Absolution (40 page)

‘And did you see them when they returned to Cape Town?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ Clare said, the image of Nora and Stephan’s faces as she had last seen them flashing up out of her memory. ‘The day before their return I went to a meeting of one of the groups with which I had begun to affiliate myself. I believed it was mostly a talking shop for like-minded radicals. We had no formal affiliation, no name for what we were. I knew little about the other members except that they were young men and women who were united by their abhorrence of oppression. There were rumours that one of the group, a man who seldom spoke, might have connections with MK, or was even an MK cadre himself. I don’t remember his name, might never have
known it, so I can’t be more specific. Everyone knew that Nora was my sister and somehow Stephan came up in the course of the conversation. Here was a chance, I thought, to prove myself interesting to these people I respected, and in the case of the man who seldom spoke, who may or may not have been part of the liberation movement’s armed struggle, perhaps even to prove myself useful. I announced that my sister and brother-in-law were returning home, that Stephan had been recalled, and that they would arrive in Cape Town the following day for a stay of a few nights. The man who seldom spoke suddenly looked more alert and asked if they would be staying with me. I told him no, they would be staying at a guest house in Constantia. I gave him the name, knowing as I did that it was quite possible I was putting my sister’s life in jeopardy. Nora had intimated on the phone that their return was not public knowledge, and that the place they would be staying was also secret as Stephan had received death threats. There had been stories about Stephan and his activities in Washington in the national press, stories about the money he was winning from international investors and the IMF – it had all been widely reported, critically by those who had the courage to criticize, in celebration by the mouthpieces of the Establishment. I knew that in giving away not only their itinerary but also their location in Cape Town I might be endangering both of them. And rather than feeling remorse, what I felt was this torrent of excitement, and even a kind of ecstatic terror, that I had shown myself to be not just a faculty wife and mother, not just a writer who had published very little, but someone with information and knowledge who knew when that knowledge might be useful and was not afraid to act. The man who seldom spoke thanked me for the interesting information, and we moved on to other matters.’

‘And in the following days …?’

‘Two days later they were dead. The police woke me in the middle of the night and took me to identify the bodies. Their faces had been disfigured. Their supposed assassin, John Dlamini, was a
man I had never met at any of the gatherings I attended, certainly not the man who seldom spoke and was rumoured to be involved with MK. Dlamini, as you know, was arrested shortly thereafter and, unlike other assassins and would-be assassins in this country – Tsafendas and Pratt, for instance – Dlamini was not found to be insane and unbalanced, but was promptly sentenced to death. He did not protest his innocence or claim to be controlled by a foreign body (human or animal or national), but insisted he was working alone and wished only to destroy the quintessence of the apartheid state, or something to that effect. He died in custody before the execution could be carried out.’

‘Is that the end of your story?’

The coldness of Mark’s voice, the abrupt thwack of his speech in the room, pulled Clare out of her own narrative. She looked down at her lap to find that her hands were shaking. ‘I suppose it is. Will you cross-examine me? Will you call other witnesses?’

‘There can’t be a trial where no crime has been committed. If anything you’re merely a gossip, and your gossiping resulted in the deaths of two people, at least one of whom was wholly innocent.’

‘You mean your Aunt Nora.’

Clare watched as Mark wove his fingers together and frowned. She knew what he must think of her, that she was a monster, that he could never love her again, assuming he ever had. He sighed once more and she wondered whether, in his meetings with clients, with the unambiguously criminal, he showed his frustration and impatience so openly. She hoped for the sake of the innocent that he did not.

At last, his eyes blinking with what looked like fury, he spoke. ‘Nora didn’t do anything wrong apart from trying to intervene in your life and make trouble. I don’t see that she had a political function. If we started killing off everyone who made ordinary mischief, we’d soon depopulate half the planet. But it’s my guess you wouldn’t think that such a bad thing.’

Clare

The vision of you caged and naked, under the beating sun, tethered to the shore and waiting for the sea to take you, for the predators to consume you, is nothing but a vision. If you had been captured I have to hope your fate would have been more prosaic. They would have taken you to the women’s jail in Johannesburg, and after spending time in the block for prisoners awaiting trial, and then submitting to the trial itself, you would have passed the term of your sentence, assuming you were not sentenced to death, in one of the few small but comparatively comfortable whitewashed rooms.

I went there again not so long ago, to that prison which is now a museum. I tried to imagine you into that space, to see your lean and limber body testing itself against its confinement. At least there, in prison, you would have been reachable. If arrested and detained, I might have found a way to aid your defence, might yet have had correspondence with you, seen you again, come to know you better, to repair all that I failed to do, to make you love me again. I would have made amends, repented to you, sought your absolution for my failures against you.

During my visit to the museum I found it difficult to be moved by the cells once reserved for white women, or by their stories. Compared to the women of colour, who were detained in conditions unsuitable for dogs, conditions that would have tested even the mettle of rats, the white women lived in relative comfort.

I looked for your name in the histories of dissent in the museum’s displays but could find no reference. Your name has not been rehabilitated. You have not been made over into a hero. The saints of the struggle are those whom we know were murdered, or
who survived to turn themselves into holy orators.

But perhaps my nightmare vision is not so fanciful. There are secrets that remain buried in the history of this country, people who were kidnapped and never recovered, remains buried in unmarked graves whose locations have been forgotten or suppressed, lives never accounted for, disappearances unexplained. Perhaps you did escape, into Lesotho or Zimbabwe or Mozambique, or slipped over into Swaziland or even the Transkei, and from one of those places were kidnapped and brought back into the country, or killed on the spot.

I see you in a bay on the northern Natal coast, in one of the old covert facilities, your pale skin burned and ravaged, your head immersed, your body wracked by electric shock, your arms dislocated from hanging, lacerations at your wrists and ankles. Your torturers no longer saw you as human, not even as animal, but as a thing outside of nature, a monster who had stolen life to animate herself. They killed not just out of indifference, those men, and not only out of hate – but out of fear.

*

Unlike in your final notebook, detailing your journey with Sam in the days leading up to your disappearance, this earlier one offers no sustained narrative. It is, instead, a collection of fragments: notes about your work, the stories you were writing for the paper, and telegraphic diary entries about your life. If you had a lover, you say nothing about him.

The work at the
Cape Record
kept you ever busier as the weeks and months progressed. You had no particular ‘beat’, such as crime or education or labour, the kinds of topics where the real news was happening. Instead, your editors held you down in the pool of general news reporters, assigned in large part to cover what the press has always called ‘human interest stories’: a housewife’s award-winning roses grown in memory of her husband; a blanket-drive for the poor and homeless ahead of the winter storms; the
first-hand account of a teenage girl who was the sole survivor of a boating accident off Noordhoek.

Most days you stayed late to finish stories and arrived before dawn on others. You began to work weekends and holidays when the news editor bullied you into doing more than you should have, made leering comments about you and said he thought of you like a daughter. You stayed late not because of him but because of the work, hoping that if you proved your ability you would be allowed to cover more interesting news.

When you did have time off you saw Peter and Ilse. Sometimes you went to their house for dinner, or else you invited them to your apartment where, as inept a cook as your mother, you made eggs and toast smothered with chutney and melted cheese. You had no other friends apart from someone you only identify as ‘X’, to whom you spoke on the phone at least once a week. I assume this must have been a lover from university, someone still in Grahamstown, perhaps even a professor, a man like your father who could not keep his hands off his students.

‘X’ suggested you start jogging as a way of relaxing and building your strength. In the evenings, at least three days a week, you ran through residential streets in Observatory and Rondebosch. One night a drunk who might have stumbled down from the mountain forests tackled you against the dark side of a building just around the corner from your apartment. He was large but so intoxicated that you easily repelled him, kneeing him in the groin and pulling the fingers back on his left hand until they broke, crushing the digits into a lumpy pulp that you squeezed like an orange. You ran home as he shouted for the police, as if the law should have been protecting him instead of you.

Though you marvelled at your own strength, after the encounter with the drunk you only ran during the day, in the mornings before going to work. You did push-ups and sit-ups and kept a log of how many each day. You maintained a meticulous record of everything you ate, as though you were training for the Olympics.

You bought a scale and weighed yourself each morning.

One evening you helped Peter distribute stacks of pamphlets throughout the city, hoping that you would not be caught. If the security police had discovered this notebook the scant details you sketched of that single evening might have been the only clue that you were involved in anything illicit. Your words are so circumspect that at times I question whether they are yours and not the work of someone else, copying your hand, using you as his puppet.

All these things you never told us when they were happening, knowing we would have implored you to be careful, to look after yourself, not to do anything foolish. We could never come up with the words that you wanted to hear. I remember a Sunday in the autumn of that year when you condescended to come home for lunch. It was the first time I had seen you since your move back to the city. When I asked if I could come to your apartment you made excuses – it was a mess, you said, and it was not the kind of place I would be comfortable. By then Mark was living in Johannesburg, so the three of us sat in the dining room, eating. Your father asked if you had made many friends at the paper.

‘I met one of your old students, Ilse. She’s a freelancer.’

William, I remember, tried to look unfazed. ‘Oh, yes? How is she?’ he asked, looking at his plate.

‘Married,’ you said. I knew what it meant and wondered at the time if you did as well. I hastened the end of the meal, and sent you on your way.

I wonder, after all, if I hate you for every secret you kept from me.

*

While some of your colleagues were detained and arrested, held without trial, charged with offences both preposterous and petty, you remained as untouched by the chaos as most of us were, safe in our white streets. You never moved beyond the general reporting of the ‘human interest story’, the inconsequential, while
others threw themselves into clouds of tear gas, struggling to tell as much truth as they could report under the ever more stringent restrictions and regulations imposed by the government against the press. Some were fined, others spent months and even years in detention, a few died. Others still were lucky to escape with vandalism of their property and anonymous threats against their lives. Your editors, whose own lives and families were threatened, rewrote stories so that they obscured more than they revealed. Those of us who read such news were left having to put together the pieces, to discern through the silences and obfuscations (the surreal avowals that, for instance, the details and purpose of a gathering could not be disclosed even though one had nonetheless occurred) that a peaceful demonstration had taken place on Adderley Street and been met with the force of police bullets.

And yet you, Laura, went on writing your stories about high-achieving child prodigies and exceptional housewives.
Perhaps
, you wrote in the notebook,
they will eventually trust me to do something more important
.

Yet no promotion, no greater freedom ever came. You met with Peter and Ilse and their circle of friends and associates. In private, you compiled further notes on Rick Turner, and when you had exhausted that topic, finding no answers and not knowing where else to turn in search of the truth, expanded your scope. I read it with horror:
Unsolved deaths. Robert Smit. Rick Turner. Stephan Pretorius. Nora Boyce Pretorius
. From an individual you shifted to a theme, became obsessed with the dead, whatever side they might be on.

But unlike Smit or Turner, whose deaths have remained, objectively, unsolved and unexplained, the deaths of your aunt and uncle had their day in court. A man confessed and was found guilty. Nonetheless, something about the resolution did not satisfy you, as if you intuited that the story of their deaths was only a cover, obscuring the real story, the one beneath and behind the cover story.