The next day I got a phone call halfway through my shift. It was a certain Howard Nathan who asked whether it was a good time to talk. Ever the closet optimist, the faithful lapdog, I thought he might want to offer me a job, even though I’d never heard of him in a profession where everybody knew about or was aware of almost everyone else, so I scurried out onto the balcony where I’d first shaken Kay’s damp hand to hear what the man had to offer. What a pleasure it would be to have a change of jobs, a change of scenery, a sea change, perhaps, but I should have recognised that fuck-you tone of certain Joburg lawyers, saying his client had laid charges against me.
“And who might your client be?”
“Kay Greenwood.”
“What are the charges?”
“Rape,” Nathan said.
Was it my imagination or were people avoiding making eye contact with me? I went back to subbing someone’s editorial opinion, but I was thinking I’d been told off by Kay and Klara, the old man and I weren’t talking to each other and now I had to deal with something that would probably end my brilliant career at the paper.
I didn’t sleep or listen to Beethoven that night and the next morning the chief of HR, Herman Sebogodi, called. He spoke to me circuitously when all he really meant to say was that, because I was up on charges I was being suspended from work, with – and here he sound deeply regretful – full wages.
“Thank you,” I said curtly, put down the phone and told Butch we were going for a walk, which got him delirious. We went down the road with its bare trees, high walls, electric fences and furious dogs, which, in the absence of a reachable quarry, turned on each other. Mandla wasn’t at the gate, but there was a notice on the new palisade that if anyone wanted to contribute towards his funeral they could put money into the following bank account.
There was an icy wind blowing off the late-snowed ’Berg and across the Free State plains, sweeping over the presently dull Suikerbosrand, picking up more dust from the last gold dumps in the south, getting radioactive from the Brixton tower and screaming through the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s skyscraper, down into the Auckland bowl and over the ancient Melville koppies, where it marched along that corridor of yellow grass between the city and the cemetery, where my maternal grandmother lay.
That night I went to Jay and Veron’s, told them most of what had happened and they were fully on my side. Veron said I needed a woman to defend me, made a call and I spoke to Aisha Mohammad, who said I could come to see her in her chambers “in town” the next morning. Jay still wasn’t drinking, so I decided I wouldn’t either and after a quiet, pleasant supper with him, Veron and the girls I went home.
Whether anyone else in the office knew what was happening to me I did not know, nor did I particularly care: the powers that be could gloat as much as they liked in their little political certitudes. I needed Klara badly and wondered, if I had abused her had I also abused my mother, once again. After about an hour of pacing I got into my car and went out looking for Ruth. What was I going to do if I saw her? Repeat our previous and sole exercise? Offer to take her away from her miserable life? Get some Nigerian pimps howling for my blood? She could be drugged, infected, dead, her children motherless. Well done, Mr Bezuidenhout.
Having decided that I’d stop looking for her, I thought I’d cruise the strip one last time, as if I were going somewhere, away, keeping an eye out for some pedestrian who might walk up to you while stationary at a traffic light, just to blow your brains out for your cellphone. Then it occurred to me that it was not beyond the realms of possibility that Kay’s fancy lawyer might have me tailed to get evidence of my moral character – or lack thereof – so I kept a third eye on the rear-view mirror to see if anyone was tailing me. Or had I been reviewing too many thrillers lately? Whatever the case, so busy was I keeping eyes out for all these phantoms that it took me quite a while to realise that there was a familiar car not behind me but ahead of me. It had a Blue Bulls sticker on its rear bumper and it was heading towards that area where a certain kind of prostitute plied her mincing trade. In fact, right now Dolf was stopping and bartering with a tranny who, after a short exchange, gracefully entered his Mazda. So much for Dolfie’s impotence and his agricultural products.
I went home and tried to sleep but couldn’t. I was grateful that Klara had always insisted on using a condom – was it because she knew or suspected what Dolf was up to? should I warn her? would she believe me? would I believe me? – round and round.
Next I tried to listen to the A minor, informed as it was by pain. But it wasn’t getting through to me. I was drifting off on a tangent, wondering where that famous temper came from. Had it been something in Bonn or later Vienna’s water? And if it was true that the old man’s genes had come from that neck of the woods, had we inherited that particular temper? Possibly. Why exactly had the dying man lay shaking his fist at the heavens? His work was done, I, ever the expert, thought, though I hadn’t heard the allegedly more conventional sixteenth yet. Surely it wasn’t because he hadn’t consummated his relationships with unreachable, upper-class women, or because he’d failed to provide the suicidal Karl with a moral upbringing. Was it because he had failed to produce as much work as Herrn Bach, Haydn and Mozart as a result of his concerns with Karl? Possibly, but doubtful. So what gave? Maybe, just maybe, he lay there venting because that temper, that vehemence, that intensity – which released all kinds of enzymes – was his only way of cursing the heavens for their cruelty and thus he remained defiantly present and alive to the very last mortal moment.
When dawn came Butch and I went for a run before I drove to the CBD.
Ms Mohammad was wearing a chador and gave me a firm, henna’ed handshake. We made some small talk in which she briefly and unsentimentally told me how she and Veron had been involved in the struggle and endured such pleasantries as solitary confinement (while I tried to find my precious white soul at some country college), after which we got down to business.
“You’re going to have to tell me everything.”
“Sure,” I said, feeling very small.
“Did you or did you not wear a condom?”
“Always.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want any messy pregnancy or abortion. I’ve been through that before and it’s not nice. Plus I suspected that she was sleeping around, but that was more instinctive than based on any facts. There was one night towards the end that she insisted I didn’t wear a condom and when I refused that was the end of that night’s sex.”
This woman from another world but the same country was writing assiduously, neatly, firing questions at me, questions that were only going to get more embarrassing.
“What exactly happened?”
“We were drinking and coking it up. Lots of coke. She was taunting me.”
“How?”
“Dancing naked with her back to me, except for a pair of high-heeled shoes.”
“What was she taunting you about?”
“About how her black lover was so much better – and bigger – than me. You know, the usual insults: how I was just an ageing, white racist.”
Whether Ms Mohammad agreed with that last statement or not, she did not show it.
“Had she ever done something like this before?”
“Yes. She seemed to like stripping.”
“Was there anything about her appearance that was different?”
“Well, she’d certainly had a makeover. I mean, she’d always dressed really badly. But now she was wearing a corporate black suit and looked good for it. And she had switched to contact lenses.”
“Nothing else?”
“No, unless putting on a little weight is unusual. I remember thinking I preferred her – physically – with a little extra weight.”
Scribble, scribble, scribble.
“What happened then?”
“Well, this is very embarrassing …”
“Don’t worry. I’m a lawyer.”
“You’re also a woman and a –”
“– Muslim,” she completed my sentence. “Does that change anything?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“What happened next?”
“Well, I started kissing her … you know –”
“No I don’t.”
“– her buttocks.”
“Did she say anything?”
“Well, I was being quite rough, and … um, she seemed to be liking it. I mean, she said so.”
“Do you think she might have been acting?”
“I … hell, I don’t know … I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“Then you had anal sex with her.”
“Ja.”
“Were you still being rough and was she still encouraging you?”
“Yes to the first and … once I was nearing orgasm she started shouting that I must stop …”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Were you wearing a condom this time as well?”
“Yes, she insisted on it, for once.”
She carried on writing, which I tried – and failed – to decipher, upside down.
“Okay,” Ms Mohammad said, anticlimactically.
“Is that it?”
“Ja.”
“So what now?”
“She doesn’t have a foot to stand on, even if she did make a video or recording of it and cut out the encouraging part.”
“Oh Jesus …”
“I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“I’ll say,” I said. “But what makes you think she doesn’t have a foot to stand on?”
“First of all, the fact that she only reported you five days after the alleged rape already blows her case out of the water, however traumatic it was and she’ll try to make it sound. Secondly, if you’re telling me the truth about using a condom it’s almost certain that she’s pregnant, whether with Edward Mhlophe or someone else. Three, taking drugs, alcohol and smoking while being pregnant isn’t very responsible. The reason why she wanted you to wear a condom was to show that it was deliberate, premeditated. But I must warn you that she’s going to try to play the media game. She’ll try to blow it up beyond proportion, and even when she loses she’ll say she struck a blow for all abused women.”
“That sounds about right,” I said, feeling some very warm feelings for this woman. “So what do I do now?”
“Nothing. You do not speak to the media. You do not speak to your colleagues, no one. Not even Jay or Veron. You refer everything – and I mean everything – to me. The more time goes by and the more pregnant she is, the worse her case becomes.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.”
After I’d shaken her hand numerous time and thanked her like the old man had always embarrassingly thanked others, grovelling with gratitude, I walked out into the street and had the real feeling I’d had that day I walked out of the divorce lawyer’s office, an allegedly free man. It was the lingering taste of what the old man would call the not so faint tang of es-aitch-one-tee. Still, I was elated that Aisha Mohammad could help me and guilt-stricken that she first had to be tortured along with Veron before she could practise freely to help someone like me, pro bono. By the same token, I was livid that Kay had taken this vicious little route and knew that Aisha had been right. Kay had abused her freedom as much as a pornographer and his client, me, abused theirs. Abusing others or being complicit in that abuse is not freedom, it’s abuse.
I felt miserable that I would have to tell the old man what I’d been up to. He would stand by me, I knew, which made the disappointment he’d feel all the more acute. I felt equally bad that I wanted to leave this country, whether he’d advised me to do so or not. If I did I would miss this street, this light, this air, these people as much as I didn’t know what to do with this echoing solitude and restlessness I felt. It also didn’t help much walking past a news poster that said: Girl, 2, Raped.