41 | MATTHEW

BACK IN AMSTERDAM I tried to channel the heat and energy of the brief spell in Tanzania into my work, but loneliness could be overwhelming. I comforted myself in the best way I knew how. My period of abstinence came to an end.

Sometimes the encounters were small, perfect stolen moments of time. At the end of a post-coital drift into sleep, the boy would uncouple from me, our sealed mutual sweat pulling at our parting skins, cold air seeping in under bedclothes as he stepped away and dressed quickly against the chill. A last kiss, a last running of fingers through my hair and he’d be gone, the door clicking shut behind him. A few minutes later I would hear the whirr of bicycle wheels on the street below.

Or there would be brief ersatz romances. Compelled by the aggression, or the gentleness, of the sex of the initial encounter – or even where sex had not happened and there had been only a whispering among the pillows curtailed by unexpected sleep – he would stay and I’d wake to him in my bed the next morning and take the encounter further. This would usually entail a sleepy, decadent breakfast at a café of pannekoeken with bacon and maple syrup and strong coffee, knees touching under the tablecloth. Then after a few such days the lustre would wear off and we would part. Any chance encounter days, weeks, even months later in the Albert Heijn or a club or at the Concertgebouw, would elicit a “Nou zeg!”, “Hoi! Hoe is’t?”, friendly but devoid of sincerity. But this was how it was done and it seemed easy.

I do not think I could have loved any of those boys. I chose them for their beauty, perhaps they chose me for mine. I chose them for their voices, their shyness and sweetness, their parodies of butch masculinity, or simply out of my own intense loneliness and need for intimacy. I suppose I also chose them ultimately for the accumulating repertoire of my sexual encounters and how they differently responded to my uses of them. In doing so I was emulating the seamless careless encounters of the city’s “flikker kut”, but for me they were aimless and unconnected.

One of the contacts set up for me by Pru was Rufus. Until now I had never crossed the line of intimacy in my work for the movement. When it came to my personal life, there was an unseen, unspoken border that I knew ought not to be crossed. It had blurred in my time with Oliver, both at home and after I came to Europe, and I had learnt that lesson. Since Oliver I had always, possibly instinctively or perhaps through Mandla’s cautioning me to do it, managed to compartmentalise.

Rufus was different and in a sense it was me who was taken up by Rufus, not the other way round. Like me, he was a history and literature major but he had decided to take a year out of university to work for the South African Student Travel Service. This brought him to Europe frequently to travel expos marketing to the burgeoning backpacking industry back home. And indeed as I met him at the bus station, scores of mostly young South Africans, long-haired and denim-clad, alighted from the bus as Rufus did, swinging the uniform heavy backpacks down from the luggage racks and then making their way across the tram tracks towards the Damrak, their outlines comically grotesque against the receding light, transformed into misshapen beasts by the weight and shape of the bags on their backs.

At home in South Africa Rufus was from Bonteheuwel in Cape Town and he was at the centre of a cell organising acts of resistance. These involved a staggered irregular sequence of strikes, youth marches and consumer boycotts. These actions were buttressed by a number of neighbourhood committees mobilising street by street. Talking to Rufus, I got a sense of new confidence and of energy in the struggle intensifying. It made me especially homesick for Cape Town.

I was fascinated by Rufus. In an early encounter he had informed me that he was gay. It was an offhand remark, a matter-of-fact reference, and there was no reticence in the revelation. Before any tension could take hold of the conversation I interjected, “Me too.” After that an automatic unsolicited intimacy entered our interactions. He’d lean in and touch me during a briefing. After a meeting at one of the bruin cafés in the streets off the Damrak we’d sometimes go together to a gay bar. In the middle of making a serious political point he might stop to comment lasciviously on the physique of a passing youth. Outside of our political work we talked about other things. He filled me in on his liaisons back home, which appeared to be mostly with feckless working-class boys from the Flats who were wary of commitment. I’d drift out of the conversation sometimes, as he punctuated his fevered stream of narrative to light up a cigarette, and contemplate him as a sexual being. He was not conventionally attractive. There was nothing in his features that struck through his ordinariness, no tautness to his clothes that suggested a fineness of frame. Actually, if I was honest, there was a general unkemptness about him. His hair was always tousled and he wore oversized shirts that suggested someone too consumed by what he did to bother to take better care of himself. His skin had a rather pallid tone to it; he was loose limbed and often clumsy.

But there was an intensity about Rufus that was compelling, an authenticity that shone through. His hands trembled during his telling of an escape from a police raid. As he described the thrill of a ten-thousand-strong march taking to the streets, how the chanting and singing echoed powerfully between the high buildings in the city centre his eyes behind his thick glasses grew moist. It wasn’t that he assuaged my homesickness through the references to the friends left behind, but more the inclusiveness of his demeanour that drew me back into the life of the Cape Town I had known. Whenever he left an emptiness came over me that would take days to lift.

One of our briefings went way over the allotted time and it was past midnight when we acknowledged that it was time to wrap up. The two of us had been talking for hours. The briefing had involved a dispute in Rufus’s committee, the issue, as seemed frequently to be the case, of how closely the committee should align to the movement’s strategy. Rufus was uncertain about where to place his support and together we had been turning over his options for most of the night. My fingers were stiff from taking notes and the many pages of my notebook bore testimony to just how much ground we had covered. We had met in an all-night student café near the university. It was one of those polymorphous places frequented by would-be poets from the Literature Faculty, lesbians in leather, feminists, and a sprinkling of New Romantics and Goths, whose dark attire matched the black walls and went well with the poorly lit interior. At first Rufus was aghast at the hairstyles of these night creatures and at how noisy the place was. The soundtrack was full blast Nina Hagen and Siouxie and the Banshees, but we powered on.

“That’s it,” said Rufus eventually with a big sigh. “That’s all I have to say.”

I put my notebook aside and took a swig of Duvel. It had started raining heavily and we were both loath to leave and submit ourselves to the elements. We went over to the bar and forced our way between a group of women furiously debating an aspect of feminism and some Goths who were proclaiming the virtues of a Danish band. Rufus toasted me with his jenever, knocked it back, then physically jumped, startled at its strength. He gasped. I laughed at him. He pulled me to him and ruffled my hair. I stared up at him. I could smell the alcoholic jolt of the drink on his breath. Then he leaned in and kissed me. It was a chaste kiss, gentle, a mere fluttering of his lips across mine. “I want to sleep with you,” he said.

Dawn came and with it the soft, almost indistinct sounds of the breaking day – the gulls far off in the harbour, the murmur of traffic, a ship’s horn, fragmented, then lost on the breeze. The faintest light came stealing in at the window. Only half awake, I turned and sleepily comprehended the confusion of limbs in the bed beside me.

I was cautious as I curled into him, taking up the slow pulse of his sleeping form, solicitous of his stillness. Watching as the light grew in the room and illuminated more of him and shaped his body in different ways, light refracting across his skin and muscles, I hoped that bright, harsh daylight wouldn’t rob his body of light and shade and render it toneless and ordinary.

Not long afterwards Rufus’s father took ill and he returned to Cape Town to take care of his mother and his three sisters. I don’t know whether he continued with his activist work back home or whether his functions had been reassigned, but I never saw or heard from him again. I found that I was content with that.