The Impostor (8 page)

7

He rings his brother that evening. They talk in a general way for a while, and then Adam brings the conversation around to their schooldays. It’s not a topic they often dwell on; under Adam’s casual tone, there is a guarded, defensive note.

‘Tell me something,’ he says. ‘Do you remember somebody called Canning?’

‘Hmmm. I think I do. He was in your year, not mine.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Jeez, Ad, I couldn’t tell you. Kind of average and boring. Why?’

‘I ran into him up here recently. But I can’t really place him. Was he a friend of mine? Did I hang out with him?’

‘I don’t know. If you don’t remember him, why should I? He was sort of a nobody, I think, a bit of a background character.’ Gavin yawns. ‘So how’s it going up there otherwise? Have you tackled the weeds yet?’

The weeds. They seem, somehow, more numerous than before, rustling and hissing, mocking him in a foreign tongue. When he’s finished talking to Gavin he goes out onto the back
stoep
and stares at them. What better way to mark a new beginning than by clearing out the weeds?

He’s up at sunrise the next day. He wants to start early, before the heat builds. With the solid heft of the pick in his hand, he is full of power and purpose. But in five minutes he’s gasping and reeling, slippery with sweat. The earth is hard and resilient as iron. The pick bounces off it, making hardly a dent, throwing his own force back at him. The sun is well clear of the horizon by now.

He works a while, rests a while, works again. After an hour he has cleared a tiny space, not much bigger than himself. And he hasn’t even managed to dig the weeds out of the ground: all he’s done is break off the stems at the base, leaving the roots buried. Despite the gloves, his hands are raw from the thorns and blistered from using the pick. The sun pours down its molten malevolence on him. When he wipes the sweat from his eyes, he sees the yard stretching away.

A voice says, ‘No, man, that’s not going to work.’

The blue man is leaning on the fence.

‘Why not?’ Adam says.

‘You need to make the ground soft first. You got to run the water over it, let it loosen up. Then you can pull those things out.’

The blue man has a hoarse, soft voice, with a heavy Afrikaans accent; Adam has to lean forward to hear him. From close up, he can see the lines on his face, the teary quality of his blue eyes behind their glasses, the way he has combed a few long hairs sideways over his head to hide the baldness. There are nicotine stains on his fingers and on the fringe of his moustache. He is about sixty years old and–now that Adam and he are squaring up to each other like this–just an ordinary man. He looks avuncular and friendly; a neighbour, like any other.

He says, ‘I see your windmill is broken. It’s a small problem. I can fix it for you, if you like. Then you can fill up the dam and run water over the ground.’

‘Would you? I’d really appreciate that. Thank you.’

They have slipped into conversation so obliquely that it’s no big deal. Weeks and weeks of silence; then they are suddenly chatting over the fence. Why didn’t they just talk to each other in the first place? Adam decides to introduce himself. By now names are almost incidental, almost unnecessary, but they go through the ritual. The blue man says, ‘Blom,’ and they shake hands.

Blom
. It could be a first name or a surname. Somehow it doesn’t matter: one word is enough of a designation, as with Canning. But no; it’s not like Canning. The surname has stuck on Canning because it’s an echo from schoolboy days. ‘Blom’ is something else: an extraneous oddity, like a hat.

The blue man lets himself through the strands of wire and comes plodding over to the windmill. He measures and mutters to himself. ‘I think I might have a pipe that fits,’ he says. He goes off and comes back again with the pipe and a box of tools.

He is there for a few hours, banging and hammering and welding. He’d said it wasn’t a big job, but he exudes an intense flurry of toil and concentration. Adam makes tea and carries it out to him, feeling all spare and wifely. While they are standing there, sipping from their mugs, looking out over the brown weeds moving in the wind, Blom says, ‘I’ve seen you over the fence. Many times.’

‘Yes. Me too. I saw you see.’

‘I also moved here recently. I came here only one or two months before you. So we are like the new boys on the block!’ He laughs immoderately.

‘Yes,’ Adam says. ‘It’s all a bit strange to me still. I’ve never lived out in the countryside before.’

‘
Ja
, I can see that,
ou maat
. I can see you’re a city boy. Don’t know up from down. But
moenie
worry
nie
, you’ll start to like it. Soon it’ll be like you lived here your whole life.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Adam says, looking uneasily at the metal innards of the windmill, the weeds vibrating in the breeze. ‘You can’t really change who you are.’

‘That isn’t true,’ Blom says with sudden seriousness. ‘Didn’t you ever imagine moving to a new place, where nobody knows you, leaving the past behind…Didn’t you ever think about that? Starting again from nothing?’

‘Well, maybe. Lots of people have done that, to escape from something. But that’s just a con, isn’t it? You’d just be pretending. You wouldn’t really be a different person.’

‘Do you believe in God, Adam?’

‘No. That is, I don’t know.’

‘You should believe. If you accept the Lord into your heart, it’s like life starting again. Not pretending–for real. The whole past washed away! But I don’t judge you. We are all sinners in the eyes of God. Me above all. But I came through that test. My faith is stronger than before.’

‘That’s good,’ Adam says, and sips at his tea.

‘I have been reborn. And that’s when I decided to start again. A whole new life! I gave up my old ways. All my sins. I became a new man.’

‘I can understand that,’ Adam says. ‘I’m also changing my life.’

‘
Ja
? How is that?’

‘Oh, just…getting away from things. Taking time out to think.’ He leaves it at that. Poetry versus religion: he doubts they’d have a language in common.

Later, at the end of the afternoon, Blom is done. He steps back, hands on hips, to see. From the pipes that lead into the dam there is a clunking and throbbing, and then a rush of brown water. It fades, then comes again. With every rotation of the heavy old blades above, there is a sudden gush down below. The colour of the water changes, becoming clearer.

A headiness goes through Adam, out of proportion to the scene. It feels good, this successful labour with the elements. To have this pure transparency, driven up from under the ground by wind–it is a kind of magic. Although he hasn’t done any work himself, he has drawn closer to the world.

Blom comes inside to clean up. In the bathroom, he strips off his shirt before washing at the sink. While getting him a clean towel, Adam notices a bad scar on his back. It doesn’t look surgical; more like an accident. He would like to ask about it, but they don’t know each other well enough. Scars are a kind of history; they may have been made by stories too personal to be discussed.

Afterwards, in the kitchen, they drink another cup of tea. ‘Thank you very much for all your trouble,’ Adam says, but Blom only nods. It occurs to Adam that gratitude may not be enough. ‘Can I pay you for your time?’ he says.

Blom holds up a hand, palm outward, in refusal. ‘People must help each other,’ he says. ‘But if you want to give me something, you can let me have that.’

He is pointing at the peacock feather Adam had picked up at Gondwana. It’s been lying on the sideboard since he brought it home; he hasn’t looked at it once. ‘That? Sure. Take it.’

He can’t imagine what Blom might want it for, but he’s happy to part with it. There’s no real use, in the end, for Beauty. He feels touched all over again to watch the solitary figure of his neighbour plodding away afterwards through the brown weeds, his tool-box in one hand, the long glossy feather in the other.

When he thinks about Canning and his wife, he knows they would never help anybody like this. No, they are city people, with their corruption and complexities–they are, in fact, too much like him. Blom is a rough diamond, a real salt-of-the-earth type. The charity they’ve exchanged today is as simple and pure as the water still running into his dam. He is learning country ways at last!

That night, when Adam sits out on the steps and sees the blue man smoking a cigarette outside his back door, each wears a name and a face for the other. Adam raises a hand in greeting, and Blom waves back.

All night he can hear water running into the dam. He imagines that it might be the same water he swam in a few days before. It’s possible that it has travelled across the countryside, then percolated through the ground at the bottom of the river into some subterranean pool, from which the windmill has drawn it up.

In the morning he goes out to stare at the dark disc of the surface. There are strange things floating there, released perhaps from the mud at the bottom. Leaves and feathers. The dead shell of a dragonfly. He turns the tap on the outlet pipe and lets the water run. It pours across the parched ground like an explosion in slow motion. At first the soil is too hard to take it in, but after a few minutes the ground swallows in shock. The earth changes colour, from brown to black. Then the dam is dry. He closes off the pipe, to let it start filling again. He waits for the standing puddles to sink in, to loosen the ground, before he fetches the pick.

This time there is no resistance: the weeds lift out cleanly, roots and all. They are passive and brittle. He starts piling them up, to be burned later. He works quickly; he has a vision of the whole yard being cleared. But after he’s gone a short way, the ground is hard and dry again. The water has soaked only a small area at the very top of the yard. He realizes that he will have to do this in stages: dig a channel for the water, flood a new section, then clear it. It will take a long time, maybe months, to get all the weeds out.

But that’s all right. Man against the earth: it’s an old story, perhaps the oldest one of all. Already–even though the cleared space is small–he feels good. It’s the satisfaction of physical work: of honest sweat and broken skin. And the satisfaction of seeing the weeds in retreat, the turned soil taking their place.

8

He has thought about Canning and Baby from time to time during the week, with both irritation and excitement. He’s aware, in almost a physical way, of the weekend coming closer, but he doesn’t like the pull that they exert on him, he fights against it, so that when he drives out to Gondwana in the late morning on Saturday, the journey happens almost vaguely, as if he’s actually headed somewhere else. It’s only when he turns in at the gate that a sense of inevitability closes around him, like a soft fist.

He is prepared for a long discussion with the guard. But the man–not the same one as before–grins and tells him, ‘Mr Canning, he say you are coming.’ Then there is the vast landscape opening around him, with its hot distances, its broken, abandoned farmsteads. And ahead of him, like something dark and secret and forbidden, that green fold in the mountains.

There is another car, a Mercedes, parked under the trees. A visitor. And when he has crossed to the lodge, Adam hears a strange voice speaking. He stops for a moment to listen–not eavesdropping exactly; just getting his bearings.

‘As it stands,’ the voice is saying, ‘the EIA can’t be passed. It’s too negative. We need a new report, with positive conclusions. Then he’ll pass it.’

Canning’s voice answers. ‘I’m working on it. I’ll have a new EIA in a couple of weeks. But I’m not convinced he’ll pass it, even then.’

‘He’s jumpy, it’s true. But if you make the donation we talked about, he’ll move on it.’

‘I’ll make the donation. I’ve got it ready. It’s all wrapped up, just waiting to be delivered.’

‘Go ahead and deliver it. Then when you submit the EIA, it’ll be passed smoothly. I’m guaranteeing it, I spoke to him this morning.’

Adam can’t place at first where this exchange is happening. He’s in that high, central space, where sounds break and echo. But when he walks a little further, in the big mirror above the reception desk he sees the two of them huddled in chairs in front of the fireplace. They seem knotted together in a parody of conspiracy, and their voices carry the low, private note of collusion.

‘I’m anxious,’ Canning is saying. ‘This is holding everything up. Mr Genov is very keen to move forward.’

‘So am I. You know that. I’ve also got a stake in this, remember.’

‘Yes, of course. I’m just saying.’

The visitor is a short, shiny black man, in his early thirties, wearing snappy casual clothes. Even in profile, at a distance, he looks familiar to Adam. He is leaning forward, towards Canning, but he senses the intruder and pulls quickly back.

‘Oh,’ Canning says, and jumps up. There is a minuscule beat in which he looks uncertain, but then his usual hearty demeanour takes over. ‘Come in, come in,’ he says. ‘This is Sipho Moloi, up from Cape Town for the day. Sipho, this is Nappy.’

Adam smarts under the nickname as they shake hands. But Sipho Moloi wears a gleaming grin. Yes, Adam has seen him before, maybe on television–and he has the eager vacancy of a continuity announcer as he says, with too much sincerity, ‘I am so very happy to meet you.’ An awkward pause follows on.

Canning says, ‘We’re just talking business for a second, Nappy. Could I give you to Baby for a while? She’s outside, at the room. Why don’t you go and chat to her?’

Adam’s eyes have adjusted to the dimmer light indoors; as he goes back out onto the lawn he is momentarily dazzled by the sun. He struggles to find the right one in the circle of identical
rondawels
and has to knock on three doors before Baby’s voice answers. He can hear at once that she is peevish and fretful.

‘Oh, I wasn’t expecting a visitor,’ she says. ‘I haven’t got any makeup on.’

Makeup seems to be the least of it: she’s still in bed in her nightclothes, her hair hanging loose around her shoulders. Around her, like space-debris encircling a planet, is a litter of old cups, mascara sticks, hair-brushes and dropped clothes. Spread out on the duvet is some kind of card game, apparently abandoned halfway through. All of the mess seems to emanate from Baby; there is no trace of Canning, except for a single jacket hung over a chair.

‘How are you?’ she says tonelessly. She doesn’t look at him as she speaks; her long nails continue to flick through the pages of a fashion magazine.

‘I’m fine.’ He has to raise his voice to be heard above the simultaneous clamour of the television and a radio blaring from the bathroom. ‘What about you? Are you ill?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I am ill–with boredom.’ She sweeps the cards onto the floor with a tiny, impatient hand.

‘You should come outside. It’s a gorgeous day.’

‘Outside? What would I do there?’

‘You could sit in the sun, or go for a walk.’

‘Come in,’ she says, by way of answer. ‘Sit down.’ And once he has entered the room and put himself down in an armchair, her mood seems to lift: she smiles radiantly at him and throws the magazine aside. ‘Would you like something to drink?’

He asks for a coffee; there is a coffee machine on the kitchen counter, along with sugar and Cremora. But she doesn’t move from the bed; she picks up a telephone next to her and speaks tersely to somebody. While they wait she takes a hand-mirror and various bits of makeup that are scattered around and starts unselfconsciously to paint her face. In a few minutes the old black woman he’d seen last week comes in with a cup. In her age and her air of tattered futility, she is everything Baby is not. But no glance, no acknowledgement, passes between the two women, except in the form of command.

‘The coffee is for the master, Grace. Put it down there.’

Adam takes it from her. There is a tiny, involuntary contact between their hands, and he wonders, abstractedly, what it feels like for somebody like Grace to be taking orders from Baby. Just a few years ago they would’ve both been in the same position: exiled from power, with no prospects, no future. Now everything has changed for Baby, while for Grace it has all stayed the same. He glances at the old lady, but she shows nothing in her face; she doesn’t even raise her eyes as she goes out.

With remarkable swiftness, Baby has filled in the blank oval of her face–her lips, eyebrows, cheekbones, have all taken on form. As he watches her daub a lurid green shadow onto her eyelids, Adam has a flash of the same obscure anger she’d stirred up in him last week. Who is she, this vain, vacuous, lovely little doll, to whom all the lush beauty outside is just torment and boredom? Yet his irritation is inseparable from desire, and with a mixture of both he finds himself asking her, ‘Where did you guys meet?’

‘Me and Kenneth?’

It’s part of the strangeness of this whole setup that he doesn’t know who she means. Then he realizes: Canning has a first name. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You and Kenneth.’

‘It was in Johannesburg. A mutual friend introduced us. At a party.’

‘And was it love at first sight?’

‘Something like that.’

She has finished with her face; she examines the final effect in the mirror before setting it aside. Without pausing, she takes up a vial of nail polish and starts working on the spread fingers of her left hand. She seems not to notice that he’s there. His longing and anger more intense, Adam says, ‘What’re they talking about in there?’

‘Kenneth and Sipho? Just business.’

‘Well, I’m sorry that I’ve been forced on you.’

‘No, I’m happy to see you.’

But she doesn’t look happy; she looks indifferent. He has finished the coffee and is about to make an excuse and leave when she looks directly at him with her brilliant green gaze and says, ‘Could you help me for a minute?’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Could you do the nails on my right hand? Do you mind? I always mess it up.’

He crosses uncertainly to the bed. She is holding the hand out to him, coolly. He sits down on the edge of the mattress and goes to work with the brush. The lacquer is green, the same shade as her eyes, and the artificial smell of it stings his nose. At the same time he’s conscious of her long, slender fingers in his palm, and the nearness of her breasts under their filmy white cloth. He can feel that she’s looking at him, but he doesn’t return the gaze.

‘You’re spilling,’ she murmurs.

‘Sorry.’

‘Your hand is shaking.’

‘No, it’s not,’ he says, but he can feel the tremor himself. He tries to keep his attention on the task. ‘I’m interested in your name,’ he says fiercely. ‘Where does it come from?’

‘Baby? It’s just a name.’

‘Yes, but it’s unusual. Who chose it, your mother or your father?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says crossly. ‘I wasn’t there.’ She pulls her hand away sharply. ‘Never mind,’ she tells him. ‘You’re messing it up. I’ll finish it myself.’

He’s about to answer her when he hears Canning’s voice outside. In a moment he’s on his feet and has moved several steps from the bed. The movement is involuntary; his nearness to Baby feels illicit and dangerous, something he must conceal. But she is calm, blowing on her nails, as her husband blusters in, full of effusion and apology.

‘Sorry about that, Nappy, just had to take care of a few things. I hope Baby has looked after you?’

‘I’ve looked after him very well,’ she says. Her voice and her eyes are steady. She picks up the brush and starts to paint the last fingernail, carefully and exactly.

Adam and Canning and Sipho Moloi sit in the cavernous restaurant of the lodge, the only customers in a thicket of tables and chairs. They are waited on by the old black couple, who lurch in and out through a pair of swinging doors that lead to the unseen kitchen beyond. Adam watches them come and go, but he can’t work them out. He says to Canning. ‘It’s quite unusual, isn’t it, to see…’

He becomes aware of Sipho, and doesn’t finish.

‘Blacks in this part of the world, you mean?’ Canning is gnawing on a drumstick, pulling off pieces with his fingers. ‘They were my father’s most devoted servants, actually. They followed him around from farm to farm, all over the country. They started out in the Orange Free State, went all the way up north, almost to the Limpopo, and ended up here. I remember them from when I was a small boy. Ezekiel must’ve been a young man then, in his early twenties.’ The thought makes him glance reflectively at the old man, who thinks he’s being summoned, and comes forward.

‘
Ja, my Kleinbaas
…?’

‘No, no, I’m not calling you, Ezekiel. But tell Mr Adam, did you like the
Oubaas
?’

Ezekiel bares his two worn fangs in a smile. ‘
Ja, ja, die Oubaas, hy was baie goed vir ons
…’

‘And for how many years did you work for him, Ezekiel?’

‘
Meer as veertig jaar, Kleinbaas
.’

‘And were you happy, Ezekiel?’

‘
Ja, hy was goed vir ons, die Oubaas
…’

‘Thank you, Ezekiel. You can bring me some toothpicks, please.’

Through this whole exchange, Sipho Moloi has kept his eyes demurely down, while he chews fastidiously. Adam has another moment like the one in the
rondawel
, where he wonders at what wordless perceptions might be passing between this young, well-heeled black yuppie, and the poor old family retainer. But perhaps he is the only one who notices: the two of them are so far from one another, sitting at such divergent points of history, that they might be in different worlds. Instead it’s Adam who’s left with an acute awareness of the life that Canning’s thoughtless cross-questioning has evoked: the blind economic dependence, the drifting around from one place to another in the wake of the
Oubaas
, the indeterminate destiny ahead…

‘He doesn’t like me much, actually,’ Canning says, as Ezekiel goes to the kitchen. ‘He much preferred my father. The old man could speak his language, at least.’

For the first time, Sipho glances up with a flash of genuine interest. ‘Really?’ he says. ‘Your father spoke isiXhosa?’

‘Oh, yes. And Zulu too, as a matter of fact. He was the old-style feudal overlord, you know. Could give orders to the serfs in their own language.’

‘You didn’t ever want to learn yourself?’

‘Never thought about it, actually. And now it’s too late. The brain has hardened.’ He’s finished with the chicken bone; his mouth is shiny with grease. ‘Don’t know what to do about Ezekiel and Grace,’ he adds musingly. ‘They’re pretty useless these days. Not much future there. I’ll have to make a plan.’

Sipho has finished his meal; he lays down his knife and fork, wipes his fingers on his napkin. ‘I’m going to leave you in a minute, Kenneth,’ he says. ‘There’s a long road in front of me.’

‘That’s a shame, Sipho. Can’t I persuade you to stay the night?’

‘No, I’ve got things to do. But I’ll be back soon enough.’

‘All right. I’ll walk you out, but just wait for me for a minute, I have to go and pee.’ When Adam and Sipho are alone, they smile at each other self-consciously, looking for something to say. The buzzing of a fly at the window next to them sounds uncomfortably loud.

‘And where do you fit into the picture?’ Sipho says at last.

‘Me? I, uh, I know Canning from school.’

‘Ah. So you know each other very well.’

‘You could say so. What about you? Where did you two meet?’