Absolution (47 page)

‘I never saw so much as a flicker of recognition.’

She raises a hand in modesty. ‘We’re dealing with two matters here. The first matter is the project at hand, the biography. If it serves to create new interest in my work, and prevents it falling out of print when I am dead, then that will make my son happy, no matter how he protests, and it will make my publishers very happy indeed. The second matter is: why you? I chose you not because I respect your work more than anyone else’s. I have read more insightful scholarship, more theoretically sophisticated engagements, and better written ones, too. You’re here because of who you are, because of your place in my family, or the place that I denied you in my family. You’re here also because I hoped you might know something more about my daughter in the days before she disappeared. Let us be honest about that at least.’

I feel my legs begin to wobble as she smiles her child’s smile, pursing her lips. Standing here with her now, I know I can never tell her what I’ve learned from Timothy and Lionel. Whatever she may or may not guess about Laura, to tell her what I now believe to be the truth would, I fear, destroy her. Despite whatever lingering resentment I may feel about the past, the last thing I want to do is hurt her.

‘I have never forgotten you, Sam. How could I? That day, I saw you before you knocked. Lionel, Timothy, and you, all three emerged from a bright little car and stared at my house, consulting a piece of paper, a slip with an address, I presume, then crossed the street and knocked. My husband was at a conference in Johannesburg and I was alone in the house. Suddenly here
were these two strange men and a boy on my doorstep, so it was not a good beginning because I was already on guard. Lionel and Timothy introduced themselves and Timothy presented an envelope from my daughter, and her notebooks, and Lionel’s photographs. One of them asked if I had heard from Laura. I said no, and pointed at you, and asked who you were. Timothy spoke. He said, “This boy was with your daughter. It seems she was taking him to his aunt in Beaufort West. But then we were in Beaufort West some days ago and we found Sam on the street, running around like a stray. He says his aunt couldn’t take him in. She did at first, to please your daughter, but as soon as Laura left, his aunt kicked him out onto the street, in a town where he doesn’t know anyone. We just found him in the street.” I asked them where Laura was now and they said they could not tell me because they did not know themselves. Is this the way you remember it?’

‘More or less,’ I say. ‘But you don’t know the whole story. They were making it up. At that point I hadn’t even been to see my aunt.’

‘We’ll come to that. For now, what is important is what
I
remember of that day. I asked them why they had brought you to me, of all people in the world. Timothy spoke again. He explained that because you were with my daughter, they thought perhaps I might be some relation of yours. “At first,” said Timothy, “we actually thought Sam was Laura’s son, but she told us that wasn’t so. But maybe a cousin, we thought, a nephew or cousin. And since she’d asked us to bring these papers to you when we could, we thought maybe you’d know what to do with Sam.” I looked at you, sternly I think now, and knew that you were no relation of mine. You were not the son of my son, not the child of my cousins or my cousins’ children. You stared so blankly at me, Sam, with those dead eyes that I see even now in moments when your mind is elsewhere, and when you think no one is looking. There were bruises on your gangly arms. Your hair was long, fraying at the
ends, and even though it was obvious that you’d just been washed, you looked like someone who had been filthy for a long time before that, like a tramp, or a stray. Dusty and ashen.’

‘Do you remember what you said next?’

‘Yes. And I have regretted it since. It is but one in the long catalogue of my regrets. I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know this boy. He is not one of my relatives. Do you know me, child?” You shook your head, holding tightly, so tightly to Lionel’s hand. And Timothy asked, as if he couldn’t believe my cold-heartedness, “He isn’t one of your family? You have no obligation?” ’

‘And you said, “I’m afraid he isn’t. I don’t. He’s nothing to do with me. I don’t know him. I can’t explain how he came to be with my daughter. Child, can you tell us how you came to be with my daughter?” That’s what you said.’

‘I don’t remember the words quite in that way,’ Clare says, touching my arm, ‘but never mind. Our versions are close enough. And you, when I asked you that hard question, you only shook your head. You had nothing to say. Tell me now, if you can. Tell me what you know.’

I can’t let the challenge pass. I did have things to say, and I still do. So I tell Clare the truth about what happened, about my idealistic parents, their friendship with Laura, their deaths, their memorial service, seeing Clare and her husband there, the promise he made, the promise Laura herself made, that if I ever needed anything, all I had to do was to come ask. As I tell her all of this, Clare’s face drops, scrambles in confusion, becomes a wet red grid.

‘You can’t be Peter and Ilse’s son? You can’t. Oh God,’ she cries, ignoring my hand and turning away from me. She finds a bench and collapses on it. ‘I didn’t realize. I thought you were just a stray of my daughter’s. I felt badly enough about
that
, you see. And now. Oh God!’ she shouts. A man across the street turns to see if something is the matter, but Clare is oblivious. ‘I didn’t understand that you were important. But how could I? There were
two boys in my memory – the filthy boy at the door with the men, and the clean-scrubbed boy at the funeral, Peter and Ilse’s child. I always wondered what happened to the boy at the funeral, but I paid so little attention to my husband’s life. A dead student was a tragedy, but – I never thought. I was so consumed in my own life and work. I should have remembered your face but perhaps – is it possible I didn’t see you properly at the funeral?’

‘It is possible. I saw you, but I don’t remember if you saw me.’

‘You must understand that my husband’s life was my husband’s. I played the faculty spouse when I had to, but I paid no attention to details. I had my own career, my own students. What’s more, there were many things about my husband’s life – I mean to say, we did not have an uncomplicated marriage. There was a great deal I tried quite hard to ignore, to not know about. But–’ Her fingers search her face and after a moment she turns to look at me in a way she hasn’t before. ‘I should have seen it long ago. Of course you’re Ilse’s child,’ she says, leaning over and kissing my cheek. ‘I never even
told
my husband about you and the men. You must believe that – you must understand, he didn’t know you’d ever come. It isn’t his fault. You see I knew what Laura must have done and I was so furious with her. All I wanted was to hear from her, but
directly
from her. And to receive those notebooks and her letter made me so panicked, so very angry. I had to believe that she really might still be alive, and to be faced with you, this responsibility that she had shouldered, it somehow compounded my anger. But this is awful. You knew her, didn’t you? You must have known her for years.’

I think of all I might now say, how I could, in one way, write the end of Laura’s story for Clare. But it’s not for me to do. I know that the end I could provide would only be the beginning of another volume, the reading of which Clare might not survive. Instead, I tell her that Laura appeared like a saviour when I most needed one.

‘How do you mean? A saviour, what, in the way I imagined?’

‘Not quite.’

I replay the scene of that day in my head, the remote site where Bernard and I stopped, the falling light, the fury that had broken out inside me as I looked at him there, tight with his own kind of wrath, asleep on the ground with a magazine covering his face. I see my hand turn the key, feel the click of the ignition. My father had put me on the seat in front of him a few times, so I knew how to move the gearshift, how to put my foot on the clutch, to shift the balance from the clutch to the accelerator. The idea was to give Bernard a fright, or perhaps just to drive away. I could say that the accelerator stuck. I could say that the truck went faster than I expected it would and I lost control. I could say that my foot didn’t find the brake in time. But now, as I play back the scene, a different version begins to piece itself together.

Bernard is asleep on the ground and I have been left alone in the cab of the truck. As with all the versions I remember I’m almost delirious from dehydration. But in this version, Bernard is still alive when Laura arrives. She comes stealing out of the bush, sees Bernard, and runs in a crouch to the truck. In this version she understands everything. She’s been searching for me, tracking me down, trying to save me from the man on the ground. She climbs over me to the driver’s side and tells me to be quiet and close my eyes. I put my hand on the gearshift but she removes it, puts it down on the seat. I hear the key turn in the ignition; she depresses the clutch, puts the truck into gear, and accelerates. The bump is the same, and the crunch that comes after. We reverse and stop, we go forward again. With each repetition there’s less resistance. The smell of Laura comes back to me, a smell like myself. I realize, in this moment with Clare, that I finally know the truth of that night. We did it together, Laura and I.

Across the street a parade of children in winter school uniforms moves past, teachers at either end keeping them in line. A boy steps out to look at a poster on the wall of a building and with a single word one of the teachers shouts him back into
place. That it could be so simple, to know where to step, how to walk, to be told when one has fallen out of line, to be reminded when one has erred and told how to correct oneself. I can see that it’s cost the boy something to obey. He wants to run back to the poster, he wants to cross the street to a shop, he does not want to go where all of his classmates are going. Clare is watching him, too.

‘A goat midst the sheep,’ she says, nodding towards the boy. ‘He’s the one who’ll make a mark, for better or for worse.’

Words begin to pile up in my mouth. I edit and reorder them. ‘Because you’ve trusted me with so much, there’s something I feel I’d like to trust you with,’ I say, knowing the story I’m about to tell is no longer the truth.

‘A secret?’

‘Assuming Laura is dead, it’s a secret that no one else knows, not even my wife. I still don’t have the courage to tell her. It’s a secret that should change the way you think about your daughter. It seems fitting that you should be the only other person who knows. In telling you, I’m putting everything in your hands – my freedom and my life.’ The story is for Clare’s sake, not for mine, and for the sake of Laura’s memory.

Clare nods as the parade of children passes around the corner. I assemble the version I want her to know, the feeling of doing it,
my
foot on the accelerator and
my
hand on the wheel and gearshift. It runs like a film on a loop that lives inside me and which I live inside.

‘Laura was mysterious, a fighter and a force of nature, but she wasn’t a murderer, not a killer in cold blood, not as you imagined her in your diary. She didn’t kill my uncle.’

As Clare’s face clears and she turns her body to look at me more closely, I know this is the right thing to say.

‘Are you telling me what I think you are?’

‘Yes. But you were right about the truck.’ The words come out in a croak, my voice breaking.

‘It was what she wrote in her notebook, that she ran him over with his own truck. But somehow, ultimately, I could not believe she would be so indirect. A truck makes more sense if the driver is a child.’

‘What does that make me?’

‘It makes you little different from me, but as a child – at least as a white child in those days – you almost certainly would not have been held accountable. What I did to put my sister and brother-in-law in jeopardy was worse in a way, because it was careless and selfish. It is a crime that has haunted me in a very real sense. Writing this last book was my attempt at self-exorcism, a casting out of my demons and my sense of complicity in their deaths, as well as my sense of great failure in not being a better mother to my daughter – and not only my daughter, but to my son as well.’

‘There’s more,’ I say, and struggle to tell her the rest, about the bodies in the truck, about the grave and Bernard’s burial, as I remember it. I tell her about once trying to find the place again in the hills above Beaufort West and now not knowing whether to believe what I remember. Clare listens, looking at me even when I can’t bear to look at her.

‘The historical record would suggest you are mistaken,’ Clare says, her voice cool, analytical. ‘As far as I am aware, there have been no discoveries of mass graves. There are two things to say about that. First, that history is not always correct, because it cannot tell all the stories that have been, cannot account for everything that happened. If it could, historians would be out of work, because there would be nothing left to do with the past but to interpret what is known. Second, that the record of memory, even a flawed memory, has its own kind of truth. Perhaps the literal truth is not what you have remembered, but the truth of memory is no less accurate in its way. Our whole country has been a mass grave, whether the bodies are in one location or in many, whether killed in one day or over the course of decades. There is still a further thing to consider. It is possible, through a sense of vanity, either
conscious or unconscious, to attribute crimes wholly to oneself in which one has had only a partial hand. Do I know with certainty that the people to whom I spoke were responsible for transmitting the information I revealed about my sister and brother-in-law to the person or persons responsible for their assassination? No. There is only a temporal link. I spoke carelessly and the result, it seemed to me, was their deaths. But I have no incontrovertible proof of my own involvement apart from my
sense
of my own involvement. That is why, as Dostoevsky says in his quotation of Heine,
that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility
, because it is in the nature of humans to lie about themselves. You look confused, Samuel. I am not suggesting that what you have told me is a lie. But to remember yourself as, in a very real sense, the agent of your own emancipation, that is a kind of vanity. Let us assume that you did kill Bernard, that you were also complicit in the transport of the bodies of people killed in apartheid atrocities. Without wishing to excuse the killing of your uncle, it is possible to explain it as the result of both historical circumstance and your own highly personal experience of trauma. In the same passage, Dostoevsky says that everyone remembers things he would only confide to his friends, and other things that he would only reveal to himself, under the cloak of privacy.
But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself
. The question I think you have not asked is why you hated Bernard such that your rage had no choice but to express itself – or, seen another way, that you had no choice but to defend yourself. There are gaps in your narrative. Perhaps you did not tell me the whole story. You need to ask yourself what Bernard himself must have done to make you act as you did.’