The Impostor (3 page)

‘I’m sure that’s all true,’ Adam said. ‘But I’m not after money. I’m after something else.’

‘What?’

How could he explain? His brother would never understand. For Gavin, the goal in life was money and power, and he judged everybody by that standard. He assumed that everyone shared his aim, but of course that wasn’t true. Adam believed in beauty for its own sake: Beauty with a capital B. He couldn’t talk to Gavin about Beauty, but he saw his way forward clearly in that moment. He was a penniless poet, with nothing to offer anybody except words, but he was the real soul of the country. He was at the centre of things.

His feeling of exultant certainty lasted the rest of the day. In his room that evening, he studied himself in the mirror. He had a theory, which was that people’s faces gradually became set around one overriding expression. There were satisfied faces, angry faces, sad faces. His own expression, he’d realized, was one of disappointment: it seemed to be the dominant theme of his life. But now, as he gazed at his image in the glass, he imagined he could see a transformation in his face. The little defeats, the compromises, had burned away. What remained was his essential self.

Adam was still a good-looking man. He didn’t have the lush handsomeness of his early years, it was true, with his wild locks and saturnine stare; he had really looked the part of a poet back then. His hair had greyed and thinned, he had put on a bit of weight, there were creases next to his eyes. But the basic outline, the shape, was still in place. His intrinsic nature showed through, his creative, bohemian spirit. The young man had matured into something less dramatic, but he was still pleasing on the eye.

He fell asleep that night secure in his conviction. But he woke in the small hours into doubt. He lay there for a long time, with the lights of the city spread out below the window, corroded by questions. What was he playing at? Who did he think he was? Thank God he hadn’t used that line on Gavin, about being the real soul of the country. It didn’t feel true any more. Of the two of them, perhaps it was Gavin who stood closer to the core of things. Maybe the soul of South Africa wasn’t a poet; maybe it was a crooked property developer, obsessed with cheap fittings.

‘I’ve got an idea to put to you,’ Gavin said. ‘No, no, not the job. Something different.’

This was a few days later. Adam had lapsed into a more normal state meanwhile, neither triumphant nor despairing. He knew what he wanted, but he wasn’t sure he was right. In this cautious frame of mind, he paid attention to his brother, and the proposal he was listening to gradually took hold of him.

A few years before, Gavin said, he’d bought a house in a tiny Karoo town, about eight hours away. He’d meant to fix it up, to use as a place for long weekends and holidays, but somehow he’d never got around to it. So the house was just standing there, empty and unused, slowly going to pieces.

‘You could go and stay there, if you like. I bought it complete, with all the furniture and everything. It wouldn’t cost you much–just the electricity and water. You say you want to write poetry. Well, this could be the perfect spot for you.’

When he’d finished speaking, Gavin watched Adam with a little smirk on his face. There seemed to be some challenge in the look. It was only afterwards that Adam understood: Gavin was throwing down the gauntlet. In his mind, it was a crazy proposal. He was saying, in effect, ‘you talk about writing poems. Well, let’s see how badly you want to do that.’

Adam saw himself sitting at a window, a vista of rolling hills and fields outside, words proceeding from his pen in a long, unbroken flow, and it was exactly where he wanted to be. ‘
Yes
!’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’

Gavin’s face fell and almost immediately he tried to persuade his brother why it was a really terrible idea. But every argument that he put forward–that the place was rough and old, that he hadn’t been up there in years, that it was miles from anybody he knew–only made Adam more determined to go. It felt to him that his life had narrowed in on a tiny point of fate, on the other side of which lay regeneration and renewal. He had been worshipping false gods, but all the old idols were broken now. What would take their place was unknown, but it was almost in his grasp.

Which was how, not long afterwards, he came to find himself driving into the countryside on a Sunday morning in his old Fiat, following behind Gavin and Charmaine, who were speeding along in Gavin’s red sports car. Once he was out of the city, he felt that he could breathe. He opened all the windows to let air into the car and it was like a new, fierce wind blowing through his life. He felt lighter than he had in years, as if he was leaving all his old, cumbersome baggage behind. He was sloughing off his previous life, like a skin that didn’t fit him any more. His few remaining possessions, piled on the back seat, and even the car itself, didn’t matter to him–he could let it all go.

Like a physical symbol of this change, the landscape they were driving through resembled nothing that he knew. He had seen the Karoo before, of course, but always in passing, on his way to Cape Town or back to Jo’burg. He had never given it his full attention till now. There were sun-blasted stretches of plain, then sudden eruptions of oddly-shaped hills. The emptiness was powerful and strange. It had the feel mostly of desert, but it was springtime and in certain fertile valleys, where there was water, the green was vivid and intense. Sometimes there would be a farm-house, with a scattering of buildings, a few stick-like human figures. And sometimes there was a tiny dwelling, no bigger than a room or two, in the middle of a huge desolation. It didn’t seem possible that anybody could live there.

He had even begun tentatively to consider the poems that he might write. His early work, from the first collection, had been rooted in a very different landscape. Those were African poems: hymns to the bushveld. The stark, stripped-down countryside he was passing through now was of a different order entirely. It wasn’t African; not in any conventional way. It was more like the surface of some arid, airless planet, or perhaps it was the bottom of the sea. But still, he could imagine that one might come to love all this vast vacancy. One might respond to the hugeness of the sky, or the brilliance that a blossom took on against the pale severity of the scrub. Up close, it was probably teeming with its own versions of life and vitality. Its beauty would be more valuable for having to be learned. No doubt the enormous spaces would fold the spirit inwards, on some core of contemplation and insight. Yes, it was a religious sort of landscape; and he felt a corresponding rhetoric stirring in him.

He was actually on the verge of a promising phrase, something he could build a stanza around, though its full cadence remained just out of reach, when the cop stepped out into the road.

3

He started by cleaning out the house. It was a big labour. He hadn’t been this industrious in months, washing things and setting them in place, then changing his mind and moving them again. It seemed important to arrange the furniture in a new configuration. He took the curtains down and washed them in the bath. The bed-linen and the table-cloth too. He got down on his knees and scoured the floors. As he wiped and brushed, old colours emerged that had been dimmed under dirt. It was satisfying to push the dust back outside from where it had invaded, grain by grain.

This satisfaction was most complete in the evening as it started to get dark. He had been to the municipality to get the power connected and he switched on every light. The warm yellow glow renewed the little rooms. He walked through the house, exhausted but triumphant, and sat down on the back steps. At the edge of the light he could see the front line of the weeds, massed like a besieging army in the yard. There was still that enemy to overcome.

But he knew how much hard work was involved in a project like that. It wasn’t easy to subdue the natural world. His neighbour, the man in the blue overalls, spent hours and hours outside each day, hacking and digging and pruning. Over the next week or two, Adam observed him as he toiled in solitary fervour. There was never a repeat of that strange incident from the first morning, when the man had gone rushing inside. But there was a mutually suspicious awareness between Adam and his neighbour, which grew more complex as the days went by.

They were always watching each other, in a sneaky sort of way. And one evening, as he sat out on his
stoep
, Adam noticed the man standing outside his back door, smoking a cigarette. There was a spill of light from inside the house and it caught the brooding presence of him, so silent and intense there on the grass, the red glow of the cigarette going agitatedly back and forth. It was twilight, the end of the day: a natural moment for reverie. But Adam felt uneasy–as if the man was waiting for something; wanting something from him–and this time it was he who jumped up and hurried off inside.

After that, they avoided each other. When the man was outside in his garden, Adam stayed indoors, spying on him from behind the curtains. But there wasn’t much to see. The blue man–which was how Adam thought of him–was always working, always anxious and frenetic. On the rare occasions when he was standing still, he would be puffing on a cigarette. Nobody ever came to visit him; he appeared to be as lonely and singular as Adam himself.

Although he slaved away furiously in his garden, he had another job too–or perhaps it was a hobby. He did metal-work. There was a small shed behind the house and for hours every day a horrible noise of screeching and welding came out of it. When he worked at night, Adam could see a spray of fire inside, like the glow of some infernal industry. The blue man was making burglar bars and security gates. They were often propped up outside for the paint to dry. Later he would load them up on a
bakkie
and drive off to deliver them.

The poems didn’t come. Or not yet. There was a big window in the lounge with the view that he’d imagined: rolling fields and hills, the dark bar of mountains in the distance. But in the foreground was the windmill, towering over his psyche, making thumping, threatening noises as the blades turned in the wind. It was broken, he could see; the water it fetched up blurted out in jets from a missing section of pipe. When he’d set up a desk in front of the window, with his notebook and pen on top of it, all he could see and hear was the windmill, churning uselessly against the sky. It stood between him and the poems, which stirred invisibly beyond it, out of reach.

He told himself he needed time. He’d had a major upheaval, a big shift in the foundations. He had to take it easy, allow himself to adjust. In a couple of weeks the windmill would recede into the background and the poems would take its place.

Meanwhile he tried to settle into this new life of his. He took himself off on walks to explore the town. But the heart of it was really that one main street. And whenever he walked down its length, popping into the shops, trying to make friendly conversation with the locals, the same feeling from that first day rose up in him again: that he was trapped somewhere that was nowhere, in which the light was too blindingly stark, and in which it was always Sunday afternoon.

What he felt–it came to him after a week or two–was the absence of history. There was the sense of a white deadness before the lightning strikes. In this electric lull, the hands of the clock didn’t move. There was only the land, rolling and vast and elemental, in which time was measured out in the shadows of clouds passing over, or the minute scrabbling of a beetle among grains of sand. Human events were elsewhere. In Johannesburg or Cape Town, there was a sense of turmoil and ferment; South Africa’s big change was evident and tangible. But not here. Here the way things were seemed inevitable and natural, as preordained as the weather. There was the old racial division, all the whites on one side of the river, in their spacious and expensive properties, and all the coloureds on the other side, in the township, in their crowded little houses between pot-holed, neglected streets. Two or three times a day there would be a knock on Adam’s front door and it would be somebody looking for work. There was deference and desperation in the way they appealed to him, the men holding their hats in their hands and the women avoiding his eyes. He felt a curious mixture of pity and anger towards them. Couldn’t they see that he had nothing to offer, that he had lost control of his own destiny too, that his future was up to fate?

One night he went down to the hotel in town, the place where Gavin and Charmaine had stayed. He’d seen the bar in passing and remembered it, and now the thought had come to him that he might go down there, have a beer, maybe chat to a couple of people.

It was almost empty. Five or six customers at most, not counting Fanie Prinsloo. The meaty ex-rugby player welcomed Adam loudly. But his heartiness was close to aggression, and the assortment of rugby jerseys hanging on the wall, amongst tarnished trophies and faded team photographs, were like the flags of a club that had refused membership to Adam.

After he’d set down his beer, Fanie Prinsloo said, ‘So, Alan. What is it you do?’

‘Adam.’

‘Sorry?’

‘My name is Adam. I write poetry.’

A gaunt older woman with a leathery face leaned towards him. ‘I didn’t catch that. You do pottery?’

‘No, no. Poems. I write poems.’

Silence descended on the room, while Fanie Prinsloo flipped through channels on the television in the corner.

A thin man with glasses asked, ‘You make a good living out of that?’

‘Um, no, not really.’

‘Didn’t think so,’ the man said.

The leathery woman leaned in again. ‘Where do you come from?’

‘Jo’burg. Well, more recently, Cape Town. I’m new here. I arrived a couple of weeks ago.’

‘You know where he’s staying?’ Fanie Prinsloo said. ‘He’s staying in that old
vrot
place up the hill, with all the dead weeds outside.’

Somebody whistled and somebody else laughed.

‘That place?’ the thin man said. ‘You not scared, living in that place?’

‘No, why should I be?’

‘I’ve seen lights moving around in there. In the night-time.’

‘No, that’s me,’ Adam said. ‘I light a candle sometimes at night. To keep me company.’

‘You should clean that place up, man,’ Fanie Prinsloo told him. ‘Get those weeds out the back.’

‘Yes, I plan to.’

‘Get a boy to do it. Hire yourself a couple of boys.’

The thin man asked him, ‘So how do you like it so far, living up here?’

‘It’s all right. A big change from the city.’

The older woman shifted closer. Adam saw that she had a glass eye, which he hadn’t noticed till now. The half-dead stare unnerved him, as she told him, slurring just a little: ‘I’ve lived here my whole life. I was born here. This was always a quiet place. Now they’ve made this fancy tar road that goes past. They’ve made a pass that goes across the mountains. The traffic that goes through now! It’s ten times what it used to be.’

‘Twenty,’ the thin man said.

There seemed to be general agreement on this, though Adam couldn’t work out whether they liked the traffic or not. Then a little dried-up man with ginger hair, who hadn’t spoken till now, suddenly declared shrilly, ‘There are prostitutes now. Girls from the township sell themselves up there, along the new road. To the truck drivers going through. There didn’t used to be trucks. There didn’t used to be prostitutes.’ He slurped fiercely at his drink.

‘Not only to truck drivers,’ the older woman said, and the ginger man sank between his shoulders, because he took this as a reference to himself.

‘Now crime is starting here too,’ Fanie Prinsloo said gravely. ‘Two robberies last year. Never had that before up here. That’s also the road. It’s people passing through.’

A sad-looking woman spoke up from behind the bar. She’d been sitting there the whole time, but Adam only now realized that she must be Fanie Prinsloo’s wife. ‘It isn’t our coloureds,’ she announced. ‘Our coloureds behave themselves.’

‘Except for the mayor,’ Fanie Prinsloo said, and silence fell again.

In recent years, Adam had been experiencing a curious ambivalence when discussions of this nature came up. In the distant past, he had always been clear about his moral position, but that wasn’t the case any more. These days, he found himself taking the opposite stand to whatever political point had been raised. If people liked the new road, he would start to wonder what vices and problems the road might bring. On the other hand, if people said the road was a bad thing, he would think of it as progress and development. His ambivalence was genuine; there seemed to be both a radical and a reactionary buried in him. More than anything, it was this fault-line in his psyche that he thought of as his new South African self.

In this particular conversation, the people in the bar were too uncertain themselves about the merits or dangers of the road for him to take a contrary position. But now that the mayor had been mentioned, the focus of the talk hardened. Everybody in the room seemed to dislike the mayor.

‘You have a coloured mayor?’ Adam asked, astounded. It didn’t seem possible, not here.

‘Oh, yes,’ Fanie Prinsloo said. ‘He’s with the government. An angry
hotnot
. Always shouting about this and that. Nothing is ever right.’

‘It’s because of him they’ve changed the name of the town,’ the thin man said. ‘Everybody was happy with the old name. So the place was called after a Afrikaner hero–so what? Everybody’s got their heroes. You start taking away people’s heroes, then you’re in trouble.’

‘That’s what they’re doing,’ Fanie Prinsloo’s wife said. ‘Taking away our heroes.’

‘Now the town’s got a African name that nobody can pronounce,’ the thin man said. ‘What’s the use of that? What do we want a name like that for?’

There were nods and exclamations of dismay. What was happening was terrible; it shouldn’t be allowed.

‘But the road,’ Adam said. ‘Surely you’re grateful to the mayor for the road?’

The silence came again, but it was charged now with suspicion. After a few moments Fanie Prinsloo said darkly, ‘The road came before the mayor. The mayor’s got nothing to do with the road.’

The conversation unravelled again into monologues and moody introspection, and not long afterwards Adam paid up and left. He didn’t want to hang around with these sad, lost people, nursing their bigotry and their drinks. As he slipped out the door he heard the gaunt woman saying, to nobody in particular, ‘I don’t like the road. We got along fine before the road was here.’ The television rimed her face in an icy blue frost.

He didn’t go back to the hotel again, but there weren’t a lot of other options for entertainment. At the far end of the main street he discovered a bed-and-breakfast place run by two women from the city who had recently moved up here. They had a bar too, but the clientele there upset him in a different sort of way. They were mostly visitors passing through, though there was a scattering of local people too, and all the talk was of crystals and energy lines and reincarnation. Charmaine would have felt at home in this company. All of these people, in their vague and apolitical way, thought that the mayor and the road and the new name for the town were good and positive things; any change, in their opinion, could only be for the better. And Adam found himself disagreeing with them on every count. To his own discomfort, he even recycled the arguments he’d heard in Fanie Prinsloo’s bar, about the sudden arrival of prostitution and crime in the town.