The Impostor (9 page)

‘Nicolai introduced us.’ He glances at Adam. ‘Mr Genov, I mean. Do you know Mr Genov?’

‘I’ve heard his name. But I don’t know him. He doesn’t sound…local.’

‘Well, he lives here now, of course. But he comes from somewhere else. Russia, I think. Or maybe Bulgaria…? Anyway, it doesn’t matter, Eastern Europe somewhere. He’s moved around a lot. He’s a man of the world. Are you sure you’ve never met him?’

‘No. I mean, yes.’

‘So you’re not part of the deal.’

‘What deal is that?’

He looks away. ‘Well, I mean…you and Kenneth aren’t in business together.’

‘No, no. I’m not a businessman.’ Another pause, then Adam says, ‘What about you? You’re in television, right?’

‘Television?’ His friendly face looks puzzled. ‘I don’t follow you.’

Coming up behind Adam, Canning says, ‘Where do you get that from? Sipho’s involved in government.’

‘The government…? Oh, I beg your pardon, I thought…’

‘I really have to leave now, Kenneth. It’s late already.’

Adam trails behind them to the car. He feels embarrassed by his gaffe, but he has placed Sipho by now: his name, his face appear occasionally in the media. He is a mid-ranking politician, one of the new, young crowd, both known and unknown, in the way of nebulous officials. At least it explains the cheap celebrity veneer. But that’s about all it explains.

Canning takes him for a drive. They head out of the
kloof
, across the dry plain. There are dirt tracks looping and meandering out there, made for the purpose of game viewing. Their drive consequently has an aimless quality to it, exacerbated by Canning’s tendency to speed up or slow down without apparent reason. Along the way they pass more shattered homesteads and Canning explains that his father had had to dynamite any habitable buildings on the various farms he’d bought, so that squatters could not move in. It’s as if the land has been emptied out by war.

‘I’m sorry if I offended your friend just now,’ Adam says, after a silence sets in.

‘What? Oh, you mean Sipho…? He’s not my friend. He’s a wanker.’

Adam is startled. The cosy camaraderie he’d seen in the dining room an hour before seemed natural, unforced. Now Canning dismisses it with a casual wave of his hand.

Not long afterwards, at an arbitrary place in the middle of a flat stretch, Canning pulls over. ‘There’s something I want to show you,’ he says.

Adam follows him out, into heat and white light. A little way off the road, next to a dry watercourse, is a little cave. It’s a tiny, dark grotto, nothing special, but he points to a series of paintings along the rock wall.

Adam crouches down. ‘Bushman art?’ he says. ‘Is it real?’ The figures in the paintings are stick-like but expressive, the colours still bright. It appears to be a hunting scene: people with bows and arrows, pursuing animals.

‘Yes, of course they’re real,’ Canning says impatiently. ‘But forget them, I’m showing you something else.’

It takes Adam a while to make out another engraving altogether. This is a set of intertwined names cut into the rock.
Kenneth/Lindile
. There’s a blurred date underneath.

‘I don’t understand,’ Adam says, puzzled.

‘My first playmate,’ Canning tells him, ‘was a little black boy, Lindile. He was the son of Ezekiel and Grace–you know, the old couple at the lodge.’

‘You did this?’

‘Me and him, yes. Long ago, when we were very young. Before we grew up and realized how complicated the world was. It was an innocent time.’ Canning’s eyes have actually filmed over with moisture. ‘I often think about back then, Nappy. What I wouldn’t give to rewind to that time.’

‘Where is Lindile now?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. He’s around. But we’re not friends any more. Like I said, the world got complicated. My father paid for him to study in Cape Town, but he got all political and turned angry. So my father stopped paying and he disappeared. I haven’t seen him in years.’ He continues to gaze at the piece of juvenile graffiti, his face softened by sentiment.

There are contradictions in Canning’s story that Adam can’t work out. On the one hand, he refers to his childhood in slighting, bitter terms; on the other, he lapses into moments like these, where he becomes whimsical and nostalgic. He speaks about his father as a hard, angry man, an old-style feudal overlord, but then mentions casually that he could speak two black languages and paid for the education of his loyal servants’ child. It’s hard sometimes to know where one’s sympathies should lie.

And the contradiction extends to other aspects of Canning too. He speaks about Adam as some kind of childhood hero, but except for a general air of reverence he shows no genuine interest in him. Aside from a few perfunctory questions, he hasn’t tried to find out anything about Adam’s life in town, or what circumstances had led to him moving up here, or even what he’s done the past week since they met. In Canning’s company, Adam doesn’t feel like a real person so much as a symbol from long ago, whose full significance he doesn’t understand.

But then again, unexpectedly, Canning is capable of human, solicitous gestures. On the drive back to the lodge, he suddenly says, ‘You know, Nappy, I wanted to say…’ He hesitates, looking embarrassed, then goes on: ‘It’s just that I noticed…you don’t seem to have a lot of money at the moment. Your car, I mean, your clothes…what I’m trying to say is, if you ever need money, you just have to drop the word.’

Adam is taken by surprise. ‘Well, that’s very kind of you, Canning.’

‘Not at all. It’s just,’ he says forcefully, ‘I know what it’s like to be poor. I battled for a long time myself, in my early years. The whole chemical business, you know. But things are all right now. That’s my good luck! But I’d like to share my luck with you, Nappy.’

‘Thank you, Canning.’

‘Now we won’t mention it again, unless you need to.’

They drive on in silence, while Adam struggles with himself. Canning’s basic contradiction seems to have infected him too. It’s hard not to be touched by the offer of money, however fumblingly it was made. But at the same time his pride bristles: the two of them hardly know each other, after all, and there is something presumptuous and invasive in even discussing it. And what does he mean about his car and his clothes?

Back at the lodge, the evening is a repeat of last week: the fire under the tree, the endless blue cocktails, the drunken talk around the coals. Baby doesn’t emerge from the
rondawel
to join them, and neither man mentions her, but for both of them her absence is like a kind of presence.

9

He stays the night again. In the morning, they are going through all the pleasantries of goodbye when Canning suddenly hits his forehead with his palm. ‘I almost forgot,’ he says. ‘I wanted to ask you a little favour. Would you be able to deliver a parcel for me in town? It’s just some papers, I’d do it myself, but I’m in a bit of a rush.’

‘No problem.’

‘Thanks, Nappy. You’re saving me a detour. Could you hang on just one moment?’

Adam is standing at the car and he watches a peacock make its stately way across the lawn while he waits. Every few steps it stops and flares its tail magnificently. The display seems to serve no purpose, except as a show of beauty. Adam approves: loveliness for its own sake is a worthy creed, he thinks. Yet he has not written a single poem since he got here.

Canning comes back out with a package. ‘The address is written on the front,’ he says. ‘Would you be able to deliver it tonight? I’ll make sure somebody’s waiting at, say, eight o’clock.’

‘Sure,’ Adam says, weighing the parcel in his hands. It’s compact but hefty, and it gives off a satisfying crinkling sound. ‘I don’t recognise this address.’

‘It’s in the township. Just go over the river and ask anybody for the street. And Adam–it’s important. Please look after it.’

‘Of course,’ Adam says, speaking in a casual tone to cover his anxiety. Making deliveries to the township, even out here in the countryside, isn’t in his normal ambit of activity, but he doesn’t want to say that to Canning.

‘We’ll be seeing you next weekend, I hope? Don’t wait for Saturday. Come on Friday–stay the weekend. You’re part of the family now.’

He thinks about that on the drive home. The family: Canning’s little circle. He’s beginning to have an inkling of what that might involve. With his black wife and his multiracial business associates, Canning’s repeated claims to be a new South African man are starting to look less hollow than before. It’s Adam, by contrast, who feels a little outside events, a little superfluous.

He wonders what the parcel might contain. Papers, Canning had said; but papers dealing with what? There is some kind of money-making scheme afoot, that much is clear. He supposes that it has to do with the game farm, with getting it started again, now that Canning’s father is dead. That can’t be a simple process, Adam imagines, though what it entails he wouldn’t know. The world of business, of money and power: it has always been a mystery to him. It’s a part of life he’s never felt equipped to understand. No, he was made for simpler, leaner things, though he can’t quite decide what they are.

At eight that night he drives across the bridge to the other side of the river. Though he sees the township off in the distance every day, this is the first time he’s actually been there. Nevertheless, the tiny houses, the burnt-out, scrappy gardens, the pot-holed roads and sputtering streetlamps: it’s all known, all familiar. He has thought of it as far milder than the townships in the city; a place without danger. But as he noses slowly along, trying to find a street name, he notices a few groups of carousing drunk men. His car is a minor event; people stare at him as he passes and somebody yells out wordlessly at him. Sunday night in the country, after a weekend of hard revels: this is a task perhaps better left till daylight.

He is on the verge of turning around and heading home, when he passes a woman walking on her own. He stops and asks her the way. Yes, that is Smit street, that one over there, she tells him; and he’s no sooner in the street than he finds the house he’s looking for. It’s a neater, bigger place than the houses nearby, with the start of a good garden around it. He parks outside and hurries in. The door is opened almost immediately to his knock by a youngish man who looks vaguely familiar. They shake hands, and the man says, ‘How are you,’ in a nervous, friendly way.

‘I was asked to bring this to you. Mr Canning, from the game farm…’

‘Come inside for a minute.’

He steps into a murky front room. He can see another room beyond, where a woman and a child are watching television. The young man closes the interleading door, then returns expectantly.

‘Thank you,’ he says, as Adam gives him the parcel. He holds it away from him, with the tips of his fingers, as if it might dirty him. Then they stand in uncomfortable proximity, as though waiting for something meaningful to happen. The atmosphere is not quite hostile, but it isn’t relaxed either; there’s a tension with no clear cause.

‘Well,’ Adam says. ‘I’d better be off.’

A voice from the television carries metallically through the door. The young man says to him, ‘The trees are still there.’

‘I beg your pardon…?’

‘The three aliens. In your front garden. I noticed the other day, as I went past. They’re still there.’

Adam stares at him in astonishment. And suddenly understands. ‘Oh, it’s
you
,’ he says. ‘I didn’t realize.’

The young man nods, although he also looks surprised. ‘Who did you think it was?’ he says. ‘How is the poetry coming along?’

The short drive back to the other side of town feels inordinately long. Something about the encounter he’s just had stays with Adam, perturbing him. It’s as if an object at the edge of a room, which he’s noticed unconsciously out the corner of his eye, has been removed when his head was turned. A tiny displacement, almost indiscernible, but enough to nag at his mind. The phone is ringing as he comes through the front door and when he picks it up, Canning’s voice says immediately, ‘Is it done?’

‘Yes, I’ve just come in.’

‘Ah, good man, yes, good.’ It’s only now, when his voice softens, that Adam recognises how peremptory that initial tone had been. ‘You’re a real friend, Nappy. One in a million.’

‘That was the mayor,’ he says.

‘Um, yes,’ Canning says, sounding guarded again. ‘So what?’

‘Nothing. Just…you hadn’t mentioned it was the mayor.’

‘Didn’t I tell you that? I should’ve mentioned it. Well, thanks a lot, Nappy, it means a lot to me that you did that. Will we see you on Friday?’

‘See you on Friday,’ he says.

Before Friday comes, he sits down at his desk. What impulse takes him there he doesn’t know; he hasn’t attempted poetry in weeks. But he has no sooner placed himself than the words begin to fall out of him–words pressured by some nameless internal sensation rising volcanically at his core. In a couple of hours he is looking down at his first complete poem in half a lifetime.

Other poems follow on. Over the next few days the same feeling carries him back to the page. It’s as if he is giving voice to unspoken words that have piled up dangerously inside. Sometimes he can experience them almost physically: word stacked on word, like bricks laid in rows, walling off his mouth.

Now that they’ve been released, these words take on a life of their own. He hears them as a rustling, a seamless susurration at the very edge of things. At first, particular sentences, specific meanings, don’t stand out. He thinks of them as the leftover scurf of human talk, everything that has ever been said, moving in endless waves through the universe, unable to die.

In time the words become grafted onto the presence in the house, which still drifts in and out erratically. He senses it most acutely at night, when the world shrinks to the size of a few connected rooms. It has never felt menacing or malicious, this presence, and its occasional nearness is company for him. He still talks to it in a half-real, half-fanciful way. But now its replies take on a tone and volition of their own.

My, my
, it says, reading over his shoulder.
Looks like the real thing
.

‘Well, I am a poet.’

I was beginning to have my doubts about that
.

‘Oh, I was collecting myself. You can’t just snap into it after such a long break.’

Yes, I see. But I’m surprised. I would never have thought of you as such a hot type
.

‘Hot?’

Mmm. Such a would-be lover boy
.

‘I really don’t know what you mean.’

But when he reads the poems again, he does understand. He’s been so caught up with rediscovering his gift that what the words are saying is almost secondary. But of course they have a subject; of course they have a theme. It wasn’t immediately apparent, not even to him, but now that it’s been pointed out, he sees it right away.

He’s been writing about
her
–about Baby. More specifically, he’s been writing about his longing for her. Not as a would-be lover, that part is nonsense, but with a sort of metaphysical yearning. Until now, he’s been trying to write poems about the wilderness, a world empty of people, while all the time he’s needed a human being to focus on. And here at last she is, intervening between him and the landscape–not an identifiable person, but an emblematic female figure, seen against the backdrop of a primal, primitive garden. All of it is very biblical.

The poems have also broken the mould of his first collection in other ways. Part of what’s been hindering him is an obsession with the metre and rhyme–the mechanics of the exercise. Instead, now that he has a real subject, what’s poured forth is in free verse, a spontaneous explosion of language in which the technicalities of form are subservient to his passion. This is right and proper and obvious: the way it should be. Yet there is also something wanton and uncontained about it, something abandoned, which makes him slightly ashamed. It would be all right for an adolescent, but he’s middle-aged, supposedly past all that looseness of feeling.

After a bit of hesitation, he tells Baby about the poems the next weekend. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting or wanting from her, but she only stares coolly back at him.

‘Poems? About me?’

‘Well, not
you
exactly. But somebody like you. Or no–what am I saying? It
is
you, but a heightened aspect of you. A dream-you, if you know what I mean.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

They are sitting outside in the shade on a pair of fold-out chairs. It’s the Saturday afternoon, and Canning has withdrawn into the lodge to make a conference call. Once again he has asked Adam to occupy himself with Baby, and Adam is happy to oblige.

‘You’re like a kind of muse,’ he tells her now.

‘A
what
?’

He starts backing off, feeling oddly hurt by her bemusement. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ he mumbles. ‘They’re just scribblings.’

‘I don’t really know about poetry,’ she says, looking away.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says again.

‘Kenneth showed me your other poems. Your book. He read some of them to me. That was some time ago, before I met you. But I didn’t understand them.’

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘I don’t understand them myself.’

He changes the subject and their talk moves on to other, less dangerous things. But the exchange stays with him, giving him both pleasure and pang when he thinks back on it. He feels a little further away from her, a little colder, but also a little closer and warmer towards her husband. Had Canning really done that–read his words aloud to her when Adam wasn’t around?

Nevertheless, he doesn’t mention the poems to Canning.