23 | MATTHEW

WHEN PRU AND I HAD sat beneath the trees at the tea garden in the Vondelpark, she had reminded me about the “need to know” policy, which of course I understood. She had also secured my undertaking that, should I take up her invitation to play an active role in the movement from my base in Amsterdam, I would share what I was doing with absolutely no one in my social circle, including Oliver. In the nervous excitement of the moment I had agreed; there hadn’t been any time to give thought to the practicalities of this arrangement anyway, with my mind racing. Some instinct, perhaps just a selfish one, had prevented me from mentioning to Oliver that Pru had called out of the blue in the first place; and after Pru and I had met and I understood her reason for contacting me, I was glad that I hadn’t.

It was my intention to stick to our agreement and to keep Oliver out of it. Oliver and I had long since stopped talking about “home”. It had become easier that way for both of us. Whenever something violent happened in South Africa that made the international news – such as the death of Steve Biko in September of 1977 – it caused me great distress and would set off a pattern in our conversations that almost always ended in disconnection, anger and despair. Sometimes it would be days before we could resume our comfortable domestic intimacy and get back to what I now thought of as the “normal” life I had chosen. I would be moody and restless. Oliver could be petulant in his anxiety. I would retreat into a book or the whisky bottle, while he would try to coax me back with delicious home-cooked meals or the surprise treat of a long evening downstairs at the Ankara over wine and conversation about music. I loved Oliver then, when I sat across a table from him, watching him talk – with his long expressive fingers illustrating a point and his blue eyes shining with passion. I loved the glow of his skin in the soft lighting of the restaurant and the way he would toss his hair back and laugh like a small boy when I reciprocated and told him stories about the strange requests we would get from customers in Allegro.

In the beginning, it was easier than I thought it would be to keep my new, different life separate and compartmentalised. My first meeting with Mandla at Paramaribo, followed by the simpler initial tasks of researching bookshops and posting material on to the address in London, could be absorbed into my day without attracting attention or disrupting my job at Allegro. Oliver was always at the Conservatory, leaving early and coming home for dinner, and Allegro had never been a completely structured place in any event. Janneke was often away on buying trips and Wim, Toon and I were relaxed and comfortable with getting the work done and keeping things ticking over. We never kept tabs on one another and, anyway, it was not at all unusual for me to be out and about in the city on errands.

As the demands on my time and skills increased, and I was drawn deeper and deeper into what I was doing for the movement, I felt myself absorbed and energised in a way I hadn’t experienced for a long time. The exercise that Mandla had instructed me to do in the very beginning, namely, write down the full story of my life, leaving out no detail or memory, no matter how trivial, also released in me something else that I had forgotten: how much I loved to write.

When I had finished with my own biography, I didn’t stop there. Sometimes in my lunch break I would head out on my own, usually to the Vondelpark and what became my favourite table at the edge of the tea garden, dig out the notebook I had taken to carrying with me, and write. If the muse wasn’t co-operative that day, I would draw stick figures or create elaborate doodles in the margins. I had to keep my fingers moving. I tried my hand at sketching but I quickly realised that this wasn’t a talent of mine. The inquisitive sparrows that would hop boldly up onto the table and help themselves to crumbs were my first models. I loved to see them so close, their heads turning this way and that, their sharp black eyes alert and challenging. But they turned into bad cartoons in my hands so I soon gave that up. Occasionally, I would attempt a clumsy portrait, or a drawing of a child at the water’s edge with its mother, or a muscled arm in a tight T-shirt, but mostly I wrote. Pieces of verse, a memory that swam up at me unbidden from my childhood, the beginning of what might or might not become a short story.

For some reason I didn’t share this new activity with Oliver, and I began to realise, gradually, that I was keeping more and more of my thoughts and feelings to myself. When Mandla bought me a secondhand typewriter, I kept it at Allegro. Oliver didn’t seem to notice the change in me and as the weeks and then months went by, it felt okay to keep some things private without any harm being done to either of us or to our relationship.

Oliver and I were accustomed to one or both of us coming home late in the evenings, but as my involvement deepened, there were many evenings when I would come home at midnight and find him fast asleep. There would be a plate of food on the table for me, solicitously covered in foil, which I tried not to take as a reproach and thanked him for when I slid under the covers beside him, murmuring into his neck and allowing the familiar warmth of his body to reassure me. He had joined a small group of fellow music students at the Conservatory who gave informal concerts at a home for the elderly, and so on certain evenings he would be out performing, or else he would be practising with the group. As I got busier with my assignments and meetings, many of which were increasingly after hours, it became more and more difficult to juggle my time, so I was grateful to be the one who was understanding when it was Oliver who was apologising for missing dinner.

It was on an evening at the Ankara that I told him what I was doing. We had twined our legs together beneath the table and both of us had drunk a lot of red wine. I felt very close to him. Earlier in the week Mandla had been in town and he had brought me a well-thumbed copy of Oswald Mtshali’s Sounds of a Cowhide Drum. I had been reading through the poems while waiting for Oliver to show up. When he came through the door, smiling, I set the book on the seat beside me.

“What’s this?” Oliver asked, stretching out his hand. “What are you reading?”

“Oh, Mandla gave that to me on Tuesday,” I replied without thinking. “Mtshali’s his favourite poet –”

Oliver frowned. “Who’s Mandla?” he asked. He pulled his legs back and looked at me enquiringly.

And so it came out. I told him about Pru making contact after three desolate years, and about Mandla, and about how I was finally making the contribution I’d always wanted to make. Once I started talking, I couldn’t stop the flow, but somehow I avoided the detail of what I had taken on. I talked more about how Oliver and I had first met, so long ago now in Cape Town, how our home with Pru and the others had been such a tight unit of friends. I talked about George and bowls of olives and long nights strategising and drinking at the Kalamata in the city bowl. I didn’t know it was all still so close to the surface, this nostalgia for activism, this terrible sickness for home and belonging. I spoke more about the past in the end than the present. It was as if I needed to go back to the beginning, to pick Oliver up from where I had left him – such a lonely, brave figure – to cross the border that day, and bring him back with me.

When I ran out of breath, and realised with a heart-stopping moment of panic what I had just done, I saw an expression on Oliver’s face that I had never seen before.

“Oliver –” I said, but he held up his hand to stop me.

He turned the copy of the Mtshali collection over and studied the back cover blurb. Then, without looking at me, he said, “You’re leaving me. Aren’t you, Matt?”

We struggled, Oliver and I, to save our relationship but something had shifted irretrievably. We retreated into entrenched positions, he disconcerted by my re-engagement with South Africa, I despairing that he would never consider a future there. To make it worse, the argument was academic – surely there was no prospect of return? It was really just the romance of Mandla and the future he held out that kept me engaged.

Wounded by his past and finding solace in the violin, concerts, the measured civilised pace of the Conservatory, his life his own at last, Oliver was devastated by my restlessness. At the heart of it all, I knew, was my refusal to surrender the absolute conviction in an essentialist identity of an activist.

Eventually, we stopped discussing the issue and whenever the word “home” came up, it referred to our cosy apartment. We remained affectionate, though, and took refuge in the bonding intimacies of sex. We discussed the niceties of shopping, and we dined more frequently at the Ankara, where the owner, Osman, always enjoyed a chat. Whereas before we had always preferred privacy at our table in the window, now we welcomed the distraction. With Osman we had conversations about the weather, what was fresh in the markets, the council’s threat to close the brothel down the street, and the problem with the pigeons that congregated in such numbers in the adjoining square they had become a menace, soiling the pavements and the eaves. The neighbours continued to feed them, sentimental in their defence of the birds, and the council would never shoot them, so the problem looked like it wasn’t going away anytime soon.

As much as I was taken up by Oliver, by my empathy with his vulnerability, with his body, his easy moods, I felt that if I gave in on the core point – the slim but increasingly imagined notion of a home in the land of our birth – I would be consumed. I would become a creature of Amsterdam’s comforts, as I had found myself becoming before Pru’s unexpected visit. I could be absorbed into the easy rhythms of its seasons, of life in coffee shops and bars and the endlessly changing tenor of the water in its canals. It was a life composed of a series of bland choices: where to eat, what to discuss, what music to listen to, what book to read or discard, what opinion to hold. And all so clever, every discussion with a tinge of irony. No dragging, painful commitment. This was the lure of Europe.

It took me a little while to acknowledge the truth but Oliver and I had already begun to live past each other. We were leading parallel but unconnected lives. Oliver was comfortable in predictable routine and sought no radical change in it, while my head was entirely elsewhere. I’d watch him leave for the Conservatory in the morning as I stood at the window upstairs drinking strong Dutch coffee, see him cycle swiftly in the direction of the station, the ends of his scarf flying about his dark head in the early morning mist. I imagined him on the train to Utrecht reading his biography of Shostakovich – this semester he was studying Soviet composers – oblivious to the rocking of the carriage as it tacked through the flat lime-green polders. I imagined the short trajectory to his lecture hall, the heels of his shoes clicking on the cobbles.

But it wasn’t very long before even the possibility of such early morning contemplations fell away. With more activists passing through Amsterdam, and the uneven pattern of clandestine meetings choreographed by Pru and Mandla by means of the post restante cards, and the weekly calls to Pru from the callbox on Leidseplein, managing my days and nights became a challenge. It kept my focus elsewhere.

I tried to arrange it so that the meetings were confined to my lunch breaks so as not to disturb the flow of work at the music store and, if that wasn’t possible, to set up the assignations in bars and cafés in the early evenings so as not to have to lie to Oliver. He hadn’t asked exactly what the nature of my activities for the movement were and I hadn’t volunteered any more information than what I’d blurted out that evening over dinner, but a certain furtiveness crept in, especially when I could not keep to this pattern. I was already lying to my colleagues at the store. For example, someone – “a key contact” – would be passing through the city briefly, at Schiphol Airport, with only two hours between flights. This happened more than once and when it did I’d have to devise some reason to leave the shop. The lies came easily: a fictitious doctor’s appointment, opening up the apartment for a plumber, having to collect a parcel at the post office, or needing to get to the local Albert Heijn before it closed. Janneke was relaxed about these interruptions, and in fact I wasn’t the only one who took breaks to deal with their domestic lives. The danger lay more in some random discovery of my deceit. Amsterdam was a small city in a way, and you could say there was an “incestuousness” to our social gatherings. How then to prevent an encounter with some barfly, previously casually befriended by Janneke or Wim and myself in the course of an evening’s drinking of Belgian wit bier and that news finding its way into the next round of beer-fuelled small talk?

With Oliver I used the staff of Allegro as a foil and attributed my lateness in getting home some nights to drinks with Janneke or Wim. He seemed unconcerned. Perhaps he genuinely didn’t want to know. Then there would be a period of quiet and the domesticity of our routine would resume. When I came home it was to the aroma of a beef stew percolating in the room and Prokofiev on the sound system.

It was the small talk that tripped me up. Our pattern in the evenings had always been to share bits and pieces of news about friends, work, the domestic murmurings about our respective days. But sometimes I would lose concentration and drift without thinking into a febrile musing about a report I still needed to write or a meeting I’d had earlier, going over the debriefing in my head, the details of which I’d noted in my Moleskin and later typed up on my typewriter at Allegro. When this happened, Oliver’s voice would recede and become nothing more than high-toned inconsequential chatter. Then he’d fall silent and I’d see him staring intently at me across the room and realise that I had heard nothing of what he’d been saying for the last ten minutes. He would click his tongue in exasperation and turn back to the cooking, the rapid knocking of the wooden spoon against the sides of the pot eloquently expressing his irritation. For the most part it was mild irritation, but it served as the source of his growing unease about what was happening to our relationship.

Unease began to solidify into distrust after a series of events in which I saw my ability to control my life ebb away and which fed his embryonic suspicion. Somehow, through all the disruptions, we still managed to keep to our now Friday tradition of eating at the Ankara. This pleasant, predictable ritual seemed to steady us at the end of the week. There would be some repartee with Osman, who, in his broken Dutch, would give us the rundown on the current unfolding political events in Turkey or something else of mutual interest. Oliver and I would get slightly drunk and then have slow romantic sex upstairs afterwards, falling into a delicious inebriated sleep. Recently, however, I’d been edgy and unable to give myself up to potential languor, unable to perform. I’d plead tiredness and pull Oliver close to me, spooning his body, absorbing his warmth, and wait for sleep to claim me.

One Friday when custom at Allegro had been slow and, with the anticipation of the weekend infecting the last hours of work, I was sitting idly at my packing table thinking that perhaps Janneke might decide to close up early and we’d all go off for drinks, a call came through on my extension. It was Mandla. I had given him Allegro’s number for emergencies. Our conversation was tense and brief. He was unexpectedly in Amsterdam, at the station and on his way to Germany. Could I meet him? It was urgent.

When I got off the phone, feeling slightly shaken, I told Janneke that Oliver had been taken ill and that I was going to go straight home – forgoing drinks. She was solicitous and urged me to leave immediately.

Mandla was waiting for me at a small bar near the Central Station. It was a scruffy place, but crowded, where most of the patrons were in between catching connections to one place or another, so the floor was a hazard of backpacks and travel gear. Mandla had found a table near the back, in a corner. He cradled a glass of whisky between his hands and I realised as I pulled out the chair and sat opposite him that it probably wasn’t his first. He looked tired and appeared agitated. For the first time I noticed small smudges of grey in his hair.

Curiously, there did not seem to be any emergency and after a while I wondered whether I had misinterpreted his tone on the telephone earlier. I was accustomed to him taking the lead in our discussions so I didn’t say anything. We ran through some of my activities over the past weeks and he complimented me on two detailed reports I had done recently. One of these was a summary of a meeting I’d had with two members of a small peace and justice group based in Pietermaritzburg who were on their way to connect with other members of the group in Oxford. As we were leaving the Paramaribo, one of them, whom I’d dubbed “Bulldog” on account of his pugnacious expression and stocky build, had warmly greeted a woman sitting on her own near the bar. Although I had tried to edge past and make my way out onto the crowded pavement, “Bulldog” caught hold of my arm and introduced me to his friend. It turned out that she was also from Natal and that they had Oxford in common too. She was on her way home to South Africa, after spending some years working in the Zoology department at the university, doing some complicated research. Because it was my habit by now to note every detail of every meeting, even a chance one like this, I had added a brief description of the woman to the end of my report, and the name of the institute she’d worked at – the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology.

Mandla pressed me for more information about the encounter, but there really wasn’t anything more to tell. I genuinely believed that it had been a random coincidence, nothing more than that, and told him so. I hadn’t even caught her name. This nervous, fidgety Mandla was new to me; I had never experienced him morose before either. He seemed both to me this evening, but over several more whiskies we moved to general topics and he appeared to relax. At one stage he even seemed to be dropping off. It was getting late and I suddenly noticed that the bar had almost emptied. If Mandla didn’t sober up and get moving, there was every chance he’d miss his train. We said our goodbyes and parted.

Even though I had implicated Oliver in my deceit when I’d explained my hasty departure earlier to Janneke, I was so absorbed over the two hours I spent with Mandla that Oliver was the last person in my head. Our Friday night dinner ritual went out of my head as well. It was only as I approached the apartment that I remembered what day it was and it cut through me like a blade to the skin. I looked at my watch. I was an hour late. I entered the Ankara. Osman told me that Oliver had had a glass of wine and left.

Outside I let the air out of my bicycle tyres. I chained the bike to the railing outside the door to our apartment. Oliver was waiting for me at the kitchen table, another glass of wine at his elbow, almost drained. He appeared calm, but his voice betrayed his agitation. In a tone higher than normal, he said, “Where have you been?”

I affected an exhausted tone. “I had a puncture,” I replied. “I have had to walk home, all the way from the Overtoom.”

Oliver came over to me and hugged me with one arm, his other holding the glass of wine aloft. “Poor Matthew,” he said. “I was worried about you.” Then he went downstairs and brought back some meze from the Ankara. We finished it over the remains of the bottle. Afterwards we made love, I fervently, out of guilt.

It happened again. This time I was in the grip of a dialogue with a war resister and again did not notice how time had slipped by. It was near midnight when I left the bar, fired up by the things I’d been hearing. Oliver was fast asleep when I got home. He looked so peaceful in repose that the fact that I had missed our Friday dinner again did not even occur to me. But he was furious when he woke up.

“Where were you? What the fuck is happening to you?” he demanded.

He strode up and down in front of the window, the light clutching at his thin frame. Through the fabric of his T-shirt, his body was a frail outline. He drew heavily on a cigarette. Tendrils of smoke swirled around his head.

I sat up in the bed, the acidic edges of a hangover clawing at my brain. I felt nauseous, at a loss for words, as my mind raced to invent a credible excuse. “I forgot,” I said in the end. “I simply forgot. I was in the bar with Wim and he insisted we drink Duvels and I got drunk and I forgot.”

Oliver went to the back of the apartment and soon I heard the hiss of the water as he showered. He left shortly afterwards without saying another word to me. The door banged shut and I heard his footsteps, strident against the wooden staircase, as he descended to the street below.

I spent the day in self-accusing misery, sweeping and cleaning and tidying our small space in a spasm of contrition. When he came home Oliver seemed his usual self. He had bought potatoes and endives and olives and another bottle of wine. It was as if the morning had not happened. We ate dinner and went to bed early, but when I reached out to hold him he turned away and curled himself into a wordless, resistant ball at the edge of the bed.

And then the final straw. Oliver had arranged tickets for a performance of Beethoven Sonatas by Alfred Brendel at the Muziekcentrum Vredenburg – a rare and unusual treat. It was a Friday evening and I was to meet him after work at a café close by. We would go on to the concert and finish up the evening with brandies somewhere.

Outside the broad high windows of Allegro, a slow autumn dusk was settling over the city. I had noticed recently how the leaves on the elms were already turning to ochre and gold. The phone rang. Wim called me over to the reception counter. It was Mandla. His voice was terse, his tone urgent. There was someone I needed to meet, he told me. I protested that I was already committed for the evening but Mandla was insistent, entirely unaccepting of my protestations. This was important, he said. I looked at my watch. He gave me the telephone number of a hotel in the city centre and a room number. I was to arrange a rendezvous with the person who answered. I left Allegro and went to a callbox on the corner. I dialled the number. The phone was picked up almost immediately by a man who spoke tentatively but with a strong Durban accent.

I directed him to a bar I knew to be close to his hotel. I looked at my watch. If I could keep the meeting short, be peremptory even, I could still get to Utrecht by six to meet Oliver. The bar was already filling up for the happy hour and I could not tell which one of the patrons was my source. I stood in the doorway impatiently and then went to the counter and ordered a jenever. I knocked it back in agitation. No one approached me. I waited, propped against the bar, facing the door. Damn. He was late. Then he came in from the street, furtiveness and culpability in his bearing. There was a sheen of perspiration on his forehead despite the cool air outdoors. He refused a beer, opting for a coffee instead. I ordered another jenever.

We went to the back of the bar out of public view. The man was shy, evasive, soft spoken. By fits and starts – irritating to me because I wanted the meeting over as soon as possible – he revealed his background. He was in his late twenties, plain, with undistinguished features, and was over-dressed in an ugly heavily padded anorak, which betrayed him as a stranger, someone who didn’t know the weather. Today his accent pained me in this space and, as the jenever began to take the edge off my anxiety, it made me wistful.

He had qualified as an architectural engineer at university and now worked at an oil refinery in Secunda, east of Johannesburg, in the Transvaal. He handed over a manila envelope, which I opened. Inside were architectural plans. He began trying to explain them to me, reaching his hand inside the envelope and then attempting to open the document he pulled out. In the crowded bar holding one’s arms out wide and unfolding such a large sheet of paper wasn’t easy and we drew some irritated looks. The engineer’s carelessness contributed to blackening my mood and when I eventually managed to persuade him to fold the document up again and put it away, I was close to losing my cool. Eventually, I steered him outside onto the pavement, where he stood looking hot and crestfallen. I’m not sure what he’d expected, but I tried to reassure him.

“It’s okay,” I told him, tucking the envelope beneath my jacket. “There’s no need to –”

He began to interrupt, but I thrust out my hand and shook his firmly. “I know what to do,” I said. “Thank you. Goodbye.”

And then I turned on my heel and walked briskly away. When I reached the end of the street, I looked at my watch and swore under my breath, in English, Dutch and Afrikaans.

Oliver was standing in the galley, nursing a neat jenever – no orange juice to dilute its acidic track down the throat. He was in silhouette, the light behind him. I could pick up no emotion. Only his slightly swaying gait indicated that he had been drinking. He was silent, except for his breathing, which was heavy and shallow as if he had just done some physical exertion. I was so consumed by guilt, with the certain knowledge that whatever I said would mean nothing, that I almost turned around and left, to wander the streets until dawn arrived and stole the blackness from the room, that I might take solace from familiar objects.

But I just stood there, waiting. With no signal nor sound from Oliver, when I could stand it no longer, I launched into a charade of contrition, my apology so formulaic and predictable it might have been scripted.

“Oliver, I am so sorry … it was just that …”

“Don’t you fucking dare apologise again!” Oliver shouted. His words came in gasps, then in an agony of sobs. I switched on the light. He was collapsed on the floor, absolutely disconsolate. I dropped my bags and went over to him, reached out to him. He pushed me violently away. I stumbled backwards into the room. I had never seen Oliver like this before, sobbing and distraught, and to know that I was the cause was extremely distressing. I wanted to hide, to plug my ears against his pain. A sensation of regret, guilt and total helplessness ran through me.

I fled from the room, the door of the apartment banging hard behind me like the ricochet of a pistol shot. I ran headlong down the narrow rickety stairs, stumbling, catching myself on the hand rail, pulling myself back just in time from a free fall. The soles of my shoes slid on the wooden stairs worn smooth by use.

The Ankara, although almost deserted at this hour, was still open. The music was turned down low and from the sound coming from the kitchen of pots and pans being moved around, I guessed Osman was busy clearing up, preparing to call it a night. He was not impressed when I ordered first one whisky and then another, and brought the glasses to me sullenly. When I asked him if I might use the phone, he gave me a curt nod. I left a message for Mandla on the answering machine. Draining the last of my whisky, I realised just how exhausted I was. I climbed the stairs back up to the apartment wearily, dreading a further confrontation with Oliver. But he had gone to bed. An uncharacteristic snoring rose up from behind the screen.

I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep on the sofa and woke late the next morning to find Oliver gone and the apartment cold and soundless. I lay there crushed, unable to act. In the branches of the elm outside the window a sparrow set up a loud chirruping; its cold huddled form was caught in the window pane’s reflection. It looked as miserable as I felt. I forced myself to get up and take a shower, feeling comfort in the piping hot water. Then I fortified myself with several mugs of strong Indonesian coffee.

I left Oliver a note alongside two roses. Forgive me, please. That evening the note was still there, untouched, and the roses were wilting.

The next days were grey. I worked late at Allegro and bought falafels for supper at the Ankara. By the time I entered the apartment, always late, Oliver would already be asleep. I took permanent occupation of the sofa.

Then one night I had had enough. I was chilled to the bone. Ice crystals had formed on the window panes. I crept into our bed as quietly as I could and curled myself into a small ball as far to the edge of the mattress as possible, pulling the covers tentatively over me and shivering beneath their scant warmth. In the distance the bells of the church on the Amstelveld chimed. I fell asleep quickly. At some point in the night, Oliver rolled against me and of old in his half sleep he adjusted his body so that he was cradling mine from behind, his head in the nape of my neck, his hands under my T-shirt, resting over the shallow muscles of my abdomen, his knees drawn up in the crook of my legs. I had always been deeply comforted by that. It had always made me feel safe. I wept into the pillow, bereft.