space of green lawns and sculpted trees and classical vistas. It was possible to be both monumental and welcoming, to command respect without intimidating or alienating the citizenry. The Constitutional Court had failed fundamentally in this respect. Noble ideas had usurped practicality as well as beauty.

Inside the chamber, the pervasive sense Clare had was of symbolic chaos, of the hotchpotch. Brown tiles stretched across some sections of the floor, a white carpet with an incongruous grey and purple organic design covered the lowest portion. The walls were either rough red brick salvaged from the demolished awaiting-trial block or white plaster, with grey concrete pillars. Counsel sat at brown wooden desks that looked like castoffs from a lending library, while the justices themselves were seated, higher than the level of the lawyers but below that of the public gallery, behind a bench faced with black and white cowhide – a nice
African touch, Clare thought, and the only moment of originality and artistic integrity in the whole mess. It was both contemporary and traditional and yet had too much glass and steel and too many competing angles and pointless balconies and cacophonous surfaces ever to cohere into a whole. What Clare had liked, what impressed her as well as troubled her in its audacity, was that the public, the spectators, were physically above the justices. There was something too populist about this arrangement for her to be completely comfortable with it, but the idea that the judges should be servants to the people was, in theory, good. That the lawyers themselves, the counsellors appearing before the court, occupied the lowest physical position in the space was an even nicer ironic touch. Through the long horizontal window slanting behind the justices, the street life of the city – foot traffic and cars – remained just visible. Sirens were audible. Everything was permeable and transparent. This highest authority on the law of the land was not a star chamber, not a place of secrecy or privilege, but open to all. What concerned Clare more than anything, however, was that in its effort to be accessible and transparent, the Constitutional Court, the highest court in this fragile new country, could too easily be ignored – or worse, attacked.

Unlike some of his peers, men of the old dispensation who still argued with the illogic of apartheid, the logic of illogical privilege, Mark seemed to have an instinctive understanding of the tone of the court, the casual formality of its discourse, the critical interrogation and titanic frustrations and teasing good humour of its justices. He commanded the space and performed convincingly even if the justices did not find in favour of his clients. It was a noble thing to champion, the right to privacy, but Clare wondered if her lawyer son did not perhaps take it too far, if the supple intellect that could always see a more pliant interpretation of the law did not also risk perverting it. There were limits to privacy, and always had been and always must be. A state of unlimited privacy would inevitably be a
state of chaos – a state that could not for long remain a state.