“IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY,” I said and indeed it was – an azure sky capping the swarthy elms across from the station that were already beginning to lose their leaves; a metallic glint to the green water. “There’s a tea garden in the Vondelpark. It’s not far. We can get a drink there.”
I picked up Pru’s haversack and we began to walk over to the tram stop. In the square outside a dense flock of pigeons took flight, their shadows cast back onto the cobbles as a series of disintegrating rhomboids. Pru was nervously intrigued by the rituals of the tram ride – marking off the strippenkaart in the slot at the back of the tram, taking our seats, the tram’s rickety progress, lurching in its tracks as it took corners, cyclists sweeping alongside and in front of us, their clothes flying in the breeze, the irregular clanging of the tram bell. I realised how what had become second nature to me now was new to her. I must have been exactly like that when I first arrived. It made me smile. It made me feel oddly protective.
We got off the tram at the Overtoom near the western gates to the park. At a wrought-iron table in the tea garden, Pru was happy to down an Amstel but grimaced at the sting of the neat jenever chaser, and so we switched to whiskies instead, earning from the waiter a frown of disapproval, as though there was something immoral about consuming spirits so early in the afternoon.
Pru looked at me quizzically as he stalked off.
“The Dutch,” I told her, “are creatures of strict habit. We lead very ordered lives.”
“We?” she said.
Time slipped away unnoticed and soon we were onto a third round of whiskies. The atmosphere between us had assumed a quiet intimacy, as if years had not intervened between this meeting and our last in Cape Town in the summer of 1976. Now, sitting together in the dappled shade, Pru listened attentively to my story. I told her how difficult I had found it to settle down, how the void left by the emotional immediacy of South Africa had eaten away at me, how the greyness of my first Dutch winter had all but corroded my soul. How I had lost my sense of self.
I told her about my depression and that it had gradually fallen away, how the city and its small daily concerns had begun to consume me, so that now I could scarcely comprehend that we had once lived the way we had done in South Africa, fear always in the air, the military and police everyday sights, the cloying, febrile heat of the clandestine. I was in awe of normality. I felt at home in the matter-of-factness of Amsterdam life. And of course I told her about my relationship with Oliver, and the ordinariness, the openness of it, in every good sense.
“I’m glad for you, Matt,” she said. “You deserve it. And Oliver … well, who would have thought?” She smiled ruefully. “We weren’t very tolerant or caring back then, were we? Of ‘other’ loves, I mean.”
I let this pass. “Oliver would love to see you, I know,” I said instead. “If you won’t stay with us, let us at least take you to dinner?”
Pru didn’t respond to the invitation. Her thoughts appeared to have turned inward and her expression was serious. I ordered a plate of bitterballen to quell the dulling effects of the whisky.
“You aren’t missing anything,” she said out of the blue. “South Africa is a land of ash.”
And then she began to talk. She described her life over the last three years. After the arrests and incarceration of Paul, Themba and Luke, Pru had gone to ground. Her role in the underground activity, the life that had consumed all of us at the time, had for some reason remained undiscovered. She resumed her studies at the university and avoided her activist connections. The police and army had pretty much effectively crushed the uprising, put many of its leaders in jail, and had outlawed all of the organisations the resistance had spawned. An arid yet brittle normality returned to the country.
Gradually, she resurfaced. When she completed her degree, she moved up to Johannesburg. Now she was doing her articles in a progressive law firm, working mainly with clients who had no money for legal fees. They were the usual cases: unfair dismissals, evictions, police assaults, torture while detained.
“Ever the activist,” I smiled. “Nothing has changed.”
“Things have to change,” she said sternly.
She speared one of the bitterballen with a toothpick in a decisive gesture and took a small bite. I watched her, still smiling. I couldn’t believe she was here. Pru and I, together again, two friends sitting in a park, sharing a platter of bitterballen. She caught my eye and grinned. Then her expression changed again and she cast a glance around her, as if something malign might be lingering in the neatly pruned topiary. Yet all about us a benign sociability continued – sunbathers on the verdant lawns of the park, bare legs stretched out, no one quite ready to accept that it was autumn. In the distance strains of a jazz concert on the lake. Pensioners sipping coffee over the dailies.
Pru leaned in over her whisky. “Matt – what I have to tell you must remain between us,” she said solemnly. Her voice had dropped to just above a whisper.
I nodded, leaning closer too, remembering how she’d said on the phone she’d “needed” to see me.
“A small group of us have got together: unionists, student leaders, some movement stalwarts – we have formed a cell, we are meeting regularly. And we are linking up with the movement, the exiled ANC, to see how we can revive their structures in the Johannesburg area. I have been given a contact in London. That’s why I am here. I am meeting him there in a couple of days. I – we – need you to be part of this.”
I was stung by a cold, familiar sensation – ice in the lungs – a sudden frost under the breastplate, as if I had been winded by an unexpected blow.
“What do you mean?” I asked when I could breathe normally again.
“Think about it,” she said. “You are the perfect link.”
“More like the missing link,” I said, deliberately trying to lighten the tone, but Pru just frowned. “How do you mean?” I asked her.
“A link between the ANC in London and our cell in Joburg. You have an activist background, so you understand the context. But you’ve been inactive for three years – effectively you have disappeared. In South Africa you have no profile. You are a slate wiped clean.” She sat back in her chair and licked her fingers. “You have no idea how difficult it was to track you down.”
The iciness had given way to an almost vicarious thrill – the prospect of a second chance, of a life no longer claimed by the fact of exile, the prospect of meaning in the midst of this claustrophobic order, this domesticity. Still I felt the need for caution.
“Pru,” I said, keeping my voice steady, “isn’t this dangerous – not for me, but for you? You could be caught. You could go to jail for the rest of your life.”
“We have no life now,” she responded. “As I said, things have to change. And it’s not as if I haven’t done this before.”
“But why you?” I pressed. “You do have a profile and now you work for a human rights law firm – surely you are at risk?”
“I have been quiet for three years,” she replied. “And the law firm gives me the perfect reason to meet with a wide variety of players. I legitimately provide advice and support to clients. Everything is by the book, within the law.”
“What about Oliver?” I asked. “He means everything to me. I don’t know what he’d –”
“You can’t tell him, Matt,” Pru broke in. “It is strictly need to know. We can’t be vulnerable on any front. For the same reason, I can’t meet you and Oliver for dinner. I was never here.” She paused, holding my gaze. “Are you in?” she asked.
“Wait,” I said. I called for another round.
When the drinks came I knocked back the whisky, the liquid an acrid rush in the back of my throat.
Then, “You’re in,” I declared, “and so, therefore, am I.”
We clinked glasses and Pru leaned across the table and kissed me with force. I wondered if the habitués of the tea garden took us for lovers. And once, very briefly and long ago, in a moment of … I could hardly remember what … we had been.
When I looked at my watch I realised we had been talking for hours. Pru, thankfully, paid the drinks bill. My Allegro pay cheque didn’t go far. I walked with her to the one-star hotel she was booked into, part of a conglomeration of ugly commercialism, patat stalls, faux Irish bars and tourist shops in the narrow sunless streets behind the Rokin. On the way I took her past the music store. This late it was closed but the chandelier was blazing in the interior. She peered wistfully through the window.
“Music,” she said, “my first love. I envy you.”
Pru had given up studying music for law and indeed our early friendship had been sealed by a mutual love of opera and chamber music, before politics took over. I hefted her haversack over my shoulder and we linked arms, walking slowly along the cobbled streets, now burnished copper by the setting sun, as if our friendship had never been broken.
At home, immediately and perversely, I looked at Oliver with different eyes. I saw his introspected studied-ness, his wholeness in his music, his grounded lack of distraction. I had given myself to him for these very reasons – his ability to ground me, to fill the voids of mourning with something approaching certainty. Now, in the space of one strange and uninvited afternoon, something shifted in me. I didn’t fully understand what it was, but there was an uneasiness inside that made me irritable and unforthcoming.
“And?” Oliver prompted, looking at me questioningly when I decline a glass of red wine. “How was your day? How is Janneke? Did the new stock arrive?”
“Oh, fine,” I replied. “Janneke’s fine too. And yes, the new stock looks promising.”